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Psychedelic Futures and Altered States in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 December 2024
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- Review Essay
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Footnotes
*
R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (30th Anniversary Ed.; Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008), 192 pp., $18.95 pb., ISBN: 9781556437526; Yulia Ustinova, Divine Mania: Alteration of Consciousness in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 2017), 412 pp., $190.00 hb., ISBN: 1138298115; Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2020), 480 pp., $21.00 hb., ISBN: 1250207142; Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 400 pp., $135.00 hb., ISBN: 1009123068.
I have benefited enormously from comments and edits from a great number of readers, including Robert Forte, Brian Muraresku, Carl A. P. Ruck, and the members of Harvard’s “Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean” colloquium. I delivered an earlier version of this paper as a keynote lecture entitled “The Call of the Ancient: Psychedelic Pasts and Futures” at a conference, “Archives of the Impossible,” at Rice University, 11–13 May 2023.
References
1 Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical (trans. John Raffan; Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) 277, originally published as Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche (Stuttgart; Berlin; Köln; Mainz: Kohlhammer, 1977). Burkert acknowledges that Karl Kérenyi had already floated the idea that the κκεών ingredient pennyroyal (glechon) may have been mildly hallucinogenic. See Carl Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (trans. Ralph Manheim; Bollingen Series 634; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) 96, 179f.
2 Carl A. P. Ruck had already published two relevant articles: “Euripides’ Mother: Vegetables and the Phallos in Aristophanes,” Arion 2 (1975) 13–57 and “On the Sacred Names of Iamos and Ion: Ethnobotanical Referents in the Hero’s Parentage,” The Classical Journal 71 (1976) 235–52.
3 Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, 47.
4 Ibid., 42.
5 Ibid., 57.
6 Ibid., 60.
7 Michael H. Jameson, review of The Road to Eleusis in The Classical World, by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl A. P. Ruck, The Classical World 73 (1979) 197–98.
8 See, for example, R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Jonathan Ott, and Carl A. P. Ruck, Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Carl A. P. Ruck, Blaise D. Staples, and Clark Heinrich, The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001); Carl A. P. Ruck, Mark A. Hoffman, and José Alfredo González Celdrán, Mushrooms, Myth, and Mithras: the Drug Cult That Civilized Europe (San Francisco: City Lights, 2011); Carl A. P. Ruck and Mark A. Hoffman, The Effluents of Deity: Alchemy and Psychoactive Sacraments in Medieval and Renaissance Art (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2012).
9 Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 109.
10 Charles Stein, Persephone Unveiled: Seeing the Goddess & Freeing Your Soul (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2006) 112–17.
11 Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 113.
12 In Remp. II 108.17–30 (cited in Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 113–14, 171 n. 161: σμπαθείας εἰσὶν αἴται ταῖς ψχαῖς περὶ τὰ δρώμενα τρόπον ἄγνωστον καὶ θεῖον· ὡς τοὺς μὲν τῶν τελομένων καταπλήττεσθαι δειμάτων θείων πλήρεις γιγνομένος, τοὺς δὲ σνδιατίθεσθαι τοῖς ἱεροῖς σμβόλοις καὶ ἑατῶν ἐκστάντας ὅλος ἐνιδρῦσθαι τοῖς θεοῖς καὶ ἐνθεάζειν.
13 Stein, Persephone Unveiled, 116.
14 See Rachael Petersen, “A Theological Reckoning with ‘Bad Trips,’ ” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2022, https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/a-theological-reckoning-with-bad-trips/.
15 Stein, Persephone Unveiled, 105.
16 Ibid., 117.
17 Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, 17.
18 Georg Luck, review of The Road to Eleusis, in American Journal of Philology 122 (2001) 135–38, https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2001.0010.
19 Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, 6.
20 Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020), all quotations are from the 2020 ebook edition.
21 Ibid., 24, 25.
22 Ibid., 213, 356.
23 Muraresku uses the phrase “smoking gun” throughout his book, in reference to evidence for ritual psychedelics. It is usually tempered with a conditional or hypothetical modifier, “could,” as in “[such-and-such] could be the smoking gun” (ibid., 111, 348); also “potential” (143); sometimes it is Ruck who is convinced that we have the smoking gun, and Muraresku is half a skeptical step aside (154); Muraresku will even admit that the “smoking gun is elusive” (237), so much so that he gave up on it for a time (295). But the final mention is not if, but when (362).
24 Ibid., 362.
25 Michael Pollan, How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (New York: Penguin, 2018) 18–19.
26 The technologies include Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 101.
27 Ibid., 154.
28 Ibid., 132.
29 Ibid., 304.
30 Ibid., 26.
31 Ibid., 27.
32 Ibid., 33.
33 Ibid. (emphasis added).
34 Ibid., 33.
35 Aldous Huxley, “Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds,” Saturday Evening Post, 18 October 1958, cited in Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 24–25.
36 Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 27.
37 “Explorations in Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Research,” Harvard Divinity School, 1 April 2023, https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/video-explorations-interdisciplinary-psychedelic-research-conference-2023.
38 Yulia Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
39 Ustinova, Divine Mania, 1–2.
40 Ibid., 3.
41 Ibid., 14.
42 Ibid., 22, 25.
43 Ibid., 134.
44 Ibid., 61.
45 Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality, 3.
46 Ibid., 33.
47 See Hans Dieter Betz, The “Mithras Liturgy” (Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity 19; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).
48 Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality, 44–45.
49 Ibid., 47.