Program Notes
Guest speaker: Christian Räetsch
A talk by Christian Räetsch at the Mayan ruins, Palenque, Mexico – 2001.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:23 ►
I’m Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:27 ►
We’ve got something a little different for you today.
00:00:29 ►
It’s a recording of a talk that Christian Roche gave at the Mayan ruins in Planque, Mexico.
00:00:36 ►
If you go to our website, planquenorte.org, that’s P-A-L-E-N-Q-U-E-N-O-R-T-E dot org.
00:00:45 ►
And click on Christian’s name, you’ll see some pictures that my friend Richard Reset took while Christian was speaking.
00:00:52 ►
Now, if you were ever there for one of Christian’s tours, you’ll remember that this was no ordinary Palenque tour.
00:01:00 ►
You know, Christian wasn’t in for much of the regulation tour guide stuff.
00:01:04 ►
You know, Christian wasn’t in for much of the regulation tour guide stuff.
00:01:09 ►
So if you’re thinking about maybe exploring the Palenque ruins yourself one day,
00:01:12 ►
you might want to load this program on your iPod.
00:01:15 ►
Have your own personal tour guide while you’re there.
00:01:18 ►
Now, just to put this talk in a little better context,
00:01:21 ►
I should mention the Entheobotany conferences,
00:01:27 ►
for those of you who haven’t heard about these now somewhat mythical conferences.
00:01:31 ►
To be honest, once Terence McKenna got sick and stopped attending,
00:01:35 ►
these conferences at Palenque just kind of lost their steam, I think.
00:01:42 ►
But at their zenith, I’ll tell you, these intimate little psychedelic gatherings of a hundred or so people had to at least have personally introduced well over a thousand tribe members to one another
00:01:48 ►
and to some of the leading luminaries of the day.
00:01:52 ►
Psychedelic luminaries, that is.
00:01:54 ►
Anyhow, these conferences were magical and mystical, no doubt about that.
00:01:59 ►
Last time one of them was held was in January of 2001.
00:02:03 ►
One of them was held in January of 2001.
00:02:08 ►
And on Sunday of the first week, I think it was January 14th,
00:02:12 ►
Christian Rasch conducted his next-to-the-last visit to the ruins.
00:02:15 ►
And I shouldn’t say his next-to-the-last visit,
00:02:18 ►
the next-to-the-last visit tour for an Enthio Botany Conference.
00:02:20 ►
How’s that to be more specific?
00:02:24 ►
Anyhow, this recording was made by my friend Matt Palomary,
00:02:25 ►
who’s the author of Land Without Evil, which I highly recommend you read if you haven’t. And he did this on a little
00:02:31 ►
handheld cassette tape recorder, so it isn’t studio quality, but if you’ve ever heard Christiane in
00:02:37 ►
person, you’re going to recognize that this is true Palenque quality. So let’s listen now to
00:02:43 ►
Christiane Roche tell us something about what the Lacandon people know and think about Palenque quality. So let’s listen now to Christian Rasch tell us something about what the Lacandon people know and think
00:02:48 ►
about palenque.
00:02:51 ►
So, okay, I just start.
00:02:55 ►
You can record and photograph me and everything.
00:02:59 ►
I’m totally…
00:03:01 ►
Exhibitionist?
00:03:02 ►
No.
00:03:10 ►
Not yet.
00:03:16 ►
I try to throw joints on a stage when I give it to them.
00:03:22 ►
But I always don’t take them in that moment,
00:03:24 ►
because I never work when I’m stoned. So I’m very sober this
00:03:26 ►
afternoon. Nobody else here can even detect what language that was. Of course.
00:03:54 ►
In the people who really link to this place are still alive.
00:03:56 ►
And some of them you can see out there.
00:04:01 ►
It’s the Lacandon Indians, the ones with the long hair and the white tunic, and if you say hello in their language, you describe the
00:04:12 ►
weather situation. There is no way to say hello. You say, ah, nechagor kin. For example,
00:04:25 ►
Nechagor kin, for example, it’s very hot today.
00:04:28 ►
And that’s very interesting.
00:04:38 ►
Kin is a word that applies to the sun, to the day, and to the diviner.
00:04:46 ►
And the sun is very important in this place.
00:04:49 ►
There is a temple of the sun over there.
00:04:57 ►
And if it’s raining, ah, nay and hap.
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There’s a lot of water.
00:05:06 ►
And so there is no way, like we say, hello, nice to see you.
00:05:11 ►
You can say, it’s very nice that I see you again.
00:05:17 ►
But that’s different from our word.
00:05:29 ►
And so what I want to tell you about is what this little group of Indians, it’s approximately 500, still know and think of this place. I’m not an archaeologist. I don’t go with you around and say, yeah,
00:05:37 ►
you see this temple and this temple and that temple, because that is so totally super boring.
00:05:51 ►
temple, because that is so totally super boring, and it has no meaning at all. The ones who have been here before, Oh, it’s just a few.
