Most probably derived from the Middle Dutch term droge vate (“dry vat”), the plants and substances employed were eventually called “drogues” in Middle English because they were usually dry when found in the apothecaries, which were also shops for poisons. The word was applied to narcotics and opiates toward the end of the nineteenth century. This has given “drug” an unfortunate pejorative connotation that dominant religious groups often use to describe substances used by other spiritual communities. Similarly pejorative is the reference to entheogenic experience as “hallucinatory,” which once meant “dreamlike wandering,” but it has come to imply delusion and disconnection from reality rather than a heightened access to it.
Fossils show that approximately 1.5 million years ago, a sudden and scientifically baffling development in the proto-human neocortex emerged. It has been speculated that the explosion in brain size, the prerequisite for the evolution of modern humans, occurred when our hominid ancestors began to intentionally and regularly consume consciousness-altering foods. Such an important adaptive aid would have been well suited to our “trickster” disposition for creative thinking. Thus, in keeping with the myths of old, we suggest that perhaps our species did indeed first become truly human when we first ate of those sacred Eucharistic foods—initially by individuals, and then ritualistically in groups, in what can be seen as First Suppers.
Early humanity has left compelling testimonies of its entheogenic traditions in the archaeological record. In the Shanidar cave in Iraq, there is evidence that approximately 60,000 years ago Neanderthal culture had specialized knowledge of medicinal plants and incorporated them in the burial of an apparent shaman leader.
Today shamanism is recognized as the primal and universal belief system reaching back to deepest antiquity, a practice that survives intact in many cultures around the world. Its influence on the historical emergence of Western civilization, however, has been all but ignored. Historians of Europe’s debt to the Greco-Roman tradition have been largely blind to it in their own backyard, apart from admit ting, for instance, that the Druids may have been shamans and that shamanism was the likely archaic, animistic religion of Paleolithic “Old Europe.” Even less of a shamanic provenance is ascribed to the Classical tradition, that great fountainhead of Western civilization.
Nevertheless, there were shamans in ancient Greece and Rome, and ongoing research continues to ascribe central entheogenic elements to the most historically important and influential ancient religious rites. At first it was assumed that shamanic techniques were a foreign importation imitated by those peoples along the shores of the Black Sea in the regions of Scythia and Thrace who, in turn, would have adopted the practices from their neighbors, the Tungus people of Siberia. It was there among the Siberian tribes that shamanism was first recognized and described by Western scholarship as a priestly practice.
As early as the sixth century BCE, various Greeks are described as having magically traveled to the mythological lands of the Hyperboreans, who dwelled beyond the North Wind. Using innovative means such as the toxins of their arrows or by metamorphosis into birds, they made the journey in order to visit the god Apollo while their bodies appeared lifeless. Upon returning, these Greek priestesses and priests were believed to have the ability to banish plagues and predict earthquakes. One of these travelers is credited as the founder of Apollo’s great sanctuary at Delphi. Here the god’s entranced prophet was consulted even by the leaders of nations, her unquestionable validity being such that Socrates devoted his life to fathoming the meaning of her famous ironic declaration that he who knew only that he knew nothing was the wisest man in Athens. What else could one call this world-renowned priestess but a shaman? Nor was she alone; the experiences and beliefs of many important philosophers (as well as other very influential Greeks and Romans) qualify them as shamans. For example, the great mathematician Pythagoras, who lived in southern Italy, established a religious community devoted to dietary and spiritual practices, including the descent into caves that would induce the vision of the underlying mathematical relationships upon which this world of appearances is based.
We have an eyewitness to the shamanism of Pythagoras’s contemporary Empedocles, as well as his entheogenic claims. Empedocles declared that he knew of all the drugs and could teach them to his initiates, for he had drunk fire from an “immortal potion” and could now calm or summon storms at his will and lead the souls of the deceased back up from Hades, the realm of the afterlife.
Such shamanic prowess is also described among the Gnostic Orphic religious communities, who claimed that their founder had a unique dietary regime and a special ecstatic “smoke” (probably referring to the inhalation of sacred incense). Orpheus, a priest of the Hyperborean Apollo, could summon beasts and was apparently considered an incarnation of his god since, upon death, he was compounded into an inebriating potion by his ecstatic female devotees while his disembodied head continued to prophesy. His devotees believed that the body (soma) was a tomb (sema), that this life was a deathlike incarnation of the soul that would be liberated upon death (as it is temporarily during ecstatic trances), judged and recycled through an astrological-planetary curriculum before reincarnating for a series of further trials on Earth. This process continues until the soul finally achieves “perfection,” a condition described as a kind of a celestial actualization.
This basic shamanic idea of a detachable soul limited to Orphic doctrine underlies the literature of the Classical Age, where the soul is considered most alert and free in sleep, dreams, and trances, where it can acquire some of the knowledge it will attain upon the final liberation of death. This redemptive theology is consistent with the metaphysics of Empedocles and many other ancient models, including that of Roman Mithraism considered in the present work.
Parmenides gave an account of his soul’s journey to the gateway between night and day, where he met a goddess who imparted her teaching of the Gnostic Vision. He was said to have produced the laws of his city after a vision quest in a cave. He and Pythagoras were not alone in achieving visionary knowledge.
Plato explicitly claims that his dialogues are just the preparation for a vision of the Ideal or archetype of reality that only comes after an extended regime of spiritual practices, for which he employed the famous metaphor of the Cave and a Mystery initiation. Plato, like Aristotle after him, was initiated into the venerable entheogenic Mysteries of Eleusis, the experience of which certainly colored his model of a visionary community, and the resulting revelation is thought to have deeply influenced his Doctrine of Forms.
Thus entheogenic shamanism is also at the heart of what we have come to call Greek philosophy. Sophists and philosophers were probably all shaman priests, at least in the common mind; a sophist, after all, is nothing other than a sabio or sabia. It was from such a “wise-woman,” the famous Diotima, who was also adept at banishing plagues, that Socrates learned the metaphysical nature of love that he expounds in the Symposium. Aristophanes parodied Socrates as a sophist-shaman, first in Clouds, where his community of disciples was shown digging up special roots in a profanation of a Mystery initiation and hallucinating on clouds of cannabis smoke. And later, after the actual scandal of the Profanations, when certain prominent Athenians were discovered to have used the Eleusinian potion for recreational purposes at their drinking parties, he was shown in Birds again profaning the Mystery in a shamanic rite of necromancy as he summoned up spirits of the dead through the medium of an entranced companion.
As is clear from the monastic communities of “wisemen” like Pythagoras, Plato, and the Orphics, shamanism came to be practiced as a group experience. The great Eleusinian Mystery was of this type, a shamanic initiation in which participants journeyed the other world in order to experience personally the opened pathway between the realms. The psychoactive agent for the mixed potion or kykeon was derived from ergot, a fungus that grows on grains. The Mystery was enacted for nearly two millennia and most of the greatest personages of the Greco-Roman world were initiated. Cicero testified that it was the paramount contribution of Athens to the civilized world. The Eleusinian ceremony was only the best known of similar Mysteries, like that of the Kabeiroi, enacted at various other sites.
Such communal shamanism was also the basis of the maenadism of the female devotees of Dionysus. Periodically the women of the city deserted their homes for a mountain revel where they enacted herbalist rituals and induced