CHAPTER 4

DEMETER DEAREST

WHEN I LEFT CLEVELAND for college in 1970, I was as a sealed bottle of milk: wholesome and protected from experience. When anyone asked where I was from, I’d say the Midwest. If they inquired further, I’d say Ohio. And if they still weren’t satisfied I’d admit I was from Cleveland. The West Side. Near the zoo. Cleveland was a joke—it was the place where the river caught on fire. The DJs there called it “the best location in the nation.” We called it “the mistake on the lake.”

I had gone to an all-girls Catholic high school. By the time I was eighteen, I had traveled as far west as Detroit, as far south as Columbus, and as far east as Niagara Falls. The lake—Lake Erie—was north. I dreamed of going to boarding school in Switzerland and learning to speak French, German, and Italian. Radcliffe, Smith, and Wellesley were the stuff of fantasy. My father could afford to send me to a state university in Ohio. And he wanted to keep me in Ohio. I was determined to get out.

My senior year in high school, a friend who was researching colleges told me, “You should go to Rutgers—it has a renowned department of dairy science.” I had a thing about cows. Placid, motherly creatures, cows evoked for me the pastoral life, and my affection for them extended to all aspects of the dairy industry—barns, silos, milk, cheese, cow paintings. Eventually, I drove a milk truck in Cleveland—the best job I’ve ever had. (Packaging mozzarella at a cheese factory in Vermont was the worst job I ever had. Copy editing at The New Yorker was the longest job I ever had.) As a teenager, I dreamed of having three cows and a bull on a dairy farm somewhere green and pristine, preferably Vermont, and initially I pursued that dream as far as the Garden State.

Rutgers, for all its Ivy League–sounding name, is a state university—The State University of New Jersey—and the tuition was only $200 more a semester than the tuition at an Ohio state university, an amount that I could earn at my after-school job. (I was a price marker in the clothing department of a discount store called Uncle Bill’s.) So I applied to Douglass, the women’s college of Rutgers University.

My father relented, and in the fall of 1970 we headed east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We made it as far as Norristown and spent the night in King of Prussia—these names delighted me—and in the morning we headed up the New Jersey Turnpike to New Brunswick. After delivering me to the dorm, my father gripped me by the shoulders, gave me a quick kiss, and said, “I don’t like long goodbyes.” He kept his head tilted back to hold the tears in. I was sad, too, but this was a turning point: I’d made it happen and I had no regrets.

On George Street was Dave’s Food Store—a straightforward-enough name for a grocery store—and a ramshackle house with something purple blooming on the porch. It was the color of lilacs, but lilacs bloom only in the spring. What an enchanted, alien place I had landed in! The purple flower turned out to be wisteria, which keeps on blooming if you prune it. I have since inhaled it on Capri and Corfu and eaten it on Martha’s Vineyard and planted a vine of my own in Rockaway, where it is eating my bungalow.

But the punch line of my escape from Ohio is that many of the New Jersey natives at Douglass had friends who had gone in the opposite direction: “Ohio is full of good schools,” they said—Oberlin, Hiram, Case Western Reserve. “Why did you come here?”

New Jersey had the ocean, for one thing. I had never seen the ocean. I didn’t know much else about the state—I thought its capital was Atlantic City. A new friend, appalled that I had never seen the ocean, borrowed a car and drove me to Asbury Park. I remember the thrill of being on the boardwalk and knowing instinctively that the ocean was to the east. In Cleveland, the water was always north. My orientation to the whole continent changed!

My first English class at Douglass was Autobiography, and we started with Sylvia Plath: The Colossus and Ariel. Her suicide angered me. I felt that as a college freshman I was being introduced to something ugly, to despair. Here was a published poet, a woman who had gone to Smith and married a handsome British poet and had children—she had everything—who seemed never to have recovered from her father’s death, and somehow, reading her poetry, I felt as if I had to entertain her death wish. The other book that had a profound effect on me was Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. She wrote about her defiance, as a girl, toward the idea that there must be a God because someone—something—had to have existed in order to create the universe: wasn’t it just as easy to believe that the universe existed all along? (There is probably a name for this brand of heresy.) I was appalled at some of the things Mary McCarthy wrote. OK, so she didn’t believe in God—did she have to insult him? I would have hedged my bets. I expressed this in class, and when the professor said that he was an atheist himself I was horrified. I already liked this man, but I was Catholic—how could I like an atheist?

