Also forever grumbling about the fact that people want to divorce the myth but more specifically the Homeric Hymn to Demeter from its cultic purposes; Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries play a major role in the story and this has a huge effect on the storytelling, and if we divorce all of the themes it imposes on Persephone/Demeter’s storylines from their myth in this adaptation, you lose a significant amount of context and meaning
“The so-called ‘mystery cults’ were a handful of marginal Eastern Mediterranean cults which achieved popularity throughout the Roman empire and were distinguished as a unique religious phenomenon by the Belgian archaeologist and philologist Franz Cumont in his 1906 book Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. This modern label of ‘mystery cults’ has now long been used as a blanket designation to cover the cults held in honour of Mithra, Attis and Cybele, Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone, Orpheus and Bacchus/ Dionysus, and the Samothracian Kabeiroi, among countless other minor and local groups who will never be remembered. Each of these cults (with perhaps the exception of Mithraism) revolved around the dramatic and ecstatic veneration of “dying-and-rising-gods,” a title formulated by the founding father of comparative religion, James G. Frazer, and subsequently developed by British and Scandinavian members of the Myth-and-Ritual School. These so-called “Cambridge Ritualists,” held to the notion that myths do not stand on their own, but are born out of ritual. This theory, of course, is heavily disputed; but the alternative view is equally enlightening: that myth and ritual evolve along parallel lines, without one developing strictly out from the other. The ‘Divine Bridegroom’ is similarly a name I use for these dying mystery gods. For the most part, the mystery religions were sanctuary based, taking place in a telestrion (initiation chambers), caves, or mountain groves, and their members were organized by a structure of hierarchical degrees of initiation. The “mysteries” themselves generally entailed dramatic experiences conveyed via esoteric initiation ceremonies that were reflections of annual agricultural and astrological cycles. Already the mainstream view of old-school ethnologists believed in the notion that the mysteries were survivals of ancient “rites of passage,” especially by Mircea Eliade and Angelo Brelich. Many believed that the origin of the mysteries should be sought in some stage of primitive agricultural development, and it is in illo tempore - into that mythic dream time - to which I wish to return throughout this book.”
— Dan Attrell - Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy
I’ve been listening to “Blood Moon” by Saint Sister a lot this season and it inspired this piece of a spooky Minoan Artemis dancing in the woods.
“The manifold self-contradictions in Greek ideas and phrasing about death are not errors. They are styles of imagining the unimaginable, and are responsive both to personal needs and to old conventions. The same conflicts surge up in many cultures. They are necessary ambiguities in a realm of thinking where thinking cannot really be done, and where there is no experience.”
— Emily Vermeule, “Immortals are Mortal, Mortals Immortal,” Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry
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