Mystagogues

Like the goddess Demeter, Diotima from Mantineia, the prophetess who teaches Socrates about eros and the "rites of love" in Plato's Symposium, was a mystagogue who initiated individuals into her mysteries, mediating to human’s esoteric knowledge of the divine. The dialogue, including Diotima's speech, contains religious and mystical language, some of which specifically evokes the female-centered yearly celebrations of Demeter at Eleusis. … Plato borrowed Eleusinian language because it criticized conventional notions of the divine, thereby allowing him to reimagine the possibilities for the philosophical process among humans.

Nancy Evans, Diotima and Demeter as Mystagogues in Plato's Symposium

“The highest stage of initiation—the epopteia, a vision, a special state of seeing—was received.” Plato, Symposium

The third-level initiates at Eleusis were called epopteia, those who see, and in my novel Eleusis, they see visions from eating a mushroom wafer – the precursor to taking communion in the Catholic church. Primary sources say the ritual consisted of things heard, things handled (or tasted) and things seen. Since it took 18 months to become eligible for the third level, it could not be accomplished in one’s first ceremony. It’s likely that epopteia were the only ones admitted to the Greater Mystery. Scholars have assumed that everyone participated in the Pannychris, the all-night revels of feasting and drinking and all-day contests of sport, but it is quite possible that the level three initiates were being prepared for a whole different experience at that time. We know there were dietary restrictions, as is common with psychedelics, but perhaps they didn’t apply to levels one and two. Those levels were partying. During the 8th night, they wore saffron colored bands on a wrist and an ankle to differentiate them from the others, because the unprepared were not even allowed in the theater.

All initiates at Eleusis were called mystes, and we know that at least some consulted with a teacher called a mystagogue. Since three thousand people a year attended, it seems pretty impossible they all had such personal attention. Perhaps only the level three initiates, the epopteia, had this kind of guidance, because those who see were the only ones who needed it. Everyone else was attending a theater party. The level one and two initiates were wrapped up in the outer layers of the story working their way toward the heart of the heart, becoming epopteia -the inmost layer of the Greater Mystery.

In the novel, the system of consulting with a mystagogue is the way officials at Eleusis maintain such a strong control of the mindset that primed participants to have an experience of the divine. Modern research with psychedelics has shown that people are far more likely to have an experience like this if they are primed beforehand to do so. Perhaps the whole experience was precisely controlled, which is one reason why it took eighteen months to qualify for participation in the third level. By all reports, it was a profound experience, one the early church abhorred.

Slowly, the therapeutic use of teacher plants is coming back into acceptance. A growing body of research shows that it can be much more effective than any other approach we know. The ancient role of mystagogue seems similar to the way people today consult with an integration therapist before and after an experience of a mind-altering drug as a way to create a container for a really huge experience. It’s quite possible that this experience is the only truly effective means we have to address the layers and layers of trauma and PTSD caused by thousands of years of patriarchal oppression, and the racial and religious violence etched into our souls. Perhaps one day soon it will be legal for people who suffer to go to a modern-day mystagogue and receive the soul initiation and visions that make one epopteia – those who see.

How to Explain the Power of Ancient of Priestesses

[Zeus speaks] Son of Iapetus [Prometheus], you who know counsels beyond all others, you are pleased that you have stolen fire and beguiled my mind – a great grief for you yourself, and for men to come. To them I shall give in exchange for fire an evil in which they may all take pleasure in their spirit, embracing their own evil. 

Hesiod, Theogony: Works & Days, 54-59

In this myth, Zeus’ anger over Prometheus stealing fire, caused him to curse men with Pandora, the first woman. The very creation of women was explained, in patriarchal mythology, as a punishment to men for something they didn’t even do. Through this foundational myth, ancient Greece became a culture so patriarchal that women weren’t citizens, had no control over whom they would marry, didn’t vote, couldn’t go to the theater, and couldn’t be abroad by themselves or even live in the same parts of the house as men.

