An Enchanted Earth of Mysteries
Western Mysticism from Ancient Greece to the 21st century
The Sacred Mysteries, also called mystery religions, mystery cults, and various forms of magic, are remnants of an immensely ancient nature-based religious tradition we know little about. It is generally accepted that the Greco-Roman Mysteries were informed by archaic, Proto-Indo-European religious practices which were embedded in both civic and secret religious and magical rites. These very ancient rituals reflect characteristics of prior animism, chthonic Indo-European polytheism, and continue even today in the folk magic of Europe. These mysteries provide us with a radically different way of looking at Western cultural traditions, norms, and values, and they give us a fresh view of our relationship with nature and spirituality.
The word “mystery” comes to us from Greek through Latin, but the word used within this context may be much older, coming to Greek from the now extinct Indo-European Hittite language of archaic Anatolia.[1] What we know of Greco-Roman rites in general comes largely from epigraphical and other artistic evidence, along with references in works of ancient authors.
Not only were the Sacred Mysteries to be kept secret by their respective initiates, many rituals of civic religion were secret, and were thus called “Mysteries” (from the Greek, mý “to shut”, cf. Hittite. munnaezi : “to hide, conceal”).[2] This practice was adopted, in part, by Christianity, which still refers to the “Mysteries” in both a sacramental and mystical way.
In this essay, we look at which of the archaic, classical, and modern threads of Western religion fall within the scope of these Sacred Mysteries. Among the paths which had their roots in archaic natural religion are various types of folk magic, the Dionysian mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, and Orphism, which would later absorb many Dionysiac cults. Greco-Roman mystery schools were also founded based on the foreign cults of Phyrgian Kybele (Magna Mater), Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Persia, and Thracian Sabazios. It is important to note that all of these cults, with the exception of Egyptian Isis, are descendants of Proto-Indo-European or Indo-Iranian religious traditions dating back in some cases more than 10,000 years.
Given their shared heritage, the Greco-Roman mystery cults have a number of common features, the first and most important of which is the initiation of its adherents. Some cults had one initiation after a period of learning and discernment, others had levels of initiation.
Before we get into further details about these various mystery cults, let us begin at the beginning:
“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. And she brought forth long Hills, graceful haunts of the goddess-Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bare also the fruitless deep with his raging swell, Pontus, without sweet union of love.”[3]
The great-grandmother of all Western traditions is natural religion. We can see in this passage taken from Hesiod’s Theogony that everything has emanated from Chaos, and Earth gave birth to “starry Heaven”, which is Ouranos. Yes, that’s right—Earth gave birth to the heavens, not the other way around. Hesiod’s cosmology is based on a chthonic[4] set of religious ideas, based on what my late friend Jake Stratton-Kent wrote was “built up from below; the result of observation of and interaction with the visible world, including perceived supernatural or numinous forces.”[5] In this archaic religious context, mortals primarily looked into the Earth to find a connection to the divine, not upward. The cult of the Great Mother, Kybele is one example. The Great Mother of the Mountain; worshiped in caves and mountain niches, mother of the gods, healer, creator of the Dactyls, the first metallurgists and magicians.
Another example of looking into the Earth to experience the divine were the Eleusinian Mysteries outside Athens, whose rites took place in the darkness of the Telesterion, but whose core myth of Persephone is focused on the nearby Plutonian Cave of Eleusis. Still more chthonic examples include the oracles at Delphi and the Sybils in the Cumae and Baiae caves of southern Italy. These very ancient sources of divination all share the archaic perspective of chthonic, or natural religion. There was no perceived separation between the earthly and the divine. There was no emphasis on celestial beings outside of the Sun, Moon, and stars as part of the natural world. The initiate was one with Reality in every sense.
The myths of the great poets tend to whitewash both the profoundly ancient Indo-European magical tradition, and the Dionysian, Eleusinian, Orphic, and other mystery schools of classical antiquity. To try to scrape some of that classical whitewash off of these cults, we need to look at the literary, artistic and other archaeological evidence on one hand, and the existing traditions which hold a kernel of those original chthonic mysteries on the other.
We cannot delve into all the many nuances and outright differences between the various myths and mystery cults of Greece and Rome here, but we can take a brief look at the terrain.
