The Anchor · Historical companion
The feasts of the ancient world, and what they can and cannot tell us about the meal Jesus left.
A scrap of papyrus survives from Oxyrhynchus, a town in Roman Egypt. It is a dinner invitation, written in the second century. “Chaeremon requests your company at dinner at the table of the lord Sarapis in the serapeum.” The invitation goes on to name the day and hour. Someone expected someone else to come and eat. Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 110; the invitation in a study of ancient meals.
Sarapis was a god, and the dinner was to be held in his sanctuary. The note has the familiar form of an invitation between friends. That is the first thing to understand about the world in which the followers of Jesus began to break bread. Sacred meals belonged to ordinary social life. A neighbor might ask you to one this week.
This particular invitation was written after Paul. His own letters show that he knew the kind of situation it represents. Writing to Corinth in the 50s, he pictures a believer who can be seen sitting “at meat in the idol’s temple.” He also considers an invitation from an unbeliever to a meal. And he calls the Christian meal “the Lord’s table.” The invitation and the letter use different Greek words for the banquet and the table, but both speak a familiar language of dining in a lord’s honor. 1 Corinthians 8:10; 10:21, 27.
So the question this companion asks is an old one. If the ancient world was full of sacred tables, was the table of Jesus one more of them? Readers meet this question today in books, in documentaries, and in arguments online, usually with Dionysus, Eleusis, or Mithras named as the source. It deserves a careful answer, and the answer has three parts. The likenesses are real. The evidence considered here does not establish that the Christian meal was derived from any of these rites. And for Second Humanity, the decisive question is what this meal asks of those who eat it.
A word on method, said once. Where we report what a text says or what historians have found, we give the source. When we say “we read” or “we hold,” that is Second Humanity’s own interpretation. Resemblance alone does not establish a line of borrowing; establishing a historical influence would not, by itself, settle whether a religious claim is true. This companion examines the surrounding world. The Life We Share takes up the bread and cup themselves.
In brief. In the Roman world, clubs, households, and temples gathered for meals in honor of a god. Early Christian assemblies shared recognizable features with these associations. Dionysian and Eleusinian traditions were old and serious forms of religious life, offering belonging and, in some rites, hope beyond death. Jewish texts record encounters with Dionysian worship, including memories of coercion. The parallels with Jesus invite comparison, but they do not establish that his meal was copied. A chemical experiment published in 2026 strengthens the plausibility of one proposed ingredient in the Eleusinian drink; ancient use and transmission to Christianity remain separate, unproven claims. Mithraic meals drew explicit comparison from early Christian writers, although the surviving evidence does not establish borrowing in either direction. The table of Jesus belongs to this shared world while making its own claim upon those who gather there.
A world already gathering
In Athens, in the year 164 or 165, a club devoted to Dionysus had its rules carved on a stone column. The members called themselves the Iobacchoi. The stone still exists, and it reads like the bylaws of a society that has had trouble at its dinners.
A new member whose father was not already a member paid fifty denarii and offered a libation. Members contributed monthly wine dues. Nonpayment could exclude them from a gathering, but the priests could make exceptions and admit a member anyway. Anyone who insulted or abused another member faced a fine paid into the common treasury. There were officers: a priest, a chief bacchant, a president. Men called “horses” removed those who refused to leave after causing a disturbance. When a member died, the club provided a wreath and wine for those who attended the funeral. The rule of the Iobacchoi, translated by Philip Harland and John Kloppenborg.
The stone was cut more than a century after Paul, so it is not a description of the Corinthian assembly he knew. It gives us a detailed example of an ancient religious association. People sought membership, paid dues, shared wine in a god’s honor, kept order, and marked one another’s deaths. Associations of different kinds flourished in Greek and Roman cities, gathering around a god, a trade, or a household.
They had a long history. An inscription from Miletus, dated 276 or 275 BCE, regulates a Dionysian cult and its societies. They could be large. The Agrippinilla inscription, from around 160–170 CE, lists some four hundred initiates associated with a wealthy Roman household, including enslaved and freed people, arranged in an elaborate hierarchy. And they could frighten the authorities. In 186 BCE the Roman senate severely restricted Bacchic gatherings, including a ban on groups of more than five observing the rites without permission. The Miletus regulations; the Agrippinilla inscription; the senate’s decree.
