A Brief History of Vice

by Robert Evans

  The founders of the mysteries had a real meaning and were not mere triflers when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will live in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods.

  The speaker of that line is Socrates, as written by Plato, basically claiming that being initiated into the mysteries was the polytheistic Greek equivalent of a baptism. Socrates is better known today as the “Father of Western Philosophy.” Aristotle, the Father of Science, was also an initiate of the rites and an experienced kykeon user. In Pagan Regeneration (1929) Harold Willoughby claims the tripping initiates “learned nothing precisely, but . . . they received impressions and were put into a certain frame of mind.”

  In other words, the mysteries weren’t the kind of religious ritual in which adherents memorized elaborate lists of rules and dogmas. Kykeon trips were more of a “tripping too hard to use words” experience. And it left a profound impact on the Greek thinkers who first elucidated many of our modern concepts of science and philosophy.

  So, what the hell was kykeon?

  We know that three of the ingredients were wine, barley, and mint. Our friend Gordon Wasson, the mushroom man, wrote a book trying to track down the exact properties of kykeon. In The Road to Eleusis he and several other scholars argued that kykeon must have been some sort of psychedelic drug, likely introduced by ergot-infected grains in the wine.

  In the long term, ergot poisoning can cause your limbs to rot off and die. In the short term, it can cause you to vomit and (for the ladies!) spontaneously miscarry babies. That’s thanks to the chemical ergotine. Another chemical in ergot is lysergic acid amide (LSA). If that name sounds familiar, it’s because LSA turns into lysergic diethyl acid with a few years’ experience in chemistry and the right equipment. It’s possible the Fathers of Science and Philosophy spent a goodly portion of their life tripping on primitive acid.

  If you’re skeptical about the idea of an acid(ish) trip having a particularly significant impact on the birth of science, you should know that hallucinogens have a well-documented history of helping brilliant people become the “fathers” of whole disciplines. Francis Crick, a Nobel Prize winner known today as the Father of Modern Genetics, apparently first conceived of the double-helix structure of DNA while dropping acid to help focus his mental powers.

  On a more concrete note, Kary Mullis, another Nobel Prize winner, credits LSD for his discovery of a very specific technology: the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). In (criminally) brief, the PCR is how we’re able to do things like match DNA with individual people. So the key ingredient in every CSI episode and much of our current justice system owes a huge debt to acid. Today, scientists also use the PCR to identify hereditary diseases in our genes. It’s opened the door to cloning human beings and, less dystopian-y, cloning human organs.

  It’s likely that Crick’s team (or another team) would’ve eventually settled on the exact structure of DNA without the aid of an acid trip. But Mullis doesn’t think his discovery would’ve been possible without acid. In 1997, during a BBC documentary, he asked himself if he would ever have discovered the PCR without the help of Lucy and her Sky Diamonds:

  I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.

  At this point, some of you are probably chomping at the bit to try acid. And I can’t help you with that, because I really like not being in prison. But what about re-creating the ancient Greek answer to acid, kykeon? How feasible is that?

  HOW TO: Trip Like a Greek Philosopher

  As a general rule, if people have the opportunity to do a fun drug without starving themselves for nine days, they absolutely will. So it makes sense that the priests conducting the Eleusinian Mysteries wanted to keep the exact nature of what they were dosing folks with a secret. The closest we have to an ingredient list for kykeon comes from the “Hymn to Demeter,” one of the longest and oldest of the thirty-three surviving Homeric Hymns.

  Not that Homer had anything to do with writing the “Hymn to Demeter,” or any of the other hymns. The old Greeks had a tendency to just attribute anything old, wise, and of unclear origin to Homer. It was the classical equivalent of crediting Alan Smithee as a film’s director, only done decades afterward and meant as a compliment.

  The “Hymn to Demeter” dates back about as far as the seventh or eighth century BCE. The recipe to kykeon is given when Metaneira, an ancient queen and apparent bartender to the heavens, mixes a drink to calm the nerves of the goddess Demeter:

  Then Metaneira offered her [Demeter] a cup, having filled it with honey-sweet wine.

