Volta
ReligionHeld by the 7th century BC (Homeric Hymn to Demeter) — closed c. AD 392

The Eleusinian Mysteries

Also called: Mysteries of Eleusis, Eleusinia

For more than a thousand years, secret rites in honour of Demeter and Persephone were held at the sanctuary of Eleusis north-west of Athens. Initiates swore never to reveal what they had seen, and the heart of the rite is still unknown.

The Great Eleusinian Relief — Demeter (left) gives the boy Triptolemus ears of grain as Persephone blesses him; 5th century BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens
The Great Eleusinian Relief — Demeter (left) gives the boy Triptolemus ears of grain as Persephone blesses him; 5th century BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens

Yair-haklai · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

The Eleusinian Mysteries were secret rites of Demeter, goddess of grain, and her daughter Persephone (Kore). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, of about the 7th century BC, already tells how Demeter taught her rites at Eleusis, so the Mysteries existed by then at the latest. A Mycenaean building found beneath the sanctuary has led some scholars to trace them back to the Bronze Age, but the evidence is slight. The Telesterion, the great hall where initiates gathered, was rebuilt on a larger scale in the 6th century BC and again under Pericles in the 5th.

Each autumn, in the Attic month of Boedromion, the Greater Mysteries began with a procession of initiates along the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis, some 20 km away. Men and women, slaves and foreigners could be initiated as long as they spoke Greek; the Roman emperors Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius were initiates. Initiates drank the kykeon, made from barley and mint; the claim that it contained a hallucinogen remains unproven.

The secret was kept to the end, so what was shown and said inside the Telesterion is unknown. The Mysteries were closed around 392 under Theodosius I, who made Christianity the state religion, and according to the historian Eunapius the Visigoth Alaric plundered the sanctuary in 396.

Show on the map

The map in 650 BC

Open the full map

OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap contributors

States at the time
Greek city-states
Places
Eleusis

1 part of this event

  1. 650 BCHades and PersephoneLegend

    A Greek myth told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. When Hades, god of the underworld, carried off Demeter’s daughter Persephone, Demeter searched for her and, staying at Eleusis, kept the grain from growing. In the end Persephone was to spend part of each year in the underworld.

Before and after

Earlier
700 BC Hesiod Composes the Theogony
Later
594 BC Athenian Democracy: the Reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes

Themes that include this event

  • The Olympian Gods800 BC – 432 BC

    From Chaos and Gaia to the War of the Titans, the reign of Zeus, Prometheus and Pandora — the gods of Greek myth in story order, alongside Hesiod’s Theogony and the real sanctuaries where the myths lived: Eleusis, Delphi, the Parthenon and Olympia