The Andania Mysteries

The officials swear before the rites begin

The Andania Mysteries were secret rites held in Messenia, a region of Greece, near ancient Andania. Mysteries were rites in which people were initiated, admitted to worship that outsiders could not see.

Before the rites began, the sacred men chosen to run them stood before burning offerings and swore an oath. They promised that the festival would be run properly and justly. They promised that they would neither commit nor allow an improper act against the mysteries, and that they would follow the written rules. The sacred women and the priest swore similar oaths. They were protecting a ceremony whose central act is never described.

The words survive on a long inscription known as IG V 1, 1390. Its stone was found in Messenia in 1858, cut in two and built into a church doorway. What remains may be only part of a longer set of rules, but it says a great deal. It governs the people and the goods around the initiation, while keeping the initiation itself out of sight.

What the sacred law covers

The inscription organises a festival. It does not explain beliefs about the gods. It sets the order of the procession and gives tasks to officials. It covers the animals for sacrifice, the camping places and the supplies.

It also controls clothing. Initiates wear white and go barefoot. Women’s clothes must not be see-through, and further rules limit decoration, jewellery, make-up and elaborate hair.

These rules show how much public organisation surrounded a secret act. People travelled, walked in procession, camped, ate and worked under named officers. The law expects disorder and gives attendants the power to control it. It orders silence for people who are not being initiated, while the rites take place elsewhere, out of their sight.

When the law was written

The inscription is often dated to 91 BC, because its year can be counted from the Roman settlement of Greece. That reading is not certain.

Some modern scholars have proposed that the same number belongs to a different count of years, the era beginning with the battle of Actium. That would place the inscription in AD 24. Others keep the earlier date after weighing both arguments, and the calculation is still disputed.

So the sacred law may come from the first century BC or from the first century AD.

Which gods received the mysteries

The inscription and the ancient writer Pausanias do not describe the group of gods in the same terms. The rules speak of the gods for whom the mysteries are held. In their practical details they name several powers, including Demeter, Hermes and Apollo Karneios, Apollo under a local title.

Modern scholars disagree about the Great Gods of the inscription. Some identify them with the gods called the Dioscuri. Others see Demeter and Kore as part of a larger group. Others leave them without one settled identity.

Pausanias speaks instead of the Great Goddesses. Earlier in his account of Messenia, he says that a figure named Caucon brought their rites from Eleusis to Queen Messene, and that later figures developed them at Andania. This origin story was written centuries after the possible dates of the inscription. It should not be used to erase the different wording on the stone.

What Pausanias saw in the grove

The rites were still being held when Pausanias reached the Karnasian grove in the second century AD. He describes ground thick with cypress trees, and statues of Apollo Karneios, Hagna and Hermes carrying a ram. Hagna, he explains, is a title of Kore, the daughter of Demeter. A spring rises close to her statue.

Then he stops. Pausanias says the Great Goddesses have mysteries there, and he keeps their rites secret. He ranks them second in holiness only to the mysteries at Eleusis, but the comparison brings no description of what happened. He will name the grove, its statues, its water and the objects kept there. He will not go past the ritual boundary.

On this point his silence agrees with the inscription. Andania left an unusual record of how a festival of mysteries was run, down to clothing and the order of the procession. Neither source supplies the missing scene. The grove can be found and the spring named, but the act that all those oaths protected was never written down.