Diotima and Demeter as Mystagogues in Plato's Symposium

NANCY EVANS, Hypatia

 2009

Like the goddess Demeter, Diotima from Mantineia, the prophetess who teaches Socrates about eros and the “rites of love” in Plato's Symposium, was a mystagogue who initiated individuals into her mysteries, mediating to humans esoteric knowledge of the divine. The dialogue, including Diotima's speech, contains religious and mystical language, some of which specifically evokes the female‐centered yearly celebrations of Demeter at Eleusis. In this essay, I contextualize the worship of Demeter within the larger system of classical Athenian practices, and propose that Plato borrowed Eleusinian language because it criticized conventional notions of the divine, thereby allowing him to reimagine the possibilities for the philosophical process among humans.

Socrates’ praise of Eros becomes a philosophical discussion of Being1 that redefines the relationship not simply between human erotic partners, male‐female as well as male‐male, but even the relationship between human and divine. Interestingly, Socrates claims from the outset that the speech he gives is not his own, but rather one he heard from a woman. It is the prophet Diotima from Mantineia, Socrates says, who taught him about love, about Eros, and about eras and the divine. Diotima is in fact more than an ordinary prophet; like the goddess Demeter, Diotima is a sort of mystagogue, one who initiates individuals into her Mysteries and who mediates to humans information about the divine.
This essay will explore Diotima's speech as recalled by Socrates in Plato's Symposium, looking to the language and images that specifically evoke the yearly celebration of Demeter and Kore (the Maiden, also known as Persephone) at Eleusis. Drawing from our new understandings of the Eleusinian Mysteries and their role in the larger system of civic cult observances in the Greek city‐state (Evans 2002; Foley 1994; Clinton 1993, 1988; Burkert 1986, 1985; Richardson 1974; Mylonas 1961), this essay will further explore the possible implications that the worship of Demeter had for Plato. Eleusinian cult practices were a centuries‐old tradition within classical Athenian civic religion that focused on female experience, while at the same time directly addressing the relationship between divine and human, where ‘human’ is a category that includes both male and female. It is an initiate's experience of the Eleusinian Mysteries that constitutes the central metaphor for encountering Being in the Symposium, and this metaphor is depicted as having been invented by a woman in a dialogue full of men.
. Women's customs included everything from magical practices, to initiatory puberty and childbirth rites, to state‐sponsored cult activities such as the Thesmophoria and Parthenaia (Dillon 2002).
By far the most important mystic cult during Plato's time, and indeed throughout most of antiquity, was the mystery cult of Demeter at Eleusis, a small town sixteen miles outside Athens. Assuming that some motifs present in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter correspond to the initiation rite (Foley 1994; Burkert 1986; Mylonas 1961) Demeter, the initiate, was at one time living among the other divinities, but then separated herself from them after Death (the god Hades) forcibly took her daughter Kore away to live with him in the underworld. The Hymn, or the initiation rite, then illustrates the process of preparing to unite oneself with the divine, as Demeter and Kore are reunited with each other and with the deities on Mount Olympus after Persephone's return from the underworld (Foley 1994; Richardson 1974). To commemorate the reunion with her daughter, Demeter taught the humans at Eleusis how to sow crops, as well as how to celebrate her mysteries. The Eleusinian rites were unusual in the full system of Greek polytheism because their focus remained fixed on the experience of the female, in this case a divine mother and her daughter as she comes of age and marries, all the while maintaining a relationship with her mother.
Hierarchical practices in the polis and the more egalitarian rites of Demeter at Eleusis existed side by side, and simultaneously offered contrary conceptions of purity and impurity, male and female, human and divine. In the Symposium it is the language of the Mysteries that Plato evokes at the end of Diotima's speech, depicting a “leader” like a mystagogue conducting the “initiate” through the “rites of love.” The encounter with Beauty and Being is depicted as a rite that one can be initiated into as one was initiated into the rites of Demeter at Eleusis.
As Socrates recounts Diotima's lessons on erotics, he establishes the difference between contraries and contradictories. Once it is shown that Eros is neither beautiful nor good, an obvious question arises: does that make Eros ugly, unattractive, and base? Such a polarized argument arises from the traditional distinction between kalos and kakos, words whose well‐known meanings (“beautiful, good” and “ugly, bad”) ever since Homer encompassed both physical characteristics and moral judgments. Diotima teaches that there lies a middle term between any two opposite terms. Contraries like good and bad, or beautiful and ugly, are not necessarily contradictories; something in between, metaksu, lies between them. Before she reveals to Socrates what lies between good and bad, Diotima generates more examples of contraries that are not contradictories. An important one centers on the opposition of human (thnetos, anthropos) and divine (athanatos, theos). Since Socrates had agreed that Eros lacks what is beautiful and good, and since the gods are those who are happy because they eternally possess the beautiful and the good, Diotima teaches that Eros is not a god (202c, oude theon).
Diotima then proceeds to teach Socrates that between mortal and immortal is to daimonion, a term that has no proper analogue in English, but which may be rendered “godlike.” Furthermore, Eros, neither human nor divine, is a great daimon (202e). The noun daimon, like the adjective daimonion, is very difficult to translate. In the polytheistic system of classical Athens, a daimon could indicate a god or a goddess, a supernatural power, a spirit, or a semidivine entity. The latter is what it seems to mean in this dialogue. A definition of religious practice that stresses its culturally defined “in between” nature begins to emerge: “for in fact all that is to daimonion is between (metaksu) god and mortal,” Diotima tells Socrates (202e1). Inherent in this discussion of the “in between” is the concept of mediation, in which a third, intermediate term can bridge two terms defined as opposite, or commonly conceived to be completely separate from each other. An important connection between mediation in this philosophical and linguistic sense and mediation in a religious sense is then made explicit in the next part of Diotima's speech, when the priestess openly discusses traditional Greek religious practices (202e3–203a8). At 202e, Diotima's outline of Greek religion (pan to daimonion) explicitly includes civic sacrifice (thusia), prophecy (mantike), and mystical cult (teletai). Since the gods do not mingle at all with men, the entire art of divination (he mantinike pasa) and the skill of priests both relate civic sacrifices (thusiai) and the special knowledge of mystery initiations (teletai) back and forth between human and divine (202e7–8). Since Eros too is part of to daimonion, he has the power to cross back and forth between human and divine, carrying prayers and sacrifices from men to the gods, and requests, precepts, and orders from the gods to men (202e3–5). Eros and to daimonion thus fulfill important religious functions in Diotima's lesson on erotics.

