ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. The most important mystery cult of the ancient world was that connected with the sanctuary of Demeter Eleusinia on a hillside outside Eleusis, about fourteen miles northwest of Athens.

Origins and History

The ritual of initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries preserves memories of an earlier phase during which the mysteries were the initiation ritual of a political and, at an earlier stage, clan community, especially in the initiation of the pais aphʾhestias, the "boy from the hearth," the religious center of house and state: he was an Athenian boy chosen by lot who underwent initiation at the cost and on behalf of the polis of Athens. Other traces are preserved in the cult of Demeter Eleusinia, which was widespread throughout Greece. On the island of Thasos, it was still a clan cult in the fourth century BCE; in Laconia, it concerned especially the...