The Secret of Eleusis Can Be Partially Known, and the Book’s Method Shows How

Kerényi opens against a commonplace: that the secret of the Eleusinian Mysteries was kept so well that we can know nothing about them. “This is not true,” he writes; our knowledge cannot be complete, but it is more than a beginning. The book’s epigraph, from Seneca, states the working principle: “There are holy things that are not communicated all at once: Eleusis always keeps something back to show those who come again.” The method is reconstruction, and Kerényi’s governing analogy is liturgical. Suppose the total context of the High Mass were lost and only fragments of liturgical books and ruins of churches remained; reconstruction would still be possible, because at every stage the liturgy formed a coherent whole with its own inner logic, and one can judge which elements conflict with that logic. The book is accordingly built in two strictly separated parts. The first, “Reconstruction,” assembles the archaeological record—above all John Travlos’s excavation of the Telesterion and his discovery and restoration of the Hierophant’s throne—with the reliable literary tradition, without asking what the rite meant. The second, a “hermeneutical essay,” asks the question of meaning, and Kerényi insists that hermeneutics must remain open to unusual human experience or forfeit its standing: a historical science that shrinks from fields making demands on the investigator’s capacity for experience “would cease to be science.” What such openness recovers, he argues, is a trait of Greek culture itself, a “natural capacity to see visions” that could be deliberately stimulated. He cites what he calls a possible axiom of the Eleusinian religion, from Kallimachos: “He who sees the god is great, he who does not see him is small.”

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter Is the Founding Document, and It Falls Silent at the Decisive Point

The mythological setting rests on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: the rape of Persephone while she picks flowers, Demeter’s grief and wandering search, her arrival at Eleusis and her attempt to immortalize the child Demophoön in fire, the famine she imposes, and the reunion in which the daughter is restored for two-thirds of every year. Kerényi stresses that the hymn distinguishes what was public from what was not. The grain that grew on the Rharian Plain was no secret; nothing connected with Demeter as mother of the grain was hidden, and the ear of grain adorned the visible architecture of the Mystery shrines. The essential gift was something else—in the hymn’s own account, “the essential gift was the ceremonies which no one may describe or utter.” At that threshold the poet stops, saying that “great awe of the gods makes the voice falter.” Kerényi also reads the hymn as a Homeric document that effaces older, stranger strata: the snake-formed seducer of the Orphic versions, the archaic triad of companions, the material he traces back to a Middle Minoan cup from Phaistos that he takes for the earliest extant representation of Persephone. What the hymn does preserve is the pattern the rite required. Demeter’s mourning—her fast, her sitting by the well, her refusal of wine—was imitated by the initiates. The mystai entered the role of the searching goddess, and this imitatio deae, in Kerényi’s reconstruction, is the human machinery of the entire festival.

The Rite Ran From Agrai to the Telesterion: Fast, Kykeon, Procession, Vision

Kerényi reconstructs a graded sequence. The Lesser Mysteries at Agrai on the Ilissos conferred the myesis, the preparatory initiation whose tone he calls more physical; the Great Mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated in the autumn month of Boëdromion, conferred the epopteia, the state of “having seen,” whose tone was more spiritual. Plato assumes the distinction when Diotima separates the lesser mysteries of love from the epoptika, and in the Phaedrus the two levels of initiation supply the vocabulary for the vision of the Ideas. Between the two stood the preparations: nine days of fasting, the great procession, the mockery at the bridge over the Kephisos that relieved the mourning as Iambe’s jesting had relieved Demeter’s, and the drinking of the barley drink. The initiates’ password has survived: “I have fasted, drunk the kykeon, taken things out of the big basket and, after performing a rite, put them in the little basket, whence I put them back in the big basket.” Kerényi treats the fast and the kykeon as pharmacological preparation in a strict sense, drawing on correspondence with the Basel pharmacologist Albert Hofmann, whom he quotes: “The volatile oils contained in poley oil (Oleum pulegii) might very well, added to the alcoholic content of the kykeon, have produced hallucinations in persons whose sensibility was heightened by fasting.” The goal was the Telesterion, a columned hall enclosing the small Anaktoron at its heart, with the throne of the Hierophant—whose title Kerényi renders not as he who shows the holy things but as “he who makes them appear”—set beside its single door. Plutarch supplies the phenomenology: the initiate who has beheld the great light, as when the Anaktoron opens, “changes his behavior and falls silent and wonders.”

