Sacrament in the Long Tradition

A sacrament is a material thing through which the Source of All Things is encountered. Bread, wine, water, oil, smoke, leaf, root, molecule. The substance is real; what moves through it is not produced by the substance but is met in its presence. The sacrament does not manufacture the encounter. It is the door at which the encounter has been known to arrive.

This is older than any of us. It is older than the religions we have named.

A sacrament is not a medicine, though it may heal. Medicine addresses the body and asks whether the symptom has remitted, and is right to ask. A sacrament asks something else — and we will come to that question in time. Nor is it an experience sought for its own novel sake. The contemporary framing that approaches these substances as occasions for novelty, for insight, for self-improvement, treats them as instruments of the personality self. A sacrament is something stranger and quieter. It is a vehicle. It is a tool.

The long human inheritance

Wherever human beings have lived in serious relation to what is beneath the material world, they have known that certain substances participate in the holy. This is not a religious claim in the narrow sense. It is a human claim. The traditions offered to us thus far hold the record.

At Eleusis, for nearly two thousand years, initiates walked from Athens along the Sacred Way to drink the kykeon and pass through the Telesterion. The exact composition of the kykeon has been debated, though contemporary scholarship leans toward an ergot preparation — the same fungal alkaloid family from which the modern psychedelic compound of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1938. What the initiates encountered behind the veil of the Mysteries they were sworn never to describe, and almost none did. Plato passed through. Cicero, Pindar, Sophocles. Cicero said afterward that nothing the Athenians had given the world was finer, and that he had learned not only how to live with joy but how to die with hope. The form did not survive Christianization. The teaching, in some sense, did not need to: it had already done its work in the formation of the philosophical inheritance the West would carry forward.

In the Americas, the peyote of the Native American Church holds a continuous lineage running back through Huichol and Wixárika ceremony into prehistory. The cactus is taken in night-long ritual, framed by song and prayer, in a structure of intentional encounter that the United States government — after long and ugly resistance — finally recognized as a sincere religious practice protected under law. Adjacent to this, the ayahuasca traditions of the Amazon were carried into formal religious bodies in the twentieth century — the Santo Daime and the União do Vegetal — both of which now hold legal sacramental status in multiple jurisdictions. In the highlands of Oaxaca, the Mazatec curanderas held the velada, the all-night ceremony of the niños santos, the holy children, the mushrooms — in lineages running deep before any anthropologist arrived to document them. María Sabina, who in the middle of the twentieth century opened a corner of that tradition to outsiders and was never quite forgiven for it, said the mushrooms taught her to read what cannot be read.

And in the Christian inheritance — closer to home for most who will read this — there is the Eucharist. It is worth slowing here, because the doctrine the Western Church has held about its own central rite is the closest theological precedent in our cultural inheritance for what is being offered in this essay. The Roman Catholic position, settled in 1551 at the Council of Trent and held since, is that at the moment of consecration the bread and the wine are not symbolically but substantially transformed. The accidents — the appearance, the taste, the chemistry — remain unchanged. Transubstantiation. The substance becomes the body and the blood. This is not poetry. This is the literal claim of one of the longest-lived religious traditions on earth: that a material thing, taken into the body in a ritual context, is the vehicle of direct encounter with the Divine. The wafer is not a metaphor. The wafer is what the Divine has, in this tradition, been understood to inhabit.

We name this not to argue with it. We name it because it is true, and because it is already what so many seekers have been formed by. The Eucharistic claim is part of the inheritance. The long tradition has known.

Not a renaissance. A remembrance.

The contemporary cultural moment, particularly within clinical and scientific communities, has begun to speak of a "psychedelic renaissance." The phrasing is well-meant. It is also slightly off. A renaissance is the rediscovery of what was lost. What is happening now is not a rediscovery; it is a return. The substances were never lost — they were carried, sometimes openly and sometimes underground, by the lineages just named, and by many others. What has changed is that the dominant culture, which had spent some decades pretending these doors were closed, is again willing to acknowledge that they are open.

The framework of "renaissance" makes the West the protagonist and the molecules the discovery. The framework of remembrance — which is the framework of Ekstaeses — makes the human soul the protagonist and the molecules the inheritance.

It hits different.

The naming

Within Ekstaeses, the sacraments are psilocybin and MDMA.

Psilocybin is the active alkaloid of certain mushrooms long held within the Mazatec and other Indigenous lineages. It is, in the Ekstaeses understanding, the molecule that opens the door. It loosens the framework of inherited assumption through which the personality self has been viewing All That Is, and presents — sometimes briefly, sometimes for a long held hour — what is beneath the framework. The mushroom does not give a vision. It removes the obstruction that has been standing in front of one.

MDMA is a younger sacrament, in this register. The compound itself was synthesized in 1912 and entered serious therapeutic use only in the latter half of the twentieth century. Within the Ekstaeses sacrament, it does work that is distinct from psilocybin and complementary to it: it dissolves the defensive structures the personality self has erected against its own recognition. The fear that would otherwise refuse the encounter is, for a time, laid aside easily. What is met in that laying-aside is the love that the fear had been concealing — and the recognition that what is not love is always fear, and nothing else.

These two together — opening and unguarding — are the sacraments of this offering. They are taken in ritual, in the presence of trained witnesses, with intention, with preparation, with reverence. They are not taken to feel something. They are taken to see.

What the sacrament asks

The clinical question is honest and useful: did the symptom remit? It is the right question to ask of medicine. The sacramental question is something else.

The sacramental question is: Did you see the Source of All Things, with new eyes, in All That Is?

This is what the long tradition has known. The encounter is not the production of something new. It is the return of sight to what has always been here. The seeker has prior been desperately searching in a valley. Suddenly they are brought to the mountain top from where they may perceive every possibility before them. The sacrament is what carries the seeker, briefly, to the place from which the seeing is possible and what is seen cannot be unseen. The window opens. The room is filled with light. One recognizes that this has indeed always been a room of windows.

There is but one shift in perception necessary, because there is but one mistake. The personality self takes many forms, but it is always the same idea of separation. What is not love is fear, and nothing else. This teaching has been held in many articulations — the Syllabus states it explicitly — and it is what the sacrament returns the seeker to: not a new claim about the world, but the recognition that what is not love has never had any substance at all and may be released and grasped no longer.

The remedy, in this register, lives inside the seeing. It is not delivered separately and then applied. The sight is the transformation.

A door, not the door

The Source of All Things breaks through where it chooses. It has chosen the silence of the desert and the wine of the Mass and the song of the velada and the breath at the end of long meditation and the face of a stranger and the death of a beloved. It has chosen these molecules, in this place, in this time, for some of those who arrive at this door.

Ekstaeses tends its own door. It is not the only door, but it is an open offering here and now. The wine and the bread that some have loved before arriving at this door are not displaced by it; they are joined by it. The traditions that have carried the seeker thus far have already done holy work, and what has been received in them is held, not surrendered, when a new form is approached.

If you are reading this and your formation has held you, in part or in whole, in any of the older sacraments, you are welcome here. If you are reading this without such formation, you are welcome here. The door is open. The sacrament is real. The Source of All Things is, and has always been, what we are of, what we are in, and whom we are with.