The team of Wasson, Ruck and Hofmann has focused its research on the scene at Eleusis, near Athens, and analyzed the receptacles which were reported to have been used at the celebrated Mysteries, where Demeter and Dionysos were honored by a secret initiatory rite. This secret (of women at its beginning) was surely one of the best kept in history, contrary to the saying that a woman cannot hold a secret. We still don’t know exactly what the famous Eleusinian Mysteries were about, even though they were already established in the Bronze Age and continued through the rationalism of classical Greece up to the point when Christianity suppressed them. Pilgrims went to the sanctuary at Eleusis in search of revelation, of initiation into a vision of eternity.
Anyone—man, woman, slave or emperor—could be initiated at Eleusis except the Barbarians, that is, anyone not Greek. In the Hellenic and Roman era this restriction disappeared, and the Mysteries prevailed over the entire civilized world. In the face of Christianity, Eleusis remained one of the major centers of pagan resistance, right up to the end. Dionysos was not represented at Eleusis at the beginning of the Mysteries, which belonged principally to Demeter (or Cybele or Gaia, other Mother-Goddesses). The basic image of the Mysteries remained that of the Mother separated from her daughter Persephone who has been carried off by Hades. The Mother, inconsolable and angry, wanders over the earth. When the Mother is angry life is barren: as long as her daughter is not returned, Demeter refuses to play her role as Goddess of Fertility. Winter symbolizes the ensuing period of sterility. Still looking for her daughter, Demeter, in tears, arrives one day at Eleusis disguised as a poor old woman and is greeted by the people and their king Keleos who offer her hospitality. She meets there another old woman, Baubo, who distracts her briefly from her pain by making her laugh at some jokes. The story goes that old Baubo lifted up her dress to show Demeter her wrinkled backside while tossing off all sorts of obscenities. Baubo is so funny that Demeter forgets her sorrow and laughs with the old woman.
That episode with old Baubo is taken up again in the Eleusinian ritual when everyone yells obscenities as the procession advances—as if to remind us that laughing is part of the divine. As so often happens in our lives, humor is the beginning of the end of Demeter’s rigid stance; from then on, she moves to rage. Rage and humor are fundamental psychological moves that can help us out of depression: to laugh at oneself or at a funny situation is a sure sign that one is coming out of the inferiority feeling, out of one’s egocentric preoccupation. To laugh is to take a distance, and to gain perspective one has to move out of the depressive pit.