A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

Very little is known about the Eleusinian Mysteries and the earliest manifestations of Orphism; yet the fascination that they have exercised over the best minds of Europe for more than twenty centuries constitutes a religious fact that is highly significant and whose consequences have not yet been properly understood. Certainly, the Eleusinian initiation and the secret Orphic rites, extolled by certain late authors, reflect mythologizing Gnosticism and Greco-Oriental syncretism. But it is precisely this conception of the Mysteries and of Orphism that influenced medieval Hermeticism, the Italian Renaissance, the “occultist” traditions of the eighteenth century, and Romanticism; and the Mysteries and the Orpheus that inspired modern European poetry, from Rilke to T. S. Eliot and Pierre Emmanuel, are still the Mysteries and the Orpheus of the scholars and mystics and theologians of Alexandria.