Editor’s note: The zodiac divides the sky into 12 signs of 30º each. An ancient subdivision of these 30º signs is into three “decans” (from the word for “ten”), or 10º segments. Each year, ten days before the Spring Equinox, the Sun reaches the third decan of the sign of Pisces, before beginning the astrological year again as it enters Aries at the Equinox. This post was written specifically for this third decan of Pisces.
This time of year, I find my thoughts drifting back to something my friend Sara Mastros said about visiting Greece in February. She got into a cab one day at her hotel, and told the cab driver to take her to Eleusis, about fourteen miles away. The driver, once he understood her request, nodded and sighed. “There, it will already be spring.” In downtown Athens, she said, this was a hard statement to credit —it was cold and blustery, with an extra needle or two of frost in every breeze. But, once there, she found it impossible to ignore — there was new greenery everywhere, and flowers were starting to open in every sunny sheltered place around the site of the ancient Telasterion, the hall where the Mysteries of Eleusis were celebrated.
It was already spring there.
Of course, the Greater Mysteries of Eleusis were celebrated at the start of the ancient month of Boedromion. Called “The Showing” and open only to initiates, it was a multi-day ritual that we know only a little bit about, and some of that only from Christian apologists attacking it as pagan nonsense. The season of these Mysteries began on the 14th day of Boedromion, and probably at or just before the Autumn Equinox, and with particular pomp and circumstance every four years. We know that these rites involved the story of Hades kidnapping Persephone, of Demeter’s imposition of the first winter on the Earth, and Zeus and Hermes negotiation of a truce.
But by the 7th century BCE, the Mysteries were already so old and full of archaic language that people barely knew what they were witnessing. And sometime in the century or so that saw the elevation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to cultural prominence in Greece, the priestly families that oversaw the Eleusinian rites established the Lesser Mysteries. These lesser mysteries, called “the Teaching” or “The Telling”, were also only open to would-be initiates, who sent a donation of a piglet as an offering to the Telasterion and its attendant families as the price of initiation.
This Telling was held at this time of year, in our mid-March before the Spring Equinox, in the Athenian “month of flowers” — and they were a catechism of sorts, a multi-day series of rituals, sacred meals, purifications, lectures and discussions about what would be received by the initiates at the Greater Mysteries. Once inducted, attendees then were eligible to participate in the Greater Mysteries eighteen months later, where they would have the background and intellectual framework to understand the experiences that the initiates went through in the autumn.
It sounds a lot like a modern pagan gathering, with rituals interspersed with workshops, doesn’t it? And how many of us had the depth of knowledge to understand our first pagan gathering? How many of us needed to come a second time, or a third, to really understand what was going on?
Of course, our rituals today are not the same. At Eleusis in the fall, we know there was “an ear of grain in silence reaped” — there was a mass washing of people at a beach, and a night in complete darkness, and a sacred drink in the dark, and a chest or box with sacred secret things in it, and a basket whose contents are similarly obscure to us today. And our rites and rituals are not so obscure or ancient to us that we have to hold special training sessions eighteen months ahead of time to have clarity about them.
But. All the same?
It’s not a bad idea to use this time of year to reflect on our own mysteries — not the Mysteries of what this object or that ancient text might mean to us as pagans today; or how to interpret the strange symbolism of rituals that haven’t been performed in almost eighteen hundred years.
No — instead, let’s take the time to talk about the Mysteries of how all life on Earth is dependent on the interrelationships of Sun and seed and soil, of rock and planetary orbit and seasonal shifts in daily sunlight, and the way that the dead provide both the fuel and foundation for new life. We can couch it in myth — like Persephone and Hades and Demeter and Helios — or in the most up-to-date scientific lingo we can.
But at its heart, this is still a mystery we humans understand only a little. And we deserve to be reminded of it, again and again — and perhaps most especially at this time of year, when the equinox is not yet come and the trees are still bare of leaf or blossom. This is the time of year when we most benefit from the reminders and the explanation, of course — because in summer and in autumn, the bounty of this transformation is obvious. Now we need to Tell ourselves the story, because the Show will be so obvious, later in the year.
And perhaps this is the reason to mark the Lesser Mysteries now, at this time of year when it’s still gray. It’s how we make spring come early in our hearts and minds, and bring a little of the mystery of Eleusis into our life.
There, it is already spring.
