In memory of Blaise Daniel Staples, my companion and soul mate. He is dearly missed. PREFACE by Huston Smith WHEN I WAS ABOUT TO PUBLISH Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals, there were those who advised me not to do so, saying that it would destroy my reputation. Time has proved them wrong. As the religious significance of these substances comes to be increasingly accepted—the glaring exception being the Food and Drug Administration—the sales of that book (favorably reviewed from the beginning) continue to rise. As does my conviction of the importance of the issue, and I will say why. The great achievement of the linguist Noam Chomsky, who was my colleague during the fifteen years I taught at MIT, was to discover the universal grammar that every spoken language–– English, Chinese, French, whatever––must conform to, for it seems to be imprinted into the human brain. I, for my part, have worked out the universal grammar of religion to which authentic religions conform. Reduced to a single sentence, that grammar concludes that Reality is Perfect, and that human beings should do their best to conform their lives to that perfection. Reality’s perfection seems to be contradicted by perception of the world, but this is not surprising, for Reality is Infinite and our minds are not. Out minds must expand if they are to receive even glimpses of the Infinite Perfection. Thus the question is: how can they do this? Perfect Reality has provided a way. Through the entheogens, to be sure, but here we come to a point that has been under-noticed in the discussion of this important subject. A half century ago, the Canadian medical anthropologist, Raymond Prince, pointed out that the brain chemistry caused by exhaustion and typhoid fever is very close to that which the entheogens produce. And, he added, in early history entheogenic experiences must have been induced far more frequently by those physiological causes than by entheogenic plants which are rare in nature and very hard to come by. To this I need only add every religion—and indeed every civilization, for civilizations flow like tidal waves from implosions that set them in motion. These implosions are Revelations. The word, Revelation, derives etymologically from re-velum, the drawing back of a veil as in the morning we draw back the curtains to let in the light of day. And that is precisely what entheogenic alterations of brain chemistry do—they let in the light of the Infinite, Perfect Reality. However, despite the importance of Revelation, they are also limited, for like the tidal waves they set in motion, the power of the tidal waves diminishes as they proceed. This is where sacred plants become important. To switch metaphors, they are like telephone poles that restore wires to their original height. Welcome to the book in hand, Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess and the Secrets of Eleusis. It brings a wealth of new information to the vitally important subject. HUSTON SMITH is a most foremost scholar and interpreter of religion and the author of The World’s Religions and The Soul of Christianity. 1 Mysteries and Secret Cults THERE IS NOTHING SACRED TODAY about the Sacred Road except its name. It leaves what was once the ancient city of Athens amidst ramshackle shops and industrial buildings, passing through dismal suburbs as it slowly rises toward the low ridge on the barren mountain that encloses the western limit of the Attic plain. On the crest, the ancient traveler would pause to rest in a grove of laurel trees sacred to Apollo. It is they that still give their name to the place, but long ago a Christian monastery was built there out of the ancient stones to obliterate the memory of the pagan traveler, and the surrounding pine forest is now the site for the annual Daphni Wine Festival. The House of the Goddess FROM THE RIDGE, the road descended into the fertile Rarian plain; it was here, they said, that grain had first been planted. Today, the plain is the most highly industrialized area in Greece and although the road follows its original path along the shore, the narrow bay of Salamis, where the Athenians once defeated the vastly superior Persian fleet, is now congested with tankers riding at anchor, unloading petroleum to the clusters of storage facilities and refineries. The trip to Eleusis used to be mimetic of a journey to the otherworld to claim back from death the daughter of the grain mother Demeter, whose sorrow for her lost daughter could be assuaged only through the mystery of rebirth. In 1938 Dr. Albert Hofmann synthesized a chemical he named LSD, whose visionary properties he did not discover until his historic “Bicycle Ride” of 1943, thereby stumbling upon a 4000year-old secret. A traveler on the modern highway is apt not even to notice the remains of the sanctuary of the love goddess Aphrodite on the right at the base of the descent or the brackish streams that were thought to flow from a subterranean source and that once formed the boundary between the two realms. A man named Krokos, named for his “Saffron” hue, was said to have been the first to dwell on the other side of the lake as husband to the Eleusinian Saisara, the “Grinning Bitch,” a name that was an epithet for the terrible queen amongst the dead, before the Mystery had pacified her and changed her name. Appropriately, only the priesthood had the prerogative of fishing in those waters, for it was they, the inheritors of that office, who regulated the transfer from life to death, a passage which the Eleusinian faith viewed as a metaphysical union between lovers across a division of water. At Eleusis itself, the religion toward which the ancient traveler made his way was shielded from profane observance by the sanctuary’s fortification wall, and the essential dogma was imparted only to those who, under pain of death, had vowed to keep it secret and had undergone a lengthy preparation for their initiation. Although the walls have fallen into ruins and the modern tourist can freely intrude upon the prohibited ground, the secret is no longer there. A century of archaeological excavation has succeeded only in clearing the debris from a sanctuary that was destroyed not by time alone, but by the bitter hatred of a rival faith, for the Mystery of Eleusis had competed too well with the newer religion and finally in its fourth century into the Christian era it had forcibly been brought to an end after almost two millennia, during most of which time it had been the primary spiritual consolation for all of Hellenized mankind. The ancient Greco-Roman world worshipped in established religions supported by the governments, like the officially recognized religious denominations of today. But the official cults, in their great diversity, failed to offer a sense of individual identity and special communion with the deities of the otherworld. In various private or more emotive and ecstatic cults and rituals, the individual was afforded an experience of personal communion with deity, involving secrets of actions and meanings that were hidden and whose divulging outside the community of initiates was prohibited, under the penalty of death. These cults were called Mysteries. The major of the Mysteries was the one practiced for two millennia at the village of Eleusis to the west of Athens, called the Eleusinian Mystery. Whoever among men who walk the earth has seen these Mysteries is blessed, but whoever is uninitiated and has not received his share of the rite, he will not have the same lot as the others, once he is dead and dwells in the mould where the sun goes down. HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER VERSUS 480 SQ. At Eleusis, the deities were a duo of females, Demeter and Persephone, interchangeable in their roles as mother and daughter, hence known simply as the religion of the two goddesses, with a third female lurking in the background, the post-menopausal crone, Hekate, patroness of drugs and witchcraft, who united them as a triad triumphant over the dominant males who feared their power and attempted to separate their intuitive and physiological communion by sequestering them as wives isolated within a husband’s household. The initiation into their cult restored them to primacy, at least in the religious realm, and taught both males and females how to live in tune with the incomprehensible phenomenon of the continuity of life and death, and the awesome powers of the once dominant Goddess and the forces of nature. The desecrated sanctuary has lost its numinous aura today, all its gods long since dead or chased away. But in Athens, some twenty feet lower than the modern city, we can still stand on a portion of the Sacred Road where it first left the city gate, passing through the monuments of the ancient cemetery. From this excavation, the intervening city disappears and we can look up across the centuries directly to the Acropolis. In the swampy ground that lies along the road, reeds grow and flower profusely and amidst the croaking of frogs, we can almost expect still to hear the exultant cries of the initiates as they set out for Eleusis, calling upon Iakchos, as in the Eleusinian chorus of Aristophanes’ Frogs. It was this Iakchos who would lead them to the Mystery. Iakchos is the personification of their ecstatic cry. His real identity was part of the secret, probably an epithet of Dionysus, since he was specifically named a child of Semele.