Demeter

Demeter's central cult was the Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated for close to two thousand years at Eleusis near Athens and open to any Greek-speaker, free or enslaved, man or woman, who had not shed blood. Initiates underwent a night ritual in the Telesterion whose culminating vision was guarded by an oath of silence so well kept that, despite the Mysteries' enormous fame, no ancient writer plainly records what was shown; scholars reconstruct only fragments, and the debate over whether a sheaf of grain, a sacred drama of Persephone's return, or an altered state lay at the centre is unresolved. What the sources agree on is the promise: the initiate, unlike the uninitiated, could expect a better lot after death. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter preserves the myth the rite re-enacted, of the mother's search for her stolen daughter.

The Telesterion at Eleusis, the great roofed hall where the Mysteries' central rites were performed, was rebuilt and enlarged repeatedly across the centuries, most notably under the tyrant Peisistratus in the sixth century BCE and again in the fifth century BCE to a design associated with Ictinus, one of the architects of the Parthenon, each expansion accommodating the swelling numbers of initiates drawn from across the Greek and later the Roman world. The cult finally ended not by gradual neglect but by violence and decree: the Christian emperor Theodosius I's edicts of the early 390s CE banned pagan sacrifice across the empire, and in 396 CE the Visigothic king Alaric's forces sacked the sanctuary itself, bringing to a definitive close a rite that had run for close to two thousand years.

Behind the Mysteries stood Demeter's plainer identity as the goddess of the cultivated grain, and her worship tracked the agricultural year across the Greek world. The women-only autumn festival of the Thesmophoria, among the most widespread of all Greek festivals, enacted the fertility of the fields and the seed-corn stored for the next sowing; her title Thesmophoros, the law-bringer, tied agriculture to settled, lawful life, the two being understood as one gift. The Romans identified her with Ceres, an old Italic grain goddess whose name survives in the word cereal and whose temple on the Aventine became a centre of the Roman plebs. Sacred to Demeter were wheat, the poppy that grows among it, the torch of her nocturnal search, and the pig sacrificed at the Thesmophoria.

Sicily held an especially deep attachment to Demeter and her daughter, since Greek tradition placed the abduction of Persephone at the lake of Enna in the island's interior; Cicero, prosecuting the corrupt governor Verres for looting Sicilian temples, calls Enna's sanctuary of the two goddesses the most ancient and sacred of all such shrines and describes the whole island as consecrated to Ceres and Libera above every other place on earth. The historian Diodorus Siculus, himself Sicilian, likewise treats the island's special devotion to Demeter and Persephone as a matter of local pride, evidence that a single Panhellenic myth of loss and searching could take root as an intensely local and even patriotic cult far from Eleusis itself.