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Behind these common assignations lies a long tradition of cultural evolution from earlier times when the plants that were the gods' botanical attributes originally had chemical properties that made the plants more than symbolic entheogens; these properties made the plants function psychoactively in rites of shamanism. Thus, even in the classical age, Demeter was still assigned the narcotic poppy, in addition to her sheaf of grain; and her secret barley drink at the Eleusinian Mystery actually induced a visionary experience for her initiates. So, too, Apollo's chemically innocuous laurel was still responsible, if only symbolically, for precipitating the ecstatic seizures of his clairvoyant priestess at the sanctuary of Delphi. And the wine produced from the grape vines of Dionysus was not only an alcoholic inebriant, but it was treated, in social and viticultural rites, as the very embodiment of the god's possessing spirit.

At the dawn of consciousness, we may surmise that humans, apart from the other beasts, recognized the inevitable death awaiting each one and the fearful dependence of the living upon the dead for nourishment and for the continuance of generations. Thus the first science was founded. Edible matter was distinguished from inedible matter, whether poisonous or not useful or taboo, and the earliest perceptions of religion were sensed through those medicinal and magical substances that seemed to mediate between this world and the worlds of the gods and ancestors. These entheogens varied with environment and cultural traditions: availability alone would not suffice to determine a plant's sanctity; meaningful connotations in mythology and religion were also necessary.

For those peoples who took up a settled way of life--tending herds, sowing crops, and founding towns--the dark entombment of the earth became their sacred place where the spirits dwelt. This was the womb into which the seed was entrusted. Earth was the great Mother, the goddess who was the end and the next beginning of all that lives. The darkness of this chthonic realm was mirrored by the recurrent cycles of the night, lighted by the lunar phases that uncannily seemed to correlate with womankind's rhythms. Opiates, the plants that induced an irrationality and a loss of conscious control, were the [132] pathway to Mother Earth's other world. Her special art was the discovery of how to manage the wastes produced by the continuous living of people and herds in the same place, without becoming poisoned by pollutants or famished by depletion of the land's fertility. Pollution had to be transmuted, both magically and in actual fact, into the fertilizing power that would renew Mother Earth for future generations.

In contrast to these settled peoples, nomadic peoples moved on, abandoning one location for another, and often not even burying their dead but hanging them from trees to free their spirits to the winds. Hunting and gathering required that nomadic peoples roam, migrating with the annual journey of the solar disc and seeking totemic kinship with the animals whose wild nature they would have to anticipate if they were to succeed in the hunt. Masculine strength determined precedence in the tribe, for whom god was masculine and the father. Appropriate to such a deity were wild plants, instead of cultivated ones, and his visionary realm was one of celestial enlightenment.

Such generic scenarios about earliest prehistory are misleading simplifications, although they are basically true, read back from mythological traditions and historical indications several millennia later. In what were to become the Greek lands, the Great Mother had already taken up residence, honored by the Minoans and other similar cultures, when the Indo-Europeans with their Great Father Zeus began arriving about the beginning of the second millennium B.C. By the middle of that millennium, the newcomers had taken over many of the previous settlements and assimilated their traditions with those of the earlier inhabitants.

At Mycenae, where modern archaeologists first uncovered traces of Indo-European civilization in Greece, the newcomers had imposed a kingship of their own style and they reinterpreted the name of the place to suit their own traditions. The word Mycenae is a feminine plural, like many names of Minoan settlements, which were named for the sisterhoods of the goddess's worshippers. In this case, the settlement was named after the Mycene girls, just as Thebes was named for the Thebe girls and Athens for the Athene girls. Even today the names of these towns are plurals grammatically. The Mycenaean Greeks, however, gave their town a false etymology, associating it with the tradition of the entheogen from their Asiatic homeland, the mykes or mushroom. Perseus, the city's refounder, had dynastic ties to another branch of the Indo-European migration, the Persians. Deposing the fearful Queen of the Gorgon sisterhood on the site of what was to become the new city, Perseus was said to have picked the sacred wild mushroom. By this act, Medusa, whose name means queen, lost her power to stupefy and was changed to celestial inspiration in the form of Zeus's daughter Athena and the flying horse Pegasus, who was responsible for numerous fountains, the drink of which liberated the soul for higher visions. In the same manner, Perseus's father, Zeus, would wield the lightning bolt as his weapon of enlightenment against the chthonic forces of darkness, planting, as it was supposed, the fungal entheogen wherever it fell to earth, as he took possession of the new Greek lands. The ensuing reconciliation of Minoans and Greek Mycenaeans would end up with the males in uneasy dominance over the females, but not without due allowance for some role for the traditions of the pre-Indo-Europeans.

The sacred mushroom of Zeus's people, as R. Gordon Wasson has shown, was the Amanita muscaria. The Indo-Europeans brought a remembrance of it wherever they migrated from their original home in the central Asian highlands. The Persians, for example, remembered it as haoma. Among the Hindus, it was soma.

