The Kykeon, the Drink of the Initiates

The Hymn stages the drink as the end of a specific ordeal rather than an ordinary refreshment. Demeter, disguised as an old woman and mourning for her stolen daughter, sits at the roadside well unsmiling and refuses every welcome offered her at the house of Keleos, taking neither wine nor food, until the servant Iambe, through jesting nobody else could manage, finally makes her laugh, and only then does the goddess accept the kykeon, barley meal and water flavored with pennyroyal, in place of the wine a guest would ordinarily be given. The refusal of wine specifically marks the mourning as still in force even as the goddess accepts hospitality, and the drink she takes instead becomes, in the initiates' own reenactment at Eleusis, the fixed point at which a fast undertaken in imitation of Demeter's own grief was broken.

Because the Hymn ties an ordinary sounding recipe to a moment of ritual transition rather than to nourishment, ancient sources treat the kykeon as marking a threshold crossed, the end of withholding and the start of what could be received, rather than as an incidental detail of the story. What exactly initiates experienced after taking it inside the sealed hall at Eleusis, the Hymn does not say, and says explicitly that it may not be said, leaving the drink's ritual meaning more secure than any claim about a further effect.