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May 7 - May 15, 2021
Meanwhile in Canada, Dr. Gabor Mate was offering phenomenally successful Ayahuasca healing sessions to his drug-addicted patients before the Canadian government stepped in and stopped his work on the grounds that Ayahuasca itself is an illegal drug.
I’m still an atheist, and I still accept that those scientists who seek to reduce consciousness to matter may be right. But my experiences with Ayahuasca have convinced me, as no amount of reading or studying or listening to lectures or sermons ever could, that materialist-reductionism is a profound error, that to be alive and conscious at all is a mystery of enormous, immeasurable proportions and, in brief, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, that “there are more things in heaven and earth” than are presently dreamed of in our philosophy.
And right there, plain as can be, is the stated goal of every mystic or saint who has ever tried to put any of the world’s religions to the ultimate test. To die before you die. Or rather, to psychologically maim the ego—even for a brief instant—in order to be initiated into an understanding of what lies beneath all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that have gone into the lifetime construction of our false, or at the very least incomplete, sense of self. The little ego (Latin for “I”) that seems so firmly in control is just an elaborate illusion. And only half the story, as brilliantly
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The written word that tries to capture the original encounter inevitably replaces the personal experience of awe. So that “live doctrine fossilizes into dogmatism,” and the ethics and morality that attempt to translate “mystical communion into practical living” are reduced to moralism.21 But despite the dogmatism and moralism that inevitably muck up the system, the mystics have always come along with an embarrassing reminder for the self-appointed enforcers of the establishment’s rules and regulations. When it comes to “God”—a word rarely used by the mystics—there is total unanimity on one
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For the mystics, the only way to know God is to experience God. And the only way to experience God is to unlearn everything the ego has been trying so vigorously to manufacture since our infancy. In order to stop wetting the bed and become productive members of society, that “deep, inner-peace circuitry of the right hemisphere” has been sidelined along the way. To bring it back online, say the mystics, the simplest and most effective method is to die before you die.
a fundamental concept for the Kabbalists, the mystics of Judaism, is Ayin (Nothingness). “When a man attains to the stage of self-annihilation he can thus be said to have reached the world of the divine Nothingness. Emptied of selfhood his soul has now become attached to the true reality.”
the German theologian Meister Eckhart, the mystic par excellence of medieval Christianity, put so much emphasis on the “self-effacement” that is the one condition precedent to finding God: “If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all.”
To this day all visitors to Saint Paul’s Monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece, one of the most important sites of Orthodox spirituality, will come face-to-face with a beautiful Greek saying mounted on the wall of the reception area: “If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.”
Where even a pragmatist like Dinah might find herself agreeing with the old adage about mysticism: atheists and mystics both essentially believe in nothing. The only difference is that mystics spell it with a capital N.
“Nothing could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy,” the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven.”
As the first to legalize statewide cannabis for personal use in 2012, Colorado is already home to the International Church of Cannabis, which opened its doors in 2017.33 The first psychedelic churches will inevitably be next.
What was the original sacrament of Western civilization? And did it somehow sneak its way into the primitive rites of Christianity? If the experts ever turn up new information on the real reason why the universe of Greek-speaking pagans became the founding generations of Christianity, turning a Jewish healer from Galilee into the most famous human being who ever lived, it promises the Reformation to end all Reformations. Because the mystical core, the ecstatic source and true lifeblood of the biggest religion the world has ever known, will have finally been exposed.
Before the rise of Christianity, did the Ancient Greeks consume a secret psychedelic sacrament during their most famous and well-attended religious rituals? Did the Ancient Greeks pass a version of their sacrament along to the earliest, Greek-speaking Christians, for whom the original Holy Communion or Eucharist was, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist?
I present every piece of evidence that, taken together, finally convinced me of the psychedelic reality behind Western civilization’s original religion.
But one thing is certain: that storied tension between the mystics and the bureaucrats has reached a breaking point. In order to find our soul again, a popular outbreak of mysticism could be just what the doctor ordered. And the prescription could be exactly what it was in the beginning: to die before we die, with a solid dose of the religion that started it all. The religion with no name.
Eleusis was our first, undisputed spiritual capital. Throughout classical antiquity, the quaint harbor town was ground zero for generations of seekers. But its religion wouldn’t last forever. In the battle for the sacred legacy of the West, Eleusis was a spectacular casualty. Its demise at the hands of the newly Christianized Roman Empire in the fourth century AD marked the beginning of an identity crisis that persists to this day. Are we Greek or are we Christian?
