Wasson - The Road to Eleusis.pdf

5/20/2018 Wasson - The Road to Eleusis.pdf

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THE ROAD TO ELEUSIS

Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries

R. Gordon WassonAlbert HofmannCarl A. P. Ruck

To Richard Evans Schultes, Ph.D ., M .H. (Hon.)Pioneer Explorer of Psychotropic Plants in the New World

Holder of the Paul C. Mangelsdorf Chair i n the Natural SciencesDirector and Curator of Economic BotanyBotanical Museum of Harvard University

Fby R. Gordon Wasson..............................................................................................

I. TWRE(...)...................................................................................

II . A CQMA(..) .................................................................

III. STEM(....)..........................................................................

IV. AD ......................................................................................................................

V. THHD..........................................................................................

VI.

D(....)

(Chapter V included in alternate translation from the Loeb Edition. Chapter VI not included.)


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F

o much has been written about the EleusinianMysteries and for so long a time that a word is

needed to justify this presentation of three papers

dealing with them. For close to , years theMystery was performed every year (except one) forcarefully screened initiates in our month of Septem-ber. Everyone speaking the Greek language was freeto present himself, except only those who had theunexpiated blood of a murdered man on theirhands. The initiates lived through the night in thetelesterion of Eleusis, under the leadership of thetwo hierophantic families, the Eumolpids and theKerykes, and they would come away all wonder-struck by what they had lived through: according tosome, they were never the same as before. The tes-timony about that night of awe-inspiring experience

is unanimous and Sophocles speaks for the initiateswhen he says:

Thrice happy are those of mortals, who havingseen those ri tes depart for Hades; for to themalone is granted to have a true life there. Forthe rest, all there is evil.

Yet up to now no one has known what justifies ut-terances such as this, and there are many like it.Here lies for us the mystery of the Eleusinian Mys-teries. To this mystery we three have applied our-selves and believe we have found the solution, closeto ,years after the last performance of the riteand some ,years since the first.

The first three chapters of this book were read bythe respective authors as papers before the SecondInternational Conference on Hallucinogenic Mush-rooms held on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington,on Friday, October .

...

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COTWRE

ith this little book we begin a new chapter in

the history of the fifty-year-old discipline ofethnomycology, a chapter that for the first timetakes within its purview, and in a big way, our owncultural past, our legacy from ancient Greece. Eth-nomycology is simply the study of the role of mush-rooms, in the broadest sense, in the past of the hu-man race; and it is a branch of ethnobotany.

The English language lacks a word to designatethe higher fungi. Toadstool is an epithet, a pejo-rative designation embracing all those fungalgrowths that the user distrusts, whether rightly orwrongly. Mushroom is ambiguous, covering dif-ferent areas of the fungal world for different per-

sons. In this little book we will use mushroom forall the higher fungi. Now that at long last the worldis coming to know these fungal growths in all theirmyriad shapes and colors and smells and textures,perhaps this novel usage will answer to a need andcome to be generally accepted.

We are three who have enlisted for this presen-tation. Dr. Albert Hofmann is the Swiss chemistrenowned for his discovery in of , but hisfamiliarity with the plant alkaloids is encyclopedicand he will draw our attention to attributes of someof them relevant to the Eleusinian Mysteries.

As we are dealing with a central theme of Greek

civilization in antiquity, it was obvious that weneeded the cooperation of a Greek scholar. At theappropriate moment I learned of Professor Carl A.P. Ruck, of Boston University, who for some yearshas been making notable discoveries in the recalci-trant area of Greek ethnobotany. For many monthswe three have been studying the proposal that weare making and his paper will be the third and con-cluding one. The Homeri c Hymn toDemeter is thesource for the myth that underlies Eleusis and weoffer a new English rendering of it by Danny Sta-ples.

It will be my function, in this first of three pa-

pers, to stress certain attributes of the cult of inebri-ating mushrooms in Mexico.Early Man in Greece, in the second mil lennium

before Christ, founded the Mysteries of Eleusis andthey held spellbound the initiates who each yearattended the rite. Silence as to what took place therewas obligatory: the laws of Athens were extreme inthe penalties that were imposed on any who in-

fringed the secret, but throughout the Greek world,

far beyond the reach of Athens laws, the secret waskept spontaneously throughout Antiquity, and sincethe suspension of the Mysteries in the th century

..that Secret has become a built-in element in thelore of Ancient Greece. I would not be surprised ifsome classical scholars would even feel that we areguilty of a sacrilegious outrage at now prying openthe secret. On November I read a brief paperbefore the American Philosophical Society describ-ing the Mexican mushroom cult and in the ensuingoral discussion I intimated that this cult might leadus to the solution of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Afamous English archaeologist specializing in the ar-

chaeology of Greece, with whom I had had thefriendliest relations for about thirty-five years, wroteme in a letter a little later the following:

I do not think that Mycenae had anything todo with the divine mushroom or the Eleus-inian mysteries either. May I add a word ofwarning? Stick to your Mexican mushroomcult and beware of seeing mushrooms every-where. We much enjoyed your Philadelphiapaper and would recommend you keep asclose to that as you can. Forgive the franknessof an old friend.

I am sorry that he has now joined the shades in Ha-

des, or perhaps I should be happy that he will notbe pained by my brashness in disregarding his well-meant advice.

My late wife Valentina Pavlovna and I were thefirst to use the term ethnomycology and we havebeen closely identified with the progress in this dis-cipline over the past fifty years. That the reader maysense the drama of this our latest discovery I willbegin by retelling the story of our mushroomic ad-venture. It covers precisely the last fifty years. Itconstitutes in large measure the autobiography of

the Wasson family, and it has now led us directly toEleusis.

Late in August my bride, as she then was,and I took our delayed honeymoon in the chaletlent to us by the publisher Adam Dingwall at BigIndian in the Catskills. She was a Russian born inMoscow of a family of the intelligentsia. Tina had

W


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fled from Russia with her family in the summer of, she being then years old. She qualified as aphysician at the University of London and had beenworking hard to establish her pediatric practice inNew York. I was a newspaper man in the financialdepartment of the Herald T ri bune. On that firstbeautiful afternoon of our holiday in the Catskills,we went sauntering down the path for a walk, handin hand, happy as larks, both of us abounding in the

joy of life. There was a clearing on the right, amountain forest on our left.

Suddenly Tina threw down my hand and dartedup into the forest. She had seen mushrooms, a hostof mushrooms, mushrooms of many kinds thatpeopled the forest floor. She cried out in delight attheir beauty. She addressed each kind with an affec-tionate Russian name. Such a display she had notseen since she left her familys dachanear Moscow,almost a decade before. She knelt before those toad-stools in poses of adoration like the Virgin heark-

ening to the Angel of the Annunciation. She begangathering some of the fungi in her apron. I called toher: Come back, come back to me! They are poi-sonous, putrid. They are toadstools. Come back tome! She only laughed the more: her merry laughterwill ring forever in my ears. That evening she sea-soned the soup with the fungi, she garnished themeat with other fungi. Yet others she threaded to-gether and strung up to dry, for winter use as shesaid. My discomfiture was complete. That night Iate nothing with mushrooms in it. Frantic anddeeply hurt, I was led to wild ideas: I told her that Iwould wake up a widower.

She proved right and I wrong.The particular circumstances of this episodeseem to have shaped the course of our lives. We be-gan checking with our compatriots, she with Rus-sians and I with Anglo-Saxons. We quickly foundthat our individual attitudes characterized our re-spective peoples. Then we began gathering infor-mation, at first slowly, haphazardly, intermittently.We assembled our respective vocabularies for mush-rooms: the Russian was endless, never to this dayexhausted; the English, essentially confined to threewords, two of them ill-definedtoadstool, mush-room, fungus. The Russian poets and novelists filled

their writings with mushrooms, always in a lovingcontext. I t would seem to a stranger that every Rus-sian poet composes verses on mushroom-gatheringalmost as a rite of passage to qualify for mature rat-ing! In English the silence of many writers aboutmushrooms is deafening: Chaucer and Milton nevermention them, the others seldom. For Shakespeare,Spenser, William Penn, Laurence Sterne (exten-

sively), Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, for Edgar AllanPoe and D. H. Lawrence and Emily Dickinson,mushroom and toadstool are unpleasant, evendisgusting epithets. Our poets when they do men-tion them link them to decay and death. We beganto cast our net wider and to study all the peoples ofEurope, not only the German and French and Ital-ians, but more especially the peripheral cultures, outof the main stream, where archaic forms and beliefssurvive longestthe Albanian, Frisian, Lappish,Basque, Catalonian and Sardinian, I celandic andFaroese, and of course the Hungarian and the Fin-nish. In all our inquiries and travels we looked, notto the erudite, but to the humble and illiterate peas-ants as our most cherished informants. We exploredtheir knowledge of mushrooms and the uses towhich they put them. We were careful also to takethe flavor of the scabrous and erotic vocabulariesoften neglected by lexicographers. We examined thecommon names for mushrooms in all these cultures,

seeking the fossil metaphors hiding in their ety-mologies, to discover what those metaphors ex-pressed, whether a favorable or unfavorable attitudetoward our earthy creatures.

