Initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries participated in the most famous secret religious rites of ancient Greece by drinking a barley beverage called kykeon that was likely contaminated with psychoactive ergot.

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Initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries participated in the most famous secret religious rites of ancient Greece by drinking a barley beverage called kykeon that was likely contaminated with psychoactive ergot. For nearly two millennia, prominent figures from Plato to Cicero traveled to the cult's headquarters near Athens to undergo an overnight initiation in a dark hall where they experienced profound, life-altering visions of the goddess Demeter. The penalty for revealing the specifics of this mystical revelation was death, which effectively kept the ancient world's worst-kept secret under wraps. Historians love to romanticize the profound spiritual enlightenment of classical philosophers, but the reality is that the foundation of Western thought was largely established by a bunch of dudes tripping absolute balls on toxic fungus while staring at a priest holding a stalk of wheat. It makes your college roommate's transformative ayahuasca trip sound significantly less original