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The Road to EleusisR. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. RuckIV. Ancillary DataA Greek scholar, writing just half a century ago, did not hesitate to dismiss the worship of Demeter at Eleusis as "trivial and absurd; but," he added, "there can be no doubt that it did much to satisfy the emotional side of the religious instincts of the Greeks. Its modern analogue is perhaps the Salvation Army." We trust that our own comparisons will be less bizarre than his. In our generation we enjoy the advantage of having rediscovered the hallucinogenic experience. Moreover, the value of interdisciplinary collaboration is that it gives us access to knowledge otherwise apt to be beyond the reach of scholars. Our joint effort has yielded a radical answer to our problem: it sets the stage for much reexamination of traditional opinions about the classical Greeks and their tragic literature in celebration of the god Dionysus. The ancient testimony about Eleusis is unanimous and unambiguous. Eleusis was the supreme experience in an initiate's life. It was both physical and mystical: trembling, vertigo, cold sweat, and then a sight that made all previous seeing seem like blindness, a sense of awe and wonder at a brilliance that caused a profound silence since what had just been seen and felt could never be communicated: words are unequal to the task. Those symptoms are unmistakably the experience induced by an hallucinogen. To reach that conclusion, we have only to show that the rational Greeks, and indeed some of the most famous and intelligent amongst them, could experience and enter fully into such irrationality. Eleusis was different from the convivial inebriation of friends at a symposion or the drunken komos revel at the festivals of drama. Eleusis was something for which even the maenadic ecstasy of the mountain women was only partial preparation. In their various ways, other Greek cults too enacted aspects of the ancient communion practiced between gods and men, between the living and the dead, but it was at Eleusis alone that the experience occurred with overwhelming finality: here alone was the grand design fulfilled of the maiden resurrected with her son conceived in death, and of the ear of barley that like her had sprouted beneath the earth. By this resurrection was validated the continuance of all that a Greek held most dear, the civilized way of life that, beyond each city's constitution, was the Greek heritage, evolved out of aboriginal primitivism just as all life too came from the beneficent accord with the lord of death. Here indeed is a rich full-bodied myth, filled with contradictions like all the myths of an unlettered age, one saying this and another saying that and a third saying something else, but somehow in the end harmonizing into one whole, a myth that for the Greeks explained the beginning and the end of things. Months of learning and rituals preceded the revelation on the Mystery night, each action programming in further detail the meaning and substance, the full ramifications of the vision that lay ahead. At last the initiates would sit on the steps in the initiation hall. It was all done now except for the finale. They had learned the secret version of the sacred myth, they had bathed in the sea, abstained from various tabu foods and drinks, sacrificed a pig, taken the long walk along the Sacred Way from Athens, and made the perilous crossing of the final division of water before their arrival at the city of their Eleusinian hosts. Outside the sanctuary walls, there was the night-long dance beside the Maiden's Well on the very ground that the goddess had visited. Then there was the fast and the momentous entrance into the forbidden territory past the cave that was an entrance to Hades and the rock where Demeter had sat in grief. In the initiation hall, there was the final ceremonial dance of the priestesses carrying the chalice of grain upon their heads as they mixed and distributed the sacred potion: fragrant blechon, the despised herb associated with the illicit nature of the abduction, immersed in water to which was added a sprinkling of flour from barley grown in the Rarian plain. The barley's potential as the foodstuff for mankind depended upon keeping at bay the encroachment of the reddening corruption that would draw it back to its worthless avatar, the rust-infested weed. Like the blechon, the weed too was thus associated with primitivism and the ways of life before the institutions of society brought man to a higher mode of existence. Of these two plants the initiates drank and then paused expectant for redemption while the hierophant chanted the ancient words. Then, suddenly, there was light and the boundaries on this world burst their bounds as spiritual presences were felt in their midst and the hall was flooded with glowing mystery. From beginning to end here there was a reenactment of a sacred drama in which the initiates as well as the officiants had their role to play, until at last they experienced as actors the ineffable, all of their senses and emotions being shot through with what would thereafter be forever the unspeakable. As the initiates passed through the lengthy proceedings, they were admitted to many secrets, but the hierophants may well have withheld from them the Secret of Secrets: the sacred water of the potion had already soaked up in the right dosage from the immersed ergot what it contained of ergine and ergonovine, as we call them today. But the hierophants were certainly, through the centuries, seeking ways to improve their technique, their formulae. In the course of those two millennia