What was behind the “best-kept secret” in history? Part 2
Why the secret of Eleusis never got betrayed.
Mosaic depicting the Epiphany of Dionysus (second century AD), found in Dion, Greece, Archeological Museum of Dion.
In another installment of this series about the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were taking place for nearly 2000 years just outside of Athens, this article will continue to answer how the “Secret of Eleusis” never got betrayed (Part 1).
We will discuss the ineffable nature of the initiation, the difference between direct knowledge and propositional knowledge, especially in the context of psychedelic experiences, and briefly touch on why we might need to recover the Eleusinian experience for our modern world.
(Check out the earlier articles: 1 2 3 4 5
If you have Medium membership you can also read this article here.)
Participating in the Mysteries was an experience which cannot be understood by examining only their external appearance, for it evoked alterations in the soul of the initiate. [1]
-Albert Hoffman
Something really profound appears to have happened to the Mystes, at Eleusis during the initiation.
The core of this experience seems impossible to communicate with words, as it is something that one has to experience by themselves to know it. This could explain how the secret has been kept throughout its 2000-year history and until modern times.
Are we missing a grander perspective? Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.
Let’s briefly summarize the points mentioned until now (for a closer look feel free to revisit the previous articles):
· At the height of the ceremony the Kykeon, a ceremonial drink served in a small kernel, was consumed.
· From the reports of the participants, we know that at the heart of the Eleusinian initiation was an experience that is commonly described in terms of a journey into the underworld or an experience of death and rebirth.
· Furthermore, this experience can be characterized as “undergoing something” (pathein), which is at the same time indescribable with words (arrheta).
This may lead us to believe that the Mystai, the initiates, were in some altered state of consciousness as he or she seems to have undergone something that lies outside our ordinary experience and mode of perception.
Profound insight, often combined with (indescribable or “ineffable”) visionary states, are common for experiences of this kind, which can be brought about through psychedelics as well as natural means such as breathwork, rhythmic music or dancing (among others) as mentioned before.
But adding to all that:
· The Mysteries could reliably deliver their transformative experience over a period of 2000 years.
· In the case of the profanations of the mysteries by Alcibiades (an Athenian general and disciple of Socrates) the mysteries could seemingly be recreated at home in something that may have been more of a dinner party than a real ceremony.
… it seems very likely some psychoactive ingredient was the secret spice behind the Kykeon reliably enabling a profound mystical experience even in a mundane environment.
Evaluating the evidence, it seems clear that the initiates went through a profound and life-changing experience in which they went beyond every-day consciousness.
One of the greatest classicists of the 20th century, Walter Burkert, mentioned in the previous article:
Seen against this background, ancient mysteries still seem to form a special category:[…]
From the perspective of the participant, the change of status affects his relation to a god or a goddess; the agnostic, in his view from outside, has to acknowledge not so much a social as a personal change, a new state of mind through experience of the sacred.[2]
The difference between propositional knowledge and direct experience
To further illuminate the matter, the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance/ direct experience and propositional knowledge, which John Vervaeke (professor for Cognitive Science in Toronto) and others have argued, is essential.
We can know someone like Nelson Mandela from movies and articles, and maybe we have even read his Wikipedia entry, but until we meet him, we won’t really know him. Know him in person, directly through acquaintance, that is. Without this direct acquaintance we can’t know what he’s really like as there is an undeniable difference between meeting someone and only hearing or reading about them.
The former type would be propositional knowledge, knowledge about something, and the latter would be knowledge by acquaintance, we could also call it direct or experiential knowledge.[3]
Propositional knowledge can be objective in nature because it can be abstracted from the individual having the experience but knowledge by acquaintance depends on the individual, subjective experience.
Try describing a great piece of art such as your favorite song to someone and you will run into precisely this issue
The same said about Mandela could be said about places, festivals, tastes, music, and the like; you have to be there or try it yourself to really know what it’s like.
You won’t know how it was to see Jimi Hendrix live, how fried ice cream tastes, what Burning Man is like, or how it feels to stand on top of a volcano until you have been there yourself.
This is certainly true in regard to the Mysteries of Eleusis as well. We have no idea what happened there and what it was like, as long as we can’t undergo the experience ourselves. But we can search for comparisons and parallels to similar experiences and events.
Many scholars speculated how Eleusis managed to maintain its impact and gravitas while keeping the secret alive and this may be the explanation. It could not be betrayed because you had to be there.
Try to tell someone about the most profound trip you ever had. They have no chance to understand you unless they had a similar experience themselves. This may be true about a deeply personal experience as much as about a profound psychedelic one. The initiation of Eleusis was most likely both.
