Note: “Hamilton Morris” in this piece is a fictional alias. It is not the real journalist and chemist of that name. It’s a playful stand-in for an anonymous psychonaut who did the work described below. Everything attributed to him here is invented dialogue built around real experimental details shared with me anonymously. Matthew Stahl is a real person, and the recipe discussed is his, adapted from his book LSI.

For roughly two millennia, once a year, thousands of initiates walked from Athens to the sanctuary at Eleusis to drink a beverage called kykeon. Plato likely went. Cicero later wrote that Eleusis gave people “a reason not merely to live in joy, but to die with a better hope.” The Homeric Hymn to Demeter describes the rite in reverent language, but also evasively because the rites were considered sacred and initiates were sworn to secrecy. For nearly two thousand years, the secret remained remarkably well guarded. Finally, outside pressure shut the practice down. Roman Emperor Theodosius I effectively banned pagan worship in 392 CE. A few years later the sanctuary at Eleusis was looted and devastated by invading Goths led by Alaric. The last initiates who knew it firsthand eventually died, and the secret was lost.

The modern investigation started in 1978, with The Road to Eleusis. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck argued that kykeon was an ergot preparation. Ergot is a fungus, Claviceps purpurea, that infects the flowering heads of grasses. Hofmann had already shown that ergot alkaloids could be coaxed into something psychoactive (he’d synthesized LSD from one of them). Yet, the theory didn’t quite close. Raw ergot alkaloids are famously dysphoric, causing nausea and vasoconstriction. These are not the sort of substances that square with the “better hope” Cicero wrote about.

That’s where Matthew Stahl comes in. In his book LSI: Ancient LSD, Secret of the Eleusis Kykeon and Vedic Soma he proposed reacting an extract of ergot with aldehydes from young barley grass. This novel psychoactive, he says, feels stimulating instead of sedating, beautiful instead of dysphoric. And it lasts, he claimed, roughly 12 hours. With moving earnestness and confidence, his descriptions line up reasonably well with what the ancients recorded.

The complaint file #

I’m a journalist, based in Oregon. I publish a monthly, because a story needs time before it stops sounding like what you expected. Credit where due: the book Slow Sex had a genuinely good premise. I’ve redirected it toward journalism, where it belongs.

I first came across Stahl’s work through McKenna’s Brainforest Café podcast. He was an engaging guest, seemed to know his chemistry, and radiated unshakable confidence in his personal testimony. I ordered the book. It was written in that same confident style, with chemistry details that were over my head but sounded plausible enough. But there were oddities too.

He repeated the kykeon recipe, almost word-for-word, three times. Why would he do that? Chapter 5, pages 94–134, was much longer than it needed to be. He also mentioned, at the bottom of page 134, that he had a discussion thread on bluelight.org. What I found waiting there was a toxic cesspool. He had one or two supporters, but practically everybody else on the thread was complaining that the recipe didn’t work or were trying to poke holes in his chemistry. I DM’d Stahl around the same time that a moderator stepped in and locked the public discussion thread to new replies.

Reading through a locked, acrimonious thread, I might have drifted off to more promising stories. But one participant caught my attention. Why was Hamilton Morris posting here? Yes, the guy behind Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia. I had talked to Hamilton a few times over the past year. Years back, his early 5-MeO-DMT reporting got the discovery story wrong. I introduced him to the actual discoverer. A small favor on my end, but he never let the debt go. Tiresome, honestly. He collected debts the way other people collect grudges.

I DM’d Stahl: “Why does this fail for so many people?” He replied that people were not following his recipe carefully enough. He also blamed Hawaiian baby woodrose suppliers for selling seeds that weren’t actually Argyreia nervosa. I could feel his frustration, but also his unshakable faith in the recipe. He pointed to the one or two other people who had gotten it to work.

I called Hamilton. He said he was going to Vancouver, BC for a month in August to figure it out. He said he’d be in touch.

Vancouver #

In Canada, ergine isn’t a Schedule III controlled substance the way it is in the US.¹ And Vancouver has a harm-reduction culture that makes it about as forgiving a place as any to run this kind of self-experiment. Over the month, Hamilton ran a series of experiments. What follows is his account, reconstructed from our phone calls.

