The Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites E-Book

Wright Dudley

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This interesting essay by Dudley Wright, The Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites, was first published in London in 1919 by the Theosophical Publishing House.
As a publisher, I decided to give this book a new life, republishing it in the Telestérion series, dedicated to the best texts on ancient mystery cults, with the addition of an introductory essay of mine. And I decided to republish it because, as simple and short as it is, it represents in my opinion one of the best essays that have been written on the Eleusinian Mysteries. It contains many truths, many more truths than essays written in recent decades by presumptuous and arrogant academics, who never really understood the true essence and message of Eleusis to humanity.
It is relevant to emphasize the universal and ecumenical nature that distinguished the Eleusinian Mysteries from the other mystery religions in ancient times. One of the main meanings of the message of the Goddess Demeter and of the institution of the Mysteries was symbolized by the possibility, offered to whole mankind, to elevate the sacral concept of “Lineage” through the initiation, at an ecumenical, universal level.
Cicero, initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, referred to them in his writings – as well as in relation to their role for a major civilized development – concerning the knowledge of the “principle of life”, and the hope of a happy survival after death, which the initiation could give: «There is nothing better than the mysteries by which we are polished and softened into politeness, from the rude austerities of barbarism. Justly indeed are they called initiations, for by them we especially learn the grand principles of philosophic life, and gain, not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope». (Nicola Bizzi)

Leseprobe

DUDLEY WRIGHT

THE ELEUSINIAN

MYSTERIES AND RITES

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: The Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites

Author: Dudley Wright

Series: Telestérion

With an introduction by Josepf Fort Newton

and an introductive essay by Nicola Bizzi

Editing and illustrations by Nicola Bizzi

ISBN e-book version: 979-12-80130-34-1

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2021 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

[email protected]

www.auroraboreale-edizioni.com

INTRODUCTION BY THE PUBLISHER

This interesting essay by Dudley Wright, The Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites, was first published in London in 1919 by the Theosophical Publishing House.

As a publisher, I decided to give this book a new life, republishing it in the Telestérion series, dedicated to the best texts on ancient mystery cults, with the addition of an introductory essay of mine. And I decided to republish it because, as simple and short as it is, it represents in my opinion one of the best essays that have been written on the Eleusinian Mysteries. It contains many truths, many more truths than essays written in recent decades by presumptuous and arrogant academics, who never really understood the true essence and message of Eleusis to humanity.

In 2016 the Westphalia Press published an excellent biography by Dudley Wright, written by John Belton: Dudley Wright: Writer, Truthseeker & Freemason. John Belton, a well known British researcher into the history of Freemasonry, a member of Quatuor Coronati Research Lodge in London, and Fellow of the Philalethes Society and the Masonic Society in the United States, is author of several important essays, including The English Masonic Union of 1813: A Tale Ancient & Modern. His main interests are in the nineteenth and especially twentieth century, and for exploring those less travelled angles to masonic history that are often most fascinating.

In my opinion, the title of John Belton’s book could not have been better chosen, because Dudley Wright, in addition to being a great writer and a Freemason, was above all a tireless seeker of Truth.

Born in 1868, Dudley Wright was an Englishman who took a universalist approach to the various great Truths of Life, he travelled though many religions in his life and wrote about them all, but was probably most at home with Islam. As a professional journalist he made his living where he could. In England as Assistant Editor of The Freemason and Masonic Editor of The Times of London – and through his friendship with Joseph Fort Newton, in the USA, writing for the fabled magazine The Builder and later The Master Mason. He was one of that group of great Masonic writers that graced the American scene, unconventional enough to write well, but eventually to disband after the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Perhaps his boldest work was to edit Gould’s 1880s History of Freemasonry, and the six volume United States version of 1936 remains the most recent complete masonic history extant.

In 1908, four years prior to becoming a Freemason, Wright published a series of short essays relating to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, in magazines such as Spiritual Power, the Homiletic Review, and the Bible Review. Wright also published his second book, Was Jesus an Essene?, in 1908 (his first book, more precisely a pamphlet, was entitled The Fourth Dimension). In Was Jesus an Essene?, Wright argued that Jesus was a member of the Essenes, a Jewish sect at the end of the Second Temple period, rather than the Son of God, or a part of the Trinity. According to Simon Mayers, at this stage of his life, and until he converted to Catholicism in the early 1930s, Wright did not consider himself a Christian. When he wrote a letter to the Jewish Chronicle in 1910, he explicitly identified himself as «a Gentile, though not a Christian reader of the Jewish Chronicle». Whilst he held Jesus in high esteem as a teacher, he was often critical of what he referred to as “orthodox” forms of Christianity.

