The closest access we have to the subjective experience of mystic initiation is the famous account preserved by Plutarch (fr. 178).
The soul on the point of death . . . has an experience like those being initiated into the great mysteries . . . At first wanderings and exhausting runnings around and certain anxious uncompleted journeys through darkness, and then before the consummation itself all the terrible things, shuddering and trembling and sweat and amazement. But after this he is met by a wonderful light (φῶς) and received into pure places and meadows, with voices and dancing . . . now completely initiated . . . he keeps company with holy and pure men, and surveys the impure, uninitiated mass of the living as they trample on each other [i.e., on the ground].
Another crucial passage is from Euripides’ Bacchae (605–35). It occurs just after thunderbolt and earthquake have destroyed Pentheus’ house, from which Dionysos emerges.
DIONYSOS: Barbarian women, thus astounded by fear have you fallen to the ground? You felt, it seems, Dionysos shaking apart the house of Pentheus. But raise up your bodies and take courage, putting trembling from your flesh. CHORUS: O greatest light (φάος) for us of the joyful-crying bacchanals, how gladly I looked on you in my isolated desolation.
DIONYSOS: Did you become faint-hearted, when I was being sent in, thinking that I would fall into the dark enclosures of Pentheus?
CHORUS: How could I not? For who would be my protector, if you met with disaster? But how were you freed, after encountering an impure man?
DIONYSOS: I save myself easily, without effort.
CHORUS: But did he not tie up your hands?
DIONYSOS: This was just how I humiliated him: thinking that he was tying me up he failed to get hold of me, but fed on hopes. And finding a bull at the manger, where he led me and imprisoned me, he tied it up, panting out his energy, dripping sweat from his body, biting his lips. But I calmly sat close by and watched. During this time Dionysos came and shook up the house and on the tomb of his mother ignited fire. And Pentheus when he saw this, thinking that the house was on fire, rushed this way and that, telling the servants to bring water . . . And abandoning this toil, thinking that I had fled, he rushed with a sword into the dark1 house. And then Dionysos, as it seemed to me—made a light (φῶς) in the courtyard. And Pentheus, charging against it, rushed and stabbed the shining image as if slaughtering me . . . . . Through exhaustion he dropped the sword and collapsed.
This is just one of the very large numbers of passages in Bacchae that evoke mystic initiation. What happens to the chorus of Asian maenads and Pentheus here is inexplicable as mere narrative, but makes perfect sense as a projection of mystic initiation. The correspondences with the mystic initiation described in the Plutarch passage are indicated by my underlinings in both passages. These correspondences are all the more striking given that the Plutarch passage is derived (entirely or partly) from the Eleusinian and the Euripidean (entirely or partly) from the Dionysiac mysteries.2
I have argued all this in detail elsewhere.3 My concern here is confined to the light that appears at the culmination of both passages.
It is necessary, as a preliminary, to repair the damage done by the modern editors, who at Bacchae 630 accept the conjecture φάσμα (Jacobs). The manuscripts have φῶς. The attraction of φάσμα, ‘phantom,’ is that Pentheus is said to attack it, thinking that it is Dionysos. One can mistake a phantom for a person, but one cannot (it seems) mistake a light for a person. However, in this mystic context the reading of the manuscripts, φῶς makes excellent sense. The editors fail to see this because they have not recognized the multiple evocation here of mystic ritual. If the reading of the manuscripts had been φάσμα there would have been a very good case for emending it to the lectio difficilior, φῶς. As it is, we can be certain that Euripides wrote φῶς. How so?˘
Dionysos is, in the very same passage, identified as light. The chorus, whose experiences reflect the experience of being initiated, welcome him, in their suffering, as ‘greatest light’ (compare the ‘wonderful’ light that saves the suffering initiands in the Plutarch). The experiences of Pentheus also reflect the experience of being initiated, and he too identifies Dionysos with light. But so far from welcoming the light, as the chorus do, he attacks it. Whereas the chorus embody the mystic transition from anxiety to eternal joy described in the Plutarch, Pentheus embodies the (horrific) rejection of the transition.But is not calling Dionysos ‘greatest light’ a mere metaphor? In this context, certainly not. This will be made even clearer by what follows.
In Aeschylus’ lost Bassarai Orpheus, as a result of what he had seen on his visit to the underworld, transferred his loyalty from Dionysos to Helios (the Sun), whom he considered to be the greatest of the gods and addressed as Apollo.4 Orpheus was—more than any other individual—associated with mystery-cult. His descent to the darkness of the underworld, and seeing something there that made him worship the sun, reflect—I suggest—a mythical projection of the illumination of the darkness (imagined as the darkness of the underworld) in mystic initiation, as described in various texts, including our passage of Plutarch. In a much later text, describing the mystic ritual of Isis, the initiand reaches the boundary of death and sees the sun shining brightly in the middle of the night (Ap. Met. 11. 23).
