Two Thousand Years of Suppression: Sacred Pharmacology and Legal Rights

“The Mysteries were abolished by state power in 392 CE because they competed with state religion. The US scheduling of psilocybin and LSD follows the same logic.”

In 392 CE, Emperor Theodosius issued edicts outlawing non-Christian religious practice throughout the Roman Empire. The Eleusinian Mysteries, which had operated continuously for approximately a thousand years, were formally prohibited. The political structure of the suppression is not obscure: a state religion that could not coexist with a competing institution offering direct, individual experience of the divine used state power to eliminate the competition.

Carl Ruck's scholarship places contemporary drug prohibition in this historical lineage: the recurring pattern in which institutions that manage access to the sacred suppress experiences that bypass their mediation. Psychedelic experience characteristically produces what William James called the 'noetic quality', a sense of having directly received genuine knowledge. This is precisely what institutional religion claims to provide.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act provides the current US legal framework for the argument that psychedelic experience deserves First Amendment protection. Gonzales v. O Centro (2006) applying RFRA to ayahuasca demonstrates legal traction. The Church of Gaia's May 2025 non-litigation DEA approval demonstrates the regulatory system can accommodate sincere religious psychedelic use.

But RFRA protection requires demonstrating sincerity of religious belief, creating institutional barriers. The Road to Eleusis scholarship's argument, that entheogenic religious practice is foundational rather than peripheral to Western civilization's religious history, is directly relevant to how these barriers should be evaluated.

Sources

• Wasson Hofmann & Ruck The Road to Eleusis (1978)
• Theodosius Codex 392 CE
• RFRA (1993)