The winter solstice, 21 December

Story · scroll slowly, with your eyes open

Mystery may come from a Greek word for closing your eyes.1 Or your lips.

Mystery

A procession of small figures walks along a road below a hill with a round temple, in a wide sunny landscape.
View of Delphi with a Procession · Claude Lorrain, 1673 · Art Institute of Chicago 1941.1020

I. The roadEvery autumn, crowds walked from Athens to Eleusis. About twenty kilometres.

They shouted one name the whole way: Iakchos!

A huge orange moon rises over dark trees and a field at dusk; a small figure stands in the grass.
Moonrise · George Inness, 1891 · Art Institute of Chicago 1911.39

II. The nightThey arrived after dark, by torchlight.

Then they went into the great hall, and the doors closed.

III. InsideWhat happened inside, nobody wrote down.

For more than a thousand years, thousands of people went in.

Not one of them told.

A young woman in a white headscarf holds a finger to her lips; a small child sleeps against her.
Woman and Child (Silence) · Auguste Boulard the Elder, 1855–60 · Art Institute of Chicago 1968.94

IV. Lips closedThe Hymn to Demeter says these rites can’t be spoken: “deep awe of the gods checks the voice.”

Cicero went. All he would say was that he came home with a reason to live with joy.

A quiet room with a closed white door and sunlight on the floor; a woman stands with her back to us by the window.
Strandgade, Sunshine · Vilhelm Hammershøi, c. 1906 · Cleveland Museum of Art 2023.38

V. Keep oneSome things grow when you don’t tell them.

Try this

Keep one good thing to yourself for a day before you tell anyone. Notice how it feels to carry it.

The word: Greek myein, to close the eyes or the lips; an initiate was a mystēs (Online Etymology Dictionary, mystery). The rites can’t be spoken: Homeric Hymn to Demeter 476–479, Evelyn-White 1914. The shout of Iakchos on the road: Herodotus 8.65; Aristophanes, Frogs 316 onwards. The walk from Athens, the arrival by torchlight, the hall (the Telesterion), and the rites kept until the end of the 300s AD: George Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, 1961. Cicero: On the Laws 2.36, in our own words.

Myopia has the same Greek verb in it, myein, “to shut”: the short-sighted were the ones who squint.

The paintings

  1. At the top: Bernard Gaillot, Woman Sleeping in a Landscape with a Letter, c. 1800. Cleveland Museum of Art 2008.289.
  2. Claude Lorrain, View of Delphi with a Procession, 1673. Art Institute of Chicago 1941.1020.
  3. George Inness, Moonrise, 1891. Art Institute of Chicago 1911.39.
  4. Auguste Boulard the Elder, Woman and Child (Silence), 1855–60. Art Institute of Chicago 1968.94.
  5. Vilhelm Hammershøi, Strandgade, Sunshine, c. 1906. Cleveland Museum of Art 2023.38.

Read on

All stories · short myths, A to Z

1 Online Etymology Dictionary, mystery