The Mysteries admitted women, slaves and foreigners alongside Athenian citizens. The two bars were homicide, since a person carrying blood-guilt was polluted and could not approach the sacred, and inability to speak Greek, since the proclamation and the rite were conducted in it. Nothing else was required beyond the fee, the sacrificial piglet and the preliminary rites, and the numbers initiated each year appear to have been large. That openness is worth setting beside the secrecy, because the two are usually treated as opposites and were not. Eleusis was a public institution of the Athenian state, administered by named hereditary families, funded through accounts cut in stone and announced by a herald, and its secret was kept inside a crowd rather than inside a small closed circle. Roman emperors were initiated in their turn, and the sanctuary continued until Christian imperial legislation closed it and the buildings were destroyed at the end of the fourth century.
Facts
Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteThe openness is worth setting beside the secrecy, because the two are usually treated as opposites and were not. Eleusis was a public institution of the Athenian state, administered by named hereditary families and funded through accounts cut in stone, and its secret was kept inside a crowd rather than inside a small closed circle. 1 Structure
StructureTwo bars only: homicide, since a person carrying blood-guilt was polluted and could not approach the sacred, and inability to speak Greek, since the proclamation and the rite were conducted in it. Nothing else was required beyond the fee, the sacrificial piglet and the preliminary rites. 1 Belief
SubjectCommunity and its boundaries 1 Origins
Held ByThe Eleusinian Mysteries 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1 Learn More
The Emperor Who Went Through the Rite Like Everyone Else
The clearest illustration of how far Eleusinian openness actually reached is a single well documented biography. The emperor Hadrian traveled to Athens more than once, was initiated into the Mysteries at Eleusis during one of those visits, and by most accounts underwent the higher grade of initiation, the epopteia, on a later trip, taking his place inside the crowd of ordinary applicants the sanctuary processed every year rather than receiving some invented imperial shortcut. No special mystery rite existed for emperors, and no evidence suggests Hadrian was shown anything an Athenian shopkeeper or a foreign merchant clear of blood guilt was not shown in the same hall the same year. The detail matters against a modern assumption that ancient religion routinely built separate tiers of access for the powerful, since Eleusis instead ran one initiation for everyone who met its two plain conditions, and a Roman emperor met them by walking the same path as the piglet buying crowd Aristophanes had mocked centuries earlier. Hadrian's participation also shows the cult still functioning as a live, prestigious institution deep into the Roman imperial period, not as an archaic survival kept going out of antiquarian respect, and his patronage helped fund building work at the sanctuary that later archaeology has recovered.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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