Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World By Jan N. Bremmer

Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World

By Jan N. Bremmer, 2014 , University of Groningen.,“Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston”
Lecture 1 “ Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries : A ‘Thin’ Description”
 p 25  “the main sources of rather scanty literary information are Christian authors, who often wanted to defame the ritual, and, in some cases, lived six or seven hundred years after Athens’ heyday. Nonetheless, it also seems unnecessary to limit ourselves strictly to pre-Platonic evidence. ”
p 26 “Our analysis will follow a chronological order and look first at the necessary qualifications of the initiands and their preparations (§ 1), then at the first degree of initiation, the myêsis (§ 2), continuing to the highest degree of Eleusinian initiation, the epopteia (§ 3) and finishing with the aftermath of the initiation and some conclusions ”

Qualifications and preparations for initiation “. Uniquely for Greek festivals, the Mysteries were open to men and women,44 free and slaves,45 young and old, Greeks and non-Greeks.46 Yet not everyone could afford the Mysteries. ”
they said “ ‘I fasted, I drank the kykeon (like Demeter in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter), I took from the hamper, after working I deposited in the basket and from the basket in the hamper’.”
 p 27 “Initiation into the Mysteries, then, was not a simple act; potential initiates must have been in a position to spend time and money, as they also had to pay a fee to the officiants.”
 p 28 “On the fifteenth of the month Boedromion (September) well over 3000 prospective initiates and mystagogues assembled in the agora of Athens to hear the proclamation of the festival, a gathering that excluded those who could not speak proper Greek or had blood on their hands”

“ in later antiquity, in line with the growing interiorisation of purity,59 this ban came to be extended to those ‘impure in soul’.60 Participation en masse meant that the initiates had to bring their own sacrificial victims,”

“. The next day the formula ‘initiates to the sea’ sent them off to the coast in order to purify themselves and their animals”

p 29 2 The myêsis
“On the morning of the 19th Boedromion, after three days rest (a free period of time that had made it possible to intercalate the Epidauria festival for Asclepius), 65 the prospective initiates assembled again in the agora and formed the procession to the sanctuary of Demeter and her daughter Persephone in Eleusis.66 At the front went the Eleusinian dignitaries,67 dressed in their full glory,68 the priestesses carrying sacred objects on their heads in special baskets closed by red ribbons,69 and, in later times, the ephebes, the Athenian male youth. They were followed by a huge cavalcade of Greeks, each holding a kind of pilgrim’s staff consisting of a single branch of myrtle or several held together by rings70 and accompanied by their donkeys with provisions and torches for the coming days.71 The procession now left the city, and it would have been quite a few hours before they completed the roughly 15 mile journey, which was repeatedly interrupted by sacred dances, sacrifices, libations, ritual washings, ” with hymns and pipes
p 30 “d rhythmically chanted ‘Iakch’, o Iakche’, invoking the god Iakchos at the head of the procession, who was closely related to and sometimes identified with Dionysos”
“The participants were now in that transitory stage of betwixt and between, which, as the anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) has taught us, is often characterised by reversals and confusions of the social order.76 During the journey the young mocked the old,77 at the bridge over the Athenian river Kephisos a prostitute hurled mockery at the passers by,78 and the wealthier women who rode in buggies reviled one another.79 Although some couples must have been initiated together,80 in general the occasion presented an opportunity for the two sexes to take a close look at one another in a way that would have been unthinkable in normal circumstances. ”

p 31 “After their tiring but inspiring journey, the prospective initiates are unlikely to have performed other ritual obligations, and the evening and night must have been fairly quiet. The next day will have begun with sacrifices, as was normal. We hear of sacrifices by the epimelêtai, the archôn basileus and the ephebes.88 To demonstrate their physical prowess, the ephebes, ‘in the way of the Greeks’ (Eur. Helen 1562), lifted up the sacrificial bull to have its throat cut.”

