With soma it was the juice of a plant or fungal sacrament that Watkins explicitly characterized as “the source of the hallucinogenic agent.”25 With the Greeks he couldn’t say for sure. But like Gordon Wasson, he thought the Amanita muscaria mushroom was a good candidate. The hard data from Mas Castellar de Pontós suggests another mushroom, ergot, spiked the beer-based kukeon at Eleusis. As for the Dionysian wine that replaced Demeter and Persephone’s beer, Watkins said, “clearly it is no ordinary wine.”