The first churches had features their neighbors could recognize: gatherings in houses, a common meal, contributions, and care for members. When the governor Pliny investigated Christians in Asia Minor around the year 112, he reported their account of meeting before dawn to sing to Christ and later gathering for ordinary, harmless food. They told him they had stopped the latter practice after his prohibition of associations. His investigation also concerned their refusal to abandon the Christian name and worship the Roman gods; it was more than an inquiry into a dinner club. Pliny, Letters 10.96–97.
The meal Jesus left was kept in a world that already knew what a sacred meal was. The question is how to understand its particular place within that world.
What the mysteries offered
Around the end of the fourth century BCE, a woman was buried at Pelinna in northern Greece with two thin leaves of gold laid on her chest, cut in the shape of ivy. They carry words about death, new birth, and release by Bacchios, a name of Dionysus. One begins: “Now you died and now you were born.” The dead woman is told to speak to Persephone of the release the Bacchic god has given her. Charles Segal on the Pelinna tablets.
A reader who knows Paul’s language of dying and rising will feel how near those words come. They were written centuries before him. The mysteries were serious religious practices. Two traditions matter especially here, but they were different things, and no single rite can stand for all.
Eleusis lay a day’s walk from Athens. Across many centuries people went there to be initiated into the rites of Demeter and her daughter Persephone: a mother’s loss, a daughter’s return, and the grain that comes back each year. Participation extended beyond Athenian male citizens to women, enslaved people, and people from other communities. The public festival and procession were visible; the central rites were guarded. Enough traces survive to identify parts of the observance, but not to reconstruct the initiates’ experience with confidence. Cicero, himself an initiate, associated the mysteries with a more humane life and a better hope in dying. Kiki Karoglou, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Cicero, On the Laws 2.36.
Dionysus was the god of wine, of theater, and of a joy that overflows ordinary limits. His worship took many forms, from the orderly club of the Iobacchoi to the mountain dances represented in Euripides’ play The Bacchae. In that play the seer Teiresias praises wine as relief from human sorrow and presents the god’s gift as the means through which people pour offerings to other gods. The literary scene and the club’s inscription reveal different aspects of a varied religious world. Euripides, The Bacchae.
People brought to these traditions grief, fear of death, hopes for belonging, and gratitude for life. People brought such things to Jesus too. Recognizing that shared human need allows us to take the comparison seriously. It does not require us to make the answers identical.
Jewish life within that wider world
Borrowing requires contact. Between Jews and Dionysian worship, contact is certain. Some Jewish texts remember it as coercion.
Around 167 BCE the Seleucid king Antiochus IV attempted to suppress Jewish practice. The Second Book of Maccabees remembers one humiliation: “when the feast of Bacchus was kept, the Jews were compelled to go in procession to Bacchus, carrying ivy.” The Third Book of Maccabees, a later literary narrative set in Egypt, describes a royal decree that Jews be registered, reduced to the status of slaves, and branded with Dionysus’s ivy-leaf emblem. Its account is not a straightforward record of the events it narrates. It does show how Dionysian symbolism could figure in Jewish stories about threatened identity and forced submission. 2 Maccabees 6:7; 3 Maccabees 2:28–30, Revised Standard Version.
Dionysus was also a neighbor. Scythopolis, modern Beth Shean, lay near Galilee and belonged to the Greek cities of the Decapolis. Pliny the Elder reports that it had been called Nysa, connecting the name with the nurse of Dionysus. Later coins and dedications attest the god’s importance to the city. Such evidence places Dionysian worship in the wider world around Galilee; it does not tell us what Jesus or any particular disciple personally knew about its rites. Ovadiah and Mucznik, “Dionysos in the Decapolis”.
Outsiders sometimes identified the two worships. A speaker in Plutarch argues that the God of the Jews is Dionysus, pointing to the branches and festivities of the Feast of Tabernacles. Tacitus reports a similar association, including the golden vine in the Temple, and rejects it. These authors show us ancient attempts to interpret one people’s worship through another’s categories. They do not give us a neutral account of what Jews themselves believed. Plutarch, Table Talk 4.6; Tacitus, Histories 5.5.
