The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries
“[Gordon Wasson has] made the specialty of mycology something of universal importance and one of the pillars of anthropology and the history of religions.”—Octavio Paz, Nobel Prize-winning poet and author “The Road to Eleusisgrew out of a three-way collaboration of scholar-scientists sparked by R. Gordon Wasson’s insight into the true nature of an ancient religious ritual, the Eleusinian Mysteries. In collaboration with the world-renowned chemist, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck, a Classical scholar specializing in the ethnobotany of ancient Greece, they give solid foundation to what Wasson deduced as the essence of the Mysteries. The three authors present their findings and their evidence, drawing the specialties of their three fields together in fascinatingly persuasive form. “The content of those Mysteries is, together with the identity of India’s sacred soma plant, one of the two best kept secrets in history, and this book is the most successful attempt I know to unlock it. Triangulating the resources of an eminent Classics scholar, the most creative mycologist of our time, and the discoverer of LSD, [The Road to Eleusis] is a historicaltour de forcewhile being more than that. For by direct implication it raises contemporary questions which our cultural establishment has thus far deemed too hot to face.”—Huston Smith, author ofThe World’s Religions “The book’s themes of the universality of experiential religion, the suppression of that knowledge by exploitative forces, and the use of psychedelics to reconcile the human and natural worlds make it a fascinating and timely read.”—Gaia Media