Read before you journey

For something close to two thousand years, from the Mycenaean age until the sanctuary was shut by the Christian emperors at the end of the fourth century CE, people walked the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis each autumn, in the Attic month of Boedromion. They fasted. They bathed in the sea. They carried torches through the night. And inside the great hall called the Telesterion, after days of preparation, they drank the kykeon and saw something that it was death to describe.

We know the drink's ingredients because the Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells us: when the grieving goddess refuses wine in the house at Eleusis, she asks instead for barley, water and tender pennyroyal, and that is what the initiates drank. We know the experience was worth having because people who could choose anything chose this. Cicero wrote that of all the things Athens gave the world, nothing was better. Sophocles, Pindar, Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius were initiated. Nobody ever told.

In 1978 the banker-mycologist R. Gordon Wasson, the chemist Albert Hofmann and the classicist Carl Ruck published The Road to Eleusis, proposing that the barley in the kykeon carried ergot, the fungus Claviceps purpurea, whose alkaloids include lysergic acid amides, chemical cousins of the LSD Hofmann had first synthesised forty years earlier. Critics have pointed out that ergot is toxic, that no residue has ever been found at Eleusis, and that an experience shared by thousands every year for centuries would need a remarkably reliable brewer. Defenders point to the fasting, the barley, the mint, the single night, and the uniformity of what the ancient sources hint at: a terror, then a light, then a confidence about death that lasted a lifetime.

Our position is that we do not know, and that it does not matter as much as the shape. What Eleusis teaches is the structure: a long preparation, a procession, a shared drink in a protected hall, a thing shown once, and silence afterward. That shape is what we keep at Mabon, and it would work with nothing in the cup at all.

The ninth book of the Rig Veda is a hundred and fourteen hymns to a single plant. Soma was pressed between stones, filtered through sheep's wool, mixed with milk or water, offered to the gods and drunk by the priests, who then sang that they had become immortal and found the light. Across the mountains, the Iranian Avesta sings to the same plant under the same name, haoma, in the Hom Yasht. This is the sacrament of the Indo-Iranian peoples, and it sat at the exact centre of their religion.

Then it was lost. By the later Vedic period the texts already speak of substitutes. Modern Zoroastrian priests use ephedra, which they still call hōm. What soma originally was has been argued about for a century and a half. Wasson, in 1968, said Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, pointing to the hymns' silence about roots, leaves and flowers and to their strange references to urine. Flattery and Schwartz said Syrian rue, Peganum harmala, whose harmala alkaloids are the same ones found in the ayahuasca vine. Others have proposed ephedra, cannabis, a psilocybin mushroom, the blue lotus, or a drink that was never one plant at all.

We tell this story at the reading circle for a single reason. A tradition with hymns, priests, stone presses and a god of the plant lost its sacrament within a few centuries of being cut off from the place where the plant grew. Memory does not survive on its own. That is why our circles keep a scribe, why the fellowship keeps gardens, and why we write everything down except the one thing nobody should: what each person saw.

Every child in Europe can draw it: the red cap, the white spots, the fairy sitting on top. Amanita muscaria grows under birch and pine across the whole northern world, and among the Koryak, Chukchi, Itelmen and other peoples of Siberia it was eaten in ritual and in feasting for as long as anyone recorded. The first detailed European account came from Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, a Swedish officer captured at Poltava in 1709 and held in Siberia for twelve years, who published in 1730 a description of the mushroom, its effects, and the custom of drinking the urine of those who had eaten it, since the active compounds pass through the body intact.

Reindeer seek the mushroom out and behave strangely after eating it. Shamans used it for journeys to the spirit world. From these facts a popular modern story has grown up that the figure of Santa Claus, red and white, flying with reindeer, coming down the chimney of the snowed-in winter house, is a memory of the Siberian mushroom shaman. We tell the story at Yule because it is a good story. We do not tell it as history, because the evidence for it is thin and the people who first made the claim were not historians.

The pharmacology is the other reason the fly agaric stays in our stories. Its actives are ibotenic acid and muscimol, not psilocybin; the experience is closer to delirium and sleep than to the classic psychedelics, the dose in any given cap is unpredictable, preparation changes everything, and poisonings happen every year. Our rule is simple and we do not bend it: the red mushroom is honoured at the Yule fire, and it is never in the cup.

