Eleusinian Mysteries The celebrations in honour of goddess Demeter|Myth| Eleusina

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In antiquity, Eleusina was mainly known for the Great Mysteries, as the Eleusinian Mysteries were also called, the most famous secret religious rite of the ancient Greece. According the tradition, it was a nine – day festival which taking place in the shrine of Demeter and Persephone each September and it lasted from the Mycenaean time period (15th -13th century B.C.). In antiquity a festival was a period of holy days, sacred time, intended to please the gods and strengthen links between mortals and immortals. The celebration takes a PanHellenic character while many more pilgrims visit Eleusina from all over Greece. Its core was the myth of Persephone’s abduction and the initiates, probably through a symbolic reenactment of the “death” and “rebirth” of Persephone and other sequence of steps, claimed a better life after death. What, exactly this mystic ritual was, no one knows. Because of its secret character, the participants are forced not to reveal the form of this holy celebration. However, we do know that after all the pilgrims were relieved from the fear of death.

The myth and the rites are absolutely intertwined. According to the Homeric Hymn, Demeter, the goddess of fertility and harvest had an only daughter named Persephone who had been carried off and by some accounts, raped, by Hades the lord of Underworld. She was searching everywhere for Persephone for nine days until she finally came to Eleusina during the reign of King Celeus. There, disguised as an old woman, not to reveal her divinity, she presents herself to king’s family as nurturer for Damophon, the son of Celeus. The goddess, grateful for the hospitality, tried to make the baby immortal with ambrosia and secretly at night held him over the flames of the fire.

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