Category: Stoicism

Great article, well done!

https://donaldrobertson.name/2017/11/23/stoic-politics-and-the-republic-of-zeno/

Here’s an article about the actual evidence of early Stoic political writings but the way Stoicism was later applied to politics probably evolved…

https://donaldrobertson.name/2017/11/23/stoic-politics-and-the-republic-of-zeno/

Here’s an article about what Marcus Aurelius actually says regarding politics in The Meditations:

https://donaldrobertson.name/2017/08/03/marcus-aurelius-politics-and-freedom/

People keep asking me for a practical guide to using Stoic exercises in daily life. So I went ahead and created one for you. It’s a free…

People keep asking me for a practical guide to using Stoic exercises in daily life. So I went ahead and created one for you. It’s a free email course consisting of six lessons — each one describes how to use a different psychological technique from ancient Stoicism. The goal is to help you build your emotional resilience and cope better with stress.

My latest Medium article provides an overview of the six practical exercises we chose to focus on.

Read “A Guide to Stoic Exercises” on Medium

The new email course goes into these in more depth. It will officially launch on Tuesday 27th July. However, as you’re a subscriber to our Stoicism — Philosophy as a Way of Life newsletter on Medium, I’ve decided to give you early access. If you choose to enroll now you can join our beta testers on the pilot version of the course — free of charge.

Enroll on A Guide to Stoic Exercises

You’re also invited to attend our launch webinar on Instagram Live, at 8.30pm EST on the 27th. Follow our verissimusgraphicnovel account on Instagram for notifications of the event.

Hope you enjoy the Medium article. Please feel free to comment on it with your thoughts and questions — and remember you can highlight, clap, or share. If you want more information please join us on 27th July for the free launch webinar — I look forward to seeing you there.

Six of the Best Practices for Emotional Resilience

Stoicism is experiencing a renaissance in popularity. This arguably started because it provided the philosophical inspiration for the pioneers of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s, CBT had become the leading evidence-based form of modern psychotherapy. However, around the start of the 21st century more and more self-help books influenced by Stoic philosophy began to hit the shelves.

My background is in both academic philosophy and CBT. I was among the first wave of authors to begin writing popular books on Stoicism. I focused on self-help techniques that combined ancient Stoic philosophy with modern research-based psychology. The Stoicism of ancient Greece and Rome contained a system of psychological therapy but there was also much more to it. It’s grounded in a philosophical worldview and a set of core ethical principles — what we call today a “virtue ethic”. However, even in the ancient world, people were often drawn to Stoicism initially because it held out the promise of relieving their emotional suffering and helping them to build greater mental resilience.

People are often still unsure how they’re supposed to practice the philosophy in daily life.

Although Stoicism is more popular now than ever, many people are still unsure how they’re supposed to practice the philosophy in daily life. “How exactly,” they ask, “does it promise to relieve our suffering?” I recently created a short email course to explain six of the most important psychological practices derived from ancient Stoicism. In this article, I’ll summarize and describe them for you…

1. Separating Thoughts from Events

This is probably the most important psychological technique in Stoicism but perhaps the hardest to describe. It’s summed up, though, in a very famous quotation from Epictetus:

It’s not things that upset us but rather our opinions about them. — Epictetus, Enchiridion, 5

This was widely-quoted by the founders of CBT because it happens to express what we sometimes call the “cognitive theory of emotion”. This is the view that our emotions are caused, to a large extent, by certain underlying thoughts and beliefs. As soon as we realize that our emotions are “cognitive” in nature, or derived from our thinking, we open up a whole toolbox of cognitive therapy techniques.

However, the most important and powerful of these techniques consists in reminding ourselves, and truly grasping, that our emotions are being shaped by strong value judgements, such as that something is “awful” or “catastrophic”, and so on. It’s a subtle technique but a very powerful one because viewing our emotions in this way tends to weaken their intensity, making it easier for us to see through them and exercise greater self-control.

