CHAPTER 22: Eleusis

In the evening, I sit on my bed in the Hotel Couros in Athens. I decided to return to Plaka where I stayed when I first came to Greece two months ago, but this time I’ve taken a quiet hotel off the main drag. I hear a motorbike, but the sound is distant and muffled. Hotel Couros is a large brick building but old inside. The halls are narrow and echo with the sounds of footsteps and voices. Our community bathroom just outside my door could qualify as an archaeological dig. A dark-green heat radiator sits against the wall, but the nice young man at the front desk said they will not turn it on until next month.

I have so much left to do here in Athens. I must see Eleusis where in antiquity the divine ritual of the Mysteries was held. Life-giving, death-bringing Demeter was perhaps the most powerful of the goddesses. She brought Zeus to his knees, and she did it without the use of force. When I came to Greece, I had no plans to visit Eleusis, but all the problems concerning my daughter surfacing has brought the myth of Demeter and Persephone with it. And I must see Colonus.  Oedipus died there. The last day, I’ll do nothing but catch the bus to the airport and board my flight back to the States. My ticket is still carefully tucked away in my security pouch around my neck. I’ll have another twelve hour layover in London, and I’m not looking forward to it.

I wake several times during the night, cold and fighting for more cover. I have a nightmare about another Space Shuttle disaster: a giant explosion on the launch pad, a fireball, screaming.

4 Dec, Saturday

Church bells from every direction, a chorus of divine peals heralding a new day. The bell in the church next to the hotel clangs, a sharp shattering sound followed by silence. I arise later than I would have liked, feeling tired and stiff and convinced not to tolerate another freezing night of sleeplessness in Hotel Couros. Even stacking all my clothes on top of me wasn’t enough. I check out and walk to Hotel Phaedra where I stayed when I first arrived in Greece two months ago. The man behind the counter with the aristocratic presence and easy smile, recognizes me immediately, says he’s glad I’m back. He assures me my room will be heated.

The sun gradually warms me, dissolving my stiff-jointed sluggishness. Bright sunlight streams between tall buildings zebra-striping Plaka’s deep shadows on my walk to the temple of the Olympian Zeus. Athens has changed in the two months I’ve traveled Greece. It’s cooler, and both the traffic and exhaust have mellowed. Hadrien’s Arch cuts a striking presence without the fumes and din of traffic. This morning I start my quest for the sites involved in the ancient Mysteries of Demeter. If the lives of Oedipus and Laios are the Rosetta stone for the myth of men and the male half of civilization, the Mysteries constitute the great myth of women and the feminine side of civilization.

As in the legend of Agamemnon and Iphigenia, Demeter’s story is of the disappearance of a daughter. The connection between the myths of mortal Iphigenia and the goddess Persephone define the parallel between mortal and immortal existence. Iphigenia’s life was symbolic of her death as a maiden and her rebirth as a young woman. Persephone’s life was symbolic of death and rebirth into the afterlife. The two girls are on opposites sides of the gulf forever separating mankind and the gods. The religion of the ancient Greeks and that of modern Christianity are one long statement of the attempt of both mankind and the gods to bridge that gulf. I’m reminded of Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel depicting God reaching forth his finger to touch the finger of Adam.

Ancient Athens was surrounded by a large circular wall with many gates. The sites leading to Demeter’s Mysteries are strung along a line cutting the city in half from the southeast to the northwest. The first site attended by the initiates was to the southeast, outside the city walls next to the temple of Olympia Zeus where I am now. This temple was the first I visited when I came to Greece back on October 3rd. This ground was also sacred to the Earth goddess, Gaia,[1] although it’s rarely recognized now.

As I enter the site, I’m still struck by the colossal marble columns of Zeus’ temple in the middle of the open field. This was also where the last waters of the Great Flood ran, through a two foot split in the ground. But Zeus’ temple is not what I’ve come to see this morning. I walk south through scattered pines, one bare trunk weaving a lazy S before donning a dense-green cloud of pine needles. A recent rain has settled the dust. I walk to the chest-high stone fence bordering the southern edge of the site and peer over the edge. In front of me lies what’s left of the bank of the ancient Ilissos river. The river is no longer visible. It was diverted underground in 1956-67[2] and the river bank excavated. It’s a ghostly underworld presence now, Styx-like.

This is the ancient district of Agrai. The name Agrai comes from the goddess Artemis Argrotera, which means wild, country-loving. A temple by that name was located just across the river. The area was congested with buildings in Plato’s day but is now sandwiched between the stone fence and Ardittou (Ardittou Street) which traverses the old riverbed.

In Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, Socrates, on one of his few excursions outside the city walls, and Phaedrus, a friend of his, walked barefoot along the bank of the delightfully-clear Ilissos to the shade of a tree where they sat cooling their feet in the cold water. A gentle breeze blew as they discussed the nature of love. Socrates described the setting:  

Upon my word, a delightful resting place, with this tall, spreading plane, and a lovely shade from the high branches of the agnos [a willow like tree]. Now that it’s in full flower it will make the place ever so fragrant. And what a lovely stream under the plane tree, and how cool to the feet! ... And then too, isn’t the freshness of the air most welcome and pleasant, and the shrill summery music of the cicada choir! And as crowning delight the grass, thick enough on a gentle slope to rest your head on most comfortably.[3]  

The bank of the Ilissos has deteriorated significantly from that described by Plato. The hard packed earth is hardly a place to rest your head. Maidens also drew their prenuptial bath water here at the Killirrhoe spring[4] and this is where the Athenians crossed the Ilissos.

The reason I’ve come here is that this is the site of a great purification ceremony attended by the initiates to Demeter’s Mysteries which took place twenty kilometers east of here at Eleusis. The ceremony was held in the month of Anthesterion, the month of flowers (our February) and took place in the Metroon on the south bank of the Ilissos.[5] The purification ceremony was called the Lesser Mysteries and was for those of unintelligible speech (non-Greek speaking) or murderers who could not attend the great spiritual Mysteries at Eleusis without purification.

The first and most famous person purified at Agrai was Heracles (Hercules to the Romans), the great hero and native of Thebes who had killed many men. To be purified, he had to be cleansed and experience a symbolic death and rebirth. Heracles used a pig, Demeter’s favorite animal, to symbolically represent himself. For purification, he bathed with the pig in the cold February water of the Ilissos then sacrificed it. The pig died in his place similar to the deer dying in Iphigenia’s place at Aulis. He ate the pig, thus completing identification with the animal which put him in a symbolic state of death. He was then allowed to see what mortals were forbidden to see. He was shown an infancy basket with a great snake coiled about it. The basket contained sacred objects signifying rebirth. Thus he had symbolically died, and returned to infancy. In this purified state, he was ready to learn the mystery taught at Agrai. The mystery was kept secret and is still not known today. We do know it was about Demeter and in particular Persephone, her daughter who disappeared into the Underworld.

The cost of purification at Agrai was fifteen drackmes, a little over six cents (American) today, but ten days wages in antiquity.[6] Even slaves could attend provided they were citizens of Athens and had the fee.

When Socrates and Phaedrus left the bank of the Ilissos, as I’m about to do, Socrates recited the following prayer to Pan:  

Dear Pan, and all ye other gods that dwell in this place, grant that I may become fair within, and that such outward things as I have may not war against the spirit within me. May I count him rich who is wise, and as for gold, may I possess so much of it as only a temperate man might bear and carry with him.[7]  

Socrates lived the true spirit of the Mysteries since they were spiritual and not associated with wealth or power.

A year and a half after attending the Lessor Mysteries at Agrai, the initiates were permitted to attend the Greater Mysteries at Eleusis, which occurred over several days and also started here in Athens. The initiates of the Greater Mysteries assembled in Athens[8] on Boedromion 14th (late September). Boedromion 15th, the first day of the Greater Mysteries, was called “agyrmos” or “gathering,” which also included a sacrifice.

Just as the initiates had bathed in the Ilissos in the Lesser Mysteries, they again bathed with piglets but this time in the Saronic Gulf. This occurred on Boedromion 16th when the Hierophant command, “Initiates to the sea!” followed by a procession to the coastal town of Phaleron just south of Piraeus. After returning, they sacrificed and ate the piglet. The following day, the rites were picked up at the Asklepion, a sacred temple at the foot of the Akropolis, where I’m now headed.

After a quick bite of lunch at the same street-side restaurant where I had the stuffed eggplant back on October 3rd, the first day I was in Greece, I take a hike to the foot of the Akropolis. The air has warmed some, but shadows are forever long this late in the fall. On the west side of the theatre of Dionysus, up the pine-speckled hill close to the cliff rising to the Akropolis, lie the ruins of the temple of Asklepios, Apollo’s son and god of healing. This is the reason Asklepios is a part of the Mysteries.

Originally Asklepios, who I’ve encountered in Epidaurus, Kos and Pergamon, was mortal even though he was the son of Apollo. He was raised by Chairon, the centaur, who taught him the art of healing. With the help of Athena, who had given Asklepios the resurrecting blood from the Gorgon Medusa, Asklepios learned to heal the dead. Zeus was concerned Asklepios might make the race of humans immortal and killed him with a lightning bolt. Apollo promptly made Asklepios immortal. Asklepios, as a god, was closely associated with Demeter and the Mysteries because the Mysteries provided a process whereby the soul of mortals was made immortal.