00:06:08 ►
Well, for archaeology,
00:06:14 ►
this place was built between the 3rd and the 10th century,
00:06:23 ►
and then it was abandoned, and nobody knows why, and because
00:06:28 ►
it’s so strange that they abandoned such a fantastic, big area, there is a lot of theories
00:06:39 ►
that are put on these ruins and onto this spot.
00:06:47 ►
And nobody knows what is true.
00:06:56 ►
It’s even not known what language the people living and working here did speak.
00:06:57 ►
We don’t know.
00:07:02 ►
There is, some people think it’s the Choll language language that is the main spoken language by
00:07:06 ►
the native people living around
00:07:07 ►
here now.
00:07:12 ►
You asked a question,
00:07:14 ►
is it between the third and the tenth century?
00:07:16 ►
Is it before or after? No, after.
00:07:19 ►
Otherwise,
00:07:20 ►
it would be the tenth to the third.
00:07:22 ►
Just for that reason.
00:07:25 ►
So,
00:07:27 ►
you can,
00:07:29 ►
if you look at the temples
00:07:32 ►
and palaces
00:07:33 ►
and whatever they call it,
00:07:36 ►
you can find hieroglyphs.
00:07:38 ►
The Mayan hieroglyphic writing
00:07:40 ►
is supposedly
00:07:44 ►
deciphered.
00:07:49 ►
I doubt it.
00:07:51 ►
Because the so-called experts on deciphering that script
00:07:58 ►
do not speak any Mayan language.
00:08:02 ►
And that is typical in scholarship,
00:08:06 ►
that you don’t know anything.
00:08:10 ►
Unless you do it by yourself.
00:08:13 ►
That refers also to the bio-essay stuff
00:08:16 ►
Jonathan talked about last night.
00:08:18 ►
So, the hieroglyphic writing
00:08:22 ►
may be similar in the way to use as the Chinese use,
00:08:29 ►
because you can use the same writing with different languages.
00:08:35 ►
And I think, from what I learned from the native people I lived with,
00:08:42 ►
that this was a multilingual place
00:08:46 ►
like the village of Palenque is today.
00:08:50 ►
Have you been to downtown?
00:08:52 ►
I mean, to this one road.
00:08:56 ►
You can meet different Mayan-speaking people,
00:09:02 ►
the Chor, they’re living around here,
00:09:05 ►
the Lakandons, they live in the deep jungle.
00:09:08 ►
You can meet people from Yucatan, the real Maya,
00:09:13 ►
the only group who calls themselves Maya.
00:09:16 ►
You can meet Saltal and Satsir.
00:09:19 ►
So it’s at least five different ethnic groups.
00:09:23 ►
And then, of course, you can meet the tourists and the freaks and the hippies and so on
00:09:28 ►
to meet in this area.
00:09:32 ►
And I think that’s pretty much the model for this place,
00:09:37 ►
that this was not a city.
00:09:40 ►
It was a meeting point.
00:09:43 ►
It was a university. It was a meeting point. It was a university.
00:09:45 ►
It was a ritual place.
00:09:49 ►
And it was a healing place.
00:09:52 ►
And that people of different Mayan languages came here for either doing rituals or get healing or get advice by diviners and astrologers and so on. And
00:10:08 ►
the archaeology tells something like that, that it was a big, big thing. And nowadays
00:10:19 ►
all these different ethnic groups use Spanish as the lengua franca.
00:10:31 ►
And I don’t know what they may have used in old times,
00:10:33 ►
but they have to have,
00:10:41 ►
because we have a language group of at least 23 different languages called the Mayan linguistic family.
00:10:51 ►
different languages called the Mayan linguistic family. And then we also have a certain style here, like pyramids and the way the buildings are set up and so, and the artwork that’s
00:11:01 ►
called always Mayan. And if you look at books of archaeology, oh, everything
00:11:08 ►
is Mayan from the north of Yucatan until San Salvador, but that’s an art style. And art
00:11:17 ►
style is not necessarily connected to linguistics and to ethnic groups. Look at European art history.
00:11:26 ►
You have an art style
00:11:27 ►
in every century or so.
00:11:31 ►
And, for example,
00:11:33 ►
Art Nouveau you can find in Germany,
00:11:35 ►
in Czechoslovakia,
00:11:37 ►
in France,
00:11:39 ►
even in Mexico.
00:11:40 ►
And they are totally different,
00:11:41 ►
but the style is very similar.
00:11:45 ►
So from the style, we cannot find out what ethnic group was here.
00:11:53 ►
And so there is a lot of speculation.
00:11:58 ►
And if you read the literature of linguists and of archaeologists,
00:12:06 ►
everything is different.
00:12:09 ►
And every time they dig out another temple,
00:12:12 ►
the whole theory has to change because then they found something else.
00:12:14 ►
And so this is the perfect place to dream up your dream,
00:12:22 ►
what you want to see in it,
00:12:24 ►
what you want to feel in it. What you want to feel in it. How you
00:12:27 ►
want to use it. And I just will go into the Lacandon’s perspective, because to me, it most likely is that they are the people of this place.
00:12:49 ►
And it is because they still come here.
00:12:57 ►
They have a mythology about all the buildings.
