The Road to Eleusis
R. Gordon Wasson
I. The Wasson Road to Eleusis
With this little book we begin a new chapter in the history of
the fifty-year-old discipline of ethnomycology, a chapter that
for the first time takes within its purview, and in a big way,
our own cultural past, our legacy from ancient Greece. Ethnomycology
is simply the study of the role of mushrooms, in the broadest
sense, in the past of the human race; and it is a branch of ethnobotany.
The English language lacks a word to designate the higher fungi.
"Toadstool" is an epithet, a pejorative designation
embracing all those fungal growths that the user distrusts, whether
rightly or wrongly. "Mushroom" is ambiguous, covering
different areas of the fungal world for different persons. In
this little book we will use "mushroom" for all the
higher fungi. Now that at long last the world is coming to know
these fungal growths in all their myriad shapes and colors and
smells and textures, perhaps this novel usage will answer to a
need and come to be generally accepted.
We are three who have enlisted for this presentation. Dr. A1bert
Hofmann is the Swiss chemist renowned for his discovery in 1943
of LSD, but his familiarity with the plant alkaloids is encyclopaedic
and he will draw our attention to attributes of some of them relevant
to the Eleusinian Mysteries.
As we are dealing with a central theme of Greek civilization in
antiquity, it was obvious that we needed the cooperation of a
Greek scholar. At the appropriate moment I learned of Professor
Carl A. P. Ruck, of Boston University, who for some years has
been making notable discoveries in the recalcitrant area of Greek
ethnobotany. For many months we three have been studying the proposal
that we are making and his paper will be the third and concluding
one. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is the source for
the myth that underlies Eleusis and we offer a new English rendering
of it by Danny Staples.
It will be my function, in this first of three papers, to stress
certain attributes of the cult of inebriating mushrooms in Mexico.
Early Man in Greece, in the second millennium before Christ, founded
the Mysteries of Eleusis and they held spellbound the initiates
who each year attended the rite. Silence as to what took place
there was obligatory: the laws of Athens were extreme in the penalties
that were imposed on any who infringed the secret, but throughout
the Greek world, far beyond the reach of Athens' laws, the secret
was kept spontaneously throughout Antiquity, and since the suspension
of the Mysteries in the 4th century A. D. that Secret has become
a built-in element in the lore of Ancient Greece. I would not
be surprised if some classical scholars would even feel that we
are guilty of a sacrilegious outrage at now prying open the secret.
On 15 November 1956 I read a brief paper before the American Philosophical
Society describing the Mexican mushroom cult and in the ensuing
oral discussion I intimated that this cult might lead us to the
solution of the Eleusinian Mysteries. A famous English archaeologist
specializing in the archaeology of Greece, with whom I had had
the friendliest relations for about thirty-five years, wrote me
in a letter a little later the following:
I do not think that Mycenae had anything to do with the divine
mushroom or the Eleusinian mysteries either. May I add a word
of warning? Stick to your Mexican mushroom cult and beware of
seeing mushrooms everywhere. We much enjoyed your Philadelphia
paper and would recommend you keep as close to that as you can.
Forgive the frankness of an old friend.
I am sorry that he has now joined the shades in Hades, or perhaps
I should be happy that he will not be pained by my brashness in
disregarding his well-meant advice.
My late wife Valentina Pavlovna and I were the first to use the
term ethnomycology and we have been closely identified with the
progress in this discipline over the past fifty years. That the
reader may sense the drama of this our latest discovery I will
begin by retelling the story of our mushroomic adventure. It covers
precisely the last fifty years. It constitutes in large measure
the autobiography of the Wasson family, and it has now led us
directly to Eleusis.