With the passage of time, knowledge of the deity's original botanic identity was forgotten or restricted and substitutes or surrogates were employed, probably because the original was no longer easily obtainable in the new environments. The surrogates at first perpetuated certain attributes of the original, although they often were only symbolically [133] entheogenic. In some ways this perhaps even made these surrogates more appropriate, since the Indo-Europeans were prejudiced against ultimately admitting any corporeal or material component in the experience of spiritual enlightenment.

In India, the earliest surrogate was a mushroom lacking the chemical properties of the original mushroom but symbolically appropriate nonetheless; it functioned ritually as the transmutation of corporeal putrefaction into fragrant spiritual essence through the purifying agency of fire in the making of the Mahavira vessel for the Pravargya sacrifice.

Fungal surrogates are also found in Greek traditions. More often, the color of Amanita muscaria and its relatives is remembered, or the warty scabs from its ruptured membrane, or its wild unpredictable manner of growth, or its mycorrhizal associations with certain trees, or even the intoxication of its psychoactive urine constituent. Thus, the color of Viola odorata (or ion in Greek) made it sacred to the homonymously named Iamid dynasty of clairvoyant priests who replaced earlier priestesses at Olympia when the Indo-Europeans took over the goddess's sanctuary and rededicated it to their god Zeus. Probably, however, no chemically active entheogen was used in the divination practiced by these priests, who employed rational scientific methods of prognosis based on carefully observed omens, instead of the former irrational possession that had characterized the procedure previously.

The same botanic surrogate for the fungal entheogen occurs in the traditions about Apollo's secret son Ion, who was named for the violet and was begotten in a cave at Athens. No plants other than molds can be expected to grow in such a subterranean environment, but the Queen supposedly conceived the child there as she gathered the saffron-hued Crocus saliva in the company of her Athena sisterhood. This child of Apollo was instrumental in shifting Athens from its previous traditions of matriliny to patriliny, as well as for purifying Apollo from the taint of female subservience, his role prior to assuming a new manifestation as a son of Zeus among the family of Olympians. It is Ion who lent his name, by a false etymology, to the "moving" electrical particle, a meaning that belies his former botanic fixity to Earth. This reinterpretation of his name was ancient and involved the myth of how he found a father, as well as his mother.

The luminous radiance of the sacred plant's color not only determined the violet and crocus as suitable surrogates for Amanita, but it appears to have been responsible also for the tawny hair that characterized Mycenaean princes such as Menelaus, Odysseus, and Achilles, as well as that of Apollo.

Animal surrogates also recall attributes of Amanita. The leopard that is sacred to Dionysus bears the warty scabs of the mushroom's ruptured membrane in the markings of its tawny pelt, and the antlered hind, an animal not found in Greece but from the Indo-European homeland, was sacred to Apollo's sister Artemis. The hind's fondness for Amanita and its constituents associates this animal with the entheogen in Siberian shamanism, and the golden antlers of the particular magical beast that belonged to Artemis suggest a botanical treelike surrogate of the appropriate color. Just as Perseus picked a mushroom in supplanting the religion of the goddess, Heracles numbered the plucking of these antlers among the labors he performed in claiming Greece for the religion of his father Zeus. In a similar manner, both Heracles and Perseus plucked golden apples from a sacred tree, just as another hero, Iason (or Jason), plucked the golden fleece. "Fleece" and "apple" are homonymous in Greek, and some traditions remembered that the original for what the heroes harvested from the trees was a mushroom.

The magical properties of the constituent are also recalled in the myth of the hunter Orion, one of several males who once were consorts of the goddess in the persona of Artemis, before she was assimilated to the Olympian family as a daughter of Zeus and twin sister of Apollo, who formerly also had been a version of her consort. Orion was killed for trying to rape a maiden like Artemis from the Indo-European homeland, but in [134] dying was transmuted into a celestial configuration as the constellation. In this newer identity it was claimed that Orion was a son of Zeus, who had inseminated Mother Earth with urine.

The Indo-European migrants, however, could not have failed to note the superior civilization of the Minoan peoples among whom they settled. That awareness, together with a tendency to equate the forward linear course of historical time with evolutionary progress, gave rise to the idea that the past is more primitive than the present and future. Hence, as new surrogates developed, the attributes of Amanita were also displaced upon the traditions of the previous inhabitants, equating all that was old as somehow inferior to newer manifestations in the Hellenic age that developed after the reconciliation of the two cultures. The people of the olden times, therefore, were sometimes themselves mushrooms or bore attributes of the entheogen from the original Indo-European homeland, even if in reality they must have been Minoans. At Corinth, for example, a town that also was resettled by the Mycenaean Greeks, the aboriginal populace was said to have been mushroom people before they were transformed into the new human inhabitants.

Settlements such as Mycenae and Athens were said to have been built by the Cyclopes, which were one of several versions of partial, maimed, or half figures in Greek mythology, all of them probably derived, like the one-legged man, from metaphors for Amanita. Each Cyclops had a single eye, suggesting the special vision afforded by the entheogen. The Cyclopes were associated with both chthonic and celestial shamanism. In the former, they tended the forge of the limping or one-legged Hephaestus in the heart of volcanoes, which were seen as a pathway to the underworld. In the later shamanic orientation, they were pressed into service of the new religion making Zeus's thunderbolts in that volcanic forge.

