Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess

Secrets of Eleusis

"Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess" delves deeply into the mythic roots of Western European spirituality. By joining cults, called Mysteries, the ancients were afforded an experience of personal communication with deity, involving secrets of actions and meanings that were hidden. Divulging these secrets was prohibited, under penalty of death.

The Mysteries all involved a sacramental Eucharist - a sacred drink containing psychoactive chemicals derived from a mushroom parasite that grows on the ergot rye.

One of the Mysteries was practiced for two millennia at the village of Eleusis to the west of Athens, called the Eleusinian Mystery. For centuries these secrets have been hidden from public knowledge in the arcane language of alchemy, the occult sciences and secret societies.

At Eleusis, the deities were a duo of females, Demeter and Persephone, interchangeable in their roles as mother and daughter, hence known simply as the religion of the two goddessess, with a third female lurking in the background, the post-menapausal crone, Hecate, patroness of drugs and witchcraft.

The initiation into Eleusian cult restored them to primacy, at least in the religious realm, and taught both males and females how to live in tune with the incomprehensible phenomenon of the continuity of life and death, and the awesome powers of the once dominant Goddess and the forces of Nature. "Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess" explores these rites in enjoyable, easily accessible prose.