Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I think, when it’s all sorted out, it ALL happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater, all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 B.C. up until around 9,000 B.C.”
“The African ‘Cradle of Civilization’, I don’t even regard that as a theory. Anybody who doesn’t believe that is going to have to do some fast talking.”
“They [16th century alchemists] were angelic magicians, is what they were.”
“DMT is this very short-acting hallucinogen that you smoke, but it’s a neurotransmitter. It occurs in all human beings on the natch, and it occurs in various plants and animals. In terms of nature, it’s the commonest of all hallucinogens. In terms of impact, it’s the strongest of all hallucinogens. It’s a completely reality-obliterating experience, and it comes on so quickly that you don’t grok it like a drug.”
“The other thing about DMT that’s weird is, it does not affect your mind. In other words, you don’t feel gaga with ecstacy. You don’t feel relaxed. You feel exactly the way you felt before you did it. It’s that the world has just been swapped out, and that’s strange. I sort of like that, that it doesn’t lay a glove on the observing cognitive processes, instead it just does something in the visual cortex that causes the world to be replaced by a three-, four-, five-dimensional, highly colored moving environment filled with screaming elf-deamons.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:25 ►
And I really apologize for taking so long in getting this podcast out.
00:00:29 ►
But as you know, last week I flew up to San Jose for the Psychedelic Science Conference.
00:00:35 ►
And, by the way, I had a fantastic time.
00:00:38 ►
But I came home on Saturday afternoon before the conference was over with a sore throat.
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And my voice was about to go, but then on Sunday morning I woke with what turned out to be a nasty stomach virus
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that laid me low for most of the week.
00:00:53 ►
So now I’m back in catch-up mode. I’m feeling great.
00:00:57 ►
But that means I’m going to have to wait a week or so before passing along my observations about the conference
00:01:02 ►
because I want to first finish this current series of Terrence McKenna talks
00:01:07 ►
and then I’ll give you all those details.
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However, before I do anything else,
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I want to pass along my love and best wishes to some of our fellow slauners
00:01:17 ►
who have sent in donations since I was last with you.
00:01:20 ►
And those wonderful supporters are
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Brian H., Alec S., Yoshi N., a slauner called Lightning Hawk, And those wonderful supporters are… Two of my new best friends whom I met at the conference, Shane G. and Jason F.
00:01:35 ►
And long-time major supporter, Vafal P., who writes…
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Brother Al, love!
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I’m sorry I haven’t been able to provide the same level of support this past year as prior years.
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But I, too, have been impacted by the now infamous economic crisis.
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I wasn’t worried, though, as the tribe always finds a way.
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Bless you.
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Well, Vipal, it’s the other way around.
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I send blessings to you, my friend.
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And please consider yourself donated up for life.
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You’ve gone way above and beyond anything I could imagine from a fellow salonner.
00:02:10 ►
Also, I should mention that several other salonners came up to me at the conference
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and told me that they knew that we’ve been getting regular donations from others,
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and so they are now supporting some of the new podcasts that are coming online.
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In fact, just the other day I heard KMO on his Sea Realm podcast
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thanking Max T for a very generous donation.
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And that was just a week or so after Max did the same for us here in the salon.
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So what a great guy, huh?
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So I want to thank all of our donors and supporters,
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as well as those who are also helping other podcasters get their message out.
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And I sure don’t want to leave out the salonners who have bought a copy of my audio book, Thank you. since I’m only selling it through my own website. And believe me, I won’t forget you either.
00:03:07 ►
Your support means an awful lot to me.
00:03:12 ►
Now, one other name I should mention that just occurred to me is that of ErockX1, whose Guyon Botanicals website
00:03:15 ►
can be found through a link that you’ll find
00:03:18 ►
on the left side of our psychedelicsalon.org blog.
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Now, ErockX1 has been a a long time supporter and helper around here and even though
00:03:27 ►
he’s in a bit of a financial bind himself nonetheless he’s printed and distributed many
00:03:32 ►
thousands of psychedelic salon bookmarks to help us get the word out so if you are looking for any
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high quality botanicals from a reputable source you may want to take a look at all he has to offer. And he is very careful in how he sources his products, by the way.
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This would be a really good guy to support if you need anything he’s selling.
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As Red Green often said, we’re all in this together, you know.
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And now we’re about to share some more time together with the late, great Terrence McKenna.
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time together with the late, great Terrence McKenna.
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As you already know, today we’re going to hear the next installment of a series of recordings sent to me by fellow salonner Brian P. And I should let you know that there were a few
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places where there was a very short skip in the tape, and they were actually there.
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I didn’t edit anything out, so you’re getting it just as it is.
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Now we’re going to pick up where we left off in this 1992 workshop as Terrence McKenna begins doing what he did best.
00:04:31 ►
And that is, he would take a simple little question from somebody in the audience and then he’d answer it.
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Without any notes of any kind, I should add.
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Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
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Well, listen to this first question right now.
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And then count how many different topics Terrence covers, along with detailed references, I should add, before the next question is asked.
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And then you will begin to understand just what an incredible mind he had.
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thinking we’re about to hear, because about an hour from now, we’re going to hear Terrence tell the story of what he called one of the high-water weirdness events of my life.
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You can just imagine what that must be, huh?
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So let’s get started.
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Somebody had a question?
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Yeah.
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You talked about the fall of Eleusis.
00:05:24 ►
How does the life go out in the future yeah the fall of
00:05:28 ►
Eleusis
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well as you all probably know
00:05:31 ►
Eleusis was a cult
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site near Athens
00:05:36 ►
on a plain
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there’s now a big
00:05:39 ►
lumber yard there
00:05:42 ►
the last time I was there
00:05:43 ►
but anyway
00:05:44 ►
it was this plain, a very fertile plain
00:05:47 ►
outside of ancient Athens, and they
00:05:51 ►
celebrated the greatest of the Greek mysteries
00:05:55 ►
there. They celebrated, it was a
00:05:59 ►
biannual, or I mean a twice yearly festival.
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In the spring, they would celebrate the lesser mystery.
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And this seemed to be a fairly local get-together of some sort
00:06:15 ►
and probably a planting festival.
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But every September, for 2,000 years,
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people from all over the Greco-Roman world would come for the festival at Eleusis.
00:06:32 ►
And the rule was, first of all, it was open to everyone.
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Men, women, free man, slave, everyone could attend.
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The rule was, you could only attend once in your life and so you had one shot
00:06:50 ►
at whatever this thing was and you were sworn to silence and literally everyone who was anyone Anyone went to Eleusis to experience the mysteries. I mean, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aeschylus, Euripides, everybody.
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People would make journeys of thousands of miles.
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It was the wellspring of Greek spirituality.
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The problem is we can’t
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we don’t know with certainty what the excitement
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was all about
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we know that there was an inner cult area called the
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telestereon and that people would
00:07:38 ►
that something was drunk
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and that something was seen
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and in the 19th century they just went nuts on this subject i talk
00:07:48 ►
about it in my book and they finally all these constipated victorian classicists decided that
00:07:57 ►
the mystery of elusis must be a representation of the female genitals
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illuminated at the height of this ceremony
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by a laser light show of some sort.
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And so, you know, it was just absurd.
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I mean, it was a complete distillation
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of the Victorian mind being projected.
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I mean, you’d like to believe
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that the roots of western civilization are deeper
00:08:27 ►
than a peep show but hey who knows uh there was a very interesting incident in it’s called uh
00:08:37 ►
the scandal of 415 which is that in 415 bc a wealthy Athenian noble named Alcibiades was busted for the charge was possessing the Eleusinian mystery and distributing it to guests at dinner.
00:09:01 ►
Well, this seems to make it fairly clear that this was not a clay representation of anybody’s
00:09:08 ►
genitals this was some kind of dope of some sort so then the scholars whip out their knives and
00:09:17 ►
and all kinds of theories have been brought forward uh some of you may know that the scholar Robert graves discusses this in
00:09:27 ►
the white goddess and his theory which I think deserves to be more more looked at
00:09:34 ►
than it has his theory was that these recipes if people drank something
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from a special cup called a kikakion
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and recipes supposedly exist
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for what they drank
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and it’s honey, barley
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something else
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and always water
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and Graves argued that
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you don’t
00:10:09 ►
that water is not something that you list
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as an ingredient of something you drink
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obviously it has water in it
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so he said the inclusion of water
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in this list is in order that there can be an
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augum do you know what an augum is
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you will when I tell you because you’ve all seen them an augum is when you
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make a list of things in such a way that the first
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letters spell out a word
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you grok that?
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So the idea was that in Demotic Greek,
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the words for barley, honey, water,
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and this fourth ingredient that I can’t remember,
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those four words can be arranged
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to spell out the word miko,
00:11:02 ►
which means mushroom.