The same shift in orientation is represented in the encounter of the Cyclops named Polyphemus and the hero Odysseus. In the cave where Polyphemus is holding him captive, Odysseus introduces the monster to a new experience of intoxication with a powerful wine from Apollo. In escaping from Polyphemus, as in his other adventures, Odysseus is liberated from the chthonic realm to return to his homeland on the island Ithaca and to establish patriliny with his son Telemachus and father Laertes, in a place that during his absence had been in danger of becoming a queendom.

Other notorious half-men are the lame Oedipus, whose myth, like that of Ion, involves the discovery of paternity, and the one-shoed Iason, as well as Theseus, whose father's sandal was a clue that led to the hero's discovery of patriliny, and Achilles, whose heel was his only vulnerability. These lame figures probably derive originally from phallic symbolism of the Earth consort, reinterpreted through resemblance of Amanita to an erect phallus, for which common metaphors included the "single eye," the "lame third leg," the "little man," and so on. Sometimes the goddess even becomes involved with surrogates for the mushroom. Such is the case of the maiden (V)iole, who was responsible for the chthonic intoxication of Heracles and who bears the feminine version of Ion's name, with its reference to Viola odorata.

More often than through simple equation with primitivism, the Indo-European entheogen was thought to have undergone an essential hybridization from the wild plant of the Asiatic homeland (remembered as the realm of the Hyperboreans) into some cultivated substitute upon its importation and transplantation into the Mediterranean region. Thus the olive, which was supposed to have been discovered by Heracles in the Indo-European homeland, where it is not native, was transplanted to Greece and became the sacred emblem of Athena as daughter of Zeus, replacing her Minoan entheogen. It even became the symbol of Zeus at the Olympian games, after the Mycenaean Greeks took control of the sanctuary.

Among the earlier plants of Athena replaced by the olive was one the Greeks called [135] "horse-mad" or hippomanes, Datura stramonium, the thorn-apple or jimson weed. This chemically psychoactive entheogen was associated with Athena's primordial, pre-Olympian manifestation as a maddening Gorgon Medusa and it also is characteristic of the goddess in tantric traditions. Just as Athena came to symbolize the higher inspiration of the civilized arts of the Olympian Age, the olive was thought to be superior to its botanical avatar, for it is a cultivated tree, requiring constant pruning to keep it from reverting to the useless wild olive. At Athena's Panathenaic games in Athens, instead of a wreath of olive leaves, which was the prize at Olympia, the victorious athlete received an amphora of oil pressed from the sacred olive trees. This pressing of the surrogate fruit recalls the tradition of the original Indo-European entheogen, called in Vedic lore by the metaphor of the "pressed one," which is the meaning of the name soma. The olive was superior not only because it was cultivated whereas Amanita was wild, but also because it required the further intervention of scientific procedures of manufacture to release its food.

Athens claimed to have the first olive tree that ever grew, but the same claims was made elsewhere. On the island of Delos, where Apollo and Artemis were reborn into their Olympian identities, the aboriginal olive tree retained ritual connotations of the psychoactive original. In addition to the mock flagellation of pubescent dancers who chewed on its bark in commemoration of earlier times when they would have been sacrificial victims to the goddess, the identity of the Indo-European entheogen that supplanted the Minoan religion was maintained as restricted knowledge. Each year a secret offering of Amanita was supposed to have been transmitted through intermediaries from the Hyperborean homeland and presented among the offerings of first fruits sent to Delos from the various Greek cities. These first fruits were symbolic of primitivism, harvested early, before the full crop had ripened to maturity. Among these gifts, the secret offering from the Hyperboreans was the most primitive avatar of the agricultural arts.

Like the olive, Apollo's bay or laurel tree, Laurus nobilis, was similarly considered a sacred import or transplantation from the olden times in the traditions of the god's sanctuary at Delphi. It was used for the wreaths to crown victors in the Pythian games commemorating Apollo's triumph over his atavistic former identity at the site, where in pre-Indo-European times (i.e., before Apollo was reborn as a son of Zeus) the god had functioned in chthonic shamanism as a consort of Earth. The games at Delphi included musical and athletic competitions, celebrating contests of male physical superiority and, just as the games of Athena, the harmony of the higher artistic inspiration that dispels the discord of irrational, feminine possessing spirits.

Although the laurel retained the tradition of its psychoactive original in the shamanism of the Pythian priestess, it replaced more sinister plants formerly associated with the pre-Olympian manifestations of Apollo. One of these was aconite (Aconitum) or wolfsbane, a metaphoric name that goes back to the Greek nomenclature. Aconite is chemically psychoactive and its flowers, like those of Viola, mimic the sacred color of Amanita. This fortuitous resemblance facilitated the merging of the Indo-European god with his indigenous chthonic precedent. Wolfsbane or lykoktonos originated in the prophet-deity's cults, among the northern Hyperboreans and in what was known as his other homeland among the so-called wolf-people, the matrilineal Lycians of Asia Minor. This wolf persona became characteristic not only of Apollo's darker nature, but also in general of the recidivous other self of all the heroes who were sons of Zeus. This lupine metaphor is a classical version of the werewolf mythologem and coincides with Indo-European versions of the same phenomenon. In Greek, the "wolf-madness" is rabies, the power of the she-wolf to cause the domestic dog to revert to its wild primordial ancestor. The Olympian Apollo was so dangerously unstable in his new identity that even dogs were excluded from his Delian sanctuary.

