Eleusis at the Intersection of Antiquity and Modernity: The Mysteria, Altered Consciousness, and the Neuroscience of Transformational Experience (original) (raw)
Related papers
Eleusis at the Intersection of Antiquity and Modernity
The official shutting down of the Eleusinian mysteries around 400 CE after a millennium of worship did not bring an end to Eleusis or the mysteria. What began as a ritual in honor of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone ramified over deep time and across geographical expanses into a variety of discourses that have shaped the concept of mystery as we know it today. This includes the incorporation of the term into Christian theology, Gnosticism, and secret societies whose lore sometimes connected them with a “golden thread” of esoteric wisdom extending back to Eleusis. Beyond religion, mystery has been sexualized to sell romance, exoticized to promote the exploration of strange places, and cosmologized in narratives about the enigmas of the universe. What about these associations is related to ancient meanings that grew out of the Eleusinian cult? Why has mystery continued, long after the suppression of the mysteria, to pique our imagination and resist domestication? While scholarship on the ancient mysteria abounds, none of it has tackled such questions from the perspectives opened by translation studies. Particularly relevant is the recent turn toward cultural translation, which explores how ideology, modes of production, the currency of cliques and trends, and tensions between the local and the global affect intra- and interlingual exchange. This paper seeks to advance the discussion of mystery and the mysteria within such a theoretical frame by juxtaposing two historical moments: 1) the ancient intralingual translation of mysteria-vocabulary in Greek into philosophy, particularly in Plato, and 2) the contemporary interlingual translation of this vocabulary into the discourses of new religious movements and cognitive neuroscience, which has begun exploring the phenomenology of extraordinary spiritual encounters through brain mapping. Linking these two recent discursive fields is what some have called the “archaic revival” in our time, which has been marked by a return to festival and ritualized forms of liminality. Here Eleusis has helped structure a set of loosely connected tropes in the cultural imaginary that combine postmodern forms of expression with a reverence for the pagan past. It has also functioned as a conduit for the return of initiation as a vital dimension of mystery—one that modern subjects are attempting to recreate in alternative culture heterotopias and that science is studying because of the light it casts on altered states of consciousness and transformational experience. This invites a closer look at the relationship between initiation and secrecy, the two main vectors of the Eleusinian mysteria.
2019
The Eleusinian Mysteries have gripped the imaginations of both ancient candidates for initiation and generations of modern scholars. They are among the most intriguing of ancient cults, as their study raises a variety of questions regarding Athenian politics, religion, philosophy, and soteriology, as well as issues surrounding the continuity of the cult from the Bronze age, through the classical period, and on into the Christian era. The Mysteries attracted individuals who participated as a matter of personal choice, offering an eschatological perspective at a time when the fashion for 'mystery' and 'oriental' cults had not yet reached the height of its popularity. Initiation by choice means that participation in this public cult, which is administered by the Athenian state, is not purely a matter of tradition, as was the case for other cults attended by citizens or demesmen. At the same time, the Eleusinian Mysteries were open to all those who wished to be initiated and they attracted a large and varied audience. The decision to participate led the initiand to take a series of preparative ritual actions and then on to the various stages of the initiation itself: the preliminary initiation, the muêsis, and, ultimately, the epopteia where the initiand becomes one who has seen.1 How should we understand the combination of the individual aspect with the collective in this cult? While the unique individual is prominent in the Mysteries , they are still, obviously, strongly characterised by socially and politically predetermined expectations. The collective aspect, on the other hand, applies here to various groupings. In what follows, we shall examine the ways in which individual and collective combine. This approach will cast light on the extent to which individuals act and the extent to which they are acted upon, the roles they are expected to play, and the space left for individual initiative. Within the framework of polis-or public cults, the Eleusinian Mysteries are indeed an exception. Not only is participation based on personal choice-itself an oddity, since attendance is still regulated by tradition-, but individual initiation promises to change one's fate in the afterlife. This focus on the individual has been seen 1 For the various stages of initiation, see Clinton 2003, 51, considering the preliminary initiation, the mustai as first-time participants, and the epoptai, the viewers, one year later. See also, with slight differences, Richardson 1974, 20; Dowden 1980; Simms 1990, 190, rejecting preliminary initiation and identifying the muêsis with the Mysteries.
The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries
In 1998 William Dailey and I founded Hermes Press International and republished this classic, seminal text on the role of entheogens in Western religion and philosophy originally published in 1978, by R. G. Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck, with the Homeric Hymm to Demeter translated by Blaise Staples. In 2008 North Atlantic Books (Berkeley, CA) published a soft cover edition. These two later issues differ from the original with the addition of new material by Carl Ruck, Jon Ott, Albert Hofmann, Peter Webster, and includes a preface by Huston Smith. The importance of this text is that it shows how psychedelic, or entheogenic experience, long known to be central to the religious and curative practices of traditional societies, is also (apparently) found at the birth of Western civilization. I hope that this research will have useful legal and policy implications in pursuit of freedom of religion.