may they not have discovered a kind of ergot that contains solely the hallucinogenic alkaloids such as has been found in modern times in ergot of Paspalum distichum? Indeed herbalists other than the hierophantic families may have shared in this discovery and it may have been their knowledge that prompted the rash of profanations in B. C. 415. The inside story of those events will never be known but that there was a story to tell is certain. In unlettered cultures the knowledge of the herbalist—the knowledge of the properties of plants and their use—was everywhere a body of secret lore passed on by word of mouth from herbalist to apprentice and sometimes from one herbalist to another. The apprenticeship took years before one practiced on one's own, and one never stopped learning. There were questions of dosage, of side effects, of proper plant ingredients that became poisons when taken to excess. In Mexico Bernardino de Sahagun and Francisco Hernandez were gifted Spaniards and they spent endless effort and time to take down from the Indians the virtues of various Mexican plants. But they were Europeans who knew not the American plant world, and in their European world they were certainly not what we would call botanists or herbalists. Their intentions were good but their ignorance was complete. What they have to tell us about the hallucinogens is childish. They could have tried the hallucinogens but elected not to do so, spurned the chance. What a different story they would have told us if they had lived for a number of years as apprentices of the Indian sabios. In the Homeric hymn to Demeter, on arriving at Eleusis, tired and disconsolate over the loss of her daughter Persephone, Demeter was offered a drink of wine, which she declined. Since every act in this narrative had mythic meaning, it seems that drinking the alcoholic beverage did not go with the drinking of the divine potion called kykeon. The two kinds of inebriation were incompatible. In Mexico those who will take the mushrooms know that they must refrain from drinking alcoholic beverages for four days before the velada, as the mushroom celebration is called. Alcoholic inebriation would profane, would defile, the divine draught, alike in Mexico and Greece. The Eleusinian Mysteries were in the exclusive hands of the Eumolpus and Kerykes families. For close to two thousand years, these hierophants governed with autocratic authority the rites at Eleusis. By contrast, in the sacred mushroom country of Mexico every village has its sabios ("wisemen") who are the custodians of the rite. (In some remote Mixe villages the individual families take the mushrooms when they feel the need, without the guidance of a sabio. Whether this informal practice in the Mixe country marks a breakdown in the rite or the survival of an earlier archaic procedure, we do not know.) In Greece the "initiate" took the potion only once in his life, and thus he could not compare successive experiencies. In Mexico one may consult the mushroom whenever a grave family problem presents itself. Some Indians choose never to take the mushroom, others only once, yet others intermittently. The newcomer to the experience is constantly warned that ingesting the hallucinogen is in the highest degree delicado, "delicate" with a connotation of grave danger. At Eleusis and in Mexico certain items of food were proscribed for some time before the big night. It is impossible to compare the dietary exclusions, so different are the foods, except that in both cases eggs are tabu. Fasting was practiced in Greece and also in Mexico, from the morning throughout the day: in both cases one faced the night on an empty stomach. In Mexico before the Conquest it was the practice in aristocratic circles to drink nourishing chocolate spiked with the inebriating mushrooms, in this way breaking the fast as the events of the night were launched on their course. Owing to the silence enjoined on everyone who had taken part in the Mystery, there are scarcely any hints as to what happened in the writers of the flourishing period of Eleusis, but in the early centuries of the Christian era, with Eleusis breaking down, we discover a few references, obscure, inhibited, that may permit us some uncertain glimpses. We find mention of a collation served to the initiates when a large cake called the pelanos, made of barley and wheat harvested in the adjacent sacred Rarian plain, was broken into pieces and the portions served to all. In the sources one hears of a bond of alliance and friendship that sprang up among the initiates, and some have suggested that this sprang from the collation they had shared together. It is not incompatible with the Greek texts to suppose that the collation paralleled the breaking of the fast in Mexico, the pelanos taking the place of the chocolate. But surely the bond of alliance and friendship had nothing to do with the collation: nothing so jejune would have sufficed. The overwhelming effect of the night under the influence of an hallucinogen gives natural birth to a feeling of shared supernatural experience never to be forgotten, a feeling of cofradia, of brotherhood. Two of us have known this personally in Mexico: those who pass through a velada, in the right set and setting, live through an awesome experience, and feel welling up within them a tie that unites them with their companions of that night of nights that will last for as long as they live. Here we think is the bond of alliance and friendship of which the Greek sources speak obscurely. Then there is the matter of secrecy. In Mexico nothing had been heard of the sacred mushrooms in sophisticated circles since the early