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So Robert Graves was convinced that a psilocybin mushroom
00:11:10 ►
lay behind the Eleusinian mysteries.
00:11:12 ►
This is a pretty good, this is not entirely unreasonable.
00:11:18 ►
Now, a few years ago, there was a book written
00:11:22 ►
by the great mushroom enthusiast and discoverer Gordon
00:11:28 ►
Wasson and the chemist who discovered LSD, Albert Hoffman, and the classicist Ruck. The
00:11:41 ►
three of them, and Jonathan Ott I think was also in there wrote a book
00:11:45 ►
called Persephone’s quest not Persephone’s quest that’s a different
00:11:50 ►
book the road to Eleusis good watch me the road to Eleusis and they put forth
00:12:00 ►
there a new theory which was that on the plane of Eleusis they grew barley
00:12:08 ►
and and these people thought that there may have been a special strain of
00:12:16 ►
claviceps do you all know what claviceps is do you all know what ergot is? Ergot is a smut. A smut is a disgusting disease, a fungal disease
00:12:32 ►
of grain. Have you ever been in a cornfield and seen an ear of corn that looks like it’s covered
00:12:40 ►
with some black, slimy, horrible stuff that’s flowing out of it and all over it.
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It’s absolutely disgusting.
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Although, God, in California,
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I don’t know if this is hit here yet,
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but in California for the past year,
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the hippest thing that you can be served
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at pretentious art openings and stuff like that
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is corn smut,
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which they spread on crackers and it’s just
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horrible and it’s really expensive i mean it’s more expensive than caviar and it’s just become
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a craze and i wouldn’t get near it i mean it’s not only disgusting to look at but the chemistry of it is so weird
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God alone, I mean hives would be the least
00:13:28 ►
of your problems
00:13:29 ►
so corn smut and there are rye smuts
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and there are wheat smuts
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but interestingly the rye smut
00:13:39 ►
which is ergot is an organism called
00:13:43 ►
claviceps pus poly
00:13:44 ►
produces LSD like alkaloids which is ergot, is an organism called Claviceps paspali,
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produces LSD-like alkaloids.
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And the problem is that LSD, ergot-related alkaloids, also tend to cause convulsions, or they can cause convulsions.
00:14:06 ►
If any of you suffer from migraine headaches,
00:14:09 ►
now there are a lot of different drugs for migraine.
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But up until just four or five years ago,
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the drug of choice for migraine was called ET,
00:14:20 ►
ergonamine tartrate.
00:14:22 ►
Ergonamine tartrate, if you’ve got a kilo of it, you can settle down and make several million hits of LSD. Ergonamine tartrate is this very rigidly controlled underground substance that is produced legally only in certain sanctioned fields in northern Pakistan. And it’s produced for the world market of migraine sufferers.
00:14:48 ►
And you get these little tiny blue pills.
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I have migraines.
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I used to take or got, but I’ve gotten it under control.
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But anyway, it’s the drug of choice for migraine
00:15:00 ►
because it constricts the blood arteries going into the head.
00:15:06 ►
Anyway, Wasson and Hoffman argued that what they were doing at Eleusis
00:15:12 ►
is that they were brewing an ergot beer.
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They were deliberately gathering barley that was infected with claviceps
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and they were brewing an intoxicating beer
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and people were having a hallucinogenic experience.
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Well, now this is a great area for the able-bodied among us to do research
00:15:37 ►
because it should be possible to collect claviceps
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and maybe even to go to Eleusis and collect claviceps and maybe even to go to Eleusis
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and collect claviceps there
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and culture it out
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and see if you could make an ergot beer
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that would actually get you hallucinogenically stoned.
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I’m not sure what’s going on.
00:16:01 ►
Ergot is a dangerous substance.
00:16:05 ►
I remember an anecdote once.
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Many years ago, I knew these people
00:16:13 ►
who occasionally dealt illegal substances,
00:16:17 ►
and one day they were moving some ET to somebody,
00:16:24 ►
and they asked this guy there if he would take this ounce
00:16:29 ►
of et and deliver it to this certain address and they when they gave it to him they said now this
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is et you know so just leave it alone and he got out in the car and he looked he opened up the baggie and it was this white powder and he
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said you know these people can’t fool me so he honked up a little of it and then he went on his
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appointed rounds and and the guy who was supposed to have the stuff delivered um he was sitting in
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his house and he heard this commotion on his front porch
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and opened the door to find this guy flopping around with his legs and feet in the air
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having convulsive seizures because of the E.T. he’d snorted up.
00:17:18 ►
It’s just one more story about the dangers of white powder drugs, folks.
00:17:27 ►
story about the dangers of white powder drugs folks uh anyway it’s important for the argument because um i don’t see how they could have been serving several thousand people ergotized beer
00:17:37 ►
every september for two thousand years and not had the ellisinian mysteries get a certain reputation for risk,
00:17:46 ►
that people would have convulsions and conceivably even die of heart attacks.
00:17:52 ►
I mean, how could they get that many people loaded year in and year out
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and not get a bad rap on it?
00:17:59 ►
And then I talked to Albert Hoffman about this,
00:18:04 ►
and he didn’t seem to feel that it was such a problem.
00:18:06 ►
He said that what you could do is float hot oil on the surface of this beer,
00:18:16 ►
and you could draw off the convulsive alkaloids,
00:18:20 ►
would have an affinity for the hot oil,
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and then you could just skim this oil off and discard it
00:18:26 ►
and you would leave the hallucinogenic material in the beer.
00:18:30 ►
Well, I haven’t tried this.
00:18:32 ►
Like I say, it’s for the able-bodied.
00:18:35 ►
But in any case, this was the last outpost in the West
00:18:40 ►
of psychedelic mystery.
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And eventually,
00:18:48 ►
those enthusiastic Christian barbarians
00:18:51 ►
appeared on the scene.
00:18:54 ►
In this case, it was Alaric the Visigoth,
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a great guy to take to an art museum.
00:19:02 ►
And, you know, they smashed it all to pieces. pieces alaric the visigoth was kick-ass people
00:19:10 ►
don’t realize that these barbarian invasions of the late roman empire the vandals took over a huge
00:19:17 ►
swath of north africa they didn’t just stop at the bottom of the boot of Italy or on the Peloponnesian Peninsula these guys just kept
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rolling and huge parts of Africa were under the control of Visigoths and and Vandals North Africa
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Carthaginian coast of the Mediterranean and that killed that was the end of the illusinian mysteries and but it shows how late this mystical psychedelic impulse
00:19:49 ►
persisted in western civilization uh see the thing that gave the greeks their genius
00:19:59 ►
was that it was a mingling of a northern mentality
00:20:06 ►
coming out of Thracia and places like that,
00:20:10 ►
meeting a very old, mystical, feminist culture
00:20:19 ►
that had its roots 10,000 years deep in Saharan Africa
00:20:24 ►
via Egypt and Çatalhöyük in Turkey.
00:20:29 ►
Because it was said, even in classical times,
00:20:33 ►
what is celebrated in secret at Eleusis is celebrated publicly at Knossos in Mycenae.
00:20:43 ►
at Knossos in Mycenae. You see the Mycenae in Minoan Crete.
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You see Minoan civilization
00:20:50 ►
was an archaic civilization.
00:20:53 ►
It preserved the goddess worship,
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the opium use.
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All of these archaic styles
00:21:02 ►
were preserved in Minoan Crete
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for millennia
00:21:05 ►
after the rule on the coast of Asia Minor was kingship, bronze-tipped spears, city building,
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and that whole sweat socks mentality that built up there.
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And what finished those folks off was around 950 AD,
00:21:26 ►
Mycenaean pirates eventually laid siege to these Minoan cities.
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And after centuries of slowly drifting deeper and deeper into opiated decadence,
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Minoan Crete fell.
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But all of the mysteries and the mysticism and the orgiastic rites and all of these archaic relationship to these things called aniconic pillars, they’re called.
00:22:11 ►
What they are are mushrooms, as far as I can tell.
00:22:14 ►
They built shrines, they worshipped columns, but these columns were slightly flared on the top.
00:22:22 ►
If any of you are interested in it well something that should be said
00:22:26 ►
see we have a distorted view
00:22:28 ►
of how culture developed
00:22:32 ►
and what classicism really meant
00:22:35 ►
because for the past
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throughout the 18th and 19th century
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European scholarship spent a huge amount of time it distorting and
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erasing the debt of Greek civilization to Africa they basically screwed with
00:22:56 ►
the record because they just couldn’t bring themselves to believe that all
00:23:02 ►
this wonderful architecture and proportion and mathematics,
00:23:08 ►
that it was little brown people who were responsible for this.
00:23:13 ►
And if you’re interested in this, there’s a book by Burnell called Black Athena
00:23:18 ►
that is a really radical book.
00:23:23 ►
Have any of you read it?
