Episode 157: Mystic

(Intro & Piano music) Μυώ (meo) is an ancient Greek verb and it means I initiate someone into a religion, I induct. The ceremony for that induction is called a μυστήριον (mystirion). The biggest religious festival in ancient Greece was the Ελευσίνια μυστήρια (elefsinia mystiria) to celebrate and worship the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. The festival would last nine days and people from all over Greece would travel to Athens to watch. Not all days were accessible to the public. Some would be and music, dance, food, theatre and re-enactments of Demeter's search for her daughter would take place. But the secret days were the ones where initiations happened. To this day, we know very little about what took place during days three and six and that's because revealing even the tiniest of detail, was punishable by death. The general idea was that the high priests would accept the new members by passing on the secret to the afterlife. The priests were called μύστες (mystes), the initiation μυστήριο (mystirio) and since secret and unknown things happened even after Christianity took over, and the festival ceased to exist, the word kept a meaning that engulfed all the festival was. In old French Mystere, in Latin Mysterium and in modern Greek the word for secret, Μυστικό/Mystic.

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