On the way back to the dorm, I caught myself praying. It was a habit, a way of talking to myself without feeling insane. “God, please don’t make me stop believing in you.” Before the next class, I had a blinding insight. Infallibility, whereby the Pope cannot be wrong in matters of faith because he takes dictation directly from God: wasn’t that as absurd as the emperor of Japan saying he was descended from the sun? The whole edifice crumbled for me—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. (Was this what Dad was trying to prevent by keeping me in Ohio?) At any rate, I would discover that a person can describe herself as an atheist yet still maintain that, in the words of the Catechism, the Roman Catholic Church is the one true holy catholic and apostolic church.

The seal was off the milk bottle.

Soon I was registering for exotic-sounding courses like astronomy, existentialism, and mythology. I dropped astronomy (too much math) and was way over my head in existentialism, but mythology, Classics 355, was a revelation. It was a lecture class taught by Professor Froma Zeitlin, who assigned starry things like the Oresteia and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and readings in Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose anthropological approach to myth was the basis of structuralism, and Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religion, and Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who had developed a theory of archetypes (I thought it was pronounced “Archie types”).

Professor Zeitlin was just starting her academic career and she already had a following. She was an inspired lecturer, who made mythology electrifying. In 1976, she moved to Princeton, where she taught for decades, gaining fame for the approach to classics that I had lucked into in the spring of my sophomore year. (“You studied with Froma Zeitlin?” a classicist asked me years later, awed.) She was particularly eloquent on the “Great Round,” the cycle of life and the seasons, and Gaia, the Earth Mother, as she deconstructed the myth of Demeter and Persephone and elaborated on the cult associated with them, the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Initiates into the cult walked in procession from Athens to Eleusis on a road known as the Sacred Way, along which were many tombs. Nobody knows precisely what the Mysteries were, but they had something to do with death. Eleusis was a center of worship of Demeter (De-me-ter), the patron goddess of agriculture. She was the Mother Nature of the Greek gods. Her daughter, Persephone—often called Kore, which means simply “girl”—was abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld. Kore was out picking flowers and was attracted to an especially beautiful narcissus when Hades erupted from the earth in his horse-drawn chariot and carried her off. She was raped and abducted, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Professor Zeitlin made it sound inevitable: “Virgins are always ripe for sacrifice.” I was a virgin, and, like many coeds, I was eager to lose my virginity, but I had never thought of it that way.

The loss of her daughter was tragic for Demeter, who had no heart for making things grow anymore. No one could comfort her. She made the mortals suffer, too. If Mother Nature does not produce grain, if nothing germinates and nothing blooms, nobody eats. Demeter’s grief caused a famine. Zeus and the other gods realized that if mortals were to go extinct, there would be no one to worship them—the gods are selfish—so he agreed to let the reluctant bride go back to her mother. But there was a trick: before she left, Hades made her eat a few seeds of a pomegranate. I don’t think I knew what a pomegranate was before this, but it is a fruit of many seeds—it is a red globe crammed with red seeds, obscenely packed with seeds, a fruit that is nothing but seeds. Because she had eaten of the pomegranate—“she took his seed into her mouth”—Kore would have to return to the Underworld.

This was presented as the background for the Eleusinian Mysteries. People traveled on foot from Athens to Eleusis, past gravestones, thinking of a mother and daughter, of the inevitability of death and the promise of rebirth. Maddeningly, they were sworn to secrecy, and nobody revealed the content of the Mysteries. What happened when they got to Eleusis? Did they listen to a lecture, see a performance, close their eyes and follow a guided meditation? What did they learn? I wanted to be an initiate!

