Persephone
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
The
goddess Persephone was abducted by Pluto, lord of the underworld. While
Persephone is picking flowers in a beautiful meadow, the earth suddenly
opened and the gloomy lord of death, riding in a magnificent chariot, grasped
her in his arms. Screaming and struggling, he dragged the goddess to his
subterranean palace, where he forced her to become his Queen. She was trapped
in the underworld because of her ingestion of a pomegranate. Because of
hunger; having eaten of the bitter fruit of death, she becomes partly the
goddess of death. The soul of humanity—often called Psyche, symbolized
by Persephone in the Eleusinian Mysteries—is essentially a spiritual
thing. It’s true home is in the higher worlds, free from the bondage
of material form, truly alive and self expressive.
The human, or physical nature of man, according to this doctrine, is a tomb,
a quagmire, a false and impermanent thing, the source of all sorrow and
suffering. Plato describes the body as the sepulcher of the soul; and by
this he means not only the human form, but also the human nature. The gloom
and depression of the Lesser Mysteries represented the agony of the spiritual
soul unable to express itself because it has accepted the limitations and
illusions of the human environment.
The crux of the Eleusinian argument was that a man was not better or wiser
after death than during life. If he does not rise above ignorance during
his sojourn here, at death a man goes into eternity to wander about forever,
making the same mistakes he made here. If he doesn't outgrow the desire
for material possessions he will be tormented by it in the invisible world
where it is truly impossible to gratify his desire. To the Eleusinian philosophers,
birth into the physical world was death in the fullest sense of the word,
and the only true birth was that of the spiritual soul of man rising out
of the womb of his own fleshly nature.
An ancient initiate once said that the living are ruled by the dead. As
a member of the Eleusinian community this means that the majority of people
are ruled by their senseless animal personalities rather than their genius
spirits. Transmigration and reincarnation were taught in these Mysteries.
The cult believed that at midnight the invisible and visible worlds were
closer together making the passing of souls into our world easier. At this
time the souls would come into human and animal wombs to be reborn again.
Many of the ceremonies were done at midnight due to this belief, the initiates
witnessing the passing to and fro of the dead between the worlds. The mystics
of Eleusis laid a stress on the evils of suicide and homocide. To kill oneself
or another was to kill god, who was hidden within us and in everything on
the ultimate level.
The Greater Mysteries were sacred to Ceres, mother of Persephone, and represent
her wandering through the worlds in search for her abducted daughter. On
ritual wine bowls, in which the hallucinogenic wine of the Mysteries was
poured Ceres, is depicted carrying two torches (intuition and reason) to
help her in her search for her missing soul-child. She eventually found
Persephone and emerged near Eleusi. Out of gratitude, she taught the people
there to cultivate corn and grain, both sacred to her. Ceres established
her Mysteries in full in the area of Eleusis. She showed priests how to
gather grain and corn, which carried ergot, and collect hallucinogenic mushrooms
from the area. The LSD within the ergot and psylocibin in the mushrooms
was added to the wine of the Great Mystery. (This was shown by Gordon Wasson
in Road To Eleusis yr: unknown) The initiate was given what would
amount to a massive dosage of hallucinogenics at different points while
they went through their nine days of initiation.
The nine days of initiation of the Mysteries were symbolic of the nine spheres
through which the human soul descends during the process of assuming a terrestrial
form. The secret exercises for spiritual unfoldment given to disciples are
most likely from Indian Hindu origin via Thrace through Orpheus or his followers.
Thrace was inhabited by many of a mixed African and Indian origin, such
as Orpheus himself, and many elements of Hindu worship are very similar
to those of Greece. It is well known to those in occult circles that the
Eleusinian mysteries ended with the Sanskrit words, "Konx Om Pax,"
which means “light in extension.”
The initiate would be led through different chambers during the nine days
of his initiation, each day drinking the sacred wine and giving the appropriate
offerings. The respective nine chambers become brighter and brighter with
light as he went on. Each room was more brilliantly lit and radiant until
the last day when the initiate, overcome by vision and bliss, would be led
into a great vaulted room in the center of which was a illuminated statue
of Ceres. Here, amidst visions, in the presence of the Hierophant and surrounded
by priests in magnificent robes, he was instructed in the highest of the
secret mysteries of Eleusis. At the conclusion of this ceremony he was hailed
as an Epoptes, which means one who has beheld or seen Ultimate
Reality directly. The Epoptes wouldthen take up his position as
a keeper of the books and scrolls of the mystery. From the record available,
a number of strange and supernatural phenomena accompanied the rituals.
Many initiates would see the gods directly.
Ceres made a deal with Pluto to have Persephone come into the world for
half the year in the summer and return to the underworld during the winter.
The Greeks believed Persephone was a manifestation of the sun's energy.
While in the winter months she lived under the earth with death, but in
the summer she returned as the goddess of fertility and agriculture. It
was said that the flowers of earth loved Persephone and would die in despair
when she had to return to the land of the shades for another winter season.
Thomas Taylor epitomizes the doctrines of the Greater Mysteries in the following
statement: "The Greater Mysteries showed, by mystic and splendid visions,
the felicity of the soul both here and hereafter when purified from the
defilement of a material nature and constantly elevated to the realities
of spiritual vision." Just as the lower mysteries discussed the prenatal
epoch of man when the consciousness in its nine days was descending into
the realm of illusion and assuming the veil of unreality, so the Greater
Mysteries discussed the principles of spiritual regeneration and revealed
to initiates not only the simplest but also the most direct and complete
method of liberating their higher natures from the bondage of material ignorance.
Like Prometheus chained atop Mt. Caucasus, man's higher nature is chained
to his inadequate personality.
The astronomical part of the allegory of the mysterys consists in the diurnal
appearance and disappearance of Lady Persephone. She was a simple marker
for the procession of the equinoxes, but also symbolized a very important
religious tenet that is also found in Orphism, tying death to dreams as
a similar experience in which the soul can leave the body to traverse the
astral planes. The Eleusinians taught astral projection and forms of dream
yoga. The Spiritual principle Persephone, like Osiris in the Books of the
Dead, would be hidden in the underworld during the daytime hours, but would
ascend to the higher worlds during sleeping. The initiate was taught how
to intercede with Pluto, the dark force of gravitation and finality in the
universe and self, to allow the spiritual Persephone, the soul, to ascend
from the darkness of his material nature into the light of understanding.
When thus freed from the shackles of mortality and hardened concept structures,
the initiate was liberated not only for the period of his life, but for
all eternity he went to a superconscious heaven, the Elysinian Fields, rather
than the unconscious darkness of the underworld.
In the Metamorphosis, Apulies describes his initiation into the
Mysteries, "I approached to the confines of Death, and having trod
on the threshold of Prosperine, I returned from it, being carried through
all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining with a splendid light;
and I manifestly drew near to the gods beneath and the gods above and adored
them all..." The Mysteries Of Eleusis and the Gods were venerated by
the great minds of the ancient world. Pindar, Plato, Cicero, Epicetus and
others have spoken of them with great admiration. Strabo tells us in his
histories that the great temple of Eleusis would hold between twenty to
thirty thousand people. These immensely popular Mysteries survived until
400 A.D. when the tyrannical Christian Emperor Theodosis suppressed the
system of initiation.