Under penalty of death, all visitors were explicitly forbidden from revealing what they saw on the inside.8 Whatever happened in Eleusis, stayed in Eleusis. Frustrating as it is for modern historians, that policy served the Mysteries well. The wall of silence only fed the mystique and guaranteed fans in high places.
Plato. To keep his experience classified, the godfather of Western philosophy used vague, cryptic language to describe the “blessed sight and vision” he witnessed “in a state of perfection”—the climax of his initiation into “the holiest of Mysteries.”
In the second century AD, the emperor Marcus Aurelius studied in Athens and was later initiated in Eleusis.
It all started back in April 1978. Alarm bells were sounding from the towers of academia, as a motley crew of three misfits announced the unthinkable. The code had been cracked. What religious historian Huston Smith called history’s “best-kept secret” was a secret no more. After centuries of false leads and dead ends, the unlikely team had finally breached the inner sanctum of the Mysteries of Eleusis. They had discovered what really made the Ancient Greeks tick. At long last they had unearthed the true source of our ancestors’ poetry and philosophy. Perhaps the hidden inspiration behind the
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In The Road to Eleusis, Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck made a passionate and detailed argument for why the kukeon, the sacramental beverage of the Mysteries, must have been spiked with one or more psychedelics. And they did so in truly interdisciplinary fashion, which was basically unheard of in the stodgy field of Classics at the time.
the whole trip was seared into Wasson’s memory as the realest thing he’d ever experienced. He recorded his grand epiphany in an article entitled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” It would appear in the May 13, 1957, issue of Life magazine:
Albert Hofmann was already an internationally renowned chemist. In 1938 he had struck psychedelic gold at his research laboratory in Basel by extracting LSD from special cultures of ergot, a naturally occurring fungus.
By the early 1960s hippies and beatniks were hopping down to Mexico to get their own taste of some Maria Sabina–style expansion of consciousness. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Led Zeppelin to the Rolling Stones is rumored to have followed in Wasson’s footsteps.
A man on a mission since The Road to Eleusis first debuted, Ruck has spent the past four decades obsessively trying to prove that the Greeks found God in a mind-altering cocktail brewed by witches. Yes, it was an elite school of priestesses who prepared and dispensed the potion at Eleusis. Would Demeter have it any other way? The Lady of the Grain who brought the chauvinistic Zeus and his kidnapping, sex-offending brother to their knees? The Mysteries were always the women’s domain. At first, as a matter of fact, women were the only ones who were eligible for initiation. This curious little
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In Ruck’s analysis of the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and other Greek-language documents of the era, the earliest generations of Christians inherited a mind-altering sacrament from the Greeks, replacing Demeter’s beer with Dionysus’s wine as the vehicle for the psychedelic kick. For Christianity to compete with the eye-opening experience at Eleusis or the Dionysian ecstasy that had spread through the mountains and forests of the ancient Mediterranean, it needed a hook.
The fact of the matter is that classicists generally don’t care about Christianity. Classics and Theology are different academic departments for a reason. The people who fall in love with Ancient Greek don’t go to seminary to study the relatively simple Greek of the Bible or the Church Fathers. And they certainly don’t become pastors and priests. They go to Harvard and Yale to study Homer, Plato, and Euripides, and to write increasingly esoteric articles about the true founders of Western civilization.
And what the religious authorities try to beat into young children. As if decency and virtue were things to be learned, rather than natural impulses to be coaxed into expression.
Is a society that fails to incorporate this mystical experience fundamentally flawed, its institutions empty of the shared vision that made the world’s first democracy actually work?
another part of the campaign to rid the world of pagan influence, argues Ruck, was Christianity’s exclusion of women from positions of leadership—the same women, the grandmothers, who were so integral to sustaining the Secret of Secrets in Ancient Greece.
Like many pre-Christian cultures, the Greeks revered the goddess in three principal forms: the young virgin (Persephone), the adult mother (Demeter), and the old crone (Demeter, once Persephone had given birth during the climax of the Mysteries). According to Ruck, Demeter’s transition to grandmother brings her closer to death and confers on her a mysterious “power over plants.”
Isn’t it strange that the Christian holy family—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is an all-male ensemble? And isn’t it even stranger that the only woman worshipped alongside the Trinity never becomes a grandmother? The Church would prize Mary’s virginity and motherhood above all else. Instead of marveling at the grandmother’s botanical know-how, the Church would demonize it. After the fourth century AD, Demeter and the old-crone archetype slowly disappeared. The same woman hunted by the Inquisition would eventually become the spooky lady stirring the bubbling green goop in the cauldrons of our
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Perhaps the founder of the National Resources Defense Council, Gus Speth, said it best: “I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation and eco-system collapse, and that we scientists could fix those problems with enough science. But I was wrong. The real problem is not those three items, but greed, selfishness and apathy. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”34
Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change. Therefore I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness change. I regard psychedelics as catalyzers for this. They are tools which are guiding our perception toward other deeper areas of human existence, so that we again become aware of our spiritual essence. Psychedelic experiences in a safe setting can help our consciousness open up to this sensation of connection and
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“The Eleusinian Mysteries and Christianity have so much in common. When I guide people through the threads of this archaeological site, I like to stress the similarities between ancient and modern,” says Kalliope Papangeli in a lilting Greek accent.
