Moses' Marvelous Medicine
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 taboos against psychedelic mushrooms (although Graves suggests this ban was added later, in Ezekiel's time.) The Garden of Eden story has many possible interpretations, but the true and literal meaning is undeniably related to mind-altering natural substances. Perhaps Steven Tyler said it best:
Back when Cain was able
Way before the stable
Lightning struck right down from the sky
Our mothership with fate said, "let's give it a try"
Conscience was related
Man he was created, but
Lady luck took him by surprise
The sweet and bitter fruit it surely opened his eyes
She ate it!
Lordy, it was love at first bite...
Well, she ate it!
Never knowing wrong from right...
-Aerosmith, Adam's Apple
It was only on a deeper reading of the Old Testament in my 30's and examining correspondences with Greek mythology that I saw the forest a little clearer for the trees, as it were. The Road to Eleusis had convinced me ten years earlier that acid made from ergot on barley was at the foundation of the ancient chthonic religious mysteries of Greece, which also is at the basis of Nietzsche's breakthrough work, The Birth of Tragedy, which I had intuitively perceived ten years before that when I read the book on LSD back in high school. It was easy to see as well that Joseph from the Bible, who interprets Pharoah's dream of grain and famine and the number seven, and his silver cup stolen by his brother Benjamin, all refer to the same acid cult. But when I finally got around to reading Homer I realized the hero Bellerophon had a very similar story to Joseph.
Around this time I found Robert Graves' The White Goddess or rather: it found me.
I was minding my business, walking past library shelves looking for something to read while my kids were upstairs in the children's room, the last time we would sit and read at the library together, right before the pandemic. The bright yellow and red jumped out at me; or perhaps it was the triple-spirals. I was inspired and challenged by the book; it took me three tries, each time giving up, starting over at the beginning, and getting a little farther than the last time; until finally during lockdown I finished it. Now, I'm almost done reading it for the third time, and I am finally beginning to understand it!
But immediately one of the things I realized was my intuition that the Old Testament and Greek Mythology both refer to the same historical and religious world was here confirmed, or at least shared. Another was just how important the barley cult was to everything in the ancient world. Much more slowly did I catch on to the role Acacia played in Hebrew and Greek mysteries and philosophy.
The acacia is bound up in the mystery of the Burning Bush, the Ark of the Covenant, and later visions of the canonical Prophets. Graves alludes to the acacia as of prime significance in the Essene community, which scholars believe influenced the Christian faith and which Graves links to Pythagorean traditions, which ultimately go back to Orpheus, or Moses, anyway. It finally hit me as I had already begun writing this "book" in which I claim that God is a mushroom, certain of the hierarchical supremacy of the Holy Trinity of amanita, psilocybe, ergot in prehistory. Too late to change the title, it seems some usurper God already changed the tale, some millennia ago; and this is what Graves refers to as the Battle of the Trees, a medieval Welsh poem commemorating the alteration of the sacred Druidical tree calendar.
Some will know of ayahuasca as a potion containing DMT. DMT itself is orally inactive; the word ayahuasca actually refers to a woody vine containing beta-carbolines, natural MAO inhibitors, that allow DMT to be taken orally, and theoretically potentiates the effects of other serotonergic drugs such as lysergic acids, found in ergot as well as morning glory seeds, and psilocybin/psilocin and baeocystin, the three main alkaloids in magic mushrooms. The acacia of northeastern Africa does contain DMT and other alkaloids. Although there is no known tradition of using the bark for hallucinogenic purposes, the tree does have a sacred status to many people; it is protected in Israel, for example. The health of the acacia valley is a symbol of life and fertility in the Prophetic visions, which also involve wild, frightening imagery, foretelling of the future and moral directives to people and king. Now we can return to the debate later, but while R. Gordon Wasson identified the legendary Soma of the Indian religious classic the Rg Veda, as Amanita Muscaria, others have proposed that Soma and Huoma, used in the Persian Avesta to refer to a sacred substance as well, are both the same thing and really refer to Syrian rue. The languages and the words are related; but I think that the S and the H make a crucial difference, as anyone will see who goes ahead and reads The White Goddess. In particular, H represents the whitethorn, which probably means the acacia originally, and is bound up in these mysteries...but we will return to this later and hopefully if I remember pay an unexpected visit to the Mormons. My point is, I think that originally they may have used the same substance but there was an argument at some point, and Soma and Huoma became antagonistic cults, the Deva and the Asha...but that huoma does probably refer to Syrian rue, which contains similar beta-carbolines to the ayahuasca vine, huasca = huoma. The names are similar anyway; sorry, that was the whole reason for the tangent.
The rue, which is still burned as an incense to avert the evil eye in Islamic societies today, as well as having established medicinal properties according to Ayurvedic Medicine, was associated with the Passover bread since ancient times. Barley and rue are thus intimately associated and I speculate that when it was added to the ergot potion, what the Greeks called the kykeon, the effects were incredible. It was probably already used with psilocybin mushrooms when available, and we shall return to that again with Zoroaster. But there is some ambiguity in Exodus about psilocybin mushrooms, and in fact outright hostility which is peppered throughout the Old Testament; although Graves suggests this propaganda was added later, after the Exile. There is ultimately a competition between the Ten Commandments and the Golden Calf; but as we have said earlier the Calf represents the first appearance of the Lord to Man as psilocybe cubensis on cattle dung in Africa (this is McKenna's theory in a nutshell) whereas the commandments probably somehow represent two big amanita caps! But why? I thought we were talking about ayahuasca? Well, some South American shamans throw those into the brew as well!
But seriously...I think the amanita propaganda was added later as well, after the Babylonian influence. But who knows? They were always there, at high elevations. But getting back to the Sinai, the importance of the acacia being paramount, I realized DMT had played a major role in Hebrew religion. I thought I was the first to figure this all out, with Graves' assistance (from the grave, as it were) but then I wanted to check my bases, and check up on the latest psychedelic literature since I hadn't read anything new in twenty years, and all of a sudden I was overwhelmed by how much people have written on that topic since then. Of course I was reassured in my own mission when I realized most of it was at best regurgitating the same old information (and errors) that I had been familiar with since high school. However, I was amazed to discover Rick Strassman's DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, where he specifically connects DMT with the Hebrew prophetic tradition.
Strassman gives all sorts of evidence that he believes shows a phenomenological similarity between the DMT experience (in clinical trial patients injected with a synthesized version of the drug) and descriptions of prophecy in the Old Testament. But instead of considering the obvious explanation that the Prophets used mind-altering plants, as anthropologists know all peoples have always done, to enter this hallucinogenic state, he flatly rejects that possibility despite the mounting evidence, and proposes that endogenous DMT produced naturally by the human brain could explain all those spontaneous religious experiences. It is quite a theory. There is DMT in our brains; but what exactly it does, no one is quite sure. I have always thought it had to do with near-death experience and possibly dreams and yes, spontaneous mystical experiences; but I probably got those ideas put into my head back in high school by internet sources that, again, were just regurgitating the unexamined Gospel of their leaders, in this case Strassman himself, who is responsible for these (not unreasonable) speculations.
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