Resurrections On-Demand

Put LSD Back in the Communion Wine

On every Saturday night before Easter, the peak ritual of Christianity goes down in a parking lot outside a Greek Church. Four hundred people gather, shoulder to shoulder, among cars and candles, waiting for the clock to strike midnight. When the time comes, we scream in unison:

"Xristos Anesti!" (Greek for: “Christ has risen!”)

"Alithos Anesti!" (Greek for: “Truly, he has risen!”)

This is the catharsis of Lent. The climax. It commemorates the big event: the Resurrection — the day Christ rose from the dead. This supernatural feat shook the ancient world

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, so the celebration should be equally epic. But 80 generations later, the rituals to honor this cosmic event are .. kind of a let-down.

The night before Easter feels more like a family function than a sacred ritual. Your parents go. Your parent’s parents go. So you might as well go too. By this logic, you can guess why the place is mobbed. The chanters and priests are lost in an ocean of spectators, so there are no consequences to dicking around. People gossip and scroll Instagram. Most of the attendees didn’t immerse in the 46 days of prep that build to this midnight march. It’s a formality; the thing to do the night before you feast on entire lambs.

Is this the pinnacle of being Christian? The peak-experience felt like a non-event. Maybe I was unprepared to appreciate it. After all, I was one of those spectators who showed up without committing to the holy season. In 2015, I decided to take Lent seriously.

I fasted from meat and dairy, sat silently in wooden pews each week, drank the communion wine, and most importantly, studied the rituals. In the weeks leading up to Easter, there are hundreds of “liturgical” details hiding in plain sight. I yearned to know why we do the things we do. I learned the meaning behind words, the stories behind symbols, and the reasons behind rules. Everything is coordinated. Even the chanted hymns get ‘spookier’ every week as we approach the death of Christ. The whole thing is meticulously orchestrated.

But even when I came fully prepared, the climax still didn’t hit me. The rituals all aimed at something profound, something larger than life, but I always found myself on the outside of it. I could rationally respect it, but I couldn’t feel it.

At the peak of a religion’s flagship ritual should be a moment of shock, awe, and ecstasy. We’re talking sharp, life-defining mystical experiences that bring disbelief, instant insight, redemption, and a transcendence of self, time, and space. I want the fear of death shocked out of my operating system.

I witnessed this once (second-hand), not at a church, but in a Brooklyn apartment, trip-sitting for a friend in his 60s with terminal cancer. He was quite literally facing death. A few hours into his LSD trip, he erupted in tears after having a vision of St. Teresa of Avila, a 16th-century Spanish nun. He was an atheist, an intellectual, and a philosopher, now having a closed-eye hallucination of a religious nature. It was a tremendous release; a psychological resurrection. He woke up lighter the next day.

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Could psychedelics be the missing ingredient in Christian ritual?

When I studied Greek Orthodox rituals, I traced them back to the Eleusinian Mysteries of antiquity. It makes sense that the Hellenic version of Christianity adopted the local rituals of the time

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, but there’s something peculiar. At the center of this ancient religion was a mystical experience. Not only that, it was triggered by some sort of holy drink. It’s quite possible that Christian rituals are already designed to include a psychedelic experience.

Maybe all we have to do is put LSD back in the communion wine.

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The Eleusinian Mysteries

STATE-SPONSORED PEAK EXPERIENCES

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Growing up, even as a Greek-American, I only knew the caricature of Ancient Greece. They gave us democracy, the Parthenon, and Socrates. Religion was acknowledged, but belittled. Mythology was superstitious. Polytheism was primitive. But the more I learn, the more I realize how religion was the Greek’s biggest achievement.

Back in the toga days, a citizen would check out dozens of religious festivals over their life. It wasn’t exclusive like it is today. The closest parallel we can relate to is the panoply of music festivals. Think of Burning Man, Coachella, and Bonnaroo, but centered around mythological Gods instead of commercial idols.

Each religion had two types of events. The large festival was open to the public and got everyone exposed to the lore of a specific God. But, more interestingly, there was a smaller “VIP” track, where the serious patrons could initiate and immerse themselves in rituals around the God.

Despite the spiritual polygamy, there was one festival that had a you-have-to-try-this-once-in-your-life reputation: The Eleusinian Mysteries.