00:23:24 ►
It was very controversial a couple of years ago. radical book. Have any of you read it? It had quite a…
00:23:25 ►
It was very controversial a couple of years ago.
00:23:28 ►
Great book.
00:23:30 ►
Yeah.
00:23:31 ►
Black Athena by Burnell.
00:23:33 ►
And it shows how Western culture
00:23:37 ►
misrepresented the debt of classicism to Africa.
00:23:42 ►
I mean, they could tolerate the idea of Egypt
00:23:45 ►
as long as you always made sure, you know,
00:23:48 ►
that these people were white as the driven snow.
00:23:51 ►
Well, it’s a bunch of malarkey.
00:23:53 ►
I mean, it was a thoroughgoing black culture
00:23:57 ►
and everything was derivative of it
00:24:00 ►
right up until, I don’t know,
00:24:03 ►
the Byzantine Empire or something
00:24:06 ►
I mean Plato freely acknowledged
00:24:08 ►
his debt to this stuff
00:24:10 ►
it was just that it was
00:24:11 ►
unswallowable to
00:24:13 ►
late European culture
00:24:15 ►
yeah
00:24:16 ►
oh yeah they did a cover
00:24:20 ►
thing on it I
00:24:21 ►
didn’t read it time
00:24:23 ►
a few months ago yeah what was it called?
00:24:25 ►
Our African Roots or something?
00:24:28 ►
Yeah. And there are, it’s
00:24:30 ►
not, it’s no
00:24:31 ►
shuck and jive. I mean,
00:24:34 ►
we think 19th century scholarship
00:24:36 ►
was so careful and so
00:24:37 ►
wonderful, and what it really was, was an
00:24:40 ►
old boys club. I mean,
00:24:42 ►
they were fast and loose
00:24:43 ►
with this stuff. You know, I think when it’s all
00:24:47 ►
sorted out, it all happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater,
00:24:58 ►
all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 BC up until around 9,000 BC in the Saharan
00:25:11 ►
grasslands, which then, because of drying, these people were forced into the Nile Valley
00:25:19 ►
and into a different cultural style.
00:25:23 ►
But the African cradle of civilization,
00:25:26 ►
I don’t even regard that as a theory.
00:25:28 ►
Anybody who doesn’t believe that
00:25:30 ►
is going to have to do some fast talking.
00:25:33 ►
And, you know, there’s been this recent effort
00:25:36 ►
to say that the Australian Aborigines
00:25:40 ►
broke off very, very early.
00:25:44 ►
But, you know, it’s pretty specious, I think.
00:25:49 ►
You probably all know the theory of Eve
00:25:52 ►
and the fact that you can trace the maternal line
00:25:57 ►
through the episome of the mitochondria.
00:26:00 ►
So you can actually, it’s actually now believed that every human being on earth is descended from one woman.
00:26:12 ►
And this woman lived in Africa less than 200,000 years ago.
00:26:20 ►
You know, it’s really amazing.
00:26:22 ►
All other human lines have been quenched somewhere along the line.
00:26:29 ►
Her progeny were phenomenally successful.
00:26:35 ►
And this is, I would say now, the strongest theory about this now is the eve theory when it was first propounded it was thought to be
00:26:46 ►
screwball but that’s because the physical anthropologists didn’t really understand how
00:26:52 ►
the molecular geneticists achieved this conclusion once it was explained to everybody
00:26:59 ►
it’s pretty clear you know that that we are all descended from one single female human being, not that
00:27:07 ►
there weren’t other human beings that she was embedded in as a society, but none of
00:27:13 ►
those lines of descent reach to the present.
00:27:19 ►
Yeah.
00:27:21 ►
When you said the known civilization is decadent in the sense that it went
00:27:29 ►
into a kind of a deep freeze
00:27:31 ►
the level of change in the last
00:27:35 ►
thousand years of Minoan civilization
00:27:37 ►
the dating of ceramic and stuff like that is almost impossible
00:27:41 ►
because they were completely static
00:27:44 ►
they were unchanging for a very
00:27:47 ►
very long time in that late phase and that’s when these opium tallies were rising like crazy yeah
00:27:55 ►
the hermetic The Hermetica? They were beginning to invent, in fact, the Casa Bones are considered to be the inventors of modern philology.
00:28:20 ►
Oh, is it? Interesting. I wonder if it was a soap job.
00:28:26 ►
Yeah, modern philology.
00:28:30 ►
And the way you do it is by interlocking textual reference and studying locution styles. shock to the Renaissance when they realized that what they thought was 5,000 years old was less
00:28:47 ►
than a thousand you know or was about a thousand years old and that’s what really discredited that
00:28:55 ►
whole worldview which is in a way silly because who cares how old it is the question is how much sense does it make but the Renaissance was so
00:29:05 ►
strongly imbued with this belief that the ancient things were the better that
00:29:13 ►
if something was shown to be not as old as previously thought then it usually
00:29:18 ►
went on the discard pile
00:29:25 ►
I think we lost who were they?
00:29:28 ►
yes
00:29:29 ►
it was Cosimo de’ Medici
00:29:34 ►
and that family
00:29:36 ►
and the Borgias
00:29:38 ►
but you know this family
00:29:39 ►
there were I think 11 popes
00:29:41 ►
who bore the name Borgia
00:29:44 ►
in a hundred-year period.
00:29:46 ►
So these people were very, very well connected.
00:29:49 ►
They were very wealthy.
00:29:51 ►
They had disposable income, which was something new in the world.
00:29:56 ►
And they invented a whole bunch of things which God knows this city lives or dies by.
00:30:03 ►
I mean, like connoisseurship, patronage of the arts,
00:30:09 ►
and secular research projects.
00:30:13 ►
I mean, they were funding da Vinci’s work on catapults and flying machines
00:30:19 ►
at the same time that they were keeping all these painters paid
00:30:23 ►
and in mistresses and so forth.
00:30:26 ►
They were organizing archaeological digs.
00:30:30 ►
People couldn’t believe this stuff.
00:30:32 ►
I mean, we have assimilated all this, but they had forgotten the classical world.
00:30:40 ►
And they lived in places like Rome and Naples and Venice, but they had never dug.
00:30:48 ►
And they’d just been quarrying the Colosseum and stuff like that.
00:30:52 ►
Well, then when they began bringing this stuff out of the’re this year celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage,
00:31:10 ►
which in a sense can be seen as the cherry on the top of the Renaissance mental explosion.
00:31:23 ►
We are still living in a classical world.
00:31:27 ►
We still react against classicism.
00:31:30 ►
The buildings we live in, the clothing we wear,
00:31:35 ►
our notion of how gentlemen behave,
00:31:40 ►
our attitudes toward women largely,
00:31:44 ►
our attitudes towards private wealth
00:31:47 ►
all of this is classicism
00:31:50 ►
and it had been dead 1200 years
00:31:54 ►
before these Italians latched onto it
00:31:57 ►
and dusted it off and set it up
00:32:00 ►
and the modernism
00:32:03 ►
in its broadest context whatever that means is the first
00:32:08 ►
movement to come along to be able to in any way challenge classicism the the subsets of class
00:32:17 ►
the the art movements and literary movements that preceded modernism were simply aspects of classicism, romanticism, mannerism,
00:32:30 ►
the baroque. All of these are like facets of the classical object. It’s only in modernism. And what
00:32:40 ►
modernism represents, in my humble opinion, is a kind of return to the archaic.
00:32:48 ►
Modernism deconstructs the clarity of the Western eye.
00:32:53 ►
If you have to date where modernism begins, it begins with impressionism,
00:33:00 ►
which takes the clarity of the Western eye and begins to dissolve it, you know.
00:33:08 ►
And the linear, you know, the columns and lines,
00:33:13 ►
that’s how narrative was
00:33:15 ►
until James Joyce and Henry James
00:33:20 ►
and people like that showed that narrative
00:33:22 ►
could be broken up.
00:33:26 ►
Modernism is a form of primitivism, strangely enough.
00:33:32 ►
The people who created modernism,
00:33:34 ►
people like Marcel Duchamp and Picasso and the surrealists,
00:33:39 ►
they were tremendously influenced, in the case of Picasso,
00:33:43 ►
by African art, masks and sculpture,
00:33:49 ►
stuff that had never been seen in Paris in 1905 through 15.
00:33:55 ►
And everybody was tremendously excited by it.
00:33:59 ►
Modernism is part of this much larger phenomenon
00:34:03 ►
which I call the archaic revival.
