Journey of Life and Death: Demeter in Eleusis
World Heritage Collage Series: Demeter in Eleusis, 2021. Mixed-media collage, 7"x 9.5".
The Path to Eleusis and Immortality
Eleusis is a real place in Greece, but also an ancient place of worship during pagan times. In gnostic and pre-cursor religions of Christianity, there were traditions adapted from pagan cultures in order to assimilate their faith easier. One of these appropriated acts, a initiation ritual in Eleusis, has been possibly covered up over the centuries by the Church. In The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku suggests that part of the ritual lost to time was actually an act of pre-Christian eucharist. The drinking of blood of the divine was a metaphor for the literal drinking of a potion that brings the disciple closer to God.
Many have come in search of the secrets in Eleusis, but perhaps it has more metaphorical impact. The search for something bigger than oneself. Curious searchers of science and religion all just want a glimpse of that greater order. The once potent entheogen speculatively taken at Eleusis could have been a literal bridge to the ethereal or God, and would entice the participant to withhold their ego and enact death.
The journey to Eleusis is epitomized in the story of the deity Demeter, who had travelled there in search of her daughter. The people of Eleusis treating her well, offered her a son in exchange that he live eternally healthy. With such power comes doubt distrust, they didn't know she was a deity. Instead of immortality in life, she provides death within life; she gave them what they wanted...the full sublime horror of eternity in a potion. She instructs them of rites and the drinking of the kukeōn, leaving a bridge to a temporal eternity found in all of us.
If Eleusis is instead our entire Consciousness, and the voice in our heads the doubtful civilians, we reject our real ability to witness the divine because we doubt our own significance.
The journey Demeter takes is the same one our inner self takes when exposed in our day to day. Like Sisyphus we must beat along the same path we call our daily routine, either eventually forgetting their purpose or beginning to questioning it? In peoples attempts at immortality the purpose is often missed. It's not freedom from pushing the boulder up the hill that we want, because another task will ultimately replace it; it is the freedom from desire that Sisyphus and the Eleusians should want. Demeter showed the Eleusians that with all of life there is death, and by witnessing life/death as it is, you already have immortality within.
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