It was a state-sponsored “mystery school.” The Athenian elites, along with a lineage of monks who live inside a walled city, put together a Lord-of-the-Rings-scale epic that you could only legally attend once. Everyone did it — Plato, Hadrian, Julius Caesar, perhaps even St. Paul — from the emperors to the slaves.

This was such an important rite of passage, such a vital human right, a thing that had to be experienced before death, that they temporarily freed slaves for it.

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When your time came to enroll in the “Greater Mysteries,” you moved to Athens for three months.

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Your cohort-mates from around the empire flocked in to study with the “hierophants” (hardcore monks). After training, everyone marched 15 miles from Athens to Eleusis. They lived and prayed inside the city walls for 7 days. Come Saturday night, the whole thing climaxed as they celebrated the resurrection of Persephone, the Goddess at the center of the mystery.

Notice the similarities? It’s as if Greek Orthodox Christianity carries the remnant rituals of Eleusis.

• Months of devout preparation? Check.

• A seven-day Holy Week? Check.

• They celebrate the resurrection of a tragically killed holy person and chant their name at midnight? Check.

Growing up, I never understood the Greek influences on Christianity. The official narrative focuses on its evolution from Judaism. Little did I know, the rituals I experienced as a kid were watered-down versions on this hardcore ancient odyssey.

While it’s eerily close, there’s an important difference. At midnight, the Ancient Greeks went through a reality-bending peak experience.

Here’s where it gets fishy. We don’t know exactly what happened on that Saturday night. Initiates were sworn to secrecy. Certain details were top secret. If you told anyone what you saw inside the cavernous, “Telesterion” temple, they’d kill you. Seriously. They executed two teenagers for sneaking into the city walls during the ceremonies. Still, people whisper, and we know some basic details. We’re left with a fuzzy, puzzling impression.

Something ‘impossible’ was seen. One philosopher leaked a clue that it was a ‘phantasma’ — a ghost. This was tough for straight-edge historians to swallow. Whatever happened, it was unanimously a positive experience, cited by many as “the most important moment in their life.” In one night, Greek citizens evolved from rustic beasts into empathetic, civilized humans who no longer harbor a fear of death.

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Sounds like religion done right.

Despite it’s ravenous popularity, the ceremony itself was well-encrypted. It has remained a mystery for 1,850 years. Its run was almost as long as Christianity, and yet, most people today never heard of it. But in 1978, a group of three researchers

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claimed to crack it in “The Road to Eleusis.”

Their proposal? The Greeks were tripping. They said the peak experience at Eleusis was triggered by a psychedelic. Historians already knew that initiates drank ‘the kykeon’ (a sludgy brew) an hour before they saw ‘the vision.’ Their theory connects the dots. Albert Hoffman speculated that LSD-like alkaloids could be extracted from the typically poisonous ergot fungus that grew on their wheat-based crops every fall.

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It’s a solid theory, with one critical hole. They obsessed over pharmacology, history, and mythology, but barely commented on the ritual. We have no answers on how they harnessed the unpredictable nature of psychedelics. Stan Grof, the world’s leading LSD researcher, defined it as an ‘unspecific amplifier of the unconscious.’ Put simply, in unstructured environments, you’re playing with fire.

We saw how tricky it is to control a psychedelic ceremony with “The Good Friday Experiment.” In 1962, on the Friday before Easter, some researchers at Harvard

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administered psilocybin (shroom juice) in a church setting. It was a small group of ten people. Several of them had the classic peak experience.

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And yet, even in this sacred space, there were a handful of bad trips. Someone had to be tranquilized. Another had to be physically restrained from escaping the church into the streets of Boston.

How then, could thousands of Greeks go through this psychedelic rite of passage and have a universally positive experience?

Set and Setting

DESIGNING A PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE

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A sacred setting isn’t enough to guarantee a mystical experience. Leary’s experiment was missing a sense of ritual. Through intentional design, you can make psychedelic experiences less chaotic. There are two key variables that shape the nature of a trip — “set and setting”

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— and both of these can be harnessed through ritual.

• Set is your mindset going into a trip. It includes all the subconscious material you accumulate in your head over the prior weeks and months. It’s your baggage, your intentions, and your beliefs.

• Setting is the environment. It’s the place where the trip unfolds. It includes the people you're with, the architecture, the nature, the lighting, the colors, and the quirks of a place.