The Asklepion was built in 420 BC when Asklepios was brought from Epidaurus to purify Athens after the plague which had ravaged it from 430 through 426 BC.[9] The plague killed slave and aristocrat alike, even Pericles, the leader of the Athenian state, died of it in 429. Birds of prey who dined on the rotting carcasses died also.[10] Asklepios came to Athens in the form of a snake. Sophocles was caretaker of Asklepios while the temple was being built, selected because of “his reputation for uprightness and religious scrupulosity.”[11]

The Asklepion, here next to the theatre of Dionysus, is actually two temples, the first built in 420 BC and the other around 350 BC. The old temple had four rooms, a temple with an altar, and a spring with a square cistern. The rites of the Great Mysteries continued here on Boedromion 16th, which was called “Epidauria” in commemoration of Asklepios’ arrival and was for, like Asklepios, late arrivals. On this day, the god of the Underworld, Hades, assumed the form of Asklepios, the god of healing. In his snake aspect, Asklepios was himself associated with the Underworld, herbs, plants and all things which spring from the earth, and so closely related to Demeter, giver of all vegetation sprouting from the earth.[12] Thus the healer and physician, who could even resurrect the dead, merged with the Lord of Death.

I climb the slope up next to the Akropolis cliff, walk the tourist-packed earth through pine trees to an assembly of granite stones. His temple, like all those of antiquity, lies in ruins. It was literally built into the cliff of the Akropolis, the large stacked stones forming retaining walls. The site is now a jumble of stones with a shallow cave recessed even further into the side of the cliff.

The sun is already nose-diving in the west, reflecting brightly off the vertical surfaces. I feel its radiant energy from the heat-absorbing Akropolis cliff. This fall sun is bashful, rising late, hanging close to the southern horizon all day and setting early.

The procession to the Asklepion was followed by a major sacrifice and all-night celebration. The following day, Boedromion 18th, was a day of rest. Sacred objects were also used in the ceremony and were brought under escort to the Athens Eleusinion. The Eleusinion was just south of the Agora, another site I missed two months ago, but one I’ll visit today. On Boedromion 19th, the initiates escorted the sacred objects from Athens back to Eleusis, and on Boedromion 20th, the great procession of initiates walked to Eleusis, both processions starting from the Eleusinion just south of the Agora.

I walk east of the Akropolis, past the hotel and along Adreanou Street where the smell of gyros and seafood greets me, past the Roman Agora and eventually to the southeast entrance to the ancient Greek Agora where I enter from the southeast. Here, near the entrance at the side of the street, lie the ruins of the Eleusinion. I stand in the shadow of the Akropolis, the sun eclipsed by a marble monolith, stand on the ground where the initiates gathered for the walk to Eleusis to have their souls saved by a goddess whose image was that of a young girl. Several thousand people made the walk, young, old, women, men, children, even slaves. I imagine a great commotion as they heard the signal to proceed, the shout of thousands.

Mylonas, classical scholar who collaborated in the excavation of Eleusis, describes the procession:  

Iacchos and his priest were at the head; then came the priests and the panageis, the all holy, priestesses of Demeter bearing the Hiera [sacred objects] ... Then came the officials of the state, the theories of other cities and foreign representatives, then the mystai [initiates] on foot--men and women and children with their sponsors, then those in carriages, and finally the pack animals forming the end.[13]  

I exit the Agora, cross the bridge over the train tracks running along its northern edge, the same path followed by the procession, watch a slow-moving train clippity-clop along the shallow ravine. I walk through the Monastiraki district, past the taverna where two months ago JoAnn and I sat talking of my pending journey through Greece, seemingly an eternity ago. She was a new acquaintance then but now seems a long-lost friend.

The procession came through the Agora along the Sacred Way, cutting a diagonal path through the maze of buildings and temples, and then on east to the Dipylon (“with two gates”) where it exited the city through the Sacred Gate to Eleusis. The entire ancient city of Athens was surrounded by the wall, and the Dipylon was the double-gated main entrance through it. The adjacent gate led to Plato’s academy where he founded his famous school of philosophy.

I walk north to Hermes Street, west to the ruins of the Dipylon. On the outside of the city walls was the Kerameikos, the Potters Quarters which served as the city cemetery as far back as Mycenaean times, the age of Theseus. The site is now located in an industrial zone, gray buildings lining dirty streets, but the ruins are several meters below ground level which isolates it from the hubbub of traffic. A couple of scraggly cats skirt my path to hide at the foot of olive trees and oleander bushes.

In ancient times, on a well by the Dipylon gate, an inscription to Pan had been cut which read as follows: “O Pan, O Men, be of good cheer, beautiful Nymphs, rain, conceive, overflow.”[14] The theologian Hyppolytus believed these words to be the secret of the Mysteries, and according to Proclus, the Neoplatonist scholar of the 5th century AD, the following words were spoken during the Mysteries: “... they gazed up to the heaven and cried aloud ‘rain,’ they gazed down upon the earth and cried ‘conceive.’“ The words may well have been a part of the Mysteries, but they could in no way have been the essence of the ceremony. To have revealed the secret on the gate of the Dipylon would have been a sacrilege punishable by death.