Eros and theDaimonion

Diotima shares with Aristophanes this same conception of a cosmos inhabited by opposing categories of beings, those who will know death and those who will forever remain untouched by it. But Diotima's cosmos is more complex than that of Aristophanes because it includes the third mediating class of beings, the daimones. Diotima defines Love as one of these daimones that mediates between bad and good, and between human and divine. Like Aristophanes, Diotima illustrates her point with a story. The myth of Eros's parentage that Diotima now narrates further elaborates this aspect of Love's status as a medium between two opposites. Love is the child of the mortal woman Penia and the god Poros (personifications for want or lack, penia, and resource, poros, who is the divine son of the goddess Metis, or cunning). Penia conceived Eros at a birthday party for the goddess Aphrodite, and it is this that explains his connection to the goddess of love (203c). The language in Diotima's myth of the parentage of Eros relies again upon the oppositions (good/bad, immortal/mortal) that she has previously made. One the one hand, Diotima describes the mortal nature of the mother Penia as base and inherently lacking in beauty. She gives these qualities to her son (203d), and Eros is homeless, barefoot, rough, and squalid (the very same qualities that Alcibiades will later attribute to Socrates himself in 220a ff.). On the other hand, the father Poros, who is by nature beautiful and immortal, gives his son manliness, cleverness, intensity, and resourcefulness (203d5). This makes Eros in between (metaksu, 203e2–3); neither beautiful nor ugly, neither mortal nor immortal, but continuously dying, and then coming back to life and flourishing.

Eros, himself a mediator and a daimon, therefore practices philosophy, and enables the human and the divine to communicate with one another (202e3). Diotima proposes that because humans are mortal (and lack beauty, goodness, and wisdom), they experience the communicative or hermeneutical aspects of divinity when the daimonion relays to them divine orders, precepts, and commands (202e). But humans need constant mediation not just between human and divine, but even between human and human. Relation with other people constitutes yet another type of divine mediation, as when the Athenians learned the gods’ will about the plague through Diotima. In that instance, Diotima understood the gods’ will through prophecy (manteia) which came to her through the daimonion; she then interpreted her mantic experience to the Athenians.

