Conspiracy file · Ended AD 392

The Eleusinian Mysteries

The most famous secret rite of the ancient world: an initiation held every year at Eleusis, near Athens, for Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Thousands were initiated over many centuries, and the secret of what they saw was kept.

Also known as The Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone · The Greater Mysteries · Eleusis

On the record Timeline From the comics In Paranoid American comics Sources & further reading

From Secret Mystery School #4

The story

The rite followed the story told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Hades carries off Persephone, and her mother Demeter searches the earth and lets the crops die until Zeus allows her daughter to come back for part of each year. Athens held the Lesser Mysteries in spring and the Greater Mysteries each autumn, in the month of Boedromion, at the sanctuary of Eleusis west of the city.

Initiates, the mystai, bathed in the sea, sacrificed piglets, fasted and walked the Sacred Way from Athens shouting the name of Iacchus. At Eleusis they drank the kykeon, barley and water with pennyroyal, and entered the Telesterion, a hall big enough for thousands, for a night of things done, said and shown that no one was allowed to reveal. Men, women and slaves who spoke Greek could join. Cicero, an initiate, said the Mysteries taught people "not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope".

The Mysteries ran until the emperor Theodosius closed the pagan sanctuaries around 392, and Alaric's Goths plundered Eleusis in 396. Because the secret held, theories fill the gap. The best known, from R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl Ruck in The Road to Eleusis (1978), is that the kykeon held ergot, the barley fungus from which LSD was first made. Others prefer mushrooms.

Memorandum for the recordSubject: The Eleusinian Mysteries

On the record

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, from around the 7th century BC, tells the myth and has Demeter drink kykeon of barley, water and pennyroyal.
In 415 BC the Athenian general Alcibiades was accused of mocking the Mysteries in a private house and was recalled from the Sicilian expedition (Thucydides, Book 6).
Diagoras of Melos was condemned for impiety, including revealing the rites, and fled Athens.
Initiation was open to men, women and slaves who spoke Greek and were free of blood guilt.
Cicero wrote that the Mysteries taught "not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope" (On the Laws 2.36).
Marcus Aurelius rebuilt the sanctuary after raiders sacked it around AD 170; the emperor Julian (r. 361-363) was among the last imperial initiates.
Theodosius I closed the sanctuary around 392, and Alaric's Goths plundered Eleusis in 396.

The theory

The kykeon contained ergot, a fungus of barley with LSD-like alkaloids (Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, 1978).
The sacrament was psilocybin mushrooms (Robert Graves; Terence McKenna).
The Mysteries never ended: they went underground and passed into later secret societies (a common claim in esoteric writing).
Early Christianity borrowed its sacred meal and its dying and returning god from the mystery cults (James Frazer's school; Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020).

Timeline

c. 1500 BCThe first Mycenaean buildings rise on the site of the sanctuary
c. 650 BCThe Homeric Hymn to Demeter
6th century BCUnder Peisistratos, Athens enlarges the Telesterion
415 BCAlcibiades is accused of profaning the Mysteries
c. AD 170Raiders sack Eleusis; Marcus Aurelius rebuilds it
392Theodosius I closes the pagan sanctuaries
396Alaric's Goths plunder Eleusis
1882The Greek Archaeological Society begins systematic excavation at Eleusis
1978The Road to Eleusis proposes the ergot theory

From the comics

Panels straight from the page. Click one to read it full size.

From Secret Mystery School #4 · Pages 11, 13

The True Solemn Name of the Mystic

The final exam is an initiation in a field at night: torches, a pig, and a hierophant shouting the name Iacchus. Then come the sacraments, which are not juice and crackers. The comic is having fun, but most of the details come from the ancient sources, and the mushroom theory is a real one.

The True Solemn Name of the Mystic, 2 of 5

The True Solemn Name of the Mystic, 3 of 5

The True Solemn Name of the Mystic, 4 of 5

The True Solemn Name of the Mystic, 5 of 5

Iacchus was the torch-bearing god of the procession from Athens to Eleusis; the crowd shouted his name as it walked. "Over two thousand years" is a little generous: the sanctuary goes back to about 1500 BC, and the rites ended around AD 392-396.
Piglets were the standard offering: initiates sacrificed one to Demeter as part of their purification.
In the Homeric Hymn the kykeon is barley, water and pennyroyal. In The Road to Eleusis (1978), Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck argued it also held ergot, a fungus of barley; others have proposed psilocybin mushrooms. No test of material from Eleusis has confirmed either.

Get the evidence