GOD said:
Where does that information come from ? They grow from at least as far north as north scotland and southwards down to the pyrenes in abundance . Greece also has areas that fit in that zone . Why would Psilocybe mushrooms grow in the other areas but not in greece ?
Of course Greece has mushrooms, mostly in the north and mountainous regions. Psilocybes are however not that common. Especially not in the summer months.
Look at the
temperatures and rain for Athens, just south of Eleusis
Now, with our experience of mushroom hunting, I think you see the problem matching the optimal mushroom season with the Eleusian cermonies in September...
By abundance i mean from personal experience a normal day without even looking comeing home with 50 G dry semilanceata . On a normal day looking with no effort 100 - 200 G dry alone . The best day i ever had was 4 kilos dry in one day . With P.Cyanescens a bad day for me was 50 G dry . A normal day was 200 - 500 G dry in not more than 3 hours . When i did it fo money we were picking 500 G a day each = 1.5 kilos dry weight . Everyday . In the middle of the city . People dont realise the quantitys that are growing and one can pick if one trys .
I have picked P. semilanceata for >10 years and I consider 100g-200g (2000-6000 mushrooms) is extremely rare to find per day, even in the peak seasons and the perfect habitats. I'm not suggesting you exaggerate your harvests, I know it's possible to find this much, but honestly, it's only reported a few times every year in the international report threads at different forums. Most experienced hunters don't even find half of that in a complete season. In any way, it cannot be directly transfered to Greece, where
reports of this species is rare, and it's one of the very few
active species, some of them are probably even less common, like P. bohemica (=P. serbica) which isn't even considered common in the countries with most occurrences...
There was trade across what was later called the silk road to china before the mysterys . There was sea trade between the middle east and india 30000 years ago .
= NO poblem getting enough Psilocybe mushrooms to dose all the visitors .
I would gladly accept this if there was any good archaeological evidence of psilocybin use in Asia or Europe around this time... From what we know, kykeon's active ingredient was a hidden knowledge, and this kind of trade would spread the secrets among the outsiders.
The only argument brought against it is the claim that Kykeon took ten days to brew ? How reliable is that information ? Exactly where does it come from ? Is it direct information or hearsay ?
Huh? I made no such claims. The Hernandez paper tells us the fermentation of the Claviceps went on for 10 days in his scientific setup, and I use this to argue that sterility and absolute cleanness might not be of greatest importance, contaminants might not colonize the substrate to a great degree before it's ready.
What about the argument that Paspali is rare ? = Someone comes up with the idea that they cultivated it ?????
I don't think it's rare around the Mediterranean, but it's anyway not the species I proposed as the kykeon ingredient. Before I knew about this growing method of C. puprurea, yes - It has psychedelic alkaloids (LSA, LSH) from the beginning, we can gather and eat it right away... But now, after discovering C. purpurea as a good ergonovine source, in my opinion it seems even more well suited.
In this thread I also see mentions of the lack of reports about cold water extractions of ergot. There was actually one person who made a successful CWE of ergot and reported LSD-like effect, which was posted on entheogen.com (edot) back in 2006 (mentioned in the
bluelight thread, also linked in #1 in this thread). I unfortunately can't find it anymore on
the successor of edot. Anyway, I happened to be a member of that forum and this experience report sparked my interest for Kykeon and methods to use Claviceps as a a drug without using it to get lysergic acid for a LSD synthesis. So I started researching everything about ergot,
collected sclerotia from the wild and finally had enough to try CWE bio assays. This didn't work very well because of too low doses, but I felt some slight psychoactive effects.
The point I want to make here is that there is a big fear of the toxic effects from ergot, like St. Anthony fire, limbs falling of, death etc. This effects occur when you eat ergot over longer times, like several weeks. It takes a quite large single dose to reach LD50, and like I stated earlier, the dangerous alkaloids are not soluble in water, which creates a very simple and safer method to use it than eating the scerotia (I highly advise against trying doing that)...
Perhaps it was a mistake of me to post the info about the solid substrate growing method this Kykeon thread, but since this is the LSD, LSA and LSH forums, I thought it would balance the debate about possible Phalaris, mushroom and harmala ingredients and bring it back on topic...
But it's more a interesting method to make your own lysergic brew, whether it ever was used in any way by the ancient Greeks or other people. Think about it.
