Cosmic Junkyard #7: What were the Eleusinian Mysteries?

Revealing the truth about this ritual was punishable by death in ancient Greece. Did it involve psychedelics? And is it high time to revive it for our modern world?

Cosmic Junkyard will enter its biweekly rhythm as promised after this post, but I had to share this today because this topic works perfectly with my Mabon Creativity + Ritual Challenge, which also starts today. Check it out for suggestions on how to implement the Mysteries into your own life and more information about the seasonal importance of these rites. As always, thanks for being here.

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I am turning one year older soon soon, and my birthday’s position at the very beginning of autumn has always felt appropriate.

My birthday also has always felt feels like a bit of a somber occasion. Every time I turn a year older, I’m honestly very conscious that I’m a year closer to death.

As always, I see my own growth and cyclicality mirrored in the earth’s. Every year, around this time, the earth starts to die. Late September/early October is a threshold, a binary between the summer’s lushness and the withering that happens like clockwork every year.

I often feel like my life — and life itself — is defined by various risings and fallings. I veer back and forth between pitch-dark sadness and immense gratitude. I feel despair and love for this world so much in equal measure.

Perhaps that’s why I resonate so much with the story of Persephone, her mother Demeter, and Hades, the god of death who pulled her into the depths of the earth.

Persephone and Demeter, by Dadaleme via Etsy

The Story of Persephone and Demeter

The Greek myth goes like this. Persephone, young and beautiful, was chasing a glittering bauble through a lush meadow. There among the irises and hyacinths, she was spotted by Hades, the god of death and the underworld. He fell in love with her immediately and lured her down to his subterranean domain of lost souls.

Above the ground, Persephone’s mother Demeter flew into a rage. For nine desperate days, she searched high and low for her daughter. Eventually she stumbled upon the moon goddess Hecate who led her to the sun god Helios, and together they discovered Persephone’s whereabouts. But Hades would not relent.

After this, Demeter fell into despair. As the goddess of the Earth, Demeter was critical to maintaining the earth’s fertility — but in her rage, and following a labyrinthine series of events, she began wreaking havoc on the land, and mass starvation and disaster ensued in the human realm.

The world withered. Winter was born.

At last, seeing how the humans were suffering, Zeus persuaded his brother Hades to release Persephone. But before Hades let her go, Persephone ate some pomegranate seeds, which meant she had to return to Hades for at least part of the year, every year.

I imagine the seeds stained her lips rose-red. Perhaps their juice stung just a bit. Within the darkness was sweetness; within the sweetness, an eternity in the dark.

So Persephone returned to her mother and to the world above and spring resumed. But the months cycled and eventually she had to go back down to Hades again. For the rest of time, she would spend half the year above and half below.

So goes the myth, which is connected — as most immortal stories are — to the cycles of the earth. Now, there is some disagreement about whether Persephone actually wanted to go with Hades to become the Queen of the Night or whether she was truly stolen away against her will, but the bones of the tale remain the same.

There is a young girl. She falls. The world dies. She is born again. The world is reborn with her.

Flux, change, duality, and creation itself are all contained within this powerful narrative. For the ancient Greeks, this story also formed the heart of their most important ritual, a practice that by all accounts was wholly life-changing for all who participated. This ritual was called the Eleusinian Mysteries.

What happened during the Eleusinian Mysteries?

We know that the Mysteries took place at the Panhellenic Sanctuary in the city of Eleusis in ancient Greece. Up to 3,000 initiates at a time could participate, and involvement was entirely voluntary. They did not have to be Greek, and women and slaves were allowed; the only rule was that participants could not have committed a homicide.

There were two parts: the Lesser Mysteries, which occurred in the spring and were preparatory rites, and the Greater Mysteries, which occurred in the fall around now. This post will be about the latter.

Paul Sérusier, LES MYSTÉRES D´ELEUSIS

During this ceremony, which is believed to have lasted nine days just like Demeter’s search for her daughter did, it is believed that initiates would cleanse themselves in the sea and would fast for days, and animal sacrifices and purification rites may have also been involved. They would then walk the 14 miles from Athens to Eleusis, where they would arrive at Demeter’s sanctuary.

They would then spend a night engaged in ritual dance, and would then drink a brew called the Kykeon, a drink believed to be composed of barley, mint, and water.