Late in August 1927 my bride, as she then was, and I took our
delayed honeymoon in the chalet lent to us by the publisher Adam
Dingwall at Big Indian in the Catskills. She was a Russian born
in Moscow of a family of the intelligentsia. Tina had fled from
Russia with her family in the summer of 1918, she being then 17
years old. She qualified as a physician at the University of London
and had been working hard to establish her pediatric practice
in New York. I was a newspaper man in the financial department
of the Herald Tribune. On that first beautiful afternoon
of our holiday in the Catskills, we went sauntering down the path
for a walk, hand in hand, happy as larks, both of us abounding
in the joy of life. There was a clearing on the right, a mountain
forest on our left.
Suddenly Tina threw down my hand and darted up into the forest.
She had seen mushrooms, a host of mushrooms, mushrooms of many
kinds that peopled the forest floor. She cried out in delight
at their beauty. She addressed each kind with an affectionate
Russian name. Such a display she had not seen since she left her
family's dacha near Moscow, almost a decade before. She
knelt before those toadstools in poses of adoration like the Virgin
hearkening to the Angel of the Annunciation. She began gathering
some of the fungi in her apron. I called to her: "Come back,
come back to me! They are poisonous, putrid. They are toadstools.
Come back to me!" She only laughed the more: her merry laughter
will ring forever in my ears. That evening she seasoned the soup
with the fungi, she garnished the meat with other fungi. Yet others
she threaded together and strung up to dry, for winter use as
she said. My discomfiture was complete. That night I ate nothing
with mushrooms in it. Frantic and deeply hurt, I was led to wild
ideas: I told her that I would wake up a widower.
She proved right and I wrong.
The particular circumstances of this episode seem to have shaped
the course of our lives. We began checking with our compatriots,
she with Russians and I with Anglo-Saxons. We quickly found that
our individual attitudes characterized our respective peoples.
Then we began gathering information, at first slowly, haphazardly,
intermittently. We assembled our respective vocabularies for mushrooms:
the Russian was endless, never to this day exhausted; the English,
essentially confined to three words, two of them ill-defined—
toadstool, mushroom, fungus. The Russian poets and novelists filled
their writings with mushrooms, always in a loving context. It
would seem to a stranger that every Russian poet composes verses
on mushroom-gathering almost as a rite of passage to qualify for
mature rating! In English the silence of many writers about mushrooms
is deafening: Chaucer and Milton never mention them, the others
seldom. For Shakespeare, Spenser, William Penn, Laurence Sterne
(extensively), Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, for Edgar Allan Poe and
D. H. Lawrence and Emily Dickinson, "mushroom" and "toadstool"
are unpleasant, even disgusting epithets. Our poets when they
do mention them link them to decay and death. We began to cast
our net wider and to study all the peoples of Europe, not only
the German and French and Italians, but more especially the peripheral
cultures, out of the main stream, where archaic forms and beliefs
survive longest—the Albanian, Frisian, Lappish, Basque, Catalonian
and Sardinian, Icelandic and Faroese, and of course the Hungarian
and the Finnish. In all our inquiries and travels we looked, not
to the erudite, but to the humble and illiterate peasants as our
most cherished informants. We explored their knowledge of mushrooms
and the uses to which they put them. We were careful also to take
the flavor of the scabrous and erotic vocabularies often neglected
by lexicographers. We examined the common names for mushrooms
in all these cultures, seeking the fossil metaphors hiding in
their etymologies, to discover what those metaphors expressed,
whether a favorable or unfavorable attitude toward our earthy
creatures.
A little thing, some of you may say, this difference in emotional
attitude toward wild mushrooms. But my wife and I did not think
so, and we devoted most of our leisure hours for decades to dissecting
it, defining it, and tracing it to its origin. Such discoveries
as we have made, including the rediscovery of the religious role
for the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico, can be laid to our
preoccupation with that cultural rift between my wife and me,
between our respective peoples, between the mycophilia and mycophobia
(words that we devised for our two attitudes) that divide the
Indo-European peoples into two camps. If this hypothesis of ours
be wrong, then it must have been a singular false hypothesis to
have borne the fruit that it has. But it is not wrong. Thanks
to the immense strides made in the study of the human psyche in
this century, we are all now aware that deep-seated emotional
attitudes acquired in early life are of profound importance. I
suggest that when such traits betoken the attitudes of whole tribes
or peoples, when those traits have remained unaltered throughout
recorded history, and especially when they differ from one people
to another neighboring people, then you are face to face with
a phenomenon of deepest cultural implications, whose primal cause
is to be discovered only in the well-springs of cultural history.