00:13:00 ►
They know which temple is dedicated to which god or goddess. Well, they always
00:13:12 ►
think in pairs. There is no virginity and stuff. They always in pairs, in couples, the gods and goddesses, and they have a huge amount of explanation for this
00:13:31 ►
site, and that is so amazing that I want to give you a, first of all, Palenka is the navel of the world. And that’s
00:13:52 ►
why so much magic spreads out. If you have never been here, you will feel at least in
00:14:01 ►
a couple of days. And what I and many other colleagues and friends and
00:14:07 ►
people feel is this is a place where you really get horny. That’s really true. And it’s amazing.
00:14:24 ►
you will feel it in three days at least.
00:14:32 ►
And I think they choose actually this place because there is some kind of magic or energy
00:14:37 ►
or whatever we can tell it.
00:14:40 ►
I have no idea what it is.
00:14:42 ►
I just feel it.
00:14:45 ►
And I really hope you will feel it,
00:14:48 ►
especially if you go by yourself through the place
00:14:51 ►
and absorb whatever it is.
00:14:56 ►
Maybe it’s just imagination.
00:14:58 ►
It’s maybe just fantasy.
00:14:59 ►
Or it’s just the tropical climate.
00:15:02 ►
I don’t know.
00:15:04 ►
And so because we don’t know much of this place,
00:15:11 ►
I mean, the historic story of it
00:15:14 ►
is written in some of the hieroglyphic tables and so.
00:15:21 ►
That is so boring stuff.
00:15:24 ►
It only says, oh, yeah, this and that ruler was
00:15:28 ►
there, and then this and that ruler came, and I mean, nothing about the culture. It’s
00:15:33 ►
total boring shit. And it doesn’t say anything about cosmology or mythology or science and so on. But from smaller findings, we got out of some tombs here and so on, it’s
00:15:55 ►
very clear it was kind of a conscious center. And that is because
00:16:06 ►
this is the place where
00:16:08 ►
the gods were born.
00:16:12 ►
And so, according to
00:16:14 ►
the Lacandon mythology,
00:16:17 ►
right there,
00:16:20 ►
in front of the so-called palace
00:16:23 ►
and in front of the so-called palace and in front of the so-called
00:16:25 ►
temple of inscriptions there
00:16:27 ►
is the place where
00:16:31 ►
the whole thing started.
00:16:36 ►
It was Kha-Kauch,
00:16:40 ►
yet to luck.
00:16:43 ►
That means it was
00:16:44 ►
two howler monkey with his wife. They were just there. yet to luck. That means it was two
00:16:45 ►
howler monkey with his wife.
00:16:48 ►
They were just there
00:16:49 ►
because nobody can explain where
00:16:51 ►
anything comes from.
00:16:53 ►
I mean, they have no
00:16:55 ►
Big Bang Theory and
00:16:56 ►
even if they had, I mean, the Big Bang Theory
00:16:59 ►
is so stupid.
00:17:01 ►
I mean,
00:17:03 ►
where the Big Bang comes from? From some fireworks? So it was this couple.
00:17:14 ►
It was just there, and there was only sand. So they were really bored, and they were sitting
00:17:23 ►
there and thought, oh, maybe we should create something.
00:17:26 ►
And then, just out of nothing, came two plants, and they planted them there. It’s the tuberose,
00:17:34 ►
the night hyacinth. It’s a very beautiful plant with white flowers, and in the evening the flowers pour out the most beautiful perfume.
00:17:47 ►
It’s enchanted.
00:17:50 ►
Has anybody smelled it?
00:17:54 ►
Is that the same as the night-blooming jasmine?
00:17:55 ►
No, no, no, no, no.
00:17:57 ►
The night-blooming jasmine is…
00:17:59 ►
No, it’s a plant you cannot find in the forest.
00:18:07 ►
You only find it with Indians who cultivate it.
00:18:12 ►
And that plant is super sacred for them
00:18:16 ►
because that’s the plant where the gods and goddesses were born from.
00:18:22 ►
So Khak-Aj planted one, and his wife planted one, and then it went into
00:18:31 ►
blossom, and then out, the companions came out.
00:18:47 ►
So they were sitting on the flowers and got bored again.
00:18:55 ►
Three and three.
00:18:57 ►
So they thought, oh, maybe we should mate.
00:19:01 ►
And of course they did.
00:19:02 ►
and of course they did and
00:19:04 ►
well there came some
00:19:07 ►
offspring of some other
00:19:09 ►
gods and so
00:19:10 ►
and
00:19:11 ►
so
00:19:13 ►
they were sitting there oh what should we do
00:19:17 ►
oh why don’t we create the world
00:19:19 ►
maybe you get this in some
00:19:22 ►
acid trips or so
00:19:23 ►
I don’t know.
00:19:26 ►
And then they were thinking, oh, what to do?
00:19:31 ►
They didn’t really want to leave the flower because of this beautiful smell.
00:19:35 ►
And they love this smell so much.
00:19:38 ►
And they are actually nourished by smell.
