The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most important religious ritual in ancient Athens and the surrounding area for almost two thousand years, until the Holy Roman Emperor Theodosius outlawed pagan rites in the fourth century AD. The veil of secrecy around the rites has led both to an absence of any definitive historical records of the events’ details and to a surfeit of fragmentary allusions to the Mysteries in a variety of sources. Thus, our knowledge of exactly what transpired is hazy at best. Theo’s understanding of the ritual’s components is a loose conflation of many scholars’ hypotheses, most prominently those featured in Jon D. Mikalson’s Ancient Greek Religion, Mara Lynn Keller’s article “The Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries” in the Rosicrucian Digest, and The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts, edited by Marvin W. Meyer. My apologies to these and the many other classicists who would no doubt find the version of the Mysteries presented in this book hopelessly simplistic.
The nature of the epiphany at the rite’s climax is unknown and still a point of great scholarly debate. The presence in the kykeon of a hallucinogen not unlike LSD has been proposed in R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, and Carl A. P. Ruck’s The Road to Eleusis and would seem to explain the Greeks’ powerful reaction to the ritual. That human sacrifice played a role is my own invention. The Oxyrhynchus Project has yet to discover any mention of such atrocities in its trove of Hellenic papyri (see Oxford’s Ancient Lives project at www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk if you want a chance to do some decoding of your own). However, the Eleusinian Mysteries stretch back in time before the rise of Athens, to an earlier age in which, many have proposed, earth-goddess worship may have required a bloodier form of ritual than that practiced by the sophisticated citizens of the Golden Age.
While the details of the Mysteries are in large part hypothetical, the stories of New York City’s past are all real. Alexander Hamilton’s death, the formation of the Policewomen’s Bureau in the 1920s, and the crime wave of the 1970s are all grounded in fact. So, too, are the majority of the locations in this book. The waterfall in Central Park’s Ravine is easily visited. Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential railroad car still sits on its abandoned platform beneath the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where, indeed, a paupers’ cemetery once lay. You can see pictures of it in an informative article by Jen Carlson at gothamist.com. The hidden Liberty Theater exists, and was at one time inaccessible, although a recent renovation has transformed it into a not-so-hidden restaurant. Seeing the abandoned City Hall subway station is a cinch—just ride the downtown Number 6 line past the last stop and look out the windows as the train loops around before heading uptown. To visit Montayne’s Fonteyn (barely a trickle these days) or the old Indian Cave (still walled up, unfortunately), follow the directions in Christopher Gray’s excellent article “Scenes from a Wild Youth” in the New York Times. The Pneumatic Transit waiting room has, sadly, been lost to us, but it must have been a remarkable sight. Joseph Brennan describes it in great detail in his article “Beach Pneumatic” on columbia.edu.
Into these very real locations I’ve placed characters from myth that have only ever existed in the collective imagination of mankind. The tale of Orion and Artemis has no single definitive version—only fragments and allusions remain to us. In some, the two are chaste lovers. In others, he tries to rape her or one of her nymphs. In still others, he is a lascivious braggart, brought down by her rage. He dies when Apollo tricks Artemis into shooting him or, alternatively, when the angry goddess sends a scorpion to kill him. No matter the version, however, the story of the Huntress and the Hunter has always fascinated, perhaps because Artemis has always been one of the most paradoxical and intriguing figures in classic myth. For many, myself included, she has been a feminist icon: a woman warrior unhindered by societal norms, fiercer, swifter, and deadlier than any man. And yet, she is also a product of her time—consigned to virginity by a society that sees sex, love, and motherhood as incompatible with the fiercer aspects of her personality. As demonstrated by the plethora of epithets ascribed to her, Artemis is complicated and contradictory, beloved and feared. Wandering the dusty, sunbaked streets of Delos, past the ruins of her temple, you can easily feel the goddess and her twin beside you. It seems a short leap to imagine her walking through the streets of Manhattan as well. In some ways, she is immortal indeed.
Jordanna Max Brodsky
New York, NY
April 2015