The Holy Grail (Part 3)
The Renaissance & The Sixties
TL:DR This mini-essay is the last in a three-part series about the bizarre continuity between paganism, Christianity, and the drug culture of the 1960s. The first mini-essay traces the origins of magical cups, which contained psychoactive potions in the centuries before the life of Christ. The second mini-essay follows the evolution of magic cup religions from the arrival of Dionysus at Eleusis to the transformation of Dionysus into Jesus. This final part is about the revival of Greek culture during the Renaissance, and the rediscovery of psychoactive plants during the 20th Century.
After Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, the church in Rome wanted a monopoly on access to God. Spiritual competition from Eleusis or from Dionysus was unacceptable; people finding God through psychedelic plant use was a threat to the monopoly. Going forward, the church would derive its power by being the sole source of magic in the world. So they shook the Etch-A-Sketch and wiped away the pagan past in an orgy of book burning and violence. The Library of Alexandria was razed in one of history’s greatest tragedies. The destruction of Demeter’s sanctuary at Eleusis was carried out by Alaric the Visigoth. This delightful man, ironically, would later go on to sack Rome itself. After the Fall of Rome, Christendom sailed into the Middle Ages like an amnesiac, unaware of its own pagan past.
In AD 392, the same year Emperor Theodosius outlawed the Mysteries, Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria led a rabid mob into “the most beautiful building in the world” and razed it to the ground. It’s unclear if Theophilus (Greek for “beloved of God”) and the Christians he urged on were really after the glimmering statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, or the vast library collection that was cached in his temple precinct. Either way, Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World—which framed this investigation in the first chapter—lends exquisite detail to the annihilation of the “world’s first public library” and its “hundreds of thousands of volumes.” For Aeschylus, who was once prosecuted for revealing the Eleusinian secrets, it’s seven out of ninety-nine.
-Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020
The church had everything their own way for a millennia, until the Renaissance revived classical pagan culture. The bankers of central Italy accumulated enough wealth to challenge the Vatican, who had insisted for centuries that the only relevant literature was Christian literature. Agents of wealthy banking families were dispatched to scour the Mediterranean basin for lost Greek and Roman manuscripts. Their motto was “ad fontes” or “back to the source”. And they reintroduced Christendom to, among other things, the lost works of Plato. Symbols of the old pagan mysteries, like pomegranates or Demeter or Dionysus, were welcomed back into the arts and mingled with Christian themes. But the heroes of the Renaissance never figured out the secret ingredients used in the mystery rites of antiquity.
So the good and the evil, the beautiful and the horrible, mingled in the flux and chaos of the Christian life. The simple folk of Italy remained contentedly medieval, while the middle and upper classes, half drunk with the long-cellared wine of classic culture, moved forward with a noble ardor to create the Renaissance, and modern man.
-Will Durant, The Renaissance, 1953
-Madonna of the Pomegranates by Sandro Bottacelli (photo taken by the author)
-Statue of Demeter from Boboli Gardens in Florence (photo taken by the author)
-Dionysus painted in a grotto at Palazzo Pitti in Florence (photo taken by the author)
Suppression by church managed to keep a lid on the secrets of the classical mystery religions for almost two millennia. But in 1938, Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD from ergot. Then, in 1957, magic mushrooms burst upon the scene after R. Gordon Wasson published an account in Life magazine of his wild trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. Mushrooms and LSD became emblematic of the anti-war counterculture of the 1960s; hippies could vaguely sense the awesome power of these substances, but they failed to harness their power. By 1978, the war in Vietnam ended and the hippie movement faded. That was the year Hoffman and Wasson teamed up with Dr. Carl Ruck to publish The Road to Eleusis, in which they first theorized that psychoactive plants were the secret to the old Greek mystery rites. But real evidence didn’t arrive until the COVID era, with the publication of Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key in 2020. With the passage of the pandemic into history, the time is finally right for the powerful magic of the antiquity to return as a part of a new Renaissance:
Ad fontes. Back to the Source.
-Wasson Hoffman & Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, 1978
-Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020