Galilee was not sealed off from the Greek world, and Jewish life within that world was diverse. At the same time, Israel had a vine of its own. The psalms and prophets call Israel the vine God planted. When Jesus says in John, “I am the true vine,” those Scriptures supply a direct context for the image. A reader familiar with Dionysus might also hear a comparison or a challenge. Those possibilities can be examined together without treating either cultural contact or Jewish identity as a verdict delivered in advance. John 15:1–5; Psalm 80:8–15; Isaiah 5:1–7.
What the Dionysian parallels can tell us
Five likenesses between Dionysus and Jesus recur in this discussion. Each deserves to be considered at the level of the evidence: an image, a literary echo, a ritual practice, or an established line of transmission.
Water into wine. At Cana, in John’s Gospel, Jesus turns the water in six large stone jars into wine. Dionysian wine wonders were known before the Gospels. In Euripides, wine flows from the earth among the god’s other gifts. Diodorus, writing in the first century BCE, reports that a fountain of wine appeared at Teos. Pliny describes a spring on Andros said to taste of wine during the god’s festival. Pausanias later recounts empty jars at Elis found full of wine after the building containing them had been sealed; he distinguishes what local people told him from what he witnessed. The resemblance is worth noticing. John 2:1–11; Diodorus 3.66; Pliny, Natural History 2.231; Pausanias 6.26.
Israel’s prophets also imagined God’s coming abundance through wine: a feast “of wines on the lees,” a day when “the mountains shall drop sweet wine.” These texts give readers a substantial Jewish setting for Cana. Dionysian stories belong in the comparison, especially when asking how the Gospel might have sounded to readers across the Mediterranean. The shared wonder does not, on its own, establish which story or tradition shaped John’s telling. Isaiah 25:6; Amos 9:13; Joel 3:18.
A god unrecognized. In The Bacchae, Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman. He comes to his own city in human form, is resisted, and is arrested and questioned by its king. Readers of the Gospels can recognize points of contact. One phrase is shared: the warning against kicking at the goads, or, in the King James wording of Acts, “kick against the pricks.” It was a Greek proverb, not an expression confined to this one play. Courtney Friesen has examined the ways Greek, Jewish, and Christian writers engaged with The Bacchae and its god. Such work asks how authors used a recognizable literary world. A proposed literary echo needs to be weighed in its particular passage; it is not, by itself, an explanation of the origin of Jesus or his movement. Acts 26:14; Friesen, Reading Dionysus.
A god who dies and returns. Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, lists what pagans said of Dionysus: son of Zeus, discoverer of the vine, torn apart, and ascended to heaven. He acknowledges points of resemblance and explains them through a theory of demons imitating prophecy. Accounts of Dionysus’s dismemberment and restoration were already known before the Gospels; Diodorus preserves one such account. The fuller story often repeated today, in which humanity rises from the Titans’ ashes carrying an inherited guilt, raises a different question. Radcliffe Edmonds challenges the construction of this as a single ancient “Zagreus myth,” assembled by modern interpreters from scattered evidence. Other scholars defend older connections among the traditions. We should distinguish the ancient attestations from a modern reconstruction that joins them all into one system. Justin, First Apology 54; Diodorus 3.62; Edmonds, “Recycling Laertes’ Shroud”.
The comparison remains meaningful, but the stories have different settings. The Dionysian accounts locate divine events in the legendary past. The earliest Christian proclamation concerns the recent execution of Jesus and the conviction that God raised him. His death belonged to the living memory of the people making that proclamation. That difference describes the claims being made; it does not ask a date alone to decide which religious claim is true.
Eating the god. This bears on a difficult question: the relationship between a sacred meal and the deity honored there. Euripides’ chorus sings of raw flesh, and the Miletus inscription regulates a rite involving raw meat. The interpretation that worshippers were therefore eating Dionysus himself requires a further step. The texts cited here do not establish it. Their evidence cannot simply be transferred to the words spoken over Jesus’s cup. A comparison must show what a practice meant to its participants, as far as that can be recovered, as well as identify a similar action.
The cup itself. Wine was sacred to Dionysus, and wine is in the cup Jesus shares. Wine also belonged to Jewish meals, offerings, and prophetic hopes. A material can carry more than one meaning within the same world. Its presence gives us a question to investigate, not an answer about descent.
