The first session of a seminar series built around Pinchbeck's 2002 book Breaking Open the Head, covering shamanism and psychedelic revival. He describes growing up with a scientific-materialist worldview, his father an abstract painter and his mother a writer connected to the Beat Generation, and argues the resulting nihilism made people around him unable to take the ecological crisis seriously. He credits Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs with treating consciousness as something to investigate firsthand rather than through received authority, and names the poet Michael Brownstein as his route to ayahuasca, which he wrote about for the Village Voice. He quotes Jean-Francois Lyotard on thinking past the boundaries of a culture, and closes by comparing the psychedelic revival to a second Reformation: as printing gave laypeople direct access to scripture, psychedelics give direct access to visionary experience.
In brief
- Pinchbeck says he began the research behind Breaking Open the Head in the late 1990s to test whether the scientific materialism he had inherited was actual knowledge or an unexamined belief.
- He argues that scientific materialism produces a nihilism that removes any reason to care about the future of the earth.
- He credits the Beat writers, particularly Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs, with the position that the only knowledge a person can count on is their own experience.
- He says psychedelics were treated as ridiculous in 1990s New York media circles in a way that alcohol, cocaine and heroin were not.
- He cites Jean-Francois Lyotard's line that being prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking.
- He relays an argument, which he credits to another writer, that the return of psychedelics constitutes a second Reformation, giving people unmediated visionary experience much as printed vernacular Bibles gave them unmediated scripture.
Full text
So yes, this is the first session of breaking open the head of the psychedelic renaissance. Uh, and I wanted to talk sort of about the history of uh, shamanism. Um, sorry, I'll mute everybody from time to time, but if you but if you if you hear rustling and it's coming from you, please please mute yourself. Um, okay. So, um, yeah. So basically breaking over the head, I was published in 2002 and the research on it started in the late 1990s and um essentially what had happened to me is that I was a journalist um and a magazine editor in New York City um and um had grown up with a scientific materialist worldview.
Both my parents were artists. Uh my father was an abstract painter. My mother uh you know was and still is a writer and and writing teacher and book editor. um but they had um sort of you know given up forfeited the religion of their their ancestors and and basically believed that this is it you know that there isn't any soul or spirit or anything that continues beyond this life um in that sense so when I got into my 20s and that that was basically the the context that everybody in my world uh you know how they understood reality um and as I got into my 20s I started working in magazines I had friends we had a literary magazine together and I don't I just I became more and more dispirited or kind of um uh I guess a little bit depressed about um this view of the world um you know where it seemed that life was just basically utterly meaningless and that no matter what you did it was all going to be annihilated um you know at a certain point um and I started writing about some ecological subjects and it seemed to me that um people around me couldn't focus on you know as I learned about the environment mental crisis on on how severe and serious um thing the these things were that were happening to the planet um because um there was this underlying nihilism. you know, scientific materialism led to this kind of cynical or kind of nihilistic worldview where um yeah, you didn't really believe that there was much point in in caring about the future or caring about, you know, the future of the earth and so on because anyway, it was all just um you know, going to end in oblivion.
Um and so I began to interrogate within myself. So, you know, I'd inherited this idea, this belief system, but did I actually know it to be the case? And I guess I was lucky because my mother had been part of a group of um artists and writers uh called the Beat Generation that included Alan Ginsburg and Jack Herowak. And they had been writers who starting in the 19 40s, late 40s, had met at Columbia University and had begun to have the same kind of sense that um there was a stagnant element in the consciousness of their time that it was kind of stuck. and they decided that they had to go on an excavation of consciousness for themselves and um they explored drugs, they explored meditation, they went to Morocco, they went to India.
Ultimately William S. Burroughs, we'll talk about this more actually next time when we get into the modernist artists and so on went to went to the Amazon and took Iawaska and then Ginsburg tooka and measculine and LSD and wrote all these poems about it. And um you know they they their their perspective was that the that our civilization modern civilization was very much based on secondhand knowledge and received experience and mediated experience and that actually none of that was of great value to you as an individual because ultimately the only form of experience that you can trust or count on is your own and the only type of knowledge that you can count on is your own. So I had that in the back of my mind. I met a friend who was a poet who's also had been kind of peripherilally part of the Beats and had traveled to India and done Iawaska many times, Michael Brownstein.
and through him I kind of learned about Iawaska and I ended up uh taking it at a ceremony downtown and writing about it through the village voice um and started doing mushrooms and LSD again and got fascinated by you know how powerful these experiences were and how you just couldn't really talk about them at all in uh east coast in in in the media world at that point. My friends would just laugh at me and they were doing other drugs, you know, alcohol, you know, obviously tobacco, um, coke, you know, even heroin some of them were doing, but, um, psychedelics were somehow considered ridiculous and stupid. And, and so I began to realize that there were these many layers and levels of repression that our culture had put on the psychedelic experience. Um, you know, this was, as I said, back in the 1990s. So in a way the beginning of of of of breaking open the head was an effort to try to understand you know what the value of these experiences are.
What's what's the value and meaning of these visionary experiences? Why were they so repressed uh by our society and um you know did they have any larger meaning? could could they help to illuminate the question of whether there is something that might exist a form of our consciousness that exists you know after death or in other realms or other dimensions. So that's kind of what led me on my initial journey and I'll probably talk more you know more about that as we go on. One of the quotes that I was struck with but I read a lot of uh kind of intellectual stuff philos you know structuralist postructuralist philosophy Jean Francois Leotard was a French philosopher who wrote a book I think called the postmodern condition and one of his area one of his quotes was uh being prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking and uh I really just you know really like that idea because um yeah in general, you know, we live within a culture, a cultural construct.