Professor Zeitlin was eloquent on the meaning of the myth as an explanation of the seasons: crops grow and are harvested and die back; trees lose their leaves and are bare all winter, but in the spring they send out sticky little leaves and revive our hopes. There was a time when people didn’t know, couldn’t trust, that spring would come. Frankly, every year, as winter lingers into April and May, I wonder if spring will come. So though it was a bleak scenario—rape, death, winter—it was a comfort to know there would be an end to suffering.

Professor Zeitlin’s lecture culminated in the anthropological concept of the Great Round. The cycle of life begins with the earth and returns to the earth, the way the seasons revolve from life to death and back to life again. It doesn’t mean that you don’t suffer during the death part, or even the marriage part, but it does mean that as life gives way to death, death gives way to life again.

I went soaring out of Hickman Hall that spring day and ran down the lawn to catch the campus bus across town to Rutgers for Existentialism, slipped on the wet grass, flew up in the air, and landed on my ass in the mud. A woman who had been sitting at the top of the hill witnessed the scene and pointed at me, screaming with laughter. I cut Existentialism—probably missed Sartre’s Nausea—and tromped back to the dorm, soggy but ecstatic.

I had spilled the milk. I was open to the Mysteries, excited about what came next, ready for a refill.

PROFESSOR ZEITLIN’S APPROACH to mythology was different from anything I might have absorbed growing up. From Ulysses at the Lyceum in the 1950s to the blockbuster Wonder Woman, featuring an Amazon princess, in 2017, the appeal of mythology is timeless. The classic collections, if one may call them “classic” when they are directed at nonclassi cists, include Bulfinch’s Mythology and the encyclopedic two-volume Greek Myths compiled by Robert Graves, which offers so many variations on the exploits of gods and heroes that you may be tempted to make up your own. The latest addition is a collection called Mythos by the British author and actor Stephen Fry, who attributes his love of mythology to a book called Tales from Ancient Greece, which he picked up as a boy. In the popular Percy Jackson series by the American writer Rick Riordan, a twelve-year-old boy is immersed in fantasy adventures inspired by Greek mythology. Among all these approaches, the work that is perhaps the most accessible is that of Edith Hamilton, whose books The Greek Way, The Roman Way, and Mythology were extremely popular in mid-twentieth-century America and made her the interpreter of the Greeks for generations.

For many years, I thought of Hamilton as old-fashioned, as if that could possibly be a flaw in a writer on antiquity. I also had her confused with Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Both women lived on Gramercy Park for a while, and both are beloved and revered for their contributions to culture. Margaret Hamilton had that famous thin face and sharp chin and dark eyebrows (and, in the movie, a green complexion), and in the thumbnail portrait that appears on the back of my crumbling paperback copy of The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton bears a slight resemblance to her (lacking the iconic conical hat).

But Edith Hamilton was no witch (and, for that matter, neither was Margaret Hamilton). Edith Hamilton began to study Latin with her father when she was seven years old. Her paternal grandmother was an early proponent of education for women. Born in Germany in 1867, Edith grew up in Indiana, where she was homeschooled. She was sent to finishing school in Connecticut (Miss Porter’s) before going abroad and, with her sister, becoming one of the first women to study at the University of Munich. She taught school for a living and did not begin to write about the Greeks until after she had retired as headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School, in Baltimore, when she was fifty-five.

Edith Hamilton had to be pushed into writing. She began with essays about the Greek tragedians for a theater magazine, and the writing was so lucid and engaging that she was encouraged to do more. Her collection The Greek Way was published in 1930 and was what is known in publishing circles as a sleeper: it sold steadily for years and years and is still in print today. From a lifetime of reading and teaching, Hamilton had digested the literature, in the original language, and could retell the stories in a spare and elegant style, without footnotes or any of the scholarly impedimenta that put off the general reader the same way that subtitles in foreign movies distract an American moviegoer. In Mythology, Hamilton’s collection of Greek and Roman myths, she refers in a brief headnote to the authority she has chosen to follow, and then simply, even kindly, tells the story and offers some interpretation. Her language is clear and her message is illuminating.