The five comparisons reveal a world of shared images, recognizable stories, and religious possibilities. They are not all the same kind of resemblance, and they should not be forced into one explanation. Nothing in the evidence considered here establishes a direct derivation of the Christian meal from Dionysian rites. That conclusion leaves room for further work on particular literary echoes and cultural exchanges.
Eleusis and the question of the drink
One modern proposal needs its own answer. It suggests that the Eleusinian mysteries worked through a mind-altering drink and that the first Christians inherited a similar sacrament.
The drink is real. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the grieving goddess refuses wine and asks for kykeon, a mixture of barley, water, and pennyroyal. Ancient testimony associates drinking kykeon with initiation at Eleusis. The hymn calls blessed those who have seen the rites and distinguishes their lot after death from that of the uninitiated. It establishes a hope attached to participation; it does not give us a complete account of what the initiate experienced. Homeric Hymn to Demeter, lines 205–210 and 480–482.
In 1978, in The Road to Eleusis, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck proposed that ergot, a fungus that grows on grain, made the kykeon psychoactive. One central difficulty was ergot’s toxicity. In February 2026, Romanos Antonopoulos, Evangelos Dadiotis, and colleagues, including Prokopios Magiatis and Ruck, reported a chemical experiment in Scientific Reports. Under selected laboratory conditions, treatment with a preparation made from wood ash converted certain toxic ergot compounds into lysergic acid amides, compounds with psychoactive potential. Antonopoulos and colleagues, Scientific Reports, 2026.
That result strengthens the chemical plausibility of the hypothesis. It does not demonstrate that the preparation was used at Eleusis or establish its safety for people. The authors themselves call for further pharmacological and toxicological evaluation. They also acknowledge the absence of confirmed ergot residues in vessels from Eleusis and the lack of systematic investigation there. The missing evidence leaves ancient use unconfirmed; it does not prove that ergot was absent.
Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key carries the inquiry further, toward a psychedelic sacrament among the first Christians. Charles Stang, of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, has hosted and critically examined that inquiry. He regards the older Eleusinian proposal as plausible but unverified. For the proposed early Christian sacrament, he writes, “there’s no evidence for that. None.” A possible ingredient, a demonstrated ancient practice, and a line of transmission to Christianity are three separate claims. Each requires evidence of its own. Stang’s assessment.
One saying travels with this theory: “If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.” Muraresku reports it from a plaque at a monastery on Mount Athos. In his account, it belongs to a Christian monastic setting; an ancient date is not established. The plaque cannot serve as an ancient source for what initiates at Eleusis were taught. Muraresku in conversation with Stang.
The Gospels give the question of life and eating a different center. In John, Jesus speaks in startling terms of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and of the life received through him. Christian traditions differ over how that chapter relates to the Eucharist, but its language cannot simply be set aside. Nor should Paul’s language of participation in Christ’s body and blood be reduced to a reminder to behave well. These are substantial religious claims. John 6:35–63; 1 Corinthians 10:16–17.
Those texts give us no basis for locating new life in a concealed psychoactive ingredient. The one offered is Jesus himself. In Mark, he calls people to follow him and says, “whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.” The meaning of the cup belongs within that life of receiving, following, and giving oneself. A chemical hypothesis cannot settle what he meant or what discipleship asks. Mark 8:34–35.
Mithras and the bread and cup
An especially explicit ancient comparison with the Christian bread and cup concerns Mithras. Early Christian writers themselves put it on record.
Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century, describes the Christian meal to a Roman audience and then complains that demons have imitated it in the mysteries of Mithras. He reports bread and a cup of water presented with ritual words to an initiate. About fifty years later, Tertullian also mentions an offering of bread in the Mithraic rites. These are Christian witnesses interpreting a rival tradition, a fact we need to keep alongside their testimony. Justin, First Apology 66; Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 40.
Notice what they do. They recognize the resemblance, name it publicly, and offer an explanation for it. Their explanation is not proof of the direction in which a practice traveled. Their testimony does establish that comparison was part of the ancient discussion itself.
Worshippers of Mithras met in small, cave-like rooms with raised platforms along the walls. Roger Beck describes the cult meal as a central activity: initiates reclined opposite one another, imitating the feast of Mithras and the Sun. The surviving evidence indicates male membership. This was a meal within an initiatory community, accompanied by a distinctive sacred story and setting. Roger Beck, “Mithraism,” Encyclopaedia Iranica.