Um, it's like a boundary. Um, and we we don't really question that boundary. Um, and actually thinking begins when we kind of um, you know, come into conflict with with with the boundary of our culture and begin to try to move beyond it in various ways and think about what is unthought or unknown or um, inexpressable. Um so yeah so in the beginning of um waking up in the head I really looked at this idea of um you know why were the psychedelics so repressed by our civilization and of course you know as we'll discuss it's very fascinating that now that repression seems to be lifting uh and we're seeing um you know more and more legal um kind of investigations of them. I mean basically from the late60s I mean you know late 50s early 60s a number of people in the psych psychological elite establishment thought that um you know psychedelics were the most extraordinary tools that had ever been discovered for investigating the human mind.
And some of them, you know, like, you know, Richard Liry or, you know, Tim Liry and Richard Albert from Harvard, you know, went really deep into it and ended up, you know, advocating that everybody turn on and and and and, you know, switch on, you know, switch into this different consciousness. Um but essentially by the end of the 60s they'd started to be very much demonized as part of the war on drugs and um they were you know I think there was controlled substances act uh you know the early 197072 they were all made schedule one substances they were seen as having no possible use only capacity for abuse and um yeah and they were basically written out of the medical textbooks uh the the experiments that have been done with them. So it's very fascinating to me even you know today in general to think about this mechanisms of of repression in society and how they work in different areas and how culture kind of constructs itself um as as a kind of boundary um that then allows certain things to be discussed and then other things keeps kind of outside of the discourse. Uh Paul Devo, a very interesting writer about um archo acoustics, ancient ritual practices and psychedelics, talked about how the um you know among the intellectual class in in the establishment there was this irrational hatred and repression of the use of hallucins and a smirking dismissal of the psychedelic experience. And he wondered which I also wondered is that did the society sense a kind of deep threat to its own philosophical foundations in in the psychic experience.
Frederick Jameson another very interesting uh cultural critic talked about how the mechanism repression works in in a double way. It's like it's it's a double whammy in a way. On the one hand, repression seeks to remove some particular object from consciousness like for instance the value of you know psychedelics and the visionary experience. But it also wants to do away with the trace of that removal to repress the very memory of the intent to repress. And one very powerful tool for doing that is ridicule and mockery. Uh so it felt in the late 90s that if you if you were interested in something like psychedelics or mushrooms or the visionary experience, you were actually a laughingtock.
people would would make fun of you. So, not only was it incredibly legally uh interdicted uh so that you know you could be arrested for long prison sentences with schedule one substance, but it was also like a a buffoonish thing to do. It made maybe you seem foolish and look stupid to try to do it. So, it's I think these are very interesting and I and I still in terms of how our culture functions always look for these areas of uh repression. To me, they seem like areas that hold energy. If you see particularly this combination of uh you know legal force and mockery u you know it feels like something is being concealed or or swept under the carpet that's very important.
Um let's see. One of the thinkers who came to mean a great deal to me uh as I wrote Breaking Up in the head and continue to be important to me um in the next book 2012 uh is Walter Benjamin who was a very unique figure in 20th century thinking and philosophy. He was a German Jewish critic. He kind of combined a kind of subtle um mysticism kind of Jewish mysticism cabalism. I mean he exchanged a lot of letters with Gersh Masholum who was like great coalist scholar he was connected to the Frankfurt schoolorno and Marcusa a little bit but he had his really really charted his own individual path and um he explored hashish and masculine and wrote really fascinating essays about them which we'll probably talk a little bit more next week but we definitely will.
uh and um you know Benjamin had this idea that um in the movement from you know the medieval era to capitalism it was not just we we moved from childhood to like adulthood maturity and responsibility and rationality but it was more like capitalism was a new dreamfilled sleep like another kind of intoxication or uh you know something like that and um yeah that that that that um to gain something you know in this case our rational capacities, science, science capacities always involved suppressing something else. You know, in this case, our intuition, our connection to visionary experience. And Benjamin actually saw this right writing between the first and second world war as um dangerous for humanity not not to understand this this dynamic. Um he he he felt that um humanity by its nature always has to commingle with you know what he called the cosmic powers and um you know we can do this either through rituals through initiations um through ceremonies you know through through devotional activities or it kind of happens destructively through through war through violence through ecological destruction. Um so you know one one major theme going through my work um is this idea of initiation and um we'll we'll we'll go into that um in more depth but yeah Benjamin also or Benjamin I guess to to pronounce it more accurately uh had this idea that uh even even going back you know this is back in the 20s that humanity's alienation from itself was deepening that capitalism was actually forcing this this kind of separation from our from our own nature, from nature and and human nature and our and and it was and it was forcing it would help us to see ourselves as objects of exchange and it actually as our alienation got got deeper through this process uh we could reach this degree that we would experience our own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order and I I find that idea very fascinating when we see many things that are happening now in terms of the you know worship of destructive technologies and um um yeah kind of all sorts sorts of phenomena.
So um yeah, so so um you know where where we are now, I mean Benjamin talked a lot about dialectics, the dialectics of awakening, you know, moving from one form of dream to another form of dream um you know like wake you know. Yes. and and the um um you know I think that this idea that um in this process of the psychedelic renaissance there's an awakening happening and a movement of consciousness forward but also we have to wonder what what's being kind of you know re-repressed or or suppressed and what we're seeing right now is capitalism kind of corporate financial structures of capitalism figuring out how to assimilate the psychedelic experience Um, and it feels to me that this is like a process that's been going on since the 60s that that, you know, one of the main reasons that psychedelics were demonized and suppressed back in the 60s. Um, was not because they were particularly dangerous. You know, they're much less dangerous for health than alcohol or tobacco, but there was this um sense that they challenged the underlying structure of capitalism in some sense.
