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Some extracts from the book The Road To Eleusis
by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P.
Ruck
in which the TELESTERION is mentioned. I scanned and OCR'ed this copy from the Rare Books Room at Penn State
Universities Pattee Library. The graphics in the illustrations pages are from the book,
and may be unique to the net.
[ Illustrations 1 ] [ Illustrations 2 ] [ Illustrations 3 ]
I take full responsibility for any intellectual
property issues arising from publishing this material.
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A woman herbalist cares for
a bed of Phalloi, an image related to the Eleusinian Mysteries. |
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THE ROAD TO
ELEUSIS
Unveiling the Secret of the
Mysteries
R. Gordon Wasson
Albert Hofmann
Carl A. P. Ruck
A HELEN AND KURT WOLFF BOOK
HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, INC.
Persephone's
Quest : Entheogens and the Origins of Religion by R. Gordon Wasson, et al
(Paperback - August 1992)
Our Price: $18.00 / Average Customer Review: 
The Road To
Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries by R. Gordon Wasson, et al
(Hardcover - March 1999)
Our Price: $50.00 / Average Customer Review: 
Persephone's
Quest : Entheogens and the Origins of Religion by R. Gordon Wasson, et al
(Hardcover - June 1988)
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Forward
So much has been written about the Eleusinian
Mysteries and for so long a time that a word is needed to justify this presentation of
three papers dealing with them. For close to 2,000 years the Mystery was performed every
year (except one) for carefully screened initiates in our month of September. Everyone
speaking the Creek language was free to present himself, except only those who had the
unexpiated blood of a murdered man on their hands. The initiates lived through the night
in the telesterion of Eleusis, under the leadership of the two hierophantic families,
the Eumolpids and the Kerykes, and they would come away all wonderstruck by what they had
lived through: according to some, they were never the same as before. The testimony about
that night of awe-inspiring experience is unanimous and Sophocles speaks for the initiates
when he says:
Thrice happy are those of mortals, who having seen those rites
depart for Hades; for to them alone is granted to have a true life there. For the rest,
all there is evil.
Yet up to now no one has known what justifies utterances such as
this, and there are many like it. Here lies for us the mystery of the Eleusinian
Mysteries. To this mystery we three have applied ourselves and believe we have found the
solution, close to 2,000 years after the last performance of the rite and some 4,000 years
since the first.
The first three chapters of this book were read by the respective
authors as papers before the Second International Conference on Hallucinogenic Mushrooms
held on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, on Friday, 28 October 1977.
R. G. W.
====
Each year new candidates for initiation would walk that Sacred Road,
people of all classes, emperors and prostitutes, slaves and freemen, an annual celebration
that was to last for upwards of a millennium and a half until the pagan religion finally
succumbed to the intense hatred and rivalry of a newer sect, the recently legitimized
Christians in the fourth century of our era. The only requirement, beyond a knowledge of
the Greek language, was the price of the sacrificial pig and the fees of the various
priests and guides, a little more than a month's wages, plus the expense of the stay in
Athens.
Every step of the way recalled some aspect of an ancient myth that
told how the Earth Mother, the goddess Demeter, had lost her only daughter, the maiden
Persephone, abducted as she gathered flowers by her bridegroom, who was Hades or the lord
of death. The pilgrims called upon Iakchos as they walked. It was he who was thought to
lead them on their way: through him, they would summon back the queen Persephone into the
realm of the living. When at last they arrived at Eleusis, they danced far into the night
beside the well where originally the mother had mourned for her lost Persephone. As they
danced in honor of those sacred two goddesses and of their mysterious consort Dionysus,
the god of inebriants, the stars and the moon and the daughters of Ocean would seem to
join in their exultation. Then they passed through the gates of the fortress walls, beyond
which, shielded from profane view, was enacted the great Mystery of Eleusis.
It was called a mystery because no one, under pain of death, could
reveal what happened within the sanctuary. My colleagues and I, working from hints in
numerous sources, have ventured to go beyond that forbidden gate.
Ancient writers unanimously indicate that something
was seen in the great telesterion or initiation hall within the sanctuary. To say SO much was not
prohibited. The experience was a vision whereby the pilgrim became someone who saw, an
epoptes. The hall, however, as can now be reconstructed from archaeological remains, was
totally unsuited for theatrical performances; nor do the epigraphically extant account
books for the sanctuary record any expenditures for actors or stage apparatus. What was
witnessed there was no play by actors, but phasmata, ghostly apparitions, in particular,
the spirit of Persephone herself, returned from the dead with her new-born son, conceived
in the land of death. The Greeks were sophisticated about drama and it is highly unlikely
that they could have been duped by some kind of theatrical trick, especially since it is
people as intelligent as the poet Pindar and the tragedian Sophocles who have testified to
the overwhelming value of what was seen at Eleusis.
There were physical symptoms, moreover, that accompanied the vision:
fear and a trembling in the limbs, vertigo, nausea, and a cold sweat. Then there came the
vision, a sight amidst an aura of brilliant light that suddenly flickered through the
darkened chamber. Eyes had never before seen the like, and apart from the formal
prohibition against telling of what had happened, the experience itself was
incommunicable, for there are no words adequate to the task. Even a poet could only say
that he had seen the beginning and the end of life and known that they were one, something
given by god. The division between earth and sky melted into a pillar of light.
