Suppressed knowledge can resurface centuries later when new tools emerge

Evidence

The Eleusinian secret was suppressed and then lost for some sixteen centuries after the rites ceased and Christianity displaced the old cult. Yet in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scholars — pharmacologists, archaeobotanists, classicists — began to recover its likely nature, advancing and testing the hypothesis that the kykeon carried an ergot-derived psychoactive, and finding chemical traces suggesting ritual use of psychoactive plant compounds in the ancient Mediterranean. Knowledge that had gone wholly underground resurfaced, reconstructed by new methods, long after everyone who had known it firsthand was dust. — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 1694

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ergot-psychedelic kykeon hypothesis is controversial — worth chasing the actual evidence before repeating it as fact.
• XREF: Connects to the Red Book and Methuselah passages: suppression and concealment as preservation until conditions allow recovery. — connects to: Obvious applications of a technology can wait centuries to be discovered — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 707; A history of wealth displacement challenges quantitative economic knowledge. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 148; Technological mastery of iron separated thriving from perished civilisations (+2 more)