Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
The Eleusinian Mysteries And Rites
By Dudley Wright
Introduction
INTRODUCTION BY THE REV. J. FORT NEWTON, D.LITT., D.D.,
Past Grand Chaplain of the Grand Lodge of Iowa.
Few aspects of the history of the human spirit are more fascinating than the story of the Mysteries of antiquity, one chapter of which is told in the following pages with accuracy, insight, and charm. Like all human institutions, they had their foundation in a real need, to which they ministered by dramatizing the faiths and hopes and longings of humanity, and evoking that eternal mysticism which is at once the joy and solace of man as he marches or creeps or crowds through the welter of doubts, dangers, disease, and death, which we call our life.
Once the sway of the Mysteries was well-nigh universal, but towards the end of their power they fell into the mire and became corrupt, as all things human are apt to do, the Church itself being no exception. Yet at their best and highest they were not only lofty and noble, but elevating and refining, and that they served a high purpose is equally clear, else they had not won the eulogiums of the most enlightened men of antiquity. From Pythagoras to Plutarch the teachers of old bear witness to the service of the Mysteries, and Cicero testified that what a man learned in the house of the Hidden Place made him want to live nobly, and gave him happy thoughts for the hour of death.
The Mysteries, said Plato, were established by men of great genius, who, in the early ages, strove to teach purity, to ameliorate the cruelty of the race, to exalt its morals and refine its manners, and to restrain society by stronger bonds than those which human laws impose. Such being their purpose, he who gives a thought to the life of man at large will enter their vanished sanctuaries with sympathy; and if no mystery any longer attaches to what they taught—least of all to their ancient allegory of immortality—there is the abiding interest in the rites, drama, and symbols employed in the teaching of wise and good and beautiful truth.
What influence the Mysteries had on the new, uprising Christianity is hard to know, and the issue is still in debate. That they did influence the early Church is evident from the writings of the Fathers—more than one of whom boasted of initiation—and some go so far as to say that the Mysteries died at last, only to live again in the ritual of the Church. St. Paul in his missionary journeys came in contact with the Mysteries, and even makes use of some of their technical terms in his Epistles, the better to show that what they sought to teach by drama can be known only by spiritual experience. No doubt his insight is sound, but surely drama may assist to that realization, else public worship might also come under ban.
Of the Eleusinian Mysteries in particular, we have long needed such a study as is here offered, in which the author not only sums up in an attractive manner what is known, but adds to our knowledge some important details. An Egyptian source has been attributed to the Mysteries of Greece, but there is little evidence of it, save as we may conjecture it to have been so, remembering the influence of Egypt upon Greece. Such influences are difficult to trace, and it is safer to say that the idea and use of Initiation—as old as the Men's House of primitive society—was universal, and took different forms in different lands.
Such a study has more than an antiquarian interest, not only to students in general, but especially to the men of the gentle Craft of Freemasonry. If we may not say that Freemasonry is historically descended from the instituted Mysteries of antiquity, it does perpetuate, to some extent, their ministry among us. At least, the resemblance between those ancient rites arid the ceremonials of both Operative and Speculative Freemasonry are very striking; and the present study must be reckoned as not the least of the services of its author to that gracious Craft.
THE CITY TEMPLE, LONDON, E.C.
