![]() ![]() The Panathenaic Way in the Agora, leading up to the Acropolis This was a place of memory and reflection a place where those who had experienced loss could derive some sure comfort from knowing that a goddess as powerful as Demeter had endured similar pain herself. On a quiet, sunny day, I too felt that sense of mourning as I passed the monuments that have survived, each commemorating not mere strangers but someone once intimately loved. If you want to get a sense of this mysterious Iacchus, in the image at the very top of this article you can see him as the central standing figure, raising his torch to Demeter and Persephone above.Īs initiands walked past tombs, therefore, they may have engaged on a personal level with Demeter’s loss of Persephone, re-enacting her sense of grief and suffering, and thus deriving a sense of closeness with the divinity. The verb used in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (7 th/6 th BC) when Persephone was abducted is the onomatopoeic ἰαχειν ( iacchein, ‘to let out an Iacchic shout’, ‘cry iache!’). It is at this point, at the Sacred Gate which divided the city of Athens from the Kerameikos, that a statue of the god Iacchus would appear, and the participants would let out an Iacchic shout. This gave a palpably sombre start to the procession, which began at dawn due to its sheer length. ![]() The procession travelled along the Panathenaic Way to the outskirts of the city, where it went through the Kerameikos, the cemetery of Athens. It is rather weird to start a journey with your back to the Acropolis – the religious heart of Athens – and journey outwards, but that is exactly what they did, emphasising both the Sanctuary of Eleusis, which was outside Athens, as well as its intimate link with Athens herself. It started from the slopes of the Athenian Acropolis, at the City Eleusinion, and finished at Eleusis, a sanctuary twenty kilometres west of Athens. Let us first put the procession in its place. ![]() So, during the Easter holidays of 2008, I decided to retrace the steps of these ancient pilgrims, in the hope that I could make the silent speak. To my surprise, I found that the topographical, literary and iconographic evidence had not been fully combed and combined by previous scholars. I decided to research this cult further during my university studies, giving particular focus to the famous procession. Appropriately enough, the word ‘Mysteries’ comes from μύστης ( mystes), the term for those who partook in them: it literally means ‘the person who stays silent’, deriving from the verb μύω ( muo), ‘I keep silent.’ Secrecy and silence were thus fundamentally integral to the cult. I have long been fascinated by the Eleusinian Mysteries, in particular by their secrets – secrets that have been successfully kept from the ancient world through to the modern. These Mysteries were revealed to initiands (those due to be initiated) each year as the climax of the Eleusinian Procession. Demeter thanked the King of Eleusis for his kindness by revealing secrets that somehow guaranteed any mortal who knew them a blessed afterlife. Finally, Zeus had to intervene, allowing Persephone to live half the year with her mother in the upper world of Earth, and half with Hades in the Underworld. Owing to her implacable grief, she was given hospitality at Eleusis in Central Greece. She stopped caring for agriculture and crops, her chief area of responsibility, and soon enough humans and animals starved. Demeter wandered the world looking for her daughter, utterly distressed by her loss. While roaming the meadows to pick flowers one day, Persephone was abducted by the god of the Underworld, Hades. Their tale combines, in an everlasting cycle, the universal subjects of grief and of hope. The Eleusinian Mysteries, you see, were celebrated annually in honour of the mother and daughter goddesses Demeter and Persephone. To explore this remarkable example of Greek cultic behaviour, we need to journey back into the misty realms of mythology. Perhaps you have never heard of the Eleusinian Mysteries? Or perhaps you have, but mysteries they still remain.
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