A little thing, some of you may say, this differ-ence in emotional attitude toward wild mushrooms.But my wife and I did not think so, and we devotedmost of our leisure hours for decades to dissecting it,defining it, and tracing it to its origin. Such discov-eries as we have made, including the rediscovery ofthe religious role for the hallucinogenic mushroomsof Mexico, can be laid to our preoccupation withthat cultural rift between my wife and me, between

our respective peoples, between the mycophilia andmycophobia (words that we devised for our twoattitudes) that divide the Indo-European peoplesinto two camps. If this hypothesis of ours be wrong,then it must have been a singular false hypothesis tohave borne the fruit that it has. But it is /not wrong.Thanks to the immense strides made in the study ofthe human psyche in this century, we are all nowaware that deep-seated emotional attitudes acquiredin early life are of profound importance. I suggestthat when such traits betoken the attitudes of wholetribes or peoples, when those traits have remainedunaltered throughout recorded history, and espe-

cially when they differ from one people to anotherneighboring people, then you are face to face with aphenomenon of deepest cultural implications,whose primal cause is to be discovered only in thewell-springs of cultural history.

Our card files and correspondence kept ex-panding and in the end, sometime in the earlys, we sat down, Tina and I, and asked ourselves


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what we were going to do with all our data. We de-cided to write a book, but there were so many lacu-nae in our evidence that it would be years before wecould put words to paper. In our conversations atthat time we found that we had been thinking alongthe same lines, afraid to express our thoughts evento each other: they were too fantastic. We had bothcome to discern a period long long ago, long beforeour ancestors knew how to write, when those an-cestors must have regarded a mushroom as a divin-ity or quasi-divinity. We knew not which mush-room(s) nor why. In the days of Early Man hiswhole world was shot through with religious feelingand the unseen powers held him in thrall. Our sa-cred mushroom must have been wondrous in-deed, evoking awe and adoration, fear, yes, eventerror. When that early cult gave way to new relig-ions and to novel ways emerging with a literateculture, the emotions aroused by the old cult wouldsurvive, truncated from their roots. In one area the

fear and terror would live on, either of a particularmushroom (as in the case of A. muscari a); or else, asthe emotional focus through tabu became vague, oftoadstools in general; and in another area, for areason that we cannot now tell, it was the spirit oflove and adoration that survived. Here would lie theexplanation of the mycophobia vs. mycophilia thatwe had discovered. (Toadstool , incidentally, wasoriginally the specific name of A. muscari a, the di-vine mushroom, of a beauty befitting its divinity.Through tabu, toadstool lost its focus and came tohover over the whole of the mushroom tribe thatthe mycophobe shuns.)

It was in Mexico that our pursuit of a hypotheti-cal sacred mushroom first achieved its goal. On September we received in the post two lettersfrom Europe: one from Robert Graves enclosing acutting from a pharmaceutical journal in whichthere were quotations from Richard Evans Schultes,who in turn cited a number of th century Spanishfriars telling of a strange mushroom cult among theIndians of M esoamerica; the second from GiovanniMardersteig, our printer in Verona, sending us hissketch of a curious archaeological artifact from

Mesoamerica. I t was exhibited in the Rietberg Mu-seum of Zurich. The artifact was of stone, about afoot high, obviously a mushroom, with a radiantbeing carved on the stem or what mycologists callthe stipe. Here was perhaps the very cult we wereseeking, well within our reach. Earlier we had re-solved that we would avoid the New World and

Africa in our inquiries: the world was too large andour hands were full with Eurasia. But in a trice wechanged our minds and the course of our studies,and we concentrated on M exico and Guatemala.We had been postulating a wild mushroom as a fo-cus of religious devotion, a fantastic surmise. Nowhere it was on our doorstep. All that winter we wentracing through the texts of the th century Spanishfriars, and what extraordinary narratives they giveus! We flew down to Mexico in that summer of and for many rainy seasons thereafter. With won-derful cooperation from everyone in that country,on the night of June we finally made ourbreakthrough: my photographer and friend AllanRichardson and I participated with our Indianfriends in a midnight agapeconducted by a shamanof extraordinary quality. This was the first time onrecord that anyone of the alien race had shared insuch a communion. It was a soul-shattering experi-ence. The wild surmise that we had dared to postu-

late in a whisper to each other years before was atlast vindicated. And now, nearly a quarter of a cen-tury later, we are prepared to offer another mush-room, Claviceps purpurea, as holding the secret tothe Eleusinian Mysteries.

That there might be a common denominatorbetween the Mexican mushroom Mystery and theMystery of Eleusis had struck me at once. Theyboth aroused an overwhelming sense of awe, ofwonder. I will leave to Professor Ruck the discussionof Eleusis but will quote one ancient author, Aris-tides the Rhetor, who in the nd century..pulledaside the curtain for an instant when he said that

what the initiate experienced was new, astonishing,inaccessible to rational cognition, and he went on:

Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth,and of all the divine things that exist amongmen, it is both the most awesome and themost luminous. At what place in the worldhave more miraculous tidings been sung, andwhere have the dromena called forth greateremotion, where has there been greater rivalrybetween seeing andhearing?[Italics mine.]

And he goes on to speak of the ineffable visionsthat it had been the privilege of many generations offortunate men and women to behold.

This description point by point tallies with theeffect on the ini tiate of the Mesoamerican mush-room rite, even to the rivalry between seeing andhearing. For the sights that one sees assume rhyth-mical contours, and the singing of the shamanseems to take on visible and colorful shapes.


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There seems to have been a saying among theGreeks that mushrooms were the food of theGods, broma theon, and Porphyrius is quoted ashaving called them nurslings of the Gods, theotro-phos. The Greeks of the classic period were my-cophobes. Was this not because their ancestors hadfelt that the whole fungal tribe was infected by at-traction with the holiness of the sacred mushroom,and that mushrooms were therefore to be avoidedby mortal men?Are we not dealing with what wasin origin a religious tabu?

I would not be understood as contending thatonly these alkaloids (wherever found in nature)bring about visions and ecstasy. Clearly some poetsand prophets and many mystics and ascetics seem tohave enjoyed ecstatic visions that answer the re-quirements of the ancient Mysteries and that dupli-cate the mushroom agape of Mexico. I do not sug-gest that St. John of Patmos ate mushrooms in or-der to write the Book of the Revelation. Yet the suc-

cession of images in his Vision, so clearly seen butsuch a phantasmagoria, means for me that he was inthe same state as one bemushroomed. Nor do I sug-gest for a moment that William Blake knew themushroom when he wrote this telling account of theclarity of vision:

The Prophets describe what they saw in Vi-sion as real and existing men, whom they sawwith their imaginative and immortal organs;the Apostles the same; the clearer the organthe more distinct the object. A Spir i t and aVi sion are not, as the modern phi losophy sup-poses, a cloudy vapour, or a nothi ng: they are or-

ganized and minutely art iculated beyond all thatthe mortal and perishing nature can produce. Hewho does not imagine in stronger and betterlineaments, and in stronger and better light thanhis perishing eye can see, does not imagine at al l.[Italics mine. From The Writings of WilliamBlake, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes, vol. III, p. ]

This must sound cryptic to one who does not shareBlakes vision or who has not taken the mushroom.The advantage of the mushroom is that it putsmany, if not everyone, within reach of this statewithout having to suffer the mortifications of Blakeand St. John. I t permits you to see, more clearlythan our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyondthe horizons of this life, to travel backwards andforwards in time, to enter other planes of existence,even (as the Indians say) to know God. I t is hardlysurprising that your emotions are profoundly af-fected, and you feel that an indissoluble bond unitesyou with the others who have shared with you inthe sacred agape. All that you see during this night

has a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, thecarvings, the animalsthey look as though they hadcome straight from the Makers workshop. Thisnewness of everythingit is as though the worldhad just dawnedoverwhelms you and melts youwith its beauty. Not unnaturally, what is happeningto you seems to you freighted with significance, be-side which the humdrum events of everyday aretrivial. All these things you see with an immediacyof vision that leads you to say to yourself, Now Iam seeing for the first time, seeing direct, withoutthe intervention of mortal eyes.

Plato tells us that beyond this ephemeral andimperfect existence here below, there is anotherIdeal world of Archetypes, where the original, thetrue, the beautiful Pattern of things exists for ever-more. Poets and philosophers for millennia havepondered and discussed his conception. It is clear tome where Plato found his Ideas; it was clear tothose who were initiated into the Mysteries among

his contemporaries too. Plato had drunk of the po-tion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent thenight seeing the great Vision.