How did that culture square itself with the fact that priestesses at the temples were not under the control of a father or husband? They made their own money and often became wealthy. Their sexuality was under their own control, as were their children. The grounds of temples like Eleusis held many statues that priestesses had commissioned of themselves because they had the money to do so. In such a misogynistic culture, it seemed that priestesses were a whole different class of woman, and their children, seen as fathered by gods, were a whole different class of child.

Since there clearly was a very powerful mother god in the millennia before monotheistic patriarchal religion, it stands to reason that some cultures were at least egalitarian if not completely matriarchal – in fact we know they were. Since it was obvious who gave birth, many ancient cultures traced the line of descent through the mother (matrilineal). And many cultures were also matri-local, meaning that a new husband joined his wife’s family. The children belonged to her, and the land and house belonged to the her as well. He was little more than a guest who was expected to work.

There was no moment of sudden change when we became patriarchal. Instead, cultures change at a glacial rate. Both styles of culture existed side by side for a very long time.

How did the priestesses of the ancient Hellenistic world come by so much power? Perhaps they never let go of it in the first place. Perhaps, the old system of powerful women and the new system of oppressed women existed side by side, much as progressives and conservatives do today – with all kinds of middle ground between the ends of the poles.

Look at our own political divides. The sides seem like completely different cultures, and yet we exist together, however uneasily. Perhaps the Christian’s destruction of the old temples and libraries also obliterated any remaining vestiges of this other way of seeing the world - through the eyes of women - a way of being which privileged the importance of motherhood. Perhaps, attempting to destroy the historical record was a way of promoting a father god as part of a centuries-long battle to remove all traces of worship of a mother god or any political power for her representatives on earth – women.

Parthenogenesis – Saviors Conceived without Sex

“For a goddess to be parthenogenetic thus means that she stands as a primordial creatrix who requires no male partner to produce the cosmos, earth, life, matter, and even other gods out of her own essence. Plentiful evidence shows that in their earliest cults, before they were subsumed under patriarchal pantheons as the wives, sisters, and daughters of male gods, various female deities of the ancient Mediterranean world were indeed considered self-generating, virgin creatrixes.”

Marguerite Rigoglioso, Virgin Mother Goddesses of Antiquity

The ancient ritual at Eleusis celebrated the parthenogenic birth of Kore’s divine child. At the climax of the rites, the Hierophant proclaimed: Behold! Brimo has given birth to Brimos (Abundance has given birth to Plenty). The child, Brimos, represents the promise that participants will be blessed, not only in the afterlife, but in this life as well. Then Persephone was shown standing with a youth - not holding a baby. The birth was parthenogenic, in the ways of the older, female-centered reality. He was born complete – just as she was. Kore (interchangeably called Persephone by this time) is herself a parthenogenic aspect of Demeter the great mother god - alike as a clone, the waxing moon to Demeter’s full. She always was, and always would be, a youth.

With the advent of the myth, The Rape of Persephone, marriage became the only legitimate means of producing children. Zeus became Kore’s father, though she is likely much older than he is. The scholar, Rigiglioso, argues that “Persephone’s rape shifted the cosmic paradigm.” The interruption of the women’s mysteries in this (parthenogenic) regard corresponded with the transfer of divine birth practices to the service of “gods who ushered in the patriarchal era.”

Some scholars argue that the world rape in the myth actually means abduction, and doesn’t correspond to the violent assault we think of today – so it’s not as bad as all that. But Pluto abducted Kore so he could marry her against her will (with her father’s permission) in order to get to the wedding night. Do they assume that because she was married, the act that followed could no longer be classified as rape? It seems doubtful to me that Kore suddenly became a willing participant. What does this type of thinking say about the centuries of girls married against their will to much older men?

