The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

many of the important thinkers of classical Greece (including Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Aeschylus, and Euripides) had participated in the “Mysteries of Eleusis.” Nominally a harvest festival in honor of Demeter, the goddess of cultivated grains, the Mysteries were an ecstatic ritual during which participants consumed a powerful hallucinogenic potion. The precise recipe remains part of the mystery, but scholars speculate that the active ingredient was probably ergot, an alkaloid produced by a fungus (Claviceps purpurea) that infects cultivated grains and that closely resembles LSD in its chemical makeup and effects. Under the influence of this drug potion, the lights of classical civilization participated in a communal shamanic ritual of such mystery and transformative power that all who took part in it were sworn never to describe it. There is no way to know what, if anything, a philosopher or poet might have brought back from such a journey. But is it outlandish to ask whether such an experience might have helped inspire Plato’s supernatural metaphysics—the belief that everything in our world has its true or ideal form in a second world beyond the reach of our senses?