2. Contemplation of the Sage

The Stoics believed that we could gain considerable insight into the goal of life by regularly contemplating and discussing the idea of a perfectly wise human being, known as the ideal Sage or Sophos. Whereas many other philosophies and religions claimed that their founder was perfect, the Stoics did not, and avoided turning into a cult as a consequence. Instead, they argued that we are all flawed — we’re all relatively foolish and vicious . Yet we are also capable of envisaging perfection because we are born with reason. The “seeds” of wisdom and virtue reside within us, in the form of our deepest moral preconceptions.

We’re often capable of being more objective when we take a step back and consider what it means for another person to exhibit wisdom…

When we turn our attention toward ourselves, our judgement tends to be distorted. We can see a small sliver of wood in our brother’s eye, as the saying goes, but not a huge plank of wood in our own. Indeed, we’re often capable of being more objective when we take a step back and consider what it means for another person to exhibit wisdom and other positive character traits. Once we realize this, we can potentially use it as a guide to life.

First, carefully consider the qualities you admire most in other people. Then ask yourself how it would affect your own life if you were to genuinely embody more of the same qualities. You can see Marcus Aurelius doing something along these lines throughout Book One of The Meditations, where he lists the virtues of about seventeen of his family members and tutors, the individuals he admired most in life.

3. Living in Accord with Virtue

In modern evidence-based approaches to psychotherapy, we often distinguish between clarifying values and living in accord with them. Contemplating the qualities you most admire in other people, and the concept of an ideally wise and good person, is one powerful way of clarifying your values, as we’ve just seen. However, it’s equally important to put these insights into practice in your daily life by actively living in accord with your most authentic values. (And to be clear, by that I do not mean that moral values are somehow subjective, and neither did the ancient Stoics.)

The Stoics do this in a number of ways, e.g., Marcus Aurelius repeatedly brings his focus back to the question of his fundamental goal in life. He repeatedly asks himself each day whether his actions, or even his train of thought, are truly necessary. By this he means: do they contribute to the goal of life? Do these actions bring me closer to wisdom… or am I drifting further away from it? We can also brainstorm activities that exemplify our values and plan small steps to incorporate them into our daily schedule — something modern therapists call “activity scheduling”. For example, if writing down your personal reflections on the meaning of life seems like it would bring you a step closer to wisdom then why not get into the habit of doing that each day? It takes effort at first to create new habits but remember that even small changes can have big consequences!

4. Stress-inoculation Training

Most people try to avoid thinking about upsetting things. Either that or they dwell on them in unhelpful ways, such as morbidly ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. The Stoics advise us to get into the habit of facing our fears and imagining all the most common misfortunes that may befall us in life: sickness, poverty, rejection, loss, death, and so on. They reasoned that by visualizing these setbacks as if they were already happening, we could potentially prepare ourselves in advance to cope with them better if they ever happen. It’s a very direct method of building emotional resilience, in other words. Seneca calls this premeditatio malorum, or the premeditation of misfortunes.

Modern psychotherapists teach their clients to do many things that resemble this. There are actually around five or six different benefits linked with picturing feared events in this way. From the perspective of Stoicism, the main thing is that we realize that it’s not the thing itself that upsets us but rather our opinions about it, i.e., that we separate our upsetting thoughts from these perceived misfortunes, as noted earlier. However, the Stoics also seem to have realized something that’s very firmly established by research in modern psychotherapy. When we repeatedly imagine upsetting events for a more prolonged amount of time than normal, emotional distress tends to naturally abate, or fade over time, if we allow it to do so.

This takes patience and a little bit of self-discipline but it’s a very robust way of overcoming anxiety, in particular. Donald Meichenbaum, one of the early pioneers of CBT, referred to a similar approach as “stress-inoculation training” (SIT). We inoculate people by giving them an injection that exposes their immune system to a small dose of a particular virus. We can do something similar with the things that cause stress or anxiety, exposing ourselves to them gradually, in small doses, so that we have a chance to build up our psychological coping ability, and emotional resilience. Face your fears in your imagination, therefore, and allow yourself time to patiently master them.