And all the time that you are seeing these things,the priestess in Mexico sings, not loud, but withauthority. The Indians are notoriously not given todisplays of inner feelingsexcept on these occa-sions. The singing is good, but under the influenceof the mushroom you think it is infinitely tenderand sweet. It is as though you were hearing it withyour minds ear, purged of all dross. You are lyingon a petate or mat; perhaps, if you have been wise,on an air mattress and in a sleeping bag. It is dark,

for all lights have been extinguished save a few em-bers among the stones on the floor and the incensein a sherd. It is still, for the thatched hut is apt to besome distance away from the village. In the darknessand stillness, that voice hovers through the hut,coming now from beyond your feet, now at yourvery ear, now distant, now actually underneath you,with strange ventriloquistic effect. The mushroomsproduce this illusion also. Everyone experiences it,

just as do the tribesmen of Siberia who have eaten ofAmanita muscaria and lie under the spell of theirshamans, displaying as these do their astonishingdexterity with ventriloquistic drum beats. Likewise,

in Mexico, I have heard a shaman engage in a mostcomplicated percussive beat: with her hands she hitsher chest, her thighs, her forehead, her arms, eachgiving a different resonance, keeping a complicatedrhythm and modulating, even syncopating, thestrokes. Your body lies in the darkness, heavy aslead, but your spirit seems to soar and leave the hut,and with the speed of thought to travel where it


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listeth, in time and space, accompanied by the sha-mans singing and by the ejaculations of her percus-sive chant. What you are seeing and what you arehearing appear as one: the music assumes harmoni-ous shapes, giving visual form to its harmonies, andwhat you are seeing takes on the modalities of mu-sicthe music of the spheres. Where has therebeen greater rivalry between seeing and hearing?How apposite to the Mexican experience was theancient Greeks rhetorical question! All your sensesare similarly affected: the cigarette with which youoccasionally break the tension of the night smells asno cigarette before had ever smelled; the glass ofsimple water is infinitely better than champagne.Elsewhere I once wrote that the bemushroomedperson is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisi-ble, incorporeal, seeing but not seen. In truth, he isthe five senses disembodied, all of them keyed to theheight of sensitivity and awareness, all of themblending into one another most strangely, until the

person, utterly passive, becomes a pure receptor,infinitely delicate, of sensations.

As your body lies there in its sleeping bag, yoursoul is free, loses all sense of time, alert as it neverwas before, living an eternity in a night, seeing in-finity in a grain of sand. What you have seen andheard is cut as with a burin in your memory, neverto be effaced. At last you know what the ineffable is,and what ecstasy means. Ecstasy! The mind harksback to the origin of that word. For the Greeks ek-stasismeant the flight of the soul from the body. Iam certain that this word came into being to de-scribe the effect of the Mystery of Eleusis. Can you

find a better word than that to describe the bemush-roomed state? In common parlance, among themany who have not experienced ecstasy, ecstasy isfun, and I am frequently asked why I do not reachfor mushrooms every night. But ecstasy is not fun.Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles.After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe, orto float through that door yonder into the DivinePresence? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word,and we must recapture its full and terrifyingsense. A few hours later, the next morning, youare fit to go to work. But how unimportant workseems to you, by comparison with the portentous

happenings of that night! If you can, you prefer tostay close to the house, and, with those who livedthrough that night, compare notes, and utter ejacu-lations of amazement.

I will convey to you the overwhelming impres-sion of awe that the sacred mushrooms arouse in thenative population of the Mexican highlands. In theMazatec tribe where I ingested them for the first

time these part icular mushrooms are not mush-rooms: they stand apart. Onewordthain3embraces the whole fungal tribe,edible, innocuous but inedible, and toxic,thewhole fungal world except the sacred species. Thesacred species are known by a name that in itself is aeuphemism for some other name now lost: they are

7nti1xi3tho3. (In Mazatec each syllable must be pro-nounced in one of four tones or in slides from onetone to another, being the highest. The initial isa glottal stop.) The first element, 7nti1, is a diminu-tive of affection and respect. The second element,xi3tho3,means that which leaps forth. The wholeword is thus: the dear little things that leap forth.But this word is holy: you do not hear it uttered inthe market place or where numbers of people areassembled. It is best to bring up the subject at night,by the light of a fire or a vela(votive candle), whenyou are alone with your hosts. Then they will dilateendlessly on the wonders of these wondrous mush-

rooms. For this euphemistic name they will proba-bly use yet others, a further degree of euphemism,the santi tos, the little saints, or again the littlethings in Mazatec. When we were leaving the Ma-zatec mountains on horseback after our first visitthere, we asked our muleteer Victor Hernandez howit came about that the sacred mushrooms werecalled the dear little ones that leap forth. He hadtraveled the mountain trails all his life and spokeSpanish although he could neither read nor writenor even tell time by the clocks face. His answer,breathtaking in sincerity and feeling, breathed thepoetry of religion and I quote it word for word as he

uttered it and as I put it down in my notebook atthe time:

El honguillo viene por si mismo, no se sabe dedonde, como el viento que viene sin saber dedonde ni porque. [The lit tle mushroom comesof itself, no one knows whence, like the windthat comes we know not whence nor why.]

Victor was referring to the genesis of the sacredmushrooms: they leap forth seedless and rootless, amystery from the beginning. Aurelio Carreras, townslaughterer in Huautla, when we asked him wherethe mushrooms take you, said simply: Le llevanallidonde dios esta, They carry you there where God

is. According to Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez of RioSantiago, To eat the mushrooms you must beclean: they are the blood of our Lord the EternalFather. Hay que ser muy limpio, es la sangre deNuestro Seor Padre Eterno. These are Spanish-speaking villagers picked at random. They expressreligion in its purest essence, without intellectual


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content. Aristotle said of the Eleusinian Mysteriesprecisely the same: the initiates were to suffer, tofeel, to experience certain impressions and moods.They were not to learn anything.

As man emerged from his brutish past, thou-sands of years ago, there was a stage in the evolutionof his awareness when the discovery of a mushroom(or was it a higher plant?) with miraculous proper-ties was a revelation to him, a veritable detonator tohis soul, arousing in him sentiments of awe and rev-erence, and gentleness and love, to the highest pitchof which mankind is capable, all those sentimentsand virtues that mankind has ever since regarded asthe highest attribute of his kind. It made him seewhat this perishing mortal eye cannot see. Howright the Greeks were to hedge about this Mystery,this imbibing of the potion, with secrecy and sur-veillance! What today is resolved into a mere drug, atryptamine or lysergic acid derivative, was for him aprodigious miracle, inspiring in him poetry and

philosophy and religion. Perhaps with all our mod-ern knowledge we do not need the divine mush-rooms any more. Or do we need them more thanever?Some are shocked that the key even to religionmight be reduced to a mere drug. On the otherhand, the drug is as mysterious as it ever was: likethe wind that comes we know not whence norwhy. Out of a mere drug comes the ineffable,comes ecstasy. It is not the only instance in the his-tory of humankind where the lowly has given birthto the divine. Altering a sacred text, we would saythat this paradox is a hard saying, yet one worthy ofall men to be believed.

If our classical scholars were given the opportu-nity to attend the rite at Eleusis, to talk with thepriestess, what would they not exchange for thatchance? They would approach the precincts, enterthe hallowed chamber, with the reverence born ofthe texts venerated by scholars for millennia. H owpropitious would their frame of mind be, if theywere invited to partake of the potion! Well, thoserites take place now, unbeknownst to the classicalscholars, in scattered dwellings, humble, thatched,without windows, far from the beaten track, high inthe mountains of Mexico, in the stillness of thenight, broken only by the distant barking of a dog

or the braying of an ass. Or, since we are in therainy season, perhaps the Mystery is accompaniedby torrential rains and punctuated by terrifyingthunderbolts. Then, indeed, as you lie there be-mushroomed, listening to the music and seeing thevisions, you know a soul-shattering experience, re-calling as you do the belief of some early peoplesthat mushrooms, the sacred mushrooms, are di-

vinely engendered by Parjanya, the Aryan God ofthe Lightning-bolt, in the Soft Mother Earth.

Someone has called mycology the step-child ofthe sciences. Is it not now acquiring a wholly newand unexpected dimension? Religion has alwaysbeen at the core of mans highest faculties and cul-tural achievements, and therefore I ask you now tocontemplate our lowly mushroomwhat patents ofancient lineage and nobility are coming its way!

R. GW


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CTA CQMA

n July I was visiting my friend Gordon Was-

son in his home in Danbury when he suddenlyasked me this question: whether Early Man in an-cient Greece could have hit on a method to isolatean hallucinogen from ergot that would have givenhim an experience comparable to or psilocybin.I replied that this might well have been the case andI promised to send him, after further reflection, anexposition of our present knowledge on the subject,which I already suspected would support my tenta-tive posit ion. Two years have passed, and here nowis my answer.

Ergot is the English name for a fungal growth,the sclerotium of a mushroom known to mycolo-

gists asClaviceps purpurea(Fr.) Tul. It is a parasiteon rye and other cereals such as barley or wheat, andalso on certain wild grasses. Other species of thegenus Claviceps, viz.C. paspaliStev. and Hall, C.nigricans Tul., and C. glabra Langdon, etc., areparasitical to many species and varieties of grasses.Ergot itself is not of uniform chemical composition:it occurs in biological or chemical races, differ-ing from each other mainly by the composition oftheir alkaloidal constituents. (Chemists define al-kaloids as nitrogen-containing alkaline substancesthat represent the pharmacologically active princi-ples of many plants.) Thus in Switzerland there exist

three varieties of ergot of rye: (a) in the Midlands arace containing mainly the alkaloid ergotamine, (b)in the Valais one with alkaloids of the ergotoxinegroup, and (c) in the Grisons a variety with no al-kaloids at all. Furthermore in other kinds of er-gotgrowing on wheat, on barley, on millet, onlolium, etc.there are wide variations in alkaloidalmakeup, sometimes depending on geographical lo-cation.

By far the most important of all kinds of ergot isergot of rye, purple-brown protrusions from the earsof rye. Ergot of rye (in scientific nomenclature: Se-cale cornutum) has been called in England horned

rye, spiked rye, spurred rye, but most com-monly ergot of rye, a translation of the Frenchergot de seigle. The word ergot is defined in the PetitLarousse as petit ongle pointu derriere le pied ducoq, small pointed talon behind the cocks foot,but the derivation of the French word ergot is un-certain. Other French names are blcornu, seigleergot, seigle ivre. In German there seem to be more

variants than in other languages: Mutterkorn, Rock-enmutter, Afterkorn, Todtenkorn, Tollkorn,and manyothers. In German folklore there was a belief that,when the corn waved in the wind, the corn mother(a demon) was passing through the field; her chil-dren were the rye wolves (ergot). In our context weobserve that of these names, two, seigle ivre(drunken rye) and Tollkorn(mad grain), pointto a knowledge of the psychotropic effects of ergot.This folk awareness of the mind changing effects ofergot shows an intimate knowledge of its properties,at least among herbalists, deeply rooted in Europeantraditions.

Ergot of rye has a storied past. Once a dreaded

poison, it has become a rich treasure chamber ofvaluable pharmaceuticals.

In the Middle Ages bizarre epidemics occurredin Europe costing thousands of people their lives,occasioned by bread made from rye contaminatedwith ergot. These epidemics took two forms, Ergo-tismus convulsivus, characterized by nervous convul-sive and epileptiform symptoms, and Ergotismusgangraenosus, in which gangrenous manifestationsleading to mummification of the extremities were aprominent feature. Ergotism was also known asignissacer (holy fire), or St. Anthonys fire, becauseSt. Anthony was the patron saint of a religious order

founded to care for the victims of ergotism. Thecause of these epidemicsbread contaminated withergotwas not learned until the seventeenth cen-tury, and since then there have been only sporadicoutbreaks of ergot poisoning.

Ergot was first mentioned as a remedy by theGerman physician Adam Lonitzer in . He said itwas being used by midwives to precipitate child-birth. The first scientific report on the use of ergotas a uterotonic agent was presented by the Americanphysician John Stearns in : Account of thepulvis parturi ens. But already in Dr. DavidHosack, also American, recognizing the dangers of

using ergot for accelerating childbirth, recom-mended that the drug be used only to control post-partum haemorrhage. Since then ergot has been

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used in obstetrics mainly for this purpose.1 (ThisDr. Hosack was a distinguished man. He was a phy-sician to many of the eminent New Yorkers of histime, and he accompanied Alexander Hamilton toWeehawken heights for his fatal duel with AaronBurr. This I learned from the admirable life of Ho-sack by Christine Robbins.)

The latest and most important chapter in thehistory of ergot deals with it as a rich source ofpharmacologically useful alkaloids.2 More thanthirty alkaloids have been isolated from ergot and itis unlikely that many new ones will be discovered.Hundreds of chemical modifications of these natu-ral alkaloids have been prepared and investigatedpharmacologically. Today all these alkaloids are alsoavailable by total synthesis.

Medicinally the most useful alkaloids stem fromergot of rye. The first ergot alkaloid that foundwidespread therapeutic use was ergotamine, isolatedby A. Stoll in . It is the essential component of

pharmaceutical preparations such as Cafergot andBellergal, medicaments against migraine andnervous disorders. Modern valuable ergot prepara-tions are Hydergine developed by A. Stoll and A.Hofmann in the Sandoz laboratories in Basel, con-taining hydrogenated ergotoxine alkaloids, used inthe treatment of geriatric disorders, and Dihyder-got with dihydroergotamine as active component,for the therapy of circulatory disturbances.

Of special relevance to our problem here are theinvestigations into the alkaloid ergonovine, which isthe specific uterotonic water-soluble principle ofergot. In H. W. Dudley and C. Moir in Eng-

land discovered that water-soluble extracts of ergot,containing none of the water-insoluble alkaloids ofthe ergotamineergotoxine type, elicited stronguterotonic activity. This observation led three yearslater to the isolation of the alkaloid responsible forthis action simultaneously in four separate laborato-ries, which named it ergometrine, ergobasin,ergotocine, ergostetrine, respectively. The In-ternational Pharmacopoeia Commission proposed aname to be internationally accepted to replace thesesynonyms, viz.ergonovine.

1

The standard monograph on the botany and history ofergot is G. Barger: Ergot and Ergotism, Gurney andJackson, London, .

2 The results of the chemical, pharmacological, and me-dicinal investigations on ergot alkaloids carried out inlaboratories all over the world are reviewed in themonograph by A. Hofmann: Die Mutterkornalkaloide,F. Enke Verlag, Stuttgart, .

In , starting with naturally occurring lysergicacid, I prepared ergonovine, which by its chemicalcomposition is lysergic acid propanolamide. Lyser-gic acid is the nucleus common to most ergot alka-loids. I t is extracted from special cultures of ergotand could also be prepared today by total synthesisif this procedure were not too expensive. I used themethod developed for the synthesis of ergonovinefor the preparation of many chemical modificationsof ergonovine. One of these partly synthetic deriva-tives of ergonovine was lysergic acid butanolamide.This is used today in obstetrics, replacing to a majorextent ergonovine, under the brand name M ether-gine to stop postpartum haemorrhage.

Another lysergic acid derivative that I synthe-sized in this context aiming to get an analeptic (thatis, an agent with circulation and respiration stimu-lating properties) was lysergic acid diethylamide.Pharmacological examination revealed a fairlystrong uterotonic activity in this compound, nearly

as strong as ergonovine. In I discovered in self-experiments the specific high hallucinogenic po-tency of lysergic acid diethylamide, which becameknown worldwide under the laboratory code name.

My interest in hallucinogenic agents, originatingin from my work with , brought me intopersonal contact with Gordon Wasson, pioneer eth-nomycologist and also pioneer in the investigationof the ancient Mexican mushroom cult. From RogerHeim, then head of the Laboratoire de Cryptogamieand Director of the famous Museum NationaldHistoire Naturelle of Paris, whom Wasson invited

to study and identify in the field his sacred mush-rooms, I received samples of them for chemicalanalysis. With my laboratory assistant HansTscherter I succeeded in isolating the hallucinogenicprinciples of the sacred Mexican mushrooms, whichI named psilocybin and psilocin. With my col-leagues of the Sandoz Research Laboratories, wesucceeded in the elucidation of the chemical struc-ture and the synthesis of psilocybin and psilocin.

Inspired by my talks with my friend Wasson andencouraged by our success with the hallucinogenicmushrooms, I decided to tackle also the problem ofanother psychotropic Mexican plant, ololiuhqui.

With Wassons help I obtained a large quantity ofauthentic ololiuhquiseeds of the two morning glo-ries that the Mesoamerican Indians were using,seeds of Turbina corymbosa (L.) Raf. and IpomoeaviolaceaL. When we analyzed them we arrived at anunexpected result: these ancient drugs that we areapt to call magical and the Indians consider di-vine, contained as their psychoactive principles


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some of our already familiar ergot alkaloids. Themain components were lysergic acid amide and ly-sergic acid hydroxyethylamide, both water-solublealkaloids, closely related to lysergic acid diethyla-mide (), as is evident even to the non-chemist.Another constituent of the ololiuhquialkaloids wasergonovine, the uterotonic principle of ergot.

The psychoactive property of these simple lyser-gic acid amides, closely related to , is well estab-lished. The question presented itself whether er-gonovine, being not only an alkaloidal componentof ergot but also of ololiuhqui, possessed hallucino-genic activity. In the light of its chemical structurethis did not seem unlikely: it does not differ muchfrom . But one may ask why, if it is hallucino-genic, this astonishing fact has not been announced,in the light of its use over recent decades in obstet-rics. Undoubtedly the answer lies in the extremelylow dosage of ergonovine used to stop postpartumbleeding, viz..to .mg. The effective dose of

lysergic acid amide is to mg by oral application. Idecided therefore to test in a self-experiment a cor-responding dose of ergonovine:

April .h: .mg ergonovine hydrogenmalein-

ate, containing .mg ergonovine base, in-gested in a glass of water.

. h: slight nausea, same effect as I haveexperienced always in my or psilocy-bin experiments. Tired, need to lie down.With eyes closed colored figures.

.h: the trees in the nearby forest seem tolive, their branches moving in a threaten-ing way.

.h: strong desire to dream, unable to dosystematic work, with eyes closed or openafflicted by mollusk-like forms and feel-ings.

. h: motives and colors have becomeclearer, but bearing still some hidden dan-gers.

.h: after a short sleep I awoke by a kindof inner explosion of all the senses.

.h: an unexpected visit forced me to be-come active, but during the whole eveningI lived more in an inner than in the outerworld.

.h: all effects worn off, normal feeling.

This was an experiment performed without at-tention to set and setting but it proves that er-gonovine possesses a psychotropic, mood-changing,slightly hallucinogenic activity when taken in thesame amount as is an effective dose of lysergic acidamide, the main constituent of ololiuhqui. Its po-

tency is about one twentieth of the potency of and about five times that of psilocybin.

There is a further finding that may prove to beof utmost importance in considering Wassonsquestion. The main constituents of the Mexicanmorning glory seeds are (a) lysergic acid amide (=ergine), and (b) lysergic acid hydroxyethylamide,and these are also the main alkaloids in ergot grow-ing on the wild grass Paspalum distichum L. Thisgrass grows commonly all around the Mediterra-nean basin and is often infected with Clavicepspaspali. F. Arcamone et al.3were the first to discoverthese alkaloids in ergot of P. disti chum, in .