00:34:06 ►
The discovery of the unconscious
00:34:08 ►
through Freud and Jung,
00:34:11 ►
the deconstruction of the image,
00:34:13 ►
first the image seen through Impressionism,
00:34:16 ►
and then the image imagined is deconstructed
00:34:19 ►
through Surrealism and Dada,
00:34:24 ►
and then finally you know the concentration
00:34:26 ►
on the materials of art
00:34:28 ►
which you get in abstract expressionism
00:34:31 ►
where it is about paint
00:34:33 ►
it’s no longer about paint in the service
00:34:37 ►
of the visual pictorialism
00:34:42 ►
and then all the postmodern stuff,
00:34:46 ►
which is, of course,
00:34:47 ►
just sort of running naked,
00:34:50 ►
screaming through the street
00:34:51 ►
kind of aesthetic.
00:34:53 ►
Yes?
00:34:55 ►
Has no one ever known
00:34:57 ►
this whole piece about
00:34:58 ►
a very, very foul student
00:34:59 ►
who sees how old he’s having to be?
00:35:01 ►
Well, this thing,
00:35:02 ►
only this one instance I mentioned,
00:35:05 ►
the scandal of 415 and this guy Alcibiades.
00:35:08 ►
He was fined. He was fined and given a warning.
00:35:16 ►
Question, yeah.
00:35:27 ►
Yeah, the origin. Good question.
00:35:30 ►
See, what happened?
00:35:32 ►
I mean, it’s very interesting.
00:35:37 ►
Some of you who are interested in Heidegger may know a wonderful essay by Hans Jonas
00:35:42 ►
called The Gnostic temperament
00:35:46 ►
and what he’s saying in there is
00:35:50 ►
that the
00:35:51 ►
attitude
00:35:55 ►
the psychology
00:35:57 ►
of the late Roman Empire
00:36:00 ►
let’s say Rome from AD 150 to 400 or so was strikingly what we would call modern
00:36:10 ►
that that a profound kind of exhaustion entered into the Roman psychology uh in that late phase.
00:36:26 ►
A good definition of decadence is
00:36:29 ►
it’s sophistication without feeling.
00:36:34 ►
It’s Camille Paglia’s definition, by the way.
00:36:43 ►
The Roman Empire made the emperor a god.
00:36:48 ►
Well, imagine the cynicism that would pervade our society
00:36:52 ►
if you were under state order to light candles to George Bush.
00:36:59 ►
I mean, you know, we’re free to think of the man as a jackass,
00:37:03 ►
and it’s not heresy. I mean, it as a jackass, and it’s not heresy.
00:37:05 ►
I mean, it may be bad taste, but it isn’t heresy.
00:37:10 ►
And the Roman Empire expanded so rapidly and took in so many different kinds of people.
00:37:18 ►
I mean, there were, you know, the Jews at the end of the Mediterranean.
00:37:24 ►
The Parthian Empire had been partially incorporated into the Roman Empire.
00:37:30 ►
Egyptian mystery religions and African folk religion, barbarian Celtic ideals were being imported in. And it just became…
00:37:45 ►
And the state religion,
00:37:46 ►
the religion of the emperor as God,
00:37:50 ►
it was fairly tolerant.
00:37:52 ►
You had to burn a candle to Caesar,
00:37:56 ►
but you could also burn a candle
00:37:58 ►
to Assarte and Thoth and Hermes
00:38:01 ►
and all these other people.
00:38:02 ►
What got the Christians in trouble
00:38:04 ►
was they wouldn’t give Caesar his due,
00:38:09 ►
even though it says to do this.
00:38:11 ►
They kept claiming that they had some kind of political agenda.
00:38:16 ►
They kept expecting the return of a political figure.
00:38:20 ►
The Romans hated that
00:38:22 ►
because they saw it as a political force well
00:38:26 ►
in that situation then after you see you have to talk about early christianity to get this stuff
00:38:34 ►
in context people don’t understand how shape our knowledge of the origins of christianity are
00:38:42 ►
with good reason because a religion wants you to believe
00:38:47 ►
that it’s all very cut and dried.
00:38:50 ►
There are real mysteries
00:38:51 ►
surrounding the birth of Christianity.
00:38:55 ►
Let me just run through it a little bit.
00:39:00 ►
We all know, or most of us know,
00:39:03 ►
if you’re not completely secular, the Christmas story.
00:39:08 ►
And it begins, and Caesar Augustus decreed that a census should be taken of all the world.
00:39:15 ►
And each was going to his village to register. Do you all know this story?
00:39:27 ►
know this story and so this explains why a pregnant galilean woman nine months pregnant is 110 miles away from her home village in jerusalem we’re told that they are obeying the dictates of
00:39:35 ►
caesar augustus to participate in the census of the empire and we’re told that Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea at this time.
00:39:46 ►
There was no census ordered by Caesar Augustus.
00:39:52 ►
No record exists of this anywhere.
00:39:56 ►
And if this had happened, it would have been an enormous bureaucratic task
00:40:02 ►
involving hundreds of clerks and the coordination of data from all
00:40:06 ►
parts of the empire it would have been a shtick of some sort and there’s nothing nothing only this
00:40:13 ►
reference in the little story of christ well you know weird okay so then you move on the assumption
00:40:20 ►
is that christ was born in 6 bc uh under the conjun the conjunctio maximus of Jupiter and Saturn.
00:40:29 ►
That places, if you believe the Gospels, that he was killed at age 33.
00:40:34 ►
That means the crucifixion must have been in 27.
00:40:38 ►
Well, there is no reference to Christ outside the Gospels until A.D. 71.
00:40:50 ►
What was happening between 27 and 71?
00:40:55 ►
It’s damn near 50 years.
00:40:57 ►
And the whole thing falls silent.
00:41:01 ►
And then what we get in A.D. 71 in, I think the Roman, I guess it’s in Suetonius, who was a Roman historian and contemporary, he says in a long rap about something else, he says Jews have recently come to Rome and caused public disturbances
00:41:25 ►
at the behest of their leader, Crispus.
00:41:29 ►
This is as close as we get.
00:41:32 ►
We don’t even know if Crispus is Christ.
00:41:35 ►
We just accept that this must be so
00:41:37 ►
because Suetonius is telling us that Jews of a religious type
00:41:43 ►
have come to Rome and caused this agitation.
00:41:48 ►
Some people have even wanted to,
00:41:51 ►
that Christianity was invented in the late 60s
00:41:58 ►
and that there never was a person named Christ,
00:42:04 ►
that zealots who were preparing the uprising of 69
00:42:09 ►
against the Roman Empire
00:42:12 ►
created a mythical figure of a generation earlier
00:42:18 ►
and used this mythical figure as a symbol of their rebellion.
00:42:25 ►
It would be sort of as if we were to get into Joe Hill.
00:42:30 ►
You all know who Joe Hill is?
00:42:33 ►
The engine of socialism is a slipping back.
00:42:37 ►
Come on all you workers, shovel sand on the track.
00:42:42 ►
Joe Hill was a martyr to social reform in this country i believe he was shot by
00:42:48 ►
a firing squad in utah in 1913 well we could reach back to joe hill and make him the founder of our
00:42:56 ►
movement and say what a great guy he was and collect stories about his life and and we could
00:43:02 ►
use it to center ourselves and build a kind of social reform movement
00:43:06 ►
in the name of Joe Hill.
00:43:09 ►
Yeah.
00:43:12 ►
The sacred mushroom and the cross.
00:43:14 ►
He basically says something very much like this.
00:43:19 ►
I don’t know about that.
00:43:21 ►
I just think it’s very peculiar
00:43:23 ►
that we know so little about Christ when he had
00:43:26 ►
such a major role to play. I mean, take a guy like Mani. Mani, the founder of Manism, who was
00:43:35 ►
born in, I think, around 320. God, we know everything about Manai
00:43:45 ►
we have his tax returns
00:43:47 ►
I kid you not
00:43:49 ►
we have the guy’s tax returns
00:43:52 ►
and we know what he looked like
00:43:54 ►
we know who his friends were
00:43:55 ►
we know he had marital problems
00:43:57 ►
a real person, you know
00:44:00 ►
and yet his religion was stomped into oblivion
00:44:04 ►
so there’s something funny about all this.
00:44:08 ►
And of course Christ is no ordinary person.
00:44:11 ►
Christ is the third person of the Trinity.
00:44:14 ►
God incarnate.
00:44:16 ►
This is a claim, this was an idea that had been around for a few hundred years. You all have heard of Dionysius,
00:44:25 ►
who most people tend to connect to Bacchus,
00:44:29 ►
the drunken late Roman god of wine.
00:44:33 ►
But the early Dionysius is a much, much weirder figure.
00:44:39 ►
The early Dionysius is an androgyne, always in the company of women, a god of ecstatic frenzy.
00:44:53 ►
And what the enemies of the Dionysian religion always claimed was, first of all, women were
00:44:59 ►
the major followers of Dionysius, and they would intoxicate themselves in some way,
00:45:07 ►
and then holding hands,
00:45:10 ►
dance through the countryside,
00:45:12 ►
and rend their clothing,
00:45:15 ►
and just carry on outrageously.