5. The Contemplation of Death

Of all the threats we face in life, death is clearly unique, being absolutely final in nature. The Stoics believed that our fear of death underlies most of our other fears. Seneca therefore says that to learn how to die is to unlearn how to be a slave. He meant that by overcoming our fear of death we liberate ourselves, potentially, from all other fears and attachments.

For this reason, the Stoics rehearsed the moment of their own death, as we’ve described them doing above with other misfortunes, such as poverty or exile. However, the contemplation of our own death plays a larger role in Stoicism. Seneca told himself each night, as he fell asleep, that he might not awaken in the morning. Learning to face our own mortality calmly, and with a philosophical attitude, can empower us to re-evaluate our priorities in life.

Things that seem important to the majority of people, often begin to seem trivial, in retrospect, when we face our own death. Accepting our own mortality can also help us to “seize the day” (carpe diem) as the Roman poet Horace said, and to act with greater integrity and self-awareness, from moment to moment, in our daily lives.

6. The View from Above

Finally, one of the most striking, memorable, and popular contemplative techniques found in ancient philosophy. The French scholar Pierre Hadot called this The View from Above and found evidence of it in the writings of philosophers from different schools of thought. However, it features prominently in Stoicism, particularly toward the end of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, where it’s mentioned a number of times.

Sometimes it consists in literally imagining things as if viewed from above, like the figure of Zeus, in Greek mythology, looking down on human affairs from Mount Olympus. Sometimes it’s more cosmological and involves imagining our place within the vastness of cosmic time and space:

How small a part of the boundless and unfathomable time is assigned to every man, for it is very soon swallowed up in the eternal! And how small a part of the whole substance, and how small a part of the universal soul, and on what a small clod of the whole earth you creepest! Reflecting on all this, consider nothing to be great, except to act as your nature leads you, and to endure that which the common nature brings. — Meditations, 12.32

In modern psychology, it’s well-known that emotional distress such as heightened anxiety tends to be accompanied by selective attention and narrowing of our focus onto perceived threats. This naturally distorts our perception of events, though. The Stoics realized that by doing the opposite and broadening our perspective we can train our minds to counteract the anxious mode of thinking.

What Next?

I’ve only been able to summarize these techniques here. There’s a lot more to say about each of them. However, I hope that by providing you with a brief introduction to some practical exercises, you’ll have a better understanding of Stoicism as a way of life and not merely as a “pen and ink” philosophy. If you are keen to learn more, check out my free email course A Guide to Stoic Exercises. (You’re also invited to join us on 27th July for a special live webinar hosted on our Instagram account where we’ll be discussing these techniques.)

You’ll learn more quickly by actually doing these exercises, though, rather than just reading about them. So get started putting them into practice to the best of your ability. As Marcus Aurelius once said: Stop arguing about what it means to be a good man and just be one.

Stoicism is experiencing a renaissance in popularity. This arguably started because it provided the philosophical inspiration for the pioneers of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s, CBT had become the leading evidence-based form of modern psychotherapy. However, around the start of the 21st century more and more self-help books influenced by Stoic philosophy began to hit the shelves.

My background is in both academic philosophy and CBT. I was among the first wave of authors to begin writing popular books on Stoicism. I focused on self-help techniques that combined ancient Stoic philosophy with modern research-based psychology. The Stoicism of ancient Greece and Rome contained a system of psychological therapy but there was also much more to it. It’s grounded in a philosophical worldview and a set of core ethical principles — what we call today a “virtue ethic”. However, even in the ancient world, people were often drawn to Stoicism initially because it held out the promise of relieving their emotional suffering and helping them to build greater mental resilience.