  But she refused, saying that it was divinely ordained that she not

  drink red wine. Then she [Demeter] ordered her [Metaneira] to mix some barley and water

  with delicate pennyroyal, and to give her [Demeter] that potion to drink.

  So she [Metaneira] made the kukeôn and offered it to the goddess, just as she had ordered. (trans. Gregory Nagy)

  In the hymn, Metaneira immediately follows that drink up with an offer to let Demeter (who’d just lost a kid) raise one of her own children instead. Demeter, tripping on kykeon, repays this kindness by lighting the child on fire in order to make it immortal. All of this further reinforces kykeon’s reputation as one hell of a drug.

  Two things about that recipe stand out to me: the presence of pennyroyal, which sounds like the last name of a woman James Bond would sleep with, and the utter lack of wine. While Demeter seemed to prefer her kykeon sans alcohol, it was apparently an option for others. Heraclitus, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, claimed kykeon was made of wine mixed with cheese, stirred constantly until being drunk.

  “The kykeon,” he said, “falls apart if it is not being stirred.”

  Neither of these recipes sounds wildly hallucinogenic (or appetizing) to our jaded, modern eyes. Wasson and his contemporaries suggest that the Eleusinian priests hid a key ingredient from their celebrants: ergot. The only arrow in that theory is that ergot poisoning is horribly unpleasant and sometimes fatal, while the Eleusinian Mysteries seemed to be a rip-roaring good time. Fortunately for the theory, it’s relatively simple to distill LSA from ergot using water and ash. Unfortunately for this book, testing that would be a federal crime.

  Ergot is legal to possess, but LSA is illegal to synthesize, possess, or consume. So in lieu of committing a felony, I’d like to test an alternate hypothesis: What if kykeon was more about the starvation than the substance? Remember, the Eleusinian Mysteries were conducted at the end of a nine-day fast.

  I can still remember the first meal I had at the end of my Indian dysentery adventure, after days without keeping any calories inside my body: I ate a huge bowl of macaroni and cheese with crumbled falafel inside it. It wasn’t cooked particularly well, and the cheese was fake, but that first bite I took of a spoonful of salt and fat was a revelation. Swallowing it was almost more than I could handle. The sheer rush of flavor was, quite literally, blinding.

  Peter Webster deserves the first credit for the theory that kykeon trips might have been starvation induced. In his essay “Mixing the Kykeon” (2000), he relates the story of attending a religious retreat, somewhat inadvertently fasting for four days, and then receiving a psychedelically powerful burst of spiritual revelation with his first sip of coffee on an empty, starving stomach.

  This gave me an idea: I would go on a long fast myself, walk to the top of a nearby mountain, and take a dose of both mixtures of kykeon. This would include:

  Tea 1

  Ingredients

  2 tablespoons pennyroyal

  1 cup water

  1 ounce sprouted barley

  Tea 2

  Ingredients

  1 cup wine (red or white)

  1 ounce sprouted barley

  2 grams goat cheese, shredded

  A word to the wise (and rec
klessly dumb) on pennyroyal: In addition to being a delicious species of mint, pennyroyal can kill your ass when extremely concentrated. You’d need to actually eat concentrated pennyroyal oil, the equivalent of gallons of tea, in order to be at risk, but be warned: This shit is mildly toxic and not super great for your liver. I’m trying it so you don’t have to.

  Method

  We don’t have much information about the fast that preceded the mysteries. It may have been like the Muslim fasts at Ramadan, in which the adherents avoid all food and drink from sunup to sundown, or it may have been a total fast, in which zero calories were consumed. Greek Orthodox Christians can go as many as two hundred days a year on “fasts.” Across modern-day religions, the most commonly observed fast types are caloric restriction (eating less often), alternate-day fasting (feasting followed by zero or low-calorie days), and dietary restriction (going without meat, animal fasts, etc.).

