What in the World is Kykeon?

Plus, two recipes to try yourself.

Hello, wonderful witches!

So very sorry for the delay getting today’s issue to all of you. I’m one of the very lucky 30 percent that got rebound Covid symptoms after taking the antivirals, so my brain is still a little mushy. But here we are, late and ready to go! Today’s issue is about kykeon, a potion associated with Demeter and Circe. You can try making your own with the two included recipes.

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Featured Excerpt: Mayo & Menstruation

Excerpted from Smart Mouth, a fabulously fun food culture newsletter.

Did you know that in France, there’s an old superstition that menstruation affects mayonnaise? In Smart Mouth, Emily Monaco writes: “French people, by and large, do not balk at the idea of making mayonnaise from scratch, with nothing more than a fork and a bit of patience. But once a month, some women will pass the fourchette to someone else: A pervasive myth in France claims that someone who's menstruating is doomed to have her mayo split.” Read more about it by clicking below!

Mayo & Menstruation

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What in the World is Kykeon?

By Siobhan Ball

Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash

Kykeon was a staple of the ancient Greek world. Found everywhere, from bronze age farmhouses to the opening ceremonies of mystery cults, this substance took many forms, featuring herbs, wine, water, and even cheese. The key ingredient that made kykeon kykeon was barley flour, boiled for hours to create a thick liquid that gave the potion its fortifying properties. Seen as a comforting and nourishing drink, it also took on religious or mystical properties in certain contexts, the exact purpose of which is still hotly debated by classicists and archeologists now.

The iconic form of Kykeon is found in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, an accounting of the myth of Persephone’s kidnap to the underworld and her mother’s grief and rage-filled search for her that plunged the world into endless winter. Though Kykeon is usually translated as “drink” in English texts (though a more literal translation would be “mixed together”), translations of the hymn retain the Greek term for it instead, using Kykeon as a proper noun for the specific type of Kykeon drunk by Demeter rather than a broader category. 

Demeter’s Kykeon was very simple, with low-cost, easily accessible ingredients. Viewed as a peasant’s drink, this was probably something farm laborers and other working people regularly consumed. Boiling barley or barley flour produces the old-fashioned but still familiar barley water, a drink that’s both high in calories but which also releases its energy slowly; refreshing and hydrating the drinkers while providing them with an energy boost that would keep going for hours. Pennyroyal, too, as well as other forms of mint that are commonly infused into teas around the mediterranean, has both stimulant and calming properties, making it appealing to a workforce without access to caffeine.

It should be noted that while pennyroyal may sound innocuous based on its usage here, it is also an incredibly dangerous herb. Capable of causing liver and kidney damage, and even mass organ failure, it’s also an abortifacient, and one that was commonly used (often under the euphemism of “bringing on menses” or similar) despite its frequently fatal results throughout history. As dangerous as consuming high doses of pennyroyal is, pregnancy and childbirth could be as or even more dangerous in the past, especially for an unmarried woman or one who’d carried multiple pregnancies before. In Ancient Greece, where sexually transgressive women were cast out or killed by their families, and unwanted babies left exposed to the elements to die or be picked up by slave traders, the significant chance of an ugly death still seemed more than worth the risk for many.

This may be the actual reason it turns up in the recipe described in the Homeric Hymn, though of course peasant women may also have chosen to use it as part of an everyday recipe in an attempt to take control of their own fertility. Demeter and Persephone, as goddesses of the agrarian life cycle, and fertility and death respectively, were heavily associated with plants used by women for those purposes. For the goddess of fertility to drink an abortifacient as she imposes barrenness on the land, killing off the germinating seeds before they could sprout, is potently symbolic. As is its consumption during the Eleusinian Mysteries, a cult dedicated to the goddesses and their companions, whose rituals followed the route Persephone took, into the underworld and back out again. Initiates would drink this Kykeon before entering the underworld, a place of infertility that was antithetical to life. Perhaps consuming it was a symbolic adoption of Persephone’s own transition from young corn goddess to queen of the dead, from the embodiment of generative forces to ruler of their absence. Equally it could have been in reference to Demeter, and her own journey on the surface running parallel to her daughter’s. Our knowledge of the mysteries and their rituals are fragmented due to the penalty of death for anyone who exposed them but these possibilities make as much sense as any.

Another form of kykeon, seen as suitable for warriors and the aristocracy, made use of much richer ingredients. We see it in the Iliad where Nestor brings a wounded comrade back to his tents, and has the woman he’s enslaved mix it up for them. Featuring goat’s cheese, honey, wine, and herbs, along with the essential barley flour, this was a substance designed to comfort and nourish, easy to consume and filled with fats, protein, and the numbing effects of wine. It was also, like the peasant’s kykeon consumed by Demeter, capable of being subverted for ritual and magic.