Then, having ingested nothing but Kykeon for days, they would move to the heart of the sanctuary, where they’d stand in front of a cave that represented the entrance to Hades. Someone playing the role of Persephone would then emerge from a well right beside the cave.

By torchlight, they would move to a large room full of high columns which housed the Anaktoron, a building that contained sacred objects dedicated to Demeter.

We don’t know what happened in this room. No one does except those who were there, and they have long since departed to join Hades down in the world of the dead.

One Gnostic source says that the central Mystery involved “the ear of wheat harvested in silence,” per The New York Times. Perhaps this means that the Mysteries honored grain, the food that sustains all life and defined the harvest at the year’s end. We will likely never know for sure what happened among those columns.

Via HistorySkills

Regardless, the Mysteries apparently changed lives forever. Plato described a “blessed sight and vision” that led to a “a state of perfection” after participating.

Plutarch, meanwhile, saw the Mysteries as a way to connect with the infinite perfection of the human soul, writing that “because of those sacred and faithful promises given in the mysteries ... we hold it firmly for an undoubted truth that our soul is incorruptible and immortal,” and adding, “Let us behave ourselves accordingly.”

Many said that after partaking in the rite, they no longer feared death, as it somehow showed them that we were not just our physical bodies and that death was not the end.

Plutarch also noted that “when a man dies he is like those who are initiated into the mysteries,” adding that “our whole life is a journey by tortuous ways without outlet. At the moment of quitting it come terrors, shuddering fear, amazement. Then a light that moves to meet you, pure meadows that receive you, songs and dances and holy apparitions.”

The whole point of the Eleusinian Mysteries, writes the author Brian C. Muraresku in his book The Immortality Key, was to “die before you die.” Through this premature death, one could fully understand life.

So what actually happened? How did people reach this state of transcendent knowledge and understanding?

It could have just been the hunger, and the anticipation, and the theatricality of the rites. But according to Muraresku and many other scholars and theorists, the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries may have involved a psychedelic substance.

Did the Eleusinian Mysteries involve psychedelics?

There is no real evidence that supports the theory that the Eleusinian rites were psychedelic. But many believe that the Kykeon brew incorporated ergot, a fungus that Albert Hofmann synthesized into what would become known as LSD in 1938. Some believe that the Mysteries involved psilocybin, while others propose poppy-based opiates or even DMT.

Regardless of the nature of the actual substance, this would kind of make a lot of sense. And it would also mark a huge paradigm shift in the way we view the Greeks, their religion, and the birth of Western thought.

Muraresku takes things a step further by arguing that the Eleusinian Mysteries actually were the basis of Christianity — which makes sense when you think of the parallels between the story of Persephone’s resurrection and Jesus Christ’s own.

In the most poetically tragic way, Christianity also lead to the downfall and suppression of the Mysteries and Paganism at large. (In my end is my beginning, and in my beginning is my end; the sweetness initiates the darkness, the darkness contains the sweetness, and so forth).

But if the Eleusinian Mysteries were psychedelic, and Muraresku’s theories were true, then it means that psychedelics have been shaping religious thought and shaping the progression of civilization for thousands of years.

It also means that we might be really suffering so much today, in part, because in mainstream culture we’ve abandoned these ancient rites, which were so critical in establishing our relationship with the natural world, death, and the reality of our connection to both of them.

Eleusis, via Pappas News

Do we need to revive the Eleusinian Mysteries for our ecologically devastated world today?

Today, psychedelics are creeping back into the mainstream. (I was recommended Muraresku’s book by a guy I met in Pai, Thailand whose job is facilitating psilocybin trips). And at the same time, today, we stand on the precipice of irreparable ecological disaster.

I don’t think the fact that these two things are happening at the same time is coincidence.

I think deep down, many of us are longing for union with the earth and union with the mystical. We are disconnected, exhausted, unfulfilled. Our hearts yearn for sacredness. And not the kind of sacredness that involves a big man in the sky. But the kind of sacredness Jesus Christ spoke of when he said that “the kingdom of God is at hand.”

“This is the kingdom,” writes Sophie Strand in The Madonna Secret, which is her beautiful ode to Mary Magdalene, who may have been Jesus’s wife and equal in wisdom.

That is the true message of the mystics, I believe.

Everything is right here.