And they led people to, you know, want to create all the good communities, to want to drop out of the system, to want to create alternative systems, uh, to want to create, you know, social, you know, justice movements, e ecological movements and so on. So, so now it feels to me as if, um, you know, many years have passed. Uh, other new generations have come. I mean, another issue in the 60s was that, um, there weren't really kind of, and we'll talk about this in future weeks, there weren't really elders around. Like when people go through psychedelic experiences and initiations, visionary states, um there's a lot of danger there.
And what helps is to have initiated elders who, you know, work with the visions that come up, you know, help them integrate the experience and also kind of place them back into society uh in a in a healthy way. And that didn't, you know, exist back in the 60s. So even somebody sophisticated like John Lennin, you know, who talked about basically destroying his ego and LSD, you know, couldn't find his way back for like many years um from that experience. So So yeah, but but but since then now we have many more elders, we have integration therapists, we have these career fields developing and kind of the question is, you know, is these capitalism going to somehow assimilate psychedelic experience, you know, into the current capitalist structure? um or you know is that structure going to have to change in some ways uh to um to allow this this this to happen uh and we can also ask you know is the melding of corporate capitalism and psychic therapy something good something to look forward to I mean we're seeing you know companies like compass pathways the billion-dollar company and a lot of the money is coming from kind of Silicon Valley libertarian investors like Peter Teal who was Trump's Donald Trump's science adviser and so on and I think um you know as we'll keep keep coming back to uh you know part of what happened with the psychedelic movement over the last 20 years is you know many people saw the value of the experience for society and for for individuals and they they they recognized that the only way to kind of move it along and get it kind of accepted again into society was to focus on the medicalization model and the scientific model.
So to prove it with scientific data to show the evidence that you know psychedelic psilocybin can help with end of life anxiety or you know MDMMA can cure depression or Iawaska can help with post-traumatic stress disorder or whatever. So we're doing all that research again which is great and it's having you know then there are tremendous benefits for for personal healing. Um but but but my concern is in that focus on personal healing uh the the the bigger medicine for society that the kind of psychedelic experience uh offers is being uh kind of you know a avoided let's say or or ignored. So yeah, are we still repressing something crucial? Is it is it as as this new culture forms around, you know, the mainstreaming of psychedelics is some is something, you know, really really crucial being missed.
Uh and also, you know, when we look at things like, you know, the ecological crisis, which has been a big focus of my work, the rise of AI and destructive technologies, um surveillance technologies and so on, you know, do we do we still find ourselves situated in in a larger evolutionary process? Uh, you know, is there is there a teology here or different teologies at play and is it possible that psychedelics, you know, beyond their role for personal or individual healing have a crucial role to play in our evolution as a species going forward? So, uh, yeah, now I'm going to go. So, that was all sort of introduction sort of context for how I'm thinking about the course and the subjects that that really have me kind of fascinated. I'm really curious to hear what you think.
And you know, may maybe I'll um um well, I'll tell you what. I'm I'm going to pause now and and I'll I'll let you guys if you have any thoughts or questions on that before I kind of jump into the next part, you can just raise your hand or um ask in the um in the chats and I will um uh I will I will give you a um opportunity to speak and if not, I'll just I'll just plunge on ahead. Anybody have a thought or something uh question on that? Cool. Makes sense. Sounds reasonable. Um Okay, cool. So, I'm going to go back to uh screen sharing.
Uh okay. So uh you know when I was writing breaking open in the head uh you know first of all I started to have these you know extremely profound like you know transformative experiences through psychedelic shamanism and even through you know personal consumption of substances like LSD and mushrooms. You know I then you know became fascinated by kind of the the the anthropology and the history of of the visionary experience of psychedelic shamanism. And I, you know, looked for those sources that, um, seem most pertinent. And one of the the key ones is, uh, Marcia Eliia, uh, an extraordinary professor of religious studies. Uh, he was sort of the the dominant figure in his field.
And he actually is the one who kind of coined the term shamanism, as far as I understand it, as as a cross-cultural um, kind of term. Uh I mean the word shamanism comes from Siberia uh from the from the nomadic uh people there. Uh but but in in his book shamanism archaic techniques of ecstasy realized that um there were many many cross-cultural similarities between the practices of mainly preiterate preiterate indigenous and tribal people from around the world. and um he um kind of did this extraordinary scholarship where where he really put together um you know this massive compendium showing the relationship and um yeah so what he discovered is that it was very common with these you know pre preiterate indigenous cultures uh that there would be a figure in their society who would have a certain role who would be separate from the rest of the community Uh and they would be the one who had sort of conduct with spirits who went into trance uh who had a certain access to the logos to to connection to spirits often a capacity to heal. Uh also they were often kind of figures who were feared.
They often lived kind of outside of of the tribe like they might have a tepee that pointed in a different direction. Sometimes they were really like threshold ambiguous figures. Sometimes they were sort of hermaphroditic actually in some cultures. Um so yeah, Elata enumerated these cross-cultural similarities uh which include um special relations with spirits, ecstatic capacities, permitting of magical flight, assence to the sky, descent to the underworld, mastery over fire and other elements and so on. uh and you know sha shamans are are marked by the process of initiation having undergone kind of a death and mystical resurrection uh by means of a descent to the underworld and an ascent to the sky.