00:45:18 ►
And what the enemies of the Dionysian religion claimed
00:45:21 ►
was that they became so frenzied
00:45:24 ►
that these women, who were called manaeids
00:45:27 ►
ate their own children this was the lie spread about the dionysian religion well the story of
00:45:35 ►
the birth of dionysius is very interesting because his father was zeus the hidden higher all father analogous to god the father in christianity
00:45:47 ►
but his mother was simila and in some version simila is a mortal woman the daughter of king
00:45:56 ►
cadmus of thebes but in other verse she’s herself some kind of a goddess anyway she was one of these many affairs
00:46:05 ►
that Zeus had
00:46:06 ►
he was always impregnating women
00:46:08 ►
and bearing children
00:46:10 ►
and in the 8th month of her pregnancy
00:46:14 ►
she was struck by lightning
00:46:17 ►
and killed
00:46:18 ►
and she was very dear to Zeus
00:46:22 ►
and when he came upon her dead
00:46:24 ►
he immediately performed a cesarean operation
00:46:29 ►
and he cut open his thigh
00:46:32 ►
and he put the child
00:46:35 ►
into his own thigh
00:46:37 ►
and laced up the wound
00:46:40 ►
and the child was born out of the wound
00:46:44 ►
six weeks later now this may be grotesque and peculiar
00:46:49 ►
but notice that what we have here is something close to a virgin birth it’s uh it’s born of the
00:46:59 ►
father is what we have and dionysius was then called the twice-born god
00:47:06 ►
because he was born once
00:47:08 ►
by Caesarian section from his mother
00:47:11 ►
and born again six weeks later
00:47:14 ►
from the thigh of the father.
00:47:16 ►
And it’s thought that this Dionysian impulse
00:47:19 ►
in the hands of these mystical Jews
00:47:23 ►
became then the doctrine of the immaculate conception
00:47:27 ►
and the whole notion of an immaculately conceived child.
00:47:33 ►
Christ is a type of Isis.
00:47:36 ►
I mean, it’s heresy to say so,
00:47:38 ►
but comparative religionists have been saying this for centuries.
00:47:44 ►
Dionysius was a religion of orgy and ecstasy,
00:47:49 ►
typical of this period in Greece. Another religious system that was sort of complementing
00:47:58 ►
the Hermetica and developing alongside it was Gnosticism. And, you know, I said a few minutes ago that the psychology
00:48:09 ►
of the late Roman Empire was very modern. Gnosticism is a very, very modern impulse.
00:48:18 ►
It may not at first appear so because ancient Gnosticism is freighted with angels, demons, what we
00:48:28 ►
would call superstition. But if you strip
00:48:31 ►
away all that Baroque stuff, you come to
00:48:35 ►
a philosophy very similar to the
00:48:38 ►
philosophy that many of us have accepted
00:48:43 ►
really without thinking.
00:48:48 ►
We just call it modern attitudes.
00:48:53 ►
But the idea in Gnosticism is that you’re on your own.
00:48:57 ►
You know, there ain’t no free lunch. If God did make the universe,
00:49:01 ►
he disappeared shortly afterwards
00:49:03 ►
and has no interest in you your fate your fears
00:49:08 ►
your hope uh we don’t belong gnostics were profoundly phobic of the world and uh they
00:49:19 ►
were either very ascetic cults or they were very libertine-like cults
00:49:28 ►
springing from the same idea,
00:49:31 ►
which was that they did not belong in this universe.
00:49:35 ►
They were from a different place,
00:49:38 ►
and their whole concern was to escape.
00:49:42 ►
They are the ones who decided that the earth is an iron prison.
00:49:47 ►
They didn’t like to have children
00:49:50 ►
because they felt that to have a child
00:49:53 ►
is to trap light in matter.
00:49:56 ►
In many Gnostic sects,
00:49:58 ►
the only forms of sexual activity
00:50:00 ►
that they approved of
00:50:02 ►
were forms that were guaranteed
00:50:04 ►
to not lead
00:50:06 ►
to conception so oral sex anal sex whatever but never sex which could lead
00:50:14 ►
to conception because that would trap the light and that was an abomination
00:50:18 ►
needless to say these sects died out in a hurry because they were self-limiting there were all kinds of religious
00:50:28 ►
impulses yeah yes he he said that these zealots were using amanita muscaria as a sacrament and that Christ was a symbol of the mushroom
00:50:50 ►
so that they could refer to the mushroom
00:50:52 ►
without directly referring to it
00:50:55 ►
so that only the believers would know.
00:51:00 ►
John Allegro’s case is interesting
00:51:03 ►
but not entirely persuasive.
00:51:07 ►
There needs to be more work in this area.
00:51:10 ►
There is something going on in the ancient Middle East about mushrooms.
00:51:16 ►
It’s hard to reconstruct, first of all,
00:51:19 ►
because the climate itself has changed so much
00:51:22 ►
that there are no mushrooms.
00:51:27 ►
But the evidence is pretty strong and getting stronger that that there was mushroom use I reproduced
00:51:36 ►
in my book a picture of a mushroom object and I was hoping I had another one here but I guess I left it back at the apartment
00:51:45 ►
Mandianism
00:51:50 ►
which is an old old cult
00:51:52 ►
in that part of the world
00:51:54 ►
forbids the use of mushrooms
00:51:56 ►
which is puzzling since there are none
00:51:59 ►
and they don’t forbid much
00:52:02 ►
but they go way out of their way to forbid mushrooms.
00:52:07 ►
Out of all this turmoil, I mean, it was very much like modern times.
00:52:13 ►
The whole Hellenistic world was awash in religious speculation.
00:52:17 ►
On every street corner, they were casting horoscopes and prescribing diets.
00:52:23 ►
And, you know, there were the temple prostitutes.
00:52:28 ►
So there was a whole hedonic element in sexuality.
00:52:35 ►
Orgy was a style in some religious organizations.
00:52:40 ►
And out of all of this religious foment, Gnism, Hermeticism, Chaldean Oracularism
00:52:48 ►
Jewish Syncretism, so forth and so on
00:52:53 ►
and Christianity was in there
00:52:57 ►
but it was just one in the crowd
00:52:59 ►
but with sharpened elbows
00:53:01 ►
and a sense of organization
00:53:04 ►
it was able to slowly worm its way into a position of dominance.
00:53:11 ►
The real Christians, whatever that means,
00:53:14 ►
probably were stamped out under the name of pagans.
00:53:19 ►
You see, what happened was the message of Christianity was
00:53:24 ►
that the end of the world was imminent this
00:53:27 ►
is the other thing that they were into that has also reemerged in modern times
00:53:32 ►
is the eminence of the end of the world and so for about a hundred and eighty
00:53:39 ►
years after Christ or a hundred and fifty years everybody just was like so stoned out on this rap that no organ
00:53:51 ►
no serious organization got done and they just waited for the end of the world in little
00:53:58 ►
communities practicing voluntary poverty and you know doing their thing and then it began to slowly dawn on
00:54:06 ►
people that it had been a long time since the Messiah’s promise and it was
00:54:12 ►
kind of stretching out a little and so then certain mentalities in that
00:54:18 ►
situation said you know this you know return of the Messiah is all very well, but I think we should get some real estate under our control
00:54:28 ►
and begin a vigorous building program
00:54:32 ►
and maybe found some schools and stuff like that.
00:54:37 ►
So these religions began to become,
00:54:40 ►
to turn away from their end-of-the-world ecstatic millenarianism and to see themselves as organizing
00:54:49 ►
for the long haul and it was in this atmosphere that the hermeticism is the invocation is the
00:55:08 ►
ability to call stellar demons down into statues and then these statues prophesy
00:55:17 ►
and this is why Christianity is it takes the Jewish aversion to idol worship and just raises
00:55:28 ►
it to an whole new level of intensity because they didn’t they were freaked
00:55:33 ►
out by this animating of statues with stellar demons thing that the
00:55:39 ►
hermeticists were into yeah well this is a good question you know I mean when
00:55:49 ►
you’re reading a 1500 year old account of a magical invocation if we are to
00:55:56 ►
believe them what happened was by singing certain songs burning certain
00:56:02 ►
incense and performing these rituals at certain times
00:56:08 ►
that were astrologically correct they could cause these things called decans which are
00:56:17 ►
are zodiacal demons of some sort there are three decans to each zodiacal sign see modern astrology has completely largely
00:56:29 ►
forgotten this i mean there are people who do decanic astrology but you have to pay through
00:56:37 ►
the nose because of course this is a lost and dying art but they would somehow be able to draw these decans down into the statue
00:56:46 ►
and then they could extract knowledge from the statue and
00:56:52 ►
you know this is this would lay the basis for these sympathetic magics which were then later
00:57:01 ►
developed in the renaissance it’s quite actually. This is why this book I recommended
00:57:08 ►
is so interesting, the one on spiritual and demonic
00:57:11 ►
magic by Walker because it
00:57:14 ►
shows you how by living a certain life
00:57:20 ►
these Renaissance princes were incredibly wealthy
00:57:23 ►
so you have a suite of apartments which overlook
00:57:28 ►
You know the Plaza
00:57:30 ►
San Marco in Venice and
00:57:33 ►
Certain colors are prescribed that the walls be painted you only wear certain
00:57:40 ►
kinds of robes made of certain materials
00:57:44 ►
You perform your magical invocations at certain
00:57:48 ►
times of day burning certain incenses and they were big on fresh air and light it isn’t the dark
00:57:56 ►
image of magic that we get of you know the stirring cauldron and the bat-faced familiar and all that.
