MYSTERIES OF ANDANIA. - The existence of mysteries that were celebrated in Andania, a small city of northern Messenia, is attested by various passages of Pausanias and by a long and intact inscription of 91 B.C., found at Konstantini, near the site of the ancient city.
In these mysteries were venerated Demeter, Kore (under the epithet of ἀγνά, that is Holy), the Great Gods (probably the Cabiri), Hermes and Apollo Carneius, whose sacred grove served for the celebration of the rite. According to Pausanias, the reformer of the cult would have been a certain Methapo, the same who would have introduced at Thebes the cult of the Cabiri of Samothrace. Of him Pausanias says that he was an organizer of initiations and of every kind of mystery; which leads one to presume that the association of the ancient local cult with the mysteries of Samothrace is due to him. The mysteries of A. were also connected with the Eleusinian mysteries: in fact not only do Demeter and Kore figure among the divinities worshiped there, but also the great Eleusinian Goddesses.
On the intimate nature of the mysteries of A. Pausanias gives us no light, for he expressly entrenches himself behind the prohibition against revealing what it was forbidden to divulge, and still less does the long inscription of Konstantini. From this we gather only, as regards the cult, the particular that at A. a liturgical drama was celebrated as at Eleusis and that the festival culminated in a procession; and furthermore that the mysteries were open to all, without distinction of sex, even to slaves. However, the inscription is interesting because it gives us a vivid picture of the exterior part of the festival.
The primitive cult, prior to the Spartan conquest (ca. 700 B.C.), was limited to Hermes, Apollo Carneius (a Doric divinity, not merely Spartan), Demeter and the spring Haghna, naturalistic divinities, connected not only with life, but also with death. It is not excluded that they go back at least in part to an age more ancient than the conquest of the country by the Messenians, and therefore to an epoch shortly prior to the Doric invasion itself.
Bibliography3 works
Paolino Mingazzini