Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

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.

The miraculously lifelike statues for which Greece is famous emerged from the Mystery schools. Their original function was to help bring the gods to earth.

We know from the earlier use of statues in Egypt and Sumeria that it was intended that the gods occupy them, live in them as their physical bodies and make them come alive. If you stood in front of the statue of Artemis in Ephesus, the Mother Earth loomed over you like a great tree. You had a sensation of being absorbed into the vegetable matrix of the cosmos, the great ocean of weaving waves of light, and of being at one with it.

The statues would breath, seem to move. It was said that sometimes they would speak to you.

After various trials the successful candidate was allowed to ascend to the Empyrean realm, a place flooded with light, music and dancing. Dionysus — Bacchus or Iacchos — appeared in a beautiful, radiant vision of light. Aristedes, the orator, recalled: ‘I thought I felt the god draw near and I touched him, I was somewhere between waking and sleeping. My spirit was so light — in a way someone who hasn’t been initiated wouldn’t understand. ’ By this lightness of spirit, he is referring to an out-of-body experience. It also seems clear that the gods sometimes occupied ethereal, vegetable bodies in the Mysteries and so appeared like luminous spectres or phantoms.

So the process of initiation gave direct, existential, undeniable first-hand knowledge that the spirit could live outside the body, and while in this state the candidate became a spirit among spirits, a god among gods. When the new initiate was ‘born again’ into the everyday material world, when he was crowned as an initiate he retained many god-like powers of perception and abilities to influence events.

The experience of initiation was, therefore, a mystical one. However, as we have seen in the case of Pythagoras, practical and even scientific knowledge was shown to be implicit in this experience, too. After initiation the hierophant would elucidate what the new initiate had just experienced, drawing arcane disclosures from a book made of two stone tablets, called the Book of Interpretation. They taught the way the material world and the material, human body had been formed and the way both were directed by the spirit worlds. To help them in their teaching they also used symbols. These included the thyrsus made of a reed, sometimes with seven knots and topped with a pine cone. There were also the ‘toys of Dionysus’ — a golden serpent, a phallus, an egg and a spinning top that made the sound ‘Om’. Cicero would write that when you come to understand them, the occult mysteries have more to do with natural science than with religion.