Eleusis is lovely, but it was far from the only sacred meal, drink, or banquet in antiquity.
Same thing has happened to the theory of ergot at Eleusis and psychedelics in ancient Greece. Many have acted as though talking about psychedelics in early Christianity means talking about Allegro’s theory, as if that were the only theory. It has been common to treat Allegro as the definitive case for psychedelics in early Christianity. There’s a similarity to the role Allegro the token has played in holding back discussion of psychedelics in early Christianity. As if discussing Eleusis means you have covered the topic adequately. Eleusis and the theory of ergot put forward in The Road to Eleusis would be mentioned, positively or negatively, and that’s it, as if that were the entire scope of the question of psychedelics in pre-modern Western history.
Once I suspected this trend, I started to see it more and more in popular discourse: conference presentations articles at pop psychedelics websites conversation with friends both in and out of academia. I started identifying an “over-focus on Eleusis” as a vague trend in popular discourse about psychedelics when I started paying closer attention to that popular discourse a few years ago.īy “over-focus on Eleusis” I mean that when people who are not in the field of researching psychedelics in history talk about psychedelics in history, they usually mention Eleusis in Mediterreanean antiquity and stop there, to the exclusion of all the other possible examples for Western pre-modernity.
0 kommentar(er)
