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Mysteries

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” —Albert Einstein

 Close in importance to the basic human needs for food, shelter, and companionship comes the urge to create an orderly world governed by dependable rules and to develop a reassuring structure of beliefs. This urge, since the beginning of recorded time, has provided a receptive audience for seers, scholars, scientists, and experts of every persuasion. There has never been, nor is there likely to be, a shortage of authorities ready to find reasonable explanations for all observed phenomena and to provide solutions for the mysteries of the universe. And yet there are events that seem to say that our rules, our beliefs, even our common sense, may sometimes let us down.

In the past, men and women believed that the world around them had a miraculous dimension—that angels and demons were real, that prayers were efficacious, that man had a special place in the universe. Today fewer and fewer people believe in such a world. For many, existence has become something defined by politics, economics, and discoveries made in laboratories. And yet an instinct for the unknown persists, and a conviction also that not everything in our lives can be cut and dried by the statisticians, controlled in the halls of government, or defined in a test tube.

For, though more has been learned about the earth and the cosmos in the past 25 years than in all the preceding years of recorded history, the more we have probed the more mysterious the world has become. In view of the strangeness persistently revealed around us, we ask if common sense does not require us to accept the uncommon. Should we not abandon our conventional notions of the laws of nature? As our scientists tune in to the reverberations of cosmic creation, must we adhere to the idea that time progresses in a linear way? Cannot past, present, and future exist simultaneously? Must every effect be preceded by a cause? Cannot psychic energy make itself manifest in physically observable ways? It is questions like these that open the doorway to the vast and intriguing world of the unknown. 

Mysteries. —. Among the greatest features of religious life were the mysteries held at periodic intervals in connection with the different deities, such as the Samothrecian, the Bacchic and most famous of all, the Eleusinian. Their origin is to be traced mostly to a pre-historic nature-worship and vegetation-magic. All these mysteries had three trials or baptisms by water, fire and air, and three especially sacred emblems, the phallus, egg and serpent, generative emblems sacred in all secret rites. The Samothracian centered round four mysterious deities, Axieros the mother, her children Axiocersos, male, Axiocersa, female, from whom sprang Casindos the originator of the universe. The festival probably symbolized the creation of the world, also the harvest and its growth. Connected with this was the worship of Cybele, goddess of the earth, of the cities and fields. Her priests, the Corybantes, dwelt in a cave where they held their ceremonies, including a wild and orgiastic weapon-dance, accompanied by the incessant shaking of heads and clanging of swords upon shields. The cult of Bacchus was said by some to have been carried into Greece from Egypt by Melampus. He is the god of the vine and vegetation, and his mysteries typified the growth of the vine and the vintage; the winter sleep of all plant life and its renewal in spring. Women were his chief attendants, the Bacchantes, who clashing cymbals and utter­ing wild cries in invocation of-their god, became possessed by ungovernable fury and homicidal mania. Greatest of all in their relation to Hellenic life were the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were the paramount interest and function of the state religion exerting the widest, strongest in­fluence on people of all classes. The rites were secret and their details are practically unknown, but they undoubtedly symbolized the myth of Demeter, corn-goddess, and were held in spring and September. Prior to initiation a long period of purification and preparation was enforced, during which the higher meaning of the myth was inculcated, the original meaning having become exalted by the genius of the Greeks into an intimate allegory of the soul of man, its birth, life and death, its descent into Hades and subsequent release there from. After this there came the central point of the mysteries, the viewing of certain holy and secret sym­bols; next, a crowning with garlands, signifying the happi­ness which arises from friendship with the divine. The festival also embodied a scenic representation of the Story of Demeter; the rape of Persephone, the sorrow of the mother, her complaints before Zeus, the final reconciliation. Women played a great part in this, the reason being that as they themselves produce,” so by sympathetic magic their influence was conveyed to the corn, as when crying aloud for rain they looked upward to the skies, then down to the earth with cries of “ Conceive “ These priestesses were crowned with poppies and corn, symbolical attributes of the deity they implored.

Homer tells  the tale of Circe the enchant­ress, with her magic philters and magic songs but makes no mention of Medea, the arch-sorceress of later times. Round her name the later beliefs clustered, to her were attributed all the evil arts, she became the witch par excellence, her infamy increasing from age to age. The same may be said of Hecate, the moon-goddess, at first sharer with Zeus of the heavenly powers, hut later become an ominous shape of gloom, ruler and lover of the night and darkness, of the world of phantoms and ghouls. Like the Furies she wielded the whip and cord; she was followed by hell hounds, by writhing serpents, by lamisiae, strygiae and empusae, figures of terror and loathing. She presided over the dark mysteries of birth and death; she was worshipped at night in the flare of torches. She was the three-headed Hecate of the cross-roads where little round cakes or a lizard mask set about with candles were offered to her in propitiation, that none of the phantom mob might cross the threshold of man.

Love magic and death magic, the usual forms of sorcery became common in Greece as else where. Love philters and charms were eagerly sought, the most innocent being bitten apples and enchanted garlands. Means of protection against the evil eye became a necessity for tales of bewitchment were spread abroad, and of mis­fortune and death being brought upon the innocent and unwary by means of a waxen figure molded in their image and tortured by the sorceress. In tombs and secret places leaden tablets were buried inscribed with the names of foes and victims, pierced through with a nail in order to bring disaster and death upon them. At this time it became law that none who practiced sorcery might participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and at Athens, a Samian Sorceress, Theoris, was cast to the flames.

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