Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott
In today’s podcast Jonathan Ott unfolds a parade of history setting out the use and prohibition of psychedelic medicines throughout the course of human history. Although this talk was originally given at a 1996 entheobotany conference, it remains as current as if it were given yesterday. After Jonathan describes human uses of psychoactive plants stretching back into prehistory, he goes on to explain how what he calls “the overdeveloped world” has used religious morality to impose a pharmacratic inquisition that has essentially caused “the spiritual bankruptcy of our Western Civilization.”
“Shamans are Technologists of Myth” -Lorenzo
The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries
Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History
In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley
Reality by Peter Kingsley
Peter Kingsley Interview – Western Civilization was intentionally created
Previous Episode
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 016 - A Short History of the Human Species - score: 0.70807
- 552 - The Power of Divine Inspiration - score: 0.69000
- 495 - Our Bridges Have Burned Behind Us - score: 0.66648
- 492 - The Dizziness of Things Unsaid - score: 0.65729
- 070 - Entities (Part 2) - score: 0.65594
- 239 - Shamanism, Alchemy, and the 20th Century - score: 0.65255
- 224 - McKenna_ Hermeticism and Alchemy Part 2 - score: 0.64224
- 211 - Empowering Hope in Dark Times - score: 0.64065
- 664 - Leonard Pickard’s Rose of Paracelsus Ch 4 - score: 0.63728
- Podcast 708 – Beyond Realism - score: 0.63623
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:26 ►
is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And I’d like to begin today by thanking Jeffrey D. and Philip A., both of whom made donations this past week to help offset some
00:00:32 ►
of the expenses involved in distributing these podcasts. Your contributions really mean a
00:00:38 ►
lot to me and I appreciate you taking the time to help keep these podcasts winging their way out into cyberdelic space.
00:00:47 ►
Now today I’m going to take you back once again to the 1996 conference
00:00:52 ►
from which we heard Sasha Shulgin’s talk a couple of weeks ago.
00:00:56 ►
And again, I want to thank Phil B. for sending me a copy of this talk.
00:01:01 ►
And Phil, for what it’s worth, I know that you were at the conference
00:01:05 ►
so many years ago, and as I’ve said before, it turns out that so is the woman who is now
00:01:10 ►
my wife. At long last, I’m finally catching up to things that you two learned long before
00:01:16 ►
I did. Actually, this is the first talk of that weekend conference, and it was given
00:01:21 ►
by the emcee for the weekend, Jonathan Ott. Now I want you to know that
00:01:27 ►
this is a different version of a Jonathan Ott talk from the one that I first experienced when
00:01:32 ►
I heard him speak for the first time at the Entheobotany conference in Mexico in 1999.
00:01:38 ►
That morning he came into the big room we were all in and sat on a small wooden desk up front.
00:01:44 ►
into the big room we were all in and sat on a small wooden desk up front.
00:01:50 ►
In fact, he sat cross-legged on the top of the table and his back was ramrod straight and for over an hour he gave what I still consider to be one of the most detailed and
00:01:55 ►
elegant descriptions of psychedelic plant life in the jungle that I’ve ever heard.
00:01:59 ►
And he did it all without notes, same way that Terrence used to talk.
00:02:04 ►
I thought at the time, and I still think, that he is perhaps the most intelligent person I’ve ever met.
00:02:11 ►
So when I previewed the talk that I’m about to play for you right now,
00:02:14 ►
I was somewhat taken aback to hear him reading it.
00:02:18 ►
At least it sounds as if he was reading from a prepared text.
00:02:22 ►
Even so, after listening to it twice now, I can’t wait to hear it again.
00:02:27 ►
And I hope that you like it as much as I do.
00:02:30 ►
Oh, by the way, for this talk by Jonathan,
00:02:33 ►
you won’t have to be able to understand science and botany,
00:02:36 ►
because today, Jonathan Ott is about to give our community
00:02:40 ►
a little history lesson about the tribe.
00:02:45 ►
Welcome to Entheobotany, Shamanic Plant Science.
00:02:48 ►
I want to thank you all for coming.
00:02:49 ►
I’m Jonathan Ott, and I extend this welcome on behalf of my co-organizers of the conference,
00:02:55 ►
Ken Symington and Rob Montgomery, and of course also on behalf of all the faculty members
00:03:01 ►
that have come, and we all thank you for making this event possible.
00:03:06 ►
I want to mention briefly,
00:03:07 ►
I don’t really have time to talk much about the background of this,
00:03:10 ►
but there will be time for that probably tomorrow morning
00:03:12 ►
because I’m also introducing myself as first speaker.
00:03:16 ►
And we have an action-packed program,
00:03:19 ►
and I don’t want to start out by taking an hour and a half for mine
00:03:22 ►
and setting a bad example as far as disciplining the other speakers,
00:03:26 ►
some of whom are notably long-winded.
00:03:29 ►
Actually, they can hold a candle to me in that regard.
00:03:33 ►
And so I just want to mention that we’re very pleased to be presenting an art exhibit
00:03:39 ►
of entheogen-inspired or related artwork, which is in the lobby.
00:03:44 ►
of entheogen-inspired or related artwork, which is in the lobby.
00:03:50 ►
And so please, if you haven’t already taken a look at it or a good close look,
00:03:51 ►
it certainly merits attention.
00:03:58 ►
So as I say, I’ll just give my presentation, which is called The Natural Paradises,
00:04:02 ►
and then I will be in turn introducing the other speakers.
00:04:08 ►
Two decades have passed since the American anthropologist Peter First characterized shamanism as a Pangean Ur religion of extreme antiquity,
00:04:13 ►
extending at least 50 millennia into our past.
00:04:16 ►
In The Ghost Dance, The Origins of Religion,
00:04:19 ►
fellow anthropologist Weston Labar proposed as much, offering elaborate details.
00:04:25 ►
Both First and Labar acknowledged the fundamental importance of the innovative work of R. Gordon Wasson
00:04:30 ►
and the formulation of this astonishing insight.
00:04:33 ►
Wasson, a banker and pioneering ethnomycologist, devoted his life to documenting the survival of shamanism,
00:04:40 ►
to exploring a unified field theory of the connection between shamanic ecstasy and religion.
00:04:46 ►
Wasson summarized this revolutionary discovery with disarming simplicity.
00:04:52 ►
Shamanism is the convenient name that we give to the religious experience of the Stone Age,
00:04:56 ►
and its key is ecstasy, rapture.
00:04:59 ►
Fortunately for us, the cult of the entheogen did not die out in prehistory.
00:05:04 ►
Shamanism lingered on here and there,
00:05:06 ►
reaching as with fingers down the corridors of time into early history.
00:05:10 ►
I suggest that it survives to this day
00:05:12 ►
in the secret rites of the divine mushrooms in Mesoamerica.
00:05:17 ►
Wasson was later to characterize pre- and proto-history,
00:05:20 ►
or perhaps more to the point, the preliterate history of all peoples,
00:05:24 ►
as the age of entheogens, which lives on in Amazonia
00:05:27 ►
and the remote mountains of Mexico and elsewhere.
00:05:31 ►
I have sometimes asked myself whether the unlettered ages,
00:05:34 ►
stretching back through eons of time,
00:05:36 ►
were not those belonging peculiarly to the Entheogens, the Age of Entheogens.
00:05:42 ►
The mysteries of Alevsus began in the unlettered past of the amazing Greek people,
00:05:46 ►
then persisted for a few centuries under an hermetic seal of secrecy
00:05:49 ►
into an age of glorious letters.
00:05:52 ►
The Soma of the Vedic hymns knew its heyday before the Aryans learned their letters,
00:05:56 ►
but it disappeared with the coming of the alphabet.
00:06:00 ►
Although Eliade conceived of the shamanic use of what he indiscriminately called drugs or narcotics
00:06:06 ►
as decadence, as a vulgar substitute for pure trance,
00:06:11 ►
we now know this to have been a colossal error,
00:06:14 ►
a classic example of failing to see the forest for the trees.
00:06:18 ►
With the blinders and tunnel vision characteristic of academic over-specialization,
00:06:23 ►
alloyed with prejudice derived from Western society’s pharmacological Calvinism,
00:06:28 ►
and lacking the most rudimentary knowledge of pharmacology or the history of inebriance.
00:06:33 ►
Eliade ham-fistedly described as degenerate use of the sacred plants,
00:06:38 ►
whose visionary effects were the very essence of shamanism.
00:06:42 ►
As vulgar, what Gordon Lawon was to identify four years later
00:06:45 ►
on the basis of his personal experience with Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina, as religion pure
00:06:52 ►
and simple, free of theology, free of dogmatics, expressing itself in awe and reverence and
00:06:59 ►
in lowered voices, mostly at night, when people would gather together to consume the sacred
00:07:04 ►
element.
00:07:04 ►
mostly at night, when people would gather together to consume the sacred element.
00:07:10 ►
Having experienced ecstasy at first hand, on the night of 29 June 1955 in a remote village in the mountains of southern Mexico,
00:07:14 ►
Wasson astutely recognized in the humble person of the preliterate Mazatec Indian curandera,
00:07:19 ►
Maria Sabina, the shaman, the focus for the woes and longings of mankind
00:07:25 ►
back, back through the stone age to Siberia
00:07:28 ►
she was religion incarnate
00:07:30 ►
she was the hierophant, the thaumaturge, the psychopompos
00:07:34 ►
in whom the troubles and aspirations of countless generations
00:07:37 ►
of the family of mankind had found
00:07:39 ►
were still finding their relief
00:07:41 ►
all this I saw in the light of that one match
00:07:44 ►
in the shadow performance that one match,
00:07:47 ►
in the shadow performance of Maria Sabina.