00:19:43 ►
So then they thought, okay, let’s do something. It’s like four children
00:19:50 ►
thinking of creating some stuff. So they jumped off the flowers into the sand, and suddenly And suddenly there were some little stones, like this.
00:20:07 ►
So one of the gods took the stone, threw it on the sand,
00:20:13 ►
and the stone turned into a mushroom.
00:20:17 ►
And he used more stones and threw it out,
00:20:22 ►
and there were mushrooms on the sand.
00:20:25 ►
But then these mushrooms turned into trees,
00:20:30 ►
and the forest started,
00:20:34 ►
and the earth got not so, how do you say, wet?
00:20:39 ►
I don’t know.
00:20:42 ►
It wasn’t that soft like sand.
00:20:45 ►
It was more firm.
00:20:48 ►
And so this whole jungle started from the mushrooms.
00:20:55 ►
We don’t know what kind of mushroom that was.
00:21:00 ►
It’s just mushroom.
00:21:03 ►
And maybe it was one of the more important ones,
00:21:09 ►
like the fly garrick, which is called kip lum.
00:21:15 ►
That means the light of the earth.
00:21:20 ►
Did you know the fly garrick?
00:21:21 ►
Amanita muscaria.
00:21:22 ►
Amanita muscaria.
00:21:22 ►
You know the fly garg, Amanita muscaria?
00:21:31 ►
And, well, I go into that back when I do my little other thing on smoking.
00:21:38 ►
And so then the gods and goddesses collected clay, and they made little dolls, and they just blew them, like this. You may have seen that in magical
00:21:48 ►
ceremonies or shamanic stuff, that you blew on something. Even in folkloric things in
00:21:57 ►
Europe, if a child has some pain, you blew on them, it goes away, it flies away or so. And then they came alive and people
00:22:13 ►
were created. And there was not a single animal around. But then there was another plant, and I was not able to find the place exactly
00:22:28 ►
where it grew in the very beginning, and that is a night jasmine, Sestrum nocturnum. It’s
00:22:38 ►
a salinaceous plant, a nightshade plant. We even call it nightshade plant. And it also put out some perfume in the night.
00:22:48 ►
And from that tree was the Lord of Death,
00:22:53 ►
born with all his family already.
00:22:58 ►
And so we have two different plant species,
00:23:03 ►
which caused the birth of the gods.
00:23:08 ►
And the lord of death who came out of the blossom of Cestum Nocturnum,
00:23:15 ►
he built his house there.
00:23:17 ►
This one, that pyramid there, is his house.
00:23:22 ►
Uyatoch Kisin is the Lacan-Dome name for it.
00:23:26 ►
Of course, no archaeologist knows of that
00:23:30 ►
because nobody speaks anything else than Spanish or English.
00:23:38 ►
And so he wanted to create people and did,
00:23:49 ►
but the main gods and goddesses saw it and they turned them in shape and so, and then when they came alive, they turned into all the animals living
00:23:56 ►
in the forest, like jaguars and wild cats and tapirs and monkeys and everything.
00:24:07 ►
So he was really pissed.
00:24:09 ►
And then later, that’s a long story,
00:24:11 ►
but later he thought he should cause death to people
00:24:16 ►
because he was so fucked up that his people turned into animals.
00:24:21 ►
Well, we never know. And the gods, when they finished modeling these clay puppets
00:24:31 ►
of human beings, when they washed their hands, the remnants of the clay was still on the
00:24:39 ►
hand. And in getting them off, they created all the shit we have to deal with,
00:24:47 ►
like snakes and tarantulas and mosquitoes and all the bloodsuckers
00:24:55 ►
and, you know, everything which is not so nice to us, ticks and chiggers and so.
00:25:02 ►
Not so nice to us.
00:25:04 ►
Ticks and chiggers and so.
00:25:08 ►
Because when you roll off the clay,
00:25:10 ►
it looks like a little snake and little pieces turn into whatever.
00:25:13 ►
Wasp and so.
00:25:15 ►
So all the poisonous animals
00:25:18 ►
were created by the gods.
00:25:20 ►
And so they thought,
00:25:22 ►
oh shit, what did we do to our people? So then they caught them
00:25:33 ►
all and put them in a gourd. And they sent one guy to the ocean and they said, just dump
00:25:42 ►
it into the ocean so it will be gone away,
00:25:45 ►
like people think you can dump an atomic bomb into the ocean and then it’s gone.
00:25:51 ►
But it’s not, of course.
00:25:54 ►
And the main god said, oh, don’t open it, even if you hear strange noises.
00:26:02 ►
I mean, have you ever had all these insects and stuff?
00:26:06 ►
There’s a strange kind of sound coming out.
00:26:11 ►
But the guy who was in charge was so eager to know what is in it,
00:26:20 ►
he thought, well, if I lift it a little bit, then I can see and then I put back the tent.
00:26:29 ►
So he did, but everything just went out like a volcano.
00:26:34 ►
And they all went on his back and bit him so much.
00:26:39 ►
And he ran to put himself into a swamp.
00:26:50 ►
But he got bitten very bad.
00:26:54 ►
And because of that, he turned into the toad.
