PLATO’S X & HEKATE’S CROSSROADS ASTRONOMICAL LINKS TO THE MYSTERIES OF ELEUSIS

Abstract

Recent research suggests that ancient Greek festivals with nighttime elements had astronomical links to specific celestial sights (Boutsikas, Hannah, Ruggles, Salt). Such an astronomical connection can be posited between the night sky at particular seasons and the Mysteries of Eleusis, the pre-eminent religious pilgrimage of the Hellenic and Hellenistic world. The Mysteries of Demeter guaranteed those initiated at the sanctuary outside Athens a happier lot in the hereafter. By the end of the Republic, cultured Romans headed to Athens to participate in the rites of the Mother and her daughter. Cicero had been initiated at Eleusis and, as an objective observer, he reveals that the Mysteries can be explained through natural philosophy – through science. What natural phenomena occurred in spring and in autumn – when the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries were celebrated? Plato describes gates to the afterlife in the Myth of Er at the end of Republic – infernal gates like the cave of Hades at Eleusis, as well as celestial portals that would be located at the intersections in the sky that he describes in Timaeus. The initiated Cicero’s translation into Latin of a section of Timaeus – the part with Plato’s celestial X – suggests an astronomical aspect to the Mysteries. Another astronomical connection to the Mysteries of Eleusis could be found two centuries later when the theurgist authors of the Chaldean Oracles connected Hekate – the goddess of crossroads who had helped Demeter in the Homeric hymn – to the World Soul that according to Plato has the form of a celestial X. At that intersection of the Milky Way and the path of the Planets stand the gates to the afterlife according to Macrobius’ Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, while Cicero had based the Dream of Scipio on Plato’s soteriological Myth of Er and the cosmological Timaeus. At the portals to the afterlife – at the celestial crossroads – stood Hekate, the goddess who opened and closed the gates of Hades and helped Demeter find her daughter.