One reason that Hamilton’s work was so popular is that she made an end run around academia. Classicists cannot help being snobs: once you have read something in Greek, a translation is a pale imitation, almost a sacrilege. They would not themselves value the work of Edith Hamilton or Stephen Fry or Rick Riordan—or even of Robert Graves, though his encyclopedic scheme has the earmarks of scholarship. Yet these writers with the common touch are introducing mythology to people who may fall in love with it and go on to read Hesiod in Greek and Ovid in Latin. Something made me register for Classics 355, and whatever it was—those cheesy Hollywood movies at the Lyceum or Classics Illustrated from the rack at the drugstore—the allure of mythology was strong enough to lead me, in college, to that lecture class, which in turn, eventually, led me to Greek and Greece and to Eleusis.

TEN YEARS OUT OF COLLEGE, having at length lost my virginity, and undergone a revival of interest in mythology, I lit out along the Sacred Way for Eleusis, or Elefsina, as it’s called in modern Greek. I wanted to see the tombs along the route and I hoped to experience something of what it felt like to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Maybe by poking around on the sacred ground itself with my newly acquired modern Greek I could penetrate the mystery. At the least, I thought, I would see something of the countryside outside Athens.

I had timed my stay in Athens, against Dorothy Gregory’s advice, to coincide with Greek Easter, which fell late that year, in May. I didn’t understand that everything in the capital would be closed—the Greeks go to their ancestral villages or close up shop for days at a time. Wandering around in the Plaka, beneath the Acropolis, I saw a man turning a lamb on a spit in his patch of a backyard, and I longed to fit in somehow and celebrate the season. Perhaps in Elefsina, which in ancient times was sacred to Demeter, I would find something that would connect me to the pagan rites of spring.

From Athens to Elefsina is fourteen miles, and the Blue Guide, noting that “the first 3 or 4 miles are heavily industrialized and tedious to the pedestrian,” recommended taking a bus. As a child of Cleveland and a former resident of the Garden State, I was not to be put off by “heavily industrialized.” Fourteen miles sounded tedious, though. The Blue Guide mentioned that at Dafni (Δαφνή), six and three-quarters miles outside Athens, there was a monastery famous for its Byzantine mosaics. I decided to take the bus as far as Dafni and walk the Sacred Way from there.

My Greek language skills at the time were frail, but I was game. The words that most often left my lips were Δεν κατάλαβα (Den katálava)—“I don’t understand.” I would practice what ever question I needed to ask, but unless I got the answer I was hoping for, I didn’t understand. Trying to get information about ferries from Crete to Rhodes, I was bold enough to telephone the equivalent of the port authority in Piraeus, but the man I talked to seemed to expect me to come back from Crete to Piraeus to go to Rhodes. It sounded as if every time I wanted to go somewhere I would have to start all over again. It was frustrating. Ferries existed only if the Greek you were talking to owned the ship or would receive a commission for selling you a ticket. (This was pre-Internet, remember, and the various ferry companies were not organized online for easy browsing.) After getting no satisfaction on the phone, despite having overcome my xenophonophobia (fear of foreign phones), I sought out the information kiosk at the port in Piraeus in person and posed my questions to the man there. I got the same unintelligible (or unacceptable) answer. “Δεν κατάλαβα,” I said. The man’s eyebrows shot up and he said, “I know you!” It was the same man I had spoken to on the phone.

On my Elefsinian expedition, all my Greek verbs somehow got jammed in the past tense, as if I were stuck in reverse. When I got on the bus, I asked the driver, “You took the Sacred Way to Elefsina?” Somewhat warily, he gave me the downward sideways nod of affirmation. What I saw from the bus window confirmed my suspicion that the Blue Guide exaggerated: suburbs of Athens, some large expanses of old tires, but nothing to compare to Cleveland or Elizabeth, New Jersey. We passed a basilica that I took for the monastery at Dafni—the Greeks on the bus crossed themselves repeatedly—and I got off. The bus driver gave me a quizzical look. “I walked,” I explained. He grinned.

