God is a Mushroom

  APPENDIX A     Darkness preceded the light of Creation and night begins the day. Likewise the Jewish calendar begins in the Fall, although things were different before the Exile, when barley cakes were still offered to Astarte, the Queen of Heaven. James Ussher, the seventeenth century Archbishop of Armagh in the Church of Ireland, dated the Creation to October 22, 4004 BC. This late harvest period has always been celebrated throughout the northern hemisphere as a time of magic and ritual, when the souls of the deceased returned to us for one night and day, to eat and drink together and share the never-ending story that is life. Many of the customs are similar to earlier (in the year, that is) harvest celebrations and also share many elements with modern Christmas---this is all related to the symbolism of the harvest, fertility and marriage, averting death and disease and bringing prosperity in to the new year. The Celts in particular celebrated four annual fire festiva...

  Chapter VI     The cow is central in mythology and folklore the world over. Robert Graves connects the White Goddess of Old Europe and the Mediterranean with the cow, with Io, Isis, and ultimately with a Libyan origin, while Terrence McKenna later proposed that human consciousness and religious ecstasy began in Northern Africa, around the same place and time as Isis' birth at Lake Triton in Libya, after consuming psilocybe cubensis growing from cow dung.     Even before reading McKenna, back in high school during a two-week binge on cubensis myself I felt a strong certainty this was the reason the cow was sacred in Hinduism. In the Gathas of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) the Cow, lamenting its lot at being slaughtered by Man, asks the cosmic spirit of wisdom and righteousness for a protector. None are found among mankind, until Wisdom manifests itself to Zarathustra, to intercede on behalf of the Cow, and all the lowly, afflicted and oppressed, the innocent devot...

          Prologue:            God is a Mushroom! I:       Down the Rabbit Hole II:      The Two Trees III:     Joseph's Amazing Technicolor Kool-Aid IV:    Moses' Marvelous Medicine      V:      The Red Queen & The Green Knight VI:     The Cow VII:   Theogony Botanica Appendix A: Trip or Treat --- Happy Helloween! Appendix B: Santa Claus is Real! Appendix C:  Twelfth Night (or what you will) The tale being told herein these blogg'd words is under construction; indeed, the secrets held deep within the crystalline structure of the cosmos are ever-shifting, as the winds of time, that will sweep and blow away the pages from the book of Your Life if you sit here letting it go by...in other words I have not and never will finish this Great Work for the Little Work is what should take all our time and attention, real...

Chapter IV            Perhaps the Sun rose over the Red Sea one morning (what day of the week?) to set an acacia tree ablaze upon the Sinai. Perhaps Moses then took a breath of inspiration from JAH, inhaling the fumes of the burning, thorny bark. Moses, alias Orpheus, then became the first shaman (or so the story goes; the Hyperboreans tell it differently) and invented ayahuasca, leaving behind his complicated recipe which became the book of Exodus. The clue is in the "four cups" of the Passover feast (he wasn't drinking Manischewitz!)          The idea that the Bible (and specifically the Old Testament) refers to altered states of consciousness and the mushrooms that induce them is not new. Wasson and McKenna traced our religious origins back  to two mushrooms---the Amanita explanation got a boost from John Marco Allegro. At the very least, if Genesis is not secretly about tripping then it at least contains one of the oldest t...