Our card files and correspondence kept expanding and in the end,
sometime in the early 1940's, we sat down, Tina and I, and asked
ourselves what we were going to do with all our data. We decided
to write a book, but there were so many lacunae in our evidence
that it would be years before we could put words to paper. In
our conversations at that time we found that we had been thinking
along the same lines, afraid to express our thoughts even to each
other: they were too fantastic. We had both come to discern a
period long long ago, long before our ancestors knew how to write,
when those ancestors must have regarded a mushroom as a divinity
or quasi-divinity. We knew not which mushroom(s) nor why. In the
days of Early Man his whole world was shot through with religious
feeling and the unseen powers held him in thrall. Our sacred "mushroom"
must have been wondrous indeed, evoking awe and adoration, fear,
yes, even terror. When that early cult gave way to new religions
and to novel ways emerging with a literate culture, the emotions
aroused by the old cult would survive, truncated from their roots.
In one area the fear and terror would live on, either of a particular
mushroom (as in the case of A. muscaria); or else, as the
emotional focus through tabu became vague, of "toadstools"
in general; and in another area, for a reason that we cannot now
tell, it was the spirit of love and adoration that survived. Here
would lie the explanation of the mycophobia vs. mycophilia that
we had discovered. ("Toadstool", incidentally, was originally
the specific name of A. muscaria, the divine mushroom,
of a beauty befitting its divinity. Through tabu, "toadstool"
lost its focus and came to hover over the whole of the mushroom
tribe that the mycophobe shuns.)
It was in Mexico that our pursuit of a hypothetical sacred mushroom
first achieved its goal. On 19 September 1952 we received in the
post two letters from Europe: one from Robert Graves enclosing
a cutting from a pharmaceutical journal in which there were quotations
from Richard Evans Schultes, who in turn cited a number of with
century Spanish friars telling of a strange mushroom cult among
the Indians of Mesoamerica; the second from Giovanni Mardersteig,
our printer in Verona, sending us his sketch of a curious archaeological
artifact from Mesoamerica. It was exhibited in the Rietberg Museum
of Zurich. The artifact was of stone, about a foot high, obviously
a mushroom, with a radiant being carved on the stem or what mycologists
call the stipe. Here was perhaps the very cult we were seeking,
well within our reach. Earlier we had resolved that we would avoid
the New World and Africa in our inquiries: the world was too large
and our hands were full with Eurasia. But in a trice we changed
our minds and the course of our studies, and we concentrated on
Mexico and Guatemala. We had been postulating a wild mushroom
as a focus of religious devotion, a fantastic surmise. Now here
it was on our doorstep. All that winter we went racing through
the texts of the 16th century Spanish friars, and what extraordinary
narratives they give us! We flew down to Mexico in that summer
of 1953 and for many rainy seasons thereafter. With wonderful
cooperation from everyone in that country, on the night of 29-30
June 1955 we finally made our breakthrough: my photographer and
friend Allan Richardson and I participated with our Indian friends
in a midnight agape conducted by a shaman of extraordinary
quality. This was the first time on record that anyone of the
alien race had shared in such a communion. It was a soul-shattering
experience. The wild surmise that we had dared to postulate in
a whisper to each other years before was at last vindicated. And
now, nearly a quarter of a century later, we are prepared to offer
another mushroom, Claviceps purpurea, as holding the secret
to the Eleusinian Mysteries.
That there might be a common denominator between the Mexican mushroom
Mystery and the Mystery of Eleusis had struck me at once. They
both aroused an overwhelming sense of awe, of wonder. I will leave
to Professor Ruck the discussion of Eleusis but will quote one
ancient author, Aristides the Rhetor, who in the 2nd century A.
