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Eleusis, Plato, Magic Mushrooms

Three-thousand-year rewind: It was the ancient Greeks who began to consider the world as an object and who undertook its first rational analysis. It was they who laid the foundation for the scientific method and the Western worldview. It seems, however, that the Greeks also suffered from a divorce of ego and world, of subject and object. Deeply hidden in their souls, it seems, was the need to perpetuate some portal to the ecstatic feel of the unity of everything that exists, of all being. As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche enthused in the nineteenth century: “Did those centuries when the Greek body flourished and the Greek soul foamed over with health perhaps know endemic ecstasies? Visions and hallucinations shared by entire communities or assemblies at a cult? How now?… Should it have been madness … that brought the greatest blessings upon Greece?”¹

Ecstasies, visions, and hallucinations had a place of their own in ancient Greece: About thirty kilometers down a highway northwest of Athens, situated between crude-oil refineries and a military airfield, the small city of Elefsina hosts the remains of what was probably the most secret and holy cult, then called Eleusis, of the ancient world. “Happy are they among earthly mortals who have seen these things, but who is uninitiate and who has no part in them never has such joys once dead, beneath in darkness and gloom,”2 says a Homeric hymn.

For more than 2,000 years Eleusis initiated up to 3,000 believers annually, among them Roman emperors and politicians such as Cicero, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius; poets such as Pindar, Pausanias, and Sophocles; philosophers such as Plato; but also slaves, prostitutes, and normal citizens. The rite celebrated the cycle of life and of the seasons, the unity of life and death.³ While the death penalty was imposed on those uncovering its secrets, its traces can be found even today in science and the arts.

According to legend, Persephone, daughter of Demeter, the goddess of fertility and harvest, had been raped by Hades, the god of death, while picking flowers. With the permission of Zeus, Hades abducted her into the underworld. On earth, meanwhile, her mournful mother Demeter let the fields wither, the flowers fade, and god and man starve. Finally Zeus, the lord of Mount Olympus, gave in and commanded his brother Hades to bring Persephone back to her mother and to the world of the living. The sly Hades obeys the command but feeds Persephone a pomegranate seed on her way up to the surface. When joyful Demeter at their reunion learns that Persephone ingested food in the realm of the dead, she realizes that her daughter cannot stay with her permanently: Everyone who eats food in the realm of the dead falls under the spell of the powers of death. Eventually Zeus and Demeter agree on a compromise: One-third of the year Persephone has to stay with Hades in the underworld, while Demeter mourns and winter governs earth, but two-thirds of the year Persephone can stay with her mother, during which time the fields bear plenty of fruit.

The celebration of the cyclic recurrence of Persephone evolved from its origins in archaic rites of fertility into an allegory of death and birth and the cycle of life. On top of that, it also marks the transition from the worship of Mother Earth, personified by Demeter, to the worship of a full panoply of Olympian gods and goddesses, which illustrates the crossover of an agricultural society into a society of warriors, leading eventually to modern individuation. And finally it symbolizes—through the reunion of the two goddesses—the recovery of the original unity within the cycle of nature, long lost in daily life even in those ancient times, thus loosening the tension that seems deeply implanted in the soul of ancient Greece.

For the aspirants in Eleusis, the cultic celebrations belonged among the most important experiences in their entire lives. In early summer they had already attended the minor mysteries and recognized Persephone’s death, preparing themselves for the major festivities in the late summer. They had fasted, washed themselves in the ocean, sacrificed a young pig, and, adorned with myrtle crowns, had followed the procession of the cult objects and statues of the gods on the holy street. On top of the bridge crossing the small river they had been abused and ridiculed. After their arrival in Eleusis they were consecrated to the goddess and followed the different stations of Demeter’s quest: horror, sorrow, and the joy of being reunited. They danced at the fountain and drank the kykeon, a brew of barley and mint; were once more purified with fire and air; were allowed to touch the holy womb and phallus; and witnessed the dreadful appearances at the entrance of Hades’s grotto, the portal to the underworld. Finally, after some time of searching, they found the sanctification hall, the Telesterion (Fig. 2.1), where they took the oath next to the holy fire and witnessed the holy showing of the cult objects. The highlight of the holy night was the appearance of Persephone herself. After the sacrifice of a male sheep, the death goddess was called up and eventually emerged in her incarnation as the goddess of fertility, illuminated in brilliant light, and carrying with her her son Brimos, the seed of life, back from the underworld up into the light. According to the cyclic symbolism of the ritual act, Demeter is identical to Persephone, and Brimos is Hades is Dionysus.4 The god of grain and prosperity is identical to the god of wine, fertility, and ecstasy. The father is equal to the son and thus the archetype of indestructible life.⁵

