Eleusis — The Most Important Institution of Antiquity You Have Never Heard of
The life of the Greeks [would be] unliveable if they were prevented from properly observing the most sacred Mysteries, which hold the whole human race together.
- Praetextatus, both priest and Roman proconsul of Achaea
[A]mong the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which your Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those [Eleusinian] mysteries.
-Cicero
Eleusis may have been right up there with the Olympic Games and the Oracle of Delphi when it comes to its importance and impact on the ancient world, including the later Roman empire and the whole Mediterranean. And yet, it is still largely unknown to many.
The Mysteries referred to here are the most important mysteries of Greek antiquity.
-Albert Hoffman
This article is part of an ongoing series about the Eleusinian Mysteries.
You can find links to the others released until now at the end of the article.
They are partly independent and can therefore be read separately.
I have been studying Philosophy for a good amount of years and it has been a truly fascinating ride with great insights and new perspectives gained. Many questions were brought up and buildings of thought carefully constructed.
But at some point, as my interest became more drawn towards spiritual topics, psychedelics and altered states, all the good stuff, I noticed that there are many things which are not mentioned in uni and which you can’t bring up in the academic context.
It’s not forbidden at all, people just won’t take you seriously, or they will avoid the discussion since they themselves are not versed in these topics.
After all, speculation about these topics doesn’t fit the rational self-understanding of philosophy. And if one has spent years and years in a subject and never heard about certain things, someone new suggesting that it’s all ought to be different, is doomed to be ignored or ridiculed. And as I gradually found out you can’t talk about the juicy stuff in uni, I decided to write about it.
So, it happened to me as to my fellow students that we had never heard about the Rites of Eleusis. It turns out this topic, like altered states and psychedelics among others, is on the list of things largely ignored by academic philosophy. But it is coming into the general discussion outside of academia. When I came across Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key I was hooked. I dug up all the information I could about the topic and I’d love to initiate you, my dear reader, into what we know about one of the best kept secrets of the Western World, that after all is no secret at all.
This story has it all, a secret initiation at night, a mysterious ceremonial drink, a journey into the underworld, a profound life-changing experience and many of the famous people of antiquity went there to participate.
With the Eleusinian Mysteries we have a case of famous and state-organised “mystery cult” that was literally open to anyone who could speak Greek.
So how could this ever be called a secret you may ask?
Well, it seems it wasn’t. Neither in antiquity, nor afterwards. This is one of the strange paradoxes we are going to explore.
To give you an expression how many Greeks and Romans thought and spoke about Eleusis, let’s hear how Cicero expresses himself to his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus:
[A]mong the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which your Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those [Eleusinian] mysteries. For by their means we have been brought out of our barbarous and savage mode of life and educated and refined to a state of life and educated and refined to a state of civilization; and as the rites are called ‘initiations,’ so in very truth we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope.[1]
The well renowned Hungarian scholar Karl Kerenyi writes:
If life was unlivable for the Greeks without the annual celebration at Eleusis, it means that this celebration was a part not merely of non-Christian existence but also of Greek life, of the Greek form of existence.[2]
The Eleusinian Mysteries were deeply ingrained in the Athenian state religion and were held for around 2000 years. In this incredibly long period apparently only one year was missed. From around 1500 BC to 392 AD, these religious rites, dedicated to the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, took place just outside of Athens.
When the Christian Emperor Theodosius interdicted participation in these rites and all other pagan cults they were brutally interrupted and shortly afterward, in 395 AD, the invading Goths destroyed the sanctuary.
Many if not most Athenians have been initiated there since its beginnings, including slaves and woman, as these rites were open to anyone who could speak Greek. Eleusis then became a Pan-Hellenic institution around 760 BC “when the Oracle of Delphi called upon all Greeks to make a communal sacrifice in honor of Demeter […] to banish a famine which was then affecting all of Greece.”[3]
From this period onwards, people came from all over Greece to visit the Mysteries, and the later centuries when Greece was part of the Roman Empire, they started coming from all over the Mediterranean.
The participants included some of the most famous and influential personalities of antiquity, philosophers, poets, playwrights, politicians and numerous Roman emperors.
A list of the visitors reads like a who’s who of the ancient world, among them Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Cicero, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, and Plotinus to name a few.
They were so important and holy that in all of Greece there was a mandatory truce, in which all conflicts were to stop, so the future initiates could safely travel to Athens. [4]
The Eleusinian Mysteries involved a series of rituals and preparations held over several days, culminating in an initiation ceremony, in which the participants experienced visions and gained insights into the mysteries of life and death, as we hear in the testimonies.
The central mythological narrative of the Mysteries revolved around the story of Demeter’s search for her daughter Persephone, who was abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld.
In the last night, a ceremonial drink, the kykeon, was consumed and the joyous reunion of Demeter and Persephone then marked the culmination of the ceremony before its end.
It may have been the most important event in the Athenian calendar as visitors from all over Greece, and even other parts of the Mediterranean, came for the Lesser Mysteries and stayed half a year until the Greater Mysteries. This may have also guaranteed an influx of cultural diversity and new ideas from other parts of Greece and the world.
