Okay, they have schools of technology and schools of medicine. They have music schools, and carpentry schools, and dance schools-but mystery schools? Is there any such thing?  And if there is, are they actually alive and well in today’s forward thinking community? The answer is yes, yes and yes. Yes, there is a mystery school. Yes, it is a real school. And yes, even in today’s disillusioned, non-believing society mystery schools are still alive and well.

What are Mystery Schools?

The first question most people ask when they’re talking about mystery schools is, “What on earth is a mystery school?” Let me tell you what it’s not. It’s not a school for would-be detectives. It’s not a weekend mystery retreat where someone dies and you spend the next three days trying to figure out who dunnit, and it’s not a school for witches and warlocks carefully hidden in another dimension. Mystery schools are schools for the soul. Why not just call them a soul school? Because that sounds like a bad gospel hymn.

Mystery schools are completely devoted to the quest for divinity, the search for divine understanding and communion with God through an intimate internal understanding of nature and self. They originated in ancient Greece, and their full origins have been a carefully concealed mystery. In fact, most of the information about the ancient mystery schools is a carefully kept secret, with the exception of the students’ fourteen mile procession along the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis and various other tasks that were performed in the public eye.

The secrets of the mystery school’s initiation, known as the teletai, and their culminating vision, the epopteia, remain shrouded in secrecy, buried in the pages of history.

“There are, scattered throughout the world, a handful of thoughtful and solitary students, who pass their lives in obscurity, far from the rumors of the world, studying the great problems of the physical and spiritual universes. They have their secret records in which are preserved the fruits of the scholastic labors of the long line of recluses whose successors they are. The knowledge of their early ancestors, the sages of India, Babylonia, Nineveh, and the imperial Thebes; the legends and traditions commented upon by the masters of Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato, in the marble halls of Heliopolis and Sais; traditions which, in their days, already seemed to hardly glimmer from behind the foggy curtain of the past; -- all this, and much more, is recorded on indestructible parchment, and passed with jealous care from one adept to another.”

 -- Isis Unveiled 1:557-8

Mystery schools may have originated in Greece, but they continue to be alive and well today. It has been said that mystery schools are located all over the world, their location carefully hidden where only the worthy will discover them. It has also been said that they are hidden away in the most unlikely of locations, where a small town in the Netherlands might be home to a mystery school that impacts the happenings of most of Europe. No one but the men and women actively involved know where they are, but doubting the existence of these mystery schools is the same as doubting the existence of our own heart; we may not be able to see it, but we always feel the effects of its existence.