The Mysteries of Bliss XII: Pisces Rising

"The supreme moment of the initiation ceremony was not concerned with the ritual, as Mylonas rightly insists, but with the Deiknumena--the Things shown. Suddenly the doors of the Anaktoron swung open to a blaze of light, streaming presumably from the torch of the Dadouchos, as the Hierophant revealed the Heira. Alongside him stood the goddess’ holy priestess and the two heirophantides, female ‘expounders of the mysteries,’ representing Demeter and her daughter. The effect must have been awe-inspiring as the moment when the Orthodox bishop proclaims the Resurrection of the Christ.

"The nature of the Orgia is much disputed, and will almost certainly be never revealed. Possibly they were Myceneaan cult objects, as Mylonas suggests, whose provenance and purpose had been long forgotten. Possibly again the parable of the cycle of vegetation played its part, though we can hardly accept Hippolytus’ contemptuous statement that the Epoptae or Adepts, who were admitted to the higher mysteries, were merely shown a ripe ear of wheat. According to the same authority, the ritual also included a holy birth. ‘In the course of the night,’ he says, ‘the hierophant at Eleusis in the midst of a brilliant fire celebrating the Great and Unspoken Mysteries cries and shouts aloud saying ‘Holy Brimo has borne a sacred child Brimos, that is the Mighty has given birth to the Mighty One.’'

- John Pollard, “The Eleusinian Mysteries,” in Seers, Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century BC



"To enter the figure of Demeter means to be pursued, to be robbed, raped, to fail to understand, to rage and grieve, but then to get everything back and be born again. And what does all of this mean, save to realize the universal principle of life, the fate of everything mortal? What, then, is left over for the figure of Persephone? Beyond question, that which constitutes the structure of the living creature apart from this endlessly-repeated drama of coming-to-be and passing-away, namely the uniqueness of the individual and its enthrallment to non-being. Uniqueness and non-being understood not philosophically but envisaged corporeally in figures, or rather as these are envisaged in the formless, unsubstantial realm of Hades. There Persephone reigns, the eternally unique one who is no more. ... Had that uniqueness not been, had nothing ever stirred and started up in non-being, then the realm of Hades would not exist, in relation to pure nothing it would not be at all, not even an aspect of the past.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore”

That door which once entered Eleusis
is the frame through which I
beheld her for one flickering moment.
She stood there smiling in
my heart’s outflooding stream,
smiling with eyes that said Yes.
I reached for her; she faded
with a kiss; I woke to the
third birth which fraught
the first two, ferrying me beyond
my mother’s womb and on
beyond the Christ’s shipwrecked
tomb into ardor and futility of
the deepest sea whose shores
I now attend in wavelike lines
across and down the page.
Ten thousand nights I hurried
out that door with heart on fire
for that arrow which flew
from hidden surfeit billows,
pouring all that booze onto
what proved a pyre of lonely
choiring bones. There was no
woman to find in the way
I needed her most: She was gone,
hitched to the Lord of Underworlds,
sped or fled away on cruel wheels.
Her absence became the crown
which my nights wore as I
raged and galloped and cursed
indifferent shores. That door’s
interior reaches like a universe
of frozen, too-distant stars
which burn on in eternal remembrance
of that night in which I came to
be a man, awakened and then
shattered in a hurled epiphany,
baptized by that she-shaped wave
so blue and wild and ecstatic
that I was jolted free, if only
for one night, into some quasi-
immortal scree of one,
planted and reborn in Thee.
Too bad I was then left to figure out
what to make of that awesome
awful door which framed the
nothing which she faded with
a smile through, a door which
then swung shut and locked
me in empty self’s tomblike
chill, bereft of all wild seas.
Without Eleusis I had
to myth that door in darkness,
with all the madness and error
of the fool who knows but can’t
quite say it and acts out the
drama in reverse, with ass-ears
on, upside down, backwassward,
wrong-headed, puerile,
vicious, out of control, abused,
with all the malice and criminal
intent of the son mothered
by heartbreak. A sad way to
go -- you can waste your life stuck
down there, bewildering through
the old labyrinth, making wrong turn
over and over into more wrongful
depths, holding high the fool candle
which blunders on convinced
you’ll get lucky some night
and find the strip-club-
caliber muse who’ll turn
all things aright
with one sassy sashay
of her upturned ass.
I’m still on that fool’s
errand, just on a different stage,
penis exchanged for pen,
salty nights for bottomless page.
Here it is at solstice and
I say this song’s at end, ready
to be put to bed in the
manger which concludes the tale,
the king’s youngest son reborn
in a rude hut out beneath the
stars, long after I gave up
on finding his immortal mother
in the bars, lost all flicker of
her here down the wearyings
age & so much ink spilled
in bootless rage. It simply ends,
and then he cries
tender, small and frail,
the candled renewed, leaping
across the word from where
she disappeared to where
he now begins: Thus one year
ends in the welcome of the next.
Dark and still outside, absent
and dreamy in the night’s far
wash -- at high tide here of
all that’s lost, is dead, moved on,
can never be found again --
Christmas lights burning white
across the street, a soft far slur
of traffic on 441 -- nothing here
suggests new life, but that’s
why we have mysteries, doors
turning near and wide, bliss
heightened to infinity
exactly where it dies.
My wife’s awake now & in
the shower upstairs, water
which echoes the sound
of my soul’s imago padding
softly in the garden outside,
blue slippers on her feet
still dewed with our embrace,
her blue gown like water
over her lush curves, her
blue eyes of a moon which
is nowhere this morning
to be found. But wait: You know
it will return, like the upside
wash of love, redeeming all this
drought and dearth with an infant’s
mewling cry, nursed by
his mother’s evanescently
fulfilling sigh,
tracked by an infinitesimal I
rowing on alone in
this verse coracle
praising far Demeter’s skies.