I walked, all right. I walked for more than an hour before I saw a sign for Dafni. The monastery was a leafy refuge behind a high stone wall. A handmade sign at the entrance said, “Closed Due to Damages from Earthquake.” There had been a major earthquake in the Gulf of Corinth—6.7 on the Richter scale—in 1981, and apparently putting the mosaics back together again was not a priority.

Although I hadn’t originally set out to visit the monastery and knew nothing about Byzantine mosaics, now that I was here I was not so easily turned away. Often it happens that a milestone, a stage on the journey, a name on the map chosen just to help me find my way somewhere else, becomes a destination in itself. So it was with Dafni. Now that I was here, I wanted in. Someone was on the other side of the wall, watering the garden. I made a racket at the gate with my meager vocabulary—“Kaliméra! Good morning! Is there nobody?”—and started the dogs barking. A man came to the gate, and I launched into a fractured monologue—“I was walking along the Sacred Way, and thought I’d ask for a little water . . .” I must have sounded like the Scarecrow chatting to the Wizard of Oz about running into Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road. At least I knew how to say neráki, a little water, the diminutive of neró. The man was not impressed, and sent me over to a parking lot where some people were camping. The monastery, I learned, had been devoid of monks for years and was now a park and picnic site. The campers gave me a little water and asked if I was Finnish. I must have looked very pale.

“The new highway joins the ancient road in Dafni,” the Blue Guide says. The modern highway, built in the sixties, is the toll road from Athens to Corinth, fifty miles west, and it was not intended for pedestrians. It reminded me of the FDR Drive, the busy highway along the East Side of Manhattan, which I accidentally rode my bicycle on once when I was new to New York, wobbling, terrified, along the narrow shoulder as traffic hurtled by, inches away from me. I would never make that mistake again. Now traffic whizzed past me on the Sacred Way, and every third vehicle—trucks, taxis, private cars—honked as it bore down on me from behind, shattering my nerves. Many drivers offered me a ride, but I declined. I watched for ancient tombs and instead saw miniature shrines in the shape of churches mounted on posts like rural mailboxes. Each held an icon, a wick in a shallow tin can, a pack of matches, and lamp oil, often in a recycled ouzo bottle. These were memorials to people who had been killed on the highway. It occurred to me, as another truck driver honked and shot past, that I might end up a casualty myself, and there would be nobody to raise a shrine for me.

I passed what looked like military installations, unphotogenic parcels of land with signs forbidding the taking of photographs (as if). Yellow-and-red triangles stamped with black exclamation points warned of danger ahead. A long, curving hill promised a view from the top: an oil refinery and rusty freighters in the Saronic Gulf, as it turned out. I passed factories that made equipment for telephone poles; stores selling huge assortments of colorful plastic merchandise, like sprinkling cans and laundry baskets; garden shops, where those mini churches were for sale; gas stations; more oil refineries. It was as if I were on the outskirts of some infernal industrial city like Gary, Indiana, except that here and there was a small olive grove. At one point, next to a stoneyard full of marble, there was a tiny working farm with chickens and Holsteins and bales of hay. Next to a convenience store for factory workers was a single ancient marble tomb with an olive tree spreading over it.

The surface of the Sacred Way was gummy with oil. My sandals had not been broken in when I started on the road, but they were now. My feet were coated with grease and dust. When I got to Elefsina, instead of going straight to the ruins I stopped in a soupermarket—Greeklish for a minimart—and bought a two-liter bottle of water and carried it with me to the ruins in a plastic bag. The sanctuary was not far from the center of town. Inside the gate, I started to sit down, but the Greek in the ticket booth wouldn’t let me rest there. I was bad publicity. So I trudged up the hill behind the ruins and sat in the shade of some pine trees.