Following Stahl’s recommendation for a starter dose, Hamilton made a 25-seed batch of kykeon and drank it. About 90 minutes in, he felt it arrive—clearly a plus on the Shulgin scale—but it plateaued well short of what he’d hoped for.² It only took an hour to make. Why wait a week for tolerance to reset? Impulsively, he made a second 25-seed batch, and drank that too.

The result, in his words, was spectacular. To put a number on it, Hamilton reached for the dose tiers PsychonautWiki uses for MDMA: common 80–120mg, strong 120–150mg, and heavy above 150mg. This, he said, was way past heavy, into territory the tiers don’t have a name for. It was the kind of experience people chase MDMA for, except MDMA can’t actually deliver it at that intensity without cooking your serotonin system. Even better, MDMA’s unwanted effects were absent: no jaw clenching and no next-day crash. His scientific curiosity had, he reported, been aroused. Whatever cloud of skepticism he’d flown in with, it lifted right there.

The 50-seed session had answered one question and raised another. Two batches stacked on top of each other meant he couldn’t say whether the second dose had rescued a fading first dose, or the two had simply summed into one bigger effect. A week later he wanted a single clean batch, no redosing, so he could watch a dose fail or succeed on its own terms. He went with 35 seeds: comfortably potent, but dialing back the intensity a bit.

Instead of mild stimulation and heart opening beauty, he felt the sedation and dysphoria of ergine. What went wrong? The seeds had proven potent. He’d done zillions of extractions before. The barley grass was from sealed single-serving packets filled with nitrogen to inhibit oxidation. To talk things over, he told me he called his friend Rick Doblin—the kind of nerd who reads enzyme kinetics papers for fun.

Doblin asked whether Hamilton had considered that his own body might be metabolizing the barley grass aldehydes. He reminded Hamilton about aldehyde dehydrogenase, ALDH for short. It’s the enzyme that clears acetaldehyde, the toxic byproduct your liver makes (via a different enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase) when it breaks down ethyl alcohol. Maybe ALDH was degrading the barley grass aldehydes, or the bond those aldehydes form with ergine tartrate.

There’s a body of hangover research on this topic. Different foods modulate ALDH activity. For alcohol, invigorated ALDH means faster acetaldehyde clearance, offering a milder hangover and less DNA damage. But Hamilton wanted the opposite effect. If a food is documented to inhibit ALDH, eat it, on purpose, to keep the barley grass aldehydes around longer.

Ayahuasca works by a similar trick. DMT is not orally active because monoamine oxidase (MAO) tears it apart in the gut and liver before it can act. Harmine and related beta-carbolines in the ayahuasca vine bind the enzyme’s active site and block it so the DMT can hang around and do its thing. The prescription drug disulfiram does almost the same thing to ALDH. It gets converted in the body into a reactive metabolite that irreversibly disables the enzyme. One reaction is reversible while the other is not, but the net effect is the same: temporary enzyme impairment.

Disulfiram itself was off the table, though, Hamilton explained to me. It can cause fatigue, drowsiness, headache, a lingering metallic or garlic-like taste, and with sustained use, occasional liver toxicity or nerve damage. Food-based inhibition would have to do.

As dosing day neared, Hamilton began to doubt his plan. What if the aldehyde-preserving diet wasn’t enough? He reached out to Stahl and tried to pin him down: Is it necessary to combine the ergine tartrate and barley grass before drinking?

Most other psychedelics like LSD or MDMA are single molecules. Here evidence seemed to point to something more fragile. Whatever ergine and the barley aldehydes form together, ALDH could apparently take it apart again. And once it did, the ergine seemed to reassert itself.

Stahl confessed that he hadn’t tried taking the two ingredients without prior mixing. His justification was etymological: kykeon means “to stir.” 🤦 As a backup plan, Hamilton said he picked up potato starch gel film pouches, the kind used to wrap vile tasting supplements to make them easier to swallow.

Hamilton followed an aldehyde-preserving diet starting the evening before, then tried a 45-seed batch. At 90 minutes, he recognized the same failure mode: uncomfortable sedation. Past self, Hamilton noted, had done future self a favor. He said he swallowed a barley grass pouch. Over the next 10–15 minutes, bingo! The character of the experience flipped. Ergine became kykeon.

