The Red Queen & The Green Knight
Chapter V
As I have shown the Son and the Father, as I fancy them to be, psilocybin and acid, the nomadic herdsman and the civilized farmer; and what was in Moses' Four Cups to have been a complex, sophisticated ayahuasca recipe containing these two, plus DMT from acacia and harmala, Syrian Rue, as an MAOI to activate and potentiate the other ingredients; now it remains to show the Mother to be amanita muscaria, despite all the kingly titles She has acquired. If modern man evolved from eating psilocybin in Africa, who's to say neanderthals and/or Denisovans weren't already taking Amanita, and showed us how, along with a deeper religious reverence than even the sparkling magic and omniscience of psychedelics. Wasson proposed a Siberian origin to the cult some 5,000 years ago (which coincides with Hebrew and Chinese dating) but why do I think it's older?
And who was Her consort before She came south and conquered the native cow/barley culture with Her passion and violence and animal sacrifice (if not human) and took the Barley God as her Lawful Husband? Before the domestication of the horse (which also gives 'shrooms via its dung) peoples of the Eurasian steppe had long used amanita muscaria and cannabis sativa. (Ephedra was another.) The first time I smoked fire weed on a box of cough pills in high school, I thought I was in Heaven. It wasn't like being drunk or on tranquilizers or opiates or even psychedelics. It seemed Holy. I felt like I was literally in the Garden of Eden, and in this state I happened upon Wasson's book at the public library. After the letters stopped swirling around the page, I was struck by his religious description of the drug. Could it be that Robitussin, "Dr. Mom" was the same deity as amanita muscaria, The Red Queen?
Yes. I immediately formed my hypothesis; six years later, my first initial experiments were encouraging, with that familiar feeling of expansion---ten years after reading the book, in the Fall I finally found some growing myself and got the preparation method down right. At that time I was prepared to answer my hypothesis in the affirmative, despite a number of differences in the subjective effects. But back then I wasn't using cannabis at the time. Now, more than two decades after first reading Wasson's book, I got to repeat those days' bliss with some really well preserved amanitas I ordered over the internet and some cheap but good legal weed from down the street.
The Red Queen & The Green Knight
Queen of the Mountain
Heavenly Bride of the
All-Father
She whom His priests
love to praise
in the name of JAH
Comely in her Scarlet gown
Yea, fetching as the morning dew
upon Her shining brow
the sea foam rises and falls
Who will Ascend?
Who scale her heights?
getting lost among brambles
where bearded goats tread,
even where the
spotted goat grazes
When her Man is not in
the House of Bread;
When no wind winnows
and the joy is not there on His
threshing floor,
she invites another to
her bridal chamber
The Green Knight
wields the sword
of Truth and Justice
a healing to the nations
he parcels out in leathern
sacks
Lighting up the blue sky
with his sweet fragrance,
the fruit of the orchard,
sweeter than wine
Together they lie still
day and night
Enraptured in each
others' arms
The beauty of her
thousand eyes
reflecting his
seven arms
holding her silk girdle
the fine linen she sheds
to the ground, rising
So we see originally weed was amanita's lover. Among the so-called Aryan migrations Vedic Priests brought from the North their cult, at least according to Wasson, culminating in the soma sacrifice and the inspired poetry of the Vedas. But this process likely started far earlier, before these peoples had learned agriculture, domesticated the horse and invented the wheel and chariot. We know they would burn ganja, in bowls or on the dead man's funeral pyre, and (probably communally) inhaled the vapors. Some scholars have argued against Wasson's soma theory; in fact some had already proposed cannabis prior to his amanita hypothesis. The use of milk in the beverage and the need for heating makes this a tempting possibility (as THCA needs to reach between 200-250 degrees Fahrenheit to decarboxylate into active THC, which is highly soluble in saturated fat.) Others have suggested it was nothing more than fermented barley: beer. Interesting...Probably at least some of the priests did use amanita and cannabis, simmered in milk...or possibly fermented in mare's milk. Different shamans may have had their own recipes for 'soma' and attached the name to widely divergent drugs and, later, placebos. These same wild centaurs may then have discovered the grape, praised it due to its red color and late summer/early autumn vintage, thus associating it with amanita as the fruit could be fermented to give a pleasant intoxication, the wine probably also used to preserve the mushrooms and psychoactive plants used as additives. Somewhere on the road from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean the amanita, cannabis, ephedra, henbane and wine-using nomads encountered the domesticated civilization centered on the use of psilocybin, ergot, opium and beer.
The potions spilled into each other and chaos ensued. God and Goddess changed places; Odin and Jehovah and Dionysus now took Her Majesty's scarlet crown; the Ganja God transitioned to a Goddess, but remained the now King Crimson's consort; at the same time, cannabis was added to beer, the predecessor to hops, along with henbane and opium, and likely the ergot of the barley itself, which it may have helped to preserve, along with other mushrooms.
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