00:07:50 ►
The light of that match seemed to last an eon of time,
00:07:53 ►
and then suddenly it was out.
00:07:58 ►
While many scholars of early humankind, like Eliade,
00:08:00 ►
were made uncomfortable by the Wasson theory,
00:08:02 ►
their colleagues of greater vision descried therein a skeleton key to unlock the hermetic seal of secrecy,
00:08:06 ►
veiling the spiritual world of preliterate peoples from our sight.
00:08:10 ►
To Levi-Strauss, Wasson’s was a revolutionary hypothesis,
00:08:15 ►
and Labarre saw in Wasson’s work an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man.
00:08:22 ►
Labarre explored Wasson’s nexus between entheogens and shamanism and between shamanism and religion
00:08:27 ►
in his monumental The Ghost Dance.
00:08:30 ►
With the passing years, the Wasson theory has become so widely accepted by specialists
00:08:34 ►
as to be considered beyond serious dispute.
00:08:38 ►
Shamanism is the earliest manifestation of culture, the shaman the first professional
00:08:42 ►
and precursor of the priest, physician, musician,
00:08:45 ►
and every artist alike. Visionary ecstasy is the primal heart and soul of shamanism
00:08:50 ►
and religious revelation, and the use of entheogenic plant sacraments is the most archaic,
00:08:55 ►
fundamental, and pangean, or universal, not to mention effective technique for the induction
00:09:01 ►
of shamanic ecstasy, there could be no more appropriate designation
00:09:05 ►
for our millenary preliterate past than the Age of Entheogens.
00:09:11 ►
The symbolic demise of the Age of Entheogens in Paleogea, or the Old World, occurred at
00:09:16 ►
the end of the fourth century of our era when the Christian Alaric’s Goths overran the
00:09:21 ►
sanctuary at Alepsis, putting an end to an organized mystery religion two
00:09:25 ►
millennia old, centered on an annual rite in which initiates, or mistai, imbibed the kikion,
00:09:31 ►
an entheogenic potion which transformed them into epoptai, who had seen Tahira, the holy.
00:09:38 ►
This momentous event stands as a portentous symbol of the death of ancient religion and
00:09:42 ►
the inauguration of the phacratic Inquisition.
00:09:46 ►
Although the age of entheogens lived on in Palaeogea for perhaps another millennium,
00:09:51 ►
the demise of the Eleusinian mysteries told its death knell.
00:09:54 ►
The Christians’ enmity is easy to explain,
00:09:57 ►
since they were promulgating a religion in which the core mystery,
00:10:01 ►
the holy sacrament itself, was conspicuous by its absence,
00:10:05 ►
later transmogrified by the smoke and mirrors of the doctrine of transubstantiation
00:10:10 ►
into a specious symbol, an inert substance, a placebo and theogen.
00:10:15 ►
The imposter would be all too evident to anyone who had known the blessing of ecstasy,
00:10:19 ►
who had access to personal religious experiences.
00:10:23 ►
Thus a concerted attack on the use of sacred inebriants was mounted,
00:10:26 ►
and the supreme heresy was to presume to have any direct experience of the divine,
00:10:31 ►
not mediated by an increasingly corrupt and politicized priesthood.
00:10:35 ►
The Pharmacratic Inquisition was the answer of the Catholic Church
00:10:38 ►
to the embarrassing fact that it had taken all the religion out of religion,
00:10:42 ►
leaving an empty and hollow shell with no intrinsic value or attraction to humankind
00:10:47 ►
and which could only be maintained by hectoring,
00:10:51 ►
guilt-mongering, and plain brute force.
00:10:59 ►
While the world was to endure an incredible profusion of pogroms
00:11:03 ►
and organized and unorganized inquisitions
00:11:05 ►
throughout the millennium aptly characterized as the Dark Ages,
00:11:09 ►
directed here against vestiges of pre-Christian pagan philosophy,
00:11:12 ►
there against rival faiths like Judaism, Manichaeism, Islam,
00:11:17 ►
or the nascent stirrings of science and rationalism,
00:11:19 ►
there existed continual and vigorous pressure against ecstatic religions and practitioners of traditional herbal lore.
00:11:27 ►
Thus, diviners, healers, and midwives, exponents of the shamanic arts,
00:11:31 ►
were dragged to the stake among the Jews, Manichaeans, Muslims, alchemists, political dissidents,
00:11:37 ►
epileptics, criminals, heritants, business rivals,
00:11:40 ►
and anyone else whose misfortune it was to become a scapegoat for any problem.
00:11:44 ►
The witch’s garden was plowed under by an evil force, and anyone else whose misfortune it was to become a scapegoat for any problem.
00:11:48 ►
The witch’s garden was plowed under by an evil force,
00:11:50 ►
which conceived of human beings as sheep and used their bodies to fuel the fires of ritual purification.
00:11:55 ►
By the advent of the 16th century, Europe had been beaten into submission,
00:11:59 ►
shamanic ecstasy virtually expunged from the memory of the survivors,
00:12:03 ►
and the shamanic pharmacopoeia all but forgotten.
00:12:07 ►
The age of entheogens yet lived on in Neogea, or the New World.
00:12:11 ►
However, and European seafarers abruptly came face to face with their own pagan heritage,
00:12:16 ►
with people having direct experience of the divine,
00:12:19 ►
mediated not by ignorant priests, but by a bewildering array of entheogenic plant teachers.
00:12:24 ►
not by ignorant priests, but by a bewildering array of entheogenic plant teachers.
00:12:31 ►
Troubled churchmen uneasily saw in this a diabolical parody of their cherished holy communion,
00:12:35 ►
blissfully unaware of the fact that it was rather their own placebo sacrament that was a decidedly unholy parody of humankind’s immemorial communion with sacred plant teachers.
00:12:42 ►
We might date the advent of the Pharmacratic Inquisition in Neo-Gia to 1521 when Cortes
00:12:48 ►
ragtag band of outlaw conquistadores established
00:12:52 ►
dominion over the Aztecs, consummate virtuosos of the entheogenic
00:12:56 ►
arts and sciences. On 16 June
00:12:59 ►
sorry, 19 June 1620 in Mexico City, the Inquisition
00:13:04 ►
formally decreed that use of shamanic inebriants was heretical.
00:13:08 ►
It bears witness to the sincerity and integrity of the Mesoamerican Indians
00:13:11 ►
that they continued to commune with their traditional sacraments
00:13:14 ►
in defiance of this decree, braving torture and hideous execution.
00:13:19 ►
Over the next 265 years, there were at least 90 autos de fe
00:13:23 ►
for use of peyotl or peyote
00:13:25 ►
and numerous autos de fe involving teonanacatl, the sacred mushroom,
00:13:30 ►
and ololuki, the holy morning glory seeds.
00:13:33 ►
The Inquisition eventually ran out of steam,
00:13:36 ►
failing to extirpate the use of plant sacraments in Mexico,
00:13:39 ►
but succeeding in driving this underground.
00:13:41 ►
Nevertheless, Protestant missionaries have continued the Pharmacratic Inquisition with undiminished zeal, like their Catholic predecessors,
00:13:48 ►
blissfully ignorant of any irony involved. As one missionary noted, and I quote,
00:13:54 ►
the partaking of the divine mushroom poses potential problems in relation to the Christian
00:13:58 ►
concept of the Lord’s Supper, to say the least. Contemporary prohibition of entheogenic and other psychoactive drugs dates
00:14:08 ►
from 1 March 1915, when entered into force the Harrison Narcotic Act. Although the Constitution
00:14:14 ►
itself had to be amended to prescribe alcohol, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1919 upheld this federal
00:14:19 ►
statute prescribing narcotics and the irrigation of broad federal police powers in the matter of dangerous drugs.
00:14:26 ►
The concept has achieved the status of tradition in the United States,
00:14:30 ►
which has exported its anti-drug crusade worldwide.
00:14:34 ►
And the legislation currently enforced, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970,
00:14:40 ►
provides for prescription of any substance the government wishes to add to its schedules.
00:14:44 ►
Indeed, the Controlled Substance Analog Enforcement Act of 1986, provides for proscription of any substance the government wishes to add to its schedules.
00:14:48 ►
Indeed, the Controlled Substance Analog Enforcement Act of 1986 boldly penetrates into areas of governmental control over research
00:14:53 ►
undreamed of by any national socialist, communist, or other dictatorship,
00:14:57 ►
presuming to declare any, quote, human research with new drugs, unquote,
00:15:01 ►
unlawful unless explicitly approved by the government.
00:15:05 ►
While the original impetus for anti-drug legislation involved struggles for world dominance,
00:15:11 ►
not to mention economics and racism, it triumphed on the tide of reformist zeal of fundamentalist
00:15:16 ►
religious minorities intolerant of diversity.
00:15:20 ►
Albeit tricked up as public health laws addressing so-called crimes against health, contemporary drug prohibition is merely the modern expression disguised by secular circumlocutions
00:15:30 ►
of the millennial pharmacratic inquisition.
00:15:34 ►
We must not lose sight of the fact that, like the decree of the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico in 1620,
00:15:40 ►
contemporary legislation, whatever its justification, has the effect of prohibiting ecstatic experiential religion
00:15:46 ►
while simultaneously promoting exsanguinated, desacramentalized simulacra of religion.