Mother and Daughter Are a Single Archetypal Double-Figure

The hermeneutical essay begins from the question the introduction poses: the images we still encounter at Eleusis “are the images of Mother and Daughter—as it were, a holy duality. But what are mother and daughter?” Kerényi’s answer is that the Two Goddesses are one figure doubled. At Thelpousa a single goddess had two faces; a Roman-era inscription reads “[Property] of Demeter the Eleusinian, maiden and woman,” making maidenhood and motherhood simultaneous attributes of one deity; behind both goddesses he posits an older duality in Rhea, the Primordial Mother. Persephone herself always admitted of duplication, at once queen of the underworld and the daughter who returns to her mother. In the rite, men and women alike entered the role of the goddess searching “for a part of herself in her daughter,” and Kerényi draws the consequence that dissolves the matriarchal reading: the separation of Mother and Daughter “must be characteristic of undivided human existence, of men as well as women,” since men’s imitation of the questing goddess led to the same epopteia. This is also where he settles accounts with depth psychology. Jung’s commentary on his Kore study foundered, he argues, on the attempt to split the figure between Self and Anima, and Erich Neumann “took undue liberties in interpreting the ancient monuments.” Kerényi’s alternative vocabulary is deliberately pre- and post-Jungian at once: he speaks of “archetypal facts of human existence,” realities concrete in the manner of bios itself, of which the feminine source of life is one.

The Mystery Night Showed Birth in Death, and the Ear of Grain Sealed It

Kerényi’s reconstruction of the climax rests on the Christian writer Hippolytos, the papyrus fragment behind Walter F. Otto’s theory of a real epiphany, and the archaeology of throne and fire. Under the great fire of the opened Anaktoron the Hierophant proclaimed in a loud voice: “The Mistress has given birth to a holy boy, Brimo has given birth to Brimos!” Brimo names the queen of the realm of the dead, and the proclamation announces that the goddess of death gave birth in fire. Mythology offered the parallels—Dionysos born amid Semele’s lightnings or from Persephone under the earth, Asklepios delivered from his mother’s pyre—and Kerényi condenses the message: a birth in death was possible, and possible also for human beings who had faith in the Goddesses, as Demeter herself had shown when she laid Demophoön in the fire. Then the Hierophant sounded the echeion, the ineffable things were seen, and the vision of the underworld goddess rose. In a second phase he stood “silent amid profound silence, displayed a mown ear of grain,” a gesture Kerényi sets beside the Buddha’s Flower Sermon. Those who had seen turned back at this sight “as though turning back from the hereafter into this world.” The grain was grain and nothing more, yet for the epoptai it was “the memento of an encounter in which the goddess of the underworld showed herself in a beatific vision.” Kerényi reads the whole as an Eleusinian version of the visio beatifica, an approximation to the limit the medieval concept names, and its content as the duality itself: the scission of the Mother into mother and daughter opened a vision of the feminine source of life, as the ear of grain opened a vision into the abyss of the seed.

Within Kerényi’s Archetypal Images of Greek Religion, this volume stands as the feminine counterpart to Prometheus, his archetypal image of human existence, and to Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, whose zoē the Eleusinian grain makes visible in a single mown ear. It revises the ground of his collaboration with Jung in Essays on a Science of Mythology, where the Divine Maiden first entered depth psychology, and it supplies the philological correction to Neumann’s The Great Mother, whose structural account of the Feminine it charges with overreaching the monuments. Read alongside Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane and the first volume of his A History of Religious Ideas, which closes at the Eleusinian Mysteries, it remains the standard depth-psychological source on the mother-daughter mystery: the reconstruction against which every psychological use of Demeter and Persephone must be measured.