00:26:58 ►
That is the origin story of the toad. And the toad later became a very important animal
00:27:08 ►
in Mayan art and ceremony,
00:27:13 ►
religion, and so on.
00:27:17 ►
And there is many places you can find
00:27:20 ►
complete toad skeletons
00:27:23 ►
deposited into ritual vessels used for the ceremonial
00:27:29 ►
inebriating drink. The Lakandons still use until today. And there is also some reports reports that they use the toad to booster the drink,
00:27:48 ►
to give it more power.
00:27:51 ►
In Lakandelan, the word for
00:27:54 ►
strongness of a drug and for poisonous
00:27:59 ►
is the same. It’s yuck.
00:28:04 ►
Yuck. I think you use that in American English nowadays, but for
00:28:11 ►
something else, of course. And they had these vessels. It’s like beakers, this big, with
00:28:22 ►
mythological paintings on it.
00:28:25 ►
There were many found here,
00:28:27 ►
and that’s the reason I think this was a main ceremonial center.
00:28:32 ►
And they put the toad inside.
00:28:37 ►
And when they put the beaker into a ritual deposit,
00:28:41 ►
what is very common, it’s usually outside the site in a case. There’s caves
00:28:48 ►
everywhere and you can find a lot of pottery and bones and teeth and skulls and so on.
00:28:57 ►
Then maybe this drink that is made out of a tree called Baiche, with honey that’s fermented and with some
00:29:07 ►
other ingredients, like the toad. They drank it for visionary quest or whatever. It’s not
00:29:18 ►
so easy to tell what really was going on here. We only can guess.
00:29:25 ►
So that was how the talk came in.
00:29:28 ►
And I’m sure you heard Jonathan’s talk last night
00:29:33 ►
about Bufatnin and so.
00:29:37 ►
No, last afternoon.
00:29:42 ►
And I think that this drink called Baal Tze,
00:29:48 ►
that only means a fermented drink with some additives,
00:29:54 ►
served in the Mayan culture the same as ayahuasca did and does in the Amazon.
00:30:12 ►
did and does in the Amazon. And it’s like a ritual drink where you add some stuff to and maybe some herbs to heal somebody or some herbs to make them stronger and put the turds in and so. And it’s still a chemical miracle. I did a
00:30:30 ►
lot of collection and we did some analysis of the drink and the tree used for it and
00:30:37 ►
so on, but it’s still not clear what it really is and how it really works. And from the archaeological evidence
00:30:50 ►
here, it’s totally clear that the people who stayed in this place used that drink in all different ways. And like nowadays, the Mayan groups who are left,
00:31:12 ►
they do it purposely, especially for healing, or to thank the gods that they healed somebody.
00:31:31 ►
somebody. So, for example, if my mother is really seriously sick, I prepare the drink,
00:31:38 ►
offer it to different gods and goddesses who are found out by divination, which one is responsible or so, and then the community gets together and drink it together
00:31:47 ►
and all the people get the same amount to get high and so.
00:31:52 ►
And also to bind the people together.
00:31:57 ►
And then I can, during the ceremony,
00:32:01 ►
when everybody is getting really whatever, I do some incense burning,
00:32:13 ►
and with the fumes coming up, I put my words and what I want. For example, I just say, oh, dear gods and goddesses, please come,
00:32:28 ►
see, look after my mother, hear her, tell me what is wrong, and so on. The prayers are
00:32:37 ►
not standardized. You don’t buy a book and, oh, I have to do it this way and that way,
00:32:46 ►
You don’t buy a book and, oh, I have to do it this way and that way, or say these words.
00:32:54 ►
It’s a special way of chanting, and you just put in your own words for your purpose.
00:32:58 ►
It’s like really talking to the gods through the fumes. Well, I go back to this in another lecture.
00:33:37 ►
another lecture. And so, I just got a little tote made by a Lacandon woman down here. You You can look at that later. So, additionally to the string that was, of course, invented by the gods,
00:33:41 ►
and the god of inebriation is called Bor.
00:33:45 ►
Bor is one kind of wild cat.
00:33:52 ►
And he went into the forest and took a tree and fermented it.
00:33:55 ►
And all the gods died immediately.
00:33:58 ►
It was too strong.
00:34:02 ►
And a fatal overdose. And this doesn’t fit with our concept of gods and goddesses,
00:34:07 ►
because they cannot die.
00:34:11 ►
And only Bor survived.
00:34:14 ►
And because he survived, he could revitalize the gods and goddesses.
00:34:21 ►
And then he said, oh, this tree is too strong. It kills even the gods and goddesses, and then he said, oh, this tree is too strong.
00:34:25 ►
It kills even the gods and goddesses.
00:34:27 ►
And so he reduced the poisonous part of it and turned it into a cortegem,
00:34:35 ►
into a plant which can only be found in culture.
00:34:41 ►
So this plant, it’s a leguminous tree, a little one, and it’s called Lancho
00:34:49 ►
Carpos mulaceus. That tree is named Bauche, and Bauche means the essence of the forest.