Although Stoicism is more popular now than ever, many people are still unsure how they’re supposed to practice the philosophy in daily life. “How exactly,” they ask, “does it promise to relieve our suffering?” I recently created a short email course to explain six of the most important psychological practices derived from ancient Stoicism. In this article, I’ll summarize and describe them for you…

Read the rest of this article on Medium.

Great article again, Kasey!

How Marcus Aurelius was Initiated into the Cult of Demeter

How Marcus Aurelius was Initiated into the Cult of Demeter

For I made a vow, when the war began to blaze highest, that I too would be initiated… —Marcus Aurelius, quoted in Lives of the Sophists

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD) is best-known today as the author of The Meditations, a collection of personal reflections on ethics and self-improvement inspired by Stoic philosophy. While researching my recent book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, I visited several locations associated with key events in his life. One was Carnuntum, in Austria, the legionary fortress where he stationed himself while fighting the Marcomannic War, and where part of The Meditations was written. Another was the Greek town of Elefsina, just outside Athens, which was known in antiquity as Eleusis, the home of the famous Eleusinian mystery religion, based upon the myth and rites of the goddess Demeter. Marcus became a patron of Eleusis and was initiated there toward the end of his life.

You can still see a bust of Marcus Aurelius in the extensive archeological site which contains the ruins of the ancient Temple of Demeter. Marcus is quite well-preserved, although his head has either broken off recently or been removed for repairs. This bust adorned the pediment (the top section) of the Greater Propylaea, a monumental gate at the entrance to a large fortified complex containing the temple of the Eleusinian mysteries. This gate was apparently part of a rebuilding project undertaken after the temple was sacked by a Sarmatian tribe called the Costoboci, around 170 AD. They rode all the way from their homeland, north of Roman Dacia (i.e., somewhere in the area of modern-day Ukraine), down through the Balkans, and finally besieged the temple and looted its treasures, before being driven back by the Roman army.

Following the sack of Eleusis, Marcus had the telesterion (initiation hall) completely rebuilt, and in 176 AD he visited Athens in person to be initiated.

Marcus was very interested in religion. We know this from his private correspondence and various details provided in the Roman histories. His father’s side of the family even claimed to be descendants of King Numa, who, according to legend, founded the ancient priestly colleges and rites of the Roman religion. As emperor, Marcus served as pontifex maximus, or high priest, and took his duties in this regard very seriously. Following the sack of Eleusis, he had the telesterion (initiation hall) completely rebuilt, and in 176 AD he visited Athens in person to be initiated.

The mystery religions were sworn to secrecy. That makes them very frustrating for historians because while we know they were very influential, we know very little about their doctrines or rituals. Marcus had probably already been initiated into the Cult of Mithras, while commanding the legions in Carnuntum, near modern-day Vienna in Austria, during the First Marcomannic War. Mithraism was very popular with Roman soldiers and many temples to Mithras, or mithraeums, have been unearthed at Carnuntum. There happens also to have been a mithraeum at Eleusis, alongside the main temple, which was dedicated to the goddess Demeter. However, in this article we’ll focus on the Eleusinian Mysteries and their relationship with the writings and philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.

The Worship of Demeter

Demeter was the Olympian Greek goddess of the harvest, responsible for the art of agriculture. She was sometimes called simply the goddess of grain. She was also associated with fertility, and to some extent with nature in general. Her worship at Eleusis was part of a very ancient tradition, bound up with her myths and with the symbolism of growing and harvesting crops.

The site at Eleusis still contains archeological remains depicting poppy flowers and corn (wheat or barley) sheaves, two of the main symbols of Demeter. Poppy flowers, which like to grow in wheat and barley fields, also adorned the pediment containing the bust of Marcus Aurelius. He had linked his own image, in stone, with the symbolism of the goddess.

More generally, Demeter is associated with agriculture and the harvesting of cereals, fruits, and other crops. For instance, when Demeter was in distress, the Attic king Phytalus showed her kindness and hospitality. In return she taught him how to cultivate fig trees. As we’ll see, there are several quite striking references to ears of corn and fig trees in Stoic writings, which employ symbolism quite reminiscent of the mysteries of Demeter.

