And the prescription could be exactly what it was in the beginning: to die before we die, with a solid dose of the religion that started it all. The religion with no name.

“to be the student and beneficiary of all traditions, and the slave to none.”

If we all died before we died, maybe we’d all discover the big secret that was known to the initiates of the Mysteries. We are all God.

How psychedelics were the shortcut to enlightenment that founded Western civilization: first in the Eleusinian Mysteries, then in the Dionysian Mysteries.

“Once you’ve plunged into the ocean, does it really matter whether or not you believe in water?”

copies of the trippy vegetation until my neck can’t take it anymore. In the middle of the bull’s-eye, the focal point of this entire chamber, two men flank a veiled woman. She is clothed from head to toe in a white robe. Only her face is visible. The males are dressed like the fungal surfers that surround them, complete with elaborate sandals. The

Clinical psychologist William Richards, the longtime collaborator in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin trials, concludes that ethics and morality are hardwired, “perhaps genetically encoded,” within the human organism.19 Psilocybin appears to unlock that code by tapping directly into what the mystics have been trying to mine over the history of

In its heyday the temple attracted the best and brightest Athens had to offer, including Plato. To keep his experience classified, the godfather of Western philosophy used vague, cryptic language to describe the “blessed sight and vision” he witnessed “in a state of perfection”—

“Rather than having women in the control of men,” says Dr. Fiachra Mac Góráin, a classicist at University College London, “this cult is putting young, impressionable men under the control of women.”41 In a staunchly patriarchal society like Rome, that was an act of war. So the authorities made the flood of magical wine slow to a trickle.