Mushroom Sacraments in the Cults of Early Europe

Abstract

In 1957, R. Gordon Wasson, a professional banker and amateur mycologist, inadvertently launched a profound \ncultural change that has come to be called the Psychedelic Revolution, by publishing an account of his experience \nwith a Mazatec shaman in Hautla de Jiménez in the mountains of central Mexico. The article appeared in Life \nmagazine and was intended as publicity for his forthcoming Russia, Mushrooms, and History, in which he and his \nRussian-born wife Valentina Pavlovna pursued their lifelong fascination with their dichotomous attitudes toward \nfungi, which had led them to suspect a cultural taboo upon a sacred object. In 1968 he traced this taboo back to \nthe Vedic Soma, which he identified as a psychoactive mushroom. The identification, if correct, implied that there \nshould be evidence for a similar sacred role for the mushroom in other regions in antiquity where the migrating \nIndo-European people settled. In 1978, he proposed such a role for the visionary potion that was central to the \nmystical experience of the Greek Eleusinian Mystery, that was celebrated annually for two millennia at a sanctuary \nnear Athens. The possibility that the ancient Greeks indulged in chemically altered consciousness is antithetical to \nEurope’s idealization of Classical antiquity and the proposal was largely ignored. Mushrooms, however, were \nfundamental to social norms and religious observances in the celebration of Dionysus, and figured in other Mystery \ncults and in the foundational traditions of many cities, including Mycenae and Rome. The Soma sacrament as the \nPersian haoma was proselytized to the West by the Zoroastrian priests of Mithras and became a major cohesive \nindoctrination for the Emperors, army, and bureaucrats who administered the Roman Empire. It survived the \nConversion to Christianity in the knighthoods of late antiquity and the medieval world, and was assimilated to the \nEucharist of certain of the ecclesiastical elite.

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