friars mentioned them briefly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has been said that the mushrooms were a 'secret" of the Indians living in the highlands of southern Mexico. Our own little group flushed them out into the open. But we think this 'secret" was never really a secret. In the Indian communities everyone knew about them and also about the morning-glory seeds. Every villager could, if he wished, learn the art of recognizing the sacred mushrooms and many did so. There was a small trade in the mushrooms, supplying the demand among the natives who had moved to the cities and who still wished to "consult" them. The Church had originally opposed them and the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to stamp out the native use of them by vigorous persecutions. They failed, of course, but the natural mycophobia of the Spanish population, their contempt for peculiar native practices, and the similar attitude of the French, the Germans, and the English who later came to know Mexico led naturally to an absence of communication between the natives and the occupying races on matters that lay closest to the Indians" hearts. It is small wonder that the sacred mushrooms, after an abortive spate of notices, hopelessly inadequate, in the writings of the early friars, have remained unknown to the world to our own times. The Indians would not take the initiative in speaking about them. The 'secrecy" was not a conspiracy of silence: it was imposed on the Indians by the White Man, owing to the lack of intelligent and sympathetic curiosity in the elite of the White circles. The secrecy in the ancient Greek world about the Eleusinian Mysteries was somewhat different. The laws of Athens made it a crime to speak about what went on at Eleusis in the telesterion. Toward the end of the Homeric hymn to Demeter, this silence is expressly enjoined on all initiates. In B. C. 415 there was a spate of deliberate profanations of the Mysteries by the jet set in Athens and a crackdown followed, harsh penalties being inflicted. But the secrecy ran far beyond the reach of the laws of Athens. That secrecy ruled everywhere in the Greek world and was never seriously violated. It too was self-enforcing. Those who knew the superior hallucinogens through personal experience were not inclined to discuss with outsiders what was revealed to them: words could not convey to strangers the wonders of that night and there would always be the danger that the effort to explain would be met with incredulity, with the scoffing and mockery that would seem to the initiate sacrilegious, would wound him in the very core of his being. One who has known the ineffable is loath to embark on explanations: words are useless. So far as we can say, at every point what happened at Eleusis fits in with the hallucinogenic experience in Mexico but in one major respect the Mexican rite outdistances Eleusis. They both share in the great Vision ("Vision" embracing all the senses and the emotions), but in Mexico the sacred mushrooms (and the other superior hallucinogens) serve also as oracles. The hierophants of Eleusis saw a new crop of initiates every year and there were many initiates. With the limitations that this procedure imposed, they could not serve as consultants either to individuals or the State on grave problems where these would be needing advice. In Mexico, on the other hand, the hallucinogen is consulted from time to time on all kinds of serious matters. The questions put to the mushrooms must be serious: if they are unworthy or frivolous, the suppliant is in for a sharp rebuff. Faith in the mushrooms among the Indians where traditional beliefs still prevail is absolute. When the suppliant has observed all the tabus, when the velada takes place under the right circumstances of darkness and silence, and when he poses his questions with a pure heart, the mushrooms will not lie. So say the Indians. And such meager evidence as one of us has suggests that they may be right. Toward the end of the last century the world learned of peyotl and early in the middle of this century the hallucinogenic morning-glory seeds were identified by Richard Evans Schultes. A little later the sacred mushrooms of Mexico received their full meed of public attention, located and written up by Roger Heim and one of us. They were shown the way by a botanist, Blas Pablo Reko, and an anthropologist, Robert J. Weitlaner. Now the three of us are submitting to the modern world what well may be the key to the mystery of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The tie that binds the grain of Triptolemus to the supernal experience of Eleusis, easily and safely attainable from ergot, is so close and natural and poetically satisfying, complying point by point with the myth of Demeter and Persephone, that are we not virtually compelled to accept this solution? Further avenues of inquiry open up. For example, the pregnant empresses of Byzantium lived in a porphyry-lined chamber so that their progeny would be born "in the purple" ("porphyry" = purple). Was this "purple" the color of Claviceps purpurea and do we have here a posthumous outcropping of the purple-robed Demeter and Hades-of-the-purple-hair? The earliest codices were written on purple vellum. Was this because only the most exalted color would be fitting, eg, for St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei? By a knee-jerk reflex the values of the Pagan world would thus live on under the Christian Dispensation. Chapter V.Send e-mail to The Psychedelic Library: psd_lib@druglibrary.orgContents | Feedback | Search | DRCNet Library | Schaffer Library The Psychedelic Library | Books |