Myth-busting psychedelics in ancient Greece: 5 Questions for religious studies professors Sharday Mosurinjohn and Richard Ascough
The professors discuss the scant evidence for the idea that the Eleusinian Mysteries used psychedelics, and why it persists anyway.
Recently, the Mississippi House and Senate’s public health committees held a hearing to discuss the therapeutic potential of ibogaine, a psychoactive substance that occurs naturally in plants including the iboga bush. Among the hearing’s speakers was the co-founder of an ibogaine retreat center in Mexico, who gave a brief overview of the history and use of the substance. Psychedelics, he said, now carry stigma, but many cultures have a history of using them in pro-social ways. Greek culture, he explained, had something called the mysteries of Eleusis. “A 2000 year old tradition, it was considered the most important aspect of Greek culture, and we now know there was a potion included in the mysteries of Eleusis that was called the Kikeon, and it contained an LSD type substance in it,” he said. “So much of our western culture, our democracy, our education system, grew out of the genius in Greek culture. I don’t think the Greeks ever intended that psychedelic experience to be separated from the rigid structures that they were building.”
That the Eleusinian Mysteries — a secret religious rite performed yearly — involved psychedelic substances is not a new idea. The claim was made in a 1978 book written by classics scholar Carl Ruck, chemist Albert Hofmann (best known for discovering LSD), and R. Gordon Wasson, the ethnomycologist who published an account of his psilocybin experience in Oaxaca in Life magazine.In recent years, it’s achieved greater popularity as people such as Brian Muraresku, author of the 2020 book The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name, and podcast host Joe Rogan have repeated the assertion. But in a recent paper published in Psychedelic Medicine, Queens University religious studies scholars Sharday Mosurinjohn and Richard Ascough write that there is currently little to no evidence that the Eleusinian Mysteries included psychedelics, and that repeating that idea without adequate evidence obscures the actual contributions of other cultures to psychedelic culture. The Microdose spoke with the two professors about the scant evidence for this myth, and why it persists anyway.
What led you all to write this paper? Was there a breaking point — like, we need to clarify this once and for all?
Richard Ascough: Psychedelics really isn’t my research area — I study the ancient world — but Sharday and I have collaborated on other publications. She was at a conference and texted me, “Why didn’t you ever tell me that they use psychedelics at Eleusis?”
Sharday Mosurinjohn: Wait! I didn’t say, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, “Is this true?” As far as I knew, it wasn’t, but everyone was saying it was! Before I came up for tenure, I pivoted my research program towards psychedelics, and ended up going to lots of psychedelics conferences during my sabbatical year. I went to Psychedelic Science 2023, and got really involved with the Kingston and Toronto psychedelic communities, and talked with people in Montreal and Vancouver, too. People would say, “Oh, you’re a religious studies scholar - did you know that the Mysteries of Eleusis were psychedelics, and that, actually, the origins of western religion were psychedelics?” And when I was at this conference, I was like, “Richard, it’s happening again! Why is this myth everywhere, and apparently reality-proof?!”
You’ve already given us some sense of this, but what do scholars make of these claims? Do they take them seriously?
Richard Ascough: Well, one of the critiques is that perhaps classists don’t take it seriously because we’re afraid of it. The narrative is we’re afraid of it because it’s so radical. And my response is, no, it has been considered, and it’s so wrong that we don’t need to keep repeating it! I work on the Mystery religions, but psychedelics never show up in the academic literature about them. [Reporter’s note: Mystery religions are secret religious groups or cults from Greco-Roman times.] It’s very rare and if it comes up at all, it’s something like, “There is this fringe element that talks about psychedelics but they have no evidence.”
And yet, at these psychedelics conferences, it keeps coming up again and again. There’s a disconnect between what has been said by biblical scholars and classists, and what’s being promoted within the psychedelics community. That forced us, then, to dig deeper: Where does this disconnect come from? Why is there this disjuncture?
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What do you think created this disjuncture? What narrative does this story support and why is it appealing to some people?
Sharday Mosurinjohn: As we were developing our explanations for what's going on here, we observed how people reacted when the myth was challenged, and noticed people would often get emotional or upset about it. For example, the article itself was actually roadblocked for years: we would submit it, and it would get rejected, with comments from reviewers like, “How dare you question Carl Ruck — what are you, some kind of anti-drug prude? You just hate psychedelics!” And this was even when our drafts explicitly said we consider ourselves as part of this community. We are not anti-psychedelics; we just want historical accuracy.
One of the other things going on here is maintaining the idea that psychedelics have some type of Western pedigree. There’s this idea that it's gotta be Greco-Roman for it to be “serious,” since that’s the foundation of our literature and our culture — you can be like, “Look, Mom and Dad, actually this is serious, it’s dignified — this thing that’s been stigmatized was actually the peak of spiritual religious experience.”
In your paper, you broke down the arguments made in R. Gordon Wasson’s 1978 book The Road to Eleusis and the factors that have supported the propagation of this myth. What did you find?
Richard Ascough: It’s been interesting to take a close read of The Road to Eleusis and the arguments in it. We also mention in the paper that the arguments themselves are built on flimsy premises. On one page, an author might assert, “It might be the case that…” but then two pages later, that has somehow become this foundational truth that is the basis of arguing that, “now that we know this, it might also be the case that…”
Sharday Mosurinjohn: If you think about what it would take — assuming people were actually reading The Road of Eleusis — to hold in your mind the series of arguments made over hundreds of pages and make note of all the things you’d need to check, and realize that the weight of its conclusions are resting on all these flimsy pieces — that's a really heavy cognitive load. And most people are not even reading the book, they are getting information through people like Joe Rogan, where the quality of the information depends completely on the integrity of the person. There’s this kind of “sleight of hand” thing where people can cite research to back up their argument, but also dismiss it as untrustable when it’s convenient by using the argument that the academy is biased against drugs.
Richard Ascough: That builds on itself through citations too. That book and its claims often get cited by other people, who then are cited in other papers, who are then cited also — so you get to this moment where someone writes something like, “Fifty studies demonstrate this!” But if you follow the thread all the way back, it really just points to that one thing.
As you all argue in your paper, the current evidence for the Eleusinian Mysteries involving psychedelics is scant — and given that this all took place thousands of years ago, definitive evidence either way will be difficult to come by. Why does this myth from so long ago matter, and why is it potentially harmful?
Richard Ascough: Everybody's always liked a good conspiracy theory, right? They've been around for years. I teach apocalyptic literature and that's all conspiracy theories. But now, these myths get propagated so much more quickly. And flimsy arguments, or cherry picking evidence, or ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with you are all not new but it seems to have gotten much more prominent. In the article, we write that we are for psychedelics! If you want to have legalization of some of these processes for therapeutic purposes, you need the science on your side, but you also need the history on your side. If it's going to move through the FDA and through the courts, they're going to look at both, and if you get a part of it wrong, they could kick it out.
And with Eleusis in particular, I think this kind of myth has the potential to send people down the wrong path. I’ve seen papers arguing about how ancient people could have synthesized psychedelics, how much there was — they’re all questions predicated on an assumption that they actually did use psychedelics. They forget to go back and ask, is there another explanation? It’s like we’re having a debate about which way the ball bounced, but there is no ball.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