The Abduction of Persephone

The latter part of the word Demeter happens to mean “mother” in Greek (meter). There’s some debate as to whether the first part (de) originally meant “earth” or “grain” — she could be either named earth-mother or grain-mother. We happen to have a book titled The Compendium of Greek Theology by a Stoic called Cornutus, which links Demeter with Hestia, goddess of the hearth, and states bluntly “both seem to be none other than the earth.”

Since it gives birth to everything and nourishes it like a mother, the ancients called it ‘De-meter’, as if it were Earth-Mother; or else ‘mother Deo’ because the earth and the things on it ungrudgingly produce what men can divide among themselves and feast on; or because on it they meet with, i.e. find, what they seek. — Cornutus, Compendium of Greek Theology

Whatever its origins, though, the name Demeter was bound to evoke the notion of motherhood. Indeed, Demeter had a beloved daughter called Persephone, sometimes known as Kore, meaning a young girl, virgin, or maiden. One day as she was picking flowers, she was abducted by the god Hades. He took her to his dark underground kingdom where she was forced to become his unwilling queen. Demeter was distraught at the mysterious disappearance of her daughter, and travelled the earth searching for her in vain. In other words, the Eleusinian mysteries were based around tragic and highly emotive symbolism — the abduction and rape of a child. Perhaps we would even describe this as a story about “sex trafficking” today.

While Demeter wept, the earth became barren, and there was much suffering. Eventually, Zeus took pity on her, and arranged for Persephone to return to the world of the living. However, Hades had tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds, for each of which she was fated to spend one month every year living with him in the Underworld.

Cornutus, says explicilty that the disappearance of Persephone symbolizes the planting of seeds.

There is a myth that Hades kidnapped the daughter of Demeter, because of the disappearance of the seeds under the earth for a certain time. — Cornutus, Compendium of Greek Theology

The fruits and grains of the harvest, sacred to Demeter, are provided by her, by Nature, only in due season, for part of the year. Persephone was likewise only with her mother for part of each year, symbolizing the cycles of nature, and the transience of all worldly things, even our loved ones. It’s a myth, in part, about coming to terms with loss, and impermanence.

The Rites of Eleusis

Every year, the rites would begin with thousands of initiates gathering to listen to a proclamation from the hierophant of Demeter at the Stoa Poikile, in the Athenian agora. This was, of course, the location where the Stoic school was founded and after which it was named. Five days of celebrations and ritual preparations followed, culminating with a torchlit procession along the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis. The ceremonies continued there for another four days during which time initiations were carried out.

For among the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which your Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those mysteries. For by their means we have been brought out of our barbarous and savage mode of life and educated and refined to a state of civilization; and as the rites are called ‘initiations,’ so in very truth we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope. — Cicero

The nature of these initiations was highly secret. We know they consisted of things said (logomena), things enacted (dromena) and things seen (deiknymena). It’s likely that dramatic scenes from the myth of Demeter and Persephone were acted out in theatrical performances — perhaps the actors even felt themselves to be representing the goddesses spiritually. In any case, the initiation must have been a highly-emotive experience. It was said to culminate in the epopteia or mystical vision — literally, “the seeing”.

Initiates drank a concoction known as the kykeon (“mixture”), which was perhaps a type of barley-water flavoured with mint leaves. However, some researchers now believe that it also contained powerful psychotropics. This was potentially due to the deliberate cultivation and processing of ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus that grows naturally on barley and other crops. This experience left initiates feeling somewhat less afraid of dying — to “die with better hope” as Cicero cryptically puts it. Perhaps they felt they had expanded their consciousness and glimpsed a vision of the afterlife.

Marcus in Eleusis

Although Marcus was devoted to Stoicism, a philosophy founded in Athens, he had never actually been there, as far as we know, until a hiatus in the Marcomannic Wars allowed him to tour the east in 176 AD. There are many references to the fact he was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries while at Athens. This was clearly a well-known fact and probably considered one of the most significant events of his reign.