Was Jesus an Essene?, always according to Mayers, contains the earliest evidence of this antipathy. Wright argued, somewhat imaginatively, that Jesus was influenced by Eastern religions such as Buddhism. In support of this, he observed that a recently discovered manuscript, «a copy of a chronicle of a life of Jesus», showed that Jesus spent a period of his life in monasteries in India and Tibet. Unbeknown to Wright at the time, the chronicle in question, the so-called “Life of Issa”, did not really exist, having been invented rather than discovered by Nicolas Notovitch. In a passage in Was Jesus an Essene? reminiscent of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Wright observed that this chronicle was «so inimical to orthodox Christianity that a certain Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church offered to recompense [the researcher] for the expense to which he had been put, and the time occupied in research, if he would abstain from publishing the manuscript, and hand it to the Papal Power». According to Wright, this demonstrated that “orthodox” forms of Christianity had «failed to catch any of the spirit of the teachings of Jesus».

In his life Wright was also involved in speculations of a more occult and psychical nature. In 1908, he monitored a series of tests involving so-called “thought-readers” for the Annals of Psychical Science, a periodical he later owned and edited (in 1909 and 1910). According to Wright, the purpose of this periodical was to examine well-attested observations of telepathy, clairvoyance, premonition and apparitions.

In 1910, Wright published a booklet and an article examining questions relating to reincarnation, previous lives, immortality, and the fate of the soul. He believed that psychical science was gradually demonstrating the likelihood of some form of continuity of life after death. However, he rejected dogmatism, suggesting that it was necessary to be open to the possibility of being proven wrong. «The danger – he explained – lies in our becoming dogmatic», as «dogma has been the cause of the degeneracy of every religious system». This degeneracy or corruption of religious systems was a key concern for Wright.

Whilst Wright expressed scepticism about the value of sacred texts as sources of literal history and dogma, he considered them essential as sources of parables and hidden wisdom. In two articles published in 1910 and 1911 in The Theosophist, Wright observed that the Essenes regarded the sacred texts as parabolic rather than historical. It was, he argued, their “spiritual or hidden meaning”, rather than a “literal rendering”, that was important. Wright believed that for students of the mysteries of all Scriptures, it was important to look for the «deep substratum of esoteric and occult teaching, some gem buried deep beneath the soil». «The Spirit of Truth – he concluded – cannot be directly communicated to the world, but must be presented in the form of parables».

Wright also sought for truth in a number of other esoteric sources. For example, he examined folktales and testimonies about supernatural creatures, such as vampires and poltergeists. In July 1910, Wright published an essay entitled A Living Vampire in the Occult Review. The Occult Review was a monthly magazine, contributed to by notable writers on the occult, such as Aleister Crowley and Arthur Edward Waite. A few years later, he expanded this essay on vampires into a still popular book entitled Vampires and Vampirism. Around this time he also published a book about a prominent poltergeist episode, which supposedly occurred in 1717, at the family home of John Wesley, the founder of the Christian Methodist movement.

In addition to the occult, spiritualism and psychical science, Wright was also interested in Buddhism. From 1911 to 1913, he published a number of articles and books about Buddhism, and he was for a time the editor of the Buddhist Review. In 1913, Wright argued in that magazine that «all religious systems are characterised by the same historical development. There is first the teaching of the truth in purity and simplicity, so far as it can be ascertained; then there is traceable the gradual accumulation of errors, until, sometimes, there appears to be no visible trace of the foundation». It was the original unsullied foundation of “truth,” prior to the accumulation of human errors, a kind of universal “ur-religion”, that Wright often seemed to be in search of. Wright argued that unlike Christianity and other major religions, «the fundamental principles of Buddhism have not changed from those originally taught by Buddha». Wright acknowledged that various small additions had been added to Buddhism, but he contended that «the foundation [of Buddhism] remains throughout clearly visible». He concluded that Buddhism was the «ultimate of human thought and aspiration, for no religion or philosophy since evolved has surpassed it either in simplicity or grandeur». According to Wright, «if the various religions that have sprung up since the days of the Buddha are examined and the essential doctrines noted, (…) it will be found that the basic principles are to be found in Buddhism».