I sit on a bench among pieces of ancient walls, walkways, marble statues, with the Acropolis far in the distance. The sun tries, successfully at times, to break through the cloud cover. I like the homey maple-treed atmosphere, golden leaves falling about me and scattering on the pebbled ground. To my right stands a giant cypress, its trunk enveloped in a deep-green bushy bonnet. Between trees, I see stone steps, walls, monuments, buildings, all old ruins of a time the initiates of the Mysteries walked through here on their way to Eleusis.

This is as far as I plan to walk. Tomorrow morning I’ll pickup the Sacred Way by catching the bus to traverse the twenty kilometers to Eleusis along the freeway.

After the call from Danielle telling me Cynthia was not in Highland, I had nowhere to turn. Since I had read Cynthia’s letters, I knew a great deal about her private life during the past year and yet had no idea where she was. I went back to work the next morning still embroiled in the mystery of her disappearance. I knew she hadn’t been kidnapped and wasn’t on drugs, but still had no idea why she ran off two months before she was to graduate. Was she hitching with truckers? Why didn’t she call? Was she alive?

I still regretted leaving her years before, and all my guilt surfaced. Why did I believe it would be best for her to stay with her mother in Phoenix? She needed her father, needed more than a weekend telephone relationship with him. I had sacrificed her for my career. I wanted to be optimistic but could not override the growing realization she was dead.

Work was a bubbling cauldron. We were in final systems testing prior to shipping the spacecraft to Kennedy Space Center. Grumman, who was building additional hardware for us, was also ready to deliver. I made a quick trip to their Long Island, New York facility to observe crucial last-minute testing. I remember sitting in Kennedy International Airport awaiting my return flight while writing a quick postcard to Danielle as I heard the call to board. Little did I realize, I had spent the last few days in the neighborhood of the answer to all my concerns.

5 Dec, Sunday

In the early morning, I walk north of the Akropolis to Plateia Eletherias, a couple of blocks northeast of the Dipylon, the ancient gate through the city wall, to catch a bus to Eleusis. I feel closed off this morning, old and irritable. The low angle of the fall sun makes for long shadows and, together with the dinginess of the sidewalks and streets, adds to the greasy look. I sit up front next to the bus driver. The murmur of voices settles into the soft swish of the bus along the asphalt.

The Mysteries were the most important religious rites practiced in antiquity. The ancients believed the existence of Greece depended on them and that they held the entire human race together.[15] Eleusis seems like the focal point of my journey, as though it has been one long circular pilgrimage to Eleusis.

The word “mystery” comes from the ancient Greek “musthrion,” meaning a religious truth known only by revelation and never fully understood. Though it originally applied to the many mysteries practiced throughout ancient Greece, and particularly the Greater Mysteries at Eleusis, the word also came to describe Christian sacraments. In the same way the Mysteries were the reenactment of Demeter’s search for her daughter, the life of Jesus is a mystery now reenacted in the Christian sacraments which symbolize the spiritual path to everlasting life.

The Mysteries were not about big egos, power and glory. To its credit, Eleusis did not participate in the Trojan War.[16] But they were about death. The Mysteries were very old, originating in Crete, and may have even come to Crete from Egypt. They are closely connected with the worship of Isis.[17] Crete and particularly Knossos, during 14th century BC, fell under the influence of mainland Greece, the Mycenaeans. King Minos ruled Crete and Theseus ruled Athens. During this time, most likely, the Mysteries came from Crete to Eleusis. Perhaps the descent of Theseus into the Labyrinth to kill the Minotaur and Persephone’s descent into the Underworld are symbolically related.

The initiates’ procession to Eleusis was the start of the reenactment of Demeter’s search for Persephone after she was abducted. They left Athens at the Eleusinian at the foot of the Akropolis, walked through the Agora, as I did yesterday, along the Sacred Way to the Dipylon, where they exited the city walls. A statue of torch-bearing Iakchos, the alter ego of Dionysus,[18] led the throng, the procession chanting “Iakchos! Iakchos!” When they came to the bridge over the Kephisos river just outside Athens, a group of men and prostitutes disguised in masks were waiting to ridicule the procession, make obscene gestures, and shout insults and obscenities, all as a part of the ritual.

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is the “libretto” to Demeter’s “opera” at Eleusis. According to the Hymn, which was written in the 7th century BC, after Persephone disappeared Demeter wandered aimlessly without food for nine days trying to find her daughter. Then she went to see the sun god Helios who she heard had witnessed Persephone’s disappearance. Helios told her that Hades had abducted Persephone with the approval of her father, Zeus. Demeter was enraged at Zeus and withdrew from the assembly of Olympian gods. She was grief stricken and assumed the form of a rag-clothed crone, dressed in a veil and dark robe, and wandered the land of mortals until she came to Eleusis where she sat near the Maiden’s Well.