In addition to the ascetic abhorrence of sexuality, the history of the Christian virgin birth story gives insight into why, mythologically speaking, it was important for Jesus to be born asexually to a virgin. Modern historians say that stories of Jesus’ virgin birth were not circulated by people alive at the time. There’s no mention of a virgin birth until much later, as he was being mythologized. In fact, there is no proof of the real Jesus in the historical record at all. He is, first and foremost, a mythological figure. Barbara Walker suggests that the reason his story needed a virgin birth is because “all the other saviors had one.” Mythologically speaking, to be considered a god, he needed to fit a very old and important pattern.

The Role of Teacher Plants

“There are some important lessons we can learn from the ancient use of psychedelics.”

Michael Pollen, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

At the ancient temple of Eleusis, the mystagogue’s function was to guide people into the Greater Mystery. They spent nine days creating a psychic container for this event with staged performances, readings, games, speeches, purification rituals and revelry. The likely point of all the theater, the performances and storytelling, was to bring forth Persephone (probably an actress) who showed them something amazing about the afterlife. Writers from the time claimed that the rites at Eleusis removed the fear of death.

 Modern research shows that set (mind set) and setting (the context created by the ritual) are essential and influence the psychedelic visions brought on by the drug. Participants were primed to expect to an experience of divinity – and so they did. Near the end of the ritual, the Hierophant held up a single stalk of golden wheat, reaped in silence, and the huge crowd was awe-struck. This moment was reportedly so profound it rippled out from them as a stone cast into a pond – wave upon wave of realization. They understood that the cycles of nature applied to them in ways both bigger and more mysterious than they had ever imagined. Perhaps mushrooms played a huge role in showing initiates the Greater Mystery - the third level of initiation - the nature of life and death.

Psychedelics could have been the great secret Eleusis is famous for. How else could the experience have been so profound? In some ways, it’s the only answer that makes sense. The Pharsalos bas relief (5th century BCE), now in the Louvre, shows the goddesses offering each other mushrooms while holding leather food wallets. We know those wallets were related to Eleusis. Many ancient cultures ritualized the consumption of mind-altering drugs, perhaps the ancient Greeks did too.

Like Dr. Jeremy Narby, author of The Cosmic Serpent; DNA and the origins of Knowledge, I began to wonder if the thing that separated man from the beasts began with the ingestion of teacher plants. Perhaps they kindled the imagination that gave us the domestication of plants and animals, the law, writing, medicine, everything we needed to create and sustain culture – everything once attributed to Demeter as the mother god. And if the mushroom grew on the grain, all the more to her credit – a divine gift to humanity - like to Prometheus’ gift, but this was an internal fire which burns but does not consume. If the first big bang is the sperm hitting the egg, then maybe the second is the neuronal firings of divine imagination, made possible by teacher plants.

The Savior Archetype

“Nothing in the Jesus myth occurred at random; every detail was part of a formal sacrificial tradition, even to the Procession of Palms which glorified sacred kings in ancient Babylon.”

James B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East

“Still, despite centuries of research, no historical Jesus has come to light. It seems the story was not merely overlaid with myth; it was myth to the core.”

Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician

The savior who dies and is reborn is one of the oldest god archetypes - almost as old as the great mother of all that is. Throughout centuries he has been called: Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, Orpheus, Herecles, Tammuz (Thomas), Serapis and Mithra. Hermes was even called the Logos or the word of god made flesh, long before any monotheistic religion used that description. (T. W. Doane, Bible Myths and their Parallels in Other Religions). There really is nothing new under the sun.

It was common practice to add the title “Soter,” (savior) to the names of kings who were worshiped as divine. Julius Caesar was accorded the title “Savior of Human Life,” and his successor was called something similar. The culture at the time of early Christianity was overflowing with saviors. Self-styled saviors were a dime a dozen, preaching from many street corners. Early writers complained about them as con men. Every miracle attributed to Jesus had been previously performed by some other savior. His parables also pre-date him. The Lord’s prayer comes from the Talmud, as does the Sermon on the Mount. But this doesn’t make Jesus less real or powerful - instead, it makes him more. The only thing new about Jesus is that he promised the world would end in one generation, which obviously didn’t happen. Many Christians are still waiting for the world to end. But again, veracity isn’t why the savior archetype is so powerful – and neither is logic. As people imbued each form of the savior with their faith, the archetype has grown.

