The Feminine Trinity
How the Mysteries of Eleusis Shaped Christianity
Death and rebirth are central themes of Christianity, both in its mythology—the story of Jesus is about coming back from the dead—and in its actual history. Christianity resurrected dead and dying older traditions and carried them forward into the Middle Ages and beyond.
Three major examples—all readily allegorized by death and rebirth—are debt forgiveness, astronomical cycles, and ego death. These are the three main layers of Christian source material.
The experience of ego death feels precisely like a personal death and rebirth. That’s why existing religions in the Mediterranean Basin held god-eating ceremonies with psychedelic compounds like ergot to induce ego death, preceding the bread and the wine of the Christian Eucharist by thousands of years. The experience of ego death and rebirth found a perfect allegory in ancient stories of resurrected gods.
The Myth of Demeter
The Hymn to Demeter is a Homeric poem from classical Greece. It’s a myth about three goddesses: Demeter, her virginal daughter Persephone, and the torch-bearing old woman Hecate. The story is a mythological allegory for the annual agricultural growing seasons. Demeter was the goddess of agriculture, specifically cereal grains. The Roman version of this goddess was Ceres, from whom we derive the word cereal.
The growing seasons were said to be caused by a despondent Demeter forgetting to make the plants grow while her beautiful daughter, Persephone, is confined to the underworld for six months each fall and winter.
According to the myth, the girl Persephone was kidnapped by the dark god of the underworld. Aided by the illuminating torchlight of the wise Hecate, Demeter rescued her daughter. But Persephone had grown accustomed to her new life as Queen of the Underworld, so she slyly slipped six pomegranate seeds into her mouth before leaving. This act compelled her to return there for six months out of every year, to the annual sorrow of her mother.
Ergot
Known as the “Mysteries of Eleusis”, the rites of Demeter were among pre-Christian Greece and Rome's most significant religious observances. For almost two thousand years, initiates like Plato and Julius Caesar made their pilgrimage to the Temple of Demeter at Eleusis, a small village on the edge of a vast plain where the grain that fed Athens was grown.
Inside the temple, initiates drank a mysterious potion called a “kykeon” from a ceremonial chalice. Afterwards, they described themselves as having been “saved”. The Hymn to Demeter, the Iliad, and the Odyssey describe this potion as a thin, beer-like substance made from cereal grain. Legend had it that the kykleon had the power to confer immortality. But its contents were a closely guarded secret, revealing it was punishable by death or banishment.
In 392 AD, the Roman emperor Theodosius outlawed the Mysteries. Once they took power, the Christian Emperors were determined to forge an exclusively Christian future. That meant wiping away the old pagan practices to consolidate political power under the banner of their new faith. In 395, Alaric the Visigoth razed the Temple of Demeter. The Mysteries of Eleusis were forgotten in the new Christian world that rose from the ashes of the Roman Empire, and the contents of the kykeon were lost to history.
But in the late 1990s, a ceremonial chalice used in rites of Demeter tested positive for ergot. At the same site, teeth on a human jawbone also tested positive for the psychoactive fungus that infests cereal grains. These findings were published in 2002 in the Catalan language. We didn’t get the news in the English-speaking world until 2020, when Brian Muraresku published his excellent book The Immortality Key.
The Sacred Feminine
Though ergot is highly psychoactive, the fungus is also highly toxic. The kykeon was a piece of biotechnology handed down over many generations of priestesses. Their carefully-guarded recipe allowed them to induce psychedelic experiences without killing or maiming initiates. This trick of separating the groovy properties of ergot from its poisonous effects would not be achieved again until the 1930s, when Albert Hofmann used the fungus to synthesize LSD.
At heavy doses, psychedelics cause an experience known as “ego death” that explains why the kykeon was said to grant immortality to the drinker. It’s best described as a dissolution of the sensation of being an individual. The experience is that of a death and rebirth of the self.
