The Eleusinian Mysteries

The secret rites of Demeter, kept so well that nobody knows what happened

For about two thousand years people walked the Sacred Way from the cemetery of Athens to Eleusis, swinging branches and shouting obscenities in memory of the old woman whose dirty jokes made grieving Demeter smile, to be initiated into the most famous secret rites of ancient Greece. The Mysteries told of Persephone carried off to the underworld by Hades and given back to her mother, and the initiated believed they would fare better after death. Before entering the Telesterion, a hall Strabo said could hold as many people as a theatre, each recited that they had fasted and drunk the kykeon, a drink of barley and pennyroyal. What happened inside is almost unknown: revealing it was punishable by death. That silence feeds a modern theory that the kykeon was psychedelic, from ergot on the barley, and ergot has turned up in a Spanish temple of the same two goddesses; classicists remain unconvinced. Theodosius I closed the Mysteries in 392. The sanctuary ruins stand in modern Elefsina, west of Athens.