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.