Shamans are traditionally seen as the mediators between these different realms, different dimensions, the superhuman realm, the elemental realm, uh the human realm, the realm of ghosts and spirits. Um and and Elelliotta made a crucial distinction uh for him although it's been challenged um since that there was a sort of opposition between uh shamanism which is where you would go into these other realities in maintaining your your consciousness staying in your normal state of consciousness to a certain extent or heightened state of consciousness but you would still be present and possession trance cultures that were focused on possession trans like African cultures were essentially the um you know the the priest would give themselves up to a being, a deity, a spirit who would inhabit their body and they would kind of just check out um during that process. Um well, how do you become a shaman? Uh so the different ways, one way is um inheriting it through your family. If your parents were shaman or your grandparents, you can have a hereditary transmission of the shmanic profession.
Um and the other way main way is to have an initiatory crisis often an illness a disease or a wound. Uh and and healing that wound you know requires gaining these shamanic powers uh for yourself which then become something that you kind of have to use to maintain your own health. You're kind of you're kind of almost compelled to then give the gift back and share it with the community. So in a way the the one of the archetypes of the shaman is that of the wounded healer. And the image here is Chiron who is the heal do centator who was a great doctor who was wounded by Heracles and um yeah it's kind of the archetype of of the wounded healer.
he has this poison this dise this this that he can't get rid of and yet he still performs his healing function and um I mean you know Carl Young famously said you know the wound is the gift so it's actually the the wound is actually a source of power um and um in a way is the basis for a lot of um shamanic practition practitioners another way to become a shaman is to get stuck by struck by lightning uh Holar Kawwait writes uh the Greeks believed a person struck by lightning was in possession of magical powers. And in tribal cultures throughout the world, lightning shamans are venerated and feared as mighty shamans. So if you really want to become a shaman and you're looking for a shortcut, that's one way. But generally, uh, in indigenous traditions, you know, however you enter the shamanic field, there's a long apprenticeship and long training that has to happen. And this connection to a lineage is very, very important.
I was talking with somebody here in in Tulum where I'm staying right now. There's a lot of um kind of western neo shamans and my friend I guess was at a restaurant. He met a woman there who called herself a shaman and she was doing cannabis shamanism or rituals or something and he was like, "Well, what lineage are you part of? Who did you train with?" And and she'd had no connection to any lineage, indigenous or otherwise. um and got very upset when he began to challenge her about about her vocation in a way. So yeah, so generally to become a shaman, it doesn't happen in a vacuum.
You have to go through an apprenticeship um and and sort of connect to the field of practitioners of of a lineage. Um what are the roles of a shaman? uh all shaman you know communes with spirits uh that can be contacted in different ways you know through plants you know tobacco, sage, incense, iawaska uh or you know other means. Um the shaman is traditionally the psychop who brings the souls of the dead to their place in the underworld. Um it's a very interesting um aspect of the profession. Um, and yeah, I mean some people I mean a few weeks ago I gave a talk about Rudolph Steiner uh and and Rudolph Steiner wrote in his autobiography that even when he was a boy um when a family member died uh he would have a visitation like his aunt had passed away.
She he didn't know that she had passed away but but you know in a few a town many miles away and she appeared to him in a visit and um yeah I guess he you know sort of had that psychop role sort of guiding her his family into their place in the underworld. Um the shaman according to Elata is the great specialist in the human soul. He or she alone sees it for he or she knows its form and its destiny. Uh and as I mentioned before, shamans are often separated from the rest of their community, Eliata says, by the intensity of their own religious experience. I think there's also um a sense that there's um a danger um of being too closely associated often with people who who have the shamanic vocation.
uh there there's you know the energy of these spirits that they're involved with can reverberate um negatively uh and you know c you know create danger you know cause damage to people around them who who aren't maybe um prepared for certain respects. Uh shaman shamans are often thought to have a substance to possess a kind of magical substance which they carry in their body which they transmit to persons or even things to enhance their excellence. A word for that is mana. Uh and then shamans are also often the storytellers, the myth makers, uh the the elders, the speakers of of the logos for for the community. Uh the ones who hold the uh the the lineage of knowledge, um the ancestral knowledge and um the stories that that make up the community, the myths that make up the community.
Um yeah, in in breaking up in the head, I got very interested obviously, particularly as a writer, uh in this idea that that shamanism is connected to what we might call the logos to this illuminated speech that often streams forth uh from the uh shaman, you know, in in ecstatic states and intoxicated states. Uh I mean Terrence Mc Kenna who was kind of this great psychedelic uh philosopher of the the modern era talked about how for the shaman the universe is actually made of language. Um Walter Benjamin talked about how there is no event or thing that does not in some way partake of language for it is the nature of all to communicate their mental meanings. in naming the mental being of man communicates itself to God. And so somehow the the shaman is is the logos holder uh the one who through their prayers and songs and chanting and stories and myths kind of um you know bring the world into into reality.
Um Henry Mun wrote a great essay about Mazitech shamans who work with the mushrooms in Wajaka and he described them as workers who are actively um enga expressing themselves by speaking. Creators engage in an endeavor of onlogical existential discourse. The shamans are men of language illuminated with the spirit. They call themselves the one who speak those who say. And this is a picture of Maria Sabina. uh the you know as we'll discuss more next week uh we the modern world kind of rediscovered the European you know American world rediscovered psilocybin mushrooms uh when Gordon Wasan and his wife Valentina went to visit Waka in search of uh the magic m some form of magic mushroom and they ended up having their first ceremony with Maria Sabina and and certainly throughout the whole ceremony she was chanting speaking can incantating So they had a direct experience of this uh logos bearing aspect of the shaman.