The Greek writer Praetextatus “warned us over sixteen hundred years ago that if the Mysteries ever died ... we would die,” writes Muraresku. “That whatever Christianity was offering, it was no match for the spiked-beer Eucharist of Demeter and Persephone or the spiked-wine Eucharist of Dionysus,” he continues. “How much longer can we afford business-as-usual until life becomes truly ‘unlivable’? We are sleepwalking toward the edge of a cliff, say the scientists, and no one seems to care.”

He goes on to quote Gus Speth, founder of the National Resources Defense Council. “I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation and eco-system collapse, and that we scientists could fix those problems with enough science. But I was wrong,” Speth said. “The real problem is not those three items, but greed, selfishness and apathy. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

“But,” Muraresku adds, “maybe the Greeks did. Maybe the momentary annihilation of the ego that Praetextatus and his fellow initiates experienced at Eleusis, or the maenads found in the ecstasy of drugged wine, was enough to glimpse the big picture. To understand that the Earth is our solitary home for the moment. That we are all in this together. And that mistreating Mother Nature is more suicide than murder … Just when humanity is faced with the kind of threat that only comes along once every hundred million years, is this one last chance for a civilization in crisis?”

In the most generic sense, psychedelics remind us that we are not separate from all other beings. My experiences with psychedelic medicines this year have been profoundly life-changing, reminding me that we are all unified by a current of universal love.

These experiences, which were done during carefully curated, intentional events, have actually allowed me to see that without all the blinders my ego usually places over ideas like that, which seem so antithetical to the individualism that has become associated with sanity in our modern era.

These medicines, just like truly impactful ritual and religious rites, remind us that are not separate. We are mirrors and microcosms of the earth. We die and are reborn. We live because the earth lives and dies and lives again. The earth lives because it experiences constant cycles of death and rebirth.

I’m definitely not saying that we all need to do psychedelics, or that psychedelics were the root of the Mysteries. But I am saying that maybe we need to bring back the Eleusinian Mysteries in some form, or at least some kind of rite or sacred practice that involves remembering our true nature and our connection to the earth.

This is already happening in many places. And since my birthday falls around when the Mysteries took place, I plan on hosting my own Eleusis-themed parties in the future.

Because actually, the passage of time is something to celebrate. Death is not the end. We are not individuals. We are part of a continuum.

We are love incarnate, which sounds cliché until you actually see the raw truth of it, and then you realize that actually, pretending we’re all separate is the ultimate delusion.

It makes no sense to say that we are separate. We are made of ancient pinches of stardust, encoded with our ancestors’ DNA that in turn arose from cells fizzing and sputtering into being at the bottom of the ocean.

We lose each other. We mourn. We search. We find each other in new forms, changed but familiar.

This is the mystery. And also the most primal knowledge embedded in each of us. And I believe this knowledge was the center of the Eleusinian rites.

We all have the seeds of creation inside of our bodies. We can all create new life. We all require seeds and growth to live and sustain ourselves. We require those ears of grain growing in silence.

There is so much more to say about this. I love the Mysteries because I love how they were led by women and by priestesses. And I love the Mysteries because I love the Persephone story, which I love because I have watched myself fall down rabbit holes only to rise out of them, changed and stronger and wilder and yet still the same whole person as before.

In many ways, we are collectively deep inside the underworld, caught in an endlessly looping labyrinth. We are blind and hungry and grasping, hooked on our delusions. This is part of the dance, too.

But we must remember to surface and see the actuality of truth every now and then. The cycle is the nature of existence. If we did not cycle, we would not exist at all. We’d live in the dark sublime stasis of whatever came before.

I don’t exactly know why we left that stasis for this world of form and change. Perhaps we were just curious. We were offered an apple, or a seed, or a bit of fungus, and we took it, because we wanted to see and know.

So here we are. Cycling up and down, back and forth. Growing older. Dying. Being reborn.

Mysteries and rites help us remember the real nature of all this. And they help us, just for a moment, to see the wholeness beyond it.

So happy almost 27th birthday to me. Happy autumn. I am nearly one year older.

The earth is dying. I am becoming someone new.

I love this time of year, the decaying time, the ghostly whispers of decay, the soft comfort of retreating inward and peering into the cave and resting the darkness beneath.

On a larger and more permanent scale, due to environmental destruction, the earth is dying. We are killing it. But it will be reborn with or without us. I believe that it can also be reborn into a New Earth.

What happens next largely depends on what we do in the next few years. And I think we need rites and rituals like the Mysteries to emerge to remind us that we are not separate from the planet. Our fate is inextricably tied to its fate and to each others’.