ranean basin. At the heart of the Mystery of Eleusis lay 
asecret. In the surviving texts there are numerous refer- 
ences to the secret, but in none is it revealed. Yet Mys- 
teries such as this one at Kleusis played a major role in 
Greek civilization, and thousands must have possessed 
the key. From the writings of the Greeks, from a fresco 
in Pompeii, we know that the initiate drank a potion. 
Then, in the depths of the night, he beheld a great vision, 
and the next day he was still so awestruck that he felt he 
would never be the same man as before. What the initi- 
ate experienced was ‘new, astonishing, inaccessible to 
rational cognition.’ * One writer in the 2nd century 
A.D., by name Aristides, pulled the curtain aside for 
an instant, with this fragmentary description of the Eleu- 
sinian Mystery: 
Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth, and of all the di- 
vine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome and 
the most luminous. At what place in the world have more miraculous 
tidings been sung, where have the dromena called forth greater emo- 
tion, where has there been greater rivalry between seeing and hearing? 
And then he went on to speak of the ‘ineffable visions’ 
that it had been the privilege of many generations of 
fortunate men and women to behold. 
Just dwell for a moment on that description. How 
striking that the Mystery of antiquity and our mushroom 
rite in Mexico are accompanied in the two societies by 
veils of reticence that, so far as we can tell, match each 
other point for point! Our ancient writers’ words are as 
applicable to contemporary Mexico as they were to clas- 
sic Greece! May it not be significant that the Greeks were 
wont to refer to mushrooms as ‘the food of the gods,’ 
broma theon, and that Porphyrius is quoted as having 
* For this and the following quotations see Walter F. Otto: The 
Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries, published in The Mysteries, 
1955, ed. by Joseph Campbell, Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series 
XXX, 2; pp. 20 et seq. Italics are mine. 
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