Did the Ancient Greeks Drink a Psychedelic at Eleusis?

For roughly a thousand years, Greeks and then Romans walked the Sacred Road from Athens to Eleusis, went into a great hall, and came out saying they no longer feared death. They were forbidden to explain why, and they kept the secret so well that it is still kept.

Into that silence, in 1978, three men dropped a suggestion: maybe it was the drink.

What is actually known

The Eleusinian Mysteries honored Demeter, goddess of grain, and her daughter Persephone, carried off to the underworld by Hades. In the myth, Demeter's search brings her to Eleusis. The festival that grew around the story was under way by about 600 BCE and lasted until the end of the fourth century CE, when the emperor Theodosius banned pagan worship and the sanctuary was destroyed soon after.

Its reach was enormous. The architect Ictinus, who designed the Parthenon, worked on the initiation hall, the Telesterion. The emperors Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Julian were all initiated. The Greater Mysteries took place in early autumn and involved a ritual bath in the sea, days of fasting, and the procession to Eleusis.

As for what happened inside, Britannica's summary is about as far as honest scholarship can go: "something was recited, something was revealed, and acts were performed." The rest is inference from hostile Christian writers, a few allusions and some painted pottery.

One detail survives in a much older source. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells how the grieving goddess, offered wine, refused it. In Gregory Nagy's translation she asks instead for a potion of barley and water mixed with pennyroyal. That drink is the kykeon, the potion that tradition ties to the rites.

Three men and a fungus

The word kykeon just means a mixture. In the Iliad it is a restorative of wine, barley and grated goat cheese. In the Odyssey the sorceress Circe spikes one. A barley drink, in other words, was ordinary. A barley drink that reliably changed thousands of lives was not.

In "The Road to Eleusis" (1978), R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl Ruck proposed an answer. Wasson was a writer on sacred mushrooms, Hofmann was the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, and Ruck was a classicist. Their argument: barley is prone to ergot, a parasitic fungus that Hofmann had spent his career studying and from which LSD is ultimately derived. Ergot contains alkaloids, among them ergonovine and lysergic acid amide, that can affect the mind. The priests of Eleusis, they suggested, knew how to get those into the cup.