The Old English word for a witch was hægtesse, which seems to mean hedge-rider: the one who crosses the boundary between the village and the wild, between the living and the dead. The medieval and early-modern sources are strangely specific about how she did it. Johannes Hartlieb, writing against forbidden arts in 1456, describes an ointment of seven herbs rubbed on benches and brooms. Giambattista della Porta, in his Natural Magic of 1558, gives recipes. And Andrés Laguna, physician to a pope, reported in 1545 that he had taken a jar of green salve from a couple accused of witchcraft at Metz, rubbed it on a sleepless patient, and watched her sleep for a day and a half before waking to complain that he had pulled her away from all the pleasures of the world.

The plants named again and again are the nightshades: henbane, belladonna, mandrake, and later datura, along with aconite and hemlock. Their tropane alkaloids, absorbed through the skin in fat, produce exactly what the trial confessions describe: the sensation of flight and falling, the feeling of becoming an animal, encounters with the dead and with a horned figure, a sleep that lasts for a day, and a memory of it all as if it had really happened. The witch's flight was, among other things, a pharmacological act, and the witch knew the skin was safer than the stomach.

This is the strongest evidence that European paganism, at least in its folk form, had its own entheogenic practice, and it is why Tribal Harmonix exists. It is also why we do not reproduce it. The tropane alkaloids are deliriants with a narrow margin between a vision and a death, and people die of datura every year. We honour the ointment as our ancestors' testimony. We cross the hedge by drum, by trance, and, for members who choose, with the classical sacraments that the Safety page describes, never with the nightshades.

María Sabina was a sabia, a wise one, of the Mazatec town of Huautla de Jiménez in the mountains of Oaxaca. All her life she held veladas: night ceremonies in which she and the sick ate the niños santos, the saint children, the psilocybin mushrooms, and she sang for hours in a language the mushrooms gave her. It was medicine, it was religion, and it was private.

In 1955 the American banker and mushroom enthusiast R. Gordon Wasson sat in one of her veladas. In May 1957 he published an account in Life magazine under the title "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." He changed her name. He did not hide the town. Within a few years Huautla was full of seekers, then of celebrities, then of police. The people who had kept the mushrooms for centuries were blamed for the strangers. María Sabina's house was burned. One of her sons was killed. She was shunned by neighbours for having given away what belonged to the town. She said, late in life, that from the moment the foreigners arrived the saint children had lost their purity and their force.

Every psilocybin mushroom in every modern laboratory, retreat and bedroom came through that door. There is no version of our fellowship that is not downstream of her loss. Our reciprocity pledge is the least that follows from this: a tenth of our income to source communities, no ceremonies that belong to lineages we are not part of, her name spoken at Mabon, and a refusal to treat the people who paid for our sacraments as a backdrop for our experiences.

Peyote, Lophophora williamsii, is a small, slow cactus of the Chihuahuan desert, and the oldest continuously used sacrament in the Americas that we can date; archaeological specimens from Texas go back thousands of years. The Wixárika, the Rarámuri and other peoples of Mexico walk pilgrimages for it. In the nineteenth century the peyote way spread north through the Lipan Apache, Comanche and Kiowa, and in 1918 it was incorporated in Oklahoma as the Native American Church, now the largest Indigenous religious body in North America.

The law caught up slowly and badly. In 1990 the United States Supreme Court, in Employment Division v. Smith, held that Oregon could deny unemployment benefits to two Native American Church members fired for sacramental peyote use. The outrage produced the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and, in 1994, amendments to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act that protect peyote use by members of federally recognised tribes. That protection belongs to them. It is not a general licence, and it should not be.

Meanwhile the cactus is disappearing. It takes a decade or more to flower; the wild populations in Texas and northern Mexico are being over-harvested, fenced off and ploughed under; and demand from people who were never on the peyote road has made it worse. Native-led conservation projects now grow it for their own communities. Our contribution is to stay away. Tribal Harmonix does not work with peyote, does not treat synthetic mescaline as a loophole around that, and funds Indigenous conservation at Lughnasadh. The Andean cactus wachuma, grown in gardens around the world for centuries, is a different plant with a different story; where a circle honours it at Litha it is cultivated, never taken from the wild. The desert does not need our wonder.

