Initiation, ritual, and experience in the Eleusinian Mysteries and on Plato’s Symposium a preliminary analysis.

Abstract

On this paper we formulate a few preliminary questions on initiation in both the Eleusinian Mysteries and on Plato’s Symposium, with the idea of transposition as the groundwork for our work, in an attempt to identify a few elements of the Eleusinian Mysteries supposedly transposed in the dialogue between the ‘young’ Socrates and Diotima. Thus, our paper is divided in two central parts: the first one, the longest one, in which we analyze what initiation could have been in the Eleusinian Mysteries, having as our goal a better understanding of the Eleusinian initiation and what transposition this initiation might carry on to the case of the ‘young Socrates’; the second one, the short one, we’ll focus on Plato’s Symposium, trying to identify signs and hints of elements from the Eleusinian Mysteries, centrally focused on the transposition of ‘vision’, with the goal of formulating our hypothesis that there are transpositions made by Plato from the Eleusinian Mysteries. In other words, here on this paper we will focus mainly on the element of vision and, hopefully, expand this scope of view to envelop all of the transpositions supposedly made by Plato from the Eleusinian Mysteries during the dialogue between young Socrates and Diotima on our PhD thesis.