Um this is also from Eliata. Um this a mask from Borneo and Elliot Elata talks about shamans in Borneo u and kind of the the process of initiation which is as I as I said it's cross-cultural similarities. You find it all over the world. In Borneo, the spirit uh cuts his head open, takes out his brains, washes and restores them. The spirits insert gold dust into his eyes to give him keenness and strength of sight, powerful enough to see the soul wherever it may have wandered. The spirits plant barbed hooks on the tips of his fingers to enable him to seize the soul and hold it fast.
And lastly, they pierce his heart with an arrow to make him tender-hearted and full of sympathy with the sick and suffering. Um, as Elellata discusses, uh, you know, the shamans also kind of have access to what's called the the different levels of the world tree. Um, you know, the world tree is an idea we find in cross-cultural mythology, particularly developed in Norse mythology. Um, this is a painting of the world tree by Carl Young. Um and yeah, so the idea is that you know, hum humanity exists kind of at the center of the tree and beneath us are the lower worlds of ghosts and demons and spirits, um elemental beings, earth spirits.
Above us are are angels, divinities, davas and so on. Um, you know, so these other dimensions pass through every human being and they're often represented by the access mundi or the world tree where the roots reach down to the lower domains of ghosts and spirits and the branches stretch upward toward the gods. Uh, Eliata writes, "Lata writes that the underworld, the center of the earth and the gate of the sky are situated on the same axis and it was in past times it was by this axis that passage from one cosmic region to another was affected. Um so yeah just to explore this idea of initiation a little bit more because it's an idea we'll keep coming back to um so essentially um you know the modern world um with with kind of the kind of you know taking over of mono you know monotheistic religion did away with um initiatory processes uh and cross-culturally in indigenous culture cultures around the world, you find that the young people will go through some type of crucial transition. Um, that usually involves entering into altered states of consciousness.
In Australia, it's through walkabouts. In other cultures, it's through fasting or dark retreats. And often, it's through um, you know, visionary plants uh, and so on. Uh, and um, I really love a book by Joseph Shelton Pierce called The Biology of Transcendence. And in that book um Pierce proposes that um this this this imp impulse towards transcendence is something very innate into our human nature and it's actually maybe built into our neuro physiology. Uh so if we look at our brains we find that the the part of the brain that makes us most distinctly human is the prefrontal cortex which developed in the last 200,000 years.
So it's a very recent part of the brain and um with the prefrontal cortex we're able to kind of use abstract symbols um language plan for the future. It also gives us our sense of you know egoic identity you know which is based on memory and projections and so on. But the problem with the prefrontal cortex is without some type of initiatory experience, something that that that breaks open, you know, it to to a wider understanding, we can get locked into egoic identity, a kind of limited egoic identity. And this, I think, is particularly the case for men. I mean, you generally find in a lot of um indigenous cultures, uh, you know, initiation rights are more important for men, although they're also important for women.
But the idea is that women are kind of half initiated by nature um you know by you know having to bear children by menstruation. In fact you sometimes find initiation rights in indigenous cultures that involve kind of like something like mimicking uh menstruation where men will actually like cut open their penises and bleed from their penises. Um, so yes, there's the sense that women in some in some in some ways have a superiority or or more access to this kind of initiatory state by nature and men have to therefore even be more acculturated into it. But but I think it's you know also the case for for women and for men that we can easily get locked into sort of egoic state of separation isolation uh and that without some type of transcendent experience um we we we we suffer for that for that lack of connection to something bigger communion with something outside of the selves. Uh and um yeah, I mean Joseph Chilton Pierce points out as teenagers, you know, we generally, you know, most teenagers feel this innate yearning for something.
They want to belong to something bigger. They want initiation. They'll often point to their heart, you know, or hold their heart when they when they talk about this yearning for some type of transcendence, something something greater. And they'll often in a culture that doesn't have a constructive way to to seek initiation, they'll often end up doing it going after destructively. you know, in our culture might be by doing, you know, bad drugs like speed or getting into into gangs or violence or whatever or, you know, joining the QAnon cult storming the capital or something. Um, but yeah, I mean, I mean, we have this innate yearning for transcendence.
And for Joseph Chilton Pierce, he proposes there actually is almost like a biological aspect to this that that for the prefrontal cortex to act fully as it as it's meant to, we actually need to have these experiences that that take us outside of our individual egoic conception and bring us into a transpersonal or trans transcendent domain. And once we have those experiences, it's like a different neuro neurological imprint. And um you know so so essentially what what indigenous communities would do is they would create a cultural construct that would force the young people to go through this initiatory shock to have this visionary transcendent transpersonal experience and then once they came back into their normal consciousness the elders would interpret their visions and kind of um they' be celebrated by the whole community and they'd be kind of like given their place in the community. Um so um yeah and as as I said our our society kind of lack l lacks for this. Um so Eliata you know sort of had the same biases of many of the thinkers of his time of the 50s and so on and he he wrote I believe in the shamanism book that narcotics or drugs are only a vulgar substitute for what he called pure trance.
Um and he felt that the use of intoxicants were a recent innovation and pointed to a decadence and shamanic technique nar narcotic intoxication is called on to provide an imitation of a state the shaman is no longer capable of taining otherwise. So that was Eliata's original perspective. I think he later revised it, but essentially what we've learned since then is that that was wrong and that bias against um you know plants and visionary plants and compounds was u you know kind of a Christian bias in a way like the sense that um you don't need anything outside um and that plants are somehow you know it goes back to the demonization of of the tree and the garden of Eden and so on um the demonization of nature and so on. So since then archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered you know all around the world kind of more and more ancient use of u you know visionary plants and and compounds uh to um to create uh states of uh transcendence. Uh, one of the first um kind of examples of that is this uh mural from Algeria from 4,000 BC uh which is a humanoid bee uh clutching uh a bunch of mushrooms.