The salvific light that suddenly appeared in the darkness must have been torchlight (as in the Greek Easter ceremony). In Aristophanes’ Frogs this mystic torchlight was imagined as the light of the sun, which in the underworld is only for pious initiates.5 Accordingly Pindar, in a passage full of mystic allusions, claims that after death the ‘good’ have sun by night as well as by day; and Cleanthes (331–232 BCE) claims that the gods are mystic (μυστικά) forms and sacred names, the cosmos a mystery (μυστήριον), and the sun a torchbearer.6
The identification of the sun with Apollo occurs in various fifth-century BCE texts,7 and is associated by much later authors with mystic doctrine.8 Dionysos too is identified with the sun in mystic doctrine,9 as well as with starlight. In Aristophanes’ Frogs (343–44) Iakchos (the Eleusinian Dionysos) is called by the Eleusinian mystic initiates ‘light-bearing star of the night-time mystic ritual (τελετή),’ and the description of Dionysos-Iakchos in Sophocles as ‘chorus-leader of the stars’10 is said by the scholiast to be ‘according to a mystic formula.’ Eumolpos, the imagined first priest of the Eleusinian mysteries, was said to have described Dionysos as ‘shining like a star . . . fiery in rays.’11 Iakchos was identified at Eleusis with Ploutos, who is called by Pindar ‘conspicuous star, truest light for mortals’ in an eschatological (and mystic) context.12
The Bacchae is not the only tragedy in which the powerful associations of the mystic light are evoked. Another instance is Aeschylus’ Oresteia.13 And in Sophokles’ Elektra Orestes says that he will ‘after dying in words (i.e., the fiction of his own death) be saved by action’ (59–60), and ‘coming to life, shine like a star on my enemies’ (66). Further, when he reveals himself to his sister, who has supposed him dead, she calls him ‘dearest light’ (φῶς, 1224). Now the identification of someone with light is not uncommon, and does not always evoke the mystic light. But these passages of Elektra are in fact, as I have shown elsewhere,14 embedded in a whole complex of ideas that surrounded the transition to joy in mystic initiation: fictive death, lamentation, the return from death, the birth of a child, salvation, release from suffering, the chariot race.
These occurrences of it in tragedy would have evoked, for the numerous members of the audience who had been initiated,15 the powerful emotions of the transition to joy in mystic initiation. But why did the identification of the god with light occur in mystery-cult?
Mystic initiation was a rehearsal of death, and designed to remove the fear of death. Moreover it has—I suggest—numerous similarities with the typical set of features (core experience) of the so-called Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) that have been extensively recorded and studied in recent years.16 This is not the place to demonstrate the full range of these similarities, striking though it is, but rather to focus on a central feature of the NDE, the appearance in the darkness, at the end of a journey, of a wonderful light that transforms ignorant anxiety into a sense of certainty and profound well-being.17 Though very bright, and ‘often compared to the light of the sun,’18 it is not dazzling. And—even more surprisingly—it is frequently imagined as a per- son, the so-called being of light, who conveys love, peace, enlightenment, and salvation, and so is sometimes identified as a divine figure, e.g., by Christians as Christ. We should also note that NDEs have been shown to exhibit much similarity across cultures.
NDEs have also been used to illuminate documents from the distant past.19 I suggest that among the factors giving rise to Greek mystery-cult was the NDE. The process through which this occurred is irrecoverable, but it probably involved the NDEs of numerous people over a long period. Mystic initiation incorporated the power of the NDE to remove the fear of death20 by dramatizing the NDE in a frightening ritual that culminates in the appearance of a wonderful light bringing knowledge, peace, and joy and identified with a (divine) person.
Finally, we return to the passage of Plutarch with which we started, and which provides the last two pieces of the jigsaw. Firstly the appearance of the light marks a transition not only from ignorant anxiety to joy, but also from blind conflict, in which individuals trample on each other, to the perfect solidarity of the initiated group (‘he keeps company with holy and pure men’). Similarly in the Bacchae passage the epiphany of Dionysos as ‘greatest light’ brings each of the Asian maenads out of her ‘isolated desolation’ on the ground, so as to restore the perfect solidarity of the thiasos that they have praised as a blessing of initiation (75) and that the Theban maenads exhibit on the mountainside (693, 725, 748). Pentheus, by contrast, in attacking the light retains the ignorant individual aggression of the uninitiated.
