Keith’s Reviews > LSI, Ancient LSD, Secret of the Eleusis Kykeon and Vedic SOMA > Status Update

Is this not just a recapitulation of Wasson's "Soma" and Hofmann's "Road to Eleusis"?

I haven't read those, but this seems to be based on the author's own experimentation and what could be considered "unverified personal gnosis" without citing either (so far as I've yet spotted). If you can give me their bottom-line conclusions, I can compare.

That seems like a big red flag to me. As you no doubt know, there's a whole world of what I've come to call "crypto-entheo-hermeneutics," or the (usually creative) "discovery" that core sacraments of ancient religious traditions ultimately stem from the use of some psychoactive plant or another. The two works that inaugurated that entire line of thinking are the two I mentioned. Hofmann's work is the best of the lot, he puts forth the theory that the kykeon used in the Demeter rites of Eleusis was brewed from ergot-contaminated wheat, and that the use of cold water stripped out enough of the toxins to make the residual LSA safe enough to consume.

Wasson's Soma theorizes that the famous plant of the Vedas was in fact the Amanita muscaria, pointing to evidence such as the lack of any reference to roots and leaves in the ancient texts. This is, I think, far more speculative, largely because the effects of A. muscaria are rarely "visionary" in any meaningful way - it sounds to me more like it gives you something like a fever and an alcohol-like inebriation.

The whole field is full of crackpots who are obviously driven by the conviction that real mystical experience can only be like whatever ayahuasca or 5-MeO-DMT experience they personally had that was so life-changing.

I'm not far enough yet to assess crackpottery, but this seems closer to Hofmann so far (and yes, without having read any of them previously, I am well aware of the genre, as it were). The keys in this case seem, so far, to be a combination of lysergamide sources that are easily combined under rural conditions and produce a psychoactive combination that is not anxiogenic, feeling "like ALD-52 + mescaline"

"For the Kykeon brew: the LSA[-]containing claviceps paspali ergot grows right next door to the Greek Eleusis Sacred Spiritual center on the famous Rarian plain and infects barley grass. The kykeon was served by the priests to 300 initiates every Sept for 2000 years like clockwork.

The priests grew the barley grass which they infected with claviceps paspali via sprinkling honey dew water. Claviceps paspali has the same very high levels of LSA as the HBWR seeds, so there is a symbiotic relationship of the two plants: the barley supplies the 3 levels of the very high aldehydes to convert the LSA from the claviceps paspali to LSI (Lysergic Acid Isovaleraldamide), LSV (Lysergic Acid Valeraldamide), and LSCr (Lysergic Acid Crotonaldamide).

The levels of the aldehydes: isovaleraldehyde, valeraldehyde, and crotonaldehyde are found at levels x100 times the levels of any other plant on the planet. These aldehydes are attracted to the amide NH of LSA like a magnet in acidic water forming LSI, LSV and LSCr as I prepare the golden green brew in my experiments, forming externally in ph = 4 water with stirring, but also forming internally (in vivo) in the liver as well, easily reaching the bloodstream from the liver. Both the external and internal reactions between LSA and the 3 aldehydes are simple chemical condensation reactions proven to happen with amides and aldehydes not only externally but also in vivo by a scientific paper I cite in the book."

If the author doesn't cite "Road to Eleusis", this is simply plagiarism. Either way, they're stating as fact something about which there is only speculation based on purely circumstantial evidence.

It's difficult to tell what he cites, because the citations are at the ends of each chapter when they're not simply embedded in the text: the editing here is nonexistent. But FWIW, he does cite Hofmann & Ott, among others, and "take[s] no credit" for discovering anything, as he believes he was led to his experiments by the "spirit world" to which these substances provide access, where it wasn't directly provided by books or academic papers.