Mysteries of Eleusis
"Lately it's occurred to me, what a long, strange trip it's been...." -- "Truckin'" Grateful Dead
For thousands of years Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures practiced so called "mystery religions" -- ritual celebrations whose details were clouded in secrecy. These both pre-date the Mycenaeans and continued into Roman pagan practices until banned by Christianity.
The most famous and relevant of these are the Mysteries of Eleusis and Mysteries of Dionysus (which we'll briefly cover when discussing Greek tragedy).
By definition we know little of these "elusive" mystery religions, but it is clear that both involved intoxication and trance-states often aided, we now assume, by psychedelics, especially ergot.
The Mysteries of Eleusis
As told in the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter this annual ritual celebrated the fertility goddess
Ceres/Demeter's journey to the underworld to rescue her daughter, Persephone
from Hades. Ceres' journey takes her through the city of Eleusis. Ceres annual
return to the underworld signals the annual death of life on earth and her
return the annual resurrection or rebirth of all living things.
So, too, Odysseus (and Gilgamesh etc.) must descend in order to be reborn or resurrected or, simply, healed from the trauma of death.
In the Odyssey, the "goddess pharmakaeia" and daughter of the sun Circe guides Odysseus to the underworld, much as Siduri did in The Epic of Gilgamesh, thousands of years earlier. Homer explicitly describes Circe's power as rooted in the "powerful drugs" she uses to control men, and Hermes helps Odysseus ward off these drugs with an antidote root. Siduri is also the daughter of the sun, and is similarly referred to as a "barmaid".
To enter the underworld Circe directs Odysseus to ritually prepare a concoction of kykeon or "milk and honey, and then mellow with wine, then water thrid and last, and sprinkled with barley" (Book XI).
Wine of course will come to signify the blood of Christ, in relation to his own resurrection from the underworld, but it's the barley that most interests us, for barley can be contaminated with ergot, a poisonous fungus that can also serve as either a medicine or psychedelic.
In other words, Circe seemingly intiates Odysseus into some form of Eluesian psychedelic-influenced ritual as a means of entering an altered state of mind. This state allows Odysseus to commune with those he has loved and lost, his friends, family and great Greek thinkers, and to "experience" death in a deeply therapeutic spiritual form.
Psychedelics and Modern Psychiatry
As strange as it may sound, before it became the chosen drug for
"tuning in, turning on, and dropping out," LSD was first used to treat
psychiatric disorders, and in recent years it, and other psychedelics, have been
used to treat serious psychiatric disorders and issues ranging from smoking
addictions to, most relevantly, confronting and making peace with one's death
due to terminal illness and PTSD.
These experiments are covered in a couple notable new books, which you may want to explore for extra credit (see below). However, proceed with caution -- what we learn from both ancient and modern discussion of these powerful psychedelics is that they must be treated with caution and respect and if mishandled they can take you to a deep, dark, very dark, place.
NPR: How A Psychedelic Drug Helps Cancer Patients Overcome Anxiety
NPR: How LSD Makes Your Brain One with The Universe
NPR: 42 minute interview with Michael Polan on his new book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence,