The Road To Eleusis - Review

THE ROAD TO ELEUSIS

Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries

R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck. Twentieth-anniversary issue, 1998; 149 pp. $50 ($55 postpaid). Hermes Press/William Daily Rare Books, PO Box 69160, Los Angeles, CA 90046. 323/658-8515, Antiquare@aol.com.

This seminal book, long out of print--and extremely difficult, and expensive, to find--has been brought back into print, with new essays added, in a beautiful hardback edition by the Council on Spiritual Practices. The book is well made, aesthetically pleasing, and significant.

Wasson, the founder of ethnomycology, Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, and classicist Carl A. P. Ruck collaborate here to propose that ergot was the secret of the kykeon drunk at the Eleusinian Mysteries. While this assertion, as far as I know, is still awaiting support by successful fieldwork, The Road to Eleusis builds a very strong case on the basis of the Eleusinian texts and Hofmann's chemical analysis.

The Road to Eleusis clearly underscores the importance of entheogens in archaic religion. Perhaps the passage of twenty years, and the arrival of a new generation of scholars, will give this book the hearing it deserves.

"We analyzed ergot of wheat and ergot of barley in our laboratory and they were found to contain basically the same alkaloids as ergot of rye, viz alkaloids of the ergotamine and ergotoxine group, ergono-vine, and sometimes also traces of lysergic acidamide.... Ergonovine and lysergic acid amide, both psychoactive, are soluble in water whereas the other alkaloids are not. As we all know, ergot differs in its chemical constituents according to its host grass and according to geography. We have no way to tell what the chemistry was of the ergot of barley or wheat raised on the Rarian plain in the 2nd millennium B.C. But it is certainly not pulling a long bow to assume that the barley grown there was host to an ergot containing, perhaps among others, the soluble hallucinogenic alkaloids.--Albert Hofmann

"The ancient testimony about Eleusis is unanimous and unambiguous. Eleusis was the supreme experience in an initiate's life. It was both physical and mystical: trembling, vertigo, cold sweat, and then a sight that made all previous seeing seem like blindness, a sense of awe and wonder at a brilliance that caused a profound silence since what could be seen and felt could never be communicated: words were unequal to the task. Those symptoms are unmistakably the experience induced by an hallucinogen.

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