p 32 “Some time after sunset, the prospective initiates would go to the telestêrion, where the actual initiation would take place over two consecutive nights”
“Some time after sunset, the prospective initiates would go to the telestêrion, where the actual initiation would take place over two consecutive nights.92 This was a square or rectangular building of about 27 by 25 metres, seating around 3000 people,93 and in its centre was a small chapel, the anaktoron/anaktora,94 about 3 by 12 metres, which had remained in the same place despite successive reconstructions and innovations. This housed the sacred objects that were displayed at some point in the ritual. Given that there were 5 rows of 5 pillars each inside the telestêrion, it is understandable that, as Plutarch noted, there was shouting and uncomfortable jostling at the entrance to the building, presumably in order to get the best places.”

p 36 “iven that all the other references are to clearly identifiable stages of the epoptic ritual, it seems more likely that we have here a reference to the same act mentioned by Asterius. In fact, Gregory of Nazianzus notes: ‘nor does Demeter wander and bring in Celeuses and Triptolemoi and snakes, and perform some acts and undergo others’; love between the Eleusinian king Celeus and Demeter is attested elsewhere. 119 In other words, various sources suggest that sex played a role at least on the mythical level, which could, but need not, have been reflected on the level of ritual. But how do we explain a ‘subterranean wedding’ when no such space is attested archeologically? Two answers seem possible. The anaktoron was sometimes called megaron or magaron, the term for subterranean cultic buildings of Demeter and Persephone, but also of the pits in which sacrifice was deposited during the Thesmophoria.120 Both Asterius and Mesomedes, directly or indirectly, could have misinterpreted their source’s report of the sacred wedding in the anaktoron because they were not, or no longer, familiar with the Mysteries. A second possibility is that the hierophant himself, who was the only one who had access to the[…]”
p 37 “There will also have been dancing,”
“There will also have been dancing,122 and probably other acts that escape us but which almost certainly included speaking or singing, as euphônia was required of the hierophant, whose voice could even be depicted as that of his eponymous ancestor Eumolpos.123 In fact, there is a close connection between Mousai and mystêria in a number of texts.124 As the singing of hymns is securely attested in the Mysteries of the Lykomids,125 we should expect them in Eleusis as well. A first-century BC inscription mentions hymnagôgoi in Eleusis,126 but unfortunately we cannot tell whether they instructed choirs or whether we should think of some kind of congregational singing in the telestêrion.
Before the high point of the ritual occurred, the initiated were first subjected to a terrifying experience, perhaps by being confronted with a female monster with snaky hair. As Plutarch notes: ‘subsequently, before the climax (my italics: pro tou telous) [come] all the terrors – shuddering (phrikê), shivering, sweating and amazement’.127 It is the same rhythm that we see in Plato’s Phaedrus (251a), where those who have seen ‘a godlike face’ first experience shuddering (phrikê), sweating and abnormal heat.128 We may safely[…]”

p 40 “4 The aftermath

The last day of the Mysteries was a day of festivities and sacrifices, and the happy initiates now could wear a myrtle wreath, like the officiating priests.145 The day was called Plemochoai, after a type of vessel that was used for the concluding libation, one vessel upturned to the west, the other to the east,146 to the accompaniment of a ‘mystic utterance’, perhaps the attested cry ‘Rain’, while looking up to heaven, and ‘Conceive’ while looking down to the earth.147 During this day, and probably also before, the initiates visited the fair, which was a standard feature of ancient festivals, as it often still is today.148 In the mid-fourt”

p 41 “On leaving, the initiates perhaps uttered the words ‘paks’ or ‘konks’, as we are told that this was the exclamation upon a completed task.151 We have no idea what these words mean, but the end of the Mysteries had to be ritualised somehow. Once they had returned home, the initiates used the clothes they had worn during their initiation as lucky blankets for their children or consecrated them in a local sanctuary. For that reason many an initiate even wore old clothes”

p 42 “was the goal of the Mysteries? Was it eschatological”