by Gary Borjesson
In my essay, On the Eleusinian Mysteries, I described the origin story of the Mysteries and what we know about the rites of initiation, which lasted as long as nine days. Here I will focus on the role of the psychedelic kykeon, and how this contributed to the flowering of philosophy, science, and art in ancient Greece and Rome.
1. The heart of the mysteries
At the heart of the Mysteries was an initiatory experience, not a teaching. In other words, you couldn’t gain what the mysteries had to offer by hearing about it from someone who had been initiated, even if they would tell you—which they wouldn’t because the punishment for speaking about details was death. The experience was life-changing. Cicero, an initiate, wrote that “by their means we have been brought out of our barbarous and savage mode of life….and have gained the power not only to live happily, but to die with a better hope.”
The key experience that the Mysteries facilitated is boundary dissolution. The teaser with which I ended the first essay points to this: the experience of the Mysteries was open to everyone, regardless of the conventional identities that bound them—man or woman, slave or free, citizen or foreign worker. Even if you tried to hold on to your identity, say, as a high-born Athenian statesman, the rites of initiation promised to dissolve this limited view of yourself. Moreover, it’s not just social identities that are loosened, it’s the boundary between the living and the dead, and between the human and the divine.
As the origin story suggests, boundary crossings are at the heart of the Mysteries. In that story Hades crosses the boundary from the Underworld, abducting Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, and carrying her back to the Underworld. Demeter’s scorched-earth grief leads Hades to release Persephone, who then crosses back from the dead to the living. Her journey is memorialized each year, for Persephone’s return to the land of the living brings spring and its promise of rebirth. Read more »
The recent show 
Mother’s friend departed after their weekly get-together for tea, cakes and gossip, but she forgot to take her book. It was a slim hardback with the blue and yellow banded cover of a subscription book club. It lay on the arm of the sofa for ten minutes and then, before anybody noticed, it vanished – relocated to my bedroom. I was fifteen, and this would be the first adult novel I had ever read. Its title was Under the Net by Iris Murdoch. Iris was my “first” – first adult novelist and first woman writer, and she has remained fixed in my affections over the decades. Under the Net was also Murdoch’s first novel, published in 1954. I was so naively charmed that I made a precocious promise to myself to reread it fifteen years later to see if its appeal lasted. I already knew that in the coming years I would not be rereading my previous favourites, my childhood book collections of Just William, Biggles, Billy Bunter and John Carter’s adventures on Mars. Unlike them, Under the Net had mysteries and ideas I did not yet fathom, but would need to discover.
