The Road to Eleusis by R. Gordon Wasson

Author:R. Gordon Wasson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Wasson, The Road To Eleusis
Published: 1978-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Carl A. P. Ruck

Chapter Four

Ancillary Data

A Greek scholar, writing just half a century ago, did not hesitate to dismiss the worship of Demeter at Eleusis as “trivial and absurd; but,” he added, “there can be no doubt that it did much to satisfy the emotional side of the religious instincts of the Greeks. Its modern analogue is perhaps the Salvation Army.” We trust that our own comparisons will be less bizarre than his. In our generation we enjoy the advantage of having rediscovered the hallucinogenic experience. Moreover, the value of interdisciplinary collaboration is that it gives us access to knowledge otherwise apt to be beyond the reach of scholars. Our joint effort has yielded a radical answer to our problem: it sets the stage for much reexamination of traditional opinions about the classical Greeks and their tragic literature in celebration of the god Dionysus.

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 had just been seen and felt could never be communicated: words are unequal to the task. Those symptoms are unmistakably the experience induced by an hallucinogen. To reach that conclusion, we have only to show that the rational Greeks, and indeed some of the most famous and intelligent amongst them, could experience and enter fully into such irrationality.

Eleusis was different from the convivial inebriation of friends at a symposion or the drunken komos revel at the festivals of drama. Eleusis was something for which even the maenadic ecstasy of the mountain women was only partial preparation. In their various ways, other Greek cults too enacted aspects of the ancient communion practiced between gods and men, between the living and the dead, but it was at Eleusis alone that the experience occurred with overwhelming finality: here alone was the grand design fulfilled of the maiden resurrected with her son conceived in death, and of the ear of barley that like her had sprouted beneath the earth. By this resurrection was validated the continuance of all that a Greek held most dear, the civilized way of life that, beyond each city’s constitution, was the Greek heritage, evolved out of aboriginal primitivism just as all life too came from the beneficent accord with the lord of death. Here indeed is a rich full-bodied myth, filled with contradictions like all the myths of an unlettered age, one saying this and another saying that and a third saying something else, but somehow in the end harmonizing into one whole, a myth that for the Greeks explained the beginning and the end of things.

Months of learning and rituals preceded the revelation on the Mystery night, each action programming in further detail the meaning and substance, the full ramifications of the vision that lay ahead. At last the initiates would sit on the steps in the initiation hall.

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