Initiates to the Mysteries of Eleusis were astonished to find that they could exist without the familiar mental artifact of the self, if only for a short time. The experience showed them that there is much more to each of us than the costumes of identity we habitually wear.
Instead of identifying as a single instance of the human genetic code, they identified as a never-ending series of such instances; as the code itself. Waves at the beach come and go, but the water they’re made of remains constant. Eleusinian initiates might have suggested that the trick to surviving your own death is to simply change what you conceive of yourself to be.
This flip in perspective was what those initiates meant when they described themselves as having been “saved”. During childbirth, women experience a forking of their individual selves into two or more beings, making femininity an obvious allegory for the illusory nature of personal identity. The Sacred Feminine is an ancient religious and spiritual concept emphasizing femininity as a connection to divinity. A priesthood of women oversaw the Mysteries of Eleusis, which celebrated this notion of the Sacred Feminine.
The Feminine Trinity
Early Christianity adopted many of the existing symbols and traditions of the Mediterranean Basin to make it comprehensible to new converts. After the Church rose to imperial power in Rome’s twilight, however, it began forcefully erasing those old traditions. The new Roman Catholic Church did not tolerate spiritual competition. It wanted its flock to achieve transcendence exclusively through the Holy Communion controlled by the Church, not the old pagan kykeon.
The Feminine Trinity of Eleusis is a prime example of an ancient tradition first adopted by the Church, and subsequently outlawed by it. The three main characters in the mythology of Eleusis were Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate. These three archetypal figures formed a trinity that symbolized three phases in a woman’s life: virginal girl, mother, and finally, crone or old woman.
Fascinatingly, Christianity adopted two-thirds of this Feminine Trinity. The virginal girl and the mother figure both exist in the single person of Mary, who is confusingly portrayed to this day as both a virgin and a mother at the same time.
The crone, however, threatened the Church's spiritual monopoly. The archetype of the wise old woman—who knew the properties of every plant in the forest—was recast as a terrifying consort of the devil. Salvation was to be realized only through the Church, not through ergot or any other means outside the Church’s control. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church bolstered its spiritual monopoly with violence against so-called witches. By the end of the Middle Ages, it shamelessly monetized that monopoly through the infamous “Sales of Indulgences”.
Despite the Church’s best efforts, the Feminine Trinity of Eleusis lives on in the collective subconscious. In defiance of Vatican authority, the Three Graces became a significant theme in the artwork of the Italian Renaissance, like Botticelli’s masterpiece Primavera. William Shakespeare used three witches instead of just one when he needed a supernatural element for his play Macbeth. Finally, in 1795, when William Blake set out to paint Hecate in his The Night of Enitharmon's Joy, he portrayed her triune. His bizarre rendition of the single goddess with three bodies can be seen in the title card of this essay.
Class War
Death and rebirth are central themes in both the Mysteries of Eleusis and in Christianity. Before Christianity, the annual growing seasons and the solar phenomena that drive them were frequent objects of worship. The myth of Demeter, the grain goddess who drives the yearly change of the seasons, is a case-in-point. The sun is the most apparent allegory for resurrection in the natural world. Early agricultural societies were so obviously dependent on the sun's rebirth each morning and each winter that resurrection and salvation became linked in the ancient mind. Christianity inherited that linkage.
Ego death and rebirth at Eleusis provides another layer to the age-old allegory of resurrection. The chemically-induced experience of ego death and rebirth transformed initiates who made the pilgrimage there. This allegorical layer was also received into Christianity as the bread of the Holy Communion.
A third layer of death and rebirth symbolism entered Christianity via the Jewish tradition and Mesopotamia before that; debt forgiveness. In the early days of the Agricultural Revolution, people were often pledged as loan collateral. Debt default meant slavery for those so pledged. The Bronze Age kings of Mesopotamia periodically forgave debts and released bond servants to return to their homes. Debt forgiveness would undoubtedly have seemed like a rebirth to someone after years of debt slavery.
