The Eleusinian Mysteries

For 2,000 years, the Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated in ancient Greece as an annual fertility rite that gave participants the opportunity to glimpse ta hiera, or “the holy,” through face-to-face communion with God. Notable initiates into the Mysteries include philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Cicero, Plutarch and Pindar.

As many as 3,000 people participated in the Mysteries every year, which were available to anyone who could speak Greek and had not committed a murder. Initiates could participate in the Mysteries only once in a lifetime, however, and were forbidden by law to speak of their mystical experience at Eleusis, under penalty of death. One theory suggests that both Plutarch and Socrates may have been sentenced to death for profaning the Mysteries.

Initiation began in the spring with the Lesser Mysteries. In the fall, after half a year of preparatory rituals, the ceremony culminated with a procession lasting several days from Athens to the temple at Eleusis. There, the ceremony of the Greater Mysteries was held, in which students learned the “true nature of the soul, its relation to the body, and the method by which it could be purified and redeemed” through spiritual vision and self-realization.

Before experiencing the final “soul-shattering vision” of the Greater Mysteries, initiates drank kykeon, an entheogenic potion made from ergot, from which LSD is derived. The initiates then spent the night in a darkened hall, where they beheld a great vision, which was “new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition.” Whatever the vision, there is no doubt that the effects were profound. Some hold that a night in the Eleusinian sanctuary may have inspired Plato's “ideas” and world of archetypes.

Rich symbolism attends the cult of the Mysteries. As the annual celebration of a fertility rite, the Mysteries symbolized for the Greeks the natural cycles of the changing seasons and the miracle of springtime rebirth. In a more metaphysical sense, the Mysteries represented a rebirth of the soul, “that we may live in joy, but also, besides, that we may die with better hope,” as summarized by Cicero.

According to Albert Hofmann, a premiere scholar of the Eleusinian Mysteries, “The cultural-historical significance of the Eleusinian Mysteries, their influence on European intellectual history, can scarcely be overstated. Here suffering humankind found a cure for its rational, objective, cleft intellect, in a mystical totality experience, that let it believe in immortality, in an ever-lasting existence.”