APPENDIX TWO
GREEK RELIGION MADE A LOT OF NOISE.
Just imagine one of the most secretive of rituals, the procession out of Athens from the Sacred Gate along the Sacred Way to Eleusis. Beginning in the Kerameikos, and striding the 14 miles to Demeter’s lauded sanctuary, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands (Herodotus tells us there were 30,000 in one parade) of Athenians would travel – each in search of enlightenment. Aeschylus had journeyed here, Sophocles, Herodotus and Aristophanes. Centuries later Plutarch and Pausanias too will be Eleusinian mystoi, initiates. Participants would cry out to the spirit of Iacchus (almost certainly a mutated form of the god of drink, Dionysos) a haunting chant that could be heard for many miles around. They carried with them blazing pine torches. A clanging gong marked their search for Kore, Demeter’s daughter. The spirits of the Underworld were believed to accompany the initiates along the way.
As with the cult of Bendis down at Piraeus, these votaries are doing something that is less than normal in Greek religion. They are part of a travelling cult. The Eleusinian cult in particular is concerned with individuals; it speaks to each man and woman about the possibilities of a mystical, eternal life. The rituals have their own name, they are mysteria, mysteries. The word comes from the Greek and means ‘with mouth, and/or eyes closed’. And indeed these were rituals that should be neither spoken of nor seen by non-initiates. In the museum at the Eleusis site there is a large bronze cinerary urn, packed with the semi-burnt remains of a woman. We don’t know her name,1 just that she requested to be buried at Eleusis’ sacred site, so that she could take her secrets not just to her grave, but into the very clods of Demeter’s earth itself.
To be an Eleusinian initiate, you had to be Greek-speaking, pure (untainted by a blood-crime, a murder) and it helped if you were rich.2 The tight cabal of Eleusinian worshippers frequently comprised self-made businessmen. Although the cavalcade itself was fairly egalitarian, with rich and poor alike – even some slaves – walking (although a few well-bred women managed to ride in wagons or on a donkey, the jangle of tack adding to the noise of the procession), all was controlled by a powerfully influential dynasty of Eleusinian priests. In years to come these priests would be central to the persecutions of ‘radical’ thinkers in Athens: men, like Socrates, who believed in challenging the status quo.
Eleusis is writ large in Socrates’ drama.3 We have no hard evidence that the philosopher himself was an initiate – although the ecstatic language of Plato’s works suggests that perhaps this pupil, possibly even Socrates himself, had experienced the Mysteries. The heady, primitive atmosphere of the worship at Eleusis, its development of the importance of the individual and the fact that Eleusinian influence could be seen all around the city meant that Socrates’ story was played out as an Eleusinian backdrop waited in the scene-dock. The Sacred Way ran from the Kerameikos through the Agora and on up to the Eleusis sanctuary (as it still does today). It was along this sacred, arterial track that as an initiate, Socrates would have stepped every single year of his life. The Archon who conducted his trial was the high-priest of the Eleusinian cult. In years to come, when Alcibiades mucks about with and mocks the Eleusinian Mysteries, he brings a death penalty onto his own head and infects Socrates with the disgrace. Eleusis was, in a sense, the spiritual touchstone of Athens. Not of the whole city-state, but of those who had really made it in the world.
The Mysteries were one of the most anticipated and drawn out of Athenian festivals.4 In spring – the month of Anthesterion (March) – the Lesser Mysteries, a dress-rehearsal for the main event, were celebrated near the banks of the River Ilissos, in the region that Socrates himself frequented. Candidates were coached, in secret, by the Eleusinian priests. In the year of Socrates’ death (399 BC) these Lesser Mysteries would have been in full swing in that no-man’s-land time for the philosopher, probably April, between his abrupt meeting with Meletus in the Agora and his trial itself in the Archon Basileus’ law-courts.
Five moons later, in the calendar month of Boedromion (around September), sacrifices and processions through the heart of Athens – the start of the Greater Mysteries – prepared the faithful for the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary itself. The build-up to the excursion was long and demanding; initiates had to purify themselves, were obliged to carry ritual objects from the Eleusinian shrine in Athens back to Demeter’s sanctuary, and libations and sacrifices were demanded. Secret chants were learned – if the students mocked these they could be executed.
The site of Eleusis is currently being re-excavated and is slowly yielding its secrets. Today we are asked to contemplate the grimy, once primary-coloured monuments to heavy industry that lie between Eleusis and the Aegean Sea beyond. But in Socrates’ day this would have been an idyllic spot. The land was rich and fertile – hence its connection to the goddess of grain, Demeter. The limestone bedrock erodes to form a natural auditorium. A building called the telesterion, developed within this space in the fifth century BC, has now been identified. Windowless, punctuated by columns, this vast area was where many thousands of the faithful gathered together. Initiates could not reveal what went on in here, on pain of death. On these earth-made benches, men and women would sit to watch scenes played out in front of them. These religious stories constitute the earliest form of Western drama. What the initiates saw was said to leave them ‘shivering, and trembling with sweat and amazement’. Apparitions (early theatrical tricks) produced ‘every kind of terror’.5
The burning torches were both an enactment of Demeter’s desperate search for her daughter and a symbol of light that was extinguished and then returned again. Walking together, in orange light and then pitch-dark, initiates were encouraged to confront their fears. This is a story where terrible things happen: a girl is raped, a mother loses her child, the pain of brutality spurs the goddess to dreadful vengeance – parching the earth of water, draining it of food, bleaching out life until all is barren and dying. But then Kore is found. The climax of the Mysteries was heady, joyful. At the point of reunion on the ritual ‘stage’ men and women in the ‘audience’ perhaps engaged in the sexual act. The rituals inspired collective terror and then collective relief.
The popularity of the cult in the fifth and fourth centuries BC shows that this was an epoch when ordinary, mortal men were questioning the ordin-ariness of their lives. If individuals could have potency in the political arena, if they could vote when warships were launched and against whom, then row these very warships themselves, if their lives were that valuable, might the value not extend beyond the grave? Socrates lived through a time when life itself meant more, when man’s potential on earth was being explored, when an afterlife became something that was not to be feared, but desirable.6
The rites at Eleusis speak volumes about the subtle play of power, old and new, in Athens.7 Despite the new democratic, equable structure of the state, there were those who wanted to keep things ‘a little bit special’, to find ways of distinguishing the haves from the have-nots.
Socrates ate and drank with aristocrats, he slept with them, and yet he was not automatically welcomed into their ranks. He walked for days on end with the ordinary people of Athens through the Agora and streets, he fought alongside them, and yet he would not always just join them in their popular expression of communal spirituality. Socrates, like the Eleusinians, looked to the possibility of a life after this one, but unlike them, his was a personal, internal experience. This delight in privacy made many in Athens suspicious of the remotely clever philosopher. It certainly helped to bring about the demand for his death.