After he [Marcus Aurelius] had settled affairs in the East he came to Athens, and had himself initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries in order to prove that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, and he entered the sanctuary unattended. — Historia Augusta

While Marcus was there he set up funding for several chairs in philosophy and rhetoric at Athens.

When Marcus had come to Athens and had been initiated into the Mysteries, he not only bestowed honours upon the Athenians, but also, for the benefit of the whole world, he established teachers at Athens in every branch of knowledge, granting these teachers an annual salary. — Cassius Dio

Another historian, Philostratus, quotes from a purported letter of Marcus Aurelius in which he asks the famous Sophist Herodes Atticus, his old Greek rhetoric tutor, to officiate at his initiation in Eleusis.

[Marcus wrote to Herodes Atticus:] demand reparation from me in the temple of Athena in your city at the time of the Mysteries. For I made a vow, when the war began to blaze highest, that I too would be initiated, and I could wish that you yourself should initiate me into those rites. — Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists

Marcus may have meant the famous Temple of Athena Parthenos, known as the Parthenon, on the Acropolis, in the centre of Athens.

The process of being initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries actually took several days and began in Athens. After some initial rites there was a procession from the Sacred Gate of the Kerameikos, or cemetery, in Athens, to nearby Eleusis. The Sacred Way, as the road from Athens to Eleusis was known, measured 22km, and could probably be walked in about four or five hours. It’s notable that the procession began among the tombs of the Kerameikos as much of the symbolism relates to Hades and the concept of an afterlife, but also to the notion of coming to terms with our own mortality.

We can certainly take note of several parallels between the Stoic ideas expressed by Marcus and the imagery of the Eleusinian mysteries.

If Marcus vowed during the height of the First Marcomannic War that he would be initiated, that almost certainly means he made this promise while he was in the middle of writing The Meditations. We cannot know whether passages in The Meditations were influenced by teachings from Eleusis or not. However, we can certainly take note of several parallels between the Stoic ideas expressed by Marcus and the symbolism of the Eleusinian mysteries.

The Mysteries in The Meditations

Major themes found in the Stoicism of The Meditations clearly resonate with the myth of Demeter, such as coping with loss, accepting mortality, and viewing these things as processes of universal nature. For example, the following passage quotes a lost tragedy of Euripides, and could hardly sound more Eleusinian:

Life must be reaped like the ripe ears of corn. One man is born; another dies. — Meditations, 7.40

Marcus obviously loved this line because he quotes it again later in The Meditations (11.6). He clearly means that we should accept death as a natural process, like the reaping of corn that is growing old. As the plant begins to die, it sheds seeds, which are sown in order to grow new crops.

Elsewhere, Marcus quotes a notorious passage from the Discourses of Epictetus (3.24), which once again uses the reaping of corn as a metaphor for accepting mortality:

When a man kisses his child, said Epictetus, he should whisper to himself, “Tomorrow perhaps you will die.” — But those are words of bad omen. — “No word is a word of bad omen,” said Epictetus, “which expresses any work of nature; or if it is so, it is also a word of bad omen to speak of the ears of corn being reaped”. — Meditations, 11.34

He also quotes Epictetus (3.24) employing the metaphor of looking for figs out of season.

To look for the fig in winter is the act of a madman and such is he who looks for his child when it is no longer allowed. — Meditations, 11.33

The fig-tree was another symbol of Demeter, as we’ve seen. The loss of Persephone was strongly associated with the symbolism of crops being out of season and denied to us. At first, Demeter grieved terribly, and searched frantically for her child. Although Persephone was eventually returned, it was only temporary. Her mother was forced to accept recurring periods during which her child was absent, and to view this as part of the natural order. How could an ancient Greek or Roman have talked about looking for a child when it is no longer allowed without recalling the myth of Persephone?