I took a long drink from my bottle of water and then stuck my bare feet in the plastic bag and poured the rest of the water over them. Ah . . . The crinkly plastic held—it did not leak. I suppose I should have had a higher purpose there as I looked out over the sanctuary of Ancient Eleusis and the flat roofs of modern Elefsina to the industrial cranes bending stiffly on the waterfront and the ships with rust to their watermarks and the storied island of Salamis, home of Ajax the Great, but just then I gave thanks for plastic. The word “plastic,” after all, is from the Greek, and its original meaning was innocent enough: malleable, shape-shifting. A zacharoplasteíon (ΖΑΧΑΡΟΠΛΑΣΤΕΙΟΝ) is a pastry shop, or sugar shapery. The Greek for plastic wrap is διάφανη μεμβράνη—diaphanous membrane. Plastic is lightweight and versatile and practically indestructible (which, of course, is also its drawback). It keeps things from going bad. Plastic gets a bad rap. The very refineries I was looking at may have been the source of the plastic bag my feet were soaking in.

MOST OF WHAT WE KNOW about the Eleusinian Mysteries has been deduced from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is among the earliest writings in Greek. The procession was held in the fall, at harvesttime. Initiates prepared for it in Athens (not the Athens in Ohio). One of the rites was that everyone drank a potion—a kykeón (the modern word means porridge or gruel)—of the sort that Demeter asked for when she came to Eleusis. Worn out by grief for her daughter and disguised as a mortal, she had stopped and sat down by a well. The daughters of the queen came along, and brought her home to their mother, Metanira, who took her on as a nanny to her newborn son. Metanira offered the goddess wine, but she declined and asked instead for barley water with mint, or pennyroyal (in the translation of Thelma Sargent, who was a New Yorker copy editor before my time). Edith Hamilton notes that Demeter requested the same cooling drink that farmers refreshed themselves with in the field. The authors of The Road to Eleusis, a book devoted to penetrating the Eleusinian Mysteries, believe that the active ingredient was “ergot of barley,” a fungus that grows on wild grains. They write, “This potion—an hallucinogen—under the right set and setting, disturbs man’s inner ear and trips astonishing ventriloquistic effects.” The editor/translator of the volume of the Loeb Library devoted to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, H. G. Evelyn-White, writes that the drinking of the potion, whatever it was, was an “act of communion” and “one of the most important pieces of ritual in the Eleusinian mysteries, as commemorating the sorrows of the goddess.”

As Hamilton reminds us, in her spare and eloquent retelling of the myth, Demeter was one of the suffering gods. When her daughter went missing, she searched all over the earth. None of the gods would tell her what had happened, because it was with the consent of Zeus that Hades, his brother, had nabbed Persephone. Helios, the sun, had seen what happened, and when he told Demeter where her daughter was, and that it had all been arranged between the two brothers, she was so enraged that she left Olympus. No amount of persuasion could bring her back. The gods reminded her that Hades was actually a good catch. He is called Hades after the place where he reigns, the way someone in Shakespeare is called, say, Gloucester, but the god’s real name is Pluto—Πλούτων, from πλούτος, meaning wealth—and he is rich in departed spirits. Think of him as an undertaker: even an undertaker needs a wife. And not all May-December marriages turn out badly.

Finally, with mankind on the brink of extinction, Zeus agreed to give Demeter’s daughter back. That’s where the pomegranate came into play: having eaten the food of the Underworld, the girl would have to go back there every year. Like her mother, she, too, suffers, because although she returns with the flowers of spring, she is never innocent again.

Kore has the sweetness of a girl. She does not have much personality—her epithet in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is slim-ankled—but she was popular: the hymn provides a catalogue of the friends who were out there picking flowers with her the day Hades swooped in. Her freshness is inspiring, enviable. I thought of Kore/Persephone when I read Anne of Green Gables while visiting Prince Edward Island, where most of the Anne books by Lucy Maud Montgomery are set. Sometimes when I am on a grassy trail through a meadow bordered by roses, with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod waving in the breeze, I can still feel some of the freshness of a young girl’s response to spring. But a girl has to grow up, right?