D. pulled aside the curtain for an instant when he said that what
the initiate experienced was "new, astonishing, inaccessible
to rational cognition", and he went on:
Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth, and of all the
divine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome
and the most luminous. At what place in the world have more miraculous
tidings been sung, and where have the dromena called forth greater
emotion, where has there been greater rivalry between seeing
and hearing? [Italics mine.]
And he goes on to speak of the "ineffable visions" that
it had been the privilege of many generations of fortunate men
and women to behold.
This description point by point tallies with the effect on the
initiate of the Mesoamerican mushroom rite, even to the "rivalry"
between seeing and hearing. For the sights that one sees assume
rhythmical contours, and the singing of the shaman seems to take
on visible and colorful shapes.
There seems to have been a saying among the Greeks that mushrooms
were the "food of the Gods", broma theon, and
Porphyrius is quoted as having called them "nurslings of
the Gods", theotrophos. The Greeks of the classic
period were mycophobes. Was this not because their ancestors had
felt that the whole fungal tribe was infected "by attraction"
with the holiness of the sacred mushroom, and that mushrooms were
therefore to be avoided by mortal men? Are we not dealing with
what was in origin a religious tabu?
I would not be understood as contending that only these alkaloids
(wherever found in nature) bring about visions and ecstasy. Clearly
some poets and prophets and many mystics and ascetics seem to
have enjoyed ecstatic visions that answer the requirements of
the ancient Mysteries and that duplicate the mushroom agape of
Mexico. I do not suggest that St. John of Patmos ate mushrooms
in order to write the Book of the Revelation. Yet the succession
of images in his Vision, so clearly seen but such a phantasmagoria,
means for me that he was in the same state as one bemushroomed.
Nor do I suggest for a moment that William Blake knew the mushroom
when he wrote this telling account of the clarity of "vision":
The Prophets describe what they saw in Vision as real and existing
men, whom they saw with their imaginative and immortal organs;
the Apostles the same; the clearer the organ the more distinct
the object. A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy
supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organized and
minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing
nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better
lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing
eye can see, does not imagine at all. [Italics mine. From
The Writings of William Blake, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes, vol. III,
p. I08]
This must sound cryptic to one who does not share Blake's vision
or who has not taken the mushroom. The advantage of the mushroom
is that it puts many, if not everyone, within reach of this state
without having to suffer the mortifications of Blake and St. John.
It permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal
eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel
backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence,
even (as the Indians say) to know God. It is hardly surprising
that your emotions are profoundly affected, and you feel that
an indissoluble bond unites you with the others who have shared
with you in the sacred agape. All that you see during this night
has a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, the carvings,
the animals-they look as though they had come straight from
the Maker's workshop. This newness of everything—it is as
though the world had just dawned—overwhelms you and melts
you with its beauty. Not unnaturally, what is happening to you
seems to you freighted with significance, beside which the humdrum
events of everyday are trivial. All these things you see with
an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to yourself, "Now
I am seeing for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention
of mortal eyes."
Plato tells us that beyond this ephemeral and imperfect existence
here below, there is another Ideal world of Archetypes, where
the original, the true, the beautiful Pattern of things exists
for evermore. Poets and philosophers for millennia have pondered
and discussed his conception. It is clear to me where Plato found
his "Ideas"; it was clear to those who were initiated
into the Mysteries among his contemporaries too. Plato had drunk
of the potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent the night
seeing the great Vision.
And all the time that you are seeing these things, the priestess
in Mexico sings, not loud, but with authority. The Indians are
notoriously not given to displays of inner feelings—except
on these occasions. The singing is good, but under the influence
of the mushroom you think it is infinitely tender and sweet. It
is as though you were hearing it with your mind's ear, purged
of all dross. You are lying on a petate or mat; perhaps,
if you have been wise, on an air mattress and in a sleeping bag.
