The Ergot Hypothesis of the Eleusinian Kykeon

The Mysteries at Eleusis ran for something close to two thousand years and produced, on the testimony of people who went, an experience they described as overwhelming and would not describe further. The oath held. What the initiates drank was a barley preparation called the kykeon, and nothing surviving says what was in it beyond barley, water and mint.

In 1978 a mycologist, a chemist and a classicist put the same proposal from three directions at once. Wasson had spent a career on the ritual use of fungi; Hofmann had synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide from an ergot alkaloid and knew what the ergot of rye and of wild grasses contains; Ruck read the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the iconography of the sanctuary. Their case was that ergot on the grain of the Rarian plain beside Eleusis would give a reliable and repeatable effect, that a water extraction would leave the soluble alkaloids behind and the ergotamine and ergotoxine out, and that the rite's own imagery of grain is not decorative.

The weakness is the shape of the argument rather than any single step in it. It begins from the effect and looks for a cause equal to it, which is not the same as finding evidence of the cause. No ancient writer describes the kykeon as intoxicating. The preparation the chemistry needs is delicate and nothing records it. And the one class of evidence that would settle it, residue from a vessel securely associated with the rite, has never been analysed. The proposal has therefore neither been confirmed nor put down; it has been repeated, extended and disputed for close to fifty years, which is why the fact it supports is carried here as unknown rather than as debated.