00:35:13 ►
mainly used to ferment the string with honey, basically. And even the honey can be psychoactive. Have you ever heard of psychoactive honeys? Anybody tried one? No, no, no, that’s not psychoactive honey.
00:35:25 ►
Is that when the bees are collecting psychoactive plants?
00:35:28 ►
Yeah.
00:35:29 ►
Maybe you will see them here in this area.
00:35:32 ►
It’s small black bees without a sting.
00:35:36 ►
And they collect different plant groups in different times.
00:35:41 ►
And sometimes the honey they produce is really psychoactive.
00:35:48 ►
I had it a few times
00:35:52 ►
because it’s very rare to get.
00:35:54 ►
And the first time I had it,
00:35:57 ►
I didn’t know.
00:35:58 ►
So I went to one lockdown friend
00:36:01 ►
and he said,
00:36:01 ►
Oh, I just got some real nice honey.
00:36:04 ►
Would you like some?
00:36:05 ►
I said, Of course.
00:36:06 ►
So I took a spoonful, a big spoonful,
00:36:11 ►
and after ten minutes, I got such a hit.
00:36:17 ►
I didn’t take anything.
00:36:19 ►
Oh, shit, it must be in the honey.
00:36:22 ►
So this is what they always talk about.
00:36:25 ►
And that is why the bees are very present
00:36:29 ►
and very important in Mayan art.
00:36:31 ►
In Yucatan, especially in the site of Cuba,
00:36:36 ►
you can see the bee gods coming down from heaven
00:36:38 ►
and they taught the people how to use honey to get high
00:36:43 ►
so that there is an exchange.
00:36:46 ►
Can you say something?
00:36:48 ►
People are very interested in this topic.
00:36:50 ►
Jonathan and I published a good paper on psychoactive honeys in the Journal of Economic Botany
00:36:57 ►
about a year ago.
00:36:59 ►
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have that.
00:37:01 ►
But just so, I don’t know.
00:37:02 ►
Yeah, well, but almost nobody had ever taken some.
00:37:07 ►
And there’s reports of psychoactive honey from all over the world.
00:37:11 ►
So there is…
00:37:13 ►
From Yucatan, that is the very lowland Mayan area,
00:37:19 ►
we know that the shamans use the honey collected from Ololikwi,
00:37:28 ►
from Turbina Corimbasa that contains ergots, LSD-like compounds.
00:37:34 ►
And then they also use magical spells to enhance the drink,
00:37:40 ►
and in these spells you call in all the animals and plants which are considered to be poisonous.
00:37:48 ►
And you ask them to put the essence of that poison into the drink.
00:37:53 ►
So if your magic is good, then the drink is good.
00:37:57 ►
Well, I learned all that stuff, but we don’t have the time now to get in there.
00:38:03 ►
I don’t have the time now to get in there.
00:38:07 ►
But going back to the ceremony,
00:38:10 ►
so when all the people are sitting on the sofa and drinking,
00:38:14 ►
then if I have a special request from the gods,
00:38:17 ►
I go to incense burners.
00:38:21 ►
This is a modern one from the Lakhan Downs. And here you put in the incense and it’s just, you just light
00:38:31 ►
it. You will see that later. Here we can’t do that. And then with the fumes you speak
00:38:39 ►
your words. And because everybody is in the same kind of consciousness, it’s a collective thing,
00:38:48 ►
it will be enhanced. It’s like the healthy people give their power to the unhealthy ones
00:38:59 ►
and so on. It’s like most circle rituals done in the world
00:39:05 ►
involving circle actors.
00:39:09 ►
And…
00:39:09 ►
Or this I’ll need later.
00:39:21 ►
The incense burners,
00:39:23 ►
they’re used here in Palenque, you can see in the museum,
00:39:28 ►
they are very big, and there were hundreds of thousands of incense burners,
00:39:36 ►
and next to the steps to the pyramids they were set,
00:39:44 ►
and they must have been used tons of incense.
00:39:50 ►
And so, well, to give you a picture, all these buildings, and there is so many,
00:40:00 ►
you can walk for a mile or more into that direction, and you have other buildings
00:40:07 ►
and so on. They were all covered by a kind of lime, and they were all painted in the
00:40:18 ►
typical Mayan paint. It’s basically earth paintings using mineral pigments, and the colors were mainly,
00:40:30 ►
well, you can see in the museum, they were like red, reddish, ochre, and what we call
00:40:40 ►
the Maya blue. That’s a composition very difficult to fabricate. It’s made out
00:40:48 ►
of different minerals. And so the whole thing looked like a psychedelic trip already. And
00:40:57 ►
then with all the fumes and then with all the other inebriating substances, they go around here.
00:41:07 ►
Even in our hotel ground, we have at least five different plants.
00:41:11 ►
Nobody noticed.
00:41:15 ►
I might point them out sometime.
00:41:19 ►
And then if you look at the presentations of the Mayan gods and priests, it’s unbelievable.
00:41:29 ►
So when people came here, like somebody who was ill and wanted to get healing,
00:41:40 ►
they were just blown away from the look of that place.
00:41:44 ►
They were just blown away from the look of that place.
