For Plato, Rationalists and Mystics Can Walk the Same Path
By Sam Woodward
19 August
2024
Why Did Such A Keen Proponent Of Reason Turn To
The Eleusinian Mysteries To Explain His Ideas About Knowledge?
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In 392 CE,
the Roman emperor Theodosius I outlawed one of the oldest and most
well-established mystery cults in the Greek-speaking world, the Eleusinian
Mysteries, which had taken place for more than 1,000 years in a sanctuary on
the outskirts of Athens. A devout Christian, Theodosius I’s decree was part of
an effort to stamp out pagan beliefs and cultic mysticism. His empire would not
be one with divination practices, blood sacrifices and secret mystic rites to
Greek gods. And so, the Eleusinian cult dedicated to Demeter and Persephone,
which had drawn countless people from across the ancient Greek-speaking world
since 1500 BCE, ended abruptly. The rites are now long forgotten. But the
Eleusinian Mysteries have endured in other ways.
Ten marble fragments of the Great Eleusinian
Relief (27 BCE–14 CE). Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Though we
do not know exactly what took place at Eleusis, we do know a little about how
the experience felt for initiates. This is how Plutarch, philosopher and priest
of Apollo, described the experience of mystery initiation sometime during the
1st or 2nd century:
First there was wandering and tiresome running about alongside
apprehensive and endless journeys through darkness. Then, before the final stage,
there were all sorts of terrors: shivering, trembling, sweating, and terrible
awe. After that a wondrous light confronted them, and purified landscapes and
meadows received them, with voices and songs and rites of sacred harmonies and
holy visions. In the midst of these the wholly fulfilled and initiated person
has become liberated and free to roam about, celebrating the mysteries with a
crown atop their head and communing with blessed and pure people. They look
back at the impure and uninitiated multitude back on earth, who stampede and
squabble with one another in dense mire and mist, clinging onto their
sufferings because of their fear of death and lack of faith in the good things
the next world holds.1
Participating
in the rites was clearly transformative, which is perhaps why the Mysteries at
Eleusis became so influential. Notable initiates include Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Cicero, and the Roman emperors Hadrian, Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.
Philosophers were drawn to the experience, too. But for one Greek thinker in
particular, the Eleusinian Mysteries were important for more than just
spiritual transformation.
Plato seems
to have understood the ritual experiences at Eleusis as a kind of blueprint for
acquiring higher knowledge, and he used this blueprint in his Allegory of the
Cave to show how people use education and reasoning, not their senses, to find
philosophical truth. This may be surprising. Plato is known as a rational
thinker and, on the surface, his allegory has nothing to do with the ritual
practices of a mystery cult. However, reading more carefully, his story of
philosophical truth begins to echo the initiate’s transformative experience.
And Eleusinian ideas and experiences appear elsewhere in his work. The question
is why a keen proponent of logos (reason) was so interested in the secret rites
at Eleusis. Why did Plato turn to mysticism to explain his ideas about
knowledge?
In the ancient Greek-speaking world, mystery cults for gods and heroes abounded.
Though they were widespread, we know little about them today. Many enforced a
policy of total secrecy, and each was geographically localised, with no
standardised practices or doctrines linking them. The term ‘mystery cult’ only
confuses things further. We call them ‘mystery’ cults not because they remain
obscure to us but because that is how the Greeks referred to them: ‘musteria’
meaning ‘secret rites’. The modern word ‘mystery’ has lost this ritual meaning.
The modern word ‘cult’ is also misleading. The Eleusinian Mysteries were not
fringe spiritual practices. The ‘cult’ permeated religious life, remaining open
to (almost) all people in the Greek-speaking world, including men, women,
children, foreigners, even slaves – anyone could participate if they spoke
Greek and had not committed murder or other serious crimes.