Every time I’ve had the opportunity to try psychedelics, the set and setting were recklessly ignored. It’s usually at a house party with strangers, or in a parking lot late at night. Drugs find me in the weirdest of places. I swear, I was offered DMT on an empty Sunday morning commuter train. I always turn it down, maybe because I studied psychedelics for years, and treat them with both reverence and caution.

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During my thesis in architecture school, I designed buildings for psychedelic therapy. The goal was to encode set and setting into a series of principles. I first looked to Shamanic traditions in South America, but the more I dug into the Greeks, the more I realized they were operating on a different plane.

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The Eleusinian Mysteries take set and setting to creepy, borderline unethical, but fascinating extremes. It’s possible they had such a high degree of control, that they were able to install a ‘shared hallucination’ across hundreds of people at the same time.

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What do you think they hallucinated? The resurrection of Persephone, their goddess of the underworld (of course). This takes the idea of a “resurrection ritual” to the next level. The core event in their mythology is more than spoken legend, it’s direct experience. They didn’t just believe, they saw.

For this to be done, on-demand, the hierophants must have developed a secret mastery of psychedelic ritual. It’s nuts to think that the Greeks conceived and pioneered a whole branch of “magick,” outside of historical recording, and beyond what the average modern person can conceive. A European Shamanism might have exitsed for two-thousandish years, and we know close to nothing about it.

Can we reverse engineer the rituals of Eleusis and rebuild them for Christianity?

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Shared Hallucinations

THE ULTIMATE PEAK OF A RITUAL

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The “set” at Eleusis was akin to secret fraternity brainwashing. When I joined a frat in college, I did the training rituals where they blindfold you, walk you through rooms, and make you do weird tasks. Imagine this, but instead of it being run by a group of 20-year-old keg-bros, it’s run by 75-year-old celibate priests, backed by the government, and they’re not fucking around.

Every year, there was a fixed ‘curriculum.’ It had to be mastered by anyone who wished to enter the gates of Eleusis. For three months in Athens, they studied poetry, hymns, books, plays, architectural details, prayers, and even secret handshakes.

At the center of this mystery school was a Homerian hymn. To summarize:

Young Persephone was tragically abducted and brought down to the Underworld. Her mother Demeter (plus, Zeus) were devastated, and through protest, Persephone was allowed to return to the surface of the Earth once a year. It was a resurrection story.

For months, every activity was anchored around this story. Consider it a form of “multi-modal brainwashing.” Despite the radical differences between each initiate, the priests installed a ‘common core’ of symbols. They were ready to receive ‘the vision.’

The “setting” was a structured temple ritual (on acid). After the initiates drank the kykeon, they waited in silent darkness. They had no idea that what they drank was a hallucinogen, or that it takes an hour to kick in. But once it did, the priests began their performance. This was the pinnacle of Greek theater.

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The temple was the stage, the priests were the actors, and they ushered their tripping initiates through a collective dream that unfolded in physical space.

At the peak, three things happened in unison.

• A gong was hit, symbolizing a thunderous rupture from the underworld, creating an oscillating sound wave.

• A curtain was dropped, revealing some sort of light source through the “Anaktaron,” (the center of the temple), symbolizing new birth.

• The hierophants sang a falsetto change in the eeriest of keys: “Persephone is here, risen from the dead.” (essentially, ‘Xristos Anesti!”)

The fusion of sound, light, melody, and language triggered a shared mystical experience. Everyone saw the same thing: a ghost. It wasn’t a statue. It wasn’t an actor dressed as Persephone. They all hallucinated the same Greek Goddess, in the same place, at the same time. It was “symbolically-primed synesthesia.”

This is the extreme end of what might be possible with psychedelics if set and setting are controlled to the highest degrees: collective hallucinations.

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The ‘fictional’ Goddess stepped out of the myth and into the Cartesian world of mortals.

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Only through brainwashing, ritual, acid, and fasting

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, was a person primed to witness the resurrection of Persephone. It was an aesthetic and emotional explosion at the tail end of a quintessentially Greek odyssey.

Imagine what this felt like. Imagine not just believing in the resurrection, but seeing the impossible. One of the reasons the Mysteries were easy to keep secret (in addition to the death penalty) was its “ineffability” — the challenge of putting it into words. They witnessed the supernatural. The dimension of the Gods was validated, and so was the premise of eternal life. It’s hard to explain, you had to be there.