[136] Another of Apollo's botanical surrogates was hyacinthos, a plant name from the pre-Indo-European language. The Greeks identified it with larkspur, Delphinium ajacis, perhaps since the plant's medical efficacy against ectoparasites made it a fitting analogue to their own entheogen, Amanita, which has the property of making flies insensate and comatose, hence its common name, fly-agaric. The annual sacrificial victim offered to Apollo at the cliffs on the island of Leukas was similarly thought to rid the populace of an infestation of flies. The Minoan hyacinthos may have been a different plant, probably with psychoactive properties. It bears the name of a former version of Apollo, Hyacinthos, one of the many lamented males who were mourned as dying consorts of the goddess. Apollo, in the common mythological pattern of replacement, accidentally killed his own former persona in an incident of misdirected "wind" or inspiration. The plant's flowers were said to resemble the Greek letters for the cry of lament.

The bay tree or daphne replaced both the hyacinthos and the wolfsbane. The Pythian priestess prepared for her fit of shamanic possession by commemorating the maiden Daphne who was metamorphosed into the tree to avoid the god's courtship. She chewed the leaves of laurel and became possessed by the old, darker version of Apollo, but her shrieks of frenzied rapture were transformed into enigmatic Greek verses by a male priesthood, whose masculine role symbolically was to mediate with the female past traditions and reinterpret the senseless response coherently, as befitted the newer son of Zeus. The type of questions most often answered by the Delphic oracle was consistent with this general theme of reconciliation between female and male mentalities, just as the sanctuary itself mediated between a commemoration of the original chthonic religion and the traditions of the nomadic immigrants. In addition to common problems of marital infertility (and in mythological instances, of patriliny over matriliny), the oracle was often instrumental in advising Greek cities about where new colonizations of male-dominant Hellenic civilization might be settled upon the inhospitable Earth of Mother Nature, just as the wandering Apollo had no place to call his own until he took control of Delphi.

Like the daphne and the olive, Poseidon's sacred plant, the celery (or what is commonly called "parsley" by classicists), Apium graveolens, apparently was also a chemically innocuous surrogate for a plant that originally functioned in the god's pre-Olympian religion. It, too, symbolized the triumph over the chthonic forces of primitivism. Celery was used to crown the victors in Poseidon's games at Isthmia and Nemea, sanctuaries like Delphi and Olympia that evolved from shamanic rites practiced before the coming of the Indo-Europeans. As at the other sites, the victors probably were once the sacrificial victims offered to the goddess and her consort. The celery, as a surrogate, retained its funeral connotations from those earlier times. Thus, wreaths of celery were used to adorn tombs in the classical age, and it was a homily to say that someone close to death was in need of such a chaplet.

The original entheogen may well have been the poisonous hemlock, Conium maculatum, which celery resembles, since hemlock was the drug employed in the classical age as a lethal potion to put criminals to death; because criminals were originally appropriate candidates for human sacrifice, the mode of execution betrays its ritual precedents. As "consort of Earth" (which is the meaning of Poseidon's name), the god in his pre-Olympian persona was a deity of death, linked with the Gorgon identity of Athena as his goddess. Thus, he, like Athena, had equine manifestations, in which form he united sexually with the Medusa.

It is, however, in the paired figures of Demeter and Dionysus that one can see most clearly the full complexity of the pattern involved in the reconciliation of the botanical and religious traditions of the Indo-Europeans and their indigenous predecessors in the Greek lands. These two deities represented the totality of human foodstuffs--Demeter, the dry, and Dionysus, the liquid. Both incorporate commemorations of their avatars in chthonic [137] shamanism, as well as of the fungal entheogen of the Indo-European tradition. For both deities, the evolutionary perspective placed a higher value on their cultivated manifestations in the Hellenic age, as compared to their wilder, more primitive antecedents. As in other cultures, the mushroom proved to be the perfect archetypal mediating symbol. Its wildness could be tamed into cultivated hybrids, and its obvious phallic configuration could also be viewed as feminine, when the cap becomes concave upon further opening in ripeness. It grows from what looks like an egg within the earth, thus suggesting the idea of resurrection from the nether world, and it thereby in Greek lore had surrogates in various analogous bulb plants, like the crocus, the narcissus, and asphodel, the last being the flower that traditionally grew in the Elysian fields. The chthonic mushroom's sudden appearance after rainfall suggested some causal relationship with the bolt of lightning's point of impact from the celestial realm, hence the union of sky and earth.

Because of the rational bias of classical scholarship, there has been a reluctance to consider the role of entheogens in Greek religion, as though the few researchers who do were somehow imposing their own distorted ideas upon ancient society and "gods in a flowerpot." The fact that the Greeks worshipped Dionysus as a god of intoxication should alone refute any doubt that they recognized something numinous in the experience of chemically induced madness. It is not I, after all, who found a god in my wine cup.

As the Greeks saw it, there were two aspects to this state of altered consciousness caused by the drinking of wine. One was primarily effeminate, regressive, and irrational; the other, virile and inspired, with connotations of the higher arts and of the political and social institutions of their male-dominant culture. The former was the maenadism of the women who tended the god's chthonic avatars in the mountain wildernesses during the nonagricultural season; the latter, the symposia or "drinking parties" of the men in the city, where poetry about their mythological heritage was recited and the friendships and alliances, often basically homoerotic (and hence, excluding female) were formed that sustained the male-dominated culture. Whatever women were present at symposia belonged to the hetaera or prostitute class. They were trained in dancing, poetry, and intellectual arts, and, unlike females of the citizenry, they were adept at the lascivious sexual arousal of their male patrons--talents that would have been deemed threatening in wives and daughters. To this masculine aspect of intoxication belongs also the god's role in renewing cultural identity through the paedeutic function of the theater. In modern terms, the contrast is between the drunken brawl and a cocktail party.

Wine was recognized for what it is, basically a fungal surrogate of the "pressed one," the soma of the Vedic tradition. The fungal nature of fermentation was clearly observable and seemed to the ancients to be the same kind of process that occurs in cooking, whereby the raw and primitive is transformed into civilized cuisine, a process, moreover, that was thought to be a sort of putrefaction and, hence, like a resurrection from moldering matter. In fermentation, the wild, unpredictable growth of Amanita yielded to the civilizing arts to produce a superior inebriant.

Wine, as the drink of the new age, deposed the god's avatars, all of them from both the Indo-European and Minoan traditions, but as always in Greek religion, the deposed personae must not be dishonored. They were commemorated as part of the deity's total identity. Thus, his previous names were still maintained--like Bacchus for Dionysus--or earlier iconography was perpetuated--like the Gorgon's head that Athena wears as a breastplate, a trophy of her former persona as goddess.

So, too, wine as an intoxicant was not solely the product of the grape's fermentation, but various herbal precedents were part of its "bouquet." Among these was resin, commemorating earlier ferments from the sap of trees that were host to Amanita; the pine tree became sacred to Dionysus, and modern Greek wine perpetuates this association as retsina. Many of the entheogens sacred to the goddess also found their way into this [138] ancient drink that was a symbolic recapitulatory synthesis of the two culture's reconciliation, as well as an inebriant. Some of these additives were chemically psychoactive and so intensified the wine's toxicity that it could be drunk safely and properly only when greatly diluted with water. It was all of these that gave wine its "spirit," the ghosts of its constituent gods.

Alcohol itself was a substance unknown to the Greeks, who had no name for it. Our modern term comes from Arabic, where it first was described as the distillates of minerals for cosmetics, thence applied to the liquid distillate of ferments when it was first discovered much later by the alchemists as aqua vitae. The Greek word for wine itself, (w)oinos, appears to be Indo-European, and since viticulture was not native to these people in the Asiatic homeland, it could not originally have described the vinous ferment but rather their own sacred drink. They applied its name to the newer drink when they encountered it in the course of their southern migrations. Etymologically, it appears to be a metaphor for Amanita as a "circular rimmed wheel," which is a typical pictograph for the sacred mushroom in other cultures. Cognates for woinos in Latin and modern languages (vinum, vin, vino, wein, etc.) are, therefore, derived from the Indo-European verbal root and not assimilated, as one might expect, from whatever linguistic culture originated viticulture.

Symbolically, the vine plant was seen as a botanical evolution of a more primitive, related plant. This avatar was the ivy, Hedera helix. Without fermentation, the leaves and berries were reputed to derange the mind. Ivy had not yet succumbed to the hybridization that would culminate in its civilized descendent that, like the olive, through constant pruning and tending would yield its harvest of the succulent grape, instead of the supposedly poisonous tiny berries of its ancestor.

The two aspects of Dionysus, wine and its precedents, had to be commemorated in ritual as well. Thus, in addition to the symposia of the men, the female citizenry was periodically released from the strictures of their secluded and protected lives within the innermost quarters of their houses in the city and they took off for their mountain revels as maenads or "madwomen." They formed again into the ancient Minoan sisterhoods of the triform goddess and reverted to wild, uncivilized behavior, and they laid claim again to the dominant role that once was theirs and that now was denied them in their lives within the city.

On the mountains, these women hunted the pre-viticultural manifestations of the god's possessing spirit. Symbolic of this was the ivy. As emblem of their recidivous quest, they bore the Minoan symbol of the thyrsos. This was the herbalist's staff, the implement of those who gathered wild plants. It was composed of a fennel stalk stuffed with the leaves of ivy that supposedly they had found. Other plants from olden times also figured in their ritual hunt. Prominent among these was the symbolism of the opium poppy, a plant from the Minoan religion, although it could not be expected to be found actually growing on the mountain and in the wintertime of the revel.