00:15:53 ►
The secular American state is clearly comfortable with purely symbolic Christian non-religion
00:15:58 ►
but feels rightly threatened by ecstatic religion grounded in individual religious experiences
00:16:04 ►
which lead
00:16:05 ►
people to examine their own assumptions and motivations and those of their churches and
00:16:09 ►
those of their governments. The difference is between blind obedience and eternal skeptical
00:16:13 ►
questioning and distrust of authority. Not only is the pharmercratic inquisition alive and well
00:16:19 ►
on the threshold of the new millennium, but it has been enshrined in the secular law of one of
00:16:24 ►
the world’s most secular states,
00:16:25 ►
whose constitution respects individual freedom,
00:16:29 ►
and is being used as a pretext not merely to attack ecstatic religions,
00:16:33 ►
but to attack scientific research and the very bill of rights to that constitution,
00:16:37 ►
destroying at once religious freedom, scientific freedom,
00:16:40 ►
and the juridical guarantees protecting citizens from governmental arrogance and tyranny.
00:17:00 ►
In history, as in physics, in the millennial struggle between governmental tyranny and human rights, no action is without an equal and opposite reaction. The reaction to the
00:17:05 ►
pharmercratic inquisition was the entheogenic reformation. I take you to the rainforests of
00:17:10 ►
West Africa in present-day Gabon, where in the mid-19th century the Fang people were observed
00:17:15 ►
to use an entheogenic plant called iboga, tabernanthi iboga. In response to Catholic evangelism
00:17:22 ►
and Protestant missionary activity, there evolved among the Fang a syncretism between traditional use of iboga and Christianity,
00:17:29 ►
of which the most prominent manifestation is buiti.
00:17:32 ►
As Fernandez noted,
00:17:34 ►
We have in the eating of iboga a Eucharistic experience with similarities to Christian communion.
00:17:40 ►
Members of buiti practice communion employing iboga instead of bread.
00:17:45 ►
Communion. Members of Bwiti practice communion, employing Iboga instead of bread. Some of the more Christian branches speak of Iboga as a more perfect and God-given representation of the body
00:17:50 ►
of Christ. Bwiti revolves around dynamic reinterpretations of biblical myths, with the
00:17:57 ►
story of Adam and Eve, the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
00:18:01 ►
which is, of course, Iboga, the Christian trinity and the deluge being prominent.
00:18:06 ►
Giorgio Samardini, who will speak here, one of the first outsiders to be initiated fully into
00:18:11 ►
Buiti in Gabon, quoted a remark by a Buitist establishing the place of Buiti in the Entheogenic
00:18:16 ►
Reformation. We are the true Christians. The Catholics have lost the way that leads you to
00:18:22 ►
Christ. The missionaries who offer us their insipid host and ask us to abandon Iboga
00:18:28 ►
do not know what they are talking about.
00:18:31 ►
Could we ask for a more direct statement of the difference between genuine, experiential, ecstatic religion
00:18:37 ►
and a watered-down, exsanguinated simulacrum of religion evoked by a placebo sacrament, by an insipid host.
00:18:46 ►
During the French colonial regime in Gabon, especially from 1920 through 40,
00:18:51 ►
the missionaries, in league with the colonial government,
00:18:54 ►
prosecuted a vicious pharmacratic inquisition against Buiti, burning temples and murdering its leaders.
00:19:00 ►
Nevertheless, Buiti continued to grow in the face of persecution,
00:19:03 ►
identifying with nationalist anti-colonial sentiment,
00:19:06 ►
which led to expulsion of the French and founding of the Republic of Gabon,
00:19:10 ►
whose first president was a Bwitist.
00:19:12 ►
Indeed, Bwiti has achieved the status of state religion in Gabon,
00:19:16 ►
where there are 1,000 to 2,000 Bwiti temples.
00:19:19 ►
Bwiti is spreading rapidly across borders and bids fair to become,
00:19:22 ►
along with Christianity and Islam,
00:19:24 ►
one of the
00:19:25 ►
predominant religions of equatorial West Africa. Meanwhile, in North America, the Entheogenic
00:19:31 ►
Reformation was extending its roots into the scorched earth left in the wake of the brutal
00:19:36 ►
Union army raised by Abraham Lincoln to preserve the Union. Having trampled the Constitution into
00:19:43 ►
the ground in the course of subduing the Confederate
00:19:45 ►
Army, the awesome military might Lincoln had amassed was turned against the hapless indigenous
00:19:50 ►
population of the continent. Unlike in Mesoamerica and South America, where bloody conquest was
00:19:56 ►
followed by a gradual process of mestizaje or miscegenation of European and Indian blood,
00:20:03 ►
the U.S. government embarked on a final solution,
00:20:05 ►
extermination or imprisonment on reservations,
00:20:08 ►
which shrank increasingly to approximate concentration camps of the indigenous population
00:20:13 ►
in pursuit of a manifest destiny to control the continent.
00:20:18 ►
Mexico and the British crown had already been forced in the 1840s to cede immense territories
00:20:23 ►
to the imperialistic government on the Potomac,
00:20:26 ►
lands that didn’t belong to those governments
00:20:28 ►
any more than the rest of the continent belonged to the U.S. government.
00:20:32 ►
The Indians fought bravely against superior numbers and arms,
00:20:36 ►
then watched helplessly as great chiefs and warriors,
00:20:38 ►
whole tribes, were exterminated,
00:20:41 ►
watched in stunned amazement as great herds of buffalo,
00:20:44 ►
vast roiling seas of large animals, were slaughtered for their skins,
00:20:48 ►
the huge meaty bodies which gave them sustenance,
00:20:52 ►
left to rot on the dusty prairies.
00:20:55 ►
As Labar detailed in The Ghost Dance,
00:20:58 ►
the Ghost Dance movements represent the final catastrophe
00:21:01 ►
of Indian cultures in the United States.
00:21:04 ►
It was the great Ghost Dance of 1890 which brought down the curtain on traditional Indian shamanic culture.
00:21:10 ►
It appears this was a syncretism between ancient northern Paiute beliefs
00:21:13 ►
and cyclical renewal of the world and Christian doctrines of the millennium.
00:21:18 ►
The futility of even this last desperate attempt to salvage part of their culture
00:21:22 ►
became apparent in 1890 when the Teton, Dakota
00:21:25 ►
Sioux shaman chief Sitting Bull was killed in South Dakota, followed by the massacre of his
00:21:30 ►
people at Wounded Knee, putting a sanguine end to Indian resistance to whites. Unlike the swift and
00:21:38 ►
brutal military reaction against the Sioux ghost dance, the authorities in Oklahoma allowed the
00:21:43 ►
movement to run its course in the first years of the 1890s. Meanwhile, sacramental use of peyote, an important plant
00:21:50 ►
sacrament of the Mexican Indians, began to gain a growing foothold in the U.S. In Oklahoma, this
00:21:56 ►
use took root in the fertile fields of ghost dance fervor, and on the Kiowa Comanche Reservation,
00:22:02 ►
the Caddo Delaware shaman John Wilson was a leader both of the ghost dance and the nascent peyote religion.
00:22:09 ►
Wilson and Comanche chief Quaina Parker were instrumental in the movement
00:22:13 ►
which coalesced on 10 October 1918 with the establishment of the Native American Church in Oklahoma.
00:22:20 ►
In the peyote cult, Labarre noted the complex interweaving of Christian elements
00:22:24 ►
and Mexican and Plains Indian beliefs into the new religion.
00:22:27 ►
The second article of incorporation of the church states,
00:22:31 ►
the purpose is to foster and promote the religious belief of the several tribes of Indians
00:22:35 ►
in the state of Oklahoma in the Christian religion with the peyote sacrament
00:22:39 ►
and to teach the Christian religion.
00:22:42 ►
We mustn’t forget Parker’s famous dictum,
00:22:45 ►
the white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus,
00:22:49 ►
but the Indian goes into his teepee and talks to Jesus.
00:22:53 ►
As was the case with Bwiti,
00:22:54 ►
a latter-day auto-de-fé of the Pharmacratic Inquisition
00:22:58 ►
persecuted the novel religion.
00:23:00 ►
It was too late for another extermination campaign.
00:23:03 ►
Even land-hungry whites had been shocked by the brutality of the Army’s final solution to the Indian problem.
00:23:09 ►
Since puritanical prohibitionist forces had already turned to the ballot box in Congress to wage war on inebriants,
00:23:15 ►
peyote was included with alcohol, tobacco, and other inebriants in a general legal campaign against drugs,
00:23:21 ►
culminating in passage of the Harrison Act in 1914,
00:23:24 ►
the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, and passage of the Harrison Act in 1914, the 18th Amendment
00:23:25 ►
to the Constitution, and the Volstead Act of 1919, which illegalized alcohol itself,
00:23:32 ►
although exemption was made for the watered-down Vinus Sacrament of the Catholics, that even
00:23:36 ►
a target of the prohibitionist zealots.
00:23:39 ►
Homer Stewart’s peyote religion tells the tale of the attempts to take peyote away from
00:23:44 ►
the Indians, although many battles were lost along the way, now in the courts,
00:23:49 ►
the Indians successfully resisted attempts to illegalize peyote religion.
00:23:53 ►
The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 classified peyote and its alkaloid mescaline as illicit drugs.
00:24:00 ►
But the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 specifically protects Indian religion
00:24:05 ►
and amendments to this law enacted in 1994 decree that
00:24:09 ►
use, possession, or transportation of peyote by an Indian for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes
00:24:15 ►
in connection with the practice of a traditional Indian religion
00:24:18 ►
is lawful and shall not be prohibited by the United States or any state.
00:24:24 ►
Despite discrimination against Indians in the U.S.
