The Two Trees
Chapter II
Robert Graves' The White Goddess proposes an alphabetic calendar of magical trees that was developed at Crete or Cypress and secretly transmitted to the Druids in Britain, as well as the ancient Israelites.
Moses, our greatest writer of Antiquity, has given us the most sophisticated shamanic recipe in all of literature in the book of Exodus, to which we shall return, once sufficiently baptized with Holy Spirit, and a knowledge of the Two Trees:
In Genesis (Bereshit in Hebrew) after Elohim creates the World and Man, the first incident of any drama is Man (adam in Hebrew) eating of the Tree of Knowledge and suffering The Fall---until Christ should redeem him. Cast out, wandering, eternally restless and unsatisfied, he can no longer eat of the Tree of Life.
Terrence McKenna, in The Food of the Gods, makes a strong case that the Tree of Knowledge, forbidden by modern, monotheistic, iconoclastic religions devoid of ecstatic Goddess worship and direct Gnosis of the Deity, was the psilocybin-containing mushrooms that grow from the dung of cattle and other herbivores. Perhaps we first started herding cattle after we had begun following them and worshipping the mushrooms they gave us. Perhaps the mushrooms domesticated both our species and the cattle, in order to colonize the Earth (and one day beyond?)
But if this is the case, what of the Tree of Life? It seems the two trees are generally conflated, as soon as one has been identified with a psychoactive plant. But why? Genesis states quite clearly that Man had access to the Tree of Life prior to his original sin in eating from the Tree of Knowledge. It sounds like this fruit was delightful and healing, as opposed to knowledge-giving.
McKenna was not the first unlikely cult author of the twentieth century to write a book proposing that a psychoactive mushroom was behind the world-famous mystery of a millennia-old religious poem foundational to a faith followed by over a billion people today. In Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, R. Gordon Wasson, who already had first-hand experience of Mexican religious ritual use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, thought he had 'cracked the code' to the identity of the enigmatic plant/potion/deity 'Soma' central to the Vedic hymns and rituals from which, in part, modern Hinduism developed. His candidate: Amanita Muscaria, the bright-red (though often yellow to orange) mushroom with shiny white spots seen in fairy tales and video games and reminiscent of Christmastime decorations.
McKenna dismisses Wasson's theory, presents the strong evidence gathered by others that the seeds of paganum harmala are the true original Soma, but then essentially dismisses this fine hypothesis as well in favor of an all-encompassing psilocybin-using, cow-worshipping religion. He may in fact be right; but his supporting arguments are flimsy and self-contradictory.
As we shall see, I think the culture of "Indo-European" pastoralists was complex and sophisticated, involving both Amanita and psilocybin mushrooms, as well as ergot, harmala and cannabis. The natives they encountered on the Indian Subcontinent likely had an even more advanced drug culture, if perhaps less hierarchical. The magnificent legacy of Hinduism is largely founded on a deeply penetrating synthesis of these two cultures.
In a later age, Krishna was one of the chief deities of India, worshipped by millions. Krishna is often depicted as blue-skinned and clothed in yellow. Although this may seem far-fetched, I have come to regard this color scheme with great curiosity whenever I come upon it in world mythology or inspired art. Most psilocybe mushrooms are a pale golden or orange-brown, and often bruise blue on handling. Krishna's wife or consort Radha is often depicted wearing red. I believe that their union represents the divine marriage between these two most holy mushrooms (a love that is also told in the Song of Songs.)
Images of the couple sometimes feature two trees in the background. Behind Krishna we may see a tree covered in leaves, with another tree in flower behind it. On the other side, behind the figure in red, an evergreen conifer, behind which can be seen the bare branches of a deciduous tree. On a basic level this is an obvious dichotomy of summer and winter. This is all tied up with Graves' idea of the two ritual kings, the oak king and the holly king, and their birds the wren and the robin. Radha's birthday is celebrated two weeks after Krishna's, in late summer. On a deeper level I believe that the tree behind Krishna is the deciduous hardwood host of the psilocybe mushroom Krishna represents. In any case, the red-clad figure in front of the conifer is obviously a deified Amanita Muscaria.
Graves' idea of a seasonal tree calendar strongly suggests that a polytheistic society ritually consumed a variety of psychoactive plants and fungi, which would grow at certain times of year in a given climate. What a life!
The primal division, however, seems to be the cleaving of the year in two, representing periods of growth and decay, and perhaps between cultivation and wild. I do surmise that this was originally, before the advent of agriculture, linked to the two types of mushrooms we have been discussing.
