The Secret That Lasted Two Thousand Years

“Whatever happened in the telesterion, the people who wrote about it tied it to death and hope. What the Mysteries contained is still an open question.”

The initiates at Eleusis, the ancient Greek mystery cult on the plain west of Athens, were bound by an oath of silence about what happened in the telesterion, the great hall where the culminating ceremony took place. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, usually dated to around the seventh century BCE, calls the rites something no one may pry into or utter, because awe of the gods checks the voice. Athens enforced the silence. In 415 BCE the city charged Alcibiades with mimicking the Mysteries at a private house, and it condemned him to death in his absence. Livy reports that two uninitiated Acarnanian youths who wandered into the sanctuary around 200 BCE were put to death for it.

The rites were celebrated until the end of the fourth century CE, when Theodosius I banned pagan cult and the sanctuary was later wrecked, traditionally by Alaric's Goths. If the sanctuary's Mycenaean origins are counted, that is a span close to two thousand years.

Several writers said what the ceremony meant to them, though none described it. The Hymn calls anyone who has seen the rites happy, and says the uninitiated will fare worse in the darkness below. Pindar wrote of the initiate in a line Martin Nilsson rendered as "he knows the end of life and he knows its god-sent beginning." Plutarch preserves lines of Sophocles calling those who have seen the rites thrice blessed, because for them alone there is life in Hades. In Cicero's dialogue On the Laws, a speaker named Marcus says that of everything Athens gave the world, nothing was better than the Mysteries, which taught people "to die with a better hope." His companion Atticus speaks of the rites as ones into which they themselves had been initiated. This is literary praise and contains no eyewitness description, and none of it mentions a drug. It does show that educated Greeks and Romans connected the Mysteries with death.

In 1978 three men published The Road to Eleusis. R. Gordon Wasson was a New York banker and amateur mycologist whose 1957 Life magazine article, "Seeking the Magic Mushroom," brought Mexican sacred mushrooms to a mass audience. Albert Hofmann was the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD in 1938 and isolated psilocybin from Mexican mushrooms in the late 1950s. Carl Ruck was a classicist at Boston University. They proposed that the kykeon, the drink initiates consumed, contained psychoactive ergot alkaloids. The Hymn describes the kykeon as barley meal, water and mint. The hypothesis supposes the barley carried ergot, a fungus (Claviceps purpurea) that infests rye and other grains and wild grasses, and whose alkaloids are derivatives of lysergic acid, the starting point for Hofmann's synthesis of LSD. The surviving descriptions of the drink do not mention the fungus.

Hofmann's chapter supplied the chemistry. Some kinds of ergot contain alkaloids such as lysergic acid amide and ergonovine, which dissolve in water, alongside the toxic ergotamine-type alkaloids, which do not. Hofmann argued that a water-based drink could carry the first group and leave the second behind, so priests with ancient tools could have prepared a psychoactive extract. The book also reports that he tried ergonovine on himself. Later self-experimenters described effects dominated by bodily sensations and a dreamy, drowsy state, unlike LSD. A trial of one pure compound does not show what a kykeon would have done.

Wasson supplied the comparative frame. He had documented sacred mushroom use among the Mazatec of Mexico, and he later argued that the Vedic Soma was the fly agaric mushroom. He saw the Mysteries as another case of one pattern: a plant or fungus taken inside a ritual to produce an experience understood as contact with the divine. Ruck's chapter went through the ancient evidence. Many scholars read the culminating rite as a ritual enactment of the myth of Demeter and her daughter, with sacred objects shown to the initiates. Ruck argued that the testimony pointed to a vision produced by a drug.

The hypothesis has not won general acceptance. Walter Burkert, the leading historian of Greek religion of his generation, rejected it in Ancient Mystery Cults and looked to the ritual itself for the explanation. One 2018 review of the debate describes scholars as divided between enthusiastic supporters and flat rejection. Botanical objections have hit parts of Hofmann's case. Giorgio Samorini, who supports a role for ergot, and Francesco Festi showed that the Paspalum ergot Hofmann floated as an alternative is not known in Europe before modern times.

Even the secret was not kept perfectly. Two Christian writers hostile to the cult claimed to expose parts of it. Clement of Alexandria reports a password in which the initiate says they fasted and drank the kykeon. Hippolytus, in the early third century, says the highest rite showed initiates an ear of grain reaped in silence, in the course of describing a Gnostic sect's teaching. Neither names a drug.

Eleusis also turns up in modern legal argument about psychedelics. In 2006 the Supreme Court held in Gonzales v. O Centro that, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the federal government had not yet shown a compelling interest in stopping a church from using hoasca, a tea also called ayahuasca, in its ceremonies. Federal law has protected traditional ceremonial peyote use by Indians since 1994. Dustin Marlan's 2019 law review article on psychedelic decriminalization cites Eleusis as an early psychedelic ritual and surveys these exemptions. The court's decision rested on the statute and the record before it.

The secret held well enough that no full account survives. What does survive is a long record of people saying the rites mattered, especially when they thought about dying, and a hypothesis about a drink that has not been proven. Wasson believed the kykeon was the mechanism. That remains his hypothesis, and the evidence has not settled it.

Sources

• Wasson, Hofmann & Ruck, The Road to Eleusis (1978)
• Homeric Hymn to Demeter, trans. Evelyn-White (1914)
• Cicero, De Legibus 2.14.36 (Loeb 213, trans. Keyes, 1928)
• Nilsson, M.P. Greek Folk Religion (1961)
• Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry, in Moralia I (Loeb, trans. Babbitt, 1927)
• Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades 22 (Loeb, trans. Perrin, 1916)
• Livy, History of Rome 31.14
• Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus (ca. 190 CE)
• Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 5.8 (early 3rd century CE)
• Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (1987)
• Bizzotto, J. The hypothesis on the presence of entheogens in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Medicina Historica 2(2):85-93 (2018)
• Ott & Neely, Entheogenic (hallucinogenic) effects of methylergonovine. J Psychedelic Drugs 12(2):165-166 (1980)
• Hofmann et al., Psilocybin, ein psychotroper Wirkstoff aus dem mexikanischen Rauschpilz Psilocybe mexicana Heim. Experientia 14(3):107-109 (1958)
• Wasson, R.G. Seeking the Magic Mushroom, Life magazine (1957)
• Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968)
• Gonzales v. O Centro (2006)
• Native American Church peyote exemption, 42 U.S.C. 1996a (1994)
• Marlan, D. Beyond Cannabis. Lewis & Clark Law Review, 23(3):851 (2019)