According to Burkert, the expertise transferred for tens of thousands of years from Neanderthal to Neanderthal, and Stone Age homo sapiens to Stone Age homo sapiens, somehow came to a dead stop at the temple of Demeter. Without ever explaining how, the German scholar suggested that by the time these primitive rites arrived in Eleusis, the drugs had somehow vanished from the “festival of immortality” that “seemed to guarantee some psychedelic Beyond.” That “expansion of consciousness”—a decadent escape from reality—was simply an embarrassing episode from the pre-Hellenic past. As John Silber
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