Demeter, Mysteries

Aristides the Rhetor in the second century A.D. called the experience "new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition. The "Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which tells us most about what occurred, states "Blissful is he among men on Earth who has beheld that He who has not been initiated into the holy Mysteries, who has had no part therein, remains a corpse in... 

The Effect of the Grace of the Mysteries is praised by a homeric hymn to Demeter, with the words ... 

Now, in regards to the deaths, which we have to die of, one will make the Human Being out of a three a two, and the other, out of a two, a one The former is in the region and under the righteousness of Demeter That is why the name that was given to the mysteries (telu), was like the one given to death (teleute). 

The Mysteries of Demeter became the established religion of the Arcadians and over the years developed into the worship of Diana. In recent times, the women of Aegina re-established this ritual, most likely in the spirit of protecting their husbands from the Goddess (see Appendix 13). 

As we have seen, the herding, protein-eating Indo-Hittites saw little merit in the Mother Goddess analogy of male sacrifice. Under pressure of change at Delphi, the king sacrifice became the sacrifice of any male. Later a male child became a live sacrifice or sparagmos in the Mysteries of Demeter. 

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