Demeter was still at the well grieving when the four daughter’s of King Keleos found her. Not realizing she was a goddess, they complained of the tough life imposed on mortals by the gods.  

“...what the gods send us, we mortals

bear perforce, although we suffer;

for they are much stronger than we.”[19]  

Impressed by Demeter’s demeanor, the daughters took her home with them to meet their mother, Metaneira, who also complained of our lot in life.  

                   “... we mortals bear perforce  
what the gods send us, though we be grieved;
for a yoke is set upon our necks.”[20]  

Demeter, as if in response to all this complaining, agreed to raise Metaneira’s child, Demophoon, and while carrying out her duties, decided to make him immortal. She anointed him with ambrosia and buried him in the glowing coals of the hearth to burn away his mortality, a more intense form of the “fires of life” complained about by Metaniera and her daughters. But one night Metaniera spied on Demeter, caught her with Demophoon in the fire and shrieked in fear. Demeter jerked the child from the hearth and admonished all mortals as ignorant and incurably foolish. Then she revealed herself as a goddess and requested they build a temple where she would introduce her rites, the Mysteries. Perhaps this request of the goddess points to the secret of the Mysteries: the revelation of the “fires of life,” the purification process leading to immortality. She was telling the citizens of Eleusis not to fret. Life’s tribulations and suffering have a purpose. They are the path to everlasting life.

I’m reminded of Job in the Old Testament, the good man who suffered at the hands of God for no reason, and also of a quote from Jeremiah:  

Is not my word like as a fire?  
saith the Lord; and like a hammer
that breaketh the rock in pieces?[21]  

Perhaps this also casts a new light on the plight suffered by Oedipus, who had unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. The gods had subjected him to the “fires of life” we all must experience before we find our way into the afterlife.

When the procession of initiates from Athens finally reached Eleusis that evening, the women danced around the Maiden’s Well and sang through the night. The following day, the initiates rested until evening when they witnessed the epiphany of the Mysteries.

As the bus approaches Eleusis, off to the south I see the glistening waters of the bay and the island of Salamis which, except for the narrow straits on each side, blocks it from the rest of the Aegean. In antiquity, the island sheltered Eleusis from sudden attack by pirates or a hostile fleet, and provided a quiet harbor for commerce.[22] Eleusis was annexed by Athens because of its strategic location just off the road between Attica and the Peloponnese and the lone road north through the mountains to Thebes.[23]

Elefsina, today’s little industrial town surrounding the ruins of Eleusis, has an oil refinery, cement factory and shipyard which form the ugly metal skyline along with a forest of TV antennas protruding from roofs of artless, square buildings. The perennial dust cloud, for which the site is famous, has been settled by a recent shower. I crossed the outskirts of Eleusis six weeks ago when I drove to the Cleft Way where Oedipus killed Laios.

The Sacred Way provides entrance to the archeological site as it did 2500 years ago, ending at a marble-paved courtyard before the entrance. Two large gates, called the Great and Lesser Propylaia, provided entry to the sacred complex. Chariots could drive through the Great Propylaia but were turned back by the smaller more limiting gate. It’s a sprawling site, larger than I expected and a jumble of paved pathways, exposed floors and tumbled blocks of stone and marble. I also see remains of the ancient walls that enclosed the sanctuary. Standing above it all, a hill blocks my view of the Bay of Eleusis. Occupation of the hill, where King Keleos’ palace stood, stretched back to the 3rd millennium BC.

Since all the buildings have been destroyed and the Mysteries abandoned for fifteen hundred years, I’ll be able to go anywhere I choose, but such was not the case in antiquity. Anyone who entered the sanctuary surreptitiously did so under the threat of death. Two young men, who attended the ceremony “by mistake” and gave themselves away by asking questions, were executed.

I follow the Sacred Way through the scant remains of the two gates. Off to the right is the foundation of a wall which blocked the initiates view of one of the most sacred locations at the site, a cave which was the entrance to the Underworld. This is where Persephone was abducted and where she later reappeared. The collapsed cave is now a shallow recess in the side of the mountain. The Mirthless Rock, where Demeter sat in mourning after learning her daughter had been abducted by Hades, is just in front of the cave. The initiates viewed Demeter there, wailing out her sorrow.

After Demeter learned Hades had kidnapped Persephone, she remained apart from the Olympian gods, went into mourning and refused to allow anything to grow on Earth. She would have destroyed the human race if Zeus had not intervened. He sent golden-winged Iris, female messenger of the gods, the angel, to request Demeter return to Olympus. But dark-cloaked Demeter refused, even when all the other gods and goddesses went to Demeter offering beautiful gifts. Here we see who really contains power in the world, the cloak finally removed to expose the primal essence of the gods, and it’s Demeter, a manifestation of Gaia, the Earth goddess. Demeter no longer allowed anything to grow upon the earth, and all things including mankind would have died.