A couple of years later, Wright found himself drawn to Islam, and in 1915, Islam seemed to replace Buddhism in his thinking as the purest of religious systems. The first of his many articles on Islam was published in the Islamic Review in August 1915. In this article, as he had previously as a psychical researcher, spiritualist and Buddhist, he argued that whilst all religious systems have truth at their foundation, nearly all of them had degenerated from their original spiritual base. It was, however, now Islam’s turn to be the «one religious system in which this downgrade tendency is absent». As he had previously with Buddhism, he argued that the core beliefs of contemporary Islam, are precisely as they were when they were first «propagated by its founder». According to Wright, Islam was not a new religion, but rather an uncorrupted version of the original religion, an ur-religion, that had been revealed to mankind at the beginning of human history. Significantly, Wright had previously made a similar point about Christianity, observing that «Jesus did not introduce a new religion to the world». According to Wright, the various prophets, such as Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, had each been sent to restore various forms of human-corrupted religion to their “original purity.” Wright concluded that into the midst of religious confusion, «came the word of God, spoken through Mohammed».

According to Simon Mayers, when Wright first wrote about Islam in August 1915, he was not as yet a Muslim. However, by September, he had embraced Islam. The Islamic Review reported his conversion, and listed his name amongst other recent prominent converts. The mosque that he joined was a part of the Ahmadiyya community, an extremely liberal, non-sectarian, and to this day little known and often persecuted branch of Islam. Like Dudley Wright (in the 1910s and 1920s), the Ahmadiyya movement believes that there is common ground in the core teachings of all religions, and recognizes the founders of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, and other major religions, as prophets and saints of God. Ahmadiyyaism has been deemed heretical by some Muslims, and in some cases the Ahmadi have been branded as kafirs or unbelievers (link for more on this).

From circa 1915 to 1920, Dudley Wright was a frequent contributor to the Islamic Review (the periodical of the English Ahmadiyya movement), and a preacher and resident at a temporary mosque on Upper Bedford Place in London. According to the September 1915 issue of the Islamic Review, he adopted Muhammad Sadiq as his Muslim name.

Dudley Wright’s esoteric quest for universal truth can also be found in his writings about Freemasonry, and Simon Mayers suspect that it was this quest that led him to Freemasonry in the first place. Wright was initiated into Freemasonry in 1912. By 1918, he was writing essays about Jewish and Masonic legends, and in particular about King Solomon and the Jewish Temple, which he later expanded into a book entitled Masonic Legends and Traditions.

In 1919, he argued in a book entitled The Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites (the book we decided to republish today), that at one time the Ancient Mysteries of the various nations were the principal vehicle for the existence of religion throughout the world, and that without them the very idea of religion may have died out. He suggested that if Freemasonry and the ancient mystery religions were not connected, then their close resemblance was a remarkable coincidence, and he observed that the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece and Rome bore a “striking resemblance” to some of the rituals of Freemasonry. As he had previously with Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, he hinted that the various Mystery religions were related to an original but now veiled underlying religion. He also suggested, in articles published in The Freemason in 1922, that Freemasonry was in some way connected to the rituals and traditions of the ancient Jewish Essene sect. In 1924, in a book entitled The Ethics of Freemasonry, he suggested that Free-masonry was the latest unifier of religious truth. According to Wright, unlike each of the individual religious systems of the world, Freemasonry «is a unifier, not a divider. It soars far higher than any of the religious systems that have found a home among the dwellers on earth. Within its temple there gather together for one common aim and object, Jew and Gentile, Moslem and Buddhist, Parsi and Confucian, ignoring, because forgetting, the divisions that will separate them when they leave the shelter of the sacred fane».

Dudley Wright wrote a number of positive articles about Judaism and Jewish mysticism throughout the 1920s for the Open Court, the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Guardian and the Masonic News. He also published a book about the Talmud in 1932. In this he praised the Talmud and examined several incidents of the confiscation and destruction of the Talmud from the thirteenth century onwards. According to Wright, «the Talmud is an inexhaustible mine, embodying the purest gold and the most precious of stones; its maxims and its ethics instil the teachings of religion and morality of the very highest order». In 1932, he was described by Rabbi Dr. Isidore Epstein, a respected scholar and community leader, as «a scholar whom we are glad to welcome among the small band of the Chassidé Umot Haolam to which belong Strack, Moore and Herford. His is a work of true love and piety».