"The Psychology of Secrecy in the Eleusinian Mysteries", SCS Annual Meeting, 6 January 2023
2023
This paper proposes to identify how the norm of secrecy could affect worshippers’ emotions and mindsets during and after the initiation in the Eleusinian Mysteries. To do so, I will investigate the psychological dimension of secrecy through the lens of the textual sources. Ancient authors limit their discussions on “secrecy” either in general to the experience and emotions of the ancient worshippers or more specifically, to the consequences of the violation of secrecy, like Alcibiades who had been publicly disgraced and cursed by the priests after he had violated the sanctified secrecy of the Mysteries (e.g. μιμούμενος τὰ ἱερὰ ἐπεδείκνυε τοῖς ἀμυήτοις καὶ εἶπε τῇ φωνῇ τὰ ἀπόρρητα, Lys. 6.51). In other sources, we find that dreams could act as emotional triggers for the maintenance of secrecy. For instance, Pausanias mentions (1.38.7) that “a dream forbade me from writing the things inside the wall of the sanctuary since the uninitiated are clearly forbidden to learn about what they have been debarred from seeing”.
New Classicists , 2021
Mystery cults were secret cults, which promised their initiates blessedness, in this life or/and after death. Ancient sources describe mystic initiation as a life-altering event, but provide very limited information as to the content of the initiatory experience. While current research often tends to focus on the prominence of the secret doctrinal knowledge transmitted in the initiatory rites, ancient sources, from the Classical to Imperial Roman period, seems to suggest that the essence of this process was manifested in the eye-opening experiences of the initiates. These experiences involved various sensorial elements and physical factors that have strong effects on the human psycho-physiological functioning, such as fasts and lack of sleep, sensory deprivation by means of darkness, silence and stillness, alteration between darkness and light, ecstatic music and dances, strong smells and fragrances, visual and physical interaction with sacred objects, etc. The objective of my paper is twofold: 1) To offer a brief survey of the wide-ranging functions of the senses in the initiatory experience, and 2) To integrate ancient evidence with methods and results provided by other disciplines, especially cognitive neuroscience. This interdisciplinary approach may illuminate significant aspects of the initiatory experience and allows a construal of the mechanism behind the impact of corporal sensations of the initiates on their mental states, beliefs and memories during and after the experience.
The Contemporary Review, 1880
AT the present day it is definitively proved that there was not in the mysteries of Eleusis, any more than in the other mysteries of Greece, any dogmatic teaching; that the proceedings in them were not by way of a communication, made directly by the hierophantês to the mystês, of formal doctrinal beliefs different from the public religion and superior to it. There were, on the nights of the initiations, rites and representations of a symbolic nature, intended to awaken religious impressions in the souls of the initiated; to make them penetrate further into the knowledge of divine things, and into the inner meaning of the myths presented for adoration; and, above all, to apply to them the merits of the vicissitudes in the history of the gods by throwing down the barrier between man and the divinity. But everywhere, at Eleusis as well as at Samothrake and in the other mysteries, the teaching remained closely attached to the ceremonies themselves, and it resulted immediately therefrom for those who could understand them. It did not form a distinct part intended to supply the solution of an enigma which had long been paraded before the eyes.
Unveiling the Hidden Face of Antiquity: Mysteries and Cryptic Cults (2023)
Vienna: Phoibos Verlag, 2023
This volume contains twenty-two studies focusing on a variety of topics related to mysteries, initiation rituals, and mystic cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. To better display this rich material, the twenty-two chapters of the volume have been classified under five thematic parts: • Eleusinian Mysteries • Other Gods and Heroes • Ritual and Initiation • Poetry and Philosophy • Mysteries and Theater
To Live in Joy and Die with Hope: Experiential Aspects of Ancient Greek Mystery Rites
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2013
The paper focuses on embodied mystery experiences of initiates in ancient Greek mystery cults. Four main questions are addressed: what kind of experience was considered the core of Greek mystery initiations, how was this experience attained, in what way did it influence the life of the initiates, and what real-life experience could prompt the idea of mystery initiations. Mystery initiation may be defined as ersatz-death, a rehearsal of the real one. Modelled as it seems on near-death experiences, these rites comprised alterations of the initiate’s state of consciousness. For trivial events to be remembered by the mystai as revelations, they were brought to a state of heightened sensitivity and perhaps also suggestibility. The knowledge of life and death thus acquired was a holistic and ineffable sensation, rather than a learnt doctrine: in Aristotle’s words, the initiates were “not to learn anything, but rather to experience and to be inclined”.