by Gary Borjesson
In my essay, On the Eleusinian Mysteries, I described the origin story of the Mysteries and what we know about the rites of initiation, which lasted as long as nine days. Here I will focus on the role of the psychedelic kykeon, and how this contributed to the flowering of philosophy, science, and art in ancient Greece and Rome.
1. The heart of the mysteries
At the heart of the Mysteries was an initiatory experience, not a teaching. In other words, you couldn’t gain what the mysteries had to offer by hearing about it from someone who had been initiated, even if they would tell you—which they wouldn’t because the punishment for speaking about details was death. The experience was life-changing. Cicero, an initiate, wrote that “by their means we have been brought out of our barbarous and savage mode of life….and have gained the power not only to live happily, but to die with a better hope.”
The key experience that the Mysteries facilitated is boundary dissolution. The teaser with which I ended the first essay points to this: the experience of the Mysteries was open to everyone, regardless of the conventional identities that bound them—man or woman, slave or free, citizen or foreign worker. Even if you tried to hold on to your identity, say, as a high-born Athenian statesman, the rites of initiation promised to dissolve this limited view of yourself. Moreover, it’s not just social identities that are loosened, it’s the boundary between the living and the dead, and between the human and the divine.
As the origin story suggests, boundary crossings are at the heart of the Mysteries. In that story Hades crosses the boundary from the Underworld, abducting Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, and carrying her back to the Underworld. Demeter’s scorched-earth grief leads Hades to release Persephone, who then crosses back from the dead to the living. Her journey is memorialized each year, for Persephone’s return to the land of the living brings spring and its promise of rebirth. Read more »
Socrates, snub-nosed, wall-eyed, paunchy, squat,
No one knows if it was really in the state prison, the ruins of which are visible today outside the ancient Agora of Athens, that Socrates was kept during the final days before his execution, so many times has the area been destroyed and reconstructed— walking past it sends a chill down my spine. Ancient Greece is visceral and vivid because it entered my imagination early in life; some of the most cherished tales of my childhood came from the crossovers of Hellenistic history and legend, such as the one in which Sikander (Alexander the Great) is accompanied by the Quranic Saint Khizr, in pursuit of “aab e hayat,” the elixir of immortality, or the one about the elephantry in the battle between Sikander and the Indian king Porus, or of the loss of Sikander’s beloved horse Bucephalus on a riverbank not far from Lahore, the city where I was born. I became familiar with ancient Greece through classical Urdu poetry and lore as well as through my study of English literature in Pakistan, but I would read Greek philosophers in depth many years later, as a student at Reed college; I would subsequently discover Greek influence on scholars in the golden age of Muslim civilization while working on a book on al-Andalus— the overlooked, key contribution of Arabic which served as a link between Greek and Latin, and its later offshoots that came to define the cultural and intellectual history of Europe.