In the subtropical climate of the Mediterranean, West Asia and Northern India, Amanita Muscaria grows at a high elevation, in the hills and mountains, usually around a pine tree or other conifer, growing as it were from the tree's roots. McKenna believed that humans first discovered psilocybe mushrooms growing from cow dung in Africa. Whether or not this is true, a variety of psilocybin-containing mushrooms also grow from hardwood trees, typically dead or damaged. (Modern science suggests that the wood-eating species came first, but this was well before the emergence of homo sapiens and doesn't change the argument.) Science has yet to identify every psilocybin-containing mushroom, let alone every arboreal relationship these species form. One important possibility is the oak. Now, as one travels north amanita muscaria is found at lower elevations, also forming relationships with hardwood, often birch but also including oak.
Graves emphasizes the centrality of the Oak to his Sacred Tree Calendar, corresponding with the midsummer sacrifice of the Sacred King, bound to an oak, by his twin and rival who he in turn will slay at midwinter.
(A note: the terms midsummer and midwinter traditionally refer to the solstices, not what we, with our four-season year, would think of as literally the midpoints of summer and winter.)
This rivalry manifests perennially in the seasonal cameos of these fungal deities. It is mirrored in the 4 to 8 year reign of the sacred king, killed by his successor, repeated (usually without violence) in our own succession of power between presidents heading parties that also are represented symbolically as red vs. blue---just as the Gods warred in the Heavens, Red amanita against Blue-staining psilocybes.
All that I have read suggests the identity of the lightning and oak god who gives name to Thursday with amanita muscaria. Lightning is believed by so-called 'primitive' people (who we should call the true traditionalists, or true conservatives---Tolkien called them Elves) to give birth to mushrooms. Wasson and John Marco Allegro take pains to show that, if ever it was a specific mushroom that the lightning was supposed to have impregnated the Earth with, it was amanita.
But something was nagging at my gut (or maybe I had eaten too many mushrooms) and I saw the lightning striking the oak and leaving a dead stump---before Solomon and Sheba started the Lebanese timber industry, before the Argonauts set sail for Mexico with all the friends they could gather on their thin raft; in other words before we started chopping 'em down, the main way a tree was felled was by fire where it was dry, by lightning where it was wetter. While we have seen that live hardwoods can host angel choirs of amanita, dead or damaged hardwoods give birth to psilocybin-containing mushrooms, as Athena was reborn from Zeus' thigh.
Here we have the Tree of Life, the living tree often evergreen or else pure white birch, which gives fruit of healing and delight, versus the Tree of Knowledge and the Fall, already dead or dying like the year, the Autumn, the Waning Moon, the Lefthand Pillar. Yes, for these Two Trees under Mother Heaven are the Two Pillars supporting the roof of the temple, even the vault of the sky.*
But the oak, given the central month in Graves' calendar, but also representing the New Year in January as Janus, the Oak-god who looks both forward and back (at once Prometheus and Epimetheus.) At some point, the oak was made a syncretic symbol for both the season of growth and abundance and the season of decay and scarcity, for both life and death, bliss and wisdom. It's as if Neo hadn't been such a square and grabbed both pills from Morpheus' hand in the Matrix, the Red and the Blue.
I also remembered that the Egyptians believed Heaven was a Goddess and Earth a God. Their romance was intimately bound with the Egyptian calendar myth. Graves' conflicting alphabetic tree calendars were really competing cosmological systems each with a different (and rival) supreme drug! This is behind the battle of Moses with the Egyptian priests and sorcerers, of Elijah with the prophets of Ba'al and of the Babylonian theft of the Israelites' ritual implements during the Captivity and the subsequent miracles described in Daniel when Belshazzar started bugging and saw the writing on the wall and a disembodied hand.
*Since I wrote these words in my notebook a couple weeks ago I have learned of another mushroom, lanmaoa asiatica or jian shou qing, a popular culinary mushroom in Yunnan, China which can be psychoactive if not properly cooked, as Janet Yellen famously discovered at a restaurant there. It is not certain if psilocybin is the active ingredient, although it definitely seems to be psychedelic and stains blue. The mushroom itself however is bright red and grows from the living Yunnan Pine as a symbiote; in this part of the world it seems the Tree of Life is a hardwood and the Tree of Knowledge a conifer, the reverse of what seems to often be the case. And there are psilocybin mushrooms elsewhere that grow from conifers, even pine cones! Talk about a Christmas miracle...which is all to show how great variety there is in nature, and how many possibilities the human soul has to interpret the prophecy we receive abundantly...
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