The Eleusinian Mysteries

The Eleusinian Mysteries, held each year at Eleusis, Greece, fourteen miles northwest of Athens, were so important to the Greeks that, until the arrival of the Romans, The Sacred Way (the road from Athens to Eleusis) was the only road not a goat path in all of central Greece. The mysteries celebrated the story of Demeter and Persephone but, as the initiated were sworn to secrecy on pain of death as to the details of the ritual, we do not know what form this celebration took.

Virtually every important writer in antiquity, anyone who was `anyone’, was an initiate of the Mysteries. Plato, an initiate himself (as Socrates was before him) mentions the Mysteries specifically in his famous dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the Phaedo, ” our mysteries had a very real meaning: he that has been purified and initiated shall dwell with the gods.” Plutarch, writing to his wife on the death of their daughter, says, “because of those sacred and faithful promises given in the mysteries…we hold it firmly for an undoubted truth that our soul is incorruptible and immortal. Let us behave ourselves accordingly.”

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