What follows are the preliminary, gathered sketches of a story that has been haunting me since last summer. I know I promised an essay on my recent trip to Glastonbury, but as I was sitting down to write it I kept getting pulled under the strange, haunting, not altogether comfortable or pleasant tidal force that is Glastonbury, and I also kept thinking of this story, of a similarly whirlwind visit to another very sacred place of pilgrimage, though on mainland Greece. Eleusis, of Eleusinian Mystery fame.
Something about the road and the drive toward Glastonbury tor, seeing it rise up sudden and green and gravid out of flat fields, felt very much like the road I drove last summer from the Athens airport to the site of ancient Eleusis, the old sacred way that initiates walked yearly to participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries rites. Visually, they are nothing alike. Hot huge highways outside of Athens in June heat reaching triple digits Farenheit; the soft green verges and mild two lane motorways of Somerset in April. And yet the magnetism was the same. The energetic pull. The sense of an old, old avenue leading to a place of profound spiritual potency that people had walked for thousands of years. The sense of approaching a site of remembered transmutation, dismemberment, and rebirth.
The story I want to share this weekend is about the great marble bust of one of the Caryatids from ancient Eleusis who once held up the roof of the Lesser Propylaea, a small sanctuary to Demeter and Persephone next to the cave of Pluto that was the first gateway into Eleusis. Caryatids are carved stone women used as architectural supports, but mythically they are nut-tree nymphs. The word karidia, walnut tree in modern Greek, surely shares this etymological root; certainly in my memory it does. While living in Crete, I thought of the dancing karyatides every time I ate a walnut.
This particular bust was known through the late 18th century to local people as St. Dimitra. She has been housed (by abduction) at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge since the early 1800s. I have been trailing her since last summer, winding my way toward the museum to pay my respects, though for some reason each attempt to get there has been thwarted. Her Eleusis (modern day Eleusina) I could reach, but not her angry perch in the pale light of the Fitzwilliam. Undoubtedly there is a reason for this. I’ve dreamed I made it there, my mother and I together, and that she was hung with a kind of brightly colored quilt made up of the repeating faces of the Virgin Mary. In the dream the museum was crowded, but no one was looking at her. I was whisked out again and couldn’t get back in.
Perhaps there are other pieces that need to fall into place before I can reach her. I trust that I will. Meanwhile, I think she wants her story spoken. So here are my first attempts, one a piece of nonfiction, the other a piece of fiction. The first Facts, the second Dreamings.
Note: all the following photographs are mine, © June 2021 from the ancient archaeological site of Eleusis
The facts about St. Dimitra
The year is 1801; the place is Eleusina, Greece. In the center of what was once the entry temple to the sacred precincts of classical Eleusis, where the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone were observed for more than a thousand years, a huge marble bust of a woman is sticking up out of the earth. She’s been this way since approximately 305 AD, when Visigoths sacked the city and burned the temple to the ground, leaving her broken and submerged.
She is known to the local people as Saint Dimitra, patroness of the fertility of their earth. Her face is worn entirely smooth— by worshipful hands, by rain, by sun. On her head is a carved reed basket, a cista mystica sheltering holy objects, like the priestesses of Demeter once carried from Athens to Eleusis during the Festival of the Greater Mysteries in early autumn. She is heaped regularly with animal manure to ensure abundant flocks and fields. I like to imagine that around her stone cista there might have been dried wreaths of flowers too—freesia and helichrysum, pink gladiola and Queen Anne’s lace— like people in villages still make in Crete to mark the first day of May.
By local legend at that time, Saint Dimitra was a chaste Christian girl carried off by a Turkish man to be his bride against her will. Eventually, after many trials, her mother saved her and the two were reunited. Sound familiar? A bit like the story of a lovely maiden named Persephone who was out one day gathering crocus and narcissus from a field with her girlfriends when Hades emerged out of a chasm in the earth and whisked her off to be his underworld bride against her will? A bit like the story of her mother Demeter, goddess of grain, of seeds, of the earth’s fertility, who went in mourning across the land, searching for her lost daughter, refusing to let the crops of humankind flourish until Persephone was returned to her?
Here is a sea-purple thread. Here, in Saint Dimitra, the great goddesses Demeter and Persephone never quite died.
But danger is lurking. Enter Edward Daniel Clarke that same year, 1801, a British antiques collector who has come to the ancient site of Eleusis, eager to see what he can find. The minute he beholds the bust of Saint Dimitra rising there out of ancient and hallowed ground, he wants her. She is after all one of the original two karyatides, monumental priestess-women carved into great columns that held up the roof of the Smaller Propylaea.
