Thirteen: What Happened Inside the Telesterion?
The second part of an examination of the Eleusis mystery
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On an archetypal level, the myth of Demeter and Persephone could be read as the descent of spirit into the dark world of matter and its return to the realm of light. It’s undeniably a heroine’s journey in which the female principals are transformed by their experiences.
Did the Eleusinian Mysteries recapitulate this myth ritually for the Ancient Greeks? In his book Supernatural, author Graham Hancock insists something extraordinary occurred to the participants in the Telesterion, the ceremonial center of the Eleusis shrine:
Aristotle confirms that it was “an experience rather than something learned.” The poet Sopater tells us that he saw a schema ti, “a form or appearance of some kind hovering above the ground.” Plato was perhaps a little more explicit when he spoke of phantasmata or ghostly apparitions, while Pausanias records that the initiation hall “became filled with spirits.” Also relevant are the physical symptoms reported by many: fear and trembling in the limbs, vertigo, nausea, and a cold sweat. Then there came the vision, a sight amidst an aura of brilliant light that suddenly flickered through the darkened chamber. Eyes had never before seen the like . . . The division between earth and sky melted into a pillar of light.”
“One is struck with a marvellous light,“ according to the fragment of Themistios. The purpose of encountering the light is to discover “the sublime mysteries of nature,” noted Hippolytus. The 6th century Neoplatonist Olympiodorus notes the successful initiate to the Greater Mysteries of Demeter was called epoptes, “one who has seen.”
“All ancient testimony of the Mysteries attests to the sublime encounter with the Divine Light,” writes John Lamb Lash in his book Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief.
This is a form of luminosity that does nor appear to ordinary awareness, owing to the filters of human perception, including the egoic filter. The mental gloss of self-reflection is like light shining on a window pane that makes it impossible to see through the window. Once the ego melts away, the parameters of perception are shifted and the Light is there, a substantial presence in the world, soft, white, and shadowless. It is also sentient, animated and animating, aware of itself and what comes into contact with it.
However, the Mysteries at Eleusis weren’t exactly an ancient prototype of New Age healing retreats. Piglets were said to have been sacrificed to Demeter in the Lesser Mysteries of the Spring. In the Fall, the procession began at an Athenian cemetery to Eleusis 18 kilometres away. Along the way, the participants shouted obscenities in commemoration of Iambe, an old woman in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter who amused the grieving goddess by cracking dirty jokes. At the close of the ceremonies, a bull sacrifice accompanied an all-night feast, complete with dancing and Bacchanalian merriment.
An ancient scribe, Krinagoras of Mytilene, encouraged those who had never experienced the Eleusinian Mysteries to remedy the situation:
Even if your life is sedentary and you never sailed the sea or walked the highways of the land, go nevertheless to Attica to see those nights of the Mysteries of Demeter: your heart shall become free of care while you live and lighter when you go to the realm of the majority.
A Mysterious Brew
A succession of thinkers, beginning with the poet Robert Graves in 1964, have suggested the Eleusinian visions were mediated or amplified by consumption of by a psychoactive substance of some kind. Their suspicions have centred on Kykeon, the brew of barley and mint consumed by every initiate before entering the Telesterion.
Mycologist and former JP Morgan vice president R. Gordon Wasson and psychopharmacologist Albert Hoffman suspected Eleusis was a cult based on visionary intoxication. In the early seventies, they joined forces with Carl Ruck, a professor of classical studies, to investigate the problem in depth.
Hoffman remembered the genesis of this remarkable research effort:
In July 1975 I was visiting my friend Gordon Wasson in his home in Danbury when he suddenly asked me this question: whether Early Man in ancient Greece could have hit on a method to isolate an hallucinogen from ergot which would have given him an experience comparable to LSD or psilocybin. I replied that this might well have been the case and I promised to send him, after further reflection, an exposition of our present knowledge on the subject.
in fact, Hoffman had extracted his laboratory LSD samples from ergot, a fungus of both barley and rye bread - and of course barley was an ingredient in Kykeon. It took the doctor two years of lab work to ascertain whether ancient Greeks could have extracted the hallucinogenic compounds from ergot. His answer was yes. Using a simple water solution, he was able to separate the hallucinogenic agents from the toxic alkaloids. This feat “was well with the range of possibilities open to Early Man in Greece,” he reported back to Wasson.
To this day there’s scholarly but spirited disagreement over the true psychoactive ingredient in Kykeon. Was it ergot, amanita muscaria mushrooms, or some variety of fungus? Graves believed it was the latter, as did the late ethnobotanist and writer Terence McKenna.
Experimenting mostly with ergot, a few brave researchers have even attempted to brew up and consume psychoactively charged brews of barley and mint to determine their efficacy, mostly using ergot - and mostly with disappointing or nauseating results. Such self-experimentation isn’t without risk. Ergot is toxic. McKenna pointed out that outbreak of ergotism associated with infected grain killed tens of thousand of people in 10th century France, and killed over a thousand in two centuries later.
If the fungus doesn’t limit its effects to getting you high, you have a choice of two bad outcomes with ergotism: one convulsive and the other gangrenous. McKenna wondered how ergot-laced Kykeon could have been taken for centuries without unpleasant side effects becoming part of the legend. Yet he conceded that Hoffman’s research may have identified an ancient workaround through the ‘simple water solution’ mentioned above.
Regardless of the actual active ingredient, Graham Hancock points out that researchers dispelled any remaining skepticism that the sacred potion was psychoactive when they came across evidence of a notorious scandal in Ancient Athens. A corrupt politician and military commander by the name of Alcibiades was convicted of profaning the mysteries by replicating them at home with drunken guests. Alcibiades fled to Sparta rather than face the death penalty. So it stands to reason, Hancock and others have argued, that the commander profaned the mysteries by offering up the visionary brew as a recreational drug.
Most scholars of antiquity remained unimpressed, unconvinced, or unaware of the Hoffman/Wasson/Ruck research. Terence McKenna took a dim view of such academic conservatism:
Orthodox scholars, themselves unfamiliar with the reality-transforming power of plant hallucinogens, have fallen victim to the prejudiced attitude toward ecstasy that typifies the constipated patriarchal academy and hence have been baffled by the Mystery. And their bafflement has produced some of the most tortured of speculations.
Mckenna cites one scholar who concluded that the prime mystical object displayed before the initiates was a phallus. Another scholar, objecting that Demeter was a female goddess, insisted the sacred object must have represented a womb. In touching it, the initiates were supposedly sent into religious ecstasy. Another scholar insisted this would involve displaying the womb in a blaze of light, awakening the initiates into their own divinity.
“Indeed,” Mckenna sniffs. “Displaying a representation of the vagina might have riveted a room full of male Victorian classicists, but one would like to believe that the mystical wellspring of the classical world was something more than a peep show.”
Final ideas on Eleusis in next installment.
Really good article. As an initiate of the Bwiti tradition I greatly appreciate the parallels between the mystery cult and knowing nature.