Plato wrote about the effect the mysteries had on him (of course, without revealing the punishable specifics). In Phaedo, he says:

“The.. mysteries.. appear to have.. real meaning.... he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will lie in a [swamp], but.. he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods.”

As a kid, I sat in church and intuitively yearned for some kind of breakthrough. I naively thought by squinting my eyes, or fixing my gaze at the right point on the altar, I could pierce into a visual dimension where I could hallucinate Christ. Like Thomas the doubter, I wanted to see it with my own eyes. Obviously this never happened, because the shamanic wizardry of Eleusis wasn’t passed down to Christianity.

What is most impressive is the scale of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

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This wasn’t a vision reserved for twelve disciples. This wasn't a vision reserved for the priests and elites. This was a psychological transformation, offered to everyone, slaves and emperors, men and women.

In typical Greek fashion, they made mystical experiences democratically accessible; they brought resurrections to the people, at scale, on-demand.

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Epoptes

A PSYCHEDELIC SECT OF CHRISTIANITY

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Now that I know about the Eleusinian Mysteries, Greek Orthodox Lent takes on new layers of meaning.

Part of me feels disappointed; I see it as a shadow of a once marvelous ceremony. I yearn for a religious rite of passage in my own life; to adventure on a once-in-a-lifetime quest, to the center of a sublime ancient mystery, becoming an “epoptes” — one who beheld the vision. Instead, I’m reduced to a passive spectator, mechanically repeating rituals that lost their purpose.

But another part of me sees this whole situation with fervent, rosy-eyed potential. I see the future of this senile institution. I see how Christianity is one pivot away from becoming a modern mystery school. It has all the ingredients — a rich mythology, Great Lent, Holy Week, liturgies, hymns and stories. It’s a full-stack religion.

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Everything is already aimed to help Christians experience the Resurrection. All it’s missing is an initiation program, a modified Divine Liturgy service, and a psychedelic communion wine.

The existing branches of Christianity will likely be stubborn to this proposal. What’s required here is a new sect that reframes the main tenet of the faith — the Resurrection. It would transform Christ from a literal historical figure into a psychic symbol of divine power. It would shift the project of religion from dogma to direct experience; from an abstract belief system to an immersive life-defining odyssey that’s yours to claim.

This might be the one chance for Christianity to evolve, helping it regain its relevance in a paradigm of science, atheism, and materialism. Karl Rahner, a 20th century Catholic theologian said, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.”

Instead of waiting for the second coming of Christ, we can summon the resurrection on-demand. This isn’t a form of instant euphoria or effortless transcendence. You can’t stream The Rapture on Netflix. But for those willing to put in the work of initiation, there’s a proven and repeatable way to experience the Greater Mystery and come out the other side, reborn and fearless.

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Let’s riff:

1. What were the rites of passage in your life? Were they meaningful or flat?

2. Do you think the end-effect of the Eleusinian Mysteries would have been diminished if the initiates knew there was a science behind the Resurrection they saw?

3. Do you agree or disagree that delivering mystical experiences is the core responsibility of a religion?

4. Do you see value in a structured psychedelic experience? Or would you rather it be looser?

5. What open questions do you have after reading this? (This is an idea I’ll be expanding on in the future)

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Special thanks to:

• Taylor Foreman
  - for the mythology jams

• Steven Foster
  - for the solid references

• Charlie Bleecker
  - for drawing out the personal

• Elizabeth Edwards
  - for the granular flash feedback

• Garrett Kincaid
  - for the gutting & grammar frameworks

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Footnotes:

1. The story of Christ is the supreme ‘resurrection myth.’ There were dozens of these throughout the Greco-Roman world, but this one required exclusive belief, was adopted by the state, and triggered a formal reset of the calendar. We measure our years in time since this happened.

2. MAPS (The Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Sciences) have been on a 37 year crusade to legalize psychedelics. In the last decade, they’ve made big strides. Using MDMA and psilocybin in the context of psychotherapy, they’re curing the incurable: PTSD, nicotine addiction, and anxieties from terminal illnesses.

3. Christianity didn’t launch as a single version. It all stemmed from St. Paul’s story, but it took on different forms depending on where it landed. We saw a similar kind of ‘syncretism’ when Alexander the Great respected the places he conquered. During Christianity’s spread, the meme of the Resurrection layered on top of the wide-ranging rituals and traditions that existed across the empire.