There are other means through which humans can communicate with the divine. After Diotima in her questioning and in the myth defines who Eros is, and demonstrates that Eros is a true philosopher, she goes on to teach Socrates the purpose of love. Socrates admits that he doesn't know what its purpose is, and hints that it is Diotima's role as teacher of erotics to explain it to him. Her answer is cryptic. The purpose of love is “birth in the beautiful, both in body and in soul” (206b7). Socrates is still puzzled, and responds by saying that he needs prophesy (manteia, 206b9)—the Mantinean woman Diotima—to figure out what she is saying.Birth, prophecy, and what comprises “human” were first linked together in the earlier part of Diotima's speech where she discusses Eros's birth, and defines traditional ritual practice as that which communicates between human and divine (202–203). Traditional cult practices (thusiai and teletai) constitute one type of mediation that accomplishes communication between the mortal human and the immortal divine. But Diotima teaches Socrates that humans can—and do—achieve a different sort of immortality, and this type of immortality is possible because of Eros, and love's role in conceiving, giving birth, and raising children (207a, 207d). Procreation for all mortal beings, human and animal alike, replaces the individual with his or her offspring, and thereby allows for a type of immortality and social deathlessness. This experience of death, birth, and nurturing of offspring also underlies the myth of the divine Mother and Daughter, Demeter and Kore, and stands at the basis for the Eleusinian Mysteries. Another Athenian festival that celebrated the story of Demeter and Kore, the Thesmophoria, even culminated in a joyous day called Kalligeneia, the Day of Beautiful Birth. Linking Eros to a discussion of immortality, parents, and children allows Diotima to continue setting the stage for her coming use of explicit Eleusinian language. Diotima's lessons in erotics highlight the conceptual similarity between birth and traditional religious practices. Both are forms of mediation between the individual mortal, and the larger immortal, whether the immortal is the realm of the gods with which the priest communicates, or whether the immortal is the community of a family encompassing several generations.

The Ascent

Diotima teaches that humans are capable of real proximity to the divine in the section of her speech commonly called the “ascent passage” (207a–212b). Here she narrates an individual human's encounter with Beauty (to kalon) and Being (to on). Diotima begins the ascent by speaking about people who are pregnant (egkumones) in body and soul, and she at last tells Socrates what it is that pregnant humans give birth to. Those (implicitly male anthropoi) pregnant in body turn to mortal women, and achieve their measure of immortality, memory, and happiness by fathering children (208e). In addition, birth mediates between the individual mortal and the collective immortal, when humans (anthropoi) give birth to abstract concepts such as virtue (209b4). Following the examples of poets (Homer and Hesiod) and lawmakers (Solon and Lycurgus), those pregnant in soul give birth to wisdom and virtue by writing poems and laws that serve the good of the community (209a1).16 The larger community carries on the memory of an individual and of his or her virtuous acts in much the same way that a family carries on the memory of specific members who have passed on. But it is only the presence of another beautiful person, anthropon (209b7), that allows a pregnant human soul to conceive and produce virtue, the soul's spiritual offspring that benefits mankind as it mediates with the immortal and divine.But Diotima will now continue to the higher level of initiation into the mysteries of love (ta erotika), namely the view of Being, or the epoptika. Diotima extends the metaphor of an engendering class of mortals by combining language of birth, sexuality, and humans with language of Eleusinian mystical experience. Diotima claims that the human ability to engender true virtue in the presence of the beautiful is what brings the human into an Eleusinian proximity with the divine (212a1). These are the initiatory rites and the higher grade of rites (telea and epoptika) that constitute the height of Diotima's speech on love; they lead the way to the vision of Being at the top of a ladder from which the initiate may look down upon the vision of Beauty itself. In her higher grade of visionary rites (epoptika), Diotima teaches that as the lover loves the beloved, and looks upon him or her, the lover also learns to recognize the beauty of one person in the beauty of another, and next the beauty of another in the beauty of all. Gazing at the beloved leads the lover to gaze at all creation.