00:24:27 ►
and vigorous propaganda campaigns against so-called hallucinogens like peyote and mescaline,
00:24:32 ►
the Native American church continues an inexorable expansion north into Canada and now has more than
00:24:38 ►
250,000 members. Many tribes admit non-Indians to the church, and in 1979, the all-race Peyote Way Church of God incorporated in Arizona.
00:24:48 ►
The federal government interprets legal exemptions for religious use of peyote in a racist fashion
00:24:53 ►
to apply only to Indians or persons with at least 25% Indian blood.
00:24:57 ►
Nevertheless, federal court decisions have supported the rights of non-Indians to use peyote as a sacrament,
00:25:02 ►
and the next step for the entheogenic reformation in North America is to legitimize rights of non-Indians to use peyote as a sacrament, and the next step for the entheogenic reformation in North America
00:25:06 ►
is to legitimize rights of all citizens to pursue religious ecstasy with genuine sacraments.
00:25:19 ►
With far less fanfare than accompanied its first manifestations in Africa and North America,
00:25:25 ►
the entheogenic reformation spread quietly in South America for more than half a century
00:25:29 ►
before inspiring counterattacks by reactionary forces of the Pharmacratic Inquisition.
00:25:35 ►
Starting in the 1920s in the Brazilian state of Acre,
00:25:38 ►
syncretic Christian churches began to appear,
00:25:40 ►
employing the Pan-Amazonian shamanic Entheogenic Potion, Ayahuasca,
00:25:44 ►
as the
00:25:45 ►
host in Christian rituals of communion. Today there are two major and several minor ayahuasca
00:25:50 ►
churches in Brazil, the older Santo Daime church and the more recent but larger União do Vegetal
00:25:56 ►
or UDV. Andrei Lázaro summarized the Santo Daime doctrine, stating quite plainly that
00:26:02 ►
the doctrine of Santo Daime is manifested by way of the ritual use of our sacrament, Daime doctrine, stating quite plainly that the doctrine of Santo Daime is manifested by way
00:26:05 ►
of the ritual use of our sacrament, Daime, also known as ayahuasca. Although the published doctrine
00:26:11 ►
of the Uniao do Vegetal, or herbal union, does not specifically equate the potion known as
00:26:16 ►
sha-ahuasca, vine tea, with the Christian Eucharist, it does state the Uniao do Vegetal
00:26:23 ►
professes the fundamentals of Christianity.
00:26:25 ►
In ritual sessions in its temples, the Udeve employs a tea called Oasca.
00:26:30 ►
The effect of the tea might be compared to religious ecstasy.
00:26:34 ►
As in the case in Santo Daime,
00:26:36 ►
the Udeve potion is administered in the course of mass and religious festivals.
00:26:40 ►
Like Daime, Sha’oasca consists of aqueous extracts of stems of the Liana banisteriopsis ka’api
00:26:46 ►
and leaves of psychotria viridis.
00:26:49 ►
Plants are cultivated in Amazonia to supply the primarily urban churches,
00:26:53 ►
the potions prepared in large quantities under the supervision of church maestres.
00:26:57 ►
Broadly speaking, the Udeve and Santo Daime have more attributes in common than they have differences,
00:27:03 ►
and both are emblematic of the entheogenic reformation of Christianity in South America.
00:27:08 ►
After flourishing in obscurity for some decades, this Amazonian entheogenic reformation suddenly
00:27:14 ►
was attacked by the pharmacratic inquisition of the Brazilian government.
00:27:17 ►
In 1985, Brazilian daimete and confin added ayahuasca to the list of prescribed drugs,
00:27:23 ►
prompting Udeve to petition Confen to annul the ban.
00:27:27 ►
After a governmental commission found no evidence of social disruption
00:27:30 ►
associated with sacramental use of ayahuasca,
00:27:32 ►
which commission members themselves tried,
00:27:36 ►
ayahuasca was removed from the controlled substances list in 1987.
00:27:40 ►
The following year, an anonymous denunciation in Rio de Janeiro
00:27:45 ►
prompted Confin again to order technical study of the issue,
00:27:48 ►
especially the pharmacology of the potions.
00:27:51 ►
Again, ayahuasca and the churches received a clean bill of health,
00:27:54 ►
and Confin accepted the conclusions of the study,
00:27:56 ►
which recommended ayahuasca potions, as well as their constituent plants,
00:28:00 ►
be exempted from the illicit drugs list, which they summarily were in June 1992.
00:28:11 ►
Now legitimized in Brazil, the ayahuasca churches continue a steady expansion.
00:28:17 ►
In Europe, ayahuasca masses have been celebrated in Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Munich, Frankfurt,
00:28:19 ►
Berlin, several other large cities.
00:28:24 ►
This oft-times commercial activity, the church and Christianity sometimes take a back seat in promotional literature,
00:28:26 ►
has now generated negative publicity, and it appears some white shamans may be using the name of the Daime church
00:28:32 ►
as a cover for strictly profit-making activities.
00:28:35 ►
On the other hand, Santo Daime temples have been established in European cities like Barcelona.
00:28:40 ►
The Udv is less given to evangelism, but Udv pre-nucleos have cropped up in the U.S. and other countries,
00:28:47 ►
and the UDV has registered legally as a church in at least three American states.
00:28:52 ►
Given the current rabid interest in shamanism in the overdeveloped world,
00:28:57 ►
these ayahuasca churches have unlimited potential for expansion,
00:29:00 ►
assuming they can circumvent the problem of the DMT content of the potions,
00:29:05 ►
since DMT is an illicit drug in most countries. It remains to be seen whether European and U.S.
00:29:10 ►
residents are genuinely interested in Christian doctrines of Santo Daime and Udeve, or are
00:29:16 ►
primarily interested in obtaining ayahuasca for their own non-Christian, psychonautic, shamanic
00:29:21 ►
self-actualization. Indeed, many people in the contemporary entheogenic drug scene of the industrialized world
00:29:29 ►
consider Christianity to be inimical to the ecstatic state,
00:29:33 ►
to be ipso facto the pharmocratic inquisition,
00:29:36 ►
finding in shamanism or pagan religions their sin ashore.
00:29:40 ►
It seems rather that the bulk of my peers in the overdeveloped countries
00:29:44 ►
despise Christianity and regard it to be the ecological of my peers in the overdeveloped countries despise Christianity
00:29:45 ►
and regard it to be the ecological and theological enemy of the movement,
00:29:49 ►
while shamanism, with its emphasis on individual psychonautic vision quests, is the reigning model.
00:29:54 ►
It is my impression that contemporary interest in shamanism and theogens in Western countries
00:29:59 ►
is the direct counterpart of the syncretic Christian shamanic movements we have examined in Africa and the Americas,
00:30:05 ►
that the so-called psychedelic age and the white shaman movement
00:30:08 ►
constitute our version of the entheogenic reformation.
00:30:13 ►
Besides magazines catering to cannabis habitués and users of entheogens,
00:30:18 ►
there are now magazines focusing on shamanism.
00:30:20 ►
Shaman’s Drum in particular is a forum for advertisements by tourist operators
00:30:24 ►
promoting peyote tourism to Mexico and ayahuasca tourism to South America.
00:30:29 ►
It is the transformation of holy sacrament to crass tourist commodity
00:30:33 ►
occasioned by this entheogenic tourism, which leads me to condemn it in no uncertain terms.
00:30:39 ►
In Mexico, within two decades of Wasson’s unveiling of the shamanic use of sacramental mushrooms,
00:30:44 ►
which required two years of patient fieldwork in the same village to bear fruit.
00:30:49 ►
The mushrooms were being peddled to tourists in the streets by every urchin in that town.
00:30:54 ►
Maria Sabina and some of her Mazatec peers even served jail sentences in Oaxaca City
00:30:59 ►
for allegedly pandering to the mushroomic tourist trade, as Maria noted,
00:31:04 ►
Before Wasson, I felt that the mushrooms exalted me.
00:31:07 ►
Now I no longer feel this.
00:31:09 ►
From the moment the strangers arrived, the mushrooms lost their purity.
00:31:12 ►
They lost their power.
00:31:14 ►
They decomposed.
00:31:15 ►
From that moment on, they no longer worked.
00:31:18 ►
She even said that they stopped speaking to her in Mazatec and began to speak in English,
00:31:23 ►
which she didn’t understand.
00:31:25 ►
I couldn’t express this more decisively or eloquently. It is unspeakably obscene that the
00:31:30 ►
holy sacrament be thus desecrated, nay, trivialized, that a spiritual adept of Maria Sabina’s stature
00:31:36 ►
be imprisoned like a common criminal. S. Valadez denounced peyote tourism in the pages of Shaman’s
00:31:42 ►
Drum, which had featured her huichol artist husband’s work on one of its covers.
00:31:48 ►
Westerners who participate in peyote pilgrimages with huicholes
00:31:51 ►
are endangering the huicholes who escort them.
00:31:54 ►
The soldiers patrolling the peyote desert are not impressed by Americans
00:31:57 ►
who claim they come for enlightenment.
00:31:59 ►
The Mexicans think the outsiders come for dope
00:32:02 ►
and accuse the huicholes of dealing drugs to the gringo hippies.
00:32:07 ►
Holy sacrament as trinket and souvenir is bad enough, but as dope?
00:32:12 ►
The tragic dimensions of the problem come into sharp focus.
00:32:16 ►
Not only do we profane the sacrament, but we debase the shaman,
00:32:19 ►
noble practitioner of humankind’s oldest profession,
00:32:23 ►
into a sleazy dope dealer at the mercy of the police.
