Mystery Cults in Ancient Greece
The existence of mystery cults in Ancient Greece teaches us that tolerance of diverse religious beliefs and practices held sway to the extent that a number of cults incorporated teachings and practices that were only transmitted during secret rites. An individual desiring to undergo had to vow not to disclose under penalty of death, which was apparently a sanction provided for in the law. Therefore, it must be assumed that such teachings and practices did not in themselves transgress the law or promote transgression of the law, which presumably served to articulate various norms and rules that provided a degree of mutual intelligibility that facilitated a modicum of cohesion among the individuals constituting society.
The secret transmissions associated with the Eleusinian mysteries, for example, were conducted under the auspices of the goddess of agriculture and fertility, Demeter, and I would therefore surmise it to be likely that the teachings related in some manner to phenomena relating to the reproduction of life. With regard to human beings, for example, considering that across cultures the intimacy of human reproduction is treated with the utmost sanctity, and considered to be a most private matter between the man and woman concerned, the respect shown to the secret transmissions of the Elysian mysteries under the law shows that people in Ancient Greece placed great value on the right to privacy.
Here, it is noteworthy that Socrates, perhaps Athens’ most renowned citizen and an early champion of open society, is said to have declined an invitation to be initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, citing the reason that the requirement for secrecy would preclude his discussing the initiation with his students. To Socrates, it seem that such an oath would have represented a de facto self-imposed constriction on his intellectual freedom, perhaps compromising his intellectually integrity. His declining the incitation would appear to indicate that Socrates and his cohorts had come to understand that in order to promote learning and foster the development of a coherent system of ethics for informing a good life in a viable society, intellectual integrity and freedom was an indispensible condition.
The aptness of their judgment in this regard can be discerned from the fact that Plato introduced the thought and discourses of Socrates in a manner that would suggest that he had devoted a substantial part of his life to becoming acquainted with the scope of human knowledge, and that the fruits of Socrates’ efforts can be seen not only to have contributed to broadening that scope, but to also have introduced question that remain without definitive answers, and which may be questions that recur during the course of human development and intercourse. These questions posed by the thought of Socrates have led to various forms of reflection relating to the nature of epistemology per se.
There is little doubt, given the popularity of the cult of the Eleusinian mysteries along with the fact that its secrets were not divulged over the course of more than a thousand years, that Socrates may have missed out on something that was highly valued by his contemporaries and many people over a sustained period. It is also noteworthy in this regard that on the basis of what is known of the core rite of the Eleusinian mysteries, that is, that the transmission involved “something done, something shown, and something said”, the transmission would seem to embody a tactile, sensory approach as opposed to a strictly didactic approach to learning, giving it what we moderns would consider to be an artistic dimension.
Still, the culture of learning and sustained collective inquiry that the efforts of Socrates along with his students, cohorts and predecessors were intent on passing along, with an orientation toward the unknown that served to preserve freedom and enable an ethically valuable life to be led in an open society in which such freedoms could be enjoyed would seem to indicate that the reasoning on the basis of which he reached his decision to forgo the initiation was not without merit.
Moreover, although Socrates was highly critical of the Sophists, whom he essentially considered to be engaged in a fraudulent and mercenary form of pedagogy, as far as I know he was not critical of the mystery cults themselves. This would seem to demonstrate that he respected the privacy of the cult and the people who chose to undergo the initiations, expecting nothing more than a reciprocation of respect for his privacy.
Perhaps Socrates had ascertained through his interactions with the people he encountered who’d undergone the initiation that the initiation and secret teachings transmitted during the rites held some form of intrinsic value to them as evidenced in the manner in which they comported themselves in leading their lives. To Socrates this must have resonated to the extent he professed teachings relating to the ethical dimension of leading a good life as a citizen in an open society and sought to inculcate a mode of subjectivity in his students comprising a conscience, if you will, and the secret initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries seemed to have succeeded in creating a sense of intrinsic value in the initiates in a manner that would be in harmony with Socrates’ goal of fostering a ethically informed subjectivity.
To further clarify the point by way of illustration, in contrast to such resonance one can simply point to the stark contrast which many drew between the life work of Socrates and that of the Sophists. It boils down to the contrast between democracy, as brought into being by Cleisthenes for enabling a group of people to become reflexively self-aware of their shared history and culture to institute means for governing themselves in the interest of the collective, versus democracy as a vehicle that was misappropriated by a group of self interested people seeking to cultivate techniques of persuasion that would enable them to convince people to act against their own interests, or to not act at all, creating conditions ripe for exploiting some perceived vulnerability in the social fabric.
If the contrast drawn above is valid, Socrates again comes to the fore as a pivotal figure in facilitating our study of the early democratic society in the city state of Athens in Ancient Greece. To reiterate, Socrates’ somewhat ambivalent disposition toward the mystery cults, respecting their privacy but wary of the implications of secrecy, indicates something about the characteristics of the functioning of polytheistic religion in society in Ancient Greece in general. Polytheistic religion in Ancient Greece, as embodied in mythology, associated practices, and even secret teachings and practices served, in addition to the role of a preserve of piety, faith and a register of cultural intelligibility, as a vehicle for imparting various forms of learning, and promoting the cultivation of the value of living a life imbued with intrinsic meaning. It was not primarily a tool deployed by a privileged priest class aiming to secure its own status within a hypostacized socio-economic hierarchy by inculcating obeisance among the multitude of the less privileged in the name of an other-worldly authority in whose name they legitimized their status.
To Socrates and his cohorts the ascendency of the Sophist represented a trend of people who had access to the material means to a materially good life to sacrifice the intrinsic dimension of an ethically meaningful life in society in order to perpetuate their own status by means of artifice contrived specifically to deceive or mislead others in the course of public life in the opens society of the democratic polis.
We can see that this represents a corruption of the intellectual work ethic that to some extent informed the democratic character of Ancient Greek society, and to Socrates it is likely that the ascendency of the Sophists was a symptom of a metastasis that heralded the onset of decay and systemic disintegration of open society in the democratic city state of Athens.
It should be emphasized that the degree of respect for privacy that existed in Ancient Greece was an uncommon privilege that, once lost in the course of the history of Western civilization took more than a thousand years to recuperate and enshrine as a fundamental right guaranteed under the law.