Within the kinds of ergot produced by the vari-ous species of the genus Claviceps and its manyhosts, cereals and wild grasses, types of ergot do existthat contain hallucinogenic alkaloids, the same al-kaloids as in the Mexican hallucinogenic morning-glories. These alkaloids, mainly lysergic acid amide,lysergic acid hydroxyethylamide, and ergonovine,

are soluble in water, in contrast to the non-hallucinogenic medicinally useful alkaloids of theergotamine and ergotoxine type. With the tech-niques and equipment available in antiquity it wastherefore easy to prepare an hallucinogenic extractfrom suitable kinds of ergot.

What suitable kinds of ergot were accessible tothe ancient Greeks? No rye grew there, but wheatand barley did and Claviceps purpureaflourishes onboth. We analyzed ergot of wheat and ergot of bar-ley in our laboratory and they were found to containbasically the same alkaloids as ergot of rye, viz.al-kaloids of the ergotamine and ergotoxine group,

ergonovine, and sometimes also traces of lysergicacid amide. As I said before, ergonovine and lysergicacid amide, both psychoactive, are soluble in waterwhereas the other alkaloids are not. As we all know,ergot differs in its chemical constituents accordingto its host grass and according to geography. Wehave no way to tell what the chemistry was of theergot of barley or wheat raised on the Rarian plainin the nd millennium ..But it is certainly notpulling a long bow to assume that the barley grownthere was host to an ergot containing, perhapsamong others, the soluble hallucinogenic alkaloids.The famous Rarian plain was adjacent to Eleusis.

Indeed this may well have led to the choice of Ele-usis for Demeters temple, and for the growth of the

3 Arcamone, F., Bonino, C., Chain, E. B., Ferretti, A.,Pennella, P., Tonolo, A., and Vero, L.; Nature (Lon-don) , ().


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cluster of powerful myths surrounding them andTriptolemus that still exert their spell on us today.

The separation of the hallucinogenic agents bysimple water solution from the non-soluble ergo-tamine and ergotoxine alkaloids was well within therange of possibilities open to Early Man in Greece.An easier method still would have been to have re-course to some kind of ergot like that growing onthe grass Paspalum distichum, which contains onlyalkaloids that are hallucinogenic and which couldeven have been used directly in powder form. As Isaid before, P. disti chumgrows everywhere aroundthe Mediterranean basin. During the many centu-ries when the Eleusinian M ysteries were thrivingand holding the antique Greek world enthralled,may not the hierophants of Eleusis have beenbroadening their knowledge and improving theirskills?For the Greek world as for us, the Mysteriesare linked to Demeter and Kore, and they andTriptolemus are the famed mythical progenitors of

cultivated wheat and barley. But in the course oftime the hierophants could easily have discoveredClaviceps paspaligrowing on the grass Paspalum di s-tichum.Here they would be able to get their hallu-cinogen direct, straight and pure. But I mention thisonly as a possibility or a likelihood, and not becausewe needP. disti chumto answer Wassons question.

Finally we must also discuss an ergot parasiticalto a wild grass called in scientific nomenclature Lo-li um temulentumL. In English this is most widelyknown as darnel or cockle or (in the Bible) tares, aweed that plagues grain crops. I t is sometimes calledwild rye grass, an unfortunate name because wild

rye has nothing to do with rye: the rye of wild ryegrass is of ut terly different etymology. In classicGreek darnel was airaand in classic Latin was lo-lium. Its name in French is ivraie and in GermanTaumellolch,both names pointing to a belief in itspsychotropic activity in the folk knowledge of thetraditional European herbalists. A citation for ivraiein .. has been found, and it must go backmuch further than that.

Analysis of Lolium temulentumin my laboratoryand an extended botanical, chemical, and pharma-cological investigation by I. Katz4showed that theplant itself contains no alkaloids nor does it possess

any pharmacological activity. But the Lolium spe-cies (L. temulentumand L. perenne) are notoriouslyprey to the Claviceps fungus. The psychotropic

4 Katz, I.: Contribution Etude de livraie enivrante (Lo-li um temulentum L.). Thse prsente a lEcole Poly-technique Federale, Zurich, .

reputation of darnel must therefore be attributed toits parasitic infection by ergot. Samples of ergotgrown on L. temulentumand L. perennecollected inGermany, France, and Switzerland showed largevariation in their alkaloidal composition. Somecontained substantial amounts of ergonovine to-gether with alkaloids of the ergotamine and ergo-toxine group.5A species of ergot growing on darnelmay have existed in ancient Greece that containedmainly hallucinogenic alkaloids of ergot such as wehave found in ergot of Paspalum.

In conclusion I now answer Wassons question.The answer is yes, Early Man in ancient Greececould have arrived at an hallucinogen from ergot.He might have done this from ergot growing onwheat or barley. An easier way would have been touse the ergot growing on the common wild grassPaspalum. This is based on the assumption that theherbalists of ancient Greece were as intelligent andresourceful as the herbalists of pre-Conquest Mex-

ico.AH

5 Kobel, H ., Sandoz Research Laboratories, Basel. Privatecommunication.


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CTSEM

e are told that there once was a young Athe-

nian who was much taken with the beauty ofa courtesan in one of the brothels of Corinth. Hisattempts to repay her favors in some special waywere continually frustrated by the madam, who in-sisted upon confiscating all private gifts. To give thegirl something that would be hers alone, he hitupon the idea of offering her an immaterial, andthereby inalienable, benefit: he would pay the ex-penses for her introduction into the blessed com-munity of those who had witnessed the secret relig-ious ceremony practiced at the village of Eleusis.That sight was generally considered the culminatingexperience of a lifetime. And so she was allowed to

travel to Athens, together with the madam and ayounger girl from the brothel. The lover lodgedthem all with a friend while they prepared them-selves by the preliminary rites. The full sequencewould require more than half a years residence inAthens. Then at last, amidst the throng of thou-sands who each autumn for the first and only timemade the pilgrimage, they too walked the SacredRoad, crossing the narrow bridge that still today canbe seen, now submerged in the brackish waters ofthe swamp that once divided Athens from the ter-ritory of its neighboring village, some fourteen milesdistant, a region sacred for its special affinity with

the realm of departed spirits, who were thought toinsure the fertility of the adjacent plain of grain.The procession of pilgrims symbolically passed thefrontier between worlds, a momentous journeycharacterized by its difficulty, for the bridge wasexpressly constructed too narrow for vehicular trafficand ahead, just as they arrived at the village itself, itwas traditional that they would be obscenely in-sulted by masked men, who lined the bridge acrossthe final boundary of water.

Each year new candidates for initiation wouldwalk that Sacred Road, people of all classes, emper-ors and prostitutes, slaves and freemen, an annual

celebration that was to last for upwards of a millen-nium and a half, until the pagan religion finally suc-cumbed to the intense hatred and rivalry of a newersect, the recently legitimized Christians in thefourth century of our era. The only requirement,beyond a knowledge of the Greek language, was theprice of the sacrificial pig and the fees of the various

priests and guides, a little more than a months

wages, plus the expense of the stay in Athens.Every step of the way recalled some aspect of an

ancient myth that told how the Earth Mother, thegoddess Demeter, had lost her only daughter, themaiden Persephone, abducted as she gathered flow-ers by her bridegroom, who was Hades or the lordof death. The pilgrims called upon Iakchos as theywalked. It was he who was thought to lead them ontheir way: through him, they would summon backthe queen Persephone into the realm of the living.When at last they arrived at Eleusis, they danced farinto the night beside the well where originally themother had mourned for her lost Persephone. As

they danced in honor of those sacred two goddessesand of their mysterious consort Dionysus, the godof inebriants, the stars and the moon and thedaughters of Ocean would seem to join in their ex-ultation. Then they passed through the gates of thefortress walls, beyond which, shielded from profaneview, was enacted the great Mystery of Eleusis.

It was called a mystery because no one, underpain of death, could reveal what happened withinthe sanctuary. M y colleagues and I, working fromhints in numerous sources, have ventured to go be-yond that forbidden gate.

Ancient writers unanimously indicate that

something was seen in the great telesterionor initia-tion hall within the sanctuary. To say so much wasnot prohibited. The experience was a visionwhereby the pilgrim became someone who saw, anepoptes. The hall, however, as can now be recon-structed from archaeological remains, was totallyunsuited for theatrical performances; nor do theepigraphically extant account books for the sanctu-ary record any expenditures for actors or stage appa-ratus. What was witnessed there was no play by ac-tors, but phasmata, ghostly apparitions, in particu-lar, the spirit of Persephone herself, returned fromthe dead with her newborn son, conceived in the

land of death. The Greeks were sophisticated aboutdrama and it is highly unlikely that they could havebeen duped by some kind of theatrical trick, espe-cially since it is people as intelligent as the poet Pin-dar and the tragedian Sophocles who have testifiedto the overwhelming value of what was seen at Ele-usis.

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There were physical symptoms, moreover, thataccompanied the vision: fear and a trembling in thelimbs, vertigo, nausea, and a cold sweat. Then therecame the vision, a sight amidst an aura of brilliantlight that suddenly flickered through the darkenedchamber. Eyes had never before seen the like, andapart from the formal prohibition against telling ofwhat had happened, the experience itself was in-communicable, for there are no words adequate tothe task. Even a poet could only say that he hadseen the beginning and the end of life and knownthat they were one, something given by god. Thedivision between earth and sky melted into a pillarof light.