In 1920 and 1921, Wright published several articles in The Freemason and The Builder which criticised Roman Catholicism and condemned Catholic anti-Masonry. In 1922, he published a book entitled Roman Catholicism and Freemasonry. These articles and the book examined numerous incidents, publications and declarations of anti-Masonic hostility by Catholic laymen, priests, bishops, and cardinals. They referred to incidents in which Freemasons had been imprisoned or tortured by the various inquisitions, and quoted at length from Bulls, encyclicals and pastoral letters by a number of popes, which condemned Freemasonry and prohibited Catholics from being members of Masonic lodges. Wright also observed in a letter to The Builder in 1921, that «the warfare against Masonry is conducted with all the powerful machinery at the disposal of the Catholic Church and under the complete direction of the whole Roman hierarchy».

As Simon Mayers discovered whilst searching the archives of the Catholic Guild of Israel, at some point in the early 1930s, Wright embraced Roman Catholicism. At around the same time, he drifted away from Freemasonry, perhaps because, as Robert Gilbert has noted, the “esoteric school” of Masonic research that William Westcott represented – and which Dudley Wright also favoured – had fallen “beyond the pale” by the 1930s. Wright’s membership of the Wellesley Lodge ceased in 1931, and his membership of the Eccleston Lodge was terminated in 1932, as a result of non-payment of fees. The news-paper that he founded, the Masonic News, also folded in 1931.

Wright joined the Catholic Guild of Israel on 28 October 1933 (according to the Guild’s membership logbook). His transition from Free-masonry to the Catholic Guild of Israel (an organisation dedicated to the conversion of Jews, and which regularly repeated antisemitic myths and stereotypes), was marked by a sudden inversion in his discourse about Jews and Catholicism. His discourse had previously been critical of Catholicism, Christian theological ideas such as the Trinity, and Catholic anti-Masonry, and positive about Jews and Judaism. From 1934 to 1938, he praised Catholicism, defended the concept of the Trinity, and repeated antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish usury and power, and the myth of a Jewish conspiracy bent on destroying Christian civilisation, in publications managed by the Catholic Guild of Israel (and in unpublished manuscripts held in the Catholic Guild of Israel archives). He also caricatured the Talmud and Jewish literature as venomously anti-Christian.

In the early 1940s, Wright abandoned Catholicism and the Catholic Guild of Israel, returned to the Ahmadiyya movement, and readopted the muslim name Muhammad Sadiq. When he returned to the Ahmadiyya branch of Islam, he became a very regular contributor to the Islamic Review, contributing twenty-two articles from 1944 to 1948. Significantly, Dudley Wright’s negative representations of Jews and Judaism disappeared from his discourse after he returned to Islam and the Ah-madiyya movement, and he observed that Jews and Muslims were alike in believing in the “eternal unity” of God. As he had in the 1910s and 1920s, he argued that all religious systems have truth at their foundation, and he concluded that Islam was distinctive in that it recognised the wisdom and truth of the prophets and founders of all religions.

Simon Mayers, in one of his articles, asked himself: did Dudley Wright find in the Ahmadiyya movement the peace and answers that he sought? This was his answer: «Perhaps in the final analysis, the “truth” that he sought, that most enchanting of ideas, a universal foundation at the heart of all religion, was less important than the journey he experienced searching for it. Islam was the only religion Dudley Wright ever re-embraced, and it is thus tempting to believe that before he passed away in 1949, he was satisfied that his spiritual journey had brought him home».

ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES AND ELEUSINITY

By Nicola Bizzi

As the great Irish esotericist John Heron Lepper wrote, one could say that the existence of secret or closed societies – in which certain teachings or practices are passed on to chosen individuals who must undergo a series of tests – responds to a very general predisposition of human nature1. This is unquestionably true, but this is not an exhaustive explanation, since the birth and the diffusion, in the ancient world, of rites of mysterious nature founded on the principle of initiation as a prerogative for the access to a certain knowledge, cannot be explained only through an anthropological and sociological perspective.

