Inner Alchemy
⛩
Home
🔎
Search
🗂
Sequences
📡
Influence
📰
Articles
📚
Books
🎬
Videos
📝
Notes
👁
Dreams
📋
Glossary
📚
Friends & Mentors
📍
Playgrounds
The Road to Eleusis
1978
Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries
This groundbreaking work bridges modern chemistry and ancient spirituality. The authors — an ethnomycologist, a chemist, and a classicist — propose that the sacred drink used for over two millennia in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the “Kykeon,” contained a psychoactive compound derived from ergot, the same fungus from which Albert Hofmann later synthesized LSD-25. By aligning historical research, chemical analysis, and mythological interpretation, they suggest that the Mysteries of Eleusis were not symbolic rituals, but direct initiations into divine consciousness.
Lineage Connection
This book reopens the ancient current of Eleusis — the initiatory thread linking human consciousness to the sacred through the alchemy of nature. For me, it confirms that the mystical experience is not a metaphor, but a technology of remembrance. The same intelligence that guided the Eleusinian initiates through the Kykeon reappears in Hofmann’s laboratory. “The Road to Eleusis” marks the reactivation of this lineage in our time.
Author’s Roles / Archetypes
Albert Hofmann — Chemist, discoverer of LSD, scientific mysticR. Gordon Wasson — Ethnomycologist, explorer of sacred mushroomsCarl A.P. Ruck — Classicist, interpreter of myth and ritual
Primary Sources / References
Wasson, R.G., Hofmann, A., Ruck, C.A.P. The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Harcourt, 1978.Plato, Phaedrus, and The Republic (references to Eleusinian rites).Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (contextual reference).
Quotes / Notes
“The experiences of the Eleusinian initiates and those of modern LSD subjects are strikingly similar in their reports of dissolution of individuality and union with the divine.” — Albert Hofmann