Um this was in the Tazili plateau of southeastern Algeria. Um from 4,000 BC in Spain we have what appear to be psilocybin mushrooms. um Siberia th000 BC petroglyphs uh show what appear to be ammonita mascaria headed uh humanoids. Um and these are mushroom stones in Guatemala from 1500 BC. Um, I have a story in um, one of my favorite stories in Breaking Open the head um, is from a shaman in Massachusetts who I met down in Mexico and he told me a story about how um, he um, you know, he wasn't really on a shamanic path yet. He was just sort of figuring out his life.
I guess he was living in uh, he was a gardener. He was living in Massachusetts and he had a very vivid dream of um, these mushrooms uh, growing in his garden. I guess they were ammonita mushrooms. And um then and in the dream he ate the mushrooms. Uh and in a few weeks later he went to his garden and and these mushrooms had appeared. Uh so he did some research into them and he discovered that they were considered to be the shamanic from Siberia. So he so he cut the mushrooms and he dried them and he invited a friend over and they ate the mushrooms together.
And he said that essentially nothing happened. He felt totally normal, but at one point he went to the refrigerator in the kitchen to get a beer. And when he opened the refrigerator and took out the beer and turned around, there were he said, you know, totally um as real as you know, you or I or person, there were three mushrooms um mushroomheaded beings kind of looking at him. Uh and um you know, they looked at him, he looked at them, and finally they said to him, you know, you know, why did you eat us? Uh and he said well I was following my dream and the mushrooms said um well are you prepared to follow this path and he said yes and then the mushrooms vanished and you know later under later on he understood that the path that he'd like you know intuitively agreed to follow was the path of shamanism and working with mushrooms and other plants.
Um, but it was kind of fascinating to me that the appearance of these mushroom headed beings, you know, is exactly like what we see in these mushroom stones or these petetroglyphs from Siberia. I've personally never had the experience of seeing uh, you know, sort of mushroom headed beings. Um, I did see elves once uh, which I'll probably talk about uh, in the next couple weeks. Um so other evidence of um you know ancient use of uh psychedelics the rig vda one of the essential texts of Hinduism considered to be from the 13th century BC has many many references to an inebrian called s um and one of the most famous uh quotes around it is um we have drunk s we have become immortal we have attained the light the gods discovered now what may a fman's malice must do to harm us? What o mortal a mortal man's deception?
And um there's you know basically hundreds of terms for S throughout um the Rigveda. It's called the Lord of Plants, the Lord of Speech, most respendant one, the all obtainer, a fountain made of gold, the food of gods, best rapture giver, the red colored tree, deathless god, the ancient one, the mighty, the gold hu, the king, guardian of law, the everlasting one, god, sabotar, high heaven sustainer, infallible, and so on. And yeah, there have been some, you know, so so basically over the last 30 years or 40 years, no, maybe it's 50 years now, you know, as um you know, kind of starting in the post world war, second world war era, we we kind of the modern world rediscovered psychedelics and had these profound experiences, it's led to, you know, this question of, you know, where were these substances used in our in our historical religions? You know, were were were the the kind of experiences crucial? um for the formation of these different cultures and religions and um yeah so scholars have examined things like Soma and the Rickda and um you know the evidence seems quite good and often we don't know because this was so many you know you know 3,000 years ago you know the environments have changed ge geographies have changed we don't know exactly which intoxicant which visionary plant this was it might have been the flyar uh it might have been a psilocybin you know iding with something else.
Uh there's another culture in Shaveen in Peru, very very extensive and very mysterious um psychedelic culture um that that you know existed from at least 2,00 to 200 BC and left behind these extraordinary ritual centers, these pyramids with these labyrinths underneath them with carvings of uh this this figure is clearly holding a San Pedro cactus. Uh also they used DMT and snuff. Uh so it was in you know one example you know in me America which is so incredibly rich in shamanic plants. A number of civilizations have kind of emerged and disappeared over thousands of years uh that that that that found the basis for their inspiration in in the visionary experience of of these shenanic plants. Teotakan is another example.
Uh this is a mural of the mother goddess Kuat Laui uh with a vine of Olqui. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, which is morning glory. The seats of which contain LSA. Uh and if you've ever been to Totakan, it's uh absolutely extraordinary. I mean, it almost feels like a like the precision of like a computer chip or something the way the way it's designed and built. Uh and it's on such an amazing scale. And I believe it was from uh like you know the beginning like 1st century AD or 1st century BC. I don't think we really know much about it even now what was happening there.
Um or yeah it was like um uh I mean I'm very interested in um this idea that some of these cultures are actually even older than we now think they were. Uh I mean there's questions around you know how they're dated and so on. Uh there's a very interesting book by this guy uh Robert Shock called Voyage of the Pyramid Builders and he basically argues that there was uh kind of a global network of this pyramid culture that that it was probably something like an you know what we now call you know Atlantis like an Atlantean high culture. I mean the Maya actually in their legends talk about the classical Maya talk about coming over the sea to um you know to Yucatan from an area they call Alon. Plato obviously wrote about Atlantis as the civilization that that disappeared under the waves.
Um and shock also notes that you find like in the you know the the mummies pharaohs in Egypt they find traces of tobacco and cocaine uh which really suggests that there was um you know travel routes between Meso America and Egypt. So there really might have been almost like a global culture, pyramid building culture um where psychedelic intoxicants were were a major instrument for um how they organized themselves, how they uh developed their architectures, how how how they created theiries and so on. So I think it's really still a very fascinating subject to explore for the future. Uh and then in ancient Greece uh there was Elusus uh which was the great mystery school that existed for um several thousand years uh from at least 1600 BC until it ended in 392 AD. Uh and we're going to talk about uh Lucus in in greater detail next week with Brian Morescu.
