The eating of deity as flesh and blood is the ritual that characterizes the Christian Mass, although denominational dogma is divided between the real or substantial presence. It is supposedly a commemoration of the Last Supper as recorded in three of the canonical Gospels. The Gospels, however, do not specify that the rite should be repeated, only that the supper will occur again in the otherworld. The disciples after the Crucifixion shared property and ate together, but not the sacramental flesh and blood of deity. The first evidence of a sacred meal is Paul’s First Corinthians about twenty years after the Crucifixion. He reprimands the congregation for doing the rite incorrectly, which is the reason that quite a few of them have sickened and died. He defines the Eucharist of flesh and blood as different from common food and claims that the misuse of it is the reason for its poisonous effect. He then proclaims the Christian Mystery. This is something defined in Mark as stories whose meaning is accessible only to the elite. To Paul’s Corinthian congregation, the immediate referent for Mystery would be the great Eleusinian rite celebrated nearby, where the divine flesh was materialized as the grain of Demeter and the holy blood of sacrifice was the wine of Dionysus. Wine is an intoxicant and the Eleusinian Mystery was a vision accessed via a psychoactive potion of grain. Paul’s reprimand about the toxic Eucharist suggests the recreational abuse of a sacred shamanic drug or entheogen. The earliest evidence for the Eucharist indicates that the psychoactive agent was a mushroom. As such, it was perpetuated as a secret rite in certain monastic orders and monasteries, perhaps even in the catacombs beneath St. Peter’s Basilica.
Carl A. P. Ruck (Mon,) studied this question.