Drawing Down the Moon

THE EMINENT ARCHEOLOGIST George Mylonas, director of the excavations of Mycenae, involved himself deeply in the final excavations of Eleusis, which was the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries for two thousand years. During that time multitudes of women and men from all over the world of the ancient Greeks participated in the rites of Eleusis and, if we can believe the poets, playwrights, and philosophers, drew great strength from them. Pindar wrote: “Blessed is he who hath seen these things before he goeth beneath the hollow earth; for he understandeth the end of mortal life, and the beginning (of a new life) given of God.”² Cicero, Sophocles, and Aristotle likewise extolled the Mysteries. Greek and Roman political figures such as Pericles, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, and Julian considered their experiences there moving and joyful. And some of the most profound passages in the plays of Aeschylus were considered so close to the essence of the Mysteries that the playwright came under the scrutiny of Athenian law until it was proved that he had never been initiated, and therefore could not have revealed the Mysteries in his works.

Mylonas, being a scholar of the twentieth century, was forced to study merely their remains. He concludes Eleusis and the Eleusinean Mysteries with sorrow and longing. He laments:

For years, since my early youth, I have tried to find out what the facts were. Hope against hope was spent against the lack of monumental evidence; the belief that inscriptions would be found on which the Hierophants had recorded their ritual and its meaning has faded completely; the discovery of a subterranean room filled with the archives of the cult, which dominated my being in my days of youth, is proved an unattainable dream since neither subterranean rooms nor archives for the cult exist at Eleusis; the last Hierophant carried with him to the grave the secrets which had been transmitted orally for untold generations, from the one high priest to the next. A thick, unpenetrable veil indeed still covers securely the rites of Demeter and protects them from the curious eyes of modern students. How many nights and days have been spent over books, inscriptions, and works of art by eminent scholars in their effort to lift the veil! How many wild and ingenious theories have been advanced in superhuman effort to explain the Mysteries! How many nights I have spent standing on the steps of the Telesterion, flooded with the magic silver light of a Mediterranean moon, hoping to catch the mood of the initiates, hoping that the human soul might get a glimpse of what the rational mind could not investigate! All in vain—the ancient world has kept its secret well and the Mysteries of Eleusis remain unrevealed.³

Eleusis has puzzled scholars for centuries. Much has been discovered about the preparatory and public celebrations, the preliminary processions and purifications, the Demeter-Korê myth cycle, and the nature of certain processions and lesser rites. Karl Kerényi, C. G. Jung, M. F. Nilsson, W. K. C. Guthrie, Mylonas, and other scholars have created a large storehouse of intuitions and speculations. Many scholars would now agree with Kerényi that a profound religious experience must have occurred, repeated year after year, a psychic reality that succeeded again and again.⁴

The vision of Mylonas standing, empty in spirit, in the moonlit ruins of Eleusis stayed with me through all my explorations of Neo-Paganism and the Craft. This is not surprising, since the Craft (and a number of other Neo-Pagan religions as well) has always claimed to be a Mystery religion, although exactly what that means is not always clear even to the participants.

At one level, I think, all Mystery traditions involve processes of growth and regeneration, confrontations with birth, death, the source of life, and the relationship of human beings to the cosmos. In connection with these ideas a number of Neo-Pagans and Witches have foresworn the words “Pagan” and “Witch,” saying that they regard their religion as “the revival of the Mystery tradition.” A New York coven writes that rituals are really the reenactment of “cosmic drama,” allowing the participant to enter “into the drama of life itself, of joining with the gods in an achievement of universal advantage, so that growth (which is the true magic) is achieved.”⁵

If, with Aidan Kelly, we define the Craft as “the European heritage of Goddess worship,”⁶ the connections with the Mysteries of Demeter and Korê become clearer. Above and beyond the murky area of historical and geographical connections, the philosophical connections are real. What little we know of the Mysteries seems to indicate that these rites emphasized (as the Craft, at its best, does today) experience as opposed to dogma, and metaphor and myth as opposed to doctrine. Both the Mysteries and the Craft emphasize initiatory processes that lead to a widening of perceptions. Neither emphasizes theology, belief, or the written word. In both, participants expect to lead normal lives in the world, as well as attain spiritual enrichment.

How can one explain the plight of George Mylonas? Aidan notes that the Athenians distinguished between lesser and greater Mysteries.

The Great Mysteries of Eleusis were, in large part, archetypical of the Mystery religions. According to Karl Kerényi, when Athens annexed Eleusis about 600 B.C.E. and made its Mysteries the state religion of Attica, the Athenians passed a law to protect the secrecy of the Mysteries. This law, however, distinguished two types of secrets, the “Lower” and the “Higher.” The “Lower secrets” were those that could be told to another person by word, gesture, or whatever; these were called ta aporrheta, “the forbidden,” and the law applied only to them—hence their name. Why didn’t the law apply to the “Higher secrets”? The latter were called ta arrheta, “the ineffable,” and it was recognized in the law itself that these secrets could not be communicated except by the Mysteries themselves; hence they needed no protection by a mere law.⁷

It is the process and the experience, not the secrets, that are the mystery of the Mysteries. Even were a secret chamber found in the depths of Eleusis, or had the basic rituals been inscribed, the Mysteries would defy discovery. This explains why, for over two thousand years, even during times of Christian domination, there were no revelations by converts, no statements from ex-initiates.

Mysteries, observe two Neo-Pagan writers, are “stages of growth in consciousness of the sacred universe, not secrets”:

A mystery can’t be told or even easily shown someone, while a secret can be told to just about anyone and they can tell it to somebody else. And it will be the same secret. And yet there seem to be an amazing number of people who seem to believe the two terms to be synonymous. . . .

The truly frustrating thing about the mysteries is that they cannot be taught, they must be experienced. In fact, telling most people the surfaceseeming substance or “secrets” can blind them to the depth of the real mysteries, the great sea of the untellable, the unsayable. . . . As with a zen monk, the teacher must “trick” the neophyte into awakening. . . .

If it were as easy as telling to introduce someone to the mysteries, then those who have perceived them would simply tell, and all people would become wise and awake. . . . But when people try to tell, the things that are said are either understandable but not true or true but not understandable. They are image-illusion, they are empty baskets.⁸

Mylonas is, then, a potent symbol. We are all searching among the ruins. He is all of us who have admitted our spiritual impoverishment, hoping that objects, words, and inscriptions will give us clues to things that can be learned only through experience. What Mylonas (and most of us) have been denied is the experience of being “tricked” into this initiatory process. We are forced to rely merely on our intellectual tools, which will not allow us to enter certain hidden chambers. The secret that Neo-Paganism seems to have begun to learn over the past thirty-five years is this: If the methods for creating such experiences have been lost, the way to find them again is to create them again.