The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

catechumens, bidding all those depart who were impure of body, hand or soul. Then came a time of purification, including a ritual bathing in the sea. On the roth the procession set out, bearing the image of the ‘fair young god’. There was a ceremonial reviling of the participants at the bridge over the torrent Cephissus. At Eleusis came a religious revel under the stars, then the torchlight procession to the Hall of the Mysteries, past the fissure through which Persophone had been carried into the domain of Hades. We know that only those who had passed a preparatory test in earlier years were admitted to the final rites, and that part of these rites consisted in showing a blade of corn and in touching certain sacred objects, with regard to which a formula has been recorded:

I have fasted, I have drunk the potion, I have taken (something) from the chest, and after acting laid it in the basket, then taken it out and (put it) in the chest again.

But what were the sacred object or objects and what experience did they evoke: A measure of our present ignorance is to be found in the contradictory opinions of two learned writers in the Eranos essays on the Mysteries (1955). One writer—Walter Wilitakes it for granted that the core of the Mystery was the touching of an effigy of a womb!: another—Walter F. Otto—(more convincingly) states that there is no evidence for any such assumption, and indeed that practically all the available evidence. is against it.?

It is true that archaeology has cleared away some former theories. There can have been no sacred drama at Eleusis in the ordinary Greek sense, because there was no theatre where a drama could be performed. But it has found nothing to explain what many writers have described as the culmination of the initiation—the experience of Light. Thus Aristides (530-467 B.c.) wrote: “I was between waking and sleeping, my spirit was all light, so that no man who is not initiated can comprehend it.” If the secret of the Mysteries was well guarded, it is no doubt largely because the central experience could not be put into words. Kerenyi, the very sensitive and profound writer on Greek Mythology and Mysteries, suggests that there were two stages in the experience of initiation, The first when it was arreton—

1The Mysteries, Pantheon Books, p- 82. 2 Ibid, p. 23.

2