The rites
were profoundly influential and transformative. They not only gave initiates a
way to face death, but also seemed to play a ‘civilising’ role in society. As
Cicero wrote in De Legibus (‘On the Laws’):
Through them we have been tamed from a savage and base way of life and
civilised towards a state of humanity. Just as they are called initiations, so
in truth we have learned [from them] the fundamentals of life and received the
groundwork not only for living with happiness but also for dying with better
hope.2
This is how
Cicero explained the influence of the Mysteries around 58 BCE. He implies that
some radical reformulation of worldview is acquired through Eleusinian
initiation. But what sort of ritual transforms a person’s viewpoint, their fate
in the afterlife, and their society? What exactly happened at Eleusis?
A
transition from darkness to light, from blindness to seeing, seems to have been
central to the ceremony
The
mysteries were broken into two stages. The first stage of initiation, the
‘Lesser Mysteries’, took place annually in February or March. Then an initiate
was ready for the ‘Greater Mysteries’ at Eleusis, the final stage of initiation
in September or October the following year, during the Athenian festival of
Demeter and Persephone. Before the final stage, initiates purified themselves
by fasting and bathing, observing a period of celibacy, and carrying a
sacrificial piglet from Athens to the sea. A ritual procession of hundreds of
initiates then made a journey of some 23 kilometres along the Sacred Way from
Athens to the sanctuary at Eleusis where the final revelation – called the epopteia or epoptika (literally, ‘the
beholding’), took place in a great hall called the Telesterion.
The rites
in the two stages seem to have differed. Writing around the 2nd century CE,
Clement of Alexandria, a theologian who converted to Christianity from
paganism, explains that the Lesser Mysteries comprised ‘teaching and
preparation for things to come’ whereas in the Telesterion ‘there is nothing left to learn, but rather one is to
behold and meditate upon nature and realities’.
The climax
of the Mysteries likely entailed beholding a deity and ritually enacting her
presence, culminating with the epiphanic appearance of Demeter herself. To do
this, the rites may have involved re-enacting a sacred drama depicting
Persephone’s abduction and Demeter’s epiphany (the myth on which the original
ritual was based). A transition from darkness to light, from blindness to
seeing, seems to have been central to the ceremony. Some researchers have
suggested that sacred images were shown among a plethora of torches and dancing
lights. Others suggest that ritualised psychedelics were used to intensify the
experience. Whatever the case, the experience was life-changing: a spiritual
awakening.
Awakenings also appear in the dialogues of
Plato. In his
Socratic dialogue the Symposium (written around 385-370 BCE), the final stage
of the philosopher’s ascent – philosophical truth – is analogous to the intense
revelation at the climax of a mystery ritual. In the Symposium, Plato directly
references the Eleusinian Mysteries through a dialogue between Socrates and a
seer named Diotima. While explaining her philosophy of love, Diotima uses the
words ‘telea’ (referring to the Eleusinian rites) and ‘epoptika’ (the ultimate
revelation or ‘beholding’ at the final stage of initiation) when she questions
whether Socrates could become initiated into the highest mysteries of love and
sex:
Perhaps even you, Socrates, could become an initiate in these mysteries
of love. But when it comes to the ultimate rites [telea] and highest stage of initiation [epoptika] – these being the end goal if someone progresses
correctly – I do not know whether you would be able to do this.3
By
grounding philosophical enlightenment in cultic initiation, Plato suggests that
aspiring philosophers must have a transformative experience akin to the
religious climax of the Eleusinian Mysteries if they seek the highest
philosophical truth(s). In both cases, this experience manifests without
instruction or teaching. It is sudden and epiphanic.
Just as the
mystery initiate seeks a special relationship with the divine, so does the
philosopher seeking the Forms
To
understand why Plato presents the philosophical process this way, we must
understand his Theory of Forms. His theory asserts that, for each identifiable
characteristic in the world – including mathematical properties like largeness
and length, or abstract qualities like beauty, justice and courage – there
exists a corresponding universal principle, a form (which he called an ‘eidos’). For example, the Form of
largeness causes all things we perceive as large to appear large. This
principle defines their largeness. Our senses alone do not explain this
largeness: a wolf appears large when compared with a rat but small when
compared with an elephant. The wolf can never be purely large or small.
