The Eleusinian Mysteries unfolded in two stages a year apart. The Lesser Mysteries were held each spring at Agrae, near Athens, as a preliminary purification open to any Greek speaking person who had not committed murder. The Greater Mysteries followed in the month of Boedromion, roughly September, and ran about nine days. They opened with initiates bathing in the sea at Phaleron, each with a piglet later sacrificed, then a great procession walked the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis carrying the hiera, sacred objects kept in closed baskets, while invoking Iacchus, a youthful god who personified the procession's ecstatic cry.
At Eleusis the candidates fasted in memory of Demeter's own grief, then broke the fast by drinking the kykeon, a barley and pennyroyal beverage recalling the goddess's refusal of wine while she mourned her daughter. The culminating rite took place after dark inside the Telesterion, a vast roofed hall built to hold thousands, under the Hierophant, an office held for life by a man of the Eumolpidae family, assisted by the Dadouchos, the torch bearer, from the Kerykes family. What was shown and said there was protected by an oath of secrecy carrying the death penalty for disclosure, which is why no ancient author ever described the climactic rite in full. Those who had completed the rite once were called mystai; those admitted a year or more later to its highest revelation, the epopteia, were epoptai, those who have seen.