The problem is that, though there may be times when the best thing to do is to try with all our might and not give up, there are other times, as Orpheus had found to his cost, when it is prudent to give up and go with the flow. Sometimes when you grab at what you want, you just push it further away. Sometimes the only way to keep something is by letting it go. As Lao Tzu says:
THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF PYTHAGORAS, an enormous Persian army under Xerxes swept over Greece. Then, in the early years of the fifth century BC, Persian forces were defeated and driven back by the Athenians at Marathon and then by an Athenian-Spartan alliance at Mycale.
Pythagoras had institutionalized the open discussion of options and the making of collective decisions on matters which concerned the whole community — what we today call politics. From this — and in the space created by the Athenian-Spartan alliance — would emerge the unique character of the Greek city-state of Athens.
14. THE MYSTERIES OF GREECE AND ROME
The Eleusian Mysteries • Socrates and his Daemon • Plato as a Magus • The Divine Identity of Alexander the Great • The Caesars and Cicero • The Rise of the Magi
IF WE SEE IN THE ATHENIANS A GIFT FOR free, individual thought, we see in Sparta the development of individual will, competitive edge and admiration, to the point of hero-worship, of strong men. Heroes created the space for the flowering of Greek culture, which in the fifth century BC began to set standards in beauty of form and rigour of intellect that we have aspired to match ever since.
This was the Greece of the great initiates: the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the poet Pindar and the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides.
The most famous of all the Greek Mystery schools was situated at Eleusis, a hamlet a few miles from Athens. The Roman statesman Cicero, himself an initiate, would say that the Eleusian Mysteries and what flowed from them formed the greatest benefit that Athens gave to the civilized world.
‘ELEUSIS’ COMES FROM ‘ELAUNO’, MEANING ‘I come’, which is to say ‘I come into being’. There is almost nothing left of the sanctuary — just a few scattered stones and a couple of panels from inside have survived — but a contemporary description of it talks of an unmarked exterior wall of grey-blue stone. Inside there were painted statues and friezes of goddesses, sheaves of grain and eight-petalled flowers. One account says there was an aperture in the ceiling of the inner sanctum that provided the only light source.
The Lesser Mysteries were celebrated in the spring. They involved rites of purification and also dramatizations of stories of the gods. A statue of a god crowned with myrtle and carrying a torch was led in procession with singing and dancing. The god was sacrificed and died for three days. When the sacrificed god was represented as being raised from the dead, the assembled hierophants and candidates shouted, ‘Iachos! Iachos! Iachos!’
There was also an overtly sexual element in these celebrations. Psellus, a Byzantine scholar, wrote that Venus was portrayed as rising out of the sea from in between moving representations of female genitalia, and that afterwards the marriage of Persephone and Hades took place. It was recorded by Clement of Alexandria that the rape of Persephone was enacted, and it was also said by Athenagoras that during this bizarre, violent, almost surreal drama, she was portrayed as having a horn on her forehead, perhaps symbolizing the Third Eye.
There were also accounts of ceremonial pouring of milk from a golden vessel in the shape of a breast. On one level this is obviously connected with the worship of the Mother Goddess, but it should alert us to the fact that on a deeper level these ceremonies were concerned with life after death. We know from Pythagoras that the Milky Way was conceived of as a vast river or troop of spirits. The star-like spirits of the dead ascended through the gate of Capricorn and up through the spheres, before descending back into the material world through the gate of Cancer. Pindar said, ‘Happy is he who has seen the Mysteries before being buried beneath the ground, because he knows what happens as life ends.’ Sophocles said, ‘Thrice happy are those who have seen the Mysteries before they die. They will have life after death. Everyone else will only experience suffering.’ Plutarch said that those who die experience for the first time what those who have been initiated have already experienced.
The Greater Mysteries, celebrated on or about the autumn equinox, were preceded by nine days of fasting, after which candidates for initiation were given a potent drink called the kykeon.
Of course extreme hunger can by itself lead to a visionary state, or at least a propensity for hallucinations. After fasting for so long, the candidate drank this mixture of roasted barley, water and poley oil, which can be narcotic if taken in sufficient quantities.
The Mysteries were known to involve people in the most intense experiences, the wildest fears, blackest horrors and raptures. Plutarch wrote of the terror of those about to be initiated, as if they were about to die, and, of course, in a sense they were.
Imagine if you had seen dramatic presentations of terrifying supernatural events in the Lesser Mysteries and now believed these things were going to happen for real, that you were going to take part in a drama in which you would be killed and in some sense really die! The accounts by Proclus suggest candidates were attacked by ‘the rushing forms of troops of earthly demons’. Though it was by this time very difficult for the higher spiritual beings, the gods, to squeeze down into a dense, material realm, it was relatively easy for lesser spirits, such as demons and spirits of the dead. The candidate was to be shamed and punished, tortured by demons. Pausanius in his Description of Greece describes a demon called Euronomos, with blue-black skin like a fly’s, who devoured the flesh of rotting corpses.
Are we to take this as literally true? As mentioned earlier, these initiation ceremonies were part ritual and drama — and part séance. That drugs played a part in conjuring up these demons does not necessarily — from an idealist point of view — mean they were illusory. We should also remember that in rural India perfectly respectable religious ceremonies still take place, the worship of lesser spirits, the Pretas and Bhuts and Pisachas and Gandharvas, ceremonies which we in the West would classify as séances.
The Mystery schools were concerned with granting the candidate an authentic spiritual experience, which in the context of idealistic philosophy means a genuine experience of spirits — first demons and the spirits of the dead, then later the gods.
By the fifth century BC it was, of course, difficult for a god without a material body to affect matter directly, to move a heavy object for example. But the initiate priests could mouth magic words into a cloud of smoke emanating from a sacrificial fire and the face of a god would sometimes appear. Karl von Eckartshausen, the late eighteenth-century theosophist, recorded the most effective fumigations for causing apparitions: hemlock, henbane, saffron, aloe, opium, mandrake, salorum, poppy seed, asafoetida and parsley.