These are the symptomatic reactions not to adrama or ceremony, but to a mystical vision; andsince the sight could be offered to thousands of ini-tiates each year dependably upon schedule, it seemsobvious that an hallucinogen must have induced it.We are confirmed in this conclusion by two further

observations: a special potion, as we know, wasdrunk prior to the visual experience; and secondly, anotorious scandal was uncovered in the classical age,when it was discovered that numerous aristocraticAthenians had begun celebrating the Mystery athome with groups of drunken guests at dinner par-ties.

To identify the Eleusinian drug, we must firstfind the pattern of meaning that underlies theMystery. The sacred myth that narrates the eventsinvolved in the founding of the Mystery is recordedin the so-called Homeric hymn to Demeter, ananonymous poem dating from the seventh century

.., seven centuries later than the probable date ofthe first performance of the ceremony. In it we aretold how the goddess Persephone was abducted byher bridegroom H ades to the realm of the deadwhen she picked a special hundred-headed narki ssoswhile gathering flowers with the daughters of Oceanin a place called Nysa. All Greek words ending inissosderive from the language spoken by the agrar-ian cultures dwelling in the Greek lands before thecoming of the migrating Indo-European Greeks.The Greeks themselves, however, thought that thenarki ssoswas so named because of its narcotic prop-erties, obviously because that was the essential na-

ture or symbolism of Persephones flower. Themarital abduction or seizure of maidens while gath-ering flowers is, moreover, a common theme inGreek myths and Plato records a rationalized ver-sion of such stories in which the companion of theseized maiden is named Pharmaceia or, as the namemeans, the use of drugs. The particular myth thatPlato is rationalizing is in fact one that traced the

descent of the priesthood at Eleusis. There can beno doubt that Persephones abduction was a drug-induced seizure.

That fact has never been noticed by Classicists,despite its absolute expectability in terms of what weknow about the religions of the agrarian peopleswho preceded the Greeks. Those religions centeredupon the females procreativity and the cyclical re-birth and death of both plants and mankind. Shewas the Great Mother and the entire world was herChild. The essential event in those religions was theSacred Marriage, in which the priestess periodicallycommuned with the realm of spirits within theearth to renew the agricultural year and the civilizedlife that grew upon the earth. H er male consort wasa vegetative spirit, both her son who grew from theearth and the mate who would abduct her to thefecundating other realm as he possessed her uponhis death. When the roving Indo-Europeans settledin the Greek lands, their immortal Father God of

the sky, who was Zeus, became assimilated to thepattern of the dying and reborn vegetative consortof the Great Mother. There are indications of thisassimilation in the traditions about the Zeus whowas born and died in Crete. Furthermore, archaeo-logical remains from the MinoanMycenaean pe-riod of Greek culture frequently depict visionaryexperience encountered by women engaged in ritu-als involving flowers. The priestesses or goddessesthemselves occur as idols decorated with vegetativemotifs, accompanied by their serpent consort orcrowned with a diadem of opium capsules. Moreo-ver, the myths that narrate the founding of the vari-

ous Mycenean citadels show, as we might expect,recurrent variations upon the Sacred Marriage en-acted between the immigrant founder and the au-tochthonous female in ecstatic contexts. Most inter-esting among these are the traditions about Mykenai(Mycenae) i tself, for i t was said to have beenfounded when the female of that place lost her headto the male of the new dynasty, who had picked amushroom. The etymology of Mykenai, which wasrecognized in antiquity but has been repeatedly re-

jected by modern scholars, is correctly derived fromMykene, the bride of themykesor mushroom. Fun-goid manifestations of the vegetative consort in the

Sacred Marriage can also be detected in the symbol-ism of the founding fathers at other Mycenaeansites, perhaps because that particular wave of immi-grants brought knowledge of the wild and untame-able mushroom with them on their movementsouth into the Greek lands. At Athens in the classi-cal period, the ancient Sacred Marriage was stillcelebrated annually by the wife of the sacral head of


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state: in the month of February, she would unitewith the god Dionysus.

It was as Dionysus that the Zeus who had beenassimilated as consort to the Mother Goddess sur-vived into the classical period. H is name designateshim as the Zeus of Nysa, for Dios is a form of theword Zeus. Nysa was not only, as we have seen, theplace where Persephone was abducted, but also thename for wherever was enacted that same nuptialencounter involving the passion of Dionysus birthand death. When he possessed his women devotees,the maenads or bacchants, he was synonymous withHades, the lord of death and bridegroom to thegoddess Persephone. The maenads, like Persephone,also gathered flowers. We know this because theiremblem was the thyrsos, a fennel stalk stuffed withivy leaves; such hollow stalks were customarily usedby herb gatherers as receptacles for their cuttings,and the ivy that was stuffed into the maenads stalkswas sacred to Dionysus and reputed to be a psycho-

tropic plant.Dionysus, however, could possess his ecstatic

brides through the agency of other plants as well, forhe was the vegetative consort residing in all mannerof inebriants, including apparently certain of thefungi. The stipe, by analogy to the maenads em-blem, was also called a thyrsos,with the mushroomscap substituted for the psychotropic herbs. Diony-sus himself was born prematurely in the mysticalseventh month during a winter snowfall when hiscelestial father struck his earth bride Semele at The-bes with a bolt of lightning; in the same mannermushrooms were thought to be engendered wher-

ever lightning struck the earth. The father of D iony-sus was another Dionysus, as would be expected in aSacred Marriage, for the child born at the time ofthe earths renewal is identical with the ingestedconsort who will reunite his mother-bride with theawesome nether realm from which life must foreverbe reborn. Thus not surprisingly we are told thatSemele also conceived Dionysus when she drank apotion compounded of her own sons heart. So toowas Dionysus like his father also called the thun-derer, for despite the gentleness of his infancy andhis sometimes effeminate appearance, he could sud-denly metamorphose into the virulence of his full

manhood, in which form he was a bull, rending theearth, as at his birth, announced by a bellowing, themykema that signified the presence of the mykesormushroom. His symbol was the phallos itself, by acommon metaphor also called the mykes.

It was with the vine, however, and its fermentedjuice that Dionysus was chiefly associated. Mush-rooms themselves in fact were considered a fermen-

tation of the earth, a perfect symbol of rebirth fromthe cold realm of putrefaction that was the mouldyother world. A similar process was sensed in thefrothing turmoil whereby the fungal yeast convertedgrapes into wine. In wine the god had found hisgreatest blessing for mankind; here his untameable,wild nature had succumbed to domestication. Hehimself was said to have first discovered the proper-ties of this plant that had grown from the spilledblood of the gods when he noticed a serpent drink-ing its toxin from the fruit, for serpents werethought to derive their poisons from the herbs theyate, just as conversely it was said that serpents couldtransfer their toxins to plants in their vicinity. Di-onysus taught man the way to calm this gifts vio-lent nature by diluting it with water. And custom-arily it was mixed with water that the Greeks dranktheir wines.

This custom of diluting wine deserves our atten-tion since the Greeks did not know the art of distil-

lation and hence the alcoholic content of their winescould not have exceeded about fourteen per cent, atwhich concentration the alcohol from natural fer-mentation becomes fatal to the fungus that pro-duced it, thereby terminating the process. Simpleevaporation without distillation could not increasethe alcoholic content since alcohol, which has alower boiling point than water, will merely escape tothe air, leaving the final product weaker instead ofmore concentrated. Alcohol in fact was never iso-lated as the toxin in wine and there is no word for itin ancient Greek. Hence the dilution of wine, usu-ally with at least three parts of water, could be ex-

pected to produce a drink of slight inebriating prop-erties.That, however, was not the case. The word for

drunkenness in Greek designates a state of ravingmadness. We hear of some wines so strong that theycould be diluted with twenty parts of water and thatrequired at least eight parts water to be drunk safely,for, according to report, the drinking of certainwines straight actually caused permanent braindamage and in some cases even death. Just threesmall cups of diluted wine were enough in fact tobring the drinker to the threshold of madness. Ob-viously the alcohol could not have been the cause of

these extreme reactions. We can also document thefact that different wines were capable of inducingdifferent physical symptoms, ranging from slumberto insomnia and hallucinations.

The solution to this apparent contradiction issimply that ancient wine, like the wine of most earlypeoples, did not contain alcohol as its sole inebriantbut was ordinarily a variable infusion of herbal tox-


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ins in a vinous liquid. Unguents, spices, and herbs,all with recognized psychotropic properties, couldbe added to the wine at the ceremony of its dilutionwith water. A description of such a ceremony occursin Homers Odyssey,where Helen prepares a specialwine by adding the euphoric nepenthesto the winethat she serves her husband and his guest. The factis that the Greeks had devised a spectrum of ingre-dients for their drinks, each with is own properties.

Thus the wine of Dionysus was the principlemedium whereby the classical Greeks continued topartake of the ancient ecstasy resident in all thevegetative forms that were the Earths child. In so-cial situations, the drinking was regulated by aleader, who determined the degree of inebriationthat he would impose upon the revelers as theyceremonially drank a measured sequence of toasts.At sacral events, the wine would be more potent andthe express purpose of the drinking was to inducethat deeper drunkenness in which the presence of

the deity could be felt.The herbal inebriants that figured in these Di-

onysian rites of drinking required magical proce-dures when the herbs were gathered. As wild beingswhose spirits were akin to their particular guardiananimals, the plants were the objects of a hunt. Andthe ecstatic rapture they might induce in religiouscontexts inevitably identified them as sexual forces.

