Seeing Demeter in the Dark: Cognitive and Embodied Approaches to the Thesmophoria

Advance booking is strongly encouraged for this hybrid seminar

The all-female festival of the Thesmophoria is often discussed in terms of its relating to fertility, both that of participating women and agriculture in general, while focused on very evident, even explicit, symbolic content (e.g. phallic shaped bread). Its various rites are likewise noted as serving to define the status of citizen women. The purpose of this paper is not to directly argue against these previous examinations, but rather to sensitize them to the contingent experiences, and subsequent cognitive effects, afforded by the Thesmophoria as a ritual context. In adopting this approach, this paper utilizes theories from the Cognitive Science of Religion; a field increasingly applied to the study of ancient religious experience. In particular, I will employ McNamara’s (2022) model of ‘decentering’ and the ‘divided self’; considering conditions such as hunger, embarrassment, exhaustion, and the use of light and darkness in-line with this framework. What this comparative analysis reveals is a network of experiential conditions which would facilitate the elision of a strong, agentic, sense of self, and thus encourage several important effects. Essentially, through the manipulation of sensory data, emotions, and the body, the Thesmophoria would stimulate the adoption of doctrinally desired mental states in its participants, including moralized content and shared identities. Moreover, as well as allowing for an embodied interaction with the myth of Demeter’s search for Persephone, this analysis strongly suggests how the Thesmophoria would allow for their epiphanic appearance. Indeed, where the Eleusinian Mysteries have already been considered in relation to this phenomena, I argue that the Thesmophoria would likewise allow for an epiphanic appearance of the Twin goddesses.

Speaker details:

Ben Cassell is a PhD candidate with the Department of Classics, King’s College London, where he is researching the cognitive effects of Athenian ritual practice on differing forms of memory. He is the author of a number of articles and edited chapters, with his latest due to appear in Mnemosyne and Classical Quarterly later this year. He is an editor with the Journal of Cognitive Historiography and a founding member of the New Perspectives on Ancient Greek Religion research group. The recipient of the G. Grote Prize in Ancient History in 2024, Ben is currently completing a three-month placement at the University of Trento with the Interdepartmental Laboratory on Memory and Society.