Mythology Test Analysis/ Reflection 1.My scores were _______/31 on matching and _____/24 on the short answer. 2.I used/didn’t use my notes. 3.I believe that I performed ___________ on the test. 4.I believe that my performance was attributable to __________________________________ ________________________________________ 5. I missed point on the following items: (list the facts that you got wrong in matching section and the questions you missed from the short answer)

Eleusinian Mysteries ♀Took place annually in the town of Eleusis for at least 1000, but most likely 2000 years falling into disuse around 400 AD. ♀Mysteries meant “secrets” and were open only to initiates. Initiates were forbidden to tell non- initiates about the rites. (Like Fight Club☺) ♀Initiates could be male or female, free or slave. The blending of the genders is most unusual. ♀Qualifications for initiates: 1.You had to come to Eleusis—it was a location specific religious ceremony. (This actually limited participation for those who lived far away and for the poor who could not afford travel.) 2.You could not be a murderer. 3.You had to speak Greek. 4.You had to sacrifice a pig—this also had a limiting effect socio-economically.

What Do We Know? Because it was secret, our knowledge is limited and probably biased. Some initiates must have told the secret, the surviving written references observe the prohibition. They allude to details of the Mysteries but do not describe them. The only writers who do describe the Mysteries are early Christian authors. Because they wrote with the desire to prove the Mysteries false, their testimonies may be biased and inaccurate.

What Do We Know? We know that the ceremonies had three components: 1.Things that were done 2. Things that were said 3. Things that were shown doingsaying The doing and saying may have been the acting out of some sort of religious dramas. shown The things that were shown were of the greatest interest.

The Things That Were Shown Considered the high points of the ceremony. As the initiates proceeded through the initiation ceremony over several days they would go deeper into the great temple complex in Eleusis and the final ceremony, we think, was held in an under ground chamber. (The temples are still there today in Eleusis which is now a suburb of Athens. The temple complex is surrounded by chemical and power plants.)

The Things That Were Shown obscene According to the Christian authors the sacred object shown was something obscene : statue, figurine, or symbol. ear of wheat being sliced in silence Other authors have suggested that this great revelation, the meaning of life and death was an ear of wheat being sliced in silence —rather tame?

Cutting an Ear of Wheat? Really? The power of a religious symbol seen from within a religion doesn’t depend on what that symbol is or how it would look from the outside. Another example would be the act of Christian Communion. The objects involved have little meaning in and of themselves. It is what they symbolize that makes them powerful. In this religion that was concerned with life and death, issues of mortality and immortality, Persephone’s decent and return from the underworld, cutting an ear of living grain to symbolize the death and rebirth of all life may have been highly powerful. So it is possible that this was the high point.

Details that Connect We know enough to recognize many details in the Homeric Hymn as aetiologies for parts of the ritual of the Mysteries. 1.When Demeter arrives she drinks barley meal, mint, and pennyroyal. The initiates drank a similar drink in the ceremony. 2.Demeter’s visit to Eleusis explains why the Mysteries are celebrated there. 3.On a conceptual level, the connection with death and the afterlife is aetiological, because initiation promised a happy afterlife. 4.If we had more information we might recognize other details as aetiological as well.

Happily Ever After Initiates were promised a happier afterlife than they would otherwise have. “Whoever on this earth who has seen these is blessed, but he who has no part in the holy rites hath another lot as he wastes away in dank darkness.” --Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Happily Ever After The reason people became initiates was to guarantee a happier afterlife. With more details about the rituals, we might understand more about the promise. Some believe that the Demophoön in the fire episode has some aetiological value.

Afterlife The standard view in other Greek literature is substantially less pleasant. The Underworld, Tartaros, as described by Homer in The Odyssey is a place of dim shadowy existence much less desirable than life in this world. eidolon The ghost is called and eidolon —”image”— what survives in the afterworld is much less real or important than the living person on earth. This differs from Christianity or Islam.

Afterlife The word for soul, “psyche” originally meant “the breath”—the thing that leaves the body at death—the thing that makes the difference between and live body and dead body. Spirits in Tartaros are described as being witless, not even knowing themselves. In The Odyssey, Odysseus must give them a drink of blood to regain their wits and remember who they were when they lived.

Afterlife Some noteworthy souls are picked out for reward or punishment, but overall there is little sense that one’s state in the afterlife was determined by one’s actions in this life. Most souls are dim shadowy remnants of themselves in Tartaros where nothing much happens and they eventually fade into nothing. Elysian Fields The conception of the Elysian Fields, reserved for a very few especially good souls is alluded to in The Odyssey and elsewhere in literature, but the concept wasn’t fully developed, it seems, during the time of Homer or the writing of the Homeric Hymns.

