The Eleusinian Mysteries

Demeter restores the grain and teaches the rites

The Eleusinian Mysteries were a yearly initiation, a secret ceremony that admitted people to the rites of the goddess Demeter and her daughter. They were held at Eleusis, in Attica, the land around Athens. Their founding story is told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, an early poem in praise of the goddess. Demeter ends a famine and makes fruit rise again from the Rharian plain. Then she teaches chosen men at Eleusis how to conduct her rites. In the Hymn, the return of the grain and the gift of initiation come from the same settlement made by the goddess.

The Hymn first names Triptolemus, Diocles, Eumolpus and Celeus. A little later it names Triptolemus, Polyxeinus and Diocles. The two lists differ, and the surviving poem does not reconcile them.

About the rites themselves, the Hymn says 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, not the content. Happy is the man who has seen these mysteries; the uninitiated has no lot of like good things once he is dead.

What the initiate drank

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

Where the record stops

The travel writer Pausanias walked most of Greece and wrote down what he saw. Twice he stopped at this subject. Writing about Athens, he had meant to tell more of the story of Triptolemus and to set out the contents of the sanctuary called the Eleusinium. He says a vision in a dream stopped him. At Eleusis itself, he wrote that his dream forbade him to describe the things within the wall of the sanctuary. He added that the uninitiated may not learn what they are prevented from seeing.

The two refusals matter because they show an ancient travel writer keeping to the sanctuary’s limit on what could be told. What he does record at Eleusis is the ground outside. There was a temple of Triptolemus. There was a well called Callichorum, where the women of the place first danced and sang for the goddess. And there was the Rharian plain, said to be the first ever sown, whose barley was used for the cakes offered in sacrifice.

A cry on the empty road

The rite began in Athens and went on foot to Eleusis. The historian Herodotus tells of it through two witnesses. Dicaeus was an Athenian exile in Persian service, and Demaratus was a Spartan. They stood on the Thriasian plain in the year Attica was emptied before the battle of Salamis. They saw a cloud of dust coming from Eleusis, as if raised by the feet of about thirty thousand men, and they heard a cry. Dicaeus, who was an initiate, told the Spartan it was the Iacchus cry of the mysteries. Attica was deserted. Nobody was walking the road.

Alcibiades takes back the road

The procession could be interrupted, and it was. The writer Plutarch records what happened once the Spartans had fortified Deceleia and controlled the approaches. The sacrifices, the choral dances and the ceremonies held on the road, when Iacchus is led out from Athens to Eleusis, were dropped, and the festival went by sea.

In 407 BC the Athenian general Alcibiades put his infantry along the route. He took the priests, the initiates and their guides inside a screen of armed men and led the rite back to Eleusis by land. Plutarch says that no enemy dared attack. Men who watched called him High Priest rather than general.

What the city still holds

The Athenian end of the rite was the City Eleusinion, the sanctuary of Eleusinian Demeter on the north slope of the Acropolis. Pausanias would not describe it. Excavation reached part of it in the 1930s and again in 1959 and 1960. It recovered the remains of the temple of Triptolemos, a Hellenistic stoa, or roofed colonnade, and a propylon, or gateway. The material runs from the seventh century BC to late antiquity. A significant portion of the sanctuary still lies unexcavated under the modern city.

The secret broken

The secret could also be broken, and the Athenians treated breaking it as a political crime. The historian Thucydides reports that in 415 BC informers came forward. They said the mysteries had been acted out in mockery in private houses, and Alcibiades was named among those who had done it. The charge stood beside the mutilation of the Hermae, the statues of the god Hermes. His enemies argued that both pointed to a plan to overthrow the democracy. He sailed for Sicily with the charge still against him and did not come back to answer it.