Um but this is a statue of Deita and Pphanie holding a mushroom. Um yeah and there was um essentially every year all of the greats of the ancient world you know the you know the philosophers the poets the the rich people whoever could and there it was open to all would go to Elusus and they would go through this transformational experience um which were really described in um you know very mystical terms and um you know they would they would come out of it transformed. Um, Socrates said, "Thice happy are those of mortals who having seen those rights depart for Hades, for to them alone is granted to have a true life there. For the rest, all there is evil." So, this initiatory awakening that happened in Elus was was was something that was meant to um, you know, have a have a benefit for your kind of immortal soul, for your soul in the afterlife. It gave you access to to a deeper truth.
um the the the world of of truth behind the veil of illusions or behind the shadows as Plato as Plato wrote about and uh the road to elus is a great book was Albert Hoffman, Gordon Wasan and the classicist Carl Ruck um and they they looked at the mysteries of Elus in depth uh and they ended up kind of arguing that um the intoxicant or the psychedelic that was used there was probably some form of argot. So airgot is a fungus that grows on rye. Uh and um we know that it used to infect the bread of whole towns. Uh and they would go into kind of a state of craziness for for several days but also often lead to gangarene, loss of limbs and so on. But it could also be used productively.
Midwives would use arrog to um induce muscle contraction in pregnancies. uh and in fact uh it was urgot is actually what ultimately gave us LSD uh because Sandos was interested in the 1930s the chemical company Sandos was interested in the capacity of urgot this molecular uh component of argot to induce these muscle contractions they decided to look at all these different syntheses different variants on that molecule to see if it had effect on muscle tissue and there was Albert Hoffman in 1938 who was um doing that research and when he did the 25th syn synthesis which was LSD LSD25 uh you know he he later discovered that it had these profound psychoactive um effects. Um so arrog is normally you know pretty horrible apparently uh if you take it but it may have been in the ancient world they had discovered you know ways to domesticate the effects to make it beautiful. Um you know they they may they may have figured that out. uh Carl Carl Ruck uh talks about how elusis was the supreme experience in initiates life.
It was both physical and mystical. Trembling vertigo, cold sweat and then a sight that made all previous seeing seem like blindness, a sense of awe, wonder and a brilliance that caused a profound silence. And Ruck said that ultimately the secret of elusis uh what made it so transformative for the initia was um this idea of rebirth from death. uh as the secret of elusis. Uh in Hades, Pphanany like the earth itself takes seed into her body and thereby eternally comes back to her ecstatic mother with her new son only to die as eternally in his specating embrace. So yeah, we'll get we'll get more into the legend uh of Panie and Tabina next week uh with with Brian and how that um how that that classical world uh initiation uh informed Western civilization really.
Um and um yeah and so so then you know one one question that many psychic scholars have have brought up is whether you know the tree of life or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden was was referencing uh you know psychoactive or psychedelic sacraments. You know the tree of life um you know in the garden of Eden predates Christianity. You find it in the Sumerian um culture. Um, you know, there there's many people like John John Allegro. Uh, this Princeton art historian believes that it's a it's a you know, the Bible is referring to a mushroom cult. Um, another possibility is IOGA uh could be considered a candidate for the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Um, and that's something that I have, you know, personally partial to because I've done yoga a couple times, including once in Gaban in Africa. And uh where bogga grows was kind of the cradle of humanity. Uh and um in fact Boga told me uh during a ceremony um one of my two ceremonies with the bogga the voice of Boga told me that that it was kind of the the tree of knowledge. Um so I'm partial to that idea although you know like anything in this field it's it's a theory or a hypothesis. And we'll we'll discuss um you know these different ideas in more depth as we go through this.
Um we know that um you know psychedelic shamanism was the origin of a lot of the sort of mythological complexes even of the modern world even the ones that are kind of dismissed as children's stories or folktales you know so we know for instance that the origin of Santa Claus comes from the Siberian shamanism the uh you know red and white uh spotted mushroom emancia there we see a Siberian shamaness wearing a red and white outfit s uh and there was a connection in Siberia between um kind of the the amina mascaria and the hurting of the reindeer. Um the the reindeer apparently loved to drink uh the piss of the the the nomads when they drank ammonita. So if you wanted to herd your your reindeer, you would simply take a bit of the piss of that you know after you've eaten a sprinkle on the ground and reindeer would come from many miles around. So it was the simplest way to to control them. And apparently yeah the um ammonita concentrates in piss.
So actually it's it's it's more pleasant to drink it through urine. Um so um yeah so so it's quite interesting just how um even though modern cultures rejected the psychedelic experience and the visionary experience and shamanism. It's this kind of support under under invisible support structure for a lot of mythologies. It's just something that a civilized society can't get rid of. It's it's so basic to our understanding. Um and um yeah, just more evidence of ancient use. Uh this is a very recent discovery. They found the shaman's pouch from around thousand AD in Bolivia. And the pouch is a fox snout pouch. And when they did chro chromatogram scientific tests of it, they discovered, you know, all these different psychotropic compounds, you know, cocaine, I don't even know what BZE is to be honest.
Harmine, buffetonine, DMT, potentially psilocybin. I mean, it's it's fascinating to me because this is actually very much like what I, you know, what you find today even in like the the the contemporary festival world. I mean, people have their bags of of of psychedelics and and chemicals and are experts on their use. It's like and here we go, you know, back a thousand years and we see the same thing. But an important aspect of this discovery is that indicates that um in this culture there was already a knowledge of um how DMT and harmine potentiate each other which is kind of the basis of the iawaska potion and um you know one thing we'll discuss later is actually we don't really know how old iawaska is you know whether it appeared a few hundred years ago or it's been used for millennia um you know that particular combination that is two plants one of them contains DMT.
