“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.