Sacred Art & Iconography
Great Eleusinian Relief
artwork
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A large Pentelic marble votive relief, about 430 to 420 BC, unearthed in 1859 at the sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis, near a church dedicated to Saint Zacharias, a discovery that renewed scholarly interest in the site. It shows the sanctioned public myth on which the Eleusinian Mysteries were founded, not the initiation rites themselves, which were never written down and are permanently lost to record: the youth Triptolemus stands at center as Demeter, goddess of agriculture, offers him sheaves of wheat with her left hand, while Persephone, at his right, holds a torch and touches his head, perhaps originally in a gesture of blessing. According to the myth, Triptolemus was then sent out among mortals to teach them the cultivation of grain, Demeter's gift to humankind. Roman copies from the 1st centuries BC and AD survive, including fragments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a modern plaster cast is displayed at the Archaeological Museum of Eleusis. This atlas describes this public, widely published relief and the sanctioned myth it depicts; it does not describe, and has no honest record of, the secret initiatory content of the Mysteries themselves, which ancient sources uniformly treat as a capital secret and which no continuous line of practitioners survives to consult today.
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Rights and Reproduction
Reproduction and CopyrightSourced to the subject's own accountThe relief itself is millennia past any copyright term, but a specific modern photograph of it carries its own separate copyright. This atlas describes and cites the work rather than reproducing an image of it, and describes only the public myth it depicts, never the Mysteries' own secret content, which is not recorded anywhere and is not described on this atlas. 1 Physical Form
MediumSourced to the subject's own account DimensionsSourced to the subject's own account220 cm tall by 152 cm wide by 15 cm thick 1 Custody
Current LocationNational Archaeological Museum, Athens, inventory NAMA 126 2 Current CustodianNational Archaeological Museum, Athens 2 Custody HistorySourced to the subject's own accountUnearthed 1859 at the sanctuary of Demeter, Eleusis, near the church of Saint Zacharias. 1 Origins
CreationSourced to the subject's own account Date of CreationSourced to the subject's own account CountrySourced to the subject's own account Subject Matter
Depicted SubjectDemeter presenting Triptolemus with sheaves of wheat as Persephone touches his head in blessing, the sanctioned public myth of the gift of grain agriculture, distinct from the Mysteries' own secret initiatory content. 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
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