My conversation with Director Adam-Veleni and a close read of the twentieth-century’s giants in the field of Classics—Walter Burkert and Carl Kerenyi—has convinced me that Ruck’s scholarship is less controversial than his reputation suggests.
She has shown me up close how key elements of the Ancient Mysteries never really disappeared. They merely stepped into the shoes of Christianity and kept marching forward.
Today’s foremost authority on this lost tradition is Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels. Her definition of gnosis from 1979 remains the best: The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is gnosis. As the Gnostics use the term, we could translate it as “insight,” for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they [the Gnostics] claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny … to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to
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The transition to farming may have allowed us to pool knowledge and resources, leading the human family into the great urban civilizations that have flourished ever since, but it wasn’t without some serious flaws. As the diet became less diverse and balanced, reduced to just “a few starchy crops,” our overall health deteriorated. We grew noticeably shorter. And because of the crowded, unsanitary conditions that brought the former foragers into extended contact with each other and their filthy animals for the first time, parasites and infectious disease ran amok. Which is why historian Jared
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If prehistoric humans were drinking beer over twelve thousand years ago, then altered states of consciousness have played a much bigger role in the development of our species than previously acknowledged. And the beer of yesterday, we need to realize, was very different from the beer of today.
The Stone Age inhabitants of Turkey did not just influence the Stone Age inhabitants of Greece. They became the Greeks. And the DNA evidence that now shows the biological relationship between the two people also suggests why the Anatolians were so popular with their immediate neighbors to the west.
If half of the Proto-Indo-European tradition went east into India, and the other half went west into Greece, then the common source of both could contain the answer to the whole psychedelic affair.
As part of his Anatolian Hypothesis, first published in 1987, the respected archaeologist Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University tried to pinpoint the actual mechanism that would have allowed the earliest Indo-Europeans to replace existing languages so successfully over such a wide geographic area, from Iceland to Siberia to Sri Lanka.
For Renfrew there had to be something in the earlier Neolithic period that sparked the initial, western spread of the richest family of languages in human history. There had to be a hook. His answer is what the British archaeologist terms “agricultural dispersal.” As early as 7000 BC the Stone Age growers would have begun sharing their expertise outside the only logical Proto-Indo-European homeland, Anatolia, where the wild and domesticated plants first met in the cradle of agriculture surrounding Göbekli Tepe. Rather than violently invading the European continent, these earliest
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If the Proto-Indo-European homeland has been spotted at long last, then whatever sacrament came from Anatolia could be regarded as the likely source, however distant, for both the Greek kukeon and the Indian soma. Implausible as it seems, the Anatolian graveyard beer just might be the secret inspiration behind European civilization.
Beer can certainly ferment on its own, as Zarnkow just taught me. But it’s quicker and easier in the presence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast that commonly attaches to fruit and honey. As it evolved the graveyard beer of the Raqefet Cave and Göbekli Tepe would have likely been combined with wine or mead, making for a stronger, and tastier, drink. Whenever the sacrament migrated from Anatolia, the archaeological chemistry has now proven that the Minoans and Mycenaeans definitely had a special brew on their hands, one with “a clear ceremonial and/or religious significance.” And even if
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along the way, it never left the graveyard behind.
The mug was unearthed close to the citadel that is considered the palace of the legendary Agamemnon from Homer’s epics. It tested positive for elements of a blended grog consisting of barley beer, grape wine, and honey mead. Because of a similar beverage he had recently identified on Crete in “incredibly large numbers” within “cultic contexts,” McGovern called it a “Minoan ritual cocktail.”
In September 2000 McGovern teamed up with Sam Calagione of the Dogfish Head Brewery to resurrect the graveyard beer for mass consumption. Their re-creation, still available for purchase as Midas Touch, was unveiled at a drunken Anatolian funeral feast that the University of Pennsylvania hosted in Philadelphia at their Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
The main point is that the mixed fermented beverage or “Minoan ritual cocktail,” which has now been identified chemically, probably bears some relationship to the kykeon of Greek heroic times.