00:32:26 ►
And it is a distressingly short, slippery step from the inner sanctum to the slammer.
00:32:33 ►
While shamanism may be contributing to the entheogenic reformation, to the reform of
00:32:37 ►
Christianity in Africa and the Americas, there has been a concurrent Christian deformation of
00:32:43 ►
shamanism. When Wasson met Maria Sabina, her shamanic rites were already corrupted by Christian influences.
00:32:50 ►
Maria sensed her mushrooms before a crude altar bearing cheap iconic prints of the baptism in Jordan.
00:32:56 ►
She said the mushrooms grew where Jesus Christ had spat on the ground.
00:33:00 ►
When the holy children spoke to her, it was Jesus speaking, etc.
00:33:04 ►
In order that traditional shamanism might live out its last days in peace and dignity,
00:33:09 ►
it is imperative that residents of the industrialized world have legal access to shamanic inebriants
00:33:15 ►
and ecstatic religions in their own countries.
00:33:18 ►
We descendants of Western civilization have just as much right to entheogens as any Weechel or Mazatec or Comanche
00:33:25 ►
Indian, forsooth, we’ve much more need of them as well. But we’ve no right to descend on what are,
00:33:32 ►
per force, the least civilized areas of the planet with our money, high-tech gear, and morbid
00:33:36 ►
interest in drugs. And if it weren’t for the pharmacratic inquisition, if we weren’t so desperate,
00:33:42 ►
I submit, we simply wouldn’t. Could there ever be a more
00:33:46 ►
damning indictment of the spiritual bankruptcy of our vaunted Western civilization than the fact
00:33:52 ►
that it has transubstantiated the sacred fruit of the tree of life, the veritable wellspring of all
00:33:57 ►
culture, into scurvy contraband? Could there ever be a more damning indictment of the spiritual
00:34:03 ►
bankruptcy of our vaunted Western civilization
00:34:06 ►
than the fact that it has transubstantiated the sacred fruit of the tree of life,
00:34:11 ►
the veritable wellspring of all culture, into scurvy contraband,
00:34:15 ►
made the truth a secret, the logos a dirty word?
00:34:33 ►
Perhaps history really turns in cycles as Vico proposed in the 18th century,
00:34:37 ►
but to his quadripartite scheme of historical cycles,
00:34:40 ►
theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic,
00:34:43 ►
we in this chaotic post-Wasson world, with our vastly expanded knowledge of the proto
00:34:46 ►
and prehistory of humankind, must needs add a fifth primordial cycle, the shamanic. Appropriately
00:34:53 ►
enough, the shamanic cycle embodies the quintessence of our culture, dealing as it does with what
00:34:58 ►
Vedic priests called Vak and Greek philosophers Logos, the divine afflatus. In 1872, at the age of 28, Friedrich Nietzsche gave a voice to a brilliant intuition in the
00:35:12 ►
birth of tragedy from the spirit of music.
00:35:15 ►
Dionysian stirrings arise through the influence of those narcotic potions of which all primitive
00:35:20 ►
races speak in their hymns.
00:35:23 ►
So stirred, the individual forgets himself completely.
00:35:26 ►
Not only does the bond between individual men come to be forged anew
00:35:29 ►
by the magic of the Dionysian rite,
00:35:32 ►
but nature herself, long alienated or subjugated,
00:35:36 ►
rises again to celebrate the reconciliation with her prodigal son, man.
00:35:42 ►
Lacking the most rudimentary historical or ethnobotanical data, based solely on intuition
00:35:47 ►
inspired by the Pangean sacred potion motifs of ancient hymns, Nietzsche anticipated the
00:35:53 ►
Wasson theory by the better part of a century. The great German genius conceived of the ancient
00:35:58 ►
Greek dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian worldviews. Thanks to the pioneering work of Karl Ruck,
00:36:05 ►
who characterized the Dionysian worldview as the wild
00:36:08 ►
and the Apollonian as the cultivated,
00:36:10 ►
we now know the ancient Greeks made liberal use of plant and theogens
00:36:14 ►
to dissolve temporarily the artificial boundaries of ego
00:36:17 ►
implicit in our rational, self-conscious thought.
00:36:20 ►
That yawning chasm between self and other,
00:36:23 ►
which isolates each individual human being
00:36:25 ►
not only from her or his fellow gean creatures
00:36:28 ►
but from other human beings as well.
00:36:31 ►
As Albert Hofmann astutely noted
00:36:33 ►
the Greek genius attempted the cure
00:36:37 ►
by supplementing the Apollonian worldview
00:36:39 ►
created by the subject-object cleavage
00:36:42 ►
with the Dionysian world of experience
00:36:44 ►
in which this cleavage is abolished in ecstatic inebriation.
00:36:49 ►
This is what Nietzsche meant by the reconciliation
00:36:52 ►
of the prodigal son humankind with Our Lady Gia,
00:36:56 ►
from whom we are alienated by ego, by self-consciousness.
00:37:00 ►
Indeed, religion did not merely derive from ecstatic inebriation.
00:37:04 ►
True religion is ecstasy, this inebriation or heavenly drunkenness of the spirit.
00:37:10 ►
The function of religion in human society, reduced to its barest essentials,
00:37:14 ►
is to instill in us human beings, by grace of ecstasy,
00:37:18 ►
the certainty of our unity with the universe and our fellow creatures, the unio mystica,
00:37:23 ►
to give us faith in the simple truth enunciated by William Blake 203 years ago
00:37:28 ►
that everything that lives is holy.
00:37:32 ►
The Pharmacratic Inquisition inaugurated by Alaric in A.D. 395
00:37:37 ►
has systematically attempted to annihilate the Dionysian tradition of antiquity,
00:37:43 ►
our source of faith and solace to temper the terrible solitude of self-consciousness.
00:37:48 ►
As Hofmann further noted,
00:37:51 ►
ecclesiastical Christianity, characterized by the duality of creator and creation,
00:37:56 ►
has largely obliterated the Eleusinian-Dionysian legacy of antiquity.
00:38:00 ►
Objective reality, the worldview produced by the spirit of scientific inquiry,
00:38:06 ►
is the myth of our time.
00:38:12 ►
I would say this duality of subject-object is the superstition of our time, for there is overwhelming scientific and experiential evidence that reassures us
00:38:17 ►
we are but one strand in the warp and weft of life,
00:38:20 ►
biochemically kindred to other gene life life forms and descended from the same primordial
00:38:25 ►
ancestors. This is a treacherous superstition which has led to the objectification of our planet and
00:38:32 ►
all her gean creatures. Rather than marvel at the eternally ephemeral living miracle that is each
00:38:38 ►
and every one of our furry, feathered, leafy, spiny, or scaly brethren, we see only resources to be exploited, and exploit them we do,
00:38:47 ►
so ruthlessly that the extinction of plant and animal species, nay of entire habitats,
00:38:52 ►
is an everyday occurrence. And by the time it dawns on us, if it ever does, that we too are
00:38:58 ►
on the endangered species list, it may be a trifle too late, for scientific hypermaterialism celebrates its apocalyptic
00:39:06 ►
marriage to Judeo-Christian dualism in a mesmerizing last tango on the deck of the Titanic,
00:39:13 ►
a ghastly danse macabre or totentanz, while we watch, awe-stricken. This is where the
00:39:20 ►
entheogenic reformation comes into the picture, restoring to humankind its millennial healing balsam for the lesions of materialism,
00:39:29 ►
its traditional key to ecstasy or the withdrawal of the soul from the body,
00:39:33 ►
the ineffable spiritual, non-materialistic state of being
00:39:36 ►
in which the universe is perceived more as energy or spirit than as matter,
00:39:41 ►
Blake’s eternal delight, the archetypal religious experience,
00:39:45 ►
the heart and soul of shamanism, wellspring of all culture.
00:39:49 ►
While Christianity, with its decretum horribile of humankind as a special creation,
00:39:55 ►
separate from the rest of the universe and enjoined, moreover, to subdue and dominate the planet
00:40:01 ►
with its disastrous core superstition and all the cataclysmic ecological destruction it has wrought
00:40:08 ►
seems particularly evocative of the entheogenic reformation.
00:40:12 ►
There is some evidence for a sort of archaic revival in parts of the world
00:40:16 ►
that have largely escaped the bane of Christian evangelism.
00:40:21 ►
The classical scholar Mary Barnard commented on the work of Gordon Wasson.
00:40:26 ►
Looking at the matter coldly, unintoxicated and unentranced,
00:40:30 ►
I am willing to prophesy that 50 theobotanists working for 50 years
00:40:34 ►
would make the current theories concerning the origins of much mythology and theology
00:40:39 ►
as out of date as pre-Copernican astronomy.
00:40:43 ►
Although those who might call themselves theobotanists
00:40:45 ►
or perhaps more appropriately entheobotanists
00:40:48 ►
number fewer than 50 worldwide
00:40:50 ►
and we yet have nearly two decades to go,
00:40:53 ►
I would say Barnard’s prophecy is on a sure footing.
00:40:57 ►
Wasson declared in 1986, just before he died,
00:41:00 ►
that we are well beyond the stage of hypotheses
00:41:03 ►
and four years later I referred for the first time to the Wasson theory
00:41:07 ►
of the genesis of religions in ecstatic states,
00:41:10 ►
provoked by entheogenic plants,
00:41:12 ►
comparing Wasson rather to Charles Darwin than to Copernicus.