  A complete fast, wherein the celebrants go entirely without liquid or solid calories for days at a time, is extremely rare. It’s possible the nine-day fast of the Eleusinian Mysteries was based around caloric or dietary restriction—but it may have been a total fast. I decided to hedge my bets by doing a four-day total fast before testing my kykeons. Four days of zero calories shouldn’t be enough to cause permanent damage, but it is about as close to that point as I could safely get.

  Going without anything but water and (as a treat!) decaf coffee for four days was the hardest thing I had to do in researching this book. The first two days were the worst; my temper was on a short fuse, and my guts felt like they were being aggressively kneaded by an angry giant. My muscles were sore all over, and I was, in general, poor company.

  On day three I suffered less and started to feel the benefits of an extended fast. My sense of smell became much more acute. I could smell the fast food scent wafting from my roommate’s bedroom as if it were right next to me. When the family across the street from me started their Sunday barbecue, it was as if the cooking brisket was right underneath my nose. The pain stopped sometime around the third day.

  I expected to feel weak the entire time, but it wasn’t like that! I would periodically get bursts of productive energy, as my body ate fat and muscle, followed by sudden crashes that felt almost like someone pulled the plug out from inside my gut. During the crashes, I’d find myself light-headed and slightly delirious. But on the whole my energy level increased as the experiment went on.

  By the evening of the fourth day I could feel a constant, hollow gnawing in the pit of my stomach. But, somehow, I felt strong enough to hike. In ancient Greece, the kykeon was consumed at the end of a hike with the other celebrants. My modern-day answer was to hike to the top of a nearby mountain with some friends (who were not fasting) whom I could trust to carry me back to the car if I passed out. It was around a five-mile hike, straight uphill. I tried the first mixture, the pennyroyal and barley tea, two miles into it.

  A few minutes after drinking the pennyroyal-barley kykeon, I indicated in my notes that I felt “radiating waves of warmth, and a rush of almost ticklish sensations spreading outwards from my heart.” It was not the overwhelming experience kykeon was reported to be, but it was significant. I’m not sure how much of that was the pennyroyal and how much was owed to the barley being the first solid food I’d had in days, but my body tingled all over for several minutes, and I felt a “definite sense of euphoria.”

  The end of that five-mile hike found us on the peak of a small mountain overlooking the city of Los Angeles. I prepared the second kykeon by shaking up and pouring a mixture of wine and barley into my cup. I added an ounce of shredded goat cheese to the mix, stirred it up into a swirling mixture, and then gulped it down as quickly as I could. The phrase “wine and cheese slurry” doesn’t sound appetizing, but as starving as I was, it tasted awesome.

  Here I am, savoring it. Jeremy Connors

  The wine was a red I normally find quite mild. But taken at the end of a fast, its flavor was almost uncomfortably intense. The sourness gave me a head rush that was a little bit like doing a whippet . . . but I wouldn’t describe it as hallucinogenic. Having tried both written kykeon recipes, I think it’s likely that neither is “complete.” I suspect the full recipe involves some sort of LSA synthesis.

  But I wouldn’t want to discount the value of the fast in the whole experience. The most connected I felt to the Eleusinian Mysteries during my own re-creation wasn’t while drinking either potential kykeon. It came during the “feast” at the end of the four-day fast. The few descriptions we have of the mysteries emphasize the belief in a “paradisical” afterlife for the initiated.

  After the hell that is a long, complete fast, eating was itself a kind of paradise. Even winelogged chèvre tasted delicious. And while drinking wine mixed with cheese and barley atop a mountain wasn’t exactly a religious experience, the first bite of hamburger I had after hiking five miles back to my car very nearly was.

  Tobacco and marijuana are viewed in very different lights, even by the most open-minded substance users (and abusers). These drugs seem so different, in part because we have enough science to know that tobacco kills us and marijuana, generally, doesn’t. You might be surprised to learn that back before we knew about things like cancer and emphysema, tobacco was seen and used in ways similar to today’s marijuana. Read this quote from a bewildered European observing some of the native people of Hispaniola smoke for the first time in his life: “In order to produce a state of stupor, they imbibe the smoke until they become unconscious and lie sprawling on the ground like men in a drunken stupor.”

