Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries: A “Thin” Description

Abstract

The philosopher Democritus once said: "A life without festivals is like a road without inns" (B 230), but there can be little doubt that among all the Greek festivals it is the Eleusinian Mysteries that most intrigues the modern public. It is the aim of this contribution to take a fresh look at this festival during the height of the Athenian empire, the later fijifth century b.c. Unlike older studies, the most recent detailed analyses, those by Walter Burkert and Robert Parker, have given up on a linear reconstruction of the ritual. 1 Yet there is something unsatisfactory in such an approach, as it prevents us from having a proper view of the course of the ritual and appreciating its logic. 2 Ideally, we should reconstruct a linear "thick description" (to use the famous term of the late Cliffford Geertz [1926-2006]) of the experience of the average initiate, mystês, 3 but we are prevented from doing so by the fact that our main and rather scanty literary information is from Christian authors, who often wanted to defame the ritual, and, in some cases, lived 600-700 hundred years after Athens' heyday. For these