00:58:05 ►
No, it’s all about open air, light, wind blowing through,
00:58:11 ►
flowing silk robes.
00:58:13 ►
They were angelic magicians, is what they were.
00:58:17 ►
And they were evoking these things through the use of sigils,
00:58:22 ►
which are magical symbols.
00:58:25 ►
And then there became stress on magical alphabets.
00:58:29 ►
Enochian is one of these magical alphabets,
00:58:33 ►
or languages, rather.
00:58:36 ►
John Dee, remember I mentioned the whole 10-year episode
00:58:40 ►
with the show stone.
00:58:43 ►
Well, one of the subjects which these entities that d and kelly
00:58:47 ►
were dealing with returned to again and again and again were um the the uh inoculum this language
00:58:59 ►
which they said was the true language that Abraham used to communicate with the angels.
00:59:07 ►
And it has a special alphabet, an alien alphabet.
00:59:12 ►
And there’s even been published an Enochian dictionary of some four or five thousand words.
00:59:20 ►
There was a very bizarre, this is just a footnote,
00:59:23 ►
but a very bizarre episode in the mid-1950s.
00:59:26 ►
There was a woman who was a kind of clairvoyante, and she was in contact with flying saucers.
00:59:34 ►
I mean, now everybody and their dog is in contact with flying saucers.
00:59:38 ►
But at that time, it was fairly rare, rare enough that she became an object of interest to the CIA.
00:59:49 ►
And at one point she was in the CIA building in Langley, Virginia,
00:59:54 ►
and they were interviewing her.
00:59:58 ►
And she said, well, there’s a flying saucer right outside the window
01:00:06 ►
and these guys rushed to the window
01:00:09 ►
and looked and there was some kind of thing
01:00:12 ►
in the sky and she said
01:00:14 ►
it’s giving me a message for you
01:00:18 ►
for this colonel
01:00:20 ►
and the message was
01:00:24 ►
Afa Afa
01:00:25 ►
Afa
01:00:27 ►
Afa
01:00:28 ►
A-F-F-A
01:00:29 ►
so he wrote this down
01:00:30 ►
well then
01:00:31 ►
I
01:00:32 ►
I don’t
01:00:33 ►
I didn’t read this
01:00:34 ►
I looked it up
01:00:35 ►
I had a hunch
01:00:36 ►
Afa
01:00:37 ►
is the Enochian word
01:00:40 ►
for nothingness
01:00:41 ►
just more more weirdness.
01:00:47 ►
Angelic languages, you know,
01:00:49 ►
why do these DMT creatures,
01:00:51 ►
why are they so concerned
01:00:54 ►
with language?
01:00:55 ►
Not only language,
01:00:57 ►
but alphabets.
01:00:59 ►
I had a very weird,
01:01:00 ►
in fact, you know,
01:01:01 ►
one of the high water weirdness
01:01:03 ►
events of my life was when I was young, I wanted the DMT flash to last longer, so I used to smoke it at the height of LSD trips.
01:01:26 ►
One Christmas vacation, this rooming house that I managed in Berkeley,
01:01:30 ►
everybody had gone home for Christmas, I thought.
01:01:34 ►
And so I decided I would take some LSD and smoke DMT.
01:01:41 ►
And so I took the LSD and then I smoked the DMT. It was just nuts. I mean, it’s nuts enough.
01:01:44 ►
But this was like turbocharged nuts
01:01:47 ►
it went on and on and on
01:01:49 ►
and finally
01:01:51 ►
I
01:01:52 ►
there was a woman
01:01:55 ►
who I rented a room to upstairs
01:01:57 ►
named Rosemary
01:01:59 ►
who was supposed to be in Minnesota
01:02:02 ►
and she was
01:02:03 ►
an actress and very projective
01:02:07 ►
and did everything with great flair.
01:02:11 ►
And she apparently came back early from Christmas vacation.
01:02:14 ►
So she hit the front steps running of this house
01:02:20 ►
and used her key to let herself into the front door
01:02:24 ►
and came right around to my door
01:02:27 ►
and started beating on my door.
01:02:30 ►
Well, I am by nature a very paranoid person.
01:02:34 ►
I mean, I can be up the Rio Yagwes Yasu
01:02:38 ►
in the middle of the Amazon basin
01:02:40 ►
and if I’m out in the rainforest smoking a joint
01:02:44 ►
and a stick is broken anywhere
01:02:47 ►
near me i immediately hide the dope you know and just you know i’m very paranoid so this woman
01:02:55 ►
lets herself in and comes and beats with her clenched fist on on my bedroom door well i like underwent a coronary thrombosis or something and i was in
01:03:08 ►
the elf space and they were screeching and chattering and showing me all this stuff
01:03:13 ►
and when she did this i like i i flew off i jumped like i jumped two feet in the air and landed on my feet.
01:03:28 ►
And it was as though, and don’t try this at home, folks. It was as though this sudden flash of adrenaline and this sudden movement that I made
01:03:38 ►
broke up the ordinary division between the trip and norm normality or something anyway i pulled the trip
01:03:49 ►
with me into the room i was now standing in the room eyes open but the the elf creatures had come
01:03:59 ►
with me and everything had just been like jacked up to some immense level of intensity
01:04:05 ►
and there were these rotating geometric things
01:04:10 ►
in the room
01:04:12 ►
hanging in the air
01:04:15 ►
and it was like moving in this jerky motion
01:04:19 ►
this thing was going click, click, click
01:04:23 ►
and it was faceted.
01:04:25 ►
And every time it would make this large metallic click,
01:04:29 ►
these plastic triangle-shaped,
01:04:32 ►
brightly colored chits or something,
01:04:35 ►
like little pieces of floor tile or something,
01:04:38 ►
would fly across the room.
01:04:40 ►
And each one of them had a letter on it
01:04:43 ►
in an alien language, of like hebrew or
01:04:47 ►
sanskrit and it was just there were several of these machines and these things were ricocheting
01:04:53 ►
off the walls and i had an elf hanging off each hand and i was turning around and i was just saying
01:05:00 ►
holy shit you know i’ve pulled i’m i’m i and I, and then she’s still beating on the door,
01:05:09 ►
you know, so I stagger over to the door, fling it back, and look at her, and say something like,
01:05:18 ►
and then she realized at that point what my problem was and and retreated but i’ve never
01:05:32 ►
forgotten it’s the one time that it that they went literary on me and not only did i see them
01:05:40 ►
not only did i hear them but i they were printing on the air the message as well very
01:05:48 ►
curious i mean we don’t yeah yeah it’s
01:05:56 ►
i don’t know the first the first few times i DMT, I had almost no ability to say anything about it at all.
01:06:09 ►
I remember the first time I did it, I’ve never actually seen it hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me the first time.
01:06:16 ►
I came out of it and I said, I can’t believe it.
01:06:21 ►
I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it.
01:06:27 ►
I don’t believe it I can’t believe it I don’t believe it it I don’t believe it and I said this about 200 times because I just my life I was blown out of the water
01:06:34 ►
I’d spent years getting my act together and becoming a Marxist and of this and
01:06:41 ►
of that and had all this stuff all figured out, you know.
01:06:45 ►
And it just left me absolutely intellectually naked.
01:06:50 ►
It was that everything you know is wrong experience
01:06:54 ►
except that it was from the toes, you know.
01:06:57 ►
I mean, everything I knew was wrong.
01:07:00 ►
I’ve never forgotten it.
01:07:01 ►
I mean, it is the most, I don’t know,
01:07:05 ►
it’s like hitting the reset button on your whole cosmogonic myth.
01:07:11 ►
I mean, you just, it’s the convincer.
01:07:15 ►
You know, you occasionally meet people who say,
01:07:18 ►
you people who take drugs, listen,
01:07:22 ►
you think I believe that this is anything more
01:07:25 ►
than you just hyping yourself up on this?
01:07:29 ►
Say, listen, you’ve got ten minutes to put into exploring that point of view.