Perhaps the initiates, too, freshened up before entering the sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis. I climbed down from the piney hill and started up the home stretch of the Sacred Way. In ancient times, I would have been in a crowd of excited Greeks of all classes. The only other people here now, however, were a party of French tourists. I envied them because they had someone telling them about the rocks, interpreting for them. I was an archaeological illiterate. But here is what I saw, armed with the Blue Guide: The well by which Demeter sat down when she came to Eleusis was still here. Broad, shallow marble steps rose to a propylaeum, or forecourt, and turned in toward the hill. Poppies and broom and sea lavender bloomed among the ruins. On my right was the Cave of Hades, a natural grotto in the hillside. This may have been where Persephone, as she might be called once she is Queen of the Underworld, emerged, blinking, in the spring. It’s not explicit in the myth, but she must have been pregnant, because she was raped by a god, and gods can’t not be potent. (The place of her rape has been associated with a field in Sicily.) Here were temples to Aphrodite and Poseidon. Past several lobbies where perhaps souvenirs were sold, or people gathered as in any lobby before an event, at the very end of the Sacred Way, was the holiest place: the Hall of the Initiates, a square space, roofless now, the floor paved with slabs of stone, before bleacher-like stands cut into the rocky hillside.

This is where it happened, whatever it was. Arriving at the inner sanctum, the initiates would not have seen as many gas stations or as much rust as I did. They would have passed a field of grain at harvesttime. Pausanias, touring Eleusis in the first century AD, wrote, “Here they show you Triptolemos’s threshing-floor and altar.” Triptolemos, a prince of Eleusis, was the first, Pausanias says, to “sow cultivated grain.” This was written almost two thousand years ago, but as little as two hundred years ago, in 1801, the site was still a center of worship of Demeter. That year, an enterprising and unscrupulous traveler from England, one E. D. Clarke, made off with a two-ton kistophoros—a feminine statue resembling a caryatid holding a basket on her head—against the protests of the villagers. Peter Levi, in his notes to Pausanias, writes that “an ox ran up, butted the statue repeatedly, and fled bellowing.” Clarke’s treasure sank in a shipwreck off Beachy Head, in East Sussex, England. The statue from the sanctuary of Demeter was eventually salvaged and installed in Cambridge.

In the years since my pilgrimage to Elefsina, I have learned that back in the sixties and seventies, when Greece was governed by a right-wing junta whose members were known as the Colonels, there was a flowering of petroleum refineries and other polluting industries in the Gulf of Salamis, at the foot of the city sacred to agriculture. Elefsina has long had a reputation among Greeks as the city that was ruined by industrial development. It is as if the whole region had been raped, despoiled, sacrificed. Talk about having to accept death in the midst of life. A plastic bag is handy, but can it really have been worth it to trade off the sanctuary of the goddess of agriculture for plastic? I had the feeling, standing in the Hall of the Initiates, under the hillside that protected the site, that Demeter had left the building.

“The dream forbids me to write what lies inside the sanctuary wall,” Pausanias goes on to say, “and what the uninitiated are not allowed to see they obviously ought not to know about.” Earlier, in Athens, Pausanias had visited the Eleusinion, an Athenian sanctuary presumably sacred to Demeter, and he writes that he wanted to “describe the contents . . . but I was stopped by something I saw in a dream. I must turn to the things it is not irreligious to write for general readers.” The trail of the content of the Mysteries goes cold there, back in the early Roman era.

