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Since 1965, animals, with very few exceptions, have been the only creatures officially allowed to ingest this "Stoff." Previously, more than 40,000 mental patients alone had been given it in many settings under various protocols and diverse practitioners. Anyway, it had been well established by then that Siamese fighting fish swim higher in the water and turn a bit redder under LSD's influence (whatever that means!). The best description I've heard about this largely worthless body of knowledge appears as a lengthy appendix in Hoffer and Osmond's The Hallucinogens.
Sigrid told some neophytes, who were living on a houseboat, that whatever happened that might frighten them, it all was a product of their minds, and they should not worry about it. As it happened, they somehow literally got loose from their moorings, and drifted away -- quite blissed out -- but were saved, luckily enough, by some compadres just in the nick of time from getting into deadly rapids.
R. Gordon Wasson, father of mycopsychopharmacology, asked dear Albert in July 1975 "whether Early Man in ancient Greece could have hit on a method to isolate an hallucinogen from ergot that would have given him an experience comparable to LSD or psilocybin?" Hofmann's response a year later was yes, such effects could have occurred with ergot grown on wheat or barley (rye wasn't known in ancient Greece), and an even "easier way would have been to use the ergot growing on the common wild grass Paspalum."
On April 1, 1976, Hofmann confirmed such a possibility when he took an oral dose of 2 mg. of ergonovine maleate, equivalent to about 1.5 mg. of the ergonovine base, which is about six times the normal dose used in medicine for postpartum hemorrhaging. He found that this dose produced mild psychedelic activity that lasted more than five hours.
Evidence marshalled for this thesis by Wasson, Hofmann and the Greek scholar Carl A.P. Ruck, along with a new translation of the "Homeric Hymn to Demeter," appears in their The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. They demonstrate that the potion used for more than 2,000 years in these annual "mysteries" (mysterious to the uninitiated because the penalty for revealing the ceremony was death) involved water infusions of infected barley and the sclerotium of Claviceps paspali growing on the wild grass Paspalum distichum, which flourished throughout the area and particularly on the Rarian plain. The complex historical reconstruction of these events, in the words of Jonathan Ott, "for the first time places the sacred mushroom (of ergot) in our own cultural past."
Hofmann wrote in his autobiography, "The cultural-historical meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries, their influence on European intellectual history, can scarcely be over-estimated. Here suffering humankind found a cure for its rational, objective, cleft intellect, in a mystical totality experience, that let it believe in immortality, in an ever-lasting existence."
Up to three thousand people anually were initiated "in a perfect way" for two millennia, until the suppression of these rites under Christianity in the fourth century A.D. Anyone who could speak Greek and who hadn't committed murder could present themselves once for this initiation. Half a year of preparatory rituals began in the spring, culminating in September in a procession lasting several days from Athens to the temple at Eleusis.
The ceremony occurred at night; ancient writers hint that important things were seen -- in a room "totally unsuited for theatrical performances" (as Ruck described the temple). Among those initiated were Aristotle, Sophocles, Plato, Aeschylus, Cicero, Pindar and possibly even Homer, plus many Roman emperors (such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius).
Aristides the Rhetor in the second century A.D. called the experience "new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition." The "Homeric Hymn to Demeter," which tells us most about what occurred, states "Blissful is he among men on Earth who has beheld that! He who has not been initiated into the holy Mysteries, who has had no part therein, remains a corpse in gloomy darkness."
(more to come on next page)
