The ancient Cretan word oinos was a generic word for any intoxicant. Often, in the Crete of 1500 BC or the Greece of 400 BC, it was what the Romans called trimma, wine spiked with powerful entheogenic herbs.  This was drunk from a Kalyx, a 'flower-cup.'  Any entheogenic brew, fermented or not, was called oinos.   Oinomaos, below, the Kouros, the Eniautos Daimon, arises from his tripod cauldron of oinos.

"The eniautos is not a whole circle or period but just the point at which the revolution is completed, the end of the old etos, the beginning of the new....the cardinal turning point of the year... Such a day to ancient thinking must be marked out by rites de passage, for the issues were perilous."

  "Such rites de passage are those of Closing and Opening, of Going to sleep and Waking up again, of Death and Resurrection, of killing or carrying out the Old Year and bringing in the New. To such rites it was natural, nay, necessary, to summon the Kouros."

Herakles, 'Glory of Hera,' was Oinomaos, the Kouros.   "We talk glibly of the 'club' of Herakles as his 'characteristic attribute' and thereby miss the real point. The 'club' of Herakles is not to begin with a thing characteristic of Herakles, a hropalon, the rude massive weapon of a half-barbarian hero; it is a magical bough, a klados rent from a living tree."  The Golden Bough of Transformation, brought by Hera, the Transformed Sphinx .  The Kalyx of Duris, below, c.480 BC, depicts the Sphinx as Athena, with her snake-staff, offering Hera-kouros his Kalyx of Oinos.

"In the days of the old month-year the goddess herself was a snake. When she took human form the snake became her 'attribute'; it was the 'symbol of wisdom.'"  The transformed mother of medicine, whose plants carry the bite of the serpent, presented the pharmakos with his pharmakon.

"The snake among the Greeks was full of mana, was intensely sacred, not because as food he supported life, but because he is himself a life-daimon, a spirit of generation, even of immortality. But - and this is all-important - it is immortality of quite a peculiar kind. The individual members of the group of the Cecropidae [Athenian high-priests] die, man after man, generation after generation; Cecrops, who never lived at all, lives for ever, as a snake. He is the daimon genus, the spirit, the genius of the race, he stands...for the perennial renewal of life through death, for Reincarnation, for paliggenesia...'birth back again'....a belief in reincarnation is characteristic of totemistic peoples."

Tripod cauldrons, like the one out of which the Kouros arises, were often depicted with snakes arising in his stead.  Many sacramental vases have molded snakes drinking from the mouth.  Their Oinos took one to the realm of Persephone, Lethe.  "To consult an oracle you need a rite de passage just as much as to be made a member of a tribe. To know is to be in touch with mana, not to be entheos, for the theos is not yet formulated and projected, but to be sanctified, to pass inside the region of tabu; hence the preliminary purification. Lethe is but an attenuated Death; Mnemosyne, renewed consciousness, is a new Life."