Our research on the pharmacological plausibility of the κυκεών (kykeon)—the ritual drink of the Eleusinian Mysteries—has just been published in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature Portfolio.
For our team, this publication marks a meaningful milestone. It brings into the open several years of work that began not as a funded initiative, but as a question raised during internal laboratory meetings in Athens in 2021. The question was simple and technical: if the kykeon had contained bioactive compounds, what would they have been? And under what ecological and chemical conditions could they have existed in ancient Attica?
The Eleusinian Mysteries were active for nearly two thousand years. Initiates traveled from across the Greek world to participate in a ritual sequence that included fasting, purification, procession, and entry into the Telesterion. Ancient testimonies describe the experience as deeply affecting, yet the central ritual substance—kykeon—is described only briefly as a mixture of barley and mint.
In the twentieth century, scholars including R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck proposed that the kykeon may have contained ergot alkaloids derived from fungi infecting cereal grains. Ruck’s work, especially in The Road to Eleusis (1978), placed the hypothesis within serious classical and philological scholarship. The proposal has remained controversial, but it has never been systematically examined through modern pharmacological modeling.
Our study approaches the question through laboratory plausibility. Under alkaline conditions, can ergot alkaloids be transformed into compounds relevant to the kykeon hypothesis?