In the 1930s, in the rubber-tapping state of Acre in the Brazilian Amazon, Raimundo Irineu Serra, a Black Brazilian the size of a doorway whom his followers called Mestre Irineu, founded a religion around the Indigenous vine-and-leaf brew he called Daime: "give me." Hymns, uniforms, a dance in rows, Catholic saints, African spirits and the forest, all in one liturgy. In 1961 José Gabriel da Costa founded the União do Vegetal, the UDV, with the same brew, a different hymnal, and a tighter structure. Brazil eventually recognised both as religions whose sacrament the state would not prohibit.

The UDV's American branch was raided in 1999. In 2006, in Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, a unanimous United States Supreme Court held under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that the government had not shown a compelling reason to forbid the church its tea. A Santo Daime church in Oregon won a similar ruling in 2009. In the Netherlands, by contrast, a 2001 decision protecting Santo Daime was reversed in 2018 and the ban upheld. Religious exemption is narrow, national, and never guaranteed.

Notice what the winning churches had in common. One sacrament, not many. A single liturgy, fixed and written down. A lineage going back decades. Membership rolls, controlled supply, no sales, and records the court could inspect. They looked like religions because they were religions. That is the quiet argument behind our calendar, our code of conduct, our scribes and our council: not because we expect a court to care, but because a sacrament without a structure is just a substance, and the structure is where the holiness lives.

"Psychedelic" was coined by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1956, from the Greek for mind-manifesting, and within a decade it meant a poster, a guitar sound and a police problem. "Hallucinogen" was worse: it declared in advance that whatever you saw was false. So in 1979 Carl Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott and Gordon Wasson proposed a new word in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs: entheogen, from entheos, "the god within," for a substance used in a religious or shamanic context to generate exactly that.

The word takes a side. It says the experience can be religious, that the sacrament is a sacrament, and that the people who used these plants for millennia were not confused. Pagans should love it, because pagans are the people in the modern West who still have the grammar for it: a circle, a calendar, a god to address, a thing to offer. The word also gets abused. Anything can be called an entheogen by anyone who wants to feel holy about a Saturday night, and "sacred" is a cheap word to add to a retreat brochure.

So we test it. Four questions, asked of any rite that claims the word. Does it have a calendar, a place in a year with a shape? Does it have a circle, people who are responsible for you and to whom you are responsible? Does it have a code, rules you agreed to before the cup? And does it have a return, a way the night comes back into the world as something done? Yes to all four, and the word is earned. Otherwise it is a substance, and that is allowed to be enough, but it is not what we do.

In 1962, at Boston University's Marsh Chapel, twenty divinity students took either psilocybin or a placebo before a Good Friday service, and most of the ones who got the mushroom reported a mystical experience they still rated as among the most important of their lives when they were tracked down twenty-five years later. In 2006 Roland Griffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins repeated the finding under modern conditions, with careful screening, prepared participants, two trained sitters, music, eyeshades and a quiet room. The paper's title says it: psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.

The phrase the research uses for that quiet room is "set and setting," popularised by Timothy Leary's group in the 1960s and given its sociological backbone by Norman Zinberg in 1984. Set is what you bring: expectation, mood, intention, fear. Setting is where you are and who is with you. Both shape the night more than the dose does. Modern clinical protocols are, at bottom, elaborate instruments for controlling set and setting.

Now read a pagan rite with that in mind. Cleansing the space and the body lowers anxiety and marks a threshold. Casting the circle draws the boundary of the container and says who is inside it. Calling the quarters orients the body in space and the mind in a cosmos. Speaking intention is the set, out loud, witnessed. The warden at the edge is the trained sitter. Music and fire are the setting. Thanking the gods, opening the circle and eating together is the re-entry that the clinics call integration and the ancestors called the feast. We did not borrow set and setting from the laboratory. The laboratory, through a long chain of borrowing, got it from us.