For the "Sake of the Rites"
"This section is the aetiological core of the poem, rich in allusions to the preliminary ritual of the Mysteries. Most notably, Demeter sits on a special stool covered by a fleece, she refuses wine but takes instead a drink of kykeon, and she is cheered up by Iambe's jests (192-211); these are allusions as clear as one could wish to aspects of the historical Mysteries, and the connection is actually made explicit when we are told by the poet that 'later too' Iambe had been pleasing to Demeter, and that Demeter drank kykeon 'for the sake of the rite'. So we see that the initiate is reliving the experience of the grieving Demeter."

from "The 'Hymn to Demeter' and the 'Homeric Hymns, p. 8, in "Greece & Rome," Second Series, Vol. 38, No. 1, by Robert Parker (1991)
Illustration, stemmed cups, with squid and seaforms from Ancient Crete.

^{Minoan botanical abstraction,
illustrated in Edith Hall Dohan's "Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age" (1907)}
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Demeter's Novenna:
Jests & Kykeon Break the Fast
"The Homeric hymn to Demeter offers us an almost complete picture of mysteries of the Great Goddesses under their primitive form, which they still retained at the date when the hymn was composed...[Joseph Daniel] Guigniaut thus describes the chief of them: 'Demeter seeks her daughter during nine days throughout all the earth, carrying torches in both hands; and on the tenth day she arrives at Eleusis, where she rests and breaks her long fast by drinking the restorative kykeon, of which she has herself prescribed the form of preparation. Here are so many points of affinity, but not of strict correspondence, between the legend so poetically developed by the author of the hymn and the rites observed during the first nine days of the great Eleusinian festival. [...] Iambe, who by her jests diverts the goddess from the gloomy grief into which the loss of her daughter had plunged her, personifies, with the iambic verses, the comic scenes which interrupted the mourning, [in the same way] as the kykeon broke the fast of the initiated."

from "The Eleusinian Mysteries," The Contemporary Review, Vol 27, p.953 (Oxford. 1880) by François Lenormant
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Connections to Origins
"The Thesmophoria provided women the opportunity to vent their anger against men, to share the difficulties and sorrows associated with their own experiences of motherhood — confident that Demeter the grieving mother goddess, would empathize with and dignify their lot. The rite was one that encouraged abandonment — not only to anger and tribulation but to 'obscenity,' that is, to a self indulgent sexuality. In the temple of the Mother all is permitted. [...] The connection to the mother is always also a connection to one's origins, and in this sense Demeter is also relevant to the particular power that the sexual dimension of women's love for one another may have."

from "Return to the Mother," p. 144, by Christine Downing, in "The Long Journey Home: Re-visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for Our Time" (1994)
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