Course Descriptions

As both transcendent and immanent powers, Demeter and Persephone embodied the powers of generative nature, procreation, provisioning food for all people, and the descent into suffering and its transcendence. By participating in the Eleusinian Mysteries, initiates enacted and witnessed the sacred mythos of the Mother and Daughter and were inducted into a deeper experience of the Mysteries of birth and sexuality, death and rebirth. These Mysteries, as portrayed in Diotima’s teaching to Sokrates (in Plato’s Symposium), are erotic and cosmic mysteries of love. Transformed by their experience, initiates received a new way of seeing, a new way of living in kinship with the divine Source of all. As Cicero wrote, they found “greater joy in this life, and hope for life beyond death.” Two units online explore the Eleusinian Mysteries and their significance. An optional third unit involves an abridged reenactment of the Eleusinian Mysteries rites of Demeter and Persephone, co-created by course participants in collaboration with the instructor, during a weekend intensive. This course is graded on a Pass/Not Pass basis only.