Finally, Zeus relented, sending Hermes, guide of souls in the Underworld, to tell Hades, ruler of the dearly departed, to release Persephone. This Hades readily agreed to do but asked Persephone to eat one pomegranate seed before she returned to the light. She did so and thus ensured her return to the Underworld for four months of every year, becoming not only goddess of the earth but also Mistress of the Underworld.

I walk to the temple of Demeter, the Telesterion, a large paved rectangular area where the initiation ceremony took place. 

Inside the Telesterion, a forest of columns supported the upper floor, none of which remain. Around the periphery of the Telesterion, stone steps with a seating capacity of three thousand lined the rectangular building. The steps still exist for the most part. The southern edge protruded into the side of the mountain. In the center of the Telesterion was the Anaktoron, the Holiest of Holies.

The Anaktoron was a small rectangular structure with only one doorway where the throne of the head priest, the Hierophant, stood. This is where the real mystery, the epiphany, was presented to the initiates. Throughout the centuries, the shape of the Anaktoron and its location never changed even though the Telesterion, which housed it, had been enlarged many times to accommodate the increasing number of initiates as the sacred sanctuary gained in popularity throughout the Mediterranean.

The intriguing debate continues among scholars as to what actually took place at the Anaktoron. We do know the epiphany was a viewing, not a verbal message. Until the viewing, the initiates were blindfolded, to possibly simulate blindness, and led about in the dark. As the sacred ceremony approached the epiphany, the initiates were permitted to view the Sacred Objects that the priests had taken to Athens and returned with the procession. Perhaps they were artifacts passed down generation to generation from Mycenaean times.[24] One of them may have been a golden ear of grain. Then the Hierophant sounded a gong summoning Persephone from the Underworld as the throng of initiates, sometimes numbering in the thousands, filed into the Telesterion. Suddenly the Anaktoron was bathed in a blinding light.

Mylonas quotes a passage from Stobaios which describes the journey of the soul just before death which he relates to the experience of the initiates to the Mysteries:  

The soul has the same experience as those who are being initiated into great mysteries ... at first one wanders and wearily hurries to and fro, and journeys with suspicion through the dark as one uninitiated: then come all the terrors before the final initiation, shuddering, trembling, sweating, amazement: then one is struck with a marvelous light ...[25]  

No initiate ever told what he witnessed, but several eyewitnesses on the outside of the sanctuary reported seeing intense flashes of light. One such account, as reported by Herodotus,[26] occurred during war, after all of Attica had been evacuated and Eleusis deserted. During the battle of Salamis in 480 BC, the Athenian exile Dicaeus heard a divine voice and saw a dust cloud caused by 30,000 invisible initiates. Since all of Attica was evacuated at the time, he believed the initiates were ghosts. This event occurred on the eve of the sea battle which resulted in disaster for the invading Persian forces.

Other witnesses report a nativity scene, Persephone having given birth to a Divine Child while bathed in intense light. The Hierophant officiated at the throne of the Anaktoron “under the great fire.”[27] Fire births are not unusual in Greek mythology, as evidenced by Apollo rescuing the infant Asklepios from the funeral pyre of his mother at Epidaurus, and the birth of Dionysus when Zeus killed Semele with a lightning bolt then rescued the divine child from the burning corpse.

It’s not difficult to conclude that the Divine Child of the epiphany at Eleusis was born in fire, as Demeter had tried to make Demophoon immortal by putting him in the hearth. Also the sacrificial pig who represented the initiate was cooked prior to being eaten. Archeologists have found fire marks on the terrace dating back to Mycenaean times. The initiates stood dumbfounded as Persephone, goddess of Death, gave birth in an eruption of fire so severe it was visible for miles around.

In a similar ancient story recorded in the 2nd century AD,[28] the birth of Jesus occurred in a cave and was accompanied by a great silence where no wind blew, streams ceased to flow and time stopped.  

The child himself [Jesus], like the sun, shone bright, beautiful, and was most delightful to see, because he alone appeared as peace, soothing the whole world. In that hour, when he was born, the voice of many invisible beings in one voice proclaimed “Amen.” And the light, when it was born, multiplied, and it obscured the light of the sun itself by its shining rays.[29]  

I walk back through the entryway to the Telesterion, but go off to the left up a flight of stone steps ascending the hill to a terrace where a temple of Persephone once stood, proceed on up the mountain to an even higher terrace where a small chapel now stands, the Chapel of the Virgin Mary. 

The presence of this modest structure overlooking the entire site is no coincidence. The cult of Demeter and Persephone survives for local residents as belief in the Holy Virgin, a startling revelation providing insight into the reason Christianity was absorbed so quickly into Greece when even most Jews wouldn’t accept it. I climb to the top of the mountain, the view opening to a vast expanse containing the Bay of Eleusis and the large island of Salamis, four kilometers away.

