The Message of the Mysteries to the World

In the 1970s, I was a member of a team that attempted to reconstruct what happened in the ceremony that was enacted at this ancient sanctuary whose desecrated ruins lie beside us. We demonstrated that the initiates were afforded a glimpse into a transcendent reality—something experienced by almost all the great figures of Classical antiquity, as well as common people, regardless of sex or social class. Thirty years later, I returned to the subject to present a clearer explanation, incorporating many new discoveries made in the intervening years. When I asked my colleague the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann shortly before his death at the age of 102 to provide a comment, even if only a sentence, in view of his frailty, he wrote: ‘Only a new Eleusis could help mankind to survive the threatening catastrophe in Nature and human society and bring a new period of happiness.’ Something happened at this sanctuary of Eleusis that gave hope and meaning to humankind for two millennia. As the Roman philosopher Cicero wrote: ‘For among the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which your Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those mysteries.’ Hofmann’s discovery of LSD in 1943 was an event that inaugurated a new awareness of our role in the cosmos, and looking back at the end of the century whose mentality he, probably more than anyone, influenced, he saw the crisis that we humans have created by our destruction of our planet Gaia and the possible extinction of our species. Cicero credited the ancient mystery enacted here at Eleusis as the essential impetus for the evolution of humankind’s rise from savagery to civilized modes of life: “we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope.” The great hall of initiation at Eleusis was an architectural similitude of a cave, whose antiquity as a motif can be traced back to the Paleolithic when humans first rose above the beasts as Homo spiritualis, not sapiens, but with the first inklings of spirituality, a remembrance of forgotten dreams. The cave was the womb of Gaia, the vulva to a world beyond and a gateway for birth into this realm of ordinary living. Plato used the ancient motif as his Allegory of the Cave. What the Telesterion offered was release from the Cave of ordinary seeing. What we know of the Mystery dates largely from the seventh century BCE, but its origins go back at least to the mid-second millennium. Like all the great ancient religious sites, it represents an assimilation of a pre-existent sanctuary to the evolving dominance of the Indo-European Greek-speaking peoples and their family of twelve deities, headed by the patriarchal father god Zeus. In deference to this earlier existence of the religion, Demeter, who will teach the Mystery, claims that that she has come from Crete when she first arrives at Eleusis. Hades had abducted her daughter, begotten by her brother Zeus, while picking flowers with a sisterhood of maidens. The spiritual rapture as an abduction is a common motif, and involves always the special fantasies of herb cutters, the gatherers of magical herbs. Such plants grow wild, and the maiden is abducted, not married to the possessing spirit that materialized from the magical plant. A myth is read as a dialogue in the language established by its structural polarities. With the establishment of the Mystery, Persephone has become the wedded wife of her adductor. The abduction is associated with fleabane, the concubine of Hades, named Minthe (Mentha pulegium), pennyroyal, which is an abortifacient. The abduction is also associated with the magical flower called narkissos, ‘narcotic,’ and narcosis, as induced by opium, is symbolic of death. An aryballos in the shape of the opium capsule was a tomb offering. Not only does abduction yield to marriage, but through death, Persephone yields life. She eats a seed of pomegranate as she leaves the underworld and becomes pregnant with Hades’ son. The pomegranate resembles the opium poppy capsule, but signifies the fertile womb instead of death. Persephone should have been an Olympian, since both her mother and her father are Olympians, but has taken food and seed in the underworld, so she belongs to her husband’s world. Demeter becomes the mother-in-law of Hades and has a grandson born from the chthonic realm. Originally, Demeter had rejected the option of mortality, and had tried to burn away the flesh of her nursling Demophoön and caused a stoppage of foodstuff upon the earth. Humans were starving and the Olympians were losing the sacrificial offerings upon which they depend. They relent and allow the release of Persephone, on the one proviso. As acknowledgment of the situation, that Persephone belongs to her husband and has sullied her celestial purity with food and conception in the chthonic realm, Demeter teaches the Mystery— to the boy of many names, ultimately her grandson. The structural polarities as established by the myth are: 1) matriarchal freedom to wedded subservience; 2) wild gathered plants to cultivation; 3) aborted birth of the bastard to fathered son; 4) purely spiritual being to incarnation of the spirit; 5) famine and death to resurrection; 6) toxic plants to cultivated barley; 7) narcosis to vision. The initiates for the ceremony drank a special potion, called the kykeon or ‘mixture,’ whose ingredients in water were the wild fleabane and the cultivated barley. It was intended as a magical mediation of all the mythical structural polarities. It obviously