Figure 2.1. View into the sanctification hall, the Telesterion in Eleusis.

The comprehension of the Eleusinian cult, and in particular of the mysterious kykeon brew, took an unexpected twist when, on April 19, 1943, a young Swiss chemist started on what is now a legendary bicycle ride.⁶ Albert Hofmann was a rather conservative fellow, a person who would send a jar of homemade honey to his favorite poet, Ernst Jünger. Professionally he had experimented with different derivatives of lysergic acid, the common component of several alkaloids found in a cereal fungus known as ergot. When synthesizing lysergic acid diethylamide—in short, LSD—Hofmann noticed that his laboratory animals acted nervously, and he himself felt funny during a second synthesis a few years later. To explore this effect thoroughly, Hofmann took the risk of a self-experiment with the smallest dose for which he expected any reaction at all. What he didn’t know, though, was that LSD has an effect about a hundred times stronger than comparable psychoactive substances, and in this way he stoned himself into nirvana: Within less than an hour on his bicycle trip home from the lab, the serotonin neurons stopped firing while the postsynaptic neurons inside the locus coeruleus acknowledged every stimulus, with wild fusillades bombarding the limbic system and consequently the entire brain: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,” wrote William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.7 “Break on through to the other side!” sang the Doors.⁸

My only personal experience with magic mushrooms started with a tram that would not operate since on its route a house was burning down and ended with my friend Olaf massaging the feet of a girl of nodding acquaintance on my sofa while I sat for half an hour in the bathroom laughing about the wall tiles. What I found so exhilarating was that what under normal circumstances would be a rather boring rectangular pattern became blurred and kept changing shape, transforming over and over into new arrangements and increasingly crazy and creative designs. On top of that, green dots were flickering on the white walls like emeralds, the outlines of all objects obtained an unaccustomed clarity, colors seemed to glow from inside, and the heater warped itself into the aggressive form of a futuristic weapon.

Persons who, like Hofmann, take LSD, mescaline, or magic mushrooms in high doses often give accounts of the following sensations:

• an extremely enhanced perception, in which objects wander in and out of the foreground depending on the focus of concentration;

• extreme colors and patterns made out of numerous repetitions of the same elements or geometrical shapes;

• synesthesia (the capability to see sounds as colors or shapes or to hear physical contact); and

• decomposition of the ego and distortions of the awareness of space and time.

A friend once told me how, after trying Salvia divinorum, he merged with the floor and spent an eternity living the life of a carpet. The British author Aldous Huxley described such altered states of consciousness as follows: “In the final stage of egolessness there is an ‘obscure knowledge’ that All is in all—that All is actually each.”9

And it was Hofmann’s first “trip” that turned his life upside down. Hofmann was convinced of the usefulness of LSD, and before long there was a coming and going of potheads, artists, hippies, and crackpots in his home—among them the drug apostle Timothy Leary, who had just escaped from his prison in California. Later, Hofmann’s experience with LSD inspired him to isolate and analyze the active ingredients of the Indian cultic mushroom teonanácatl and the “magic” seeds ololiuqui. He even set out on a horse expedition into the Mexican highlands in order to search for the magic plant Salvia divinorum.¹⁰ And eventually he teamed up with the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson and the classical scholar Carl Ruck to work out a revolutionary and controversial interpretation of the incidents that occurred in the Telesterion of Eleusis: The mind-altering experiences reported by the aspirants could have originated from ergot, the fungus from which the essential constituent of LSD had been recovered.¹¹

