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.