A line of red and white fishing boats stretches along its northern shore. It’s almost noon, yet the sun is low on the horizon, its rays warm on my face.

If the Zeus religion, didn’t epitomize what we know now as divine love and forgiveness, the Mysteries at Eleusis did. They were the remnants of the Earth goddess religion. The origin of Demeter’s name is ambiguous. In the ancient Greek version of her name, Dhmhthr, the prefix, Dh, meant either earth or corn, and mhthr meant mother. So her name meant either “earth-mother” or “corn-mother,”[30] and she was viewed as one of the many manifestations of Gaia, the Earth goddess. Her spirit gave birth to the Neolithic Age, the discovery of crop cultivation that ushered in agriculture. Demeter gave grain to one of the Kings of Eleusis, Triptolemus, and taught him how to sow the seed. This was the beginning of agriculture right here in the fields about Eleusis. Her daughter, Persephone, was a ghostly presence representing both death and resurrection. Persephone was so feared, her name could not be spoken in public. Those who attended the initiation were comforted and given hope in the afterlife.

The belief in the afterlife goes back to the dawn of man, before the coming of the Cro-Magnon’s to Europe.[31] The Orphics, possibly the most ancient of Greek religions, and later the Pythagoreans believed the soul is trapped in the human body, that the body is a prison. The Mysteries were a demonstration of the liberation of the soul. In the afterlife, those who had witnessed the Mysteries, a baptism of sorts, went to the Elysian Fields with the gods. The meaning of the Mysteries in the 5th century BC is revealed in a fragment of a Pindar poem:

Blessed is he who hath seen these things before he goeth beneath the hollow earth; for he understandeth the end of mortal life, and the beginning of a new life given of god.[32]

Socrates describes the epiphany of the Mysteries as he witnessed it:  

... then were we all initiated into that mystery which is rightly accounted blessed beyond all others; whole and unblemished were we that did celebrate it, untouched by the evils that awaited us in days to come; whole and unblemished likewise, free from all alloy, steadfast and blissful were the spectacles on which we gazed in the moment of final revelation; pure was the light that shone around us, and pure were we, without taint of that prison house which now we are encompassed withal, and call a body, fast bound therein as an oyster in its shell.[33]  

The ancient Greeks believed that Socrates’ oyster, the seed of our immortal soul, must be nurtured during this lifetime for it to be reborn in the next. During the ceremony, the initiates were shown a barley ear, which symbolically represented the seed, the divine part of the initiate which became the divine child in the afterlife. Planting was equated with impregnation.[34] The planting of the seed, a burial in the Underworld, resulting in new life, a rebirth as a divine child in the Elysian Fields. Persephone was the silent goddess of Death, goddess of the Underworld and also the gateway to the afterlife. Part of the revelation at Eleusis was that Demeter and Persephone were one,[35] the same goddess, and thus constituted the bridge from mortality to immortality. Christianity then replace the mother/daughter myth with the Father/Son myth, Jesus being the bridge to eternal life.

Viewed in this way, a woman’s body is a mystery, an earthly metaphor of Demeter and Persephone, and therefore sacred. Demeter’s search for Persephone is the search for self just as Oedipus’ search for the murderer of his father was a search for himself.

Who was the Divine Child born to Persephone in this flash of fire at Eleusis? He was Iakchos, whose name the initiates had shouted during the procession to Eleusis. Iakchos was the alter ego of Dionysus, the twice-born god who had mated with his own mother to give birth to himself. He was the god of indestructible life, born in blinding light, wrapped in an animal pelt. Dionysus signified that we are our own fathers. Our lives are a fathering process for the immortal child we will become.

All these elements are also present in the legend of Oedipus, the twice-born man who was the “son” of Dionysus. I now realize that the story of Oedipus is closely related to the myth of the Earth goddess, of Demeter and Persephone. It’s the male side of the story, the confrontation with the father and of doubling back on our lives to begat ourselves. Sophocles knew this. His last play, Oedipus at Colonus, written just before his death at the age of ninety, was set at a site sacred to the Earth goddess and Demeter. It was about Oedipus’ death and rebirth into the afterlife. My next stop is the setting of that play, Colonus, in northern Athens.

I leave the hill, walk back down the slope, through the ruins, along the Sacred Way to the bus stop. I stand in the shade of a tree and wait, looking back at the sacred archaeological site. Nothing lasts forever, and this was true of the Mysteries also. After holding the world together for two thousand years, the Mysteries faded as Christianity gained favor in Greece. The temple of Eleusis was officially ordered closed and the rituals prohibited in 392 AD by the Roman emperor Theodosios I.[36]

While waiting for the bus, I think about Oedipus, who experienced a severe form of this “purification by fire,” having unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Oedipus, as a grumpy Job,[37] could no more have prevented his fate than he could have prevented his own birth. I know I couldn’t have prevented what happened between me and my father, my own brush with disaster, nor my marriage to a woman much like my mother. We all survived the events, and they opened up my life in ways that led to accomplishments beyond my own dreams. But my life has disintegrated in the last few years, and that disintegration seems to have been also built into the very fabric of those events. So was the disappearance of my daughter.