Indo-European precedents also were involved in the symbolism, as is clear from the mythical traditions about the thyrsos. Prometheus was said to have first brought the fiery spirit of the celestial enlightenment from the heavens by stealing fire from the Olympians and hiding it in a fennel stalk. Celestial fire as a bolt of lightning, especially when concealed in the herbalist's thyrsos, recalls the supposed involvement of lightning in the generation of mushrooms. Prometheus was the creator of the human race and his role was the essential mediation between the chthonic realm of his own origins and the newer realm of the Olympians, whom he tricked into accepting the right of his human creatures to exist. It was he who taught humankind the ritual of the sacrificial meal, whereby the past undergoes transmutation to feed the ongoing evolutionary process. The myths about Prometheus and his brother's son Deucalion, moreover, portray the inception of a new [139] age of humans with the inauguration of the Olympian family of deities with the father Zeus at its head.

Animate surrogates of the primitive god also were objects of the symbolic hunt of the maenads. Such beasts were the leopard, with its suggestive spotted pelt, and burrowing animals, who made their lair in the womb of Mother Earth, like the prolific hare or the phallic serpent, the latter being a reptile with herbalist significance since it was supposed to amass the toxins for its poisonous bite from the plants it lived among. It was claimed that the maenads conducted this hunt without implements, like true primitives, and that like Mother Nature, what they found were their babies. When they caught their prey, they tore it to pieces with their bare hands and ate it raw, without the benefit of the civilizing culinary arts. Again, we are dealing with symbolic events, since it is hard to see how women untrained in hunting could have managed to capture animals barehanded or slaughter their own babies, when apparently the babies were not brought to the revel.

Like the herbalist witches of later times, who were accused of consorting with the devil, the maenads--these respectable ladies from the city--were said to engage in a wiled sexual romp with goatlike men, the ithyphallic satyrs. The brotherhood of satyrs represented the possessing spirit of the primordial Dionysus, since prime among the animal surrogates of the god was the goat. The goat was seen as the natural enemy of the plants tended in the vineyard, and the sacrifice of that animal was the appropriate offering to free Dionysus from his own former identity. The sacrificial meal of goat meat fed the new god and his worshippers in the city upon the demise of his primitive nature, but in the mountain revel, the god reverted to his role of caprine consort of the goddess from the time before he had been remade into a son of Zeus.

This god of the maenadic revel was also sometimes a bull, remembering the symbolism of the goddess as bovine in Minoan religion. The Indo-European entheogen assimilated the taurine persona as well, as in the Vedic tradition, and the maenads beat upon tympani in their mountain rites to waken the bellowing of Amanita as it burst suddenly into fruit with the thunderous sound of an earthquake.

Although the cultivated gardens were dormant in this winter season, the mountains would bloom with the wild flowers that were the god's bulbous surrogates. The Dionysus of the vine had departed, acquiescing to his own demise at the time of the harvest, which was a sacrifice of himself offered for human salvation. The ritual slaughter of the grape had been accomplished like a funeral, accompanied by the lamenting music of flutes; and the harvesters, disguised as satyrs, had sought to blame the murder upon the resurgent atavistic powers that were about to seize control of the world upon the death of the civilized god. The masked harvesters had trod upon the grapes and pressed the bloodlike juice, channeling it into subterranean vats, where it would be entombed, like the god's corpse, and left to molder. As his body lay fermenting through the winter months, the whole world would enter upon its regressive phase. Even the ivy would leave off its trailing, prostrate manner of summertime growth and begin to exert its regained supremacy, growing upright now in sinister mimicry of its usurped hybrid. The version of Dionysus that now took over was his primordial role as the goddess's inseminator; the erect phallus alone was this god's sign. It was borne defiantly in rural carnival-like processions, and the irrepressible lusting that it represented defied the accepted norms of civilized urban life.

This was the time when comedies originally were performed. The actors and choral dancers, costumed extravagantly as fantastic metaphors for the ithyphallus that was their prominent emblem, would hold the finger, as it were, up to the leaders of society. They would, in effect, overthrow the city as it was and remake it to the liking of their own baser instincts. Typical of the comic plot, the lower elements of society--or even women--would take control, and all that was sacred, including the Olympian gods, would have to yield. The unrestrained libido ruled the world.

[140] When the fermentation, however, was completed, at the threshold of spring, the wilder spirit of the god's avatars would have, in turn, to give way as the cultivated god triumphed over death and returned from the grave in the guise of a divinely newborn infant, repeating the age-old miracle of the rebirth of the goddess's former consort as her son. This was not the same child as in olden times. This new Dionysus of the Hellenic age was destined eventually to resurrect even his mother and elevate her, like the Assumption later of the Blessed Virgin, to the celestial realm.

Dionysus's triumph opened, as well, the gates of the nether world, like an earlier example of Christ, and with him from the grave returned the spirits of all the dear departed. This moment, when the new wine was first breached, was celebrated as a communal banquet attended by both the living and the dead. Special table manners were in effect for this feast to ensure the proper separation of ghostly corruption and human life. These included chewing buckthorn (Rhamnus) as a laxative to purge the body of its own pollution, and eating and drinking from separate facilities to keep the ghosts at a respectable distance. The myths that traced the etiology of this festival recalled the coming of a new age of humans after the great flood, the redemption from madness caused by female chthonic powers, and the shift from matriliny to patriliny.