It is dark, for all lights have been extinguished save a few embers
among the stones on the floor and the incense in a sherd. It is
still, for the thatched hut is apt to be some distance away from
the village. In the darkness and stillness, that voice hovers
through the hut, coming now from beyond your feet, now at your
very ear, now distant, now actually underneath you, with strange
ventriloquistic effect. The mushrooms produce this illusion also.
Everyone experiences it, just as do the tribesmen of Siberia who
have eaten of Amanita muscaria and lie under the spell
of their shamans, displaying as these do their astonishing dexterity
with ventriloquistic drum beats. Likewise, in Mexico, I have heard
a shaman engage in a most complicated percussive beat: with her
hands she hits her chest, her thighs, her forehead, her arms,
each giving a different resonance, keeping a complicated rhythm
and modulating, even syncopating, the strokes. Your body lies
in the darkness, heavy as lead, but your spirit seems to soar
and leave the hut, and with the speed of thought to travel where
it listeth, in time and space, accompanied by the shaman's singing
and by the ejaculations of her percussive chant. What you are
seeing and what you are hearing appear as one: the music assumes
harmonious shapes, giving visual form to its harmonies, and what
you are seeing takes on the modalities of music—the music
of the spheres. "Where has there been greater rivalry between
seeing and hearing?" How apposite to the Mexican experience
was the ancient Greek's rhetorical question! All your senses are
similarly affected: the cigarette with which you occasionally
break the tension of the night smells as no cigarette before had
ever smelled; the glass of simple water is infinitely better than
champagne. Elsewhere I once wrote that the bemushroomed person
is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal,
seeing but not seen. In truth, he is the five senses disembodied,
all of them keyed to the height of sensitivity and awareness,
all of them blending into one another most strangely, until the
person, utterly passive, becomes a pure receptor, infinitely delicate,
of sensations.
As your body lies there in its sleeping bag, your soul is free,
loses all sense of time, alert as it never was before, living
an eternity in a night, seeing infinity in a grain of sand. What
you have seen and heard is cut as with a burin in your memory,
never to be effaced. At last you know what the ineffable is, and
what ecstasy means. Ecstasy ! The mind harks back to the origin
of that word. For the Greeks ekstasis meant the flight of the
soul from the body. I am certain that this word came into being
to describe the effect of the Mystery of Eleusis. Can you find
a better word than that to describe the bemushroomed state? In
common parlance, among the many who have not experienced ecstasy,
ecstasy is fun, and I am frequently asked why I do not reach for
mushrooms every night. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul
is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who will choose
to feel undiluted awe, or to float through that door yonder into
the Divine Presence? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word, and
we must recapture its full and terrifying sense.... A few hours
later, the next morning, you are fit to go to work. But how unimportant
work seems to you, by comparison with the portentous happenings
of that night! If you can, you prefer to stay close to the house,
and, with those who lived through that night, compare notes, and
utter ejaculations of amazement.
I will convey to you the overwhelming impression of awe that the
sacred mushrooms arouse in the native population of the Mexican
highlands. In the Mazatec tribe where I ingested them for the
first time these particular mushrooms are not "mushrooms":
they stand apart. One word—thain3—embraces the
whole fungal tribe, edible, innocuous but inedible, and toxic,
—the whole fungal world except the sacred species. The sacred
species are known by a name that in itself is a euphemism for
some other name now lost: they are 7nti1xi3tho3. (In Mazatec
each syllable must be pronounced in one of four tones or in slides
from one tone to another, 1 being the highest. The initial 7
is a glottal stop.) The first element, 7nti1, is a diminutive
of affection and respect. The second element, xi3tho3,
means "that which leaps forth". The whole word is thus:
"the dear little things that leap forth". But this word
is holy: you do not hear it uttered in the market place or where
numbers of people are assembled. It is best to bring up the subject
at night, by the light of a fire or a vela (votive candle),
when you are alone with your hosts. Then they will dilate endlessly
on the wonders of these wondrous mushrooms. For this euphemistic
name they will probably use yet others, a further degree of euphemism,
the santitos, the "little saints", or again the
"little things" in Mazatec. When we were leaving the
Mazatec mountains on horseback after our first visit there, we
asked our muleteer Victor Hernandez how it came about that the
sacred mushrooms were called "the dear little ones that leap
forth". He had traveled the mountain trails all his life
and spoke Spanish although he could neither read nor write nor
even tell time by the clock's face. His answer, breathtaking in
sincerity and feeling, breathed the poetry of religion and I quote
it word for word as he uttered it and as I put it down in my notebook
at the time:
El honguillo viene por si mismo, no se sabe de donde, como el
viento que viene sin saber de donde ni porque. The little mushroom
comes of itself, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes
we know not whence nor why.