Altered States and the Ineffable
So, what do we know about the experience at Eleusis?
It was incredibly profound, inducing some internal change, indescribable with words, otherworldly, and often associated with death and rebirth or a journey into the underworld.
Sounds pretty much like a psychedelic experience, doesn’t it.
They too are commonly referred to as ineffable, they are something one has to experience to have an impression of it, and they can be incredibly profound leading to great insight, acceptance, and a sense of deep connectedness given the right conditions (right preparation, right set and setting, right integration).
The Greeks commonly referred to this as a journey to the underworld while in our culture today we might metaphorically talk about a trip (or a journey) to outer space.
In fact, the theme of the soul descending into underworld (katabasis) to recive divine revelation which was very common in Plato’s times, later became a theme of the soul ascending to the heavens to receive divine inspiration, guidance and judgement. This development is echoed in some of the middle-Platonist works of Plutarch.[4]
It becomes apparent how culture shapes the maps of meaning we use to make sense of our experience. The Greeks experienced the mysteries of life and death and got in contact with their gods while today people may a wide variety of other distinct experiences.
Given all we know the conditions for such an experience within the frame of the initiation at Eleusis must have been incredible, (days of preparation, fasting, a solemn procession and ceremony, etc.) basically as good as it gets.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime event for most, it took 9 days of ritual preparation and fasting (only during the day as far as we know), and there was a great ceremony with hundreds or thousands of participants.
All of this was framed as an initiation into the mystery of life and death on earth, into the cycle of living, decaying, and returning to life, as symbolized by the myth of Demeter and the abduction of her daughter into the underworld (read more about the myth here).
I think everyone who has had a strong experience including any profoundly altered state of consciousness will know that the dimension of reality that is experienced can be far removed from the “every day” so that the usual categories of our thinking mind, like time, space, causality, the self, distance, often become relative or altered, merge into one another, or simply disappear.
Language ceases to make any sense as the inability of dualistic conceptual thinking becomes painfully obvious.
Furthermore, these experiences are often reported to have a distinct gravitas to them, they may feel deeply profound and more real than everyday reality.
They may be perceived as a peak behind the safely guarded gates of the ordinary mind, behind the veil of reality.
We will most probably never know what the intitiates experienced. Only comparison similar events and practises may help to bridge this gap. Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash.
Psychedelic Journeys and Profound Meaning
The mystical quality of his experience inducing deep awe and wonder led the mycologist Gordon Wasson to assume that mushrooms were the secret of Eleusis after he tried them in 1955 with Maria Sabina in Mexico as one of the first Westerns ever.[5] He then brought Albert Hoffman and Carl Ruck along to put create the first multidisciplinary hypothesis talking about a psychedelic sacrament in The Road to Eleusis.
A similar commonality between psychedelic experiences and the reports from the Eleusinian Mysteries inspired Brain Muraresku’s The Immortality Key (as he explains at the beginning of the book): the huge and very meaningful impression a high-dose treatment at John Hopkins University had on its participants.[6] (if you want to know more check the links in the references)
In the trials with Psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) assisted therapy around two-thirds of the participants have reliably rated this singular experience as among the top five most profound experiences of their lives. Many of those participants were older people, having gone through marriage, childbirth, mother- or fatherhood, etc.
This has remained constant for over 15 years![7]
The experience seems to have indeed left a deep and long-lasting impact similar to what is reported by the Mystes at Eleusis.
However, we should observe that in many cultures such experiences with altered states are also induced through other means than just psychedelics. Such could be dancing, drumming, meditation, special breathing techniques, fasting, sleep deprivation, self-mutilation, sweat lodges, and many others.[8]
Often, these are also combined to increase the desired effect. In Eleusis, the preparation, the fasting, and other practices like music or dancing surely contributed to the extraordinary depth of the experience.
But Archeological findings did indeed uncover evidence of a ergot-based psychedlic sacreament at a similar site belonging to a Greek colony in Spain (Mas Castelar de Pontos). So, there is a smoking gun that appears to be pretty convincing. More on this in the next article.
Conclusions
With all this in mind, the thesis put forward by Hofmann, Wasson, and Ruck in The Road to Eleusis from 1976 no longer seems too far-fetched.
And until now we haven’t even talked about ANY of the material evidence that started popping up around the Mediterranean suggesting that beer and wine in antiquity were nothing like today as all kinds of herbal extras were a commonplace feature.
For a long time, apart from the numerous references in the written sources and illustrations on vases, there was no concrete evidence. Especially written sources are always heavily dependent on the respective interpretation; they can easily be ignored or made to fit into an already existing narrative.
