Homeric Hymn to Demeter

The longest of the Homeric Hymns tells the abduction of Persephone by Hades, Demeter's search, her withdrawal from Olympus, and the compromise by which her daughter spends part of each year below. Read as myth it explains the seasons. Read as what it actually is, it is something more specific: an account of the founding of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The hymn brings Demeter, disguised as an old woman, to Eleusis, has her received by the daughters of Keleos, sit in grief, refuse wine and ask for a mixed drink of barley and pennyroyal, nurse the king's son and attempt to make him immortal in the fire, be interrupted, reveal herself, and demand a temple. At the end she teaches the rites to the Eleusinian nobles. The kykeon, the fasting, the sitting on a stool, the ritual joking of Iambe: these are elements of the initiation, embedded in narrative.

That makes the hymn the single most important literary source for a cult that ran for something like a thousand years and about which the participants were forbidden to speak. Initiates included Athenians of every class, and slaves and women were admitted. Disclosure was a capital matter, Alcibiades was prosecuted for profaning the Mysteries.

What the hymn does not do is describe the culminating vision. It says that whoever has seen these things is blessed, and that the uninitiated has no share in such things after death, and it stops. The secret held.

The composition is usually placed in the seventh century BCE. The ascription to Homer is ancient and wrong.

Because the hymn stops where it does, the content of the culminating rite is unknown, and the vacuum has been filled repeatedly.

What can be said from the hymn and from scattered later sources is procedural: a procession from Athens to Eleusis along the Sacred Way, a fast, the drinking of the kykeon, entry into the Telesterion, and something seen. Christian writers of late antiquity, hostile witnesses writing centuries later and with an interest in making the rites sound absurd or obscene, supply the most detailed claims, an ear of grain displayed in silence, a sacred marriage, a birth announced. Hippolytus and Clement of Alexandria are the sources for these, and they are not neutral.

The best-known modern hypothesis is that the kykeon contained an ergot-derived psychoactive compound, argued in a 1978 book by Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck. It is an attractive suggestion, it has been influential well outside classics, and it rests on inference about what could have been in barley rather than on any evidence about what was. Classicists have generally not accepted it. It should be described as a hypothesis with distinguished proponents and no direct support.

More recent archaeological and residue work has been claimed as support and has been contested in turn.

The safest statement is the one the hymn makes: something was shown, it was held to change the initiate's relation to death, and the participants kept quiet about it for a millennium. That is an unusual outcome and it is the most interesting fact about the cult.