should be something visionary or an entheogen, which neither the wild nor the cultivated ingredients are. A common weed in fields of provides the answer. Tares looked identical to grain. It has the reputation of being intoxicating because of the fungal growth or ergot that infests. The most primitive of the cultivated grains from which barley was hybridized is spelt, which originally had only two red kernels, which resemble the ergot of tares. Like all grasses it, too, is infested with ergot. Tares is not an edible grass, but represents the wild weed, and the common denominator of all the grasses is the enlarged ergot kernels, whose contamination spreads also to the barley, pulling it back to primitivism. The common denominator is intoxicating, a source of the visionary LSA, similar to LSD, and an intoxicant or entheogen mediates between deadly poison and spiritual enlightenment. The Eleusinian Mystery, as we know it, dates from the seventh century, and like most of the pre-Hellenic religions, it probably involved human sacrifice, as in the burning of Demophoön, pacified in the later evolution by the offering of animal surrogates. In its Hellenic manifestation, it is an assimilation of Indo-European motifs, as evidenced by its promotion of Olympian dominance. Thus the supposed first priesthoods were seventh century Thracian northerners, backdated to the mid-second millennium. As such, it is also an assimilation of the Thracian mushroom cult and the Indo-European haoma sacrament. Ergot represents the seed of the seedless mushroom and hence a further mediation as the entheogen of the kykeon. Both ergot and some Amanita mushrooms, moreover, are deadly poisons; both require expert knowledge to access the visionary potential. There were two levels to the Mystery, the Greater and the Lesser, although the latter probably was added later, after Athens assumed control of the religion. The Lesser involved the Thracian entheogen and the abduction of Persephone, enacted by the titular Queen of Athens. The initiates journeyed in spirit from the Telesterion to visit Persephone and Hades in Elysium. They were hospitably received under the sacrosanct obligation that bound hosts to guests, but at the critical moment of parturition, when Persephone was due to deliver Hades’ son. They resurfaced in the Telesterion, reborn along with the Mystery child as Persephone returned from the netherworld, as the Hierophant announced the Mystery: Brimo has given birth to Brimos. Brimos is a mother’s son. Since the initiates were now obligated to death by his hospitality in the netherworld, they could expect a similar obligation to offer him sacred hospitality as Plouton, source of worldly prosperity. Death, when it came, would be a journey to the blessed paradise of Elysium, a place they had already visited, ruled by the hosts who had already extended the bond of xenia. The influence of the Thracian revisionist theology, attributed to Orpheus, added a new dimension, which never really became officially incorporated into the Eleusinian tradition. After many returns, with purifying ordeals in both this world and the other, the incarnation would be nullified and the Apollonian spirit would ascend, divested of the burden of flesh, to its true home in the fiery empyrean beyond the stars for an eternal existence. Today, we face the same destinations, the same solutions. An earth depleted of its resources may force us to seek other worlds to colonize. We propose the other pathway: to renegotiate our covenant with Gaia. The scope of the Project will evolve as we move forward. The War on Drugs is a futile battle against plants. Eleusis had its drug problem, also, when it was found that people were abusing the sacred potion as a recreational drug. Abuse deprives the entheogen of its sanctity. Shortly before his death Albert Hofmann wrote to Steve Jobs, who had claimed that LSD was: “A positive life-changing experience for me.” Hofmann asked: “I’m interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.” Similarly, Francis Crick reported discovering DNA after an experience with LSD. Kary Mullis discovered the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with the aid of LSD. As Terence McKenna said, “Psychedelics provide a totally different view of reality.” Hofmann called LSD his problem child. The entheogen lets you see that what you thought was a myth is reality. Recent research suggests that the Thracian entheogen played a role in the visionary experience of Pythagoras in discovering the fundamental structures of mathematics and music. As a learning center, the museum complex will encourage investigation into the secrets of religious traditions. It will sponsor programs investigating new modes of experiencing the origins of religious cognition. Awareness of the origins will predate the evolution into defined religious traditions and help reconcile the dangerous dogmatism of competing faiths. One of the agenda of the Gaia Project as a world center for renegotiating the terms for our use of Earth’s resources will be investigating modes of addiction therapy, as well as promoting a sane drug policy that includes harm reduction. It will also promote artistic creativity, offering workshops and space for exhibitions, and develop environmentally friendly use of the planet’s resources. We seek new avenues of spiritual enlightenment. “To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour. The future will start here at Eleusis. In the words of Isaiah: ‘The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.’