Afterlife The idea of punishment for the wicked is more clearly developed, but even it does not apply to the majority of humanity; punishment is restricted to a few famous wrongdoers, such as the “cardinal sinners.” Tantalos Tantalos (tried to trick gods into eating human flesh) Tityos Tityos (At Hera’s behest, tries to rape Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis)—liver eaten for eternity by two vultures), and Sisyphus Sisyphus (must push a boulder up hill every day only to have it roll back down).

Reincarnation Reincarnation ? Pythagoras (in the sixth century BC) apparently taught a doctrine that included reincarnation (and vegetarianism). Souls could be reincarnated as humans or animals. The records of his teachings were not written until at least 100 years after his death.

Reincarnation in Plato Plato discusses reincarnation in the so-called, “Myth of Er” in The Republic. Story: A warrior is killed (or thought to have been killed) in battle remains dead for a period of some days, when he comes out of his “coma” he recounts what he saw while he was dead. Among other things, he sees people being reincarnated according to the kinds of lives they have lived previously. For instance, wily Odysseus came back as a monkey. This detail may indicate that the story was created to suggest caution about proper human behavior.

Reincarnation in Plato 1.One difficulty in using this as evidence for fourth-century belief is that Plato may have invented this “myth” for use in The Republic. 2.Elsewhere for instance in the Apology of Socrates, Plato describes a view of the afterlife that is much closer to the traditional one.

Reincarnation in Virgil Virgil, writing in Rome in the first century BC, combined the ideas of reward and punishment and the idea of reincarnation in Book VI of The Aeneid. Story Story : Anchises, Aeneas’ dead father, tells him that some souls go to the land of the blessed as he has done, and some really bad ones goes to Tartaros, most souls go to a period much like Catholic Purgatory where they spend 1,000 years and then drink from the river Lethe. They are reincarnated without knowing anything of their previous lives. Anchises is showing Aeneas a long line of souls about to be reincarnated who are to be great Romans of the future and Aeneas’ descendants. Again, as with Plato, it is difficult to determine to what extent Virgil used the idea of reincarnation purely as a literary device and to what extent it mirrors actual belief.

Orpheus and Eurydice One of the most important myths concerning the afterlife. Orpheus, son of Apollo and one of the Muses, was the greatest poet who ever lived. He had the power to charm animals, stones, and trees with his music/singing. When his wife Eurydice was bitten in the heal by a snake on their wedding day, and dies. He goes into the underworld with his Lyre and his poetry to try to get his wife back from the underworld. It works, Hades and Persephone agreed with the one condition: he cannot look back at her until they have reached the land of the living again. Of course, he looked back, and she falls back into the underworld, never to be seen again.

Orpheus and Eurydice Orphism This purely mythical Roman Orpheus was associated with a body of writings and a set of religious beliefs called “Orphism.” 1.Began to be taught in the sixth century BC. (Same time as Pythagoras) 2.The Orphic writings supposedly contain the knowledge that Orpheus gained while in the Underworld. 3.Reincarnation is central to the doctrine; ascetic 3.Reincarnation is central to the doctrine; only by following the teachings of Orpheus to lead an ascetic life can the soul eventually be freed from rebirth. As in Buddhism, incarnation is a bad thing from which one seeks release. 4.Some Orphic writings contained precise instructions about what one should say and do in the Underworld to avoid reincarnation. Thus Orphism, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, held out the promise of a happy, or at least happier, afterlife.

As in so many other areas of Greek religion, no orthodoxy about the afterlife exists. It seems safe to say that it was generally considered both less important and less pleasant than this life. Greek mythology contains no aetiology for death through, for example, human sin or mistake. This is very unusual. Most cultures have mythology to suggest that we should live forever, but because of some mistake, death was brought upon us.

Questions to Consider: 1.Modern students often find it strange that Greek religion and mythology had no set doctrine about the afterlife and that the different descriptions diverged from one another so greatly. To what extent do you think this lack of unified doctrine can be attributed to the lack of a “sacred book”? 2.The Greeks’ relative lack of agreement about the afterlife is often cited as proof that their interest was mainly focused on this world and this life. Do you think this conclusion is valid?

Honor Code “I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid, nor do I have knowledge of anyone else doing so.” Signature

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