"Corona"

Sometimes a book can really change you. Or solidify your worldview.

The 1978 book "The Road to Eleusis, Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries," by Carl A.P. Ruck, R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, is one of those books for me. 

I have always identified personally with the myth of Demeter and Persephone, as many other modern women I'm sure still do. In one of the finest examples of the story, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, is included within The Road to Eleusis, emphasizing the death of ideas and rebirth of new ones that happens as you digest the essence of the book:  Western tradition included the use of psychedelic medicinal plants. Western culture, philosophy, religion, had at their core transformative experience through entheogenic plants and knowledge through non-ordinary states. 

For me personally, this book and the ongoing dialogue it has created and the other books that have followed have allowed for a rewriting of what we have been sold as the "Apollonian" ideal.

This line of inquiry allows for the "Dionysian" to regain its once central role in forming the consciousness and conscience, of Western thought. The return of Eleusis to our minds and also gives us permission to admit that in that historical period, and for centuries, women were the backbone of what our cultural memory loss has only remembered in the anecdotes of great men, but instead was an institution that lasted for two thousand years. This ritual transformation of rebirth through a cthonic realm of the feminine had the effect, for many, of the loss of fear of death.

My interest in this body of knowledge comes at a time referred to as the Psychedelic Renaissance, when the researchers and doctors have become suddenly very accepting of the subcultures' entheogens, for the purpose of medicalization as a treatment of society's ills. Contradictions abound in the ensuing conversation of how do we do this, how do we unbreak what we have broken? Does having a near-religious experience invoked by a drug with ancient receptors in our brains help us? Looks that way.

How can scientifically trained doctors ethically walk patients into spiritual realms, without a road map? 

How can the Sacred survive the modern world where violence, inequality and environmental degradation thrive?  Can monetizing our consciousness possibly lead to equity?

The Road is a long journey and the questions are painful but It is important because "entheogens are autochthonous with Western society, but have become forbidden by authoritarian sociopolitical forces that began in antiquity and continue forcefully to this day".1

1. The Road to Eleusis, foreward by Huston Smith, pg. 6, pp. 2.