Eleusinian Mysteries

Hereditary priestly families: the EUMOLPIDAE (supplying the Hierophant, chief revealer) and the KERYKES (supplying the Dadouchos, torch-bearer, and the Hierokeryx, sacred herald). A Priestess of Demeter co-officiated.

Demeter, goddess of grain, and her daughter Persephone (Kore), abducted by Hades. The myth of descent and seasonal return was enacted to promise initiates a better lot after death. Central to it was the KYKEON, a barley-and-pennyroyal drink. WASSON, HOFMANN AND RUCK argued in The Road to Eleusis (1978) that it carried ergot alkaloids from Claviceps purpurea growing on the barley sacred to Demeter. AN EARLIER VERSION OF THIS FILE SAID THIS WAS 'WIDELY SUSPECTED BY MODERN SCHOLARS'. THAT OVERSTATED IT: OPINION IS DIVIDED, between those who accept the hypothesis and those who reject it outright. The standing objections are that NO ERGOT REMAINS HAVE BEEN FOUND IN THE ELEUSIS VESSELS (proponents answer that no authorised systematic search has ever been made) and that NO CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT has ever reconstructed the drink. Recent work cuts the other way: ergopeptides can be chemically converted to psychoactive compounds by reaction in lye, a process available in antiquity; and excavation at MAS CASTELLAR DE PONTOS, near a Greek colony and cereal port, recovered ergot fragments both inside a ceremonial vessel AND IN THE DENTAL CALCULUS OF A 25-YEAR-OLD MAN — direct evidence of consumption, though not at Eleusis itself. What was revealed inside the Telesterion is genuinely unknown — the secret held for roughly two thousand years, on pain of death.

Hierophant; Dadouchos; Hierokeryx; Priestess of Demeter; the mystai (first-year initiates) and epoptai (those who have seen, second degree). Known initiates: Pisistratus, Pericles, Sophocles, Cicero, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius.

Legally abolished, then physically destroyed.

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Secrecy enforced by death penalty, yet open to any Greek speaker including women and slaves — which is why it is a mystery cult and not a coercive one.

A NOTE ON ERGOT, BECAUSE THIS FILE ARGUES ABOUT IT IN TWO PLACES AND THEY ARE NOT THE SAME ARGUMENT. Entry 165 rejects the ergotism explanation for Salem, and 164 rejects it for the dancing plagues, on the ground of DISTRIBUTION: poison in a food supply strikes house by house and takes whole families, and it does not select teenage girls in scattered households while sparing their parents. THAT OBJECTION DOES NOT APPLY HERE AND MUST NOT BE BORROWED. The Eleusis hypothesis is not accidental mass poisoning; it is DELIBERATE PREPARATION of a single ritual drink, taken once, by people who came for it. The objections to it are different ones — no ergot residue recovered, and no reconstruction that produces a safe psychoactive dose. A READER WHO CARRIED THE SALEM ARGUMENT ACROSS TO ELEUSIS WOULD REACH THE RIGHT SCEPTICISM BY THE WRONG ROUTE.