To Live in Joy and Die With Hope: Experiential Aspects of Ancient Greek Mystery Rites

Abstract

The paper focuses on embodied mystery experiences of initiates in ancient Greek mystery cults. Four main questions are addressed: what kind of experience was considered the core of Greek mystery initiations, how was this experience attained, in what way did it influence the life of the initiates, and what real‐life experience could prompt the idea of mystery initiations. Mystery initiation may be defined as ersatz‐death, a rehearsal of the real one. Modelled as it seems on near‐death experiences, these rites comprised alterations of the initiate's state of consciousness. For trivial events to be remembered by the mystai as revelations, they were brought to a state of heightened sensitivity and perhaps also suggestibility. The knowledge of life and death thus acquired was a holistic and ineffable sensation, rather than a learnt doctrine: in Aristotle's words, the initiates were ‘not to learn anything, but rather to experience and to be inclined’.

A qualitative study of motivations for meditation in anthroposophic practitioners

“…Often initiation rituals have to do with a transition from childhood into adulthood [62]. Central issues are transition and death, but also gaining exclusive knowledge [63]. As Eliade describes it, someone who has gone through an initiation is “endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another [64].…”

The Nineteenth-Century Romance with "Mysteries": Literary Detectives and Historians of Religion

“…Israeli historian Yulia Ustinova has argued that a confrontation with death and a changing attitude to life was at the core of initiation into the Greek cults. 79 She cites Cicero's view of life after initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries (De leg. 2.36) as conferring upon initiates "[t]he unique gifts … [of ] joyful existence, peace of mind, and readiness to accept death".…”