Midnight in the Temple of Demeter
A brief exploration of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the social promise of psychedelic ritual
We have so much that is novel and useful in the modern world: air conditioning and air travel and antibiotics and search engines. Yet, we lack a great deal as well… and these are things which no human society has ever gone without (in their totality): a ritual of manhood (naming ceremony); a firm belief in our culture and our cosmology; a clear idea of sex and gender roles, with the corresponding norms of mating and child-rearing; a mysticism of altered consciousness and its implications. Is what we’ve gained worth what we’ve lost? I vacillate on that question; I literally believe ‘no’ and ‘yes’ equally often. I hope that the question itself becomes moot. I hope that we can create a science of virtue and personal and social meaning and spirit and family that coexists with modern technology… but this science will result in drastically lower profits for many now-powerful actors (as people become happier and more whole, and therefore less likely to spend money to fill physical and spiritual voids) and so its establishment will be a bitter and sometimes bloody struggle.
Every experience (every new sight or read page or conversation) changes the neurology of those involved but SOME experiences have the potential to change neurology profoundly, and radically… and permanently. Psychedelics offer the promise of great struggle and tribulation and triumph contained within the mind, and of a relatively brief duration. The truths learned in confrontation spirits or elements of oneself during the psychedelic journey are no less valid… and, indeed, often seem ESPECIALLY salient and are cherished for the rest of one’s life.
Today I want to focus on our complete lack of rule or ritual around altered consciousness, and contrast that to the most prominent and influential psychedelic ritual in history: the Mysteries of Eleusis. Brian Muraresku has been making the podcast circuit with his book (which I’ve not yet bought and read) The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. In it he (apparently) covers some of humanity’ early psychedelic practices (better called entheogenic, meaning “creating God within one”) from the Paleolithic to the post-Roman eras. What seems undeniable is that drugs of this class have been incredibly important to humans in many places and times, as technologies and used with ritual and introspection, to gain insight into the nature of the universe and human consciousness and the afterlife. The Christian ritual of “drinking the blood” of Christ would have been heavy with meaning for the Greek speakers of the 1st and 2nd centuries A. D. (the first 5-6 generations of Christians) as there were already mystical rites in which mixtures (including wine and psychedelic additives) were drunk as blood of certain gods, to honor them and be close to their spirits and gain understanding of reality.
Two temple maidens mixing the wine with its additives and powerful organic enhancements: variously cannabis, nightshade, ergot, mushrooms, et. al.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were a 9-day ceremony held once each year. A participant had to be invited to be initiated and could only receive the Mysteries once. The ceremony was usually experienced later in life (late middle-age by the standards of the times). There didn’t seem to be any latent urge among the participants to repeat the experience… just a feeling of joy and equanimity and wonder which they could barely contain. After understanding the Mysteries of Eleusis the initiate would believe with calm certainty that her consciousness would live after death. Muraresku translates a Greek koan cryptically advertising the mysteries:
If you die before you die... you will not die when you die
It is believed that originally the rites were administered only by and to women, and the temple personnel continued to be female but the initiates came to be heavily male, including some of the most important figures of the ancient world: Plato; Cicero; the playwright Aeschylus; the Roman emperors Julian, Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian, Antinous, Ceasar Augustus; Plutarch…
The details of the ceremonies were secret, and divulging any information could result in death. The ceremony was, in some sense, a reenactment of the loss of Persephone (the queen of the underworld and the goddess of cycles and rebirth and spring) and her reunion with her mother, Demeter (goddess of crops, seasons, and all plant life). The common oath of silence held for more than 2,000 years and so all we have is second- and third-hand accounts of the Mysteries, which we know included a procession, a theatrical performance (although it probably wasn’t understood in those terms), a series of learnings or instructions in the secret mysteries… and the ingestion of the Kykeon, a blended drink containing (we believe) wine or beer and ergotamine or some other lysergic analogue (which produce effects very similar to their synthetic cousin, LSD). More than the details of the administration or ceremonies I am fascinated by the truth which each initiate apparently learned and which were almost uniformly described (by those few luminaries willing to speak on the subject) as the greatest and most profound lesson learned in their entire lives.
We currently live in an age bereft of rites of passage or spiritual depth or psychedelic ritual but some benefits of psychedelics are (now) rapidly being explored and becoming accepted by medicine and science. Starting around 15-20 years ago, controlled experiments began to be conducted to investigate MDMA (not a true psychedelic, but a teacher nonetheless, as many who have experienced its effects can testify), psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, ketamine (a surgical anesthetic but one that can block sensory inputs and create strange total hallucinations, now commonly offered for treatment-resistant depression), ibogaine, mescaline (the main alkaloid in peyote, described in the groundbreaking little book The Doors of Perception). These drugs offer promise for treating (variously): depression, addiction, trauma, PTSD, mortality fear, anxiety, etc... but to understand them as medications in the same way a sleeping pill is a medication would be a drastic error, in my opinion. While they can prompt massive neurotransmitter release and stimulate neuroplasticity and reset receptors these drugs heal through the creation of epic and symbolic experiences. Just as speaking to angels or confronting an ordeal of your darkest impulses personified as demons or communing with a dead relative or re-living a dark and shameful event of one’s past with a new, triumphant ending would be revolutionary for the participant these drugs are revolutionary. In a fairly large trial exploring psilocybin (the main alkaloid in “magic mushrooms”) as a treatment for nicotine addiction in heavy smokers the long-term success rate was above 80% (for some perspective, a drug offering a 20% long-term success rate for smoking cessation would be a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical bonanza quickly offered by every hospital and doctor’s office in America). This incredible healing effect was due to ONE SESSION ONLY, and the effect was measured up to FIVE YEARS. Most intriguingly, the success of the treatment strongly correlated with the intensity and profundity of the subject’s psychedelic experience. More than 85% of subjects considered their one moderate, medical drug trial with psilocybin to be among the several most important and meaningful experiences of their lives.
The truth is: the real promise of these drugs is not as a palliative or for amelioration of specific symptoms-these drugs are essential doorways to parts of reality that humanity must explore in order to be whole.
Just as the ancient Greeks understood virtue and spirituality in ways and with a depth that we seem to have lost, they were in touch with the immense spiritual potential of entheogenic drugs when used to a greater purpose in a ritual setting. Perhaps these elements are related: perhaps accepted and rule-based use of these substances can help a society access its ‘collective unconscious’… or at least remind us that there is a world of the spirit and that this world is often more consequential for the course and quality of our lives than the material
Thanks for reading!