After all my attempts to find Cynthia came to naught, my world collapsed. I had lived alone since I moved to San Diego, and Cynthia’s disappearance left me with a consuming grief. I was listless at work and unengaged, found myself staring at the walls even when confronted with astronaut safety issues. I was lethargic, my gloomy apartment stacked to the ceiling with the accumulating debris of my life.

Two weeks after she disappeared, I received an evening telephone call from her mother, my ex-wife. The initial sound of her voice sent an Arctic chill through me. But then I heard her say, “Cyndi called. She’s okay and has a job.”

I couldn’t talk. I simply fell against the wall and cried.

Cynthia had called Sue, the girl who last saw her before she left Phoenix. We still didn’t know where she was living. A few of days later, I called another of her friends, and learned she had also talked to Cynthia. She didn’t know where Cynthia was either but had a telephone number for the pay phone on the street outside where she worked. The area code was 212, New York City.

Just as Iphigenia had reappeared at the edge of the Black Sea, the edge of the known world to the ancient Greeks, and Persephone had returned from the Underworld, Cynthia had reappeared at the edge of the continent three thousand miles away.

My daughter’s disappearance was a death of sorts, as was Persephone’s descent into the Underworld. And I still have dreams of my daughter dying, as if her death actually occurred. And in a sense she did die. The ritual of Iphigenia at Aulis, where girls left a lock of hair, signified the death of the maiden and her rebirth as a young woman. When my daughter resurfaced, she was no longer a little girl, but she wasn’t married. Her nature was more closely related to that of Artemis, the virgin goddess of all things wild.

During the weeks of this journey, I’ve developed a theory of why my daughter’s disappearance affected me so when her mother was relatively unaffected. My confrontation with my father resulted in a death of sorts, the death of the life I was living. The path I had chosen for myself, one of literature and philosophy, abruptly changed. I joined the Air Force and became a man of war, as suggested by my Athena-like mother. When my daughter was born, she resurrected this softer side of myself, and her disappearance felt as if I had lost myself again, as if I had died. My search for her was a search for self as had been Demeter’s search for Persephone.

A bonding occurred between my daughter and while she was still a baby when her mother became ill and was hospitalized for three months. I had just started a new Air Force assignment in Oklahoma City and was not performing well. We provided support for the B-52’s flying missions over North Vietnam. I was still unsure how I felt about the war and strongly disagreed with the mass killings caused by bombing the North. Providing support for the planes which were causing so much death and destruction bothered me. Uncertainty filled my life, and I felt as though I was under siege from all directions. It was me and my kids against the world.

My wife’s lengthy stay in the hospital left me listless and grief stricken. Her health was very bad, and I wondered if she would ever return. During that time, I took care of our kids, our five year old son and two year old daughter. I cooked all our meals, washed the clothes, the diapers, and dressed them in the mornings before I went to work, dropped them off at the baby sitter, read them bedtime stories in the evening. Our hardship forged a close bond between us. For a while, I was their mother and father, and the way I related to them then, I’ve never lost.

Back in Athens, I walk north to Omonia Square, the center of the modern city. Streets spread out from the traffic circle in all directions, all of them clogged with frantic vehicles. The refugees from Bosnia have made this part of Athens unsafe and my guide books suggest keeping a tight hold on packs and avoiding talking to anyone. I run into the largest mass of people I’ve ever seen, an open-air flea market. Vendors line both sides of the street selling secondhand junk, antiques, carpets, shirts, jewelry, cartons of motor oil, oil filters, apples, oranges, big bunches of bananas, chestnuts, ties, scarves, pants, belts. Hordes of people fill the streets, all dark haired, olive-skinned Greeks, the machine-gun Greek filling the air with a cloud of conversation punctuated by shouts, questions, demands, orders, imperatives and exclamations. Traffic tries to creep down the center of this jammed street, trucks, taxies, the perennial motorbike. All in conflict, all trying to negotiate a path through the crowded world.

At first I think the flea market is localized to one block, but as I push and shove my way through the crowd, I look south and see an ant trail of people all the way to the Acropolis looming far in the distance. I follow the street through the swarm to Plaka where I turn aside when I reached Adrianon Street and return to my hotel.

Before sleep, I lie in bed complaining to myself about the mosquito bites I received six weeks ago in Corinth. The bites still haven’t healed. I have scabs, knots under the skin, and they itch. Is this a lifetime affliction?

Tomorrow I’ll try to find Colonus where Oedipus met his mysterious death.