The young children of the citizenry were seen as manifestations of the infant god's miracle. At the age of three or four, the children would be indoctrinated into the metaphysical meaning of the wine as they drank it for their first experience of inebriation. We see these drunken children depicted on vase paintings as they play among the gravestones or impersonate their elders in performing various Dionysian rituals, such as the pole dance and the sacred marriage.

This symbolic renewal of the world was the context originally for the god's other type of drama, his tragedies, which would be performed at the contests held later in the spring, although the popularity of these festivals was so great that the distinction was soon blurred, so that both comedy and tragedy eventually were produced at each. Tragedy etymologically is the "goat song"; it was sung for the goat who was the sacrificial victim, the honored primitive persona of the god, who had to fall before the ascendancy of his own better self. Typically, the plot of a tragedy presents a hero whose victory would endanger the fundamental stability of the Olympian order, and hence, the hero's failure is of greater value than his personal success. The choice, for example, is between an Oedipus or an Apollo, and the worlds that each represents.

In these festivals of drama, in which all the roles were enacted by men, we see a different kind of madness. Instead of the maenadic derangement of the women in the regressive mountain revel, the male actors channeled the experience of ghostly possession into a form that furthered the evolution of the norms of Hellenic culture.

The goddess Demeter underwent a similar reconciliation of her past botanic identities with her newer Hellenic and Olympian manifestation. As "Mother Deo," which is the meaning of her name, she was recognized by the arriving Indo-Europeans as the mother goddess, with one of her pre-Greek names, and she was assimilated into the Olympian family as a sister and mate of Zeus.

Another of Demeter's names from the Minoan tradition was Persephone. Since the latter, like Deo, is not Indo-European, it has no known etymology, but the Greeks could see in it the false meaning of "deadly." This version of the goddess was assimilated as Zeus's daughter by Demeter, and her myth depicts how, unlike her mother, she was denied Olympian status and relegated to the chthonic realm as a goddess of death and resurgent life from the nether house of her consort Hades.

Many were the plants sacred to the Demeter-Persephone duo: opiates, like the poppy, for which the wild rose later became a symbolic surrogate, by virtue of its similar flower and capsulelike hips, as did also the pomegranate, which it resembles; and deranging [141] herbs, like Datura and henbane (Hyocyamus niger), which was named in Greek for her sacred animal, the sow, a carnivorous beast that responds to the male scent of humans. By the classical age, henbane had become an abused drug by the younger generation.

As an Olympian, the goddess and her daughter were symbolized by the cultivated staff of barley. This was Demeter's antithesis to the wine of Dionysus. Hers was the dry stuff with which she nourished humankind, but like the vine, barley, too, had its atavistic precedent. This was seen as the wild and inedible weedy grass, Lolium temulentum, called "drunken lolium" in Latin botanic nomenclature because of the poisonous fungus (Claviceps purpurea) with which it is commonly infested. This fungus or ergot was called "rust" in Greek, as in English, because its reddening corruption overtakes the host kernels of grain in much the same way that the oxide of iron destroys the serviceable metal and seems to pull it back to the useless ore from which it had been manufactured. This same corruption seemed to spread from the weed to the cultivated grains, making them inedible like their ancestor. Barley, it was thought, would actually revert to lolium if it were not correctly tended to reinforce its evolutionary hybridization.

As with Dionysus, the fungus again was the ideal mediator. Grain, too, ferments, and the apparent putrefaction yields the leavening for the cooked loaf. The same triumph over atavism was seen in the transmutation of offal and dead matter into the renewed fertility of the plowland, a miracle that was commemorated by the ritual slaughter of the sow, whose decomposed remains were spread upon the fields as manure. As the Indo-European migrants traveled through the grain-growing lands to the north and east on their way toward Greece, they apparently found an early surrogate for their sacred plant in the chemical properties of Claviceps, the color of which perpetuated the sanctity of the original entheogen, and from which, by simple water solution, a form of LSD (lysergic acid di-ethylamide) can be easily separated from the other poisonous alkaloids of the ergot.

In the celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which derive from Minoan precedents but which, like the other great religions of the Hellenic age, reconcile the two traditions of chthonic and celestial shamanism, ergot was employed in a drink that induced a mystical vision. The worshippers gathered at a place sacred to the goddess, beside the entrance to a subterranean tunnel considered to be one of the gateways to the nether world. There, at the village of Eleusis, near Athens, in the cavernous great Hall of Initiation, the initiates drank the potion and experienced a spiritual journey together through that passageway into the chthonic other world and then returned resurrected with the goddess, who had borne a matrilineal son during her underworld sojourn. Because of this communal rebirth, the worshippers came to feel that death, as Paul was later to preach of the Christian mystery, had lost its sting. Instead of some demonic horror, they saw that the Lord of Death, who was Persephone's son, was bound to them by ties of friendship and reciprocal hospitality in his and their own homesteads.