Eleusis figures into the debt crises that rocked Bronze Age Greece and Rome not through its symbology but through its politics. In the aftermath of the clean slate debt forgiveness implemented by Solon of Athens, notes historian Michael Hudson in …and Forgive Them Their Debts, “Solon’s successors, the Peisistratids, sponsored social reforms as secular leaders, building up the Dionysus festival and Homeric recitations as counterweights to the Eleusan religion controlled by the old aristocratic families.”
If the Eleusinian Mysteries were the controlled religion of the establishment, then the Dionysus festival mentioned by Dr. Hudson is its mirror image: an ecstatic celebration that flouted authority. Just as it borrowed symbols and traditions from Eleusis, Christianity also adopted many of the elements of Dionysus worship. In the Christian Eucharist, the cereal grain of Demeter met the wine of Dionysus, whose cult will be the topic of next week’s essay…
Further Materials
When Solon of Athens and Sparta’s semi-mythical Lycurgus liberated their populations from debt bondage, they did so as authors of a new civic order, not as drawing on an ancient covenant. Solon’s successors, the Peisistratids, sponsored social reforms as secular leaders, building up the Dionysus festival and Homeric recitations as counterweights to the Eleusan religion controlled by the old aristocratic families.
Michael Hudson, …and Forgive Them Their Debts, 2018, page 267
In all the relevant studies from the early 2000s, the name of one young archaeobotanist kept popping up: Jordi Juan-Tresserras from the University of Barcelona. In the summer of 2018, I started reading everything he ever wrote, and eventually came across a paper from 2000 in the peer-reviewed Spanish-language journal Complutum. It was a summary of his and other drug-related archaeological findings across Iberia. Stuffed into the middle of the nine-page article was a single paragraph about an apparently unremarkable discovery, “the remains of ergot sclerotia” at Mas Castellar de Pontós in not one, but two different artifacts connected to Pons’s iconic “domestic chapel.”
The fungus was found embedded between several teeth of a human jawbone. Microscopic evidence of the same organism was additionally identified in one of the miniature chalices that once contained a “special beer.”
Given the “cultic” context of the area where both relics were unearthed in 1997, Juan-Tresserras linked whatever potion filled the tiny cup to “the consumption of the kykeon” during the Mysteries of Eleusis. After all, ergot played a “fundamental role” in the Ancient Greek rites according to Gordon Wasson. And no less a scientific expert than Albert Hofmann had explained how the “entheogenic alkaloids” in ergot, like the water-soluble ergine and ergonovine, could have easily been separated from the toxic alkaloids. In his bibliography Juan-Tresserras listed a Spanish version of The Road to Eleusis published in Mexico in 1980 that I didn’t even know existed. Given all the leads for psychedelic graveyard beer emerging from ancient Iberia over the past twenty years, I wasn’t necessarily surprised. But the scientific identification of ergot was absolutely unique, and almost too good to be true. So I followed the trail of bread crumbs to the only published material that ever presented the full archaeological background of the Catalonian kukeon: a massive 635-page tome published in 2002 as a complete record of Enriqueta Pons’s tenacious work at Pontós from 1990 to 1998. To this day, the monograph has been published only in Catalan. I was able to find a copy at the Library of Congress, where I dove into one of Indo-European’s most distinctive tongues for days.
Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020, page 144
One of the most beautiful of Greek myths, skillfully narrated in the Hymn to Demeter once attributed to Homer, tells how Demeter’s daughter Persephone, while gathering flowers, was kidnaped by Pluto, god of the underworld, and snatched down to Hades. The sorrowing mother searched for her everywhere, found her, and persuaded Pluto to let Persephone live on the earth nine months in every year—a pretty symbol for the annual death and rebirth of the soil. Because the people of Eleusis befriended the disguised Demeter as she “sat by the way, grieved in her inmost heart,” she taught them and Attica the secret of agriculture, and sent Triptolemus, son of Eleusis’ king, to spread the art among mankind. Essentially it was the same myth as that of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Tammuz and Ishtar in Babylonia, Astarte and Adonis in Syria, Cybele and Attis in Phrygia. The cult of motherhood survived through classical times to take new life in the worship of Mary the Mother of God.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Life of Greece, 1939, page 293
In the Greek sense a mystery was a secret ceremony in which sacred symbols were revealed, symbolic rites were performed, and only initiates were the worshipers. Usually the rites represented or commemorated, in semidramatic form, the suffering, death, and resurrection of a god, pointed back to old vegetation themes and magic, and promised the initiate a personal immortality.
Many places in Greece celebrated such mystic rites, but no other place in this respect could rival Eleusis. The mysteries there were of pre-Achaean origin, and appear to have been originally an autumn festival of plowing and sowing. A myth explained how Demeter, rewarding the people of Attica for their kindness to her in her wanderings, established at Eleusis her greatest temple, which was destroyed and rebuilt many times during the history of Greece. Under Solon, Peisistratus, and Pericles the festival of Demeter at Eleusis was adopted by Athens, and raised to higher elaboration and pomp. In the Lesser Mysteries, held near Athens in the spring, candidates for initiation underwent a preliminary purification by self-immersion in the waters of the Ilissus. In September the candidates and others walked in grave but happy pilgrimage for fourteen miles along the Sacred Way to Eleusis, bearing at their head the image of the chthonian deity Iacchus. The procession arrived at Eleusis under torchlight, and solemnly placed the image in the temple; after which the day was ended with sacred dances and songs. The Greater Mysteries lasted four days more. Those who had been purified with bathing and fasting were now admitted to the lesser rites; those who had received such rites a year before were taken into the Hall of Initiation, where the secret ceremony was performed. The mystai, or initiates, broke their fast by participating in a holy communion in memory of Demeter, drinking a holy mixture of meal and water, and eating sacred cakes. What mystic ritual was then performed we do not know; the secret was well kept throughout antiquity, under penalty of death; even the pious Aeschylus narrowly escaped condemnation for certain lines that might have given the secret away. The ceremony was in any case a symbolic play, and had a part in generating the Dionysian drama. Very probably the theme was the rape of Persephone by Pluto, the sorrowful wandering of Demeter, the return of the Maiden to earth, and the revelation of agriculture to Attica. The summary of the ceremony was the mystic marriage of a priest representing Zeus with a priestess impersonating Demeter. These symbolic nuptials bore fruit with magic speed, for it was soon followed, we are told, by a solemn announcement that “Our Lady has borne a holy boy”; and a reaped ear of corn was exhibited as symbolizing the fruit of Demeter’s labor—the bounty of the fields. The worshipers were then led by dim torchlight into dark subterranean caverns symbolizing Hades, and, again, to an upper chamber brilliant with light, representing, it appears, the abode of the blessed; and they were now shown, in solemn exaltation, the holy objects, relics, or icons that till that moment had been concealed. In this ecstasy of revelation, we are assured, they felt the unity of God, and the oneness of God and the soul; they were lifted up out of the delusion of individuality, and knew the peace of absorption into deity. In the age of Peisistratus the mysteries of Dionysus entered into the Eleusinian liturgy by a religious infection: the god Iacchus was identified with Dionysus as the son of Persephone, and the legend of Dionysus Zagreus was superimposed upon the myth of Demeter. But through all forms the basic idea of the mysteries remained the same: as the seed is born again, so may the dead have renewed life; and not merely the dreary, shadowy existence of Hades, but a life of happiness and peace. When almost everything else in Greek religion had passed away, this consoling hope, reunited in Alexandria with that Egyptian belief in immortality from which the Greek had been derived, gave to Christianity the weapon with which to conquer the Western world.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Life of Greece, 1939, page 308