The kykeon state held for 1.5–2 hours, then began drifting back toward the ergine character. So he said he swallowed a second barley grass pouch. It flipped back to kykeon again, held for another 1.5–2 hours. By the time it started fading a third time, the ergine tartrate itself was clearing, so he let it wind down. All told, the session ran somewhere around 4.5 hours, start to finish. Nowhere near Stahl’s claimed 12.

Looking back, I figure experiment 1 was the same trick, stumbled into by accident. At the time, Hamilton redosed because the first batch felt too weak. But 90 minutes was also right around when the first batch’s barley grass contribution would have been fading and ergine reasserting itself. The second batch landed fresh barley aldehydes exactly when the first dose needed rescuing.

Why it works for Stahl and not for everyone else #

Bear with a short detour. My grandfather, Nathan Pritikin, was one of the first people to realize that a low-fat, whole-food diet, could reverse cardiovascular disease. I even met my grandfather as a child. And I admire Dr. Michael Greger for continuing my grandfather’s work. So I am well aware of the ins and outs of type 2 diabetes. People describe it as sugar intolerance, but that’s just a symptom, not the root cause. The cause is chronic excess fat circulating in the blood. This fat infiltrates the pancreas, impairing insulin-producing beta cells.³

I mentioned that because Stahl helpfully disclosed in his book that he has followed a keto diet for “as long as he can remember” (pp. 216–218). No wonder he has suffered a heart attack (pp. 43–44). Anyway, if chronic fat overload can impair one enzyme system, insulin secretion, there’s no obvious reason that ALDH couldn’t be similarly impacted.

Years of a high-fat diet may have left Stahl with chronically suppressed ALDH activity.⁴ If his body simply isn’t clearing barley aldehydes efficiently, ergine doesn’t reassert itself. He wrote the recipe for his own unusually forgiving physiology, thinking it should work the same way for everyone else’s.

This would also explain the difference in duration. Stahl’s 12 hours may simply be how long kykeon can coast when ergine doesn’t interfere.

Case closed #

I opened the blackout window shades to make it easier to read back through the final draft. Kykeon is not a single molecule like most other psychedelics. Swallow ergine tartrate and barley grass aldehydes together, and they find each other. But this leaves the aldehydes vulnerable to ALDH. As ALDH mops up, ergine reasserts itself, but it’s reversible: redose the barley grass and kykeon returns. A mug of green tea had gone cold at my elbow, steam long since quit. My readers were going to love it.

I slid the pages back into the folder.

The phone rang. Hamilton, without preamble: “Here’s what you should be asking me: Does the diet matter? Or can enough barley grass work, without any special prep?”

I’d had a week with this story and somehow missed the obvious. “Go on.”

He’d eaten a pea soup dinner loaded with broccoli and onion on purpose, to invigorate ALDH. The next morning, he took 200mg of ergine—50 seeds worth—plus 320mg of THH for its stimulant and emotional distancing effects. That was 10:15 am.

At 11:36 am, still just anxious, he swallowed 0.87g of barley grass. By 12:10 pm the kykeon was already fading, so he took 1.5g more and felt it come on hard enough to go for a walk. It peaked around 12:40, then started slipping again on the way back. By 12:51 he was home, managed only 0.75g more, and collapsed onto the couch as the ergine pressed back down. He rode out a rough patch—three hours since dosing, past ergine’s peak—and by 2:17 pm the heaviness finally thinned for good.

I analyzed the timeline to work out roughly how fast his body was clearing barley grass aldehydes:

Looks like around 0.03g/min.

“Since I was focused on the initial mixing step, I didn’t track the first few trials carefully enough,” Hamilton admitted. “For the next trial, I tried to limit the number of differences to the ALDH diet.”

At 9:45am, he took THH 254mg. Then at 10:30, LSA 180mg. By 11:30, he was feeling mild nausea and anxiety, but “Maybe it was psychosomotic?” he said. He took 1.51g barley grass and ate lunch at 11:52. Kykeon peaked around 1:08 and he took another 1.5g barley grass at 1:15. By 2:30, kykeon was fading.

I analyzed the timeline and found that the aldehydes diet helped, but only modestly.

“The other learning from this trial”, Hamilton continued, “was that I took barley grass way too late. The whole experience was haunted by ergine, which cancelled out some of the kykeon feeling.”

“Anyway,” Hamilton said. “We’re square now: the 5-MeO story.”

Click. The phone went dead.