The Eleusinian Mysteries focused on rites which centered on the re-birth of Persephone, the coming of spring, and the eternal flow of life from generation to generation, and season to season. Eleusis also promised the initiate a good afterlife, but only after partaking in a series of rites and experiences—not beliefs–but actions to make way for the perception of the Reality before and within them. These acts included dromena (things done), a dramatic reenactment of the Demeter/Persephone myth; deiknumena (things shown), displayed sacred objects, in which the hierophant played an essential role; legomena (things said), commentaries that accompanied the deiknumena.[6]
The Dionysian cult is likely one of the oldest among the Western mystery schools, and it varied in form and substance from region to region and era to era. Very little is known about the secret rites of the Bacchae in the archaic and early classical periods because, like most mystery religions, it was forbidden for initiates to speak or write of what transpired during the Sacred Mysteries. Between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, and then into the Common Era, we know that at least some of the Dionysian rites were transformed by Orphism, yet another mystery religion. Here, we have the literary evidence from Heraclitus, Herodotus, Hipponion, Euripides, Plato, and Clement of Alexandria. Epigraphical evidence of Dionysiac Orphism has been found at Cumae, and Torre Nova in Italy, and at various locations in Greece, the Balkans, and Anatolia. At the height of the Hellenistic period, the Bacchic cult was present from the Scythian peoples of the east, to Colchis (now Georgia on the Black Sea), to Crete, Sicily and southern Italy, and in Near East and North Africa.
Orphism may have transformed the Bacchic rites from being transient in nature, toward an initiation which would make an indelible mark on the initiate’s spiritual destiny through the internalization of the rite of the death and resurrection of Dionysos.[7]
The efficacy of the Dionysian mysteries would echo for centuries through European thought, even to the Renaissance, when Pico Della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino praised the Bacchic approach to the divine through a negation of the intellect.[8]
“The spirit of the god Dionysos was believed by the ancient theologians and Platonists, to be the ecstasy and abandon of disencumbered minds, when partly by innate love, partly at the instigation of the god, they transgress the natural limits of intelligence and are miraculously transformed into the beloved god himself…”[9]
It is interesting to note that Marsilio Ficino took it upon himself to write this praise for Dionysian mysteries in his introduction to The Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite.[10] Sometimes referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius, this Christian mystic’s very first paragraph boldly places his theology in the field of the mysteries:
“Guide us to that topmost height of mystic lore which exceedeth light and more than unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories which exceed all beauty!”[11]
The subsequent list of Christian mystics with similar mystical approaches is long, including the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers, John Cassian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, the Cathars, Gioacchino da Fiore, Francis and Claire of Assisi, Bonaventure, and the list goes on.
We can see that chthonic qualities which we used to describe the Sacred Mysteries are very much present in the West from the earliest archaic cultures, straight through the Christian mystics of Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern periods. But apart from the other mystery cults such as that of Mithras and Sabazios, there is one other Western path to the ineffable which is practiced by rites and other acts and disciplines, and that is magic. As it turns out, magic is the only mystery cult which has survived the conversion of Europe to Christianity.
Unlike today, during the archaic and classical periods, magic was as common as water. For the Greeks, this was originally called goêteia, Latinized “goetia”. The words “magos” and “magaeia”, from whence we derive our English word “magic”, were introduced from a Persian loan word dating to the 6th century BCE.[12] The practitioner was known as a “goês.” According to the Phoronis of Apollonios of Rhodes, the goês were given their craft by the Idaean Dactyls, three (originally 10, one for each finger of Kybele/Rhea, their mother) brother daimones. These three Dactyls represent substance (iron), potency (hammer), and agency (anvil), and among other things, they were the mythical teachers of Orpheus after whom Orphism is named.
“As the first goês captured in literature, they perfectly reflect the seemingly key characteristics of the entire related craft; rather than referring to a particular practice, tool, or function, they seem to indicate a daimonic state of being, or better yet, a state of spiritual emergence.”[13]
In this sense, we can see that the practices of the goêtes form the basis of another path to the Sacred Mysteries. This is not simply superstition or belief, but a very real discipline which uses physical rites and incantations to become one with Reality, thereby harnessing that Reality. One might argue that such effective magic is no longer practiced, but that would be a rather myopic omission of very real practices. Examples from Italian Stregoneria and Benedicaria, to New World Santeria and Vodou, abound. Yet another example, which is actually rooted in Hellenistic polytheism, can be found in Bulgaria–ancient Thrace.