“She brought them in and made them sit on chairs and seats, and made for them a potion of cheese and barley meal and yellow honey with Pramnian wine; but in the food she mixed baneful drugs, that they might utterly forget their native land. Now when she had given them the potion, and they had drunk it off, then she presently smote them with her wand, and penned them in the sties. And they had the heads, and voice, and bristles, and shape of swine, but their minds remained unchanged even as before. So they were penned there weeping, and before them Circe flung mast and acorns, and the fruit of the cornel tree, to eat, such things as wallowing swine are wont to feed upon.” —Odyssey, Book 10

Circe—witch, goddess, and ruler of the island of Aeaea—dealt with trespassers on her shores through the application of poisoned kykeon. Luring them in with the promise of guest rite (the food, shelter, and entertainment all Greeks owed travelers passing through their lands), she included magical herbs in the kykeon she served up, completing their transformation into animals with the tap of her wand. In the case of Odysseus’ companions, she chose pigs, and her enclosure of them in a stye suggests she had yet more sinister plans for them to come. Other travelers became wolves and lions, and while Odysseus, with the help of Hermes, was able to outwit her and come to an accord that freed his men, her other victims weren’t so lucky.

Historians analyzing the Odyssey suspect that the drugs included in Circe’s version of Kykeon were either derived from Datura, which can be used to make people suggestive and compliant, or some other variety of hallucinogen. The ancient Greeks had access to a wide variety of hallucinogens ranging from belladonna to ergot fungus, and made frequent use of them both recreationally and during religious rituals—including perhaps the Eleusinian Mysteries, where the Kykeon may have been spiked with more than just pennyroyal.

After consuming the Kykeon, adherents would retreat to the Telesterion where they would have intense, visionary experiences—and though some have suggested the pennyroyal itself may have caused this, others believe that the addition of ergot, intentional or not, was responsible. There’s some evidence that the ritual Kykeon consumed during the Mysteries not only contained ergot, but that it was entirely deliberate. A 5th-century vase painting depicts Demeter holding an ergot contaminated wheat sheaf, and a container with traces of ergot inside it was found inside one of Persephone’s shrines. There’s also the argument that the Eleusinian Mysteries’ symbol of the wheat sheaf, and Demeter’s connection with the color purple (the same color as the fungus), both indicate the centrality of ergot use in the cult, but those are more circumstantial. As goddesses of the harvest, agriculture, and vegetal abundance, wheat was central to the worship of both, granting them their epithets of corn maiden and corn mother respectively. Regardless of whether it was intentionally consumed or the result of accidental contamination of the barley flour, ergot does seem the most likely explanation for the type of altered state the cultists experienced.

I’ve been interested in recreating the two types of Kykeon, minus the hallucinogens and poisons, since first reading about them as a teenager. While these will not be exactly the same (for fairly obvious reasons) as that consumed by cultists and divinities, I hope it provides some sense of what it was like as a sensory experience before the mind-altering substances kick in. Though modified, perhaps significantly with it’s lack of ergot (and I cannot stress enough, as with pennyroyal, that this is something you should not be consuming), I think making and drinking this version of Demeter’s Kykeon could provide a wonderful meditative devotional experience, an in-home version of following her path in the Mysteries.

Demeter’s Kykeon

Ingredients:

• Barley flour

• Water

• Mint

To make this traditionally, you would need to roast whole barley and then pound the grains into a flour yourself with a mortar and pestle. However, in addition to being time consuming, this isn’t something my joints are capable of withstanding—so I cheated somewhat and purchased ready-made barley flour instead. I happen to think substitutions in ritual and kitchen magic, so long as they’re appropriate substitutions, are perfectly acceptable. But, if you do want to start at the beginning of the process, you can roast the barley by toasting it in a pan for five to ten minutes.

Once you have the flour, store-bought or homemade, boil it in roughly ten parts of water to the amount of barley. If using the coarser, home-pounded flour, it needs to boil for at least two hours. It only takes about half an hour if using the finer store-bought variety. Make sure to stir continuously while cooking it to keep it from burning or sticking. Once ready, add the mint in similar quantities to the amount you’d use if making mint tea, and then wait until it’s cool enough to serve.

Circe’s Kykeon

Ingredients:

• Barley flour

• Dry red wine

• Firm goat’s cheese

• Honey

Prepare the barley as above and then mix the liquid with the wine in a ratio of two parts barley water and one part wine. Grate the goat’s cheese over the top, stirring it in so that it melts into the hot wine and water mix, before finally adding honey to sweeten the brew.

Siobhan is a journalist, medieval historian and jeweler who lives in Scotland with her wife, their cat, and too many plants. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @SiobhanFedelm.

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