On a more positive note: (1) thank you again to all the men who have the brains to stay at home and whine, and (2) at least I don’t have the flu?
Erratum: "CBS Sunday Morning", not "CBS This Morning."
Eleusinian Mysteries 2012
Given the time of the year, I went back to studying the Eleusinian Mysteries. I’ve discovered a few things: first thing is that a few of the present day crop of secretive societies, the Masons, the Rosicrucians to name two, and I’m sure there are more, have made it a point to study the Mysteries, so many of the papers and books written on them are often aligned with those types of societies, presumably because all of these societies want to align their initiation ceremonies with other ceremonies: "Pythagorean, Hermetic, Samothracian, Eleusinian, Drusian, Druidical" – list is from Dudley Wright in his Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites, a Freemasonry paper-turned-book.
As Freemasonry admits only men - while the Mysteries were open to men, women, slaves and freeborn alike as long as they spoke Greek - if Freemasonry draws from the Eleusinian Mysteries (or, as they claim, inspired them, although there is no proof anywhere of that), there was one heck of a patriarchal perversion somewhere along the line, to the point where they lost all contact and respectability.
As for some of the others, I don’t know enough about them, to support their supposed connections or not. There is a Pythagorean Society (created 1945, Plymouth England), and every math club in every high school on the planet called itself "The Pythagorean Society", after the original. The Samothracian Mysteries venerated mysterious deities called the Kabiri. The Drusian seemed to be connected with both Lebanon and China. The Druids are ... well, the Druids.
Magick
The second thing is a bit harder to pin down, but it seems to be that no one believes in magick anymore. Or is it terror, experienced by our present day crop of christian-Americans (to distinguish our home-grown nutballs from some of the saner varieties in other countries) or science inspired students, when something happens that they cannot explain biblically or rationally? In those cases, one has to reduce the 2,000+ year old Sacred Mysteries to drug-induced mindlessness, rather than admit that both their christian heroes and gods of science destroyed something so irrevocably precious and real? Even the new age twinkies got in on the act:
"The human intellect is not capable of comprehending the god-force directly."
Ventimiglia, Mark, The Wiccan Rede, p. 6.
Says who? Has anyone ever tried? Who made the attempt? When? Under what circumstances? I really dislike these blanket, sweeping statements, that authors hit you with, out of nowhere. And we, the readers, are all supposed to sit here, nod like bubble-heads on dashboards and intone, "*Duh*, okeydokey," without even questioning it. I mean, did the author try, and fail to "comprehend the god-force"? A mere 520 years ago, most people thought that "human beings would fall off the side of the earth if they sailed west", and look where I got deposited!
On the other hand, here’s a contradictory version of that:
"Once, when my mind had become intent on the things-which-are, and my innermost mind/understanding [nous] was raised to a great height, while my bodily senses were withdrawn as in sleep, when men are weighed down by too much food or by the fatigue of the body, it seemed that someone immensely great of infinite dimensions happened to call my name and said to me:
What do you wish to hear and behold, and having beheld, what do you wish to learn and know?"
The Corpus Hermeticum, "Poimandres to Hermes Trismegistus", Book 1, Salaman, Van Oyen, Wharton and Mahé, translators, p. 17
"Someone immensely great of infinite dimensions" seems a perfect a description of the "god force" to me. So we have a first hand account of an encounter with the god-force from a time before Moses and not only having absolutely no problem doing it, but having the same god-force offering to answer any questions he might have!, and a guy from 2003 stating unequivocally that no one can even comprehend this god-force – and without any explanation as to how he came by that rather startling irrefutable announcement.
So which version are we going to go with? Sorry, Mark – I’m going with Hermes on this one.
Still, what is disturbing about these sorts of exposés on what was supposedly the REAL mystery behind Eleusis is a complete failure of any of these people to understand basic magick – the force of the will. It never occurs to them that when participants reported witnessing Demeter ... that those people might have, in fact, witnessed Demeter ... simply because of the force of their will. Many of those same poo-poo’ers would be the first to believe in, say, the shroud of Turin, or the appearance of a woman who looked nothing like Jesus’s Jewish mother could possibly have looked and yet claimed to be her, at Lourdes, or any number of christian miracles, but turn up their noses at Eleusinian ones. No, they say, it had to be drugs.
For example, this is the second time I’ve read The Road to Eleusis, but it appears they’ve done more research on the Kykeon, moving away from an ergot concoction to possibly a fasting and ergot or shroom combination. Also, I don’t recall reading about Socrates’ "impiety" – which is why he was handed hemlock to drink - being in reference to holding drug-addled "Mysteries" parties in his home for high-born Athenians using a stolen recipe for the sacred drink. Where did that come from?
(Mayan mushroom figurines, 1000 BC through 500 AD, Guatemala)
Of interest is the comparison between the use of mushrooms by (possibly) both the Greeks and the Mexicans. Damien used one of their paths: the fast. Used by both the Greeks and the Meso Americans. The Greeks, according to the authors, mixed barley water with mint as a base; the Mexicans used a chocolate drink.
In both Greece and Mexico both eggs and alcohol are taboo, the alcohol for 4 days. In both cases, the ceremonies were "guided" by shamans or skilled practitioners. Twinkies who stomped all over the Mexican forests and offended every native they encountered were considered to have corrupted the sacred purpose of the mushroom. R. Gordon Wasson, one of the authors of Road to Eleusis, was said to have promised the shaman he learned from, that he would never reveal her secrets. As soon as he crossed the Mexican border, he did just that. He sold her "children" – as she called her sacred mushrooms - to a pharmaceutical chemist to be torn apart, examined and eyeballed. He is getting richer by the day from books like Road to Eleusis; she died in poverty.
But I happened upon someone who had the same reaction to the "Eleusinian Mysteries initiates were drugged" explanation as I did. I absolutely loved this:
The initiates were purified. They fasted. They walked in a very long procession to the site from Athens, along the way singing and engaging in ritualized acts like the bawdy jokes. They danced where Demeter once sat. They spoke sacred formulae. They were led together in a series of rituals older than they could even comprehend, on sacred ground, in a place where the veil between this world and the underworld was thin. They had a good deal of psychological investment and religious faith in the process. They built up anticipation and expectation.
And of course, the gods were there. They set up the Mysteries in the first place, and it was a revelation of the gods’ power that formed the climax of the ritual. Now, most scholars don’t believe in the gods, and so this isn’t a factor they can take into consideration, but it’s certainly something we need to remember.
This was from the "Forest Door". Loved the blog so much I subscribed to it. The author, Dver, "is a spirit-worker on the margins of Hellenic polytheism, with ties to English, Germanic and Slavic folk traditions as well. A priestess of Dionysos, and also devoted to Hermes, Apollon, Persephone, Hekate, and a host of personal and local spirits, her main practices include oracular trance, pathwalking, bone-working, and devotional worship. Dver resides in the lush, green, nymph-haunted Pacific Northwest."
URL to the Eleusinian Mysteries opinion: http://forestdoor.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/ergot-and-eleusis/?shared=email&msg=fail
URL to the blog: http://forestdoor.wordpress.com
Check it out.
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