01:07:33 ►
Check this out, because it’s confounding.
01:07:38 ►
I mean, people sometimes ask me, is it dangerous?
01:07:43 ►
It is if you fear death by astonishment.
01:07:51 ►
Astonishment is something we rarely experience
01:07:54 ►
as the genuine article.
01:07:56 ►
We fake it.
01:07:57 ►
Say, oh, you’ve really surprised me.
01:08:01 ►
But, hey, surprise, surprise.
01:08:06 ►
It can really get wrathy, yeah.
01:08:08 ►
You mentioned this ancient cult
01:08:10 ►
that forbade the use of the much-needed.
01:08:13 ►
What were their beliefs?
01:08:14 ►
Why did they?
01:08:16 ►
Mandeanism?
01:08:17 ►
Well, Mandeanism is a very old religion.
01:08:22 ►
It arose around Jerusalem a couple of centuries before Christ
01:08:28 ►
it was a baptismal cult and I’m really into the Mandai ins actually they were
01:08:37 ►
the oldest continuous Western religion in the world with a Gnostic intent.
01:08:45 ►
And they started, and they were probably,
01:08:47 ►
they started out as Jews,
01:08:49 ►
but they were persecuted.
01:08:51 ►
They claimed John the Baptist as one of their own.
01:08:55 ►
And he was a member of some kind of baptismal cult
01:08:58 ►
because we know he baptized Christ.
01:09:00 ►
But they were driven out of the area around Jerusalem
01:09:05 ►
and then for centuries they were in
01:09:07 ►
Lebanon and then they slowly
01:09:09 ►
made their way across Persia
01:09:11 ►
and they ended
01:09:13 ►
up in the swamps of Iraq
01:09:15 ►
and Iran.
01:09:16 ►
Do you? Is he from
01:09:21 ►
Basra?
01:09:24 ►
Is he from Basra, that city in the south?
01:09:29 ►
It’s a very…
01:09:30 ►
How do you know?
01:09:38 ►
I heard about that footage.
01:09:41 ►
People in London told me that they had seen it.
01:09:40 ►
footage.
01:09:42 ►
People in London told
01:09:43 ►
me that they
01:09:44 ►
had seen it.
01:09:45 ►
They’re very
01:09:46 ►
underground.
01:09:46 ►
He tells me
01:09:47 ►
that because
01:09:48 ►
they’re discriminated
01:09:49 ►
against, you
01:09:50 ►
don’t go around
01:09:50 ►
advertising as
01:09:51 ►
far as these
01:09:52 ►
people don’t
01:09:53 ►
like them.
01:09:54 ►
Oh, no, they
01:09:55 ►
don’t like them.
01:09:56 ►
Well, Mandaeans
01:09:57 ►
are very, very
01:09:58 ►
interesting.
01:09:59 ►
They have their
01:10:04 ►
own written language. Although in 1847 there was a cholera epidemic
01:10:10 ►
that wiped out 90 percent of the priesthood and only priests were allowed to learn to read and
01:10:17 ►
write this language i have some facsimile manuscripts from the Vatican library,
01:10:29 ►
I sort of think that we all should become Mandaeans.
01:10:33 ►
Of all the religions I’ve ever looked at and studied,
01:10:36 ►
it seems to me the most psychedelic, the most sort of ethically correct.
01:10:41 ►
And it would be a great religion to practice on a world scale
01:10:46 ►
because they’re into caring for the land they’re river nuts they love rivers and they build their
01:10:54 ►
they build a cult hut called a mandai and they always divert a little ditch through it and then they do their their ritual baptisms and stuff
01:11:06 ►
like that there but their folk tales and their religious beliefs are very
01:11:12 ►
interesting it’s like a religion of biology the highest god in man dion ism
01:11:20 ►
is called hibble zaiwa and hibble zaiwa is always referred to as they so it’s
01:11:28 ►
that they are in charge and it’s beautiful scriptural stuff they’re very
01:11:40 ►
much like Orthodox Jews only more so in that if you’re a religious Mandaian,
01:11:48 ►
your life is ruled by all kinds of things
01:11:54 ►
sort of like the rules of kosher.
01:11:57 ►
The most difficult rule that these people are asked to keep in their own lives
01:12:02 ►
is that if you’re really a devout Mandayan
01:12:05 ►
you are considered polluted if your eye falls on an unbeliever and an unbeliever
01:12:13 ►
is a non-Mandayan so you can imagine how difficult it is when you’re down to four
01:12:20 ►
or five hundred people to make sure that’s the only people you ever see the only profession
01:12:25 ►
that a mandayan man can follow and not require ritual decontamination every day is silversmithing
01:12:35 ►
so if you ever go to baghdad not likely too soon but if you ever go to Baghdad or Basra or Kirkuk
01:12:46 ►
there are communities of these people
01:12:48 ►
and you find them by going to the
01:12:50 ►
silver markets and then
01:12:52 ►
through discreet inquiry
01:12:54 ►
you can find
01:12:56 ►
them
01:12:56 ►
well
01:12:59 ►
in
01:13:04 ►
folklore folkloristsists folkloric anthropologists have developed all these rules
01:13:11 ►
if a religion makes something taboo you can usually bet that that means they were into it
01:13:20 ►
at some point because when a religion makes something taboo it means that there has been a reformist upheaval
01:13:28 ►
inside the religion
01:13:30 ►
this is probably how Soma was lost
01:13:34 ►
to the ancient Hindus
01:13:35 ►
it’s how Zoroaster
01:13:42 ►
was called the great reformer and he called the great reformer
01:13:45 ►
and he was the great reformer
01:13:48 ►
because he suppressed a lot of
01:13:50 ►
indigenous shamanic cults
01:13:52 ►
and some people think
01:13:54 ►
that he actually attempted
01:13:56 ►
to suppress Haoma
01:13:58 ►
and Haoma is the
01:14:00 ►
Avestan
01:14:01 ►
counterpart of Soma
01:14:04 ►
if any of you are interested in all this this book by Flattery the Avestan counterpart of Soma.
01:14:07 ►
If any of you are interested in all this, this book by Flattery and Schwartz called,
01:14:11 ►
what is it called?
01:14:15 ►
Hauma and Harmaline in Iranian Religion.
01:14:21 ►
It’s from the University of California Press.
01:14:23 ►
And they make a very strong case that soma
01:14:26 ►
couldn’t was not mushrooms that it was pagaman harmala and it’s really a great it’s a really
01:14:33 ►
interesting book i mean i learned things that i didn’t know for instance in the pre-zoroastrian phase of Iranian religion drugs were not only used to
01:14:49 ►
access the spiritual world but they actually said there was no other way to
01:14:55 ►
do it which is sort of my position so it was nice to know that these pre
01:15:00 ►
Zoroastrian Iranian light religions they were into what they called
01:15:06 ►
the men nog me no G the men nog and it’s another dimension and you can only
01:15:14 ►
attain knowledge of it through the use of drugs but the men on existence is
01:15:21 ►
where the dead people are and what their religion was about was you get to know your
01:15:27 ►
own soul through using drugs and you approach the it’s like a it’s like visiting somebody in stir
01:15:36 ►
you go and your soul comes and meets you comes through the monog existence and meets you at the membrane.
01:15:45 ►
And the idea is that during life, you must learn to recognize your soul.
01:15:52 ►
Because after death, if you can’t pick it out of the soul swarm,
01:15:58 ►
then you will be somehow incompleted in the after death world.
01:16:04 ►
Yeah.
01:16:04 ►
incompleted in the after death world yeah
01:16:04 ►
to attain death by astonishment
01:16:13 ►
well DMT raises the possibility
01:16:19 ►
of death by astonishment
01:16:21 ►
I was talking to somebody about it last night
01:16:23 ►
saying when you take DMT
01:16:25 ►
the question is not
01:16:27 ►
will I be alright?
01:16:30 ►
The question is
01:16:31 ►
have I lived through it or not?
01:16:34 ►
Because you can’t tell
01:16:36 ►
whether you’ve lived through it.
01:16:40 ►
DMT is this very short-acting
01:16:43 ►
hallucinogen that you smoke but it’s a neurotransmitter.
01:16:48 ►
It occurs in all human beings on the natch, and it occurs in various plants and animals.
01:16:55 ►
In terms of nature, it’s the commonest of all hallucinogens.