Admittedly, accepting that the Greeks, commonly taken as the founders of democracy, philosophy, the sciences, and Western Civilization, were casually doing secrete initiations (let’s remember Eleusis was one of many such institutions) with a psychedelic sacrament at its core, would have been a little too much for most scholars of the past century.
But today the time seems rife to at least take this hypothesis seriously as the general society is opening up again and many studies testify to the effectiveness of psychedelic therapy on healing mind and body alike. At the same time, many people are making their own experiences independently to snatch a peak behind the veil.
Is reality a relative concept after all? Is ordinary consciousness all there is? Are time, space and causality actually real or only a mode of our experience? Physics, Cognitive Science, Philosophy and Psychedelic Experiences all seem to question that our understanding of reality is as straightforward as we may think. Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash.
Albert Hoffman himself was deeply convinced that we need a revival of the Eleusinian Mysteries in our modern world to save us from disaster and he may be right about that.
We have indeed lost the art of ceremony, initiation, and rites of passage that put the individual life into a greater societal perspective and we lost the sense for the mystical, for the depths of life beyond the ordinary five-sense-reality. These may enable us to see beyond the walking, talking skin-encapsulated chemistry labs our bodies and brains are, and may put us into a much bigger, a truly humbling cosmic perspective.
In the process, the sense of separation and individual importance may fade to make room for a deep connectedness and wonder. [9]
Without a doubt, we need more of that.
It may help to collectively recognize that we did have these mystical practices in the West.
And more than that: These practices, like the initiation at Eleusis, may have been the true key to the Greek and especially Athenian greatness.
It’s time to remember and recover what has been lost.
The life of the Greeks [would be] unliveable if they were prevented from properly observing the most sacred Mysteries, which hold the whole human race together.
- Praetextatus, both priest and Roman proconsul of Achaea
[A]mong 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 [Eleusinian] mysteries.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero writing his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus
We will probably never know what exactly happened and what the Kykeon may have contained, but already it seems to have been more than just barley and mint.
Today, as science advances in its analysis of organic remnants archeologists have uncovered, there is much more hard evidence to be discussed. This will be the subject of the next article.
How the myth of Greek rationality came to be (especially during the Enlightenment), why it contradicts the actual written sources, and how it influences scholarship to this day, will be explored soon after.
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[1] Albert Hoffman, The Message of the Eleusinian Mysteries for today’s world, in: The Road to Eleusis, p. 97, 2008 (first edition 1978).
[2] Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 8, 1987.
[3] Vervaeke hasn’t published much on this yet, but there are some video and podcasts (One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrW3DOIkP78), where he discusses the idea of different types of knowing: propositional knowledge (knowledge of facts), procedural knowledge (skills, sequences of activities), perspectival knowledge (what it’s like to see something from a certain angle), participatory knowledge (the knowledge of what it’s like to play a certain role in your environment or in relationships). Accept for propositional knowledge all three other types include direct experience, thus I have simplified the account immensely and used Hanegraaf’s terminology of “knowledge by acquaintance” (see below).
The difference between propositional and direct knowledge is much older though as already the Gnostics have stressed the importance of direct experience and insights that could not be replaced through books. Plato arguably says something along similar lines. In more modern times the distinction is also brough up more concretely by Ken Wilber and Wouter Hanegraaf (among others, see Hanegraaf, Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, 2012).
[4] c.f. Plutarch’s Moralia, De sera: Myth from 563b-368a. De genio: Myth from 589f-592e. Also check out this episode from the SHWEP: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1pKgbY03SIXOP10ww9zZee?si=811ce69a416b40f7
[5] c.f. Hoffman, Wasson, Ruck: The Road to Eleusis, p. 27, 2008 (first edition 1978).
[6] c.f. Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, p. 12, 2020. If you’d like to check out the long list of well-researched and peer-reviewed articles about psychedelic therapy by the Johns Hopkins University, follow that link: https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/publications There are many more institutions like this in many countries as the interest in and acceptance of psychedelic therapy is rising fast.
The original article in the economist from 2006 inspiring Muraresku’s work: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2006/07/13/the-god-pill
For a recent (2024) overview on the overall state of research in regard to psychedelic therapy click here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2451902223003142
[7] https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/achievements
A great paper in a journal for pharmacology: Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269881108094300
[8] Stan and Christina Grof, Holotropic Breathwork, 2010.
[9] Plesa & Petranker 2023: Psychedelics and neonihilism: connectedness in a meaningless world
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1125780/full