00:41:17 ►
Just as Darwin’s theory of natural selection
00:41:19 ►
provided a natural mechanism to explain the historical fact of evolution,
00:41:24 ►
Wasson’s theory suggested a natural mechanism to explain the historical fact of evolution, Wasson’s theory suggested a natural mechanism to explain the historical fact
00:41:28 ►
that strikingly similar religious concepts arose independently
00:41:32 ►
in diverse parts of the terraqueous globe and proto-history,
00:41:36 ►
having certain Pangean motifs relating to ecstatic communion with the entheogens,
00:41:42 ►
the use of which has likewise been shown to be common virtually to all cultures studied, of the oxys mundi, or world tree, tree of life, tree
00:41:50 ►
of the knowledge of good and evil, et cetera, with its sacred fruit, of communion with the
00:41:54 ►
sacrament of the soul’s separability from the body of the other world.
00:41:59 ►
Just as a few fanatical believers in one or another religion to this day refuse to accept
00:42:04 ►
Darwin’s
00:42:05 ►
theory of evolutionary mechanisms in spite of the overwhelming evidence in its favor.
00:42:09 ►
So fanatical believers in one or another religion may refuse to accept the Wasson theory, however
00:42:14 ►
much evidence we entheobotanists might adduce in its favor.
00:42:18 ►
On the other hand, as surely as scientific opinion changed to accept Darwin’s theory
00:42:23 ►
as being more plausible than the reigning Judeo-Christian belief in special creation,
00:42:28 ►
which defied all the evidence of science in our senses,
00:42:31 ►
so too will scientific opinion inexorably come to accept the Wasson theory
00:42:36 ►
as being more plausible than the alternative,
00:42:38 ►
that the little toy room picture of the Bible, to use Joseph Campbell’s term,
00:42:42 ►
or the provincial found truth of any other
00:42:45 ►
God or chosen people has a greater claim on reality, or the alternative of Eliade and others
00:42:50 ►
who, as Barnard expressed it, quote, put the desire for an afterlife and the belief in an imaginary
00:42:56 ►
nectar of immortality before the experience of actual plants and beverages used in the ceremonial
00:43:02 ►
communion with the gods or the ancestors, unquote, which she justifiably likened to putting Medea’s chariot before her team of serpents.
00:43:11 ►
I will venture to make my own prophecy even more polemical than Barnard’s,
00:43:17 ►
assuming, which is by no means assured, that our civilization survives another millennium.
00:43:22 ►
Christianity and such like symbolic dogmatic religions
00:43:25 ►
will prosper only by forsaking the pharmacratic inquisition
00:43:29 ►
and embracing the entheogenic reformation with open arms.
00:43:33 ►
Only thus, restoring the true sacrament,
00:43:36 ►
a genuine agape, the very heart and soul,
00:43:39 ►
yea, the central mystery,
00:43:41 ►
to such exsanguinated, purely theoretical would-be religions,
00:43:45 ►
might they recover their spiritual authenticity,
00:43:48 ►
hence their meaning and relevance for humankind,
00:43:51 ►
only by abandoning what Blake called their pale religious lechery,
00:43:55 ►
that ancient curse of the blackening church,
00:43:58 ►
only by ceasing their binding with briars of all human joys and desires,
00:44:04 ►
only by admitting that spiritual truth
00:44:06 ►
is not some dogma thundered in stentorian tones from the eminence of any pulpit, but more a murmur
00:44:13 ►
in the heart, a whisper on the night, barely heard over the sigh of the wind in the trees,
00:44:18 ►
or the trilling ricochet of rain in their leafy filigree, only by letting the word speak for itself,
00:44:29 ►
by ceding every pulpit to the primeval Vak, the primigenial Logos,
00:44:32 ►
allowing the gentle breezes of the divine afflatus to fill the psychonautic sails of the indomitable human spirit,
00:44:37 ►
perpetually embarking on odysseys of discovery in the universe of the soul,
00:44:41 ►
on Gilgamesh’s epic pursuit of the wondrous plant of immortality, Jason’s
00:44:46 ►
errant search for the golden fleas, Ponce de Leon’s quixotic quest for the pool of living water,
00:44:53 ►
the quintessential elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone of immortality.
00:45:00 ►
In conclusion, I’d like to offer a brief extract from a work in progress,
00:45:06 ►
which is, the book is entitled Pharmacophilia or the Natural Paradises,
00:45:12 ►
to get to the title of my talk at last.
00:45:15 ►
And this extract is called Phaidomphalos.
00:45:18 ►
Of course, there are neologism, phaido for plant,
00:45:21 ►
and omphalos is the tree of life or the axis mundi,
00:45:24 ►
the navel literally in Greek.
00:45:27 ►
But omphalos was the name of a sculpture in the temple of Apollo at Delphi on Parnassos in Greece,
00:45:32 ►
which marked the center, the axis about which the universe turned.
00:45:37 ►
And I wish to offer this in the context of opening this conference
00:45:41 ►
as a sort of invocation to the plant powers,
00:45:45 ►
whether we may wish to conceive of them as plant spirits or as alkaloids or other plant secondary compounds.
00:45:53 ►
Fight on, fellows.
00:45:56 ►
Psychonauts or cosmonauts, they came from beyond the Milky Way, aboard Anaconda Canoe, our primordial parents.
00:46:04 ►
the Milky Way, aboard Anaconda Canoe, our primordial parents.
00:46:08 ►
The Dasana call her Gapi Maso, the Ahe woman,
00:46:11 ►
ascending the mighty rivers of the upper Amazon,
00:46:13 ►
fecund serpents of the soil,
00:46:17 ►
even to the hoary rock of Niyi on the Piraparaná,
00:46:21 ►
there on the equator, so they say, there to people the planet.
00:46:24 ►
From beyond the Milky Way they came, psycho-cosmonauts,
00:46:26 ►
anaconda canoe-born on Apikondia,
00:46:28 ►
the river of milk,
00:46:30 ►
where the house of the waters stood,
00:46:32 ►
there to people the planet.
00:46:34 ►
Anaconda canoe also bore a precious verdant cargo,
00:46:38 ►
exotic plants, some say,
00:46:39 ►
from beyond the Milky Way,
00:46:41 ►
just three, Kasava, Ipadu, and Yahé,
00:46:44 ►
to sustain our bodies, minds, and spirits.
00:46:49 ►
Here is the real trinity. Of this we can be certain. For our lives, like most life on this
00:46:55 ►
planet, hang on threads of plants, green leafy lifelines, twixt planetary dust and stellar fire,
00:47:02 ►
not on the whims of some wizened gray-beard god, throne enthralled.
00:47:07 ►
Fight alchemical wizards, conjuring life from streaming photons and dancing dust devils,
00:47:13 ►
even out of thin air. Such are our progenitors. How right the Tucanoan Indians were to reduce
00:47:19 ►
the essentials of our creation to those three plants, succor for body, mind, and spirit,
00:47:22 ►
The credentials of our creation to those three plants,
00:47:24 ►
sakor for body, mind, and spirit,
00:47:28 ►
our phytotrinity, our phytomphalos,
00:47:30 ►
cassava root, succulent, starchy,
00:47:35 ►
to stoke the electron fires that roil our blood and sweeten our brains,
00:47:40 ►
ipadu, toothsome coca, energy ensconcing, leaf and love,
00:47:43 ►
to strengthen our bodies and nourish our minds,
00:47:45 ►
and yache or ayahuasca,
00:47:54 ►
heaven-home helix, strand of spirits, gene-like gyre of generations untold, guiding our hearts,
00:48:01 ►
here and now. This is our true trinity, of which is woven our warp of blood and bone and sinew,
00:48:06 ►
as surely as our weft of culture, art, and history. Of such leafy stuff are we made.
00:48:08 ►
There can be no doubt.
00:48:13 ►
Some say the river of milk was the Jordan, not the Piriparaná,
00:48:16 ►
or the Ganga Yamuna, or Mississippi,
00:48:19 ►
for the universe is indeed wider than our views of it.
00:48:22 ►
But the milk is the same, wash sure as it might.
00:48:24 ►
It is the milk of plantly kindness, freely flowing from the roots of the same, wash sure as it might. Tis the milk of plantly kindness,
00:48:27 ►
freely flowing from the roots of the cosmic tree,
00:48:30 ►
Phaidontholos, where the very heavens turn.
00:48:33 ►
Niyi or Delphi, doesn’t matter.
00:48:38 ►
Memer’s well or fountain of youth or water of life or lake of milk.
00:48:42 ►
Soma milk, birch maiden breastborn, it’s all the same.
00:48:46 ►
Font of culture, tree of life, phytonphilos,
00:48:50 ►
our connection to Pangea, without which, nor are we.
00:48:55 ►
Phytonphilos grows not in some geocircumscribed garden,
00:48:58 ►
not in Eden, nor on Parnassos,
00:49:01 ►
nor indeed the shores of Saria Navat, not merely,
00:49:06 ►
but on most every square centimeter of Our Lady Jaya’s glorious body,
00:49:08 ►
all sacred ground.
00:49:13 ►
Our paradise is bound only by her vaporous breath and just barely, by thin air.
00:49:16 ►
The cherubim gate-guarding flaming swords,
00:49:21 ►
naught but ignorant ego and pious prejudice, paltry human stuff.
00:49:25 ►
Some dare call our natural paradise as artificial,
00:49:29 ►
our one true religion an inferior form of mysticism.
00:49:32 ►
Oh, pitiable, foolish young men.
00:49:35 ►
Nothing could be farther from the truth, no lie bigger.