  Now, that sounds like our friend Mary Jane, but the substance being described is tobacco. Not modern tobacco, grown in a vast field of its brothers and sisters and destined for a series of plastic-wrapped boxes, but tobacco nonetheless. So what gives?

  If you’ve ever had a cigarette habit, you almost certainly didn’t smoke so you could pass out in a drunken stupor. Most heavy smokers light up first thing in the morning, to clear their head and wake them up. They smoke after lunch, before getting back to work. They smoke . . . pretty much all the damn time, but especially right before settling into a productive task.

  So why does that old-timey tobacco sound so much more like pot? Well, for one thing, the tobacco most often used back then was Nicotiana rustica, “wild tobacco.” It tops out at around 9 percent nicotine, compared with 1 to 3 percent nicotine for the Nicotiana tabacum used to make your average pack of Marlboros or Camels or whatever. Modern tobacco is bred to grow fast, big, and without dying from all the pesticides sprayed on it. Today, we sacrifice fuck-you-up strength for the ability to produce enough cigarettes to make chain-smokers possible.

  The furthest back scientists can prove people were using tobacco was around 700 CE, and the science behind that discovery is actually super cool. Archaeologists found a tiny bowl in some Mayan ruins, small enough to fit comfortably in your palm, with “the home of his/her tobacco” (roughly translated) written on the side. It’s sorta like how today, most head shops sell little airtight jars for potheads to store their weed. The owner of this little jar apparently used enough tobacco that, thirteen hundred years later, scientists from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University at Albany were able to run a chemical analysis and find actual tobacco residue in his or her stash bottle.

  Don’t think of that tobacco jar as just more evidence of nicotine’s soul-reaping influence on human history. It’s entirely possible the owner didn’t even smoke. The ancient Mayan attitude toward tobaccy of the nonwhacky variety was similar to how certain state governments view marijuana today: It was medicine. The Tzotzil people of southern Mexico (modern descendants of the Aztecs) still consider tobacco the foundation of their traditional medicine.

  Tobacco: The Duct Tape of Ancient Medicine

  Tobacco has actually been used to treat disorders of the mind. Chuvaj, an “aggressive madness” probably
better described as “being a violent asshole,” has a traditional Mayan cure that probably made a superior deterrent to prison time. They believed such bad behavior was caused by bol ch’ich, literally “stupid blood.” You treated a bad case of stupid blood first by slicing open the forehead to let some of it out. Presumably, the dumbest blood escaped first. Tobacco leaves would then be applied to the wound, where they’d hopefully help smarten up the rest of the blood.

  Tobacco was truly the duct tape of ancient Mesoamerican medicine. Have a bug bite? Rub some powdered tobacco on that sucker. Stomach pains? Mash some tobacco with garlic and rub it on your belly. Farting too much? Some snuff will help with that! One common cure for constipation among the Zinacantan people and their Mayan ancestors is a concoction of tobacco leaf, garlic, and the recipient’s own urine. (Garlic came with Europeans to the New World, but it was quickly adopted by the Mayans.)

  That last, horrifying treatment isn’t something I can just drop at the end of a paragraph and then move on from, not in a book like this. The second my research brought me to medicinal urine/tobacco/garlic drinks, I knew I would have to try one myself.

  Step One was to be in a situation in which I could evaluate this drink’s merit as a medication. That meant inducing constipation, which is normally something we experience at inopportune times thanks to the cruel sphincter-throttling hands of Mother Nature and Father Time. I wasn’t about to wait for that, though, so I downed a huge dose of kratom and ate a dinner consisting entirely of various cheeses.

  Kratom is an Indonesian plant that, when ground and brewed as a tea, feels almost identical to an opiate. Strangely enough it’s one of the most legal drugs on earth (you can even buy it in Japan, and you can’t buy nothin’ fun, legally, in Japan). It’s a wonderful thing to keep in your medicine kit when traveling. And, as with opium, taking a lot of kratom is a surefire way to block off your body’s exit ramp. Eating all that cheese only caused further congestion. It was a wonderful night. But then . . .