“There are some important lessons we can learn from the ancient use of psychedelics.”
Michael Pollen, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
At the ancient temple of Eleusis, the mystagogue’s function was to guide people into the Greater Mystery. They spent nine days creating a psychic container for this event with staged performances, readings, games, speeches, purification rituals and revelry. The likely point of all the theater, the performances and storytelling, was to bring forth Persephone (probably an actress) who showed them something amazing about the afterlife. Writers from the time claimed that the rites at Eleusis removed the fear of death.
Modern research shows that set (mind set) and setting (the context created by the ritual) are essential and influence the psychedelic visions brought on by the drug. Participants were primed to expect to an experience of divinity – and so they did. Near the end of the ritual, the Hierophant held up a single stalk of golden wheat, reaped in silence, and the huge crowd was awe-struck. This moment was reportedly so profound it rippled out from them as a stone cast into a pond – wave upon wave of realization. They understood that the cycles of nature applied to them in ways both bigger and more mysterious than they had ever imagined. Perhaps mushrooms played a huge role in showing initiates the Greater Mystery - the third level of initiation - the nature of life and death.
Psychedelics could have been the great secret Eleusis is famous for. How else could the experience have been so profound? In some ways, it’s the only answer that makes sense. The Pharsalos bas relief (5th century BCE), now in the Louvre, shows the goddesses offering each other mushrooms while holding leather food wallets. We know those wallets were related to Eleusis. Many ancient cultures ritualized the consumption of mind-altering drugs, perhaps the ancient Greeks did too.
Like Dr. Jeremy Narby, author of The Cosmic Serpent; DNA and the origins of Knowledge, I began to wonder if the thing that separated man from the beasts began with the ingestion of teacher plants. Perhaps they kindled the imagination that gave us the domestication of plants and animals, the law, writing, medicine, everything we needed to create and sustain culture – everything once attributed to Demeter as the mother god. And if the mushroom grew on the grain, all the more to her credit – a divine gift to humanity - like to Prometheus’ gift, but this was an internal fire which burns but does not consume. If the first big bang is the sperm hitting the egg, then maybe the second is the neuronal firings of divine imagination, made possible by teacher plants.