The Eleusinian Mystery Poems
THE NINE DAYS
Poems by Fleda Brown JacksonImages by Norman Sasowsky
Copyright 1997
INTRODUCTION
Eleusis is the site of the best-kept secret of the
ancient world. From the eighth century B.C. until the Goths
burned the sanctuary in A.D. 395, Greek-speaking men, women,
and slaves were annually initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The nine-day secret ceremony represented Demeter's nine days
of wandering the earth in grief, searching for her daughter
Persephone, who had been snatched away into the underworld
by the god Hades. The ceremony linked the growing of grain,
the bread of life, with the rich, dark necessity of death.
The ritual was said to be transformative: to speak of it would
be to endanger the cosmic cycle of regeneration. The Mysteries,
the last stronghold of prehistoric agrarian goddess culture,
lost ground with each wave of patriarchal invaders.
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We first intended this project to be a loosely connected series
of poems and images based on the few available facts about the
Mysteries at Eleusis. As our work evolved, the poems became a
narrative, as did the images. The poems are the voice of one woman;
the images are the collective vision of myth, interpreted by a single
imagination.
During the time the Mysteries were practiced, artists made vase
paintings and sculptures to represent some elements of the ceremony
without ever explicitly revealing either the actual experiences of the
initiates or the ritual. The story here, and the images, are our vase
paintings and sculpture. Working independently, we chose to allow words
and images, story and myth, to tattle on each other,
as they always do.
Fleda Brown Jackson
Norman Sasowsky