Yet, despite their prominence, the Mysteries remained veiled in secrecy, with initiates sworn to silence under penalty of death. The exact details of the initiation ceremony may forever elude us, but nevertheless there is much to talk about.
The startling accounts of participants offer a glimpse into the profound significance of the mysteries.
Sophocles, the famous playwright, tells us:
Thrice blessed are those among men who, after beholding these rites, go down to Hades. Only for them is there life [after death]; all the rest will suffer an evil lot.[5]
Praetextatus, both priest and Roman proconsul of Achaea, wrote the following to the Roman emperor Valentinian when he wanted to end the mysteries in 364 AD:
The life of the Greeks [would be] unliveable if they were prevented from properly observing the most sacred Mysteries, which hold the whole human race together.[6]
In his famous dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the Phaedo, just before Plato’s Socrates explains to us, why death should not be seen as an evil to the true philosopher, he mentions the Mysteries:
And it looks as if these people who instituted our mystic rites were no ordinary people but spoke with a genuine hidden meaning when they said long ago that whoever arrives in Hades ignorant of the mysteries and uninitiated will lie in the mud, but he who arrives there purified and initiated will dwell with gods. (69: d)
The existing mentions speak almost universally in the highest terms of the experience and its profound significance, both for the individual and society as a whole. Moreover, many people only underwent initiation once in their lives, so its impact must have been all the greater. But what happened there to elicit such a profound impact?
One of the central elements for many participants seems to have been a mystical experience often including death and rebirth.
One of the inscriptions found at the excavation site of Eleusis states:
“Death is no longer an evil for mortals, but a blessing.”
Let us remember the end of Cicero’s quote:
“Through them we have learned not only to live with joy, but also to die with a better hope.”
Sophocles had written something similar and the poet Pindar expresses himself as follows:
Blessed is lie who, having seen these rites, undertakes the way beneath the Earth. He knows the end of life, as well as its divinely granted beginning.[7]
And these are by no means the only ones who speak in this manner.
So the theme is clear: learning to die before you die.
What this meant to the Greeks and how it can be and interpreted today is more difficult to answer and today we can only speculate given the available evidence. But it fits well to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, as we will explore in the next article.
This themes of death and rebirth seem to have been at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries and, if the reports are to be believed, it was a direct and life-changing experience. Another theme commonly reported is a journey to the underworld that was undertaken by the initiate.
The core of the experience was said to have been indescribable in words as it was something that could understood through personal experience. We will explore this in the fourth article of this series because here we might have a hint how the secret of the Mysteries never got betrayed.
It is also undisputed that a ritual drink, the Kykeon, was consumed at the height of ceremony on the last night, the ingredients of which remain unclear. But there is a good amount of scholarly work examining the evidence which suggests that the Kykeon was a psychedelic sacrament of some sort. This evidence comes from textual sources, from parallels to other such rites and recent archaeological findings.
Here we may have another hint what could have been the secret behind this potentially life-changing experience. This will be further explored in the 5th instalment of this series and it would also explain the ineffable nature and the profound impact of this initiatory experience.
The following articles will (2.) reconstruct the mythological framework as well as (3.) the preparation, rituals and events taking place during the mysteries and (in two parts: 3.2).
(4.) will examine the profound and ineffable nature of the experience at Eleusis and (5.) discuss why the mystery seems to have never been betrayed.
(6.) will then delve into the discussion about the potential content of the Kykeon, scrutinizing the books The Immoratliy Key and The Road to Eleusis as well as other lines of evidence, to explore the possibility of a psychoactive sacrament.
Continuing that thread (7.) will then go on to discuss the recently uncovered line of evidence suggesting that mind-altering beer and wine were quite common in ancient times.
(8.) will explore similar mysteries in other times and places around the Mediterranean, such as the Pythagorean and the Dionysian mysteries, as well as the rites of Isis.
In part (10.) we will try to answer the question what we may be able to learn from Eleusis for today’s world.
In other articles then, I want to explore related themes that have until now often been underrepresented or misconstrued when talking about ancient Greece. This will include incubation (the practise of receiving healing and insight through dreams), states of “divine mania” as Plato calls it, and the importance for direct experience for philosophical knowledge in Ancient Greece. Stay tuned if you’d like to know more.
This serious will also provide a detailed overview of the sources and a comprehensive bibliography for anyone wishing to delve deeper into the subject.
If you are interested in topics like mystcisim, meditation, breathwork and psychedelics, or philosophical consideration about our human nature in the context of science and society please follow me and subscribe for more articles. I’m trying to consistently publish on these topics and aiming to offer you insight alongside new ideas and provoking thoughts. I’m happy about any share or feedback.
[1] M. Tullius Cicero, De Legibus, ed. Georges de Plinval, Book 2.14.36
[2] Karl Kerenyi, Eleusis: The Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, 12, 1962.
[3] Albert Hoffman, The Message of the Eleusinian Mysteries for today’s world, in: The Road to Eleusis, p. 97, 2008 (first edition 1978).
[4] c.f. Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults in the Ancient World, p. 22, 2023.
[5] Sophocles, Fragment 837.
[6] Zosimos, Historia Nova IV.3.3, ed. Ludwig Mendelssohn (Leipzig, 1887).
[7] Pindar, Fragment 138.