00:41:53 ►
And then they could go to the diviners and to the physicians and so on. And the Mayas, they had very, very good knowledge how to use plants.
00:42:02 ►
And many still have.
00:42:10 ►
plants, and many still have. The Lakangons know a lot how to use the plants, and especially in Yucatan, especially in the state of Quintana Roo, there’s a lot of shamans, they still
00:42:16 ►
know a lot for all kinds of different purposes, not only for healing, but also to get high or to get insight and so on. One
00:42:26 ►
of their favorite entheogens was datura, the thorn apple, and they stillimbasa, and also the, and so on.
00:42:49 ►
And if you see the panels and so, from the Mayas,
00:42:55 ►
they always, the priests, they had headdresses made out of wood,
00:42:58 ►
basically with feathers and shells. And so I actually brought one shell.
00:43:03 ►
I actually brought one shell.
00:43:11 ►
This is the holy shell of the Mayas.
00:43:15 ►
If you want, I can put it around.
00:43:22 ►
I just got it in Veracruz because it’s a shell from the Gulf of Mexico.
00:43:29 ►
The shell, that’s a turbinela. Did they use it as an instrument? Yeah, they use the shell mainly as a trumpet. They cut up what is called the
00:43:38 ►
apex, and these days when they do these inebriating rituals, collective rituals,
00:43:47 ►
they blow the shell so people know, oh, something is going on.
00:43:53 ►
And if you want to attend, you can come.
00:43:55 ►
It’s not that you have to.
00:43:59 ►
You may do it to partake in it and so on.
00:44:04 ►
may do it, to partake in it, and so on.
00:44:10 ►
And the shell is also the symbol of evolution of the universe. And maybe you have heard some stuff of the Mayan calendar.
00:44:19 ►
First of all, 2012 is not the point.
00:44:26 ►
We even don’t know how really to correlate the Mayan calendar with ours.
00:44:31 ►
There are different perspectives on it.
00:44:37 ►
The calendar showed that there is constantly evolution,
00:44:44 ►
showed that there is constantly evolution,
00:44:48 ►
starting going back to the same point,
00:44:50 ►
but in a different way.
00:44:55 ►
And so at the end, the shell is open,
00:44:57 ►
and we don’t know what happens then.
00:45:02 ►
And that is like what people think,
00:45:04 ►
oh, there is the end of the world or so.
00:45:06 ►
I don’t believe in the end of the world because I don’t, who knows.
00:45:10 ►
Many prophets told us already
00:45:13 ►
and they all failed.
00:45:15 ►
There is not one prophecy in history
00:45:17 ►
that became true.
00:45:20 ►
And the Mayan calendar was like a shell, very much.
00:45:29 ►
And from that calendar, some of the priests did divination.
00:45:35 ►
And that is obviously what many people did here in Palenque.
00:45:42 ►
And we don’t exactly know much of it. We know how they divine in
00:45:49 ►
these days. We have in some Mayan ethnic groups, groups of the people called the daykeepers.
00:46:00 ►
And the daykeeper is more like a consultant.
00:46:06 ►
You go to him if you have a problem,
00:46:08 ►
if you don’t know,
00:46:09 ►
should I do this or that or whatever.
00:46:14 ►
You go to him and then he uses a calendar
00:46:17 ►
and like tarot cards,
00:46:19 ►
they have no meaning at all.
00:46:21 ►
It’s what you put in
00:46:23 ►
and it’s more a consultant and a psychotherapy thing.
00:46:31 ►
So they use some tools
00:46:34 ►
to get into a deep conversation
00:46:37 ►
with a person who needs help.
00:46:42 ►
And I think that is true for every kind of divining tools that they use as triggers
00:46:51 ►
to get into a good, deep conversation and help people with what you say. And that’s
00:47:02 ►
why they say, oh, this is a good diviner and that’s a bad one, because
00:47:07 ►
the good one has more skill to get into your psyche. It’s like, oh, yeah, she can do a
00:47:14 ►
good tarot reading and she not. It’s the same thing. And, or if you do the coca oracle, throwing leaves and reed them, so-called,
00:47:28 ►
or the bone oracle, what is famous in South Africa,
00:47:35 ►
it’s all the same thing.
00:47:37 ►
It’s an outside trigger for an internal process. And what we learned from the left gatekeepers, they do that way. And
00:47:55 ►
that’s fantastic, because it really helps the people. And that is
00:48:05 ►
one thing I’m very sure
00:48:08 ►
from the archaeological
00:48:10 ►
remains here that it took
00:48:12 ►
place here a lot
00:48:13 ►
and it also
00:48:16 ►
looks like that this was one of
00:48:18 ►
the astronomical centers
00:48:20 ►
archaeologists believe that the tower
00:48:27 ►
you can’t see here now
00:48:29 ►
but in Lacandon mythology
00:48:31 ►
the tower in the palace here
00:48:34 ►
is the house of the sun
00:48:37 ►
and archaeologists believe that this was an observatory
00:48:44 ►
to look at the stars.
00:48:48 ►
And the astronomy of the Maya was unbelievable.
