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

As you are doubtless aware, the term “Mescal” is a misnomer. The correct name for the plant is “Peyote.” … We do not call it mescal, neither do we call it peyote. Our favorite term is “Medicine,” and to us it is a portion of the body of Christ, even as the communion bread is believed to be a portion of Christ’s body by other Christian denominations

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

And yet, as I learned from thirteen years of Catholic school, there’s only one thing the Vatican finds more suspicious than drugs. And that’s women. For both of them to have been integral to a pagan ritual that turned humans into God is pretty much the most heretical thing you could

The prophecy comes at a critical moment in the history of Western civilization when very little stood between Eleusis and the torches and pitchforks of the Christian mobs.

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”—

… a merging of the individual consciousness in a group consciousness: the worshipper θιασεύεται ψυχὰν [“joins his soul to the group”], he is at one not only with the Master of Life but with his fellow-worshippers; and he is at one also with the life of earth.

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.

“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.