Gbekli Tepe: The Dawn of Civilization

[Gaugamela]

14. There is a fascinating, if highly speculative, book on this:

The Immortality Key, by Brian Muraresku. https://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Key-Uncovering-History-Religion/dp/1250207142/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1652225063&sr=8-1

He speculates that the kukeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and the soma of Indian texts, contained some kind of psychoactive ingredient (following the Wasson-Ruck theory). Ergot was one obvious possibility, but the stuff can be extremely dangerous. He further speculates that Anatolian "graveyard beer" might be the antecedent to both the kukeon and soma, and that in the very early years of Christianity something along this line was used in the eucharist, until the church put a stop to it. Women were in charge of mixing these concoctions, and these women were the forebears of the "witches" of the Middle Ages. The church couldn't compete with their psychedelic entheogens, and so persecuted them.

I don't think Murarseku maintains that these psychedelic concoctions went as far back as Gobekli Tepe. And as I recall, the testing on the substances found at Gobekli Tepe had mixed results, so perhaps it wasn't beer after all, just inadvertent fermentation.