00:48:53 ►
They really could picture the cost by the day.
00:49:00 ►
And so the days became very important.
00:49:04 ►
And if you get into the Mayan calendar
00:49:06 ►
that has been used in all these inscriptions here
00:49:10 ►
for putting dates,
00:49:14 ►
then you have always a connection
00:49:16 ►
to animal spirits or plant spirits
00:49:20 ►
or planetary spirits and so on.
00:49:24 ►
And they always said,
00:49:28 ►
we have many souls.
00:49:30 ►
One soul is the animal soul
00:49:34 ►
that lives as an animal in the forest.
00:49:37 ►
So you connect it to the forest automatically.
00:49:41 ►
That’s the wild part.
00:49:49 ►
Does any one of you know what is your soul, your animal soul? Do you know? Wild boar. A wild boar, great. Yes, somebody got a mosquito ashamed to tell. And the animal spirit is very important because that’s your connectedness
00:50:11 ►
to nature, to the wild nature. And because of that, you learn a lot about ecology when you get raised up and you feel
00:50:27 ►
related
00:50:30 ►
to the forest
00:50:31 ►
it’s not the green hell
00:50:33 ►
the forest is the world
00:50:35 ►
the Mayan name
00:50:38 ►
for world is
00:50:39 ►
K’ash
00:50:40 ►
K’ash means forest
00:50:43 ►
and that brings me to the end now Ash means forest.
00:50:49 ►
And that brings me to the end now.
00:50:53 ►
Here was the creation of the world,
00:50:55 ►
but this is not the center of the world.
00:50:56 ►
It’s the navel.
00:50:58 ►
Like if you look at your body,
00:51:00 ►
your navel is not the center. The heart is the center.
00:51:03 ►
So, when the gods built this all, they got bored again, and then they went into the center. The heart is the center. So, when the gods built this all, they got bored
00:51:06 ►
again, and then they went into the forest to this place, what is called Yashchilan.
00:51:16 ►
You have heard of that, I’m sure. Some have been there. It’s an enchanting place, and
00:51:23 ►
if you want to complete your Palenque experience,
00:51:25 ►
you have to go there, unfortunately, because Yashilan is the center of the world. And the
00:51:32 ►
big pyramid in the center of Yashilan is the house of the main gods. And in there is a
00:51:40 ►
statue of the main god. And there is the place, when you look into heaven,
00:51:46 ►
there is what they call the consciousness of heaven.
00:51:52 ►
And I…
00:51:53 ►
Oh, I get a…
00:51:56 ►
Shazia, I think I have the goosebumps.
00:52:00 ►
Goosebumps.
00:52:01 ►
Goosebumps or whatever.
00:52:03 ►
As I just think about.
00:52:09 ►
Because if there is a very serious case of illness,
00:52:11 ►
the Lakandons still go there into the main temple
00:52:12 ►
because there is a shortest connection
00:52:15 ►
to the center of heaven,
00:52:17 ►
to the universal mind
00:52:19 ►
which is keeping everything alive.
00:52:25 ►
Yeah.
00:52:31 ►
I don’t know.
00:52:34 ►
I am listening to you later.
00:52:38 ►
So please explore this place by yourself.
00:52:43 ►
For good archaeology.
00:52:46 ►
Go after your heart.
00:52:48 ►
It’s big.
00:52:55 ►
And I never do like a tour. I will be in the plaza over there.
00:53:01 ►
Do you see this pyramid?
00:53:12 ►
That is… that one? That’s the house of the smoking god. That’s the most shamanic place in this area. And shortly before the site closes, I give a little talk on the smoking guard and on smoking. I think we have
00:53:29 ►
to be out at five, so half past four. And usually there’s only a few people left when I arrived there. But it’s very interesting
00:53:46 ►
and please try
00:53:48 ►
to walk up
00:53:50 ►
the pyramids over there
00:53:52 ►
because
00:53:53 ►
inside the temples on top
00:53:56 ►
is very beautiful artwork.
00:53:58 ►
Very, very nice.
00:54:00 ►
And that’s the main part
00:54:02 ►
to me.
00:54:04 ►
Just you have to go. Oh, me. Just you have to go.
00:54:07 ►
Oh, just I have to go?
00:54:10 ►
Okay, we will find a few more minutes
00:54:13 ►
somewhere maybe outside or so
00:54:15 ►
if you’re still interested.
00:54:17 ►
Sure.
00:54:18 ►
Ah, that really brings back a lot of fond memories. Thank you. Christian’s talk again, I can think of about a dozen things right now I’d love to talk to you about.
00:54:51 ►
I think this program has probably gone on long enough, so I want to thank Christian for his great insights,
00:54:56 ►
Shatul Hayuk for their fine music, Mateo for the recording,
00:55:00 ►
and all of you for being here with us in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:55:06 ►
And yes, I do remember that my last podcast, I told you that this program would be a feature by Bruce Dahmer, and obviously that didn’t happen. But hopefully we’ll have Bruce
00:55:12 ►
here with us in the next edition of the Psychedelic Salon. For now, I’m Lorenzo,
00:55:17 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.