These are the symptomatic reactions not to a drama or ceremony, but
to a mystical vision; and since the sight could be offered to thousands of initiates each
year dependably upon schedule, it seems obvious that an hallucinogen must have induced it.
We are confirmed in this conclusion by two further observations: a special potion, as we
know, was drunk prior to the visual experience; and secondly, a notorious scandal was
uncovered in the classical age, when it was discovered that numerous aristocratic
Athenians had begun celebrating the Mystery at home with groups of drunken guests at
dinner parties.
===
The secrecy in the ancient Greek world about the
Eleusinian Mysteries was somewhat different. The laws of Athens made it a crime to speak
about what went on at Eleusis in the telesterion. Toward the end of the Homeric hymn to Demeter, this silence is expressly
enjoined on all initiates. In B. C. 415 there was a spate of deliberate profanations of
the Mysteries by the jet set in Athens and a crackdown followed, harsh penalties being
inflicted. But the secrecy ran far beyond the reach of the laws of Athens. That secrecy
ruled everywhere in the Greek world and was never seriously violated. It too was
self-enforcing. Those who knew the Superior hallucinogens through personal experience were
not inclined to discuss with outsiders what was revealed to them: words could not convey
to strangers the wonders of that night and there would always be the danger that the
effort to explain would be met with incredulity, with the scoffing and mockery that would
seem to the initiate sacrilegious, would wound him in the very core of his being. One who
has known the ineffable is loath to embark on explanations: words are useless.
===
Yet archaeologists have not found the holy, ta hiera, at Eleusis,
although they did actually expect that they would; and in the absence of any excavated
object, scholars have been free to fantasize whatever they wanted these mysterious hiera
to be: relics, according to some, from the Mycenaean past or phallic symbols or perhaps
the kteis, the so-called pudenda muliebria. These holy things were supposedly stored in a
small building or free-standing chamber within the initiation hall; at the moment of the
revelation, the hierophant opened a door on it and in the midst of a great light showed ta
hiera.1
This indeed he must have done, but few initiates
could have seen him, for the telesterion or initiation hall, as it now appears from archaeological excavation, was not a
theater and was in other ways completely unsuitable for displaying the liierophant's
activity. The building was rebuilt and enlarged at various times to accommodate the
increasing numbers of initiates, but in all the modifications, an essential design was
maintained: the telesteriosi was a rectilinear building built around a much smaller
rectangular chamber, the anaktoron or 'lord's dwelling.' In the later telesterion, at least, the roof
above this anaktoron was constructed as a 'lantern,' admitting the only light from outside
and affording ventilation for torches and fires. The topographical position of the
rntaktoron was kept virtually constant throughout the reconstructions, built always on the
site of the most ancient Mycenaean original. Its relative placement within the telesterion,
however, varied from period to period. On one of its sides, the anaktoron had a door,
beside which was the high-backed and roofed throne of the hierophant, affording him
protection from the great fire within the anaktoron. The interior perimeter of the telesterion
consisted of several steps leading up to the wall. Here the initiates presumably would sit
or stand, with others perhaps also on the main floor of the hall. The line of view
obviously was obstructed from many angles. With the forest of columns that supported the
roof, and the high back on the hierophant's throne, and the sacred chamber itself all
blocking the view, many candidates within the hall would have found it impossible to see
what the hierophant did at the moment of the 'vision.'
The hiera, moreover, seem to have been remarkably transportable, for
although they ordinarily resided within the chamber and were let out of the sanctuary for
processions only hidden in closed hampers, Alcibiades was able to show them profanely to a
group of friends at his house in Athens.1 Although the profanation was a great scandal, no
one ever thought of accusing the priesthood of complicity in allowing the Itiera out of
the sanctuary. Actually, were it not that all our sources insist upon a vision at Eleusis,
Greek scholars would have had no difficulty in recognizing that the hiera need not have
referred to specific objects, but to the whole realm of the holy, the experience and the
ceremony of religion.
===
Thus the hierophant began the drinking; the
initiates then followed his example, waiting, as they listened to his chanting in the
darkened telesterion, for the moment of revelation - a vision unmistakably induced by what had been
drunk, for it was accompanied by such symptoms of the drug experience as a cold sweating
and a sense of vertigo.2 The meaning of that experience had been rehearsed by months of
rituals. At Eleusis the final indoctrination had involved the manipulation of the sacred
objects enclosed in the kistai, the sealed hampers of the Mystery that had come with them
along the Sacred Way to Eleusis. Here too we glimpse a symbolism like that of the array of
objects in the cups of the kernos, testifying to a complex structuring of the botanic and
animate realms that would result from the performance of the Mystery: for these kistai, we
are told, contained sacred cakes of different shapes and meanings, balls of salt,
pomegranates poppies, fig branches, a serpent, the thyrsos, characteristic objects from
the differing lives of the male and the female, and the mystic emblems of the maenadic
Dionysus and of Themis, the goddess who ratified her divine approval of the world that
would come into being.3 These ritual actions, the so-called drornena of the initiation,
had been accompanied by recited words, the legomena. All these things were secret, and
what we learn of them from late sources comes from people who did not understand, or did
not care to bother with, their meaning.
===
[ Illustrations 1 ] [ Illustrations 2 ] [ Illustrations 3 ]
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