Victor was referring to the genesis of the sacred mushrooms: they
leap forth seedless and rootless, a mystery from the beginning.
Aurelio Carreras, town slaughterer in Huautla, when we asked him
where the mushrooms take you, said simply: Le llevan alli
donde dios esta, "They carry you there where God is".
According to Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez of Rio Santiago, "To
eat the mushrooms you must be clean: they are the blood of our
Lord the Eternal Father." Hay que ser may limpio, es la
sangre de Nuestro Senor Padre Eterno. These are Spanish-speaking
villagers picked at random. They express religion in its purest
essence, without intellectual content. Aristotle said of the Eleusinian
Mysteries precisely the same: the initiates were to suffer, to
feel, to experience certain impressions and moods. They were not
to learn anything.
As man emerged from his brutish past, thousands of years ago,
there was a stage in the evolution of his awareness when the discovery
of a mushroom (or was it a higher plant?) with miraculous properties
was a revelation to him, a veritable detonator to his soul, arousing
in him sentiments of awe and reverence, and gentleness and love,
to the highest pitch of which mankind is capable, all those sentiments
and virtues that mankind has ever since regarded as the highest
attribute of his kind. It made him see what this perishing mortal
eye cannot see. How right the Greeks were to hedge about this
Mystery, this imbibing of the potion, with secrecy and surveillance!
What today is resolved into a mere drug, a tryptamine or lysergic
acid derivative, was for him a prodigious miracle, inspiring in
him poetry and philosophy and religion. Perhaps with all our modern
knowledge we do not need the divine mushrooms any more. Or do
we need them more than ever? Some are shocked that the key even
to religion might be reduced to a mere drug. On the other hand,
the drug is as mysterious as it ever was: "like the wind
that comes we know not whence nor why." Out of a mere drug
comes the ineffable, comes ecstasy. It is not the only instance
in the history of humankind where the lowly has given birth to
the divine. Altering a sacred text, we would say that this paradox
is a hard saying, yet one worthy of all men to be believed.
If our classical scholars were given the opportunity to attend
the rite at Eleusis, to talk with the priestess, what would they
not exchange for that chance? They would approach the precincts,
enter the hallowed chamber, with the reverence born of the texts
venerated by scholars for millennia. How propitious would their
frame of mind be, if they were invited to partake of the potion!
Well, those rites take place now, unbeknownst to the classical
scholars, in scattered dwellings, humble, thatched, without windows,
far from the beaten track, high in the mountains of Mexico, in
the stillness of the night, broken only by the distant barking
of a dog or the braying of an ass. Or, since we are in the rainy
season, perhaps the Mystery is accompanied by torrential rains
and punctuated by terrifying thunderbolts. Then, indeed, as you
lie there bemushroomed, listening to the music and seeing the
visions, you know a soul-shattering experience, recalling as you
do the belief of some early peoples that mushrooms, the sacred
mushrooms, are divinely engendered by Parjanya, the Aryan God
of the Lightning-bolt, in the Soft Mother Earth.
Someone has called mycology the step-child of the sciences. Is
it not now acquiring a wholly new and unexpected dimension? Religion
has always been at the core of man's highest faculties and cultural
achievements, and therefore I ask you now to contemplate our lowly
mushroom—what patents of ancient lineage and nobility are
coming its way!