One of the loveliest things I saw at Elefsina was a stele, or grave marker, showing a relief of a seated woman with a little girl at her knee. The woman was straight-backed; the child, trusting, holds something out to her. It was the only image I saw at Elefsina that might be interpreted as an illustration of the mother love that is so abundant in the myth. Back home, I had been struck, over the past several years, observing some of my friends as young mothers, by the affection between mother and daughter. I don’t remember ever experiencing that as a girl, except with my grandmother, when she held me on her lap and read to me—probably the beginning of my love of reading. My early childhood coincided with dark days in our house. My mother, like Demeter, had lost a child. He was a boy, named Patrick, and he was two years older than me. I have no memory of Patrick himself, but I grew up hearing my mother tell the story of the day he died, in all its detail, over and over, implanting the family mythology. It was March—a bad month—and Patrick was just a few weeks shy of his third birthday. There was bacon for breakfast. My mother told Patrick to wait, that she would cut up his bacon for him as soon as she was finished feeding the baby. But he didn’t wait, and he choked on a piece of bacon. My father was there at the breakfast table, and he turned Patrick upside down and whacked him on the back, trying to dislodge it. (Nobody yet knew about the Heimlich maneuver, now posted by law in every restaurant.) It was all my father knew to do, but it didn’t work.

My mother would go on to describe my father’s grief, how he never talked about it during the day, but at night, in bed, he would sob, his whole body shaking. He even went to see the parish priest and ask for help, and the priest said that they should have another baby. So they had my little brother. “But my heart wasn’t in it,” my mother would say. She would say it right in front of the child who was conceived to replace Patrick. (And I thought I had it bad.) Who could compete with the broad-shouldered auburn-haired boy in the maroon corduroy shirt with the troubled little face who lived in the tinted photograph on our parents’ dresser? His funeral things—a lock of hair and a wreath—were kept in a long flat box at the back of the kitchen closet. They couldn’t find his shoes, my mother said, the shoes had disappeared, so he was buried without them. When we got back on Friday nights from driving my grandmother home after her weekly visit, we would stand out on the back porch and look up at the stars and ask my mother, “Which one is Patrick’s star?” She would point one out.

It was not until years later that I realized I felt guilty for my brother’s death—if it hadn’t been for my presence there at the breakfast table, he wouldn’t have died. I spent my childhood in the impossible position of having to try to console my inconsolable mother. We were both too worn out for me to learn or for her to teach me anything practical or domestic. I couldn’t scramble an egg or get a stain out of a shirt. By the time I got to college and took that course in mythology, I was still helpless, stubbornly protesting my innocence.

Somehow that mythology course with Professor Zeitlin was the beginning of releasing me from guilt. Professor Zeitlin, in her lecture on the Eleusinian Mysteries, had pointed out that the ravishing of Kore combines in one act the three rites of passage of womanhood: birth, marriage, and death. In being raped, Kore dies as a maiden daughter and is born as Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. At the time, I identified with Kore—I was a virgin, I gloried in the lilacs blooming around the edges of the cul de sac of cozy gray houses that served as our dormitory. I was a flower child. That campus was the meadow that Kore was playing in with her friends when Hades erupted out of the earth and came for her. Until that day in the lecture hall, I had been afraid to grow up, to trade in my girlhood for the life of a woman.

Professor Zeitlin’s class had woken me to the fact that I could have other models: be a bitch, be a huntress, be an Amazon, be a maenad, one of the crazed followers of Dionysus. Mythology taught me that I didn’t have to limit myself to virgin, bride, and mother—there were many other roles to play. I didn’t have to be like my mother and wear a girdle every day of my life, I didn’t have to be constrained. I could let myself live.

Now, here at Elefsina, where I’d hoped to have some kind of spring fling, I realized that I had my mother in me after all, and I was glad of it. Women are the continuum. My mother, in her unbearable sadness, went on to make breakfast for us every day, to bear another child, and though my younger brother and I have never had children ourselves, our older brother married a corn goddess (my sister-in-law is from Iowa) and they have two fine boys, both musicians, one named Patrick. Miles is a gardener, something he never learned from our father, who seemed to go out of his way to trample my mother’s chrysanthemums when he painted the house. I came to Greece to get away from my family, but as I set my course for Athens again, they were with me. This time, I took the bus.