Thus the female devotees of the god Dionysusappropriately bore the thyrsos as their emblem asthey roamed the winter mountainsides in search ofthe so-called vine that grew suddenly with earth-rending thunder and the bellowing of bulls amidst

their night-long dancing; that beloved child, theage-old serpent consort, was the object of theirhunt, who was suckled, then like a beast torn topieces and eaten raw; his own mothers, as was oftenclaimed, were guilty of cannibalism eating his flesh,for like mothers the women would have brought thedrug into being, harvesting and compounding itwith the help of the gods so-called nurses, in whoseloving care he would grow to manhood, eventuallyto possess them as his brides. Such ceremonies en-acted the sacred nuptials of the citys women, whothereby entered the awesome alliance with thenether lord, upon whose realm depended the

growth of all this worlds fertility of plants and man.Persephones abduction at Nysa was prototypicof that first nuptial between the realms, the primalexperience of death. In the hunting place calledAgrai, in the month of February, which was calledthe time of flowers, the candidates for the cominginitiation at Eleusis experienced in some way thedeath of Persephone through the ritual mimeses of

those Dionysian events. That occurrence wastermed the Lesser Mystery and it was considered apreliminary for the vision of the Greater Mysterythat would take place at the time of the autumnsowing in September.

The Greater Mystery was the complement of theLesser, for it centered upon redemption instead ofdeath, the triumphant return of Persephone fromHades with the infant son she had conceived duringher sojourn in communion with the spiritual realm.The Homeric hymn, after its account of Perse-phones fatal nuptial encounter, goes on to tell howDemeter came to establish the Greater Mystery. Ingrief for her lost daughter, she went to Eleusis. Her

journey there is a sympathetic imitation of Perse-phones entrance into the citadel of H ades, for Ele-usis was a simulacrum of the other word, whereDemeter too would experience the ominouschthonic phase of her womanhood, not as sacredqueen to the lord of death, but as witch and wet-

nurse in his house, for when Persephone progressesbeyond maidenhood, her mother must make way,relinquishing her former role and moving on to thethird stage, when a womans aging womb brings heronce again into proximity with the powers of death.These chthonic or earth-oriented phases of woman-hood were symbolized in the goddess Hecate, whosetriform body expressed the females totality as bride,wife, and aged nurse in Hades realm.

At Eleusis, Demeter first attempts to assuage hergrief by negating the possibility of the world ofdeath to which she has lost her daughter. She doesthis by nourishing the royal prince with immortal-

ity. H is mother, however, objects, for she cannotunderstand or accept a system that would inevitablyalienate the son from his own mothers realm asirredeemably as Persephone from Demeter.

Demeter again attempts a solution, this time aneternity of death, in which she and the maidenwould stay forever in their chthonic phase. Shecauses a plague of sterility so that no life can emergefrom the earth. This solution, however, leaves norole for the immortal deities of the sky, whose deli-cate balance with the forces of the earth is depend-ent upon the continuing worship of mortal men,who share with them the fruits of li fe.

The final solution is to heal the universe intowhich death has now intruded by admitting also thepossibility of return into life. Rebirth from deathwas the secret of Eleusis. In Hades, Persephone, likethe earth itself, takes seed into her body and therebyeternally comes back to her ecstatic mother with hernew son, only to die as eternally in his fecundatingembrace. The sign of the redemption was an ear of


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barley, the risen grain, that following the Mysterywould be committed once again to the cold earth inthe sowing of the sacred plain adjacent to Eleusis.

This was the final mediation that Demetertaught to a second of the royal princes in the citadelof Eleusis. His name was Triptolemus, the tri foldwarrior, and he becomes the apostle of the newfaith, traveling throughout the world on a serpentchariot spreading the gospel of the cultivation ofgrain. H is exact identity was part of the secret of theMystery, for the various tradit ions about his parent-age suggest that the initiates learned that, like thegrain that was his emblem, he was actually the sonof the trifold females who were the queens in thehouse of the lord of death. He was, therefore, an-other form of Dionysus, who in a similar fashionalso was an apostle, traveling in the same manner ofcart on his journey teaching man the cultivation ofthe vine. The pattern indicated in these Eleusinianapostleships clearly signifies the transition from wild

botanic growth to the arts of cultivation upon whichcivilized life must depend.

In the various Eleusinian mythical traditions,several other male figures symbolize a similar trans-mutation of the wild horror and loss that is deathinto the ravishingly handsome young man who isborn from Hades realm in pledge of the comingredemption. In one such tradition, he is Iakchos(Iacchus), the joyous Dionysian male who led theinitiates toward their vision of salvation; in another,Eubuleus, the serene personification of the cosmo-logical plan wherein the celestial immortals collabo-rated with the forces of death to show humankind

its proper role; in a third, Zagreus, the enigmatichunting companion of his ecstatic brides. Thefourth and most perfect of these transmuted figuresis Ploutos, the personification of the wealth thatstems from the fertility of man and field. The initi-ate could expect that this beneficent representativeof death would thereafter become welcome in hishouse as his constant guest, joined by ties of friend-ship. This Ploutos was originally the vegetative sonof Demeter in her more ancient days as GreatMother on Crete, where she conceived him in athrice plowed field when she united with her intoxi-cating mate whose name was Iasion, which means

the man of the drug.Triptolemus, however, was the paramounttransmutation, Demeters special response to theproblem of death. I t was his sacred barley, solemnlygrown in the Rarian plain and threshed on his floor,that was the principle ingredient in the potiondrunk by the initiates in preparation for the culmi-nating vision. The formula for that potion is re-

corded in the Homeric hymn. In addition to thebarley, it contained water and a fragrant mint calledblechon. The mint initially would seem the mostlikely candidate for the psychoactive agent in thepotion, except that all our evidence about this par-ticular mint indicates that it was unsuitable, beingneither sufficiently psychotropic to warrant the dan-ger of profane usage nor appropriately revered as thesecret drug. Rather, it was openly despised as a signof the illicit union of man and woman in lustfulconcubinage without the sacrament of marriage. To

just such an unsanctified abduction Demeter hadlost her daughter at Nysa and accordingly we aretold that the mother vented her displeasure bychanging the prostitute of Hades into mint, there-upon grinding and bruising her botanic body. Thefinal Eleusinian solution, on the other hand, willreconcile the mother to the daughters loss throughlegitimatizing the nuptial abduction in the rite ofmatrimony, whereby an heir can accede to the dy-

nastic house. Barley and not mint is the revelation atEleusis, and it is to it that we must look for the sa-cred drug.

With the cultivation of grain, man had left hiswild, nomadic ways and settled in cities, giving tothe earth in order to receive back its harvest. Allcivilized institutions derived from this delicate ac-cord struck with the dark, cold forces of death.Grain itself was thought to be a hybrid, carefullyevolved from more primitive grasses. If not tendedwith proper care, it could be expected to revert to itsworthless, inedible avatar. That primitive sibling tograin was thought to be the plant called aira in

Greek, Lolium temulentum in botanical nomencla-ture, or commonly in English wild ryes, darnedcockle, ivray, or finally tares in the Bible. Thisweed is usually infested with a fungoid growth,Claviceps purpurea,ergot or rust, a reddening cor-ruption to which barley was thought to be particu-larly susceptible. Aira,therefore, doubly endangeredthe cultivated staff of life, first as the renascent pri-mordial grass and secondly as the host for the en-croaching ergot infection. The revertive tendency ofthe infected grain, furthermore, was all too obvious,for when the sclerotia fell to the ground there grewfrom them not grain but tiny purple mushrooms,

the fruiting bodies of the ergot fungus, clearly a re-turn to the species of the unregenerate, wild Di-onysian abductor.

Unlike the seedless mushroom, however, ergotwould have seemed akin to the kernels of grain thatwere its host. As well as grain, therefore, it too wasDemeters plant, for she could wear its distinctivecolor as her robe or on her feet or be named with its


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epithet, Erysibe. The hallucinogenic properties ofClaviceps were recognized in antiquity, and thus wemay surmise that the parallel apostleships of thebarley and the vine would have signified analogoustransmutations wherein the chthonic spirits sub-mitted to cultivation. Wine, however, was Diony-sus realm, the liquid that gave sleep like death andforgetfulness, whereas Demeter was the earth, drywith the harvest upon which man fed to live. Grainwas her sacrament. Upon first coming to Eleusis,Demeter had refused the cup of wine and the initi-ates thereafter imitated her abstention in deferenceto the superior symbolism of the potion of barley.

Clearly ergot of barley is the likely psychotropicingredient in the Eleusinian potion. Its seemingsymbiotic relationship to the barley signified an ap-propriate expropriation and transmutation of theDionysian spirit to which the grain, Demetersdaughter, was lost in the nuptial embrace withearth. Grain and ergot together, moreover, were

joined in a bisexual union as siblings, bearing at thetime of the maidens loss already the potential forher own return and for the birth of the phalloid sonthat would grow from her body. A similar hermaph-roditism occurs in the mythical traditions about thegrotesquely fertile woman whose obscene jests weresaid to have cheered Demeter from her grief justbefore she drank the potion.

