lance! What today is resolved into a mere drug, a trypta- 
mine or lysergic acid derivative, was for him a prodigious 
miracle, inspiring in him poetry and philosophy and re- 
ligion. Perhaps with all our modern knowledge we do not 
need the divine mushrooms any more. Or do we need 
them more than ever? Some are shocked that the key even 
to religion might be reduced to a mere drug. On the other 
hand, the drug is as mysterious as it ever was: ‘like the 
wind it cometh we know not whence, nor why.” Out of 
a mere drug comes the ineffable, comes ecstasy. It is not 
the only instance in the history of humankind where the 
lowly has given birth to the divine. Altering a sacred 
text, we would say that this paradox is a hard saying, 
yet one worthy of all men to be believed. 
If our classical scholars were given the opportunity to 
attend the rite at Eleusis, to talk with the priestess, what 
would they not exchange for that chance? They would 
approach the precincts, enter the hallowed chamber, 
with the reverence born of the texts venerated by scholars 
for millenia. How propitious would their frame of mind 
be, if they were invited to partake of the potion! Well, 
those rites take place now, unbeknownst to the classical 
scholars, in scattered dwellings, humble, thatched, with- 
out windows, far from the beaten track, high in the 
mountains of Mexico, in the stillness of the night, broken 
only by the distant barking of a dog or the braying of an 
ass. Or, since we are in the rainy season, perhaps the 
Mystery is accompanied by torrential rains and punctu- 
ated by terrifying thunderbolts. Then, indeed, as you 
lie there bemushroomed, listening to the music and see- 
ing the visions, you know a soul shattering experience, 
recalling as you do the belief of some primitive peoples 
that mushrooms, the sacred mushrooms, are divinely 
engendered by Jupiter Fulminans, the God of the 
Lightning-bolt, in the Soft Mother Earth. 
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