Thracian Mystery Religions
Files
Published version
Date
2018-12-31
DOI
Authors
Ruck, Carl Anton Paul
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Carl Ruck. "Thracian Mystery Religions." SexuS, Volume 3, no. 10, pp. 819-854.
Abstract
The ancient Mystery mythological tradition links northern mainland Greece and the islands of Samothrace and Lemnos
with Troy, Persia, Boeotian Thebes, Egypt, Crete, Etruscan Italy, the Peloponnesus, Athens, and the sanctuary of Demeter
and Persephone at the Attic village of Eleusis. Common to this wide geographical matrix is the role of a psychoactive
mushroom as a shamanic sacrament affording access to mystical experience. The Greek Homeric tradition knew of the
plant as the Homeric moly, [h]omomi, and the haoma sacrament of the Zoroastrian Magi priests and the warrior brotherhood
of Mithraism. This was expressed as a zoomorphic anthropomorphism in the figure of the Gorgon Queen Medusa,
and the bovine and taurine metaphors for the Amanita muscaria mushroom. The role of Perseus, as the father of
Perses, the eponymous ancestor of the Persians, and of Medea, as mother of Medos, the eponymous ancestor of the
Persian tribal group of the Medes, is central to assimilation of the Persian sacrament into Hellenic traditions. Medea is an
adjectival version of the same linguistic root that appears in the verbal participle Medusa and the noun Metis, signifying
female empowerment though expertise in medicinal and sacred drugs, a wisdom assumed by the goddess Athena as a
deification of Sophia. This fungal sacrament figured in the various Mystery cults of the Anatolian Goddess and her male
attendant, and in the antithetical relationship of the gods Apollo and Dionysus.