The surviving dates limit what we can claim about borrowing. In his review of the earliest evidence, Aleš Chalupa places it around 75–125 CE, after Paul’s letter to Corinth and the supper tradition Paul says he had received. This dates the evidence we have; it does not establish the first moment anyone practiced the rite. Plutarch, writing later, attributes mysteries of Mithras to pirates defeated in the 60s BCE. Whether those rites were a prototype of the Roman mysteries remains uncertain, and his report does not describe a bread-and-cup meal. Chalupa, “The origins of the Roman cult of Mithras”; Plutarch, Life of Pompey 24.
On this evidence, a Mithraic source for the Christian meal has not been demonstrated. Neither has Justin’s counterclaim that the Mithraic rite imitated Christianity. We can acknowledge the resemblance without claiming to know its genealogy.
What comparison can and cannot show
Paul made the comparison himself. Writing to Corinth, he sets the Christian meal beside the temple meals his readers knew and reasons from participation in each. “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” Then: “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of devils.” 1 Corinthians 10:16–21.
His argument assumes that sacred eating joins people to what they honor and to those with whom they eat. He also invokes Israel’s sacrificial meals. These are comparable acts of participation, and that is why, for Paul, the allegiance they express matters. Some Corinthians evidently disagreed about what their meals involved; the letter is an intervention in that dispute. The earliest surviving Christian discussion already places the Lord’s table in relation to the other tables around it.
In Drudgery Divine, Jonathan Z. Smith showed how apologetic interests had shaped comparisons between early Christianities and ancient religions. His critique asks us to attend to the scholar making the comparison: which features have been selected, for what purpose, and which differences have been allowed to count? Resemblance is not an argument that explains itself. For this inquiry, it gives us a starting point. A claim that one practice descends from another requires additional evidence. Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine.
Three features help locate the Christian meal within its setting. None has to establish that everything about it was unprecedented.
It remembered a recent death. The narratives of Demeter and Dionysus concern the legendary past. Paul’s meal proclaims “the Lord’s death,” an execution within living memory. The people keeping it understood themselves to be remembering Jesus, whose life had intersected with the lives of some who still belonged to the movement. 1 Corinthians 11:23–26; 15:3–8.
Its language draws directly on Israel’s Scriptures. Mark’s words over the cup recall the covenant blood in Exodus; Paul’s “new testament,” or covenant, recalls Jeremiah. The Synoptic Gospels place the last meal at Passover. John presents a different chronology, with the Passover meal still ahead during Jesus’s trial, and Paul’s supper account does not explicitly name Passover. These distinctions matter, but they leave the Jewish scriptural setting of the meal’s language in clear view. Mark 14:12–25; Exodus 24:8; Jeremiah 31:31–34; John 18:28.
And it demanded an exclusive allegiance. In the wider religious world, participation in one cult did not generally prevent honoring other gods. Paul insists that participation in Christ cannot be combined with the rival sacred tables he addresses. That demand continues Israel’s rejection of idolatry. It is one important difference within a world where joining another association need not mean leaving the rest behind.
History can clarify those settings and claims. It cannot decide their truth simply by counting resemblances. The meal does not need to be without parallel in order to be what Christians hold it to be, and discovering its neighbors does not make it a copy of them.
What this means for the table of Jesus
What, then, does this history have to do with what the Master taught, and with us?
First, we do not need to be afraid of comparison. Justin explained some likenesses through demonic imitation. We do not take resemblance itself as evidence of that explanation. We read these ancient traditions as witnesses to human longing for joy, belonging, and a life death does not end. Taking those longings seriously is compatible with making a definite confession of our own.
Acts offers one example of engagement without indifference. It presents Paul in Athens drawing on an altar and the city’s poets: “as certain also of your own poets have said.” He uses recognizable words to announce the God he believes they do not yet know. He also challenges their images, calls for repentance, and proclaims judgment and resurrection. The speech makes contact while asking for a changed allegiance. For Second Humanity, that is permission to listen closely to a neighbor without pretending that all our claims are the same. Acts 17:22–31.
Second, the public character of Jesus’s teaching matters. Questioned in John’s account of his trial, he says, “I spake openly to the world,” and points to the synagogue and Temple where people heard him. His interrogators can question those witnesses. The scene presents teaching that can be heard and examined in public. John 18:19–21.
