5.5.1: Charter

Charter theory offers a way of understanding and examining myths through the rituals and practices they inspired. Demeter’s chief institution is the Lesser and Greater Eleusinian [el-oo-SIN-ee-un] Mysteries, rituals which recorded, taught and recreated the sacred rules of agriculture. As the name implies, much of the sacred wisdom of the rituals are lost within the silence of the mysteries outside of those initiated into the rites.

The rituals took place twice a year at the Mycenaean city of Eleusis, which means “advent,” and in Athens, and lasted nine days, symbolic of Demeter’s initial search for her daughter. Occurring in September and October, months that align with the fall harvest, the celebrations were widely attended and led by officiant priests of Demeter’s temples, and included fasting–symbolic of Persephone’s fast in Hades–costumes; purification baths in the nearby sea; sacrificing of sows, a sacred animal to Demeter and to the Great Goddess; reenactment of the hierogamy (hieros gamos), the sacred marriage, which involved her initiates “working a phallic object up and down a woman’s top-boot;” the subsequent trooping out of a [doll representing] the infant (Plutus), the instantaneous product of the hierogamy; and on the sixth day, a song-filled and torchlit procession from Demeter’s temple, which likely symbolized Kore’s descent into Hades. The highpoint of the Mysteries arrived with the epiphany (the appearance of the goddess) where Demeter granted her initiates with celestial communion, perhaps wisdom that improved the harvest or reassurance about the cycles of life, death and rebirth (Graves 71) (Harris and Platzner 150). Armstrong explains:

Death was fearful, frightening and inevitable, but it was not the end. If you cut a plant, and threw away the dead branch, it gained a new sprout. Agriculture led to a new, if qualified, optimism. The seed had to die, in order to produce grain; pruning was actually helpful to plants, and encouraged new growth. The initiation at Eleusis showed that the confrontation with death led to spiritual regeneration, and was a form of human pruning. It could not bring immortality–only the gods lived forever–but it could enable you to live more fearlessly and therefore more fully here on earth, looking death calmly in the face . . . and to have the courage to change and grow. (Armstrong Myth 56-57)

Armstrong’s insights neatly situate with the ancient practice of burying a female corn doll each winter, which was unearthed in the spring having magically sprouted. The practice endured throughout the Classical era, and is recorded on vases that illustrate men liberating Persephone from a crown of earth with mattocks (an agricultural tool), symbolically “breaking open Mother Earth’s head with axes” (Graves 70).

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The character of Triptolemus (“thrice daring”) figures largely in the myths of Demeter and represents one of the worthy humans she bestowed her favor upon. His name evokes the “thrice-plowed fields” from her sexual union with Iasion, an act which recalls the sacred sexual rites believed to assure agricultural fertility. Apollodorus writes: “But for Triptolemus, the elder of Metanira's children, she made a chariot of winged dragons, and gave him wheat, with which, wafted through the sky, he sowed the whole inhabited earth. But Panyasis affirms that Triptolemus was a son of Eleusis, for he says that Demeter came to him. Pherecydes, however, says that he was a son of Ocean and Earth.” Plato credits him with being “a mythological hero of Eleusis, worshiped as the inventor and patron of agriculture.” In this vase, Triptolemus sits in his dragon cart receiving Demeter’s water into his bowl of grain, while Persephone stands behind him holding a wreath. By the Triptolemos-painter, c. 470 BCE, Louvre. (Public Domain, via Wikimedia)