Initiates in Pure Light
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Socrates — ὁλόκληρα δὲ καὶ ἁπλᾶ καὶ ἀτρεμῆ καὶ εὐδαίμονα φάσματα μυούμενοί τε καὶ ἐποπτεύοντες ἐν αὐγῇ καθαρᾷ, καθαροὶ ὄντες καὶ ἀσήμαντοι τούτου ὃ νῦν δὴ σῶμα περιφέροντες ὀνομάζομεν, ὀστρέου τρόπον δεδεσμευμένοι
Whole, simple, unshaken, blessed — such were the apparitions we were initiated into and beheld, in radiance that was pure, being pure ourselves: not yet sealed and marked by this thing we now carry around and call the body, bound into it the way an oyster is bound into its shell.
The palinode's highest lookback: before birth, every soul stood in the true mystery-rite — whole, seeing whole things, in unmixed radiance — not yet sealed into the shell it would later learn to call a body.
Plato narrates the soul's prenatal sight of the Forms in the exact liturgical vocabulary of Eleusis, grade by grade: <em>myoúmenoi</em>, being initiated (from μύω, 'to close' the lips — the root of 'mystery'), then <em>epopteúontes</em> — the <em>epopteía</em>, the highest degree, when after a year's waiting the initiate was finally shown the unspeakable objects by torchlight. What Eleusis staged in a hall, he is claiming, every soul once had in the open sky, in <em>pure radiance</em> rather than torch-flame; the state cult is a rehearsal of a memory. The visions get ritual adjectives too: <em>holóklēra</em>, 'whole' — the word for an unblemished victim or priest — and <em>atremê</em>, unshaken: being that does not flicker, seen by seers who did not yet tremble.<br><br>Then the fall, in two strokes of wordplay. We were <em>asḗmantoi</em> — 'unmarked, unsealed' — but the word's root is <em>sêma</em>, which means both 'sign' and 'tomb': one vowel from <em>sôma</em>, body. The body-as-tomb pun was Orphic doctrine before it was Plato's (he cites it openly in the <em>Gorgias</em> and <em>Cratylus</em>); here it works underground, in a single negated adjective, before surfacing in the phrase 'the thing we <em>now</em> carry around and <em>name</em> body' — the flesh as luggage, its very name a late convention. And the sentence that began among the highest initiations ends, deliberately, in a fish-stall: bound in like an <em>oyster</em>. From epopt to shellfish — that is the exact distance of incarnation, and the oyster is chosen with care: alive, sealed in, and still able to feel light through the shell. Which is all that recollection is.
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