This solution to the Mystery of Eleusis is madestill more probable by a papyrus fragment that wasbrought to my attention by our translator of theHomeric hymn. The fragment preserves a portionof the Demes,a comedy by Eupolis written shortly

after the scandal of the profanation of the Mysteryin the fifth century ..It confirms that the profa-nation did indeed entail the drinking of the sacredkykeon and suggests that our identification of thedrug it contained is correct. In the comedy, an in-former explains to a judge how he had come uponsomeone who had obviously been drinking the po-tion since he had barley groats on his moustache.The accused had bribed the informer to say that itwas simply porridge and not the potion that he haddrunk. By a possible pun, the comedian may evenindicate that the incriminating crumbs of barleywere purples of barley.

Thus we may now venture past the forbiddengates and reconstruct the scene within the great ini-tiation hall at Eleusis. The preparation of the potionwas the central event. With elaborate pageantry, thehierophant, the priest who traced his descent backto the first performance of the Mystery, removedthe sclerotia of ergot from the free-standing roomconstructed inside the telesterionover the remains of

the original temple that had stood there in Myce-naean times. As he performed the service, he in-toned ancient chants in a falsetto voice, for his rolein the Mystery was asexual, a male who had sacri-ficed his gender to the Great Goddess. He conveyedthe grain in chalices to the priestesses, who thendanced throughout the hall, balancing the vesselsand lamps upon their heads. The grain was nextmixed with mint and water in urns, from which thesacred potion was then ladled into the special cupsfor the initiates to drink their share. Finally, in ac-knowledgment of their readiness, they all chantedthat they had drunk the potion and had handled thesecret objects that had come with them on the Sa-cred Road in sealed baskets. Then, seated on thetiers of steps that lined the walls of the cavernoushall, in darkness they waited. From the potion theygradually entered into ecstasy. You must rememberthat this potionan hallucinogenunder the rightset and setting, disturbs mans inner ear and trips

astonishing ventriloquistic effects. We can rest as-sured that the hierophants, with generations of ex-perience, knew all the secrets of set and setting. I amsure that there was music, probably both vocal andinstrumental, not loud but with authority, comingfrom hither and yon, now from the depths of theearth, now from outside, now a mere whisper infil-trating the ear, flitting from place to place unac-countably. The hierophants may well have knownthe art of releasing into the air various perfumes insuccession, and they must have contrived the musicfor a crescendo of expectation, until suddenly theinner chamber was flung open and spirits of light

entered the room, subdued lights I think, notblinding, and among them the spirit of Persephonewith her new-born son just returned from Hades.She would arrive just as the hierophant raised hisvoice in ancient measures reserved for the Mystery:The Terrible Queen has given birth to her son, theTerrible One. This divine birth of the Lord of theNether World was accompanied by the bellowingroar of a gong-like instrument that outdid, for theecstatic audience, the mightiest thunderclap, com-ing from the bowels of the earth.

Some Christian bishops, in the last days of theMystery, thought they had discovered and could

reveal the secret of Eleusis. One said that in thispagan rite there was materialized a stalk of barley.How true according to his limited lights, yet howutterly false. The Bishop had not known the nightof nights at Eleusis. He was like one who has notknown or the mushrooms of Mexico or themorning glory seeds. For close on to two thousandyears a few of the ancient Greeks passed each year


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through the portals of Eleusis. There they celebratedthe divine gift to mankind of the cultivated grainand they were also initiated into the awe some pow-ers of the nether world through the purple dark ofthe grains sibling that Dr. Hofmann has once againmade accessible to our generation. The myths ofDemeter and Persephone and all their company fitour explanation in every respect. Nothing in any ofthem is incompatible with our thesis.

Until yesterday we knew of Eleusis only whatlittle a few of the initiates told us but the spell oftheir words had held generations of mankind en-thralled. Now, thanks to Dr. Hofmann and GordonWasson, those of us who have experienced the supe-rior hallucinogens may join the fellowship of theancient initiates in a lasting bond of friendship, afriendship born of a shared experience of a realitydeeper far than we had known before.

CA. P. R


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CFAD

Greek scholar, writing just half a century ago,

did not hesitate to dismiss the worship of De-meter at Eleusis as trivial and absurd; but, headded, there can be no doubt that it did much tosatisfy the emotional side of the religious instincts ofthe Greeks. Its modern analogue is perhaps the Sal-vation Army. We trust that our own comparisonswill be less bizarre than his. In our generation weenjoy the advantage of having rediscovered the hal-lucinogenic experience. M oreover, the value of in-terdisciplinary collaboration is that it gives us accessto knowledge otherwise apt to be beyond the reachof scholars. Our joint effort has yielded a radicalanswer to our problem: it sets the stage for much

reexamination of traditional opinions about theclassical Greeks and their tragic literature in cele-bration of the god Dionysus.

The ancient testimony about Eleusis is unani-mous and unambiguous. Eleusis was the supremeexperience in an initiates life. It was both physicaland mystical: trembling, vertigo, cold sweat, andthen a sight that made all previous seeing seem likeblindness, a sense of awe and wonder at a brilliancethat caused a profound silence since what had justbeen seen and felt could never be communicated:words are unequal to the task. Those symptoms areunmistakably the experience induced by an hallu-

cinogen. To reach that conclusion, we have only toshow that the rational Greeks, and indeed some ofthe most famous and intelligent amongst them,could experience and enter fully into such irration-ality.

Eleusis was different from the convivial inebria-tion of friends at a symposionor the drunken komosrevel at the festivals of drama. Eleusis was somethingfor which even the maenadic ecstasy of the moun-tain women was only partial preparation. In theirvarious ways, other Greek cults too enacted aspectsof the ancient communion practiced between godsand men, between the living and the dead, but it

was at Eleusis alone that the experience occurredwith overwhelming finality: here alone was thegrand design fulfilled of the maiden resurrected withher son conceived in death, and of the ear of barleythat like her had sprouted beneath the earth. By thisresurrection was validated the continuance of allthat a Greek held most dear, the civilized way of lifethat, beyond each citys constitution, was the Greek

heritage, evolved out of aboriginal primitivism just

as all life too came from the beneficent accord withthe lord of death. Here indeed is a rich full-bodiedmyth, filled with contradictions like all the myths ofan unlettered age, one saying this and another say-ing that and a third saying something else, butsomehow in the end harmonizing into one whole, amyth that for the Greeks explained the beginningand the end of things.

Months of learning and rituals preceded therevelation on the Mystery night, each action pro-gramming in further detail the meaning and sub-stance, the full ramifications of the vision that layahead. At last the initiates would sit on the steps in

the initiation hall. It was all done now except for thefinale. They had learned the secret version of thesacred myth, they had bathed in the sea, abstainedfrom various tabu foods and drinks, sacrificed a pig,taken the long walk along the Sacred Way fromAthens, and made the perilous crossing of the finaldivision of water before their arrival at the city oftheir Eleusinian hosts. Outside the sanctuary walls,there was the night-long dance beside the MaidensWell on the very ground that the goddess had vis-ited. Then there was the fast and the momentousentrance into the forbidden territory past the cavethat was an entrance to Hades and the rock where

Demeter had sat in grief. In the initiation hall, therewas the final ceremonial dance of the priestessescarrying the chalice of grain upon their heads asthey mixed and distributed the sacred potion: fra-grant blechon, the despised herb associated with theillicit nature of the abduction, immersed in water towhich was added a sprinkling of flour from barleygrown in the Rarian plain. The barleys potential asthe foodstuff for mankind depended upon keepingat bay the encroachment of the reddening corrup-tion that would draw it back to its worthless avatar,the rust-infested weed. Like the blechon, the weedtoo was thus associated with primitivism and the

ways of life before the institutions of society broughtman to a higher mode of existence. Of these twoplants the initiates drank and then paused expectantfor redemption while the hierophant chanted theancient words. Then, suddenly, there was light andthe boundaries on this world burst their bounds asspiritual presences were felt in their midst and thehall was flooded with glowing mystery.

A


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From beginning to end here there was a reen-actment of a sacred drama in which the initiates aswell as the officiants had their role to play, until atlast they experienced as actors the ineffable, all oftheir senses and emotions being shot through withwhat would thereafter be forever the unspeakable.

As the initiates passed through the lengthy pro-ceedings, they were admitted to many secrets, butthe hierophants may well have withheld from themthe Secret of Secrets: the sacred water of the potionhad already soaked up in the right dosage from theimmersed ergot what it contained of ergine and er-gonovine, as we call them today. But the hiero-phants were certainly, through the centuries, seekingways to improve their technique, their formulae. Inthe course of those two millennia may they not havediscovered a kind of ergot that contains solely thehallucinogenic alkaloids such as has been found inmodern times in ergot of Paspalum distichum?In-deed herbalists other than the hierophantic families

may have shared in this discovery and it may havebeen their knowledge that prompted the rash ofprofanations in .. . The inside story of thoseevents will never be known but that there was astory to tell is certain.

In unlettered cultures the knowledge of theherbalistthe knowledge of the properties of plantsand their usewas everywhere a body of secret lorepassed on by word of mouth from herbalist to ap-prentice and sometimes from one herbalist to an-other. The apprenticeship took years before onepracticed on ones own, and one never stoppedlearning. There were questions of dosage, of side

effects, of proper plant ingredients that became poi-sons when taken to excess. In Mexico Bernardino deSahagun and Francisco Hernandez were giftedSpaniards and they spent endless effort and time totake down from the Indians the virtues of variousMexican plants. But they were Europeans whoknew not the American plant world, and in theirEuropean world they were certainly not what wewould call botanists or herbalists. Thei

Documents

Wasson - The Road to Eleusis.pdf