Ezio D’Intra, in his introduction to the Italian edition of the work of Victor Magnien Les Mystères d’Eleusis. Leurs origines. Le rituel de leurs initiations, has rightly pointed out that «The ancient man in general, especially the spiritual hierarchies of the past, had access to the experiences of the Sacred with a frequency, certainty, and lucidity that made them absolutely not akin to those, - poor, rare, and transitory, or falsified from prejudices, or artificially self-induced by strange inner thoughts - mostly unhealthy, of the modern spiritualism»2.

In the classical world and in the pre-Christian era, men were closer to the Gods and, at the same time – in a real communion – the Gods were closer to them. It was from the Gods that mankind had received precise teachings, rules, and doctrines, and the answers to the greatest questions that the human beings, since they had left the caves, had begun to wonder: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we go?

By “mystery” we mean a series of cults, religious practices, and rites developed and spread in antiquity throughout the Greek and Mediterranean world, in the ancient Near East, and later throughout the Hellenistic area and in the Roman Empire, whose roots are to be found in the Pre-Greek cultures of the Aegean, Cretan, and Anatolian coasts. Cults, religious practices, and rituals were characterized by an initiatory path, which gave gradual access to knowledge and to a following personal advancement. Essential to them was a strict vow of silence, to which all initiates were voted: the uninitiated were not allowed to have access to the teachings, to the revelations, and to everything that happened in the context of these ceremonies.

The word derives from the Greek μυστήριον(mysterion), then later latinized in mysterium. The etymology of the word goes back to an Indo-European root (my-) of onomatopoeic origin, which means “to shutup” (from which the word “mute” derives). The Greek words μύω [myo] (“being initiated into the Mysteries”), μύησις [myesis] (“initiation”), and μύστης [mystes] (“the initiated”) come from this etymological root. The verb myo was used with the meaning “to keep your mouth shut” or “to keep your eyes shut”, expressions that clearly show the esoteric nature of certain rites which, as Aristotle confirms to us, «They were called Mysteries because the listeners had to shut up and not tell any of these things to anyone»3.

The ancient Mysteries, as Piero Coda has pointed out, has generally the following features:

1) They require an initiation (μύησις);

2) There are precise rites;

3) The commitment not to talk about what it is seen nor spoken out;

4) Sharing salvation (σωτηρία) through the communion (of the initiated) with a suffering fate (πάθη) and the rebirth of the deities;

5) The community of the initiated are strictly separated from that of the uninitiated;

6) They ensure immortal life4.

As Aimé Solignac wrote, «The unifying principle of the multiple meanings of the words μυστήριον, μύστις, μύστης, μύστικός, μύστικώς, and their equivalents, is the idea of a more or less immediate communication from Gods to men, and from a mysterious initiation of men to the Gods, to their action and to their essence»5.

The mystery religions are an extremely complex and articulated phenomenon. Depending on the places and times where and when they have developed, some differences can be found, but there is always a common background, – the six points listed above – the most important of which is secrecy. A feature that, moreover, has always been present in the Mediterranean area since ancient times.

In ancient Egypt, a rather explicit inscription in the Temple of Edfu, dedicated to the God Horus, reported by the Egyptologist Émile Chassinat, states: «Do not reveal in any way the Rites you see in the Temples, in the most absolute Mystery»6.

And Chassinat, in a famous essay, refers to another emblematic inscription, found inside the tomb of a priest of Osiris: «I am a priest instructed in the mysteries, my chest will not let out the things I have seen»7.

Also the Turba Philosoforum, a collection of ancient alchemical and hermetic texts of different origins, – that had a lot of influence inside many mystery religion societies during the Renaissance – states: «He who has ears, should open them to listen. He who has a mouth, should keep it shut»8.

In his work The Reply of the Master Abammon to “Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo” better known as On the Mysteries of the Egyptians – and translated by Marsilio Ficino with the title De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum, Chaldaeorum, Assyriorum – Iamblichus states: «It would be in conformity with the divine law to preserve memory of the human and divine precepts exposed by Pythagoras, and not to share their wisdom with those who do not have a purified soul. Because it is not right to reveal to these people what has been acquired with great efforts, as it is not right to reveal the Eleusinian Mysteries to the uninitiated. Those who do it are equally impious and ungodly»9.