This ancient pattern, so deeply ingrained in the human psyche, describes something very real about us. The savior archetype personifies the pattern of how human beings grow and change – the death and rebirth transformation. Viewed in another context, it’s the way we can heal past psychological trauma and grow into a new sense of self. In this case, death is a potent metaphor for losing an old identity, who we think we are, and rebirth describes what it feels like to become someone new – a stronger and more resilient self. We all die in order to be reborn. For the adolescent to be born, the child has to die; for the adult to take center stage, the adolescent has to be sacrificed. These transformations are often painful. If you’ve ever lost a job, a spouse or a loved one, you have been through the cycle. If you have ever prayed to any form of this archetype, you have activated the transformative power that resides in the human psyche – which can be very powerful indeed. The archetype doesn’t care what you call it.

The Role of Archetypes

“The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure.”   

Carl Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry, in CW 15, 127

“When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.”

Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

The human psyche seems like a mushroom mycelium (root system) stretching for miles under the surface, a single organism from which individuals arise.  But the metaphor extends further because the mycelium also acts as an underground “wood-wide web” (National Forest Foundation), The great communicators of the forest facilitate the transfer of information about the condition of the soil, the available moisture, pest infestations, and the transfer of nutrients from strong individuals to weaker ones. Species intelligence is encoded into them. The collective unconscious is like that. It holds the vast wisdom that sustains and connects us under the surface. In this regard, the ancient idea of an underworld is closer to the bone than the much more recent idea of a heaven in the sky.

Archetypes, the heightened and pure expression of all the psychological components that human beings contain, live in an underworld water table which we can draw up either consciously or without thinking. We are all capable of every human quality under the right circumstances – even the terrible ones. Gods are personifications of these aspects of human psyche, a full-strength concentration, a personification of an aspect – eternal and powerful. They work like the clothing which gives the invisible man a definable image – now you can see him. Then homo narativa, the great narrator animal, tells stories about their exploits. They operate in us as metaphors.

If you become belligerent, or go on crusades for causes, it can be said that you are possessed by Aries, the god of war. The archetype rises up from the collective unconscious like Jonah’s whale and swallows us whole. He is quite capable of possessing whole cultures. Before the United States invaded Iraq, there was enough unconscious support for the politicians in charge that no amount of arguing could prevent the invasion. The Civil War started this way too. The country wanted war. The gods are seductive. But once the conflict is over, people look at the devastation and blink. What were we thinking? Aires doesn’t care. He isn’t immoral; he’s amoral. Human consequences don’t matter to him; another reason the gods are terrible.

Archetypes are divine – superhuman in power because all of us who ever were or ever will be are contained in them. We die, but they do not, another reason they are so powerful. It’s ridiculous to imagine there is only one god, which is actually a trinity of three gods, who fights an equally powerful but opposing, immortal being called the Devil, whom one must also believe in. Even the world’s most monotheistic religion has at least four gods. Then there are saints to pray to, demons, archangels and a whole pantheon of other immortals who influence our lives. We have never really succeeded in becoming monotheistic, but then, why would we want to? To be whole, we need all of it.

The Best Kept Secret in the World

“A thick, impenetrable veil indeed still covers securely the Rites of Demeter and protects them from the curious eyes of modern students. How many nights and days have been spent over books, inscriptions and works of art by eminent scholars in the effort to lift the veil. Certainly, no secrets have ever been so well kept as those of the Eleusinia.

