This article was originally published in Alexandria: The Journal for the Western Cosmological Traditions, volume 2 (1993), pp. 63-95.
It then goes into more detail about the rites which make for some fascinating reading.
ELEUSIS was a small bay city approximately fifteen miles northwest of Athens. Beginning as early as the fifteenth century BCE, an agricultural cult of the goddess Demeter is associated with the location. It is this provincial fertility cult which grew in Hellenistic times to become the most important of the mysteria megale, the great mystery religions. Noted historian Walter Burkert explains that these mysteries were not religious bodies apart from the wider context of ancient paganism, but rather were tangential and supplemental for those who desired them. "Mysteries," he says, "were initiation rituals of a voluntary, personal, and secret character that aimed at a change of mind through experience of the sacred."[1]
Scholars have long held considerable interest in these mysteries: of Dionysos, Orpheus, Mithras, Cybele, and Isis; but none quite so much as those of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, celebrated before thousands of initiates every fall in ancient Greece. Although we know that the Eleusinian Mysteries profoundly impressed those who experienced them, modern scholarship has struggled for well over a century to explain why the secret rites within the sanctuary were so compelling and convincing to so many people of varied background and sophistication. The curiosity with which classical scholars approach this problem has not diminished to the present day.
The Eleusinian rites were just as compelling in the pagan world and were highly respected and revered. Pausanias tells us they were held in superiority to all other religious functions "as gods are higher than heroes."[2] It was, of course, forbidden to disclose the secrets of the initiations--those who did faced exile or death [3] -- and so our sources for reconstructing the events are sometimes sparse or questionable.
Accepting this limitation, we may proceed to examine what facts remain available. We have as our sources not only literary testimonies, but the architectural and artistic remains from the site and elsewhere. George Mylonas, who performed a complete archaeological survey of the site four decades ago, confronted the whole of this data and was both confident and frustrated: "We cannot know, at least we still do not know, what was the full content and meaning of the Mysteries of Demeter held at Eleusis. We know the details of the ritual but not its meaning."[4] We can describe with some degree of confidence both the order of events and even--in certain limited cases--the acts performed.
The oldest and most fundamental source related to the Eleusinia is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,[5] probably composed in the seventh century BCE, which records the sacred story or hieros logos of the cult. The Hymn contains the mythic kernel of the Eleusinian religion and provides important clues about the rites......