The second and final piece in the jigsaw is that the Plutarch passage compares the experience of the soul at death with the experience of mystic initiation. Inasmuch as the former is most likely derived from NDE, this confirms my suggestion that it was among the factors giving rise to mystery-cult.
1. This translates the emendation κελαινῶν (Verrall) for ms.κελαινὸν. R. Seaford, Euripides Bacchae (Warminster, 1996), 201–2.
2. The two cults (and accounts of them) may have influenced each other (Persephone and Dionysos are found together in mystery-cult). A famous passage of Plato’s Phaedrus (249–54) combines elements derived from the Eleusinian with elements derived from the Dionysiac mysteries: C. Riedweg, Mysterienterminologie bei Pla- ton, Philon und Klemens von Alexandrien (Berlin, 1987), 44–5.
3. Seaford, R. Euripides Bacchae, 39–44, 195–203.
4. Ps. Eratosthenes Catasterismoi 24; Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta III (ed. S. Radt) 138; M. L. West, Studies in Aeschylus (Teubner, 1990), 26–50; R. Seaford,‘Mystic Light in Aeschylus’ Bassarai,’ CQ 55 (2005): 602–6. The transfer of loyalty may reflect rivalry between mystery-cults.
5. Ar. Frogs 454–6 (cf. 446–7, 313–4, 340, 350); and cf. 154–5 with 312–4; Seaford, ‘Mystic Light,’ 603.
6. Ol. 2. 61–3; cf. fr. 129 Snell; Cleanthes: Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (von Arnim) 1. 538.
7. Parmenides (DK 28A20); Empedokles (DK 31A23); cf. Aesch. Septem 859, Suppl. 213–4.
8. ‘Heraclitus,’ Homeric Questions 6. 6; Macrobius Saturnalia 1. 18. Already in the Derveni papyrus (4th cent. BC) mystic doctrine interprets Olympian deities as riddlingly equivalent to cosmological elements: cf. E. Phaethon 225–6; Seaford, ‘Mystic Light,’ 603–4.
9. Cleanthes, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (von Arnim) 1. 546; Macrobius Saturnalia 1. 18; M. L. West, The Orphic Poems (Oxford, 1983), 206.
10. Ant . 1147; cf. E. Ion 1074–81.
11. D. S. 1. 11 .3 ἀστροφαῆ Διόνυσον ἐν ἀκτίνεσσι πυρῶπον .
12. Ol. 2. 53–83; mystic context: H. Lloyd-Jones, ‘Pindar and the Afterlife,’ Entre- tiens Hardt 31 (1985): 245–83.
13. e.g. Thomson (1966) ad Cho. 935–71.
14. Argued in detail by R. Seaford, Sophokles and the Mysteries,” Hermes 122 (1994): 275–88.
15. See e.g., Hdt. 8. 65.
16. especially in The Journal of Near-Death Studies.
17. For this, and other characterizations in this paragraph, see e.g., S. Blackmore, Dying to Live. Near-Death Experiences (Buffalo, NY, 1993): 67–93. P. Fenwick and E. Fenwick, The Truth in the Light (London, 1995) investigate over 300 near-death experiences, in 72% of which the light was a predominant feature (and its qualities always positive).
18. M. B. Sabom, Recollections of Death (New York, 1982), 43.
19. e.g., J. Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (London, 2002), 90–6: the myth of Er in Plato’s Republic.
20. Loss of the fear of death is a very common result of the NDE. For mystic initiation see e.g., IG II/III2 3661.6.
Blackmore, S. Dying to Live. Near-Death Experiences. Buffalo, NY, 1993.
Bremmer, J. The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife. London, 2002.
Fenwick, P. and E. Fenwick. The Truth in the Light. London, 1995.
Lloyd-Jones, H. “Pindar and the Afterlife,” Entretiens Hardt 31 (1985): 245–83.
Riedweg, C.Mysterienterminologie bei Platon, Philon und Klemens von Alexandrien. Berlin, 1987.
Sabom, M. B. Recollections
Sabom, M. B. Recollections of Death. New York, 1982.
Seaford, R. Euripides Bacchae. Warminster, 1996.
———. “Mystic Light in Aeschylus’ Bassarai,” CQ 55 (2005): 602–6.
———. “Sophokles and the Mysteries,” Hermes 122 (1994): 275–88.
West, M. L. The Orphic Poems. Oxford, 1983.
———. Studies in Aeschylus (Teubner, 1990), 26–50.