But the villagers of Eleusina are adamant that he not dig her out of the ground. They tell him that she guards the fertility of all of their fields, and that if she were to be moved, a curse would come to Eleusis. Clarke doesn’t care. He wants what he wants. He bribes the then-Turkish governor with a telescope, and the statue is his—after an enormous effort digging her out of the ground. The ship he puts her on even sinks on its way back to England, but the statue is somehow recovered and makes its way to the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge anyway, where it sits to this day, looking down from a great ledge upon the rest of the artifacts.
Meanwhile, within a couple growing seasons, the crops start to fail in Eleusina—Eleusinia of Thriasian fame. Eleusina root of Demeter’s fertility. It’s unthinkable. The old women were right. Without Dimitra, a curse falls on Eleusis. Not long after, a soap factory sets up shop, poisoning the water with run-off. Over the next century, Eleusisina becomes the industrial hub of Greece and the location of its single largest oil refinery, providing much-needed jobs for an economically struggling country just emerging from centuries of Ottomon rule, but wreaking havoc on farmlands and the health of water and air and human bodies in the process. Steel, crude oil, chemical paint, cement, cargo ships coming and going dumping refuse and oil into the sea. The sacred way from Athens to Corinth is now a major highway. It curves between mountains toward the Gulf of Eleusis, where oil refineries loom.
I am struck by this juxtaposition as I turn the bend on a triple-digit-hot day in June, heading for the ancient ruin. My car is suddenly filled with the scent of crude oil. It’s overpowering, dizzying. This road literally winds on top of the ancient Sacred Way —the Iera Odos. There is a street sign under an overpass when I enter the modern city of Eleusina that bears this name.
Turning down into the once-fertile Thriasian plain, I feel trapped, claustrophobic, grief-stricken. Eleusis’ secret treasure is Demeter’s body, and it has been ravaged. Eleusis’ secret treasure is Persephone’s body, and she has been stolen. Grief brings Demeter into the human realm, grief brings Demeter among us, seeking her child: “She cast a dark cloak on her shoulders/ and sped like a bird over dry land and sea,/ searching.”[1]
I think about how Demeter gave the secrets of agriculture to humans as a precious gift that required reverence and careful, worshipful exchange. How she struck the earth with famine in her mourning, but then made it grow once more when she was reunited her child. How she offered to share her suffering over the loss of her daughter with mortal humans in the form of the Mystery rites, as if to say I forgive you, I love you, I will not leave you, I will show you what the earth knows, so you are not afraid. I think of Calypso, the sea-nymph who kept Odysseus on her island for eight years. How her name means “that which is hidden,” the inverse of apocalypse, “that which is revealed.” Oil a hidden secret in the earth which, when revealed, spells apocalypse.
Demeter Demeter Demeter, I want to cry. What has become of your daughter.
I park and make my way through the archaeological site to stand on the marble steps where the stolen statue once held up the sky with her cista, where after that for almost two thousand years she once maintained the fertility of the villagers’ fields.
It’s baking out. St John’s wort is blooming, yellow and ragged, at my ankles. Hardy mullein is struggling to grow between stones. There are a few olives for shade. To my right are shallow natural caves under a hill, with ruins of early cult shrines to Pluto/Hades. On top of the hill is a chapel to the Panagia Mesosporitissa— Virgin of the Mid-Sowing Season. In recent years, village women have renewed an ancient ritual of bringing their bread and wheat to be blessed in the church on the day of the Virgin’s autumn festival in November. They also mix the ancient polysporia, the “all-seed” from what they have in their kitchens, blended with grape molasses and pomegranate seeds, to share with all churchgoers.
Right in the heart of Eleusis, Demeter has never left.
I’ve come with gifts, hand-woven and naturally dyed by Cretan women in a traditional weaving workshop I participated in the previous week. I’ve been working on one myself all week, because I know instinctively that I can’t go to such a place without a real offering. One I took time over. One I would rather not give away. It’s a little mat made of papyrus stems I cut from the roadside in the village, held secure by cordage I’ve twined from dead iris leaves, and then woven with wool a new friend of mine dyed with loquat fruits, mulberries, and pomegranate rind. I have walnuts too, and carob pods, and bits of wild wheat.
I felt uncannily and rather impractically called to make this side-trip between flights back to England, where Saint Dimitra’s bust now lives. One of the women in the workshop was named Dimitra, a kindergarten teacher in a mountain village passionate about bringing traditional handcrafts and earth-reverence back to the children of her island. She, in particular, was insistent that I bring one of her pieces to the temple. The older I get, she told me, the more connected I feel to Demeter, to my own name. The more I feel like her.
