Mystes

The term "mystes" derives from the ancient Greek word "mystes" (μύστης), meaning "one initiated." It is related to the verb "myzein" (μύειν), meaning "to close" or "to initiate," likely referring to the closing of the eyes and lips during initiation rites.

In antiquity, the name of the Initiates; now that of Roman Cardinals, who having borrowed all their other rites and dogmas from Aryan, Egyptian and Hellenic "heathen", liave helped themselves also to the /^ivaig of the neophytes. They have to keep their eyes anel mouth shut on their consecration, and are, therefore, called Mysta. Mystica Vannus lacchi. Coinnionly translated the iiiy.stic Fun; but in an ancient tei-ra-cotta in tiie British ^Museum the fan is a Basket sucli as the Ancients' Mysteries displayed with mystic contents: Inman says with enil)]ematic testes, [w.w.w.] N. N. — The 14th letter in both the Englisli and the Hebrew alphabets. In the latter tongue the N is called Nun, and signifies a fish. It is the symbol of the female principle or the womb. Its numerical value is 50 in the Kabalistic system, but the Peripatetics made it equivalent to 900, and with a stroke over it (900) 9,000. With the Ilebr^'ws, however, the final Nun was 700. Naaseni. The Christian Gnostic sect, called Naasenians, or .serpent worsliippcrs. who considered the constellation of the Dragon as the symbol of tlioir Logos or Christ. Nabatheans. A sect almost identical in tlieir l)elit-fs with the Nazarenes and Sabeans, who had more reverence for John the Baptist than for Jesus. Maimonides identifies them with the astrolaters. . . . "Respecting the beliefs of the lSaheans'\ he says, "the most famous is tlic book. The agriculture of the Nahatheans'\ And we know that the Ebionites, the first of whom were the friends and relatives of Jesus, according to tradition, in other words, the earliest and first Christians, "were the direct followers and disciples of the Nazarene sect", according to Epiphanius and Theodoret (See the Contra Ebionites of Epiphanius, and also "Galileans'" and "Nazarenes"').

The figure of the mystes, particularly as it emerged from the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries of ancient Greece, speaks to a profound human impulse: the desire to apprehend realities that lie beyond the veil of ordinary perception. Mircea Eliade, in his seminal works on the history of religions, often highlighted the transformative power of initiation rites, which served as symbolic passages from a profane state of being to a sacred one. The mystes, by definition, had undergone such a passage. This was not a matter of intellectual assent but of embodied experience, a ritual death and rebirth that reconfigured the initiate's relationship to the cosmos and the divine.

The Greek term itself, with its root in "closing," suggests a deliberate turning away from the superficial and a deep engagement with the hidden. This resonates with Carl Jung's exploration of the unconscious, where symbolic imagery and archetypal patterns hold profound, often ineffable, truths that can only be accessed through a process of inner exploration and integration. The mystes, in essence, was one who had been shown the sacred contents of the "mystic basket," to borrow from Blavatsky's interpretation, and whose life was thereafter marked by this sacred knowledge.

This pursuit of hidden knowledge, of a truth that transcends empirical observation, is a thread woven through the fabric of human spiritual endeavor. Whether through the contemplative practices of Sufism, where the seeker aims for direct experience of God, or the yogic disciplines of Hinduism, striving for union with the Absolute, the journey of the mystes is a universal one. It is the journey of the soul seeking its source, of the finite seeking to touch the infinite, and of the individual undertaking a profound, often solitary, passage into the heart of mystery. The mystes reminds us that true wisdom is not always found in what is revealed, but often in what is sacredly guarded and profoundly experienced.