The Cow
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 devoted to slaughter, and first teach us morality: knowledge of Good and Evil. This is the knowledge that Christ wrote into our hearts before we were born; for He existed before Abraham.
But Christ is the Son. We were speaking of the cow as a Goddess...and there we have it. She is His mother: Io the White Cow who laid the Golden Calf the Hebrews went worshipping in Egypt---the Golden Calf Graves connects to the Holy Child born on the Winter Solstice, Horus as Osiris risen again---whose primeval milk spurt birthed our galaxy.
Cattle were incredibly important in ancient European culture as well. The so-called Indo-European or "Aryan" people were known to attach great importance to the cow, not just economically and technologically but mythologically. In the Poetic Edda, a collection of ancient Scandinavian poetry compiled after conversion to Christianity (and obviously written after the spread of literacy, which brought influence from Homer and other classical sources) but believed to contain many pre-Christian and pre-literary traditions, the Norse creation tells of a primeval frost giant Ymir, from whom arose that evil race, as well as a cow that licked the ice until enough melted to reveal the head of the first man, from whom Odin and the other gods descended (their mother being a daughter of the frost giants.) In Irish legend, heroes and rulers are constantly stealing each other's cattle and starting wars over magical cows. Similarly in Greek mythology the infant Mercury mischievously steals his older brother Apollo's cattle, in a tale that also explains the invention of the lyre, or harp.
What does morality have to do with cattle raiding? To our modern minds this might seem paradoxical (but see the prologue re: paradoxes) but really it boils down to this: survival of the community. Just as the townsmen will have a safe and productive city if they work hard and refrain from harming or robbing each other, destroying communal or private property, lend aid to their neighbors, etcetera, a nomadic pastoral tribe will benefit from poaching other tribes' cattle, looting the granaries of the agriculturalists, and practicing combat and the art of weaponry to overpower any defenders and resist being looted themselves.
The mushroom does not open one's eyes to a strict moral code already written in stone: it tells one what one must do to survive; but it also speaks for the interest of the group---the true origin of what Nietzsche called herd morality---a term that is now placed in its appropriate context, as it arises from and is appropriate to a herding community, and consistent with the moral imperatives of psilocybe cubensis. Although anyone can potentially have this direct unmediated access to God, it probably was not long before a predilection developed among certain members of the group to go deep into psychedelic trance on what McKenna termed 'heroic dosages' in order to access very specific diagnoses and prescriptions for individuals and more general precepts for the entire community to follow. These were not internalized as moral duty in the sense familiar to us but rather were done to ensure fertility and prosperity and ward off death and disease, although these were regarded as forces too powerful to be ultimately overcome...death was not really a problem as life goes on; and every October 31st in the evening the dead would come back to visit, provided they were honored and fed and the living in turn ate the food of the dead: the mushroom.
In fact, the mushroom may not have had any agenda at all until after Man had lost his way, ensnared by the mysteries of agriculture, spaced out from acid, drunk on beer and wine and amanita muscaria, bloated and stuffed with meat and grain...until the Saviour come, "not for the healthy but for the sick."
For many the Vision will have little to do with urgent rearrangement of one's life or some obscure Mosaic or Pythagorean code of conduct and more to do with laughter.
Does anybody remember laughter?
-Robert Plant
If the Kykeon, a mystical potion of ancient Greece made of barley, was truly an ergot-derived LSD-related sacrament, also partaken by the ancient Israelites and some early Christians, and this was the source of the sublime pathos of Attic Tragedy that Nietzsche immortalized as the Dionysian substratum of civilization in The Birth of Tragedy, from whence sprang the immeasurably deeper wells of Comedy?
Of course the cow is but one mother the Holy Child Psilocybe had...as Heimdall had nine mothers, the Ninefold Muse (we approach the High Priestess and the sacred mystery of ROTA) likewise Christ was born in many mangers...the horse is another important herbivore from whose dung psilocybes and active panaeolus species grow...perhaps this is why the Aryans and other peoples of the Eurasian Steppe began to herd horses as well, and learned to ride them...certainly the image of Odin riding an eight-legged flying horse has something to do with the original religion of the Aesir, before the northern cult of Thor transformed him into Santa Claus? She also gives birth as a tree...down by the riverside, among the willows and alders, or beneath the tall birches and ancient oaks of the shady forest. And so why should we not admit that the White Goddess then is identified with the mushroom itself?
The hobbits looked at her in wonder; and she looked at each of them and smiled. 'Fair lady Goldberry!' said Frodo at last, feeling his heart moved with a joy that he did not understand. He stood as he had at times stood enchanted by fair elven-voices; but the spell that was now laid upon him was different: less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvelous and yet not strange. 'Fair lady Goldberry!' he said again. 'Now the joy that was hidden in the songs we heard is made plain to me.
O slender as a willow-wand! O clearer than clear water!
O reed by the living pool! Fair River-daughter!
O spring-time and summer-time, and spring again after!
O wind on the waterfall, and the leaves' laughter!'
Suddenly he stopped and stammered, overcome with surprise to hear himself saying such things. But Goldberry laughed.
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