I climb up a wild ledge when the docent isn’t looking and leave Dimitra’s weaving nestled up above the caves, near the chapel and the ruins of the old temple, out of sight for all except the sun and weather. Beyond the fence of the archaeological site, industry roars. The sound of semi-trucks and cargo ships coming and going never ceases. But Demeter is still alive here— in Saint Dimitra, in the Panagia Mesosporitissa, in modern Greek women. The myth is ongoing.
We are still watching it unfold.
We are watching Demeter grieve and wander the earth seeking her daughter between smokestacks, in dry riverbeds, in polluted bays.
And we still have the chance to come toward her bearing gifts.
To come offering seeds. To return stolen statues. To listen. To weep.
To allow hidden parts of ourselves to be made new.
To wait and watch and pray for Persephone to come back up from far below, with red poppies in her hair.
The dreaming of St. Dimitra
A man came across the spring fields toward me. He did not think to step around the young garlic. Perhaps in his foreignness he thought it was a weed. But then, he didn’t seem like the sort of man who looked down very often. Not the sort of man to see that the earth was dug in careful rows by hand so that the water could run down between, and that there were seeds in it for all manner of wildflowers that had yet to come up, and that the barley already had, with its blue tinge. There would be red poppies later. They liked the barley fields. They always had. They came up through the blue-green grass like woman’s blood.
The man walked through all that. Broke the garlic stems. Crushed down the well-mounded soil the old women had patted like bread into place.
“I will have her,” he said about me to the Turkish officer. He said it like I was someone’s daughter ripe for marriage. He had, by the sound of it, great confidence in his offer.
“But my dowry, sir, was woven by the dead,” I replied, but he couldn’t hear me like the old women could. All he heard was a wind through the barley, and a bird somewhere calling.
He was, naturally, not aware I could speak at all. And he wasn’t really seeing me anyway. What he wanted was my sister, but he didn’t know about her. In fact no one did anymore except me, and Demeter’s people under the earth. He wanted a fairer face than mine, a more articulated beauty, classical, the kind he thought of as Greek. Whiter, distant, virgin, pristine.
My sister in the earth had been untouched for fifteen hundred years. She had been there, where she had fallen when our temple fell, buried under marble carved with sheaves of wheat and roses, so that it was as if she hadn’t aged at all. Her skin would be luminous still like it had been when we held the temple roof up. White as milk, like the men once sang about noble women who never left their balconies or their father’s shaded courtyards.
Meanwhile, my skin had been in the weather for as long as hers had been in the ground. I was earth-colored now, almost featureless for the number of prayers that had come as hands stroking my face, for the centuries of rain, and wind, and heat, and for the quilts of manure that got banked around me seasonally, to ensure I blessed the fields. I always did, and gladly, for I liked to be touched, and spoken to, and I liked the wet feeling of everything green rising up out of death.
Still, I don’t know if I was lucky or unlucky in the way I fell so as to be visible when the temple fell, when we two could no longer hold up the entry to Demeter’s house, when we two could no longer hold up the moon.
It was the sound of two trees falling—big sturdy walnut trees in high summer that girls shaped like us climbed up at solstice to gather the nuts for a black liqueur. We fell like old-growth full of virgins, we fell with the memory of the ten thousand initiates who had passed through our hall.
We fell in fire, in violence. We fell and were overrun. We were too big to be loot.
My sister did not have to watch it, she fell face down and was quickly buried under more stone, and soon after the winter rains that moved soil to cover her.
I, however, saw it all.
Here, she falls silent. I cannot seem to hear more. Maybe I will when I have gone to pay my respects to her in Cambridge. Maybe she will tell me why she was wreathed in colored fabrics printed with the face of Mary in my dream. Maybe it is hard for her to speak, so far from her sister and her indigenous ground. Maybe she is tired.
I will leave you with a favorite poem of mine that carries Demeter’s voice, by American poet Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948). I first came across it five or six years ago, and it has been close to my desk and my heart ever since. A prayer, and a command I continue to do my best to follow.
Demeter In your dream you met Demeter Splendid and severe, who said: Endure. Study the art of seeds, The nativity of caves. Dance your body to the poise of waves; Die out of the world to bring forth the obscure Into blisses, into needs. In all resources Belong to love. Bless, Join, fashion the deep forces, Asserting your nature, priceless and feminine. Peace, daughter. Find your true kin. — then you felt her kiss. Genevieve Taggard circa 1940
[1] Helene P. Foley, editor and translator, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, Interpretive Essays (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), lines 42-44.