Geroge Mylonas, noted Greek anthropologist (1961)

It took 18 months to become eligible to experience the third level of initiation into the Greater Mystery at Eleusis - to become one of the epopteia: those who see. It’s an interesting phrase, that. Clearly it isn’t those who are told something, though that surely did happen. Was seeing a one-time experience - or did it open up a new way of seeing? All we know is that the epopteia took something out of the sacred Kiste (huge basket), did something with that, and put that something back into the same basket. This was described as: things done, things tasted and things seen (or perhaps, understood). Whatever it was, no one ever told. We know that the people who had the experience extolled the benefit, and the fathers of the church heaped condemnation upon it.

Like so many before me, I became fascinated with the mystery. It reminded me of the trip to New Grange, Ireland that I’ve written about before. But unlike New Grange, which still stands, the temple at Eleusis was destroyed by the marauding Christians of the early 4th century who defaced priceless statues and stamped crosses into the pavement like dogs marking their territory. Because of that destruction, so much has been lost, which of course was the point.

The theories of Carl Ruck, Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann argue that the secret must have been a psychedelic drug. How else to explain the reverence with which the rites were held? The rebuttal argues that no drugs were needed to create such a powerful experience, that ancient peoples would have been so moved by the combination of theatrical and ritual performance alone. But the ancient world was full of non-believers, atheists, rationalists, scientists and mathematicians – and many of these would have derided such shenanigans. Ancient people weren’t gullible children just because they lived earlier in history than we do. Something was experienced at Eleusis, and it was powerful.

As part of my research for this story, I took mind altering drugs in ceremonies led by an experienced shaman. Even though I was a long-time meditator and imagined I knew something about the nature of consciousness, it opened areas of my psyche that were previously closed. The experience radically changed the way I see. Having seen, I can’t unsee. Consciousness (which science still understands very little about) is a profound mystery.

At Eleusis, we know mystagogues guided the initiates (who were called mystes). We don’t know how often they met or under what circumstances. Was it individually or in a group? I imagined this role as a spiritual guide, an ancient kind of integration therapist. Perhaps mystagogues created what researchers of psychedelic drugs call set (the mindset that would produce the desired experience) and the ritual provided the setting necessary to give the consistently positive experiences people had.

The Pearly Gate

“No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute.”
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

Aphrodite Marina, or Mare, was known as the Pearl of the Sea, and the Pearl of Wisdom. She was the gate to sexual paradise, because her yoni was the gate to heaven. Souls entered the world through that gate and left it through the same gate, returning to the great cauldron of regeneration: her womb. When the moon was waxing, she was taking up souls, and when it was waning, she gave them back. Pearls were said to be made of the moon and water. If you looked up at the full moon, you could see her great pearl, standing over you, against the night sky.

Like so much of Christian mythology, the idea of the pearly gate was appropriated from much older traditions and adapted to new purposes - in a game of telephone that spanned two centuries, until it was written down in scripture. In the final Christian incarnation there was a gatekeeper, who judged - but before that all souls were accepted without condition. This accomplished two things. You had to be good by a Christian definition in order to enter Paradise, which allowed one to be controlled in that way. Now you had to control your sexuality, because everything about sex was bad. Additionally, the new God was watching all the time, and knew your inmost thoughts, a completely new concept. No one in the ancient world thought any god cared enough to do that, and many found the concept repellant. You were being intruded upon in the very insides of your soul - which was a creepy violation. Now, even the thoughts a person didn’t act upon had the power to keep them out of heaven, and the vast majority of these bad thoughts were sexual. It’s impossible to calculate how much harm has been done to the human psyche by making our sexuality bad.

Daemonologie

“Pagan images in Christian eyes were not just lifeless objects of shaped stone, metal and wood, they were thought to be the seat of malignant demons.”

Luke Lavan and Michael Mulran, The Archeology of Late Antique Paganism

Statues, the very seat of the demons themselves, suffered some of the most vicious attacks. It was not enough merely to take the statue down; the demon within had to be humiliated, disgraced, tortured, dismembered and thus neutralized.

