My answer to the question is, we do and don’t need a new Eleusis, depending.

It is interesting to note that the place today, called Eleusina by modern Greeks, is the site for Greece’s largest oil refinery. Not pretty, and the air around there is certainly not fresh.

My point is that “we”, assuming “we” implies internet-using westerners, arguably the one group most responsible for change, are very different creatures from human beings 4000 years ago!

This article seems to imagine a kind of institutionalised initiatory education. But how can the undoing of society ever be accepted by society? A society that is founded on the eradication of initiation, or rather, its substitution with ineffective and traumatic ordeals, like school, military service etc.

It is the same mistake that Tim Leary made, so please don’t go there.

There will be multiple “new Eleusis” but they will have to be underground if there is anything genuine about them. I could say, The new Eleusis will not be televised, or blogged! It will have to be all about personal connections and personal relationships, but at the core of it, it cannot be about maintaining, or being involved with, the established ways of society.

At the core of it is of course The Experience, and how that is embodied, and it is my current view that the majority of westerners are not physiologically and/or psychologically able or willing to receive this particular grace. In other words I don’t see how it will ever be part of the mainstream in THIS culture. The yearning has almost been bred out of most of us.

Thanks, I saw the story about the ancient Chinese stash of weed sometime ago somewhere else and blogged it, good stuff!