Instead, it is always in a state of becoming. True largeness, like any other
Form, is distinct from the material world of becoming. It is an object of
stable knowledge whose nature never changes.
For Plato,
the sensory world is epistemologically fallible. True knowledge lies only with
the Forms, which exist in a realm separate from the material universe and are
accessible only through a person’s intellect, not their senses. This might
explain why Plato often uses the word ‘theios’, meaning ‘divine’, to describe
the Forms. Just as the mystery initiate seeks a special relationship with the
divine, so does the philosopher seeking the Forms.
Plato’s emphasis on knowing and defining, rather than sensing, may appear to
conflict with the importance of direct experience in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
However, his Allegory of the Cave from the Republic, Plato’s Socratic
dialogue written around 375 BCE, suggests otherwise. In the allegory, Socrates
compares human existence to prisoners shackled in a cave, only able to see
shadows cast by firelight onto a wall before them. Having never seen anything
else, the prisoners consider these shadows reality. If one prisoner were
released and looked directly at the fire, they would first experience pain and
confused terror. But through the process of suffering and fear they would come
closer to reality. Their worldview would begin to change. Through this process,
they become a kind of initiate. However, they are yet to experience the final
revelation.
What if,
Socrates continues, the prisoner was then dragged from the cave into the
sunlight? Once again, they would experience pain because they had always lived
in darkness. But eventually they would be able to look at the Sun directly and,
Plato writes, ‘behold what sort of thing it is’. This is the highest stage of
initiation, the epopteia.
As Plato
writes in his long epistle, the Seventh Letter, the highest philosophical
understanding cannot be conveyed through written explanation nor learned like
other subjects. It comes through direct, inner experience: ‘Through unceasing
communion with the matter itself and making it your life’s calling, it is born
in the soul suddenly, like light kindled from a leaping spark, and from there
it sustains itself.’4
In the
Allegory of the Cave, we have a transition from blindness to seeing, from pain
and bewilderment to beholding a sudden, overwhelming light. A total
reconceptualisation of reality confronts the prisoner. Later in the allegory,
there is a description of a philosophical initiate returning to the darkness of
the cave where they see their former inmates, afraid to face reality. This
echoes Plutarch’s description of those uninitiated in the Eleusinian Mysteries
who ‘cling onto their sufferings because of their fear of death and ignorance
of the afterlife’s benefits’.
We may view
Plato as an archetypal rational philosopher, a thinker at odds with the
mysticism of Eleusis. Instead, he saw common ground with the initiate who seeks
an experience beyond the sensory realm. Participants in the Eleusinian
Mysteries sought the divine through mystic ritual; Plato’s philosopher seeks
eternal and ‘divine’ Forms by transcending the shadows of sensory perception.
For Plato, mystery-cult initiates and rational philosophers can walk the same
path.
References
1. Emily
Kearns, Ancient Greek Religion: A Sourcebook (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), based on Plutarch, Moralia, Volume XV: Fragments, trans F H Sandbach,
Loeb Classical Library 429 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969),
modified translation based on the original Greek.
2. M
Tulli Cicero, De Legibus, Liber Secundus, passage 2.36, The Latin Library,
accessed 14 August 2024, my translation based on the original Latin.
3.
Plato, Lysis. Symposium. Phaedrus, ed and trans Christopher Emlyn-Jones and
William Preddy, Loeb Classical Library 166 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2022), my translation based on the original Greek.
4.
Plato, Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles, trans R G Bury, Loeb
Classical Library 234 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929),
translation modified for clarity based on the original Greek.
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Sam Woodward has a BA and MPhil in Classics
from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is a DPhil (PhD) candidate in
Classical Languages and Literature focusing on the relationship between
sexuality and philosophy in the dialogues of Plato at the University of Oxford,
UK.
Edited by Cameron Allan McKean
Source: For Plato Rationalists and Mystics Can Walk the Same Path
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