Being initiated into Beauty: Plato’s use of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Symposium 210a-211c

Barbara M. Sattler (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Diotima’s description of the ascent towards beauty in Symposium 210a – 211c is one of the most detailed accounts of how we can access a Platonic Form. In my paper, I argue that Plato is not simply playing with words when he calls this description of the ascent towards beauty the “Higher Mysteries”, but that he is in fact alluding to salient features of Greek Mysteries, more specifically of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

In my talk, I will lay out the features that Plato takes up from the Mysteries: its terminology, the association of human immortality and purity – notions central to the Mysteries –, the division into Higher and Lower Mysteries, and the idea of the mystagogue leading the initiation process. In a second step, I will explore possible reasons why Plato might have chosen these Mysteries as a template for understanding the ascent towards the Form of Beauty. It shall be shown how this reference allows him to import the implications for life and death that the Mysteries are meant to have for the initiated into his theory of Forms. Furthermore, it solves the serious language problem of how to put the intellectual vision of the Forms into words.

Finally, it shall be demonstrated that the use of the Eleusinian Mysteries not only helped Plato to describe adequately what he understands by the intellectual vision of the Forms, but also that this was a way of making his theory more accessible to his Athenian audience at his time. For Plato’s contemporaries not only knew of the Mysteries but also very likely participated in them. However, it seems that the very reference to the Mysteries, which facilitated the ancients’ understanding of his theory is an important reason why the passage appears obfuscated and difficult to understand for us moderns.