Mushrooms and philosophers

Abstract

The fifth-century philosopher Socrates was satirized by his contemporary, the comic poet Aristophanes, in the Birds as conducting a rite of necromancy in the company of a group of people called the “Shade-foots”, a fabulous tribe from India who were thought to jump about on a single foot that could also be used as a parasol. The historical reference for this imagined scene of necromancy is the scandal that had recently occurred in which it was discovered that many prominent Athenians, including a notorious disciple of Socrates, were guilty of profanely celebrating a secret religious rite with friends in their private homes. This rite was the so-called Eleusinian Mystery, the major religion of the pre-Christian era, and it involved a shamanic ceremony in which initiates, who were sworn to secrecy, drank a special potion and experienced a vision of spirits from the world of the dead. The scandal had uncovered that some people were apparently using the sacred drug for their own entertainment. The Eleusinian Mystery was a Hellenized version of a primordial Indo-European shamanic religion that was carried into Greece and combined with indigenous agrarian traditions when the Indo-Europeans migrated into the Mediterranean lands in the second millennium before Christ. A similar migration brought them and their religion into Iran and India at about the same time. There the religion survived as the ancient Soma cult, which originally also involved shamanic experience induced by the drinking of a sacred drug. R. Gordon Wasson has shown that this drug was a fungal extract and that a similar role was reserved for the fungi in the traditions of the Eleusinian Mystery, both apparently survivals from the primordial religion. The Aristophanic parody of Socrates' supposed rite of necromancy confirms that a fungal drug was indeed used in the Eleusinian Mystery, for the creatures with single, parasol-like feet can be related to a very ancient epithet for Soma and they survive in contemporary Asiatic shamanism and in European folk traditions about mushrooms. Furthermore, the Greek myth about the theft of fire, which is also part of the context for the Aristophanic parody, can be shown to have reference to shamanic experience, with parallels in Indo-Iranian traditions. Thus, in accusing Socrates of profaning the Mystery, Aristophanes was suggesting that the philosopher had derived his theories from drug-induced visions. Such was, in fact, the common presupposition about Socrates and other ancient philosophers.