“Light, Life, Love; Force, Fantasy, Fire; these do I bring you: mine hands are full of these. There is joy in the setting-out; there is joy in the journey; there is joy in the goal. Only if ye are sorrowful, or weary, or angry, or discomforted; then ye may know that ye have lost the golden thread, the thread wherewith I guide you to the heart of the groves of Eleusis.
Anonymous
If I could hop on a time machine, I’d undertake initiation at Eleusis…
The Sanctuary at Eleusis was the home of the Mysteries of Demeter and Kore, two of the most important gods of the ancient world. Its purpose was to illuminate the core mystery of life and death, and promise access to a better afterlife. Three thousand people a year flocked to Eleusis for a nine-day festival that culminated in a ritual so powerful, no less than Cicero, widely considered one of ancient Rome’s most talented philosophers, proclaimed it removed the fear of death. That’s a pretty big deal.
The Terror Management Theory of modern Psychology argues that the fear of death motivates almost all of human culture. It’s so thick around us that we can’t see it, yet it colors our personal decisions, our politics and all our institutions, especially our religions. Think about that for a minute. What would it be like to be free of that?
But not everyone at the nine-day festival was admitted to the third level initiation. It took eighteen months to pass through the two lower levels (the Lesser Mysteries) to become eligible to participate in the Greater Mystery, the part that was supposed to remove the fear of death. For more than two thousand years, it was the most influential cult in the ancient world, though some scholars say its roots are even older than that. Everyone who was anyone was initiated there, yet the rich and powerful were initiated alongside slaves, women and children without distinction. Death is the great equalizer.
All initiates were sworn to secrecy. To divulge what happened at the height of the ceremony was a crime punishable by death. This is true. Several people were tried in court (Aeschylus, the famous playwright, for example), and at least one person was actually put to death. In fact, the secret was so well kept that to this day, no one really knows what happened there - even though tens of thousands of people attended. Now that’s keeping a secret.
We do know that the word Eleusis means advent, and the festival celebrated the advent of the divine child, the savior (a kern or kernel of wheat) born of the earth mother and laid in a manger. Participants ate the body of god, partaking of his immortality, and thereafter were called epopteia (those who see). Many scholars over the years have tried in vain to see how the drink given to initiates, kykeon, could have contained a psychedelic drug. I don’t think it did. We do know that the revelation of divine salvation involved “things heard, things tasted and things seen.” So, what if the things tasted were mushrooms, and the things seen were visions, caused by a little mushroom that grows on wheat pressed into a Eucharistic wafer?