The initiates were sworn to secrecy under pain of death, but the myth that told of the founding of the religion was profane knowledge, including the part that listed the ingredients for the sacred potion. According to the myth, Persephone had been picking wild flowers on the frontier of this world, as queen among a maiden sisterhood, when she happened upon a particular plant, the narkissos. The plant's name, as we should expect, is pre-Greek, and hence its etymology is unknown, but the word was assimilated into Greek and its properties as a drug are responsible for its meaning as a "narcotic." This Minoan entheogen induced the spiritual possession that abducted Persephone to the nether world as a maenadic mate of Hades. At Eleusis, this abduction without the mother's consent was rectified by the elevation of the lost maiden to the rank of wedded wife and mother. This evolution from illicitly abducted maiden to legitimate wife culminated in the institution of the civilizing rites of agriculture. It is Persephone's mysterious son, under the name of Triptolemus, who teaches humankind the art of tending barley.

[142] The Eleusinian potion was a symbolic drink, like wine, tracing the transition from primitivism to culture and mediating the Indo-European and Minoan religious traditions. The identity of three ingredients was not restricted knowledge. These were pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium), water, and barley--none of which could have been chemically responsible for the mystery experience. The water is obviously the inert medium that binds the two plants, which represent the polarity that is reconciled through the vision provided by the mystery.

Pennyroyal is a pungent aromatic mint, a wild plant that in Greek botanical lore is reputed to be an aphrodisiac; the plant's fragrance, like perfume, had connotations for the Greeks of lascivious illicit sexuality rather than of matrimonial duty and fidelity. Pennyroyal is emblematic of Persephone's abduction and the ensuing wrath of her deserted mother Demeter, who could neither accept that her daughter be a concubine nor countenance losing her to a male's control.

Barley represents the antithesis. It is the cultivated plant, symbolic of Demeter's acceptance of the periodic separation from her daughter, just as the seed is entrusted to earth only as a temporary prelude to the renewal of life and the return of Persephone with her son. Demeter becomes reconciled to her own role in the celestial realm as an Olympian, while her former self, in the persona of her daughter Persephone, resides in the chthonic realm, bound to her by family ties and cyclical visitation.

The secret ingredient of the potion--the one that made it serviceable as an abused substance--was ergot. It mediates between the polarities of wild and cultivated and of the Minoan and Indo-European traditions of shamanism. Amanita has no seed and defies attempts to control its unpredictable growth, but the ergot that spreads from lolium to the kernels of barley, threatening to pull the cultivated foodstuff back into primitivism, produces what appears to be an enlarged purplish seed, as the fungal mycelia permeate its host. Under appropriate conditions, the ergot-infested kernel falls to earth and enters its fruiting stage, with mushroom bodies recognizable to the naked eye. Claviceps itself is poisonous, but through the intervention of civilizing technique, the entheogenic component is separated into the solution of the potion. Nor can we doubt the association of ergot with the goddess, since "Rust" was one of Demeter's names.

There were two levels to the mystery, hence the plural Eleusinian Mysteries. The Lesser Mystery took place in the maenadic winter and involved the tradition of Persephone's abduction. It ritualized the hunt for Amanita or its surrogates. Part of this ceremony was the Sacred Marriage, when the woman who portrayed the role of the Queen, from the old days when Athens was a queendom, performed some secret rite in which she was possessed spiritually by Dionysus in some "taurine" form.

The Greater Mystery occurred in the fall and was experienced by the whole body of the initiates. Instead of the narcosis of the past Minoan tradition of the narkissos, a brilliant light of visionary illumination is described as the experience in the darkened Hall of Initiation on the Mystery night, as LSD supplanted sleep with the enlightened sight it induced in the wakeful worshippers huddled within. Although still a chthonic religion of the two goddesses, the Indo-European tradition had accommodated it to its own celestial orientation.

The Eleusinian Mystery was the most prominent initiatory religion in the classical world, but there were others that struck a different balance between the claims of earth and heaven. Some were more chthonic; others, more celestial. In the mysteries of the Kabeiroi, for example, the sacred drink enrolled the initiates into a nether world brotherhood of primordial men. In contrast, the Orphics overemphasized the Indo-European aspiration to liberate the soul from its symbiotic dependence upon the body. Their supposed founder Orpheus inadvertently abandoned his Persephone-like bride permanently in the underworld, and taught his tribesmen to shun all sexual contact with women. His [143] followers sought to purify their bodies to attain eventually a totally spiritual existence through inhaling special herbal fumigations, like Olympians themselves, and through vegetarianism and dietary prohibitions.

Ruck, C. A. P. 1976. On the sacred names of Iamos and Ion: Ethnobotanical referents in the hero's parentage. Classical Journal 71(3): 235-52.

Rouner, L. S., ed. 1984. The wild and the cultivated in Greek religion. In On Nature. University of Notre Dame. 79-95.

Toporov, N. V. 1985. On the semiotics of mythological conceptions about mushrooms. Semiotica 53/54. Trans, from Russian by S. Rudy.

Wasson, R. G. 1968. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Wasson, R. G., A. Hofmann, and C. A. P. Ruck. 1978. The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. With a new translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter by D. Staples. New York: Harcourt Brace lovanovich.

Wasson, R. G., S. Kramrisch, J. Ott, and C. A. P. Ruck. 1986. Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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