01:17:01 ►
In terms of impact, it’s the strongest of all hallucinogens in terms of impact it’s the strongest of all hallucinogens i mean it’s a completely
01:17:08 ►
reality obliterating experience and it comes on so quickly that you don’t grok it like a drug
01:17:18 ►
i mean we all know what a drug is you know you feel this you feel that it gets stronger it makes you rest finally it
01:17:25 ►
overwhelms you this isn’t like that this is like that you know you and your friends are somewhere
01:17:32 ►
and there’s talk about this drug and the pipe gets filled and this and that and then you’re
01:17:38 ►
about to smoke this drug or maybe you just smoked it but anyway a 747 crashes into your apartment building at
01:17:48 ►
three times the speed of sound and interrupts whatever you were doing and sometimes people
01:17:54 ►
come out of it saying you know what happened what happened for crying out loud saying nothing have
01:18:02 ►
you just did it i mean you say you mean that’s it say yeah that’s
01:18:07 ►
that’s what it does because it is not it’s more like it happens so quickly that we
01:18:14 ►
interpret it as an event coming from the outside rather than a chemical compound diffusing through your body,
01:18:25 ►
because it completely replaces reality,
01:18:28 ►
not with the contents of your unconscious or your unfulfilled dream, wishes, or any of that,
01:18:35 ►
but with another dimension, a space filled with entities, busy about their many tasks,
01:18:43 ►
although they notice you and come flocking over with a piercing screech
01:18:49 ►
and begin to, they like to treat with you.
01:18:53 ►
They play with you.
01:18:55 ►
They’re not entirely friendly.
01:18:57 ►
It’s sort of like, I don’t know, it’s the kind of feeling I used to have in India
01:19:03 ►
when I would go to make these hash buys in these Indian markets and these guys would say, you know, welcome, welcome, you’re my friend, I am not like all the others.
01:19:27 ►
And what it was was, you know, we were there to do business, and so it was fine, and everything usually went smoothly.
01:19:34 ►
But this was no environment into which to let your guard down or anything like that.
01:19:35 ►
You’ve had your hand up.
01:19:39 ►
What does the DNC do in their brain as a neurotransmitter?
01:19:41 ►
We don’t know.
01:19:50 ►
Nobody knows what it’s doing there. And as long as the government makes it impossible for science to pursue rational questions or rational answers to these kinds of questions, it’s not likely we’ll ever find out.
01:19:56 ►
The best guess so far is that it mediates attention.
01:20:01 ►
That, for instance, if there were to be a noise over here or movement and I turn and I that that’s a
01:20:09 ►
little spike of DMT makes that possible it’s where you suddenly narrow your awareness and project it
01:20:16 ►
deeply into a small confined area this was the best guess of the people who did work on it a few years ago. Yeah.
01:20:35 ►
Well, there are a number of physioactive tryptamines.
01:20:42 ►
DMT is not, if it’s made right, not a cardioactive tryptamine.
01:20:45 ►
Sometimes when you smoke it, your heart races,
01:20:48 ►
but you can’t tell whether that’s sloppy synthesis or that you’re scared.
01:20:52 ►
What is it made from?
01:20:54 ►
It’s made from tryptophan,
01:20:56 ►
which is an amino acid,
01:20:58 ►
one of the eight essential amino acids,
01:21:01 ►
and it’s an easy conversion out of tryptophan.
01:21:05 ►
Does it come from a plant?
01:21:07 ►
Well, it can come from a plant, but if you were to ask a chemist to make it for you,
01:21:12 ►
he’d ask you to get him a few hundred grams of tryptophan.
01:21:18 ►
Can you distinguish between kinds of antibodies that you encounter on DMT against the kind
01:21:24 ►
that you have on mushrooms, you hear a voice.
01:21:30 ►
You don’t rarely, at least in my experience, do you see who’s talking.
01:21:35 ►
But on DMT, all barriers are transcended in the first 30 seconds.
01:21:41 ►
I mean, you hear it, you see it, and sometimes you feel it, you know.
01:21:47 ►
These little entities,
01:21:48 ►
these self-dribbling basketballs,
01:21:50 ►
these things that I call the tykes,
01:21:53 ►
they jump into your chest.
01:21:56 ►
They jump into your chest
01:21:58 ►
and then they jump out again.
01:22:01 ►
I don’t know why they do that.
01:22:03 ►
In the Amazon, among the tribes that use dmt derived from
01:22:08 ►
plants they say they call these spirit things they call them hikuli and they say that you’re
01:22:16 ►
supposed to not that they will jump into your chest and then you’re supposed to have a technique
01:22:22 ►
to keep them from getting out and the number of these things that you trap inside your body cavity
01:22:29 ►
indicates how powerful a shaman you are.
01:22:34 ►
Your magic is done through the hikulis that are trapped inside of you.
01:22:41 ►
So you really don’t have to steal the mushrooms?
01:22:43 ►
You do, but it’s fleeting it’s like you know
01:22:48 ►
it’s it’s different with dmt it is more real than this experience of sitting in this room is real
01:22:57 ►
i mean it is confounding it’s very hard on dmt to tell yourself this is a drug. I mean, good Lord, it doesn’t seem like it.
01:23:08 ►
It seems like you just tunneled through an energy barrier
01:23:12 ►
into the beta sub X dimension,
01:23:16 ►
which is all the time all around us,
01:23:19 ►
but somehow you just became virtual
01:23:22 ►
and moved across the energy barrier and there you are you know and
01:23:28 ►
the other thing about dmd that’s weird is it does not affect your mind in other words you don’t feel
01:23:35 ►
gaga with ecstasy you don’t feel relaxed you feel exactly the way you felt before you did it it’s that the
01:23:45 ►
world has just been swapped out and that’s strange I sort of like that that
01:23:53 ►
it doesn’t lay a glove on the observing cognitive processes instead it just does
01:24:00 ►
something in the visual cortex that causes the world to be replaced
01:24:06 ►
by a three, four, five-dimensional,
01:24:09 ►
highly colored, moving environment
01:24:11 ►
filled with screaming elf demons.
01:24:17 ►
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
01:24:22 ►
No.
01:24:23 ►
More like 50 milligrams.
01:24:27 ►
We need to go to lunch.
01:24:28 ►
This is the last clip.
01:24:30 ►
I heard somewhere that
01:24:32 ►
the compounded use of MAO inhibitors
01:24:34 ►
increases the length of time
01:24:35 ►
that the DMT experience will last.
01:24:38 ►
Have you heard that?
01:24:39 ►
And if so, in what form
01:24:41 ►
are the MAO inhibitors taken?
01:24:43 ►
Okay, the question is that can you extend the life of a DMT flash
01:24:48 ►
if you pre-dose yourself with MAO inhibitors?
01:24:51 ►
The answer is probably this is really a don’t-try-this-at-home-folks maneuver
01:24:58 ►
unless you really know your MAO inhibitors.
01:25:02 ►
There are MAO inhibitors synthetics that will inhibit
01:25:07 ►
every molecule of MAO in your body for up to six weeks after a single exposure
01:25:13 ►
this you don’t need an excellent MAO inhibitor for these purposes would be harming or harm Alene which is which is
01:25:28 ►
reversible in four to six hours so if you take harming and pre-dose it but
01:25:34 ►
before you go extending your DMT trip with an MAO inhibitor you better have
01:25:38 ►
just an ordinary old-fashioned regular DMmt trip and decide whether you really want to spend
01:25:49 ►
more time in that place because see the hook is especially for smart ass straight types
01:25:57 ►
is that you say look it only lasts 10 minutes for crying out loud you want to have all these opinions on this subject but
01:26:06 ►
you’re not willing to invest 10 minutes so most people certainly i the first i said i had taken
01:26:12 ►
lsd and all i thought 10 minutes bring it on we’ll go out that in a holographic universe, 10 minutes is indistinguishable from 50,000 years under the proper conditions.
01:26:34 ►
So, we’ll meet back here at 2.30.
01:26:39 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:26:48 ►
Well, welcome back.
01:26:50 ►
Now, rather than carry on with my usual closing remarks,
01:26:56 ►
today I’m going to cut myself off and save them for a little bit later in order to get the rest of this current McKenna series online.
01:27:04 ►
We’ve got four tapes left to listen to.
01:27:07 ►
Three of them are about 45 minutes long, but the last one’s only about five minutes long.
01:27:11 ►
So I’m going to get these next two podcasts out as soon as I can
01:27:14 ►
and save all of my commentary for the final program when the talk itself won’t be so long.
01:27:21 ►
And my objective is to have all of that done by the end of next week.
01:27:21 ►
along. And my objective is to have all of that done by the end
01:27:23 ►
of next week. Of course,
01:27:26 ►
you’ve heard stories like that from me before,
01:27:30 ►
haven’t you? So please note
01:27:31 ►
that it’s not a promise, only a plan.
01:27:34 ►
Anyway, I’ll
01:27:35 ►
close for now by reminding you
01:27:37 ►
that this and most of the podcasts
01:27:39 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon are
01:27:41 ►
freely available for you to use in your own
01:27:43 ►
audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.
01:27:49 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:28:12 ►
If you’re interested in the philosophy behind the psychedelic salon, you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as an audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:28:18 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:28:42 ►
Be well, my friends. Outro Music