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Updated: June 25, 2025
Nor would Philip be attending the mysterious solemnities of any of the fraternities. He had witnessed them often enough with his friend Diodoros, who never missed the procession to Eleusis, because, as he declared, the mysteries of Demeter alone could assure a man of the immortality of the soul.
But in sight of Eleusis, freemasonry sinks into insignificance. For, of all races, the Grecian was the most mysterious; and, of all Grecian mysteries, the Eleusinia were the mysteries par excellence. They must certainly have meant something to Greece, something more than can ever be adequately known to us.
They rode one day to Eleusis; on another day to Tatoi, buried in oak-woods on the slope of Parnes; on another through noisy and mongrel Piraeus, and over undulating wrinkled ground, burnt up by the sun and covered with low scrub and bushes of myrtle, to the shore of the gulf opposite to Salamis; on yet another to Marathon, where they lunched on the famous mound beneath which the bodies of the Athenians who fell in the battle were buried.
His sturdy legs had good reason to be as weary as his tongue, which had known no rest for five hours. But he caught sight of the large vehicle drawn by four horses, in which the vast corn-measure, the kalathos, which Serapis wore as his distinguishing head-gear, had been conveyed to Eleusis.
All Eleusis was made rich with corn, while no rain fell and no crops grew on the rest of the earth; and though first Iris and then all the gods came to beg Ceres to relent, she would grant nothing unless she had her daughter back. So Jupiter sent Mercury to bring Proserpine home; but she was only to be allowed to stay on earth on condition that she had eaten nothing while in the under world.
Could he have urged such a plea, had it not been known he was uninitiated? Could he have known the teachings, had he not been instructed in a school where they were known? He, then, was an initiate of the Pythagoreans, the new Theosophical Movement upon the new method; not of Orthodox Eleusis, that had grown old and comatose rather, and had ceased to count.
Thus even if we set aside the absence of a parallel between the ritual of the Greek Mysteries and the mise-en-scene of the Grail stories, Eleusis would be unable to offer us those essential elements which would have rendered possible a translation of the incidents of those stories into terms of high Christian symbolism.
Poor Ceres did not know what had become of her darling, and wandered up and down the world seeking for her, tasting no food or drink, till at last, quite spent, she was taken in as a poor woman by Celeus, king of Eleusis, and became nurse to his infant child Triptolemus.
An unhealed scar marred his forehead—Lycon’s handiwork; but who thought of that, when above the scar pressed the wreath of wild parsley? As the two processions met, a cheer went up that shook the red rock of Eleusis. The champion answered with his frankest smile; only his eyes seemed questioning, seeking some one who was not there. “Io!
Both here, and still more markedly in the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, we regularly find the most lovely of all goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, habitually I will not say represented by, but dangerously associated with, a sacred Sow. The third feast, the Anthesteria, belongs in classical times to the Olympian Dionysus, and is said to be the oldest of his feasts.
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