The hallowed rites of the Goddess Persephone at Eleusis held sway for nearly two thousand years (from at least 1500 BCE until the end of fourth century CE), beginning as a small localized religion and growing, until at its height, as many as three thousand followers could be initiated at one time. At about 600 BCE, Eleusis was adopted as the state religion of nearby Athens, a period just prior to the great Athenian cultural flowering. Eleusis became the centerpiece of the ancient world and the foremost sect of the mystery religions that dominated the Mediterranean sphere during classical antiquity.

It is difficult to over estimate the impact of Eleusis. As Cicero records Marcus,

For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those mysteries. For by means of them we have transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy but also dying with better hope.°

Eleusis had tremendous influence, such that our learned Roman considered it even more important than all the other marvelous advances of Athenian culture. The mysteries taught people not to fear death, that there would be joys everlasting on the other side of that veil, and in so doing made life more bearable, more pleasant; collectively organizing a societal focus on higher callings and civilizing life. Aristides the Rhetor wrote that, “Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth, and of all the divine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome and the most luminous.”°

And yet the goings-on inside the temple are cloaked in mystery, because the penalty for revealing the rites was death, a decree which is said to have come from the goddess herself. The secrecy was generally kept, which leaves a paucity of direct testimonials about these important rituals. The term mystery comes from the Greek root myein “to close,” which is normally interpreted to mean to keep the mouth closed because the initiates were sworn to silence, but the root may also indicate that what the initiates learned at a mystery could not be talked about; it could be shown, it could be witnessed or revealed, but it could not be explained.°

What we do know:

-the initiates had a direct face-to-face experience with the gods;
-the gods appeared as phasmataphos (phantoms made of light);
-the initiates endured some sort of harrowing experience that emulated death;
-the initiates were held in darkness for an extended period before meeting the gods in light;
-inside of the cavernous temple was a sacred smaller building that held a great fire;
-only the high priest or hierophant (he or she who reveals the holy) could enter the small building;
-the interior of the large temple could be plunged into darkness or lit up like daylight in an instant;
-few initiates could see the hierophant as he was hidden behind columns and a high-backed chair;
-small realistic female figurines were recovered from the site.

This scant smattering of details provides enough clues to indicate the manner of the performance of the rites. The optical principle of the camera obscura—an image cast into a dark area from an adjacent bright area via a small aperture—works irrespective of the scale of the dark and light areas. In the normal context a small dark space is surrounded by the sunlit world, but the principle is reversible, if the inside of a room is made very bright and the outside is very dark then the same hole will cast the image from the smaller space to the larger. This is how modern slide and digital projectors work. The priest’s holy fire-room acted as the box of light and the dark cavernous space crowded with initiates was the theatre. The priest at Eleusis was operating a rudimentary projection booth, the Eleusinian Projector. Figurines of the gods were stationed inside the priest's fire-room and it was their images that were projected out into the temple. The initiates were not directing their attention toward the priest or the sacred house, they were looking the other direction at spectral images, that they believed were gods, shining about on all the columns, viewing something akin to a sacred movie. Plato describes initiates experiencing, “whole, simple, unchanging, and blissful images in a pure light…”°

Fig. 1. Eleusinian Projector
The priest's sacred fire-room uses a small ceramic figurine to project a ghostly image of the Goddess.

Socratic implications

Eleusis even plays a role, though heretofore unnoticed, in the most widely read and influential philosophical writing in the western world, Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’, in which Socrates describes to his friend Glaucon a cave where men spend their whole lives chained to a wall, bound so tightly that they cannot move their heads side-to-side, believing reality to be the shadows on the wall in front of them. The shadows are cast by small sculptures that passersby carry in front of a campfire. The ‘Allegory of the Cave’ is a wonderful literary image of the human condition, wrestling with the very nature of reality, and sustaining undiluted metaphorical resonance through the centuries. But as lasting and influential as the message has been, it is something more...the allegory is heresy.

Posted March 9, 2010