00:49:41 ►
What could be more natural than to sip culture direct from Meemers’ well as our foremothers did and whence it first flowed,
00:49:44 ►
even as our fellow creaturesothers did and whence it first flowed, even as our fellow
00:49:45 ►
creatures do all round us. What could be more artificial than to forsake experience in dogma’s
00:49:51 ►
favor, dogged doggerel dogma, musty fossilized human stuff, to fell fight Omphalos and erect
00:49:59 ►
a temple in its gardening glen, yea, hew coarse beams and hack poor pews of that very living umbilicus.
00:50:06 ►
Oh, and ghastly coffins, too. Then bury our dead in the sacred ground, our foolish actions defiled,
00:50:13 ►
desecrating it. Talk of heaven, ye disgrace earth. William Blake called our natural paradise
00:50:20 ►
the garden of love and wrote of its human despoilation. And I saw it was filled with graves and tombstones where flowers should be,
00:50:30 ►
and priests in black gowns were walking their rounds
00:50:33 ►
and binding with briars my joys and desires.
00:50:37 ►
So the artificial became natural, the truly natural artificial.
00:50:43 ►
The lie was consummated, and our college of artificer augurs
00:50:46 ►
solemnly proclaimed black to be white
00:50:48 ►
and white black
00:50:49 ►
when humankind once trusted its eyes
00:50:52 ►
and such lenses
00:50:54 ►
as Phaidonphilos provided
00:50:55 ►
shut out from the natural paradises
00:50:58 ►
the way even to the artificial
00:51:01 ►
blocked by toll takers
00:51:02 ►
and foolish dogmatists
00:51:03 ►
humankind was bereft in a wilderness of its own making,
00:51:08 ►
burning or beatifying the few who still found their way back.
00:51:11 ►
A wise being called it the end of living and the beginning of survival.
00:51:16 ►
From natural paradise to artificial hell, falling into history,
00:51:21 ►
the nightmare from which we are all struggling to awake.
00:51:24 ►
falling into history, the nightmare from which we are all struggling to awake.
00:51:30 ►
But Phaidonphilos had sunk its roots deep into Pangea,
00:51:33 ►
far deeper than the rotting veneer of human stuff,
00:51:36 ►
deeper even than we might dig,
00:51:39 ►
down into the human brain, profounder than thought,
00:51:42 ►
even to the strata of instinct and desire.
00:51:46 ►
There it set its seeds year after year,
00:51:48 ►
generations passing like the moons,
00:51:51 ►
ages blowing in the winds,
00:51:53 ►
eons adrift on a river of time whose thin current slides away
00:51:55 ►
while eternity remains washed clean by the years.
00:52:00 ►
There on the ever-shrinking frontiers of human habitation,
00:52:04 ►
here in the very shadow of the church,
00:52:06 ►
in the biggest humanscape, on the shining face of Pangea.
00:52:11 ►
We die, our cultures die,
00:52:14 ►
the very words we weave worlds of perish,
00:52:17 ►
but Phaidonphilos persists in many of its protean forms,
00:52:21 ►
for it is the very texture of eternity,
00:52:24 ►
woven not of words but the stuff of
00:52:26 ►
stars, the divine afflatus breathed into it by the solar wind. Fiery star stuff made cool green life
00:52:34 ►
in the watery alembic of the bluest planet in this corner of the universe.
00:52:39 ►
We are indeed like giants plunged into the years. We are that roiling and sonorous yet shallow thin current
00:52:47 ►
that slides away over the sandy bottom of eternity
00:52:50 ►
in which Phaidonphilos has sunk its roots.
00:52:53 ►
Whether we choose to founder or to navigate this Amazon of the eons,
00:52:59 ►
we cannot resist its fearsome course.
00:53:02 ►
No anaconda canoe bears us upstream.
00:53:08 ►
its fearsome course. No anaconda canoe bears us upstream. Fight alchemical, fight eternal,
00:53:15 ►
sepultered even beneath the slow, steady accretion of 1,600 annular rings of human folly.
00:53:20 ►
Protean fight omphalos, indifferent to history, loving even the shadows, and artificial,
00:53:29 ►
archaic, anarchic, yet nurtured its kind, set its seed in sub-historical strata of Lady Gia’s lush loins,
00:53:34 ►
even in human history, faint fossilized frond prints on the strands of our words, fabric of our reality,
00:53:38 ►
on that repertory of wood notes wild.
00:53:41 ►
Could we but attune ourselves to the faint descant that rises from them,
00:53:46 ►
we could hear the ethereal echo of its Icaro. Listen. Yes, you can hear it still. A whisper on the night, sighing in
00:53:55 ►
the trees of language. Leafy rustle of solar wind afflatus. Wind song, tree sighs, whispering on the
00:54:02 ►
night. Sooth sighing, song saying, wind sighing, whispery on the night, sooth-sighing, song-saying,
00:54:05 ►
wind-sighing, whispery on the night eternal.
00:54:08 ►
There is the soothing music of this geonsphere,
00:54:11 ►
sensuous, sonorous, sooth-song.
00:54:15 ►
Casting its siren song on the winds of language,
00:54:19 ►
setting its seed in sub-historical, sub-neural strata,
00:54:22 ►
fight-omphalos endured, plant patient, strong,
00:54:26 ►
ever ready for some magic moment
00:54:28 ►
when that manimal communicant, awestruck, head bowed,
00:54:32 ►
with trembling fingers,
00:54:33 ►
should touch the tender petals of its fecund, fragrant flower
00:54:36 ►
and bid them open for long hours
00:54:39 ►
to inhale the aroma of its peculiar dreams
00:54:41 ►
into a marveling and bewildered being.
00:54:45 ►
Phytalchemical plant patient pedagogue, protean stuff of stars, font of language, culture,
00:54:52 ►
art, wind whispers sighing in its leafy branches, ages blowing in the solar wind over the shallow
00:54:59 ►
stream of time, years washing eternity to its siren song dusty delicate dance prints
00:55:06 ►
on the windblown fabric of our word-woven worlds
00:55:09 ►
divine afflatus
00:55:10 ►
lofting longing Lorelei love songs
00:55:14 ►
loin-lush logos lambent on leafy limbs of language
00:55:19 ►
sooth-sighing soaring Icaro
00:55:21 ►
rotting veneer of fetid human stuff
00:55:24 ►
so much fertilizer for its omnigean roots,
00:55:28 ►
compost of culture. And all the while we
00:55:31 ►
die. We cultures die. We word-woven
00:55:35 ►
world-weft, word-web wind-whispers wither and waste away.
00:55:39 ►
Way a waste away, a whence we came. Windy dust
00:55:43 ►
wafted away along a milky river of suns, down to a starry sea.
00:55:51 ►
Amazon of the eons, torrent of time.
00:55:54 ►
Corporal canoes caraming chaotically in Kronos’s current and cataract.
00:56:00 ►
Colossal giants plunged into its course.
00:56:03 ►
Ceaseless current of years.
00:56:05 ►
Cataract of centuries cascading, sliding over sandy shoals,
00:56:10 ►
sempiternal, down the milky river of the galaxy, its bottom pebbly with stars.
00:56:16 ►
Heaven-home helix, gene-like, generations gyring like moons,
00:56:21 ►
ages blowing, eons adrift, tree of life, roots sunk deep in the astral
00:56:27 ►
bottom of time, tendering its trenchant trunks to tether our time-tossed triremes, corporal
00:56:34 ►
canoes, mind-masts flying spirit spinnakers, running ever downwind, reaching to that milky
00:56:41 ►
haven of heaven, its bottom pebbled with stars,
00:56:45 ►
solar windblown stardust setting sail on a swirling sea of suns.
00:56:51 ►
Stallwort fight eternal, fight omphalos, plant strong, protean, puissant,
00:56:57 ►
laughing logos lustral on its leafy limbs, tendering tethers to time-tossed timorous triremes,
00:57:08 ►
limbs, tendering tethers to time-tossed timorous triremes, wizened Oaxacan wisewoman, logos leaping from lady-lush loins, language loquacious on the loin-lush ground, wind whispers, sooth
00:57:15 ►
sign, tree song, timbre-eternal tethery tendrils, leafy living logos lying latent, listener
00:57:23 ►
longing.
00:57:25 ►
Listen.
00:57:27 ►
Yes, you can hear it still.
00:57:29 ►
Icaros echoing eternal on the solar wind.
00:57:33 ►
Fight alchemical pedagogues.
00:57:35 ►
Fight eternal.
00:57:36 ►
Plant patient star stuff.
00:57:38 ►
Heavenly haven pebbly with suns.
00:57:41 ►
Starshine on aqueous alembic harboring heaven home helix. Stardust to sail on a milky
00:57:47 ►
river of time. Phytomphalos, plant persistent. Fragrant fecund flowers opening to our tremulous
00:57:54 ►
touch. Nectar kneading. Tenderling tethers, tendering tree song, silken on the nectary.
00:58:01 ►
Night, excuse me. Listen, oh listen. can’t you hear its dulcet song?
00:58:07 ►
All you have to do is listen and dream.
00:58:11 ►
Logos, lofting on the solar breeze, listener longing.
00:58:16 ►
Logos, leaping loquacious from the loin-lush landscape.
00:58:20 ►
Logos, lambent over eons Amazon,
00:58:23 ►
Api Condia, milky river of stars,
00:58:26 ►
time-tossed triremes reaching for home,
00:58:29 ►
running downwind to a heavenly haven,
00:58:32 ►
star-striving.
00:58:34 ►
Oh, listen, too,
00:58:37 ►
tree song, wind whispers, sooth sign,
00:58:40 ►
tether tendering, solar wind lilting leafen logos,
00:58:44 ►
nectar wafting on the star-milky night,
00:58:47 ►
tree sighs stirring in the branches of language,
00:58:50 ►
ambrosia welling up from deep-sunk roots,
00:58:54 ►
anchored in the star-sandy substrate of time,
00:58:57 ►
astral alembic of eons, ever-flowing milky river.