4. There were some restrictions. Most importantly, you had to speak Greek, otherwise you couldn’t participate in or understand the rituals. Also, you couldn’t join if you were a convicted murderer. Perhaps the bad karma didn’t fair well during the ritual’s psychic upheaval.

5. At 16 years old, I went to a religious sleep-away camp in Greece for two months. We toured churches and monasteries, and lived a loosely Orthodox lifestyle. Realistically though, our minds were elsewhere. It was more like Wet Hot American Summer than a rite of passage.

6. “According to the Roman statesman Cicero, and other writers of the time, [the Eleusinian Mysteries] promised a blissful afterlife.” SOURCE

“Among the many excellent and divine institutions that your Athens has developed and contributed to human life, there is none, in my opinion, better than these mysteries, by which we have been brought forth from our rustic and savage mode of existence, cultivated and refined to a state of civilization; and as these rites are called ‘initiations’ so, in truth, we have learned from them the first principles of life and have gained the understanding, not only to live happily, but also to die with better hope.”

7. ‘The Road to Eleusis’ was authored by three legends: Albert Hoffman (the Swiss chemist who synthesized LSD), Gordon Wasson (the banker who brought mushrooms to America), and Carl Ruck (a professor of Classical Studies at Boston University).

8. The ergot fungus isn’t something to mess with. Symptoms include convulsions and sometimes gangrene (causing your fingers and toes to turn black before falling off). In 1951, there was a mass poisoning from infected bread in Pont-Saint-Espirit, a small French town. In addition to 5 deaths, 50 were interned in an insane asylum. For a full day, the town suffered from hallucinations, not knowing the cause. In regards to Eleusis, Albert Hoffman theorized that the Greeks put the ergot into a brew, and then floated oil on top of it, which extracted the poisonous properties. You discard this froth at the top, leaving behind only the alkaloids that caused hallucinations.

9. This was conducted by Walter Pahnke, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity school. It was supervised by Tim Leary and Ram Dass, and included Huston Smith as a participant, all 3 of which were members in the Harvard Psychedelic Club.

10. The Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire asks you to rate your experience across these dimensions: unity, transcendence of time and space, ineffability, paradox, a sense of sacredness, noetic quality, and a deeply felt positive mood.

11. The “set and setting” framework was popularized by Tim Leary, but conceived in 1958 by an Austrian biologist named Ludwig von Bertalanffy. He’s one of the founders of “general systems theory.” He defines open systems as “simultaneously evolving over time with continuous flux of matter, energy and information.”

12. I’m eager to experiment with lower doses, but unusually patient with higher ones. For what it’s worth, I have hallucinated from edibles, hashish, sleep deprivation, and fevers; and there’s a non-zero chance of latent schizophrenia in my family. I’m grateful for a thin membrane to the subconscious, and don’t feel rushed to roll the dice in a non-ideal circumstance.

13. This was a form of “immersive theatre.” They didn’t go to one-hour play and return home to their secular lives. They were immersed in the myth for days. Starting from their 15 mile march from Athens to Eleusis, details they read about in fiction started to come into the scene (a bridge, a marsh, a cave, a gate, a well). Little by little, the priests blurred the lines between myth and reality.

14. The Hulu show “Nine Perfect Strangers” features Nicole Kidman as a rogue leader of a psychedelic retreat. One episode shows a family co-hallucinating a deceased family member to help them overcome their trauma. I was surprised to see this concept in popular culture, but I don’t think they nailed the ritual in a convincing way.

15. They fasted for 3 days in the Greater Mysteries. I need to do more research to zone in on the details. But if it was a full-fast leading up to Saturday night, it would have made it much easier to hallucinate.

16. Eleusis grew over the centuries, eventually to a point that it got corrupted. In its later years, there are stories of emperors forcing their ways into the mysteries without following the rules of initiation. It went into hiatus after Christianity, and eventually the whole site was destroyed by Alaric and Gothic invaders in 396 AD.

17. Religions (in the best case scenarios) offer a stack of benefits to live a psychologically rich life: community, shared traditions, history, morality, habits of mindfulness, fasting schedules, charity, theology, and a philosophy of death. That said, Christianity is missing a core feature: the mystical experience. Still, it’s probably easier for Christianity to add this than for a startup folk religion to build a full-stack religion without centuries of momentum.