The Eleusinian
Mysteries:
Healing and
Transformation
Stages of A Mystery
Religion
[From "The Mystery Religions
& Christianity" by S. Angus]
I. Preparation and
Probation
- Studying and receiving
teachings
- Vows of Secrecy
- Submission to a cathartic
process to remove defilement of the flesh and ritual uncleanness,
to expiate sin
- Confession
- Baptisms or lustral
purification
- Sacrifices
- Ascetic preparations of all
kinds - prolonged fasts, sexual abstinence
- Pilgrimages of penitential
nature-undergoing hardship to return to the site as an act of
devotion
- Reception of a new
name
- Reading of
scriptures
- Mastery of some foreign
expressions or secret formulae
- Enthusiastic pantomimic
dancing
- Enforced silences
- Veiling
- Wearing new robes
- Wearing white
- Offering incense
- Roaring like an
animal
- Wearing masks
- Drinking, imbibing
mind-altering substances
- Crowning of
Initiate
- Enthroning of
Initiate
II. Initiation and
Communion
Initiation:
- Invocation of the
Gods
- Things exhibited, acts done and
things said
- Exhibition of the
Sacra
- Regeneration (Becoming 'Twice
Born')
- Entering the abyss
- Passing from death into
life
- Experiencing a voluntary death,
symbolic burial
- Enacting one's own
death
- Sacred Meal
- Gaining the sign of having been
initiated
- Giving thanks
Communion and Identification with
God/Gods:
- Altered states-Ecstasy and
enthusiasm-Induced by vigil, fasting, tense religious expectancy,
whirling dances, physical stimuli, contemplation of sacred
objects, chanting stirring music, inhalation of fumes, revivalist
contagion, hallucination, suggestion
- Ecstasy-abnormal consciousness
of an exhilarating condition in which the body ceased to be a
hindrance of the soul (Ecstasy may be passive, as in a trance, or
of an orgiastic character of excitement, i.e. Divine
Frenzy)
- Entrance of the Holy
Spirit
Ascent of the soul:
- Enthusiasm-the 'immediate
inspiration' or replenishing of the personality by the
deity
- All forms of Prophecy or
Revelation, dreams, visions, oracles
- Revelations: embodying the God,
becoming like the God, identifying with the God, calling the God
into one
- The Sacred Marriage:
(considered by some to be the most profound symbol of the most
intimate union known to religious experience) sometimes literally
enacted by the Priest-literal enactment of a symbolic
wedding
- Sympathia (with the Mystery
God) participating in the sorrows and suffering of the God;
repetition of the deity's passion:
- Divine Services-public services
regularly repeating the experience of initiation
- Sacramental Meals-eating the
totem sacrifice-taking in the God
- Contemplative Adoration or
Meditation
III. Epopteia of the Mystery-God
and Blessedness
The immediate result of
Initiation was to behold an Epiphany of the Deity, whether through
vision, dreams, trances, ecstasy, or hypnotic conditions.
Blessedness and Salvation in
General:
Mystery-Gods were
primarily Savior Gods, offering atonement for the past, comfort in
the present, a participation in the Divine Life, and assurance of
an after-life or immortality 'Beautiful, indeed is the mystery
given to us by The blessed Gods: Death is for mortals no longer an
evil, but a blessing.' (Glaucus, Eleusinian Heirophant)
These mysteries-and all
the paths of initiation-have a common characteristic, they are
preoccupied with the 'flight of the one to the one' that is man's
exit from the world in which he as an individual is 'alone' to
achieve union of his whole being with the universal being.
But what of the 'Mysteria'? This
name designates a festival in the sense of a time filled with
sacred events...the mystes suffers the mysteries, he becomes their
object, but he also takes an active part in them. What was kept
secret in ancient religion?...what is nature itself?: a sacred
open secret. What was concealed in the Greek cult must have
certainly been known to all those who lived in the vicinity of the
cult sites, but it was unutterable. It possessed this
character...for in the profoundest sense it was ineffable: a true
mystery.
The Mysteries were so
essentially nocturnal that in them every aspect of the night was
experienced even that power residing solely in the night, the
power to engender the light as it were to help it come forth. They
were not merely a nocturnal festival, they actually solemnized the
feeling of being shut in by the night, culminating in a sudden
great radiance. Surely it is no accident that the Mysteria took
place at the waning of the moon.
It is a threefold darkness-the
darkness of the veiling, that of the sacred nights in Agrae and
Eleusis, and their own inner darkness-that the Mystai find their
way back to their own suffering and conceiving motherliness. And
at the same time they are filled with wonder at the eternal and
common element in their lives beginning, the archetypal in that
unique conjugal union which was their origin as they see it in the
persons and destinies of the gods.
C. Kerenyi, The Mysteries of
the Kabeiroi
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