33rd-degree Freemason Arthur Waite once said about The Legend of the Soul —

“Outside doctrine and ceremonial we know in fine that the Greek philosophy regarded the traditional history of Eleusis as portraying the legend of the soul. Persephone descends into Hades as the soul in the night of the body, but there is a way for liberation of the soul, as there was also one for Persephone, into union with the divine in the universe as into the arms of Demeter, and finally into the transcendent union outside all space and time and all that belongs to manifestation, as into the state of Elysium. In the light of these imitations Plato said—speaking of his initiation—that he beheld “eternal realities” and, in the proper understanding, that they were capable of restoring the soul to its primeval purity. I should add that the descent and return of Persephone are in virtual correspondence with the death and resurrection of other Mysteries. It is in this sense and within these limits that all Instituted Mysteries which have any claim on importance have the same story at their root. I shall recur this point more fully in a few moments because of its consequence in respect of Craft Masonry, It is like the Quest of the Holy Grail: a story told for the truest and the holiest that is in this world, because it is a mystery of grace in experience the outlines of which have been delineated in my study if Christian Mysteries, The excursus which follows arises out of the whole subject, but it deals with the concept of the Mysteries from a broad point, not merely within the measures of Eleusis.”

— Arthur Waite, A New Encyclopedia Of Freemasonry, at 248.