Catherine Nixey The Darkening Age

St. Benedict, St. Martin, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine and other such fiery church orators added fuel to the campaign of violence that began with temples and statuary and ended in people’s private homes, and endangered people’s lives. They exhorted their followers to such wanton destruction by sermonizing that these objects were possessed by demons. Their God wanted this violent destruction of art, culture and even life - their god was a jealous god indeed.

The Christian mobs, and sometimes the Roman military, were so intent on destruction that many intellectuals of the time were said to have burned their valuable personal libraries in order to escape with their lives. Many did not escape. I’ve read many a Christian apologist that claimed the church had little to do with the destruction during early Christianity. They claim the Roman state fostered the violence with the laws they wrote. But there was no separation of church and state then. Augustine and others simply asked the Christian emperor for the laws, and he decreed them. The mobs, whipped into a frenzy by violent rhetoric carried out the destruction. Once the fight started, the bishops stood back, folded their hands in prayer and benefited. Historians, mostly Christian, failed to make these connections.

As time went on, Christians became more systematic and dangerous. Fast forward and one can follow this line of reasoning about demonic possession through to its next incarnation - the obsessive preoccupation with demonic possession seen in the European and then American witch hunts. Some estimate that nine million people were tortured and executed for being possessed, 85 – 90% of them women.

Originally though, a daemon was believed to be similar to a personal guardian angel linked to the individual’s soul. But with the Christian militarization beginning in the late 3rd century, anything could harbor a demon, especially the statues depicting the old gods who were clearly demons themselves. A small percentage of the population (estimated at 10% in the beginning of the 4th century) were trying to overthrow the dominant culture, and to do that, they resorted to joyful violence and destruction.

Marriage History

“Matriarchal societies seldom permitted sexual jealousy. Women were free to change lovers or husbands, to make polyandrous or group marriages. Myths record the transition from loose, flexible marital arrangements favored by Goddesses to the rigid monogamy favored by Gods.”

Barbara Walker, The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

Husband means: one bonded to the house. It comes from a time when property rights were matrilineal (passed down from mother to daughter) and clans were matrilocal (the husband joined his wife’s family). The bridegroom willingly became the servant of the bride. Why? Well, husbandry still means farm work, someone bonded to the land, but it also means breeding, as in animal husbandry. A husband had won the right to have sex with the powerful woman and produce the next generation. But his position wasn’t secure. A woman could marry as many men as her household could support, and she could divorce (throw him out) whenever she was bored. Patrilineal societies changed this when they came to power.

And what about all that bunk about pre-patriarchal cultures not knowing that babies came from sex? They knew. It was just that fathers weren’t important - at all. Anyone could be a father. What mattered was giving birth - who your mother was. Husbands were considered strangers in their wives’ house at worst, and a permanent guest at best. The uncles and sons had more power. Husbands didn’t own anything, or have inheritance rights. They certainly did not have rights to the children. That would have been preposterous.

In pre-patriarchal cultures, women owned the land and kept the domesticated animals. Symbolically, the woman of the house was a representation of the goddess, Mother Earth, and the husband worked in exchange for bed, board and to win the right to father her children. That’s the part they never fully explain when teaching about the division of labor in moving from hunter gatherer cultures to more rooted societies.  Women didn’t just own the land, they were the land - mythically, symbolically and metaphorically. In this sense the son of god always married his mother (god) in the form of the woman of the house. In an early version of the Rape of Persephone, Rhea, a mother god, condemned monogamy as a sin, but her son, Zeus, defied her. He forced Rhea’s daughter, Hera, into monogamous marriage with his brother. Then, of course, it turned out that monogamy only applied to the woman. The man was still free.

No wonder marriage was universally reviled by the early bishops. St. Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Paul, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, Tertullian and Origen all characterized it as a crime against God. Because marriage was about always about sex, and the early church was dead set against that. They took to heart the scripture that has Jesus say that unless a man hates “his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26).