The Eleusinian Mysteries

Demeter restores the grain and teaches the rites

Demeter ends the famine, makes fruit rise again from the Rharian plain and then teaches chosen men at Eleusis how to conduct her rites. In the Homeric Hymn that bears her name, restored grain and initiation are consequences of the same divine settlement. The Hymn first names Triptolemus, Diocles, Eumolpus and Celeus, then shortly names Triptolemus, Polyxeinus and Diocles. The lists differ, and the surviving poem does not reconcile them.

What the Hymn will say about the rites themselves is one sentence: they are awful mysteries which no one may in any way transgress or pry into or utter, for deep awe of the gods checks the voice. What follows is the reward rather than the content. Happy is the man who has seen these mysteries; the uninitiated has no lot of like good things once he is dead.

Where the record stops

Pausanias walked most of Greece and wrote down what he saw in it. Twice he stopped here. Describing Athens, he had meant to go further into the story of Triptolemus and set out the contents of the sanctuary called the Eleusinium, and he says he was stayed by a vision in a dream. Arriving at Eleusis itself he wrote that his dream forbade the description of the things within the wall of the sanctuary, and added that the uninitiated are not permitted to learn what they are prevented from seeing.

The two refusals matter because they show an ancient travel writer accepting the sanctuary’s boundary on disclosure. What he does record at Eleusis is the ground outside: a temple of Triptolemus, a well called Callichorum where the women of the place first danced and sang for the goddess, and the Rharian plain, said to be the first ever sown, whose barley was used for the sacrificial cakes.

What the initiate drank

The one ritual detail the Hymn gives away is a refusal. Demeter, grieving in the house of Celeus, will not take the cup of red wine Metaneira offers her, saying it is not lawful, and asks instead for meal and water mixed with soft mint. Metaneira mixes it, and the goddess takes it. The drink survived the myth as the drink of the initiates, and the passage is the whole of the ancient evidence for what was in it.

The road, and what was heard on it

The rite began in Athens and walked. Herodotus tells it through two witnesses: Dicaeus, an Athenian exile in Persian service, and Demaratus the Spartan, standing on the Thriasian plain in the year Attica was emptied before Salamis. They saw a cloud of dust coming from Eleusis as though raised by the feet of about thirty thousand men, and heard a cry, and Dicaeus, who was initiated, told the Spartan it was the Iacchus of the mysteries. Attica was deserted; nobody was walking the road.

The procession was interruptible, and it was interrupted. Plutarch records that once the Spartans had fortified Deceleia and commanded the approaches, the sacrifices, the choral dances and the ceremonies held on the road, when Iacchus is conducted forth from Athens to Eleusis, were omitted, and the festival went by sea. In 407 BC Alcibiades put his infantry along the route, took the priests, the initiates and their guides inside a screen of armed men, and walked the rite back to Eleusis by land. Plutarch says that no enemy dared attack, and that men who watched called him High Priest rather than general.

What the city still holds

The Athenian terminus was the City Eleusinion, the sanctuary of Eleusinian Demeter that Pausanias would not describe. Excavation reached part of it in the 1930s and again in 1959 and 1960, recovering the remains of the temple of Triptolemos, a Hellenistic stoa and a propylon, with material running from the seventh century BC to late antiquity. Margaret Miles, publishing it for the American School as the thirty-first Agora volume, notes that a significant portion of the sanctuary still lies unexcavated under the modern city.

The secret was also breakable, and the Athenians treated breaking it as a political crime. Thucydides reports that in 415 BC informers came forward to say that the mysteries had been acted in mockery in private houses, and that Alcibiades was named among those who had done it. The charge stood alongside the mutilation of the Hermae, and his enemies argued that both pointed at the overthrow of the democracy. He sailed for Sicily under it and did not come back to answer it.