The Stoic Cornutus, who had claimed that Demeter was “none other than the earth”, goes on to say:

Mythology tells that she is first and last because the things that were born from the earth and sustained by it are dissolved into it; and this is also why the Greeks start and end their sacrifices with her. — Cornutus, Compendium of Greek Theology

Marcus uses similar language and literally describes death as a mystery (mysterion) of nature — a phrase which perhaps sounds like an allusion to the mysteries of Demeter, the earth-mother and goddess of nature.

Death is such as generation is, a mystery of nature; composition out of the same elements, and a decomposition into the same; and altogether not a thing of which any man should be ashamed, for it is not contrary to [the nature of] a reasonable animal, and not contrary to the reason of our constitution. — Meditations, 4.5

By contrast, those who refuse to accept loss as part of nature remind Marcus of the sacrificial piglets who screech and wriggle beneath the blade. (A cruel image by modern standards but one that to which many ancient Greeks and Romans would be desensitised.)

Imagine every man who is grieved at anything or discontented to be like a pig which is sacrificed and kicks and screams. Like this pig also is he who on his bed in silence laments the bonds in which we are held. And consider that only to the rational animal is it given to follow voluntarily what happens but simply to follow is a necessity imposed on all. — Meditations, 10.28

The Greeks often sacrificed animals such as cattle and sheep. The sacrifice of piglets was not unusual but was, as it happens, particularly associated with the worship of Demeter and Persephone. Indeed, as we’ve already seen, worshippers would sacrifice piglets to these goddesses in exchange for the chance to be initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. The psychodrama that followed was intended to cleanse them of their own fear of death, i.e., they all hoped to become unlike the sacrificial piglets.

The church father Hippolytus reported that after being initiated, celebrants would chant “Rain! Conceive!” (hye kye!). These words seemingly addressed the sky and earth respectively, and were a plea for crops to grow, especially fields of wheat and barley. This obviously resembles another Athenian rainmaking prayer admired by Marcus in The Meditations for its simplicity:

A prayer of the Athenians: “Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, down on the ploughed fields of the Athenians and on the plains.” In truth we ought not to pray at all, or we ought to pray in this simple and noble fashion. — Meditations, 5.7

Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, mentions that “Euripides says that when the earth is parched it loves rain, and the sublime heaven, when full of rain, loves to fall to earth.” Marcus seems to quote the same line from this lost tragedy of Euripides, which echoes the symbolism of the chant “Rain! Conceive!” once again:

“The earth loves the rain;” and “the solemn heaven is moved by love;” and the universe loves to make whatever is about to be. I say then to the universe, that I love as you love. And is not this too said that “this or that loves to be produced?” — Meditations, 10.21

Once more, a simple agrarian metaphor is used to express a spiritual or philosophical concept. In this case, the earth “loving” to receive the rain, in accord with nature, symbolizes the Stoic love of one’s fate (amor fati).

As noted above, we have no idea whether Marcus would have said these ideas were derived from the Eleusinian mysteries. However, as he was writing The Meditations, we know he vowed that one day, as soon as the war was over, he would go to Athens. That means he had long intended to stand before the Stoa Poikile in order to listen to the pronouncement of the hierophant, along with thousands of other worshippers. He would ritually bathe and sacrifice a screaming piglet to Demeter and Persephone. He would gather with others among the tombs at the Keramikos and proceed by torchlight along the Sacred Way to be initiated in the Telesterion at Eleusis.

It was with philosophical intent that they began to celebrate the ‘mysteries’ for her, rejoicing at the same time in the discovery of things beneficial for life, and in a festival which they used to bear witness to the fact that they had stopped fighting with each other over the necessities, and were replete, i.e. satiated. — Cornutus, Compendium of Greek Theology

With this end in mind, I feel certain, Marcus realized that his talk of “ears of corn”, “figs in winter”, and “mysteries of nature”, was echoing the famous symbolism of the Eleusinian mysteries.