Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD in 1938, came to believe that a related psychedelic compound was used by the ancient Greeks in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the secretive ritual that lasted for some two thousand years, and counted among its celebrants many of the leading lights of Greece and, later, Rome, including Plato, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius. This potion, called the kukeon, allowed those who consumed it to travel to the underworld to commune with ancestors and preview the afterlife.
