I don’t know if anyone will give a rat’s ass about this besides Fishfondler… unless anybody else has been following this mad dash through the territory of the mythological Dionysus.

Anyway… I was just looking over that McKenna book, and there’s a section about Dionysus, and he mentions his mother, Semele (his mother according to one version of his birth). And how the way that Semele died was because she asked to see Zeus in his true form. Sure, this was at the instigation of Hera, who was trying to destroy Semele out of jealousy, but the fact remains that Semele perished basically by incineration, because she beheld the true divine nature of Zeus.

And from her springs Dionysus! Who has this heritage where the quest for ultimate truth leads to death! It’s all right there.

Incidentally, I also just read that some scholars have linked Semele with the Thracian version of the great mother earth goddes, Gaia.

In addition to that, I also discovered that the person who first put forward the theory that psychotropic substances were involved in the Eleusinian mysteries was Robert Graves.