Eleusis and the Sacred Way
Eleusis and the Sacred Way describes the procession that carried initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries from Athens to the sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis, and the landscape and buildings they passed through. The architectural historian Vincent Scully reads the whole route as a staged experience, designed together with the land.[1]
Demeter's landscape
Scully contrasts Demeter with the Olympian gods. Hera's sites celebrate the surface of the earth, but Demeter's evoke its interior, the forces that give life and bring death. She is "an Olympian only by courtesy", and her mysteries revived older rites.[1] Her buildings tend to be "space-positive", enclosing the worshipper, rather than "mass-positive" like an Olympian temple seen from outside.[1] Her shrines also stand near famous battlefields, at Plataia below Mount Cithairon and at Anthela near Thermopylai.[1]
The procession
The festival lasted ten days. An image of Iacchos was carried from the Eleusinion in Athens, and the initiates (mystai) walked all day through the pass at Daphni, arriving at Eleusis by night.[1] Along the way the horned peaks of Kerata appeared, vanished and reappeared, which Scully calls "the mystic object found and lost". A sanctuary of Aphrodite stood on the Way, and the horns of Salamis came into view across the water.[1] Scully links the name Eleusis to a passage or gate, and to the "Gate of Horn" of the Odyssey and Virgil.[1]
The Telesterion
At the sanctuary two Roman gateways set up a swaying rhythm, and the path curved like a snake round the hill past the grotto of Hades, lit by "a sinuous trail of fire" from the torches.[1] It ended at the Telesterion, a windowless hall of initiation with Mycenaean beginnings and at least five enlargements. Its many interior columns made it "labyrinthine, mysterious, grovelike". The steps inside were too narrow for seats, so the crowd stood packed together and could become participants in the rite.[1]
What happened inside is unknown. Suggestions include a drama of the abduction of Kore, a journey to the underworld, a sacred marriage and the birth of a holy child linked to Dionysos, or the silent reaping of an ear of wheat.[1] Afterwards, Scully argues, the landscape reasserted itself: the temple of Demeter faces the horns of Salamis, and the Telesterion looks back to the cleft at Daphni.[1]