The Case for God Read Online Free Page B

shaped by religious changes in Greece during the sixth century. The Greeks had a uniquely tragic vision of the world. Their rituals were designed to teach participants to come to terms with the sorrow of life by making them face up squarely to the unspeakable. Every year at the festival of Thesmophoria, for example, they reenacted the story of Demeter, goddess of the grain that provided the economic basis of civilization. 8 She had borne Zeus a beautiful daughter called Persephone. Even though he knew that Demeter would never agree to the match, Zeus had betrothedthe girl to his brother Hades, lord of the underworld, and helped him to abduct her. Distraught with rage, Demeter left Olympus and withdrew all her gifts from humanity. Without corn, the people began to starve, so the Olympians arranged for Persephone’s return on condition that she spend four months each year with her husband. When Persephone was reunited with her mother, the earth burst into flower, but when she returned to Hades during the winter, it seemed to die in sympathy. Thesmophoria compelled the Greeks to imagine what might have happened if Demeter’s favors had been permanently withdrawn. Married women left their husbands and, like the goddess, disappeared from the polis. Together they fasted, slept on the ground as people had done in primitive times, and ritually cursed the male sex. The festival forced the Greeks to contemplate the destruction of civilization, which depended upon the institution of marriage, and to appreciate the real antagonism that existed between the sexes. They also meditated on the catastrophe that would ensue if the crops ceased to grow. At the end of the festival, the women went home and life returned to normal, but everybody knew that the alternative was a lurking, fearful possibility.
    As the concept of the individual developed in the polis, however, Greeks wanted a more personal spirituality alongside the public cult and developed the Mystery Cult. The word “mystery” needs clarification. The
musterion
was neither a hazy abandonment of rationality nor a self-indulgent wallowing in mumbo jumbo. In fact, the Mysteries would have a profound effect on the new philosophical rationalism.
Musterion
was closely related to
myesis
, “initiation;” it was not something that you thought (or failed to think!) but something that you did. 9 The Mysteries that developed during the sixth century were carefully constructed psychodramas in which
mystai
(“initiates”) had a direct and overwhelming experience of the sacred that, in many cases, entirely transformed their perception of life and death.
    The most famous of the Mysteries was celebrated annually at Eleusis, some twenty miles west of Athens. When Demeter had stormed off Mount Olympus after Persephone’s abduction, she wandered all over the earth, disguised as an old woman, searching for her daughter. Metaneira, queen of Eleusis, had taken her into the royal household as a nurse for her son Demophon, and to repay her kindness, Demeter decided to make the child divine by burning away his mortalparts each night in the fire. One night, however, she was interrupted by Metaneira, who was understandably horrified to see her little boy in the flames. Revealing herself in all her glory, Demeter left the palace in a rage but later returned to teach the Eleusinians how to cultivate grain and instruct them in her secret rites. There had probably been some kind of festival at Eleusis since the Neolithic era. But in the sixth century, an enormous new cult hall was built, and for over a millennium the Eleusinian Mysteries would remain an integral part of the religious life of Athens. 10
    Each autumn, a new set of
mystai
voluntarily applied for initiation. What happened inside the cult hall was kept secret because a mere recital of events would sound trivial to an outsider, but the secrecy means we have only partial glimpses of what went on. It seems, however, that the
mystai
reenacted