The three scholars had good reasons for this idea. First, it seemed rather likely that some hallucinogenic drug was involved, since thousands of believers experienced a holy show on one specific night. Next, a scandal in the fifth century BCE had been uncovered, in which the sacrilegious consumption of kykeon took place in private, profane festivities, suggesting both an important role for this brew in the course of the ritual and a psychoactive component qualifying it as a party drug. A third hint for the possible significance of ergot came from the importance of cereals in the cult of Demeter and the symbolic interpretation of the infected grain as sexual intercourse. Further hints for the sacred significance of mushrooms and fungi can be found in various ancient texts: The Greeks named mushrooms food of the gods; Hades was pictured as a god with violet hair, reminiscent of the violet stipe of the full-grown ergot mushroom; and the name of one of Demeter’s husbands, Iasion, can be translated as “man of the drug.” Hofmann also pointed out that the hallucinogenic lysergic acid alkaloids of ergot were soluble and could easily be extracted in water, while the related poisonous components were not. And finally, symptoms of nausea, dizziness, trembling limbs, and cold sweat, as well as the nature of the vision experienced by the aspirants in Eleusis, pointed toward a psychedelic drug such as LSD or magic mushrooms.

If one contemplates how many generations of the elite of the ancient world lived through such experiences—an elite that considerably shaped the origins of thought and science of the entire Western world—it is not too surprising that traces of these incidents can be found in the testimonies and scriptures of the Greeks. For example, Greek tragedy has been understood as an allegory for the cosmic cycle of life and death.12 The chorus symbolizes the eternal essence of the universe, a Dionysian commotion or world music. This chaotic state is being resolved temporarily into the beautiful appearance of the story of the protagonists who, however, eventually have to die again, becoming unified with the Dionysian entity of the universe. For Nietzsche this idea became a symbol for the course of life: Life had meaning only as a vision of a universal chorus, justified only by the aesthetic quality of its narrative. In a similar way, Hofmann speculated that the Greeks overcame their suffering about the divorce of ego and world and resolved it in the mystical holistic experience induced typically by psychedelic drugs, which weaken or even annihilate the boundary between subject and object.13 In fact, many concepts advocated in ancient Greek philosophy seem to mirror the influence of psychedelic drugs—above all, the teachings of Plato, initiate of Eleusis and probably the most influential of all Greek philosophers. In his famous “Allegory of the Cave,” he compared people with cave dwellers who perceive only the shadows of their environment and have to climb up into the light to perceive the true nature of the world—something that has been dubbed Platonic “mystery lingo.”¹⁴ The mystic holistic experience leads to the idea of the unity of all that is, to the assumption that the entirety is more than the sum of its parts, and eventually to the possibility that this One, which remains unaffected and unchanged behind the fluctuating reality, can be comprehended in a mystical experience. Indeed, such ideas constitute a central theme in Greek philosophy, starting with their origins in the work of Parmenides and Heraclitus in the pre-Socratic era, their adoption by Plato, their reappearance in the Neoplatonism of the late ancient world, and their influence on all of Western metaphysics. Moreover, the perception of smallest details during a drug trip may have affected the atomism of Democritus, who first assumed that the world should be built up of indivisible elements. Also, the reduction of the world around us into elementary patterns and symmetries can be found as the central theme of Plato’s Timaeus. Even a cyclic consciousness of time and history has been ascribed to the Greeks of the classical and pre-classical eras, and has been celebrated by Nietzsche as “eternal recurrence,” in crude contrast to the modern belief in eternal advancement.15

Already in the cradle of Western culture the Greeks were time-travelling—at least according to their own worldview. It is a moot question whether a preexisting philosophy and attitude toward life influenced the Eleusinian ecstasies or, on the contrary, the ancient Greek worldview was essentially inspired by the mind-expanding experience. In any case, the mutual relation of Greek soul and Eleusinian ecstasy makes for an intriguing topic. And, even more intriguing—as incredible as it may sound—these thoughts had a crucial bearing on the outlook of a small circle of physicists who, more than twenty centuries later, laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the microcosm with what seemed like the craziest theory ever heard of: quantum mechanics.