Fragments #6 - LSD & Communism from Ancient Greece to the CIA
A brief history of psychedelics and socialist conspiracies.
Below is the sixth installment of a new format I am trying out of shorter-form content to come out weekly. Here are installments #1, #2, #3, #4, & #5. Hopefully, this will break up the extended interregnums between my long-form pieces (I know you have been begging for more). If you like it: good; if you hate it: even better.
The Greeks knew how to party:
The Greeks have a long history of connection with psychedelics. The Bronze Age Mycenaean Empire were named from the city of Μυκῆναι (Mykenai) which has its roots in mykes or mushrooms. The Ancient Greeks believed mushrooms were literally heaven sent, sprouting in the ground where lightning from Zeus had struck.
The Eleusinian mysteries were secret sacerdotal rites enjoyed by nobility across the ancient Greek world that were thought necessary to avoid suffering in the afterlife. During the rights, the hierophant priests and followers would imbibe wine mixed with ergot a grain-growing fungus that produces lysergic acid propanolamide whose derivative lysergic acid diethylamide is more popularly known by its laboratory code name: LSD.
Albert Hoffman the inventor of LSD notes how the secret rites practiced at Eleusis were a celebration of the goddess of vegetation Demeter and her daughter Persephone who is taken to the underworld by Hades and then escapes back to Earth. Her symbolic death and resurrection mimicked the changes of seasons and were concomitant with the winter solstice and vernal equinox.
Death and rebirth are a common theme within psychedelics, where takers of LSD, psilocybin, DMT, et al. commonly report the feeling of being reborn again after experiencing ego death.
Persephone was not the only deity to experience resurrection: Dionysus, the god of wine and chaos, died from dismemberment by the Titans and was later reborn. Lost Homeric hymns tell how this son of almighty Zeus suffered and died on order to ensure the future salvation of all mankind in a clear prefigure of Christ.
Nietzsche, the famous author of the phrase “God is dead,” began to sign his personal letters as “Dionysus” as he slipped into insanity.
Dionysus’ orphic worshipers would take communion in form of the raw flesh and blood of a bull, and enter into a trance-like ἔκστασις (ekstasis) – the root of our word ecstasy. Dionysus’ symbol was the phallus by metaphor commonly referred to as the mykes or the mushroom. Which has come down to us as the idea of the mushroom tattoo.
Dionysus transfigured into the Roman god Bacchus – and his worshippers continued to celebrate him in the ribald Bacchanalia raves, that were so aggressively lit that the Senate made them illegal and executed seven thousand of the parties’ attendees.
Your friendly neighborhood drug dealer – the CIA:
LSD was introduced to the American mainstream by the CIA in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s under project MKUltra. In which the agency hoped to develop a truth serum and mind control agent.
The CIA spent $240,000 in 1953 to buy the entire world’s supply of LSD and gave out large doses of the drug to unsuspecting attendants at Agency parties and to johns visiting brothels in San Francisco.
This was not the agency’s sole foray into drug distribution, Alfie McCoy notes how around the same time the CIA utilized heroin production and distribution during the French Indochina and Vietnam war to help finance and prop up local warlords in the Golden Triangle against the Viet Cong.
The CIA launched its own airline, Civil Air Transport – later named Air America, to help facilitate transport of heroin across the world to mafia connections in southern Italy, Marseille (the fabled French Connection), and New York City.
Old habits die hard – and in the 1980’s a bit of faux-surprise was made when the CIA was found supporting the trafficking of crack cocaine into inner-city America. This plot was uncovered by Gary Webb until he – ever the overachiever – committed suicide with two gunshot wounds to the head.
It’s also worthwhile to note that in Afghanistan opium exports have plummeted 99% after the US military exited the country. I am sure, just a coincidence….
Ties between the US government and organized crime predate all of this and go back to Operation Underworld, where US intelligence allied with the Irish, Italian, and Jewish mafias during WWII. In exchange for law enforcement turning a blind eye to their activities these organized crime bodies ensured that Axis spies and saboteurs would not enter the US and aided the US military’s landing in Sicily.
Major names in these connections included Jewish crime lawyer Meyer Lansky, mafia boss Lucky Luciano, and the gay political king-maker Roy Cohn (who’s cross dressing “blue suite” parties at the Plaza hotel were frequented by J. Edgar Hoover and Cardinal Spellman). These men all grew close to the government with the rise of FDR through the New York political machine (already deeply tied to the mafia) on his road to the White House.
Communist Conspiracies Then & Now:
These ties to the mafia also insinuated American intelligence with organized labor and ultimately to the burgeoning communist movement within the US.
As ex-spy Hilaire du Berrier notes in Labor’s International Network The CIA partnered with the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) during the cold war. Led by Irving Brown, the AFL-CIO (backed by the CIA under the guise of winning influence away from the USSR) helped bolster communist movements in Brazil, Algeria, Morocco, and other areas across the third world.
The backing of the communists was not a monolithic mandate of the Agency but the interests of certain factions primarily lead by former Communist Party of the USA head, Jay Lovestone, who was station head for the CIA in Paris.
Communism has its roots in ancient Greece as well. As mentioned in a prior post, in Ancient Sparta male citizens lived in harsh military communism from the age of 7 until 30 sharing all meals and possession in common.
Pythagoras, one of the first philosophers, established a school that practiced an extremely ascetic form of communism, where participants were to maintain a vegan diet, and were prohibited from both laughing and joking.
Plato’s idealized Republic barred the ruling class from owning private property, and even from having private spouses. This model would later be used for other utopias including Bacon’s New Atlantis and (LSD-user) Huxley’s Brave New World. The more things change the more things stay the same.
That’s all for this week and thanks for reading,
Zay