As Dr. Georgi Mishev[14] wrote in his Thracian Magic:
“Healers and magicians in Bulgarian folk notion are carriers of the magical and similar in its character knowledge, connected with the imposition of personal will and turning the forces of Nature in accordance with it, but perceived as different images.”
Dr. Mishev provides several in depth ethnographic examples of Balkan magical practices and ideas, including the sacred cave of St. Marina (aka, Fiery Marina), where healing rites are performed to this day.
“The ritual practice connected with Fiery Marina bears a clearly expressed chthonic nature…The Saint herself is considered as a mistress of snakes, and as sacrifice a number of bloodless offerings are given to her like bread, flowers, coins, but a male lamb is offered too, for which there is a requirement that it must be black. All these records bring the folk image of the saint closer to the honour given in antiquity to the great chthonic goddesses like Tauric Virgin, Artemis (in her local hypostases as Phosphoros, Tauropolos or respectively Diana, Trivia and others, Hekate, Persephone and Bendis). The Fiery Virgin who finds her succession in the image of the Christian saint, has preserved her archaic ritual tradition.”[15]
As we can see through these examples, both ancient and modern, the West has an amazingly complex, if not largely forgotten heritage of earth-based mystery religion in the form of mysticism and folk magic. We Westerners do not generally think of our own cultural landscape in terms of enchanted groves and sacred caves containing the secrets of the cosmos, but it is clear that there is plenty of precedent for us to follow.
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[1] Puhvel, Jaan. The Hittite Etymological Dictionary. Walter de Gruyter, 1984, p. 188–192.
[2] Matasović, Ranko (2018). "A Reader in Comparative Indo-European Religion" (PDF). University of Zagreb, 2018, p. 48.
[3] Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica. Translated by Evelyn-White, H G. Loeb Classical Library Volume 57. London: William Heinemann, 1914, p. 116.
[4] In Greek mythology, the name Chthonius /ˈθoʊniəs/ or Chthonios (Greek: Χθόνιος, [kʰtʰó.ni. os], "of the earth or underworld") “Chthonic” is the adjective to describe things of the earth.
[5] Jake. Stratton-Kent. Geosophia:The Argo of Magic, Bibliotheque Rouge, 2010, Introduction ix.
[6] Brisson, Luc and Tihanyi, Catherine. How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology. University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 60.
[7] Jimenez San Cristobal, Ana. “The Meaning of βάκχος and βακχεύειν in Orphism” In Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia, edited by Giovanni Casadio and Patricia A. Johnston, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
[8] Ficino, Marsilio. Opera, p. 1793.
[9] Ibid. Ficino, p. 1793
[10] Wind. Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance: New Haven, Yale University Press, 1958.
[11] Dionysius the Areopagite. On the Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, trans. C.E. Rolt, Berwick, ME: Ibis Press, 2004, p. 191
[12] Frater Acher and José Gabriel Alegría Sabogal. Clavis Goêtica: West Yorkshire, England, Hadean Press, 2021, p. 13.
[13] Ibid, Frater Acher: 2021, p. 23
[14] Georgi Mishev, PhD, is a Bulgarian author and researcher in ancient culture and religion of the Mediterranean world and especially in magic practices, rituals and ancient relics in the folklore of the Balkan people.
[15] Mishev, Georgi. Thracian Magic: London, Avalonia, 2012, p. 215
(Photo 1: Demeter, enthroned and extending her hand in a benediction toward the kneeling Metaneira, who offers the triune wheat that is a recurring symbol of the mysteries (Varrese Painter, red-figure hydria, c. 340 BCE, from Puglia, Italy.)
(Photo 2: The cave-sanctuary of Pluto [Hades], god of the Underworld, who abducted Persephone. Situated to the west of the Small Propylaea at Eleusis. Photo by Carole Raddato)
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