The past forty years in particular have witnessed a vast amount of investigations into decoding the aims and procedures of ancient Greek mystery cults. More recently, a number of rigorous and insightful studies have dealt with issues of definitions and reconstructions of the mystic proceedings.1 However, mystery cults, given their strong cosmological focus and predominantly nocturnal elements,2 call for investigations that take into account the context of the season, time, and skyscape in which they were performed. Because the ancient night sky is a piece of evidence more directly accessible than many other aspects of symbolic language and associations, such a study has the potential to illuminate and enrich our understanding of cult rites of which very little is otherwise known. Thus, this chapter aims to complement earlier studies by providing the crucial temporal context of three mystery cults: Eleusis, Lykosoura, and Samothrace. To achieve this, it is essential to know the month, or at least the season, when initiation was performed. As a result, we are limited in our analysis. The case of the mysteries of Despoina in Lykosoura, for instance, the timing of which is not known, demonstrates these limitations when compared to the better-documented Eleusinian Mysteries.

In our quest for objective analysis and widely accepted models, it is easy to forget that culture is a human construct, a creature of its time and place. Thus in the study of religion in particular, literary and artefact analysis, which does not account for human interaction and experience, can only offer partial understanding. Three-dimensional reconstructions and visualisations of space are becoming more widespread, but they commonly omit half of what was visible – accurate representations of the sky. We neglect the decisive value of time, in the form of seasons, day, or night, in ancient experience. Who could argue that experiences and memories of a place, even of a structure, are identical at all times and in all weather conditions?

The first aim of this chapter is to revisit the still-resonant idea of the general eastern orientation of Greek temples,1 most commonly known through William Dinsmoor’s 1930s analysis of 110 temple orientations. We briefly discussed this idea in Chapter 2. Here, an analysis of a data set more than twice as large as Dinsmoor’s examines anew the placement of Greek temples in their spatio-temporal context. The 232 religious structures surveyed date from the Mycenaean to the Roman period and are located geographically in Greece, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Cyprus. These structures have revealed a total sample of 240 orientations if we include the side entrances. The structures with side entrances are the Telesterion of Eleusis, the temples of Despoina in Lykosoura, Alea in Tegea, Apollo in Bassae, the Thesmophorion of Pella, and the Oikos of the Naxians in Delos.

Unthinkable as it may be for most modern city-dwellers, one glimpse of a truly dark night sky is simply captivating. Our daily immersion in light-polluted, densely constructed cities has resulted in our detachment from the night sky and open horizon views. This detachment has inevitably also influenced the way we approach ancient cultures the world over. Because we do not think of the night sky, we assume the ancients did not either. And although much has been written and theorised about ancient landscapes, space, and movement, such studies almost exclusively concern these concepts as experienced in the light of day, bypassing in this way a significant portion of ancient lives and experience. In our scholarly endeavours, we forget that darkness and light amplify in different ways the experience, perception, and impression of a place or event, optically altering colours, textures, figures, spaces, landscapes, and structures.1 The effect that pockets of artificial light in dark spaces have of tightening participants’ physical proximity during nocturnal performances, for example, has been demonstrated in recent research in cultural geography. Such use of light not only brings people physically closer, but naturally also affects experience.2 In modern theoretical and empirical studies of the Classical (and particularly the Greek) world, though, investigations engaging with ritual experience and spatial movement tend to assume seasonless, diurnal conditions, despite recent efforts to stress the inseparability of time and space – in other words, the importance of the chronotope3 – in human cognition, experience, and memory. And in this way, we so effortlessly bypass approximately half of the daily twenty-four-hour cycle and, consequently, a significant portion of human experience, encounters, memories, and interpretations.4 In other disciplines, work on nightscapes has emerged as an awakening of what we have been so far leaving out in relation to embodied practice and affect.5 Yet the study of the Classical world stubbornly resists.

Apollo’s strong solar and calendric attributes make him a particularly suitable deity for an investigation concerning astronomical links in religious spaces.1 This relationship, which continues well into the Roman period,2 appears in a number of texts from the fifth century BCE.3 Many of Apollo’s epikleses associate him with the sun: Phoebus,4 Lykeios, Aigletes (god of light or sun, with a temple on the Aegean island of Anafi),5 and Apollo Eos (of the Dawn).6 In literature, the identification of Apollo as Helios (Sun) is widely attested, as are a number of cults linking the two divinities, such as Apollo Helios in Rhodes and Athens and the Boeotian Daphnephoria.7 We will explore in this chapter how a number of Apollo’s other cults employed solar associations for timekeeping purposes and for shaping the cognitive ecology of the cults, triggering the senses within the religious experience. The sun’s fundamental importance in human existence stands as testimony to Apollo’s cosmic significance. His importance in the Greek pantheon is well known, but the god’s cosmic role is, in addition, palpable in his position as the god of music, which also carried cosmological significance through the sixth-century-BCE Pythagorean ideas of the music of the spheres.8 Plato, in particular, explains how Apollo directs celestial and musical harmony.9 Of particular relevance to this study is a third association of Apollo with the cosmos, his relationship with the land of the Hyperboreans, the people of the far north: a place associated, at least in the late sources, with eternal spring and light,10 where days were of extreme length and nights very short – an ideal ambiance for the god of light.

In this chapter we discuss festivals conventionally categorised as polis cults and initiation rituals, with the intention to investigate how time, memory, the re-enactment of myths and performances, and the integration of a seemingly participating cosmos become active ingredients within religious space. Since ritual performance translates to ritual and performative memory, a study combining temporal conditions, ritual narratives, and space has the potential to enhance understanding of how the human body responds to stimulants responsible for structuring experience and constructing context-specific memories, be they architectural, performative, or temporal.

In recent years, the study of ancient ritual experience and the role of emotions has become a subject of intense research.1 It is now somewhat a scholarly cliché that experience of a space is influenced by architecture and movement. Of equal importance to this experience, though, is time (day, night, and the seasons). The aspect of time – or, in more general terms, the inclusion of the total environment – has received, as we discussed in Chapter 1, very little attention in the study of ancient Greek ritual. The three components comprising the total physical environment (land, sky, time) are equally critical in shaping memories and experience. Previous studies have traditionally focused on a combination of these components, but hardly on all three.2 Just as the study of landscape or architecture alone cannot inform us of experience, a sole focus on the time when rituals took place, or indeed only on the orientation of the architecture in space, cannot be sufficient to enrich our narrative. It is now accepted that cognition is to be understood as ‘embedded in its surroundings’, not as a detached system.3 Thus a combined study of external elements and internal processes has the potential for a far better understanding of ancient cognition.