00:59:01 ►
Listen, yes, and dream.
00:59:04 ►
Drink, dream draughts of astral amrita. Drink, dream to its
00:59:09 ►
insistent Icaro, reeling riverine reveries, star-bottomed. I thank you for your attention. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:59:37 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:59:42 ►
Before I forget to say it,
00:59:44 ►
if there is one single book
00:59:46 ►
in the English language that
00:59:47 ►
sits at the very pinnacle of the
00:59:49 ►
psychedelic index, it’s
00:59:51 ►
Jonathan Ott’s Pharmacotheon
00:59:53 ►
in Theogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources
00:59:56 ►
and History. I have to
00:59:58 ►
admit that I don’t own a copy myself,
01:00:00 ►
well, because it’s really expensive.
01:00:02 ►
But some
01:00:04 ►
of my friends have copies, and over the years when I’ve visited them,
01:00:08 ►
I’ve been able to read much of this significant work.
01:00:11 ►
So if you intend to only own one book about psychedelics in your life, well, that’s it.
01:00:16 ►
There really is no way that I know of to pass along an accurate impression of Jonathan.
01:00:23 ►
For one thing, his intellect is so bright that he can
01:00:26 ►
come off somewhat scary at times. But at other times, when he’s passing around the latest
01:00:32 ►
concoction that he’s come up with for everybody to test, well, then he’s just one of the guys.
01:00:37 ►
But I don’t know of any other person alive yet today who comes even close to having done the in-depth field work and testing of psychotropic
01:00:46 ►
substances than has Jonathan. And did you know that along with Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples,
01:00:53 ►
Richard Evans Schultes, R. Gordon Wasson, and Carl Ruck, that Jonathan was also a part of that group
01:01:00 ►
who coined the word entheogen. And as you just heard, it was Carl Ruck who also wrote The Road to Eleusis,
01:01:09 ►
Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries,
01:01:11 ►
along with Albert Hoffman and R. Gordon Wasson.
01:01:14 ►
Now, I’m sure that I’ve talked about that book in past podcasts,
01:01:17 ►
but if you haven’t yet read it, then, well, I think you owe it to yourself to do so.
01:01:22 ►
In my opinion, it presents the best case yet of explaining the psychoactive rites
01:01:27 ►
that were involved during the more than 2,000 year history of people participating in the Eleusinian Mysteries,
01:01:35 ►
which have been suggested to have been the actual foundation for Western civilization,
01:01:40 ►
as we just heard Jonathan describe.
01:01:43 ►
In fact, it seems now almost to be common knowledge
01:01:46 ►
that is bantered about by people that I’ve met at conferences
01:01:49 ►
that, of course, Western civilization was founded
01:01:53 ►
upon the knowledge gained from participation in the mysteries.
01:01:57 ►
And we know that Plato and his philosopher buddies
01:02:00 ►
also participated in the mysteries.
01:02:03 ►
But for the past 2,000 years or so, this knowledge about the true source of our philosophy Thank you. of our psychedelic medicines. And all of this is already well known and accepted by most people
01:02:25 ►
who have taken the time to look into the subject.
01:02:28 ►
But there’s actually more to this story than just eluses.
01:02:33 ►
Which, first of all, brings up something that I want to remind you about once again.
01:02:37 ►
I do a lot of talking here in the salon,
01:02:39 ►
but I don’t want you to think that I’m any kind of an expert on anything.
01:02:43 ►
You see, while I do have a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering,
01:02:47 ►
and I do have a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree as well,
01:02:51 ►
both from prestigious universities,
01:02:54 ►
those places were not where I was educated.
01:02:56 ►
I was trained to be an engineer, and I was trained to be a lawyer.
01:03:01 ►
But education and training are two different things.
01:03:04 ►
My education comes from doing a lot of traveling, living in different parts of this country,
01:03:10 ►
working at a number of different occupations, and reading several thousand books.
01:03:15 ►
In other words, like most of us working class people, I’m self-educated.
01:03:20 ►
So for the rest of today’s podcast, as I’m talking about things that I happen to think that I know something about,
01:03:27 ►
at least at this moment, well, I could be completely wrong.
01:03:31 ►
And figuring out whether or not I’m right or wrong is going to be your job,
01:03:35 ►
should what I’m about to say have some interest for you.
01:03:39 ►
And again, you probably won’t hear much about this in your college philosophy courses,
01:03:43 ►
or maybe you will.
01:03:45 ►
I actually have no idea what they’re teaching in philosophy class these days, now that I think about it.
01:03:51 ►
Anyway, as you and a good many of our fellow Saloners most likely know already,
01:03:57 ►
there is a professor named Peter Kingsley, who is one of our leading experts on an ancient philosopher named Parmenides.
01:04:04 ►
who is one of our leading experts on an ancient philosopher named Parmenides.
01:04:07 ►
Now, Parmenides was a little older than Socrates,
01:04:11 ►
and he actually may have been one of Socrates’ teachers.
01:04:13 ►
And even though he wasn’t from Athens,
01:04:17 ►
we know for sure that he nonetheless had an impact on Plato’s work.
01:04:21 ►
Now, Peter Kingsley has written two books that I recommend and will link to in the program notes for today’s podcast,
01:04:24 ►
which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com. And in today’s program notes, I’ll also link to a
01:04:31 ►
20-minute video by Kingsley that puts Parmenides in a better perspective. In my opinion, these are
01:04:38 ►
very important books for people who are interested in learning more about how we humans in the West Thank you. to skip around this issue somewhat, which is something that I find equally important
01:05:05 ►
as our beginnings at Eleusis.
01:05:07 ►
It seems that Parmenides was not only a philosopher and teacher, he was also deeply involved in
01:05:13 ►
another mystery rite that circled the Mediterranean at the same time as were the Eleusinian mysteries.
01:05:19 ►
It was called incubation.
01:05:22 ►
Right now I’m going to read you a couple short bits from two sources about incubation.
01:05:28 ►
And as I read, try to think between the lines that I’m reading
01:05:32 ►
and see if you don’t come up with a thought or two that the professional scholars may have left out.
01:05:38 ►
The first source is Wikipedia, which says,
01:05:41 ►
Incubation is the religious practice of sleeping in a sacred area
01:05:46 ►
with the intention of experiencing a divinely inspired dream or cure.
01:05:52 ►
Incubation was practiced by many ancient cultures.
01:05:55 ►
Modern practices for influencing dream content by dream incubation
01:06:00 ►
utilize more research-driven techniques,
01:06:03 ►
but they sometimes incorporate elements reflecting these ancient beliefs.
01:06:09 ►
Now I’ll read a couple quotes from Peter Kingsley’s book, Reality.
01:06:13 ►
He begins by quoting Parmenides’ famous poem,
01:06:16 ►
which is about a trip to the underworld,
01:06:18 ►
and contains the line,
01:06:21 ►
And the goddess welcomed me kindly.
01:06:24 ►
Now Kingsley then says that most scholars explain away Parmenides’ story and the goddess welcomed me kindly.
01:06:30 ►
Now Kingsley then says that most scholars explain away Parmenides’ story about a journey as nothing more than a rhetorical device, an allegory.
01:06:34 ►
However, Kingsley tells us why this is mistaken
01:06:37 ►
and that Parmenides was actually describing a real journey into the underworld
01:06:41 ►
that is experienced by participants in the incubation
01:06:45 ►
process. Here’s a little more detail, and this is another quote from Kingsley’s book,
01:06:50 ►
and again, see if you can’t read between the lines here, and I quote,
01:06:55 ►
There was a specific and established technique among various groups of people for making the
01:07:01 ►
journey to the world of the dead, for dying before you died.
01:07:06 ►
It involved isolating yourself in a dark place, lying down in complete stillness,
01:07:11 ►
staying motionless for hours or days. First the body would go silent, then eventually the mind.
01:07:17 ►
And this stillness is what gave access to another world, a world of utter paradox,
01:07:26 ►
access to another world, a world of utter paradox, to a totally different state of awareness.
01:07:33 ►
Sometimes the state was described as a kind of a dream. Sometimes it was referred to as like a dream, but not a dream, as really a third type of consciousness, quite different from either waking
01:07:39 ►
or sleeping. There used to be a whole technical language associated with the procedure, an entire mythical geography.
01:07:47 ►
And there was a name that the Greeks, and then the Romans, gave to this technique.
01:07:52 ►
They called it incubation.
01:07:55 ►
But what would you call it?
01:07:59 ►
To me, it sounds like a trip.
01:08:02 ►
And that, my friends, is what was stamped out when the Christians
01:08:06 ►
modified what is now called Western Civilization. Our task, the task of the worldwide psychedelic
01:08:13 ►
community, is to re-establish, not just in the West, but everywhere on Earth, another golden age
01:08:20 ►
when psychedelic consciousness has its place in our culture, as it did at the very beginning
01:08:25 ►
of human history. Like it or not, whether you are a young student right now or an older person like
01:08:31 ►
myself, like it or not, those of us who do know about the psychedelic state of consciousness that
01:08:37 ►
informed our ancestors, we must do our part to keep the current psychedelic renaissance alive.
01:08:44 ►
we must do our part to keep the current psychedelic renaissance alive.
01:08:47 ►
What we do will most likely be insignificant,
01:08:51 ►
but I feel that it’s very important that it be done.
01:08:56 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:00 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.