That emphasis should not be made into a simple opposition between an entirely secret pagan world and an entirely unrestricted Christian one. Eleusis had a public festival as well as guarded rites. The Gospels include private teaching: Mark says Jesus explained his parables to his disciples apart from the crowd. Early Christian meals also had boundaries. The Didache restricts its Eucharistic meal to the baptized, and Justin describes participation as belonging to those who believe, have been baptized, and live according to Christ’s teaching. Mark 4:10–12, 33–34; Didache 9; Justin, First Apology 66.
The New Testament can itself speak of a “mystery.” In Romans, Paul describes something long kept secret and now made known among the nations. For our purposes, the important emphasis is that proclamation: the message is offered to be heard, answered, and lived. This differs from treating recovery of a lost initiatory secret as the necessary key to Jesus. Romans 16:25–26.
Third, the modern hunger behind the Eleusis question deserves respect. Many people, tired of a faith that seems to be only words, are looking for an experience that will change them. Interest in the ancient drink can belong to that search. The teaching of Jesus gives experience a demanding direction: receiving life from God, following him, and bearing fruit in the way we live. Born from Above: What New Life Asks of Us explores that life. An account of a powerful experience still leaves the question of what follows when a person returns to other people.
And fourth, a meal takes its meaning from its host. The Iobacchoi regulated membership, dues, and admission, with exceptions their priests could grant. Paul addresses a different failure at Corinth: those who eat well while others go without “shame them that have not.” These texts were written a century apart and serve different purposes. The club’s rule is not evidence that Christians alone cared for poorer members. Paul’s own letter shows Christians failing the standard he sets. What matters for our table is the standard itself: the hungry neighbor cannot be made invisible while the assembly honors its Lord. The Life We Share follows that obligation through. 1 Corinthians 11:20–22.
Go back to the scrap of papyrus. Chaeremon invites someone to dine in honor of the lord Sarapis. Paul speaks of the Lord’s table. Both belong to a world in which eating together could express allegiance and belonging. What we need to understand is who the lord of each table was, what the participants believed they received, and what the gathering asked of them.
Second Humanity receives the table of Jesus through Israel’s Scriptures and the life he gave. We can honor the longings expressed at other ancient tables without making their promises identical. We come to this table because of its host—and the life he asks us to share.
Sources and further reading
Scripture is quoted from the King James Version, and the Second Book of Maccabees from the King James Apocrypha. The Third Book of Maccabees is not in the King James Bible; the linked passage is from the Revised Standard Version.
On associations and their meals: Philip Harland’s collection, Associations in the Greco-Roman World, includes the Iobacchoi, Miletus, and Agrippinilla inscriptions in translation. The Iobacchoi translation is by Harland and John Kloppenborg. Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 110 preserves the invitation to Sarapis’s banquet. Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan preserves an outsider’s investigation of Christian gatherings.
On the mysteries: Kiki Karoglou’s survey for The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Charles Segal’s study of the Pelinna tablets; Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife; Radcliffe Edmonds, “Recycling Laertes’ Shroud: More on Orphism and Original Sin”.
On Dionysus among Jews and Christians: Courtney J. P. Friesen, Reading Dionysus: Euripides’ Bacchae and the Cultural Contestations of Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians (Mohr Siebeck, 2015); Asher Ovadiah and Sonia Mucznik, “Dionysos in the Decapolis”.
On the kykeon: Romanos K. Antonopoulos and colleagues, “Investigating the psychedelic hypothesis of kykeon, the sacred elixir of the Eleusinian Mysteries”, Scientific Reports, February 13, 2026. For distinctions among the ancient evidence, the Eleusinian hypothesis, and proposed transmission to Christianity, see Charles Stang’s assessment.
On Mithras: Roger Beck’s survey in the Encyclopaedia Iranica; Aleš Chalupa, “The origins of the Roman cult of Mithras in the light of new evidence and interpretations: the current state of affairs”, Religio 24.1 (2016), 65–96; Manfred Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras (2000).
On method: Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (University of Chicago Press, 1990).
The contemporary companion, When Faith Feels Mocked: Paris, the Last Supper, and the Way of Jesus, considers the 2024 Olympic ceremony and what a response shaped by Jesus might ask of us.