Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Kool-Aid

Chapter III

If you're with us so far (you should probably have your head examined) the White Goddess Belili, Queen of the Heavens, gave birth to Her Son, the Divine Child Horus, also named, in his mother's honor, Beli, Belus, Ba'al.

Horus was born after Set killed Osiris, the Egyptian Harvest God. In Genesis, shortly after Adam and Eve get kicked out of Eden for tripping on 'shrooms (i.e. are led up out of Egypt the first time by the Golden Calf) one of their sons commits the first act of murder. In this case it is the farmer, Cain who kills his herd-tending brother Abel, again with that root BEL as in Beli or Ba'al. Graves has shown how this ritual murder between brothers, father and son, or rival kings, dramatized an iconotropic seasonal mystery. Originally that mystery was the coming of the magic mushrooms with the Autumn rains, that made us dance and sing and fuck and paint the walls of caves.

Now in the Spring a new God arose, probably originally in Israel, near Bethlehem, "The House of Bread." Man (or was it Woman) began to domesticate barley and, whether the chicken or the egg came first, we certainly discovered the properties of ergot. Winnowing the chaff from the grain would be a prosaic task of industry, rather than the awe-inspiring wonder the world holds it to be, if not for the possibility of harvesting the precursor to LSD before making your bread and beer. This is why so many gods are born on a threshing floor, or heroes transform, escaping the wiles of witches there.

These early civilizations often did practice human sacrifice, probably to increase the nitrogen content of the soil for these compounds to be synthesized by the fungi. Abel, however was both the Winter slain by the Spring, as well as an older way of life threatened by the advent of settler colonialism and globalization.

Joseph brought these secrets back down to Egypt. He is, in fact, a Dionysus figure, and so originally did make love to Potiphar's wife, in the sense that she took the trip. And, typically, he has to go to the underworld, symbolized by the dungeon---but he has the ability to interpret dreams and the Pharoah's entire dream is about harvest and famine, with allusions to acid, not least the number 7, and Joseph's silver cup is what he drank his potion from; the whole incident with his brothers stealing it is, again, tied up with the procession of the calendar.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in solving complex mythological problems is that:

Conquering Gods their titles take

From the foes they captive make,

and that to know the name of a deity at any given place or period, is far less important than to know the nature of the sacrifices that he or she was then offered.

-Robert Graves, from the forward to The White Goddess

Sometimes it is hard to separate the legends, epithets and attributes of the dying Barley God from those of the Scarlet Goddess of Heaven's Mountain. It seems perhaps it was SHE who came down from the cold North to conquer the more 'civilized' acid cult of the patriarchal Canaanites. But words and ritual take on new meaning divorced or contrary to their origin, and it may be that Her mushroom conquered secretly, while the male God's titles and tales were retained, until the conflicting accounts were so jumbled together all true sacraments became taboo and eventually forgotten by the masses.

Similarly, I cannot fully separate the spiritual role of LSD and Robitussin for me at that time, in the blessed Spring/Summer of 2001. In late April of that year I induced a massive overdose (by contemporary standards) of acid after fasting and going without sleep for over 36 hours, most of them in a different climate, latitude and time zone...although I nearly died, it was as if I was now in the Garden of Eden, paradoxically after surviving all the consequences of The Fall through to Final Judgement, and I would smoke a lot of the best Indica (by contemporary standards of the time) around; and then I started taking these cough & cold pills every other day for two weeks, and while cough medicine is artificial and potentially dangerous and I can not in good conscience recommend it to anybody, yet it is unlike toxic addictive drugs and the effects become stronger, not weaker each time I took it, and it had a spiritual quality and benefit and growth opportunity, if not greater, than vastly different and perhaps opposed, or not, complementary to that of 'psychedelics' --- as, for instance, LSD had brought me on trial before a council of The Gods, "Ha Elohim" who created the Heavens and Earth "in the beginning" ("Bereshith") in Genesis, before Moses that medicine man, that ayahuasquero---but DXM (the active drug in over-the-counter cough medicine) brought me close to God, the One God, or perhaps Goddess...Dr. Mom, they called her on the Robitussin ads. The Mother of the Universe. This was the divinely spaced-out condition in which I discovered R. Gordon Wasson's (and Valentina Pavlovna's!) Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality.

Since then my curiosity has not rested long without trying to figure out the true psycoactive origin and identity of the various Gods, Goddesses, religions, pre-Socratic Greek philosophical world-views including the Pythagoreans, the Orphics, and their relation to the Essenes, the Israelites, the Norse and more...Robert Graves, if you read between the lines, presents the very plausible view that the divine Acid inside the barley was originally worshipped as The White Goddess. I have no means of refuting this theory; in fact, it makes perfect sense. However, for whatever idiosyncratic reason, I am contrarily insisting that the Barley God, Dionysus aka Jehovah, Saturn, Cronos, the All-Father, prefers He/His pronouns, and also demands sacrifice: through morality and law, yes, which He taught us, in order to live by His will as an advanced collective co-existing and advancing, rather than living in small bands in accord with immoral nature---but His mercy was such that transgression could be forgiven as long as we return to His love and grace (i.e. by taking acid) and above all the importance of blood sacrifice, once human but after Abraham (=Bran, the Alder God; not to mention Brahma) animal, sheep or bull at the Passover festival of Spring.

Thus we come together and break bread. In this sense the Barley gives us all we need, and contains the Trinity: bread for body, beer for heart, acid for spirit. One can see it as a Triple-Goddess or a Holy Family or a Sun King whose colors are the alder's red yellow and green dyes, the last human manifestation of whom was His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I.

The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it 'nonsense', if you like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"