The Message of the Mysteries to the World

7/24/2019 The Message of the Mysteries to the World

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The Message of the Mysteries to the World

In the 1970s, I was a member of a team that attempted to

reconstruct what happened in the ceremony that was enacted at

this ancient sanctuary whose desecrated ruins lie beside us. We

demonstrated that the initiates were afforded a glimpse into a

transcendent realitysomething experienced by almost all the

great figures of Classical antiquity, as well as common people,

regardless of sex or social class. Thirty years later, I returned to

the subject to present a clearer explanation, incorporating many

new discoveries made in the intervening years.

When I asked my colleague the Swiss chemist Albert

Hofmann shortly before his death at the age of 102 to provide a

comment, even if only a sentence, in view of his frailty, he wrote:

Only a new Eleusis could help mankind to survive the threatening

catastrophe in Nature and human society and bring a new period of

happiness.

Something happened at this sanctuary of Eleusis that gave

hope and meaning to humankind for two millennia. As the Roman

philosopher Cicero wrote: For among the many excellent andindeed divine institutions which your Athens has brought forth and

contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those

mysteries.


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Hofmanns discovery of LSD in 1943 was an event that

inaugurated a new awareness of our role in the cosmos, and

looking back at the end of the century whose mentality he,

probably more than anyone, influenced, he saw the crisis that we

humans have created by our destruction of our planet Gaia and the

possible extinction of our species.

Cicero credited the ancient mystery enacted here at Eleusis as

the essential impetus for the evolution of humankinds rise from

savagery to civilized modes of life: we have learned from them

the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live

happily, but also to die with a better hope.

The great hall of initiation at Eleusis was an architectural

similitude of a cave, whose antiquity as a motif can be traced back

to the Paleolithic when humans first rose above the beasts asHomo

spiritualis, notsapiens, but with the first inklings of spirituality, a

remembrance of forgotten dreams. The cave was the womb of

Gaia, the vulva to a world beyond and a gateway for birth into this

realm of ordinary living.

Plato used the ancient motif as his Allegory of the Cave. What

the Telesterion offered was release from the Cave of ordinaryseeing.

What we know of the Mystery dates largely from the seventh

century BCE, but its origins go back at least to the mid-second


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millennium. Like all the great ancient religious sites, it represents

an assimilation of a pre-existent sanctuary to the evolving

dominance of the Indo-European Greek-speaking peoples and their

family of twelve deities, headed by the patriarchal father god Zeus.

In deference to this earlier existence of the religion, Demeter,

who will teach the Mystery, claims that that she has come from

Crete when she first arrives at Eleusis. Hades had abducted her

daughter, begotten by her brother Zeus, while picking flowers with

a sisterhood of maidens. The spiritual rapture as an abduction is a

common motif, and involves always the special fantasies of herb

cutters, the gatherers of magical herbs.

Such plants grow wild, and the maiden is abducted, not

married to the possessing spirit that materialized from the magical

plant.

A myth is read as a dialogue in the language established by its

structural polarities. With the establishment of the Mystery,

Persephone has become the wedded wife of her adductor. The

abduction is associated with fleabane, the concubine of Hades,

named Minthe (Mentha pulegium), pennyroyal, which is an

abortifacient. The abduction is also associated with the magicalflower called narkissos, narcotic, and narcosis, as induced by

opium, is symbolic of death. An aryballos in the shape of the

opium capsule was a tomb offering.


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Not only does abduction yield to marriage, but through death,

Persephone yields life. She eats a seed of pomegranate as she

leaves the underworld and becomes pregnant with Hades son. The

pomegranate resembles the opium poppy capsule, but signifies the

fertile womb instead of death.

Persephone should have been an Olympian, since both her

mother and her father are Olympians, but has taken food and seed

in the underworld, so she belongs to her husbands world. Demeter

becomes the mother-in-law of Hades and has a grandson born from

the chthonic realm.

Originally, Demeter had rejected the option of mortality, and

had tried to burn away the flesh of her nursling Demophon and

caused a stoppage of foodstuff upon the earth. Humans were

starving and the Olympians were losing the sacrificial offerings

upon which they depend. They relent and allow the release of

Persephone, on the one proviso.

As acknowledgment of the situation, that Persephone belongs

to her husband and has sullied her celestial purity with food and

conception in the chthonic realm, Demeter teaches the Mystery

to the boy of many names, ultimately her grandson.The structural polarities as established by the myth are: 1)

matriarchal freedom to wedded subservience; 2) wild gathered

plants to cultivation; 3) aborted birth of the bastard to fathered son;


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4) purely spiritual being to incarnation of the spirit; 5) famine and

death to resurrection; 6) toxic plants to cultivated barley; 7)

narcosis to vision.

The initiates for the ceremony drank a special potion, called

the kykeonor mixture, whose ingredients in water were the wild

fleabane and the cultivated barley. It was intended as a magical

mediation of all the mythical structural polarities. It obviously

should be something visionary or an entheogen, which neither the

wild nor the cultivated ingredients are. A common weed in fields

of provides the answer. Tares looked identical to grain. It has the

reputation of being intoxicating because of the fungal growth or

ergot that infests.

The most primitive of the cultivated grains from which barley

was hybridized is spelt, which originally had only two red kernels,

which resemble the ergot of tares. Like all grasses it, too, is

infested with ergot. Tares is not an edible grass, but represents the

wild weed, and the common denominator of all the grasses is the

enlarged ergot kernels, whose contamination spreads also to the

barley, pulling it back to primitivism. The common denominator is

intoxicating, a source of the visionary LSA, similar to LSD, and anintoxicant or entheogen mediates between deadly poison and

spiritual enlightenment.


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The Eleusinian Mystery, as we know it, dates from the

seventh century, and like most of the pre-Hellenic religions, it

probably involved human sacrifice, as in the burning of

Demophon, pacified in the later evolution by the offering of

animal surrogates. In its Hellenic manifestation, it is an

assimilation of Indo-European motifs, as evidenced by its

promotion of Olympian dominance. Thus the supposed first

priesthoods were seventh century Thracian northerners, backdated

to the mid-second millennium.

As such, it is also an assimilation of the Thracian mushroom

cult and the Indo-Europeanhaoma sacrament. Ergot represents the

seed of the seedless mushroom and hence a further mediation as

the entheogen of the kykeon. Both ergot and some Amanita

mushrooms, moreover, are deadly poisons; both require expert

knowledge to access the visionary potential.

There were two levels to the Mystery, the Greater and the

Lesser, although the latter probably was added later, after Athens

assumed control of the religion. The Lesser involved the Thracian

entheogen and the abduction of Persephone, enacted by the titular

Queen of Athens.The initiates journeyed in spirit from the Telesterion to visit

Persephone and Hades in Elysium. They were hospitably received

under the sacrosanct obligation that bound hosts to guests, but at


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the critical moment of parturition, when Persephone was due to

deliver Hades son. They resurfaced in the Telesterion, reborn

along with the Mystery child as Persephone returned from the

netherworld, as the Hierophant announced the Mystery: Brimo has

given birth to Brimos. Brimos is a mothers son.

Since the initiates were now obligated to death by his

hospitality in the netherworld, they could expect a similar

obligation to offer him sacred hospitality as Plouton, source of

worldly prosperity. Death, when it came, would be a journey to the

blessed paradise of Elysium, a place they had already visited, ruled

by the hosts who had already extended the bond of xenia.

The influence of the Thracian revisionist theology, attributed

to Orpheus, added a new dimension, which never really became

officially incorporated into the Eleusinian tradition. After many

returns, with purifying ordeals in both this world and the other, the

incarnation would be nullified and the Apollonian spirit would

ascend, divested of the burden of flesh, to its true home in the fiery

empyrean beyond the stars for an eternal existence.

Today, we face the same destinations, the same solutions. An

earth depleted of its resources may force us to seek other worlds tocolonize. We propose the other pathway: to renegotiate our

covenant with Gaia.


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The scope of the Project will evolve as we move forward. The

War on Drugs is a futile battle against plants. Eleusis had its drug

problem, also, when it was found that people were abusing the

sacred potion as a recreational drug. Abuse deprives the entheogen

of its sanctity.

Shortly before his death Albert Hofmann wrote to Steve Jobs,

who had claimed that LSD was: A positive life-changing

experience for me. Hofmann asked: Im interested in learning

more about how LSD was useful to you.

Similarly, Francis Crick reported discovering DNA after an

experience with LSD. Kary Mullis discovered the polymerase

chain reaction (PCR) with the aid of LSD. As Terence McKenna

said, Psychedelics provide a totally different view of reality.

Hofmann called LSD his problem child. The entheogen lets you

see that what you thought was a myth is reality. Recent research

suggests that the Thracian entheogen played a role in the visionary

experience of Pythagoras in discovering the fundamental structures

of mathematics and music.

As a learning center, the museum complex will encourage

investigation into the secrets of religious traditions. It will sponsorprograms investigating new modes of experiencing the origins of

religious cognition. Awareness of the origins will predate the


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evolution into defined religious traditions and help reconcile the

dangerous dogmatism of competing faiths.

One of the agenda of the Gaia Project as a world center for

renegotiating the terms for our use of Earths resources will be

investigating modes of addiction therapy, as well as promoting a

sane drug policy that includes harm reduction.

It will also promote artistic creativity, offering workshops and

space for exhibitions, and develop environmentally friendly use of

the planets resources. We seek new avenues of spiritual

enlightenment. To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a

wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in

an hour.

The future will start here at Eleusis. In the words of Isaiah:

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the

weaned child shall put its hand on the adders den!"

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The Message of the Mysteries to the World