The Eleusinian Mysteries:  Alchemical Grain, Part II by Sally Mansfield Abbott

Part 1 was posted yesterday. You can read it here.

The Eleusinian Mystery Rites derived from early planting and harvest festivals, agricultural rites from the late Neolithic. They celebrated the growth of the plant from a seed in the ground, but their purpose was also to convey a new way of seeing, an opening of the eyes, the Epotopia.  The golden grain signified the alchemical gold of a new consciousness, the miracle of a plant turning to gold.  Through fasting, initiates experienced a ritual identification with grief and loss, followed by a return of life and joy, a rebirth, Persephone’s triumphant return from Hades. Demeter was a giver of agricultural rites, but she laid down spiritual laws as well, hence her title of Thesmophoria, or Lawgiver.

Some harvest themes, like separating the wheat from the chaff, which we’re familiar with from Christianity, no doubt have their origin here. Joseph Campbell said that Christianity derived far more from the pagan tradition than it did from Judaism. The name Eleusis means “advent,” a theme the Christians adopted for the coming of the divine child.

At Eleusis (and elsewhere) the divine child was born in a winnowing basket to signify purity and higher consciousness. Robert Graves saw the notion that Jesus was born in a manger as originating in this tradition, also that of Moses found in a basket among the rushes.  The Welsh hero Llew Llew (or Llew Llaw) was found in a chest, and Welsh bard Taliesin was discovered in a basket brought in by the sea.

Some scholars see the Rites as an attempt to procure immortality for the initiates, like Demeter passing Demophoon through the fires, when his mother Metaneira interrupts her.  Plato, an enthusiastic participant in the Rites, thought that life after death would be markedly different for the initiated. They would be protected from death’s ravaging effects and would enter Hades as gods.

Scholar Iordanis Poulkouras sees the story of Persephone’s rape and abduction into the underworld as a reflection of the patriarchy’s incursion on Goddess worship and the status of women. The chronological timeline bears out this interpretation, since the Rites of Eleusis began c. 1450 BCE, the same date as the fall of Knossos, their point of origin. Knossos was a late-surviving matriarchal theocracy that had been overrun by Mycenian war lords. How were goddesses, priestesses, and women to survive in this new order? The Rites preserve and celebrate women’s power, even as they contend with the reality of the upheaval of the patriarchy. In the end, at least in the myth, Demeter’s power over nature is such that the patriarchal gods have to honor it and a compromise is brought into being. Persephone will go back to her mother but return to Hades for one third of each year.

                                                                   

                                               

In Return to the Goddess, Jungian analyst Edward Whitmont saw the violence done to the Feminine by the patriarchy as the Wasteland, and the return of the Feminine as the Holy Grail and Messianic Liberation sought in religious tradition. The Feminine is the element of magic, play, and psychic awareness.  According to him, the new Feminine will cooperate with the Masculine rather than be dominated by it, and be able to affirm in the face of pain, conflict, and depression, like Persephone returned from Hades.

The classicist Karl Kerenyi thought that the meaning of Demeter finding Persephone related to the reintegration of the female personality with her roots and virgin self, after the many sacrifices of motherhood. This mirroring theme shows itself in some of the friezes where the two appear more as sisters than mother and daughter.

Others see Persephone, picking narcissus when abducted into the underworld, as one who has overcome the limitations of the ego, by venturing into the shadow realm, and returns psychically enriched, a hierophant, beyond the daylight realm of Demeter. Persephone is a figure who has known extreme self-sacrifice, but has survived it, her integrity intact. 

The myth bears obvious similarities to the story of Isis and Osiris, from which it no doubt evolved. Crete was a long-time trading partner with Egypt, and greatly influenced by its culture. Egypt was the agricultural and artistic powerhouse of the region for over a thousand years. 

The Roman Empire under Constantine shut down the Rites in 329 CE and the temple was later destroyed, but the Christian church adopted many of their precepts. War and hostilities were suspended in honor of the Rites, and only once in almost 2,000 years were they ever cancelled, upon the news that Alexander the Great had burned down the city of Thebes.

In their time, the Rites of Eleusis afforded initiates an opportunity to expand their minds and their world through a heightened experience of nature, community, art, myth, the cosmos, and the realm of the Goddesses. The experience was highly prized by luminaries of the ancient world and was also open to children and slaves. Initiates were sworn to secrecy about their content, upon pain of death. We are left with these haunting questions: What was said?  What was eaten? What was shown?

Sources

Dashu, Max, Women in Greek Mythology:  Pythias, Melissae, and Titanides, Secret History of the Witches, Vol. II, Book I, Veleda Press, 2023, Richmond, CA.

Gimbutas, Marija, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, University of California Press, 1982, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Graves, Robert, The White Goddess, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1948, New York.

Keller, Mara L., “The Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries,” in Rosicrucian Digest, No. 2, 2009, pp. 28-49.

Poulkouras, Iordanis, “The Eleusinian Mysteries,” paper presented at the 7^th Esoteric Quest Conference on the Mysteries and Philosophies of Antiquity, Samothrace, Sept., 2008.

Ruck, Carl P., Albert Hoffman, R. Gordon Wasson, “The Road to Eleusis, Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries,” in The Classical World, 1979, pp. 1-22.

Whitmont, Edward C., Return to the Goddess, Crossroads Publishing Company, New York, 1983.