One contains emo inhibitors that potentiate the DMT. Uh so this is actually the the closest evidence that we have that these ancient cultures going at least going back a thousand AD that knew that uh DMT and harm kind of worked together and potentiated that the harm the Mio inhibitors in the harm potentiated DMT. Um yeah. So then then another big question which we'll also get into next week is you know was there a um you know psychedelic basis to the beginning of Christianity. Um Jean Allegro was an art historian who actually kind of ruined his career. uh he was one of the main artist joins at Princeton and in the early 70s he published a book called the sacred mushroom and the cross.
Uh and in that book he found evidence for a mushroom cult in early Christianity. Um, and he ended up actually arguing that um, what what was ascribed to Christ in in the in the in the Gospels uh, was actually a code for the the logos of the mushroom that spoke through uh, people in in in ceremony in trance. And he was kind of like um, yeah, I think it he was ridiculed and his career was kind of ruined for this. And there was a lot of arguments between Allegro and Gordon Wasan who was the investment banker who kind of discovered the psilocybin mushrooms in Waka in the 50s with his wife um on on this question of whether of whether Christianity was based on an early Christianity was based on a mushroom cult. Um yeah so for Algro the whole Eden story is mushroombased mythology not releasing the identity of the tree as the sacred fungus.
And this is, you know, this is the best evidence he's found. It's a it's a uh chapel in France from 13th century, uh where the tree of life is clearly, you know, some kind of mushroom. Uh so, Algro argues that early Christianity was actually a fertility cult based on, you know, sac sacramental ingestion of mushrooms and Jesus was a metaphor for the for the logos of the mushroom that spoke through the initiates. Um since then we've discovered other you know kind of strong indications that there was some knowledge of uh psychedelic mushrooms and early Christianity. This is a fresco from 11 12th century in France and you can clearly see what looked like psilocybin mushrooms there.
Um you know one one one interesting question is around gnosticism uh and the gnostic gospels um as a kind of um antidote you know or alternative to the um the can canonical gospels and in the gnostic gospels although there you know which were discovered I believe in 1945 in a jar in um Saudi Arabia I think it was um you know there are all these different variations of the traditional gospels and also many gospels and stories that totally got left out of of the canonical Bible. uh and you know basically what seems like what happened is you know Christianity what in the early years was kind of an argument and there were different sects different interpretations different ideas around Jesus and God and so on and then when the Holy Roman Empire kind of decided to assimilate Christianity and make it the state religion those different deviations were kind of like honed down and one canotical idea was presented but what you find in the Gnostic gospel is more of a sense of Christ as a kind of initiate who says things like in the Gospel of Thomas, you know, open the door for yourself so you will know what is. And essentially what what seems to have happened, you know, between the third and the fourth century is a transition, a shift from kind of uh initiation to indoctrination. And when the the the the empire and the church kind of joined forces, uh the idea was that, you know, people, you know, the individual, you know, was supposed to be faithful and devoted and believe in the divinity of Christ and seek, you know, to save their soul through belief in in Christ's divinity rather than maybe understanding that Christ was providing like a model for the individual to seeks for themselves to realize themselves as also the son of the father. Uh and um Christianity then became about indoctrination where only the priests held the knowledge uh of um of the sacred word of God and everybody else could only participate tangentially through the knowledge of the priest.
Um a very interesting book on this topic is by this guy John Lamb Llash. Uh it's called not in his image. Uh and he ba he basically argues that the the Gnostics were um kind of inheritors of the mystery school wisdom of Elusus and the ancient pagan world uh that had to do with direct initiation initiation through knowledge and so on. And they tried to sound the alarm that Christianity as it as it kind of um emerged in this particular form was a kind of deviation for for Gnostics. They talked about um this idea of the the demiurge that essentially we were kind of imprisoned in a false reality uh by a group of beings that they called the archcoms who were led by a being called the demiurge and um and and they sort of twisted the stories around.
So for the for the gnostics um when u Adam and Eve are offered you know the tree of knowledge in the garden uh it's not an evil thing. It's actually liberation. Um it's it's the Christ or or the divinity that that is offering humanity a chance to break the spell of the of the demiurge of the archons and and and and you know reach true knowledge for themselves. Um yeah as um as as I have here the essence of Genesis is not about the fall. It is about transcendence. The serpent does not bring evil into God's perfect world. It brings wisdom. Eve is not responsible for the original sin and humanity's downfall.
She is a courageous spiritual guide who leads humanity to exercise free will and the serpent is actually not Satan. It's actually the Christ and that that's clear in some of the gnostic gospels. Um so yes so in a sense from the gnostic perspective Christianity as it you know grew into this world religion and so on was an in a kind of prepared deviation by these kind of offplanet entities who were seeking to um kind of control humanity through power structures indoctrination structures and this idea that you're you know you gain um you know your access to divinity is just to believe and have faith in Christ's divinity um is the opposite of an initiatory process where where you where you see Christ as a model of of a human who's attained divine sacred knowledge that you pursue that uh you know for yourself. Um and so as Christianity grew in power in Europe uh at a certain point um there was this demonization of anybody who possessed kind of um visionary consciousness plant visionary plant knowledge uh and that led to the uh initiation sorry to the um inquisition sorry uh the long trip by Paul Devo he talks about how the witches of the middle ages um were the name actually were night riders or night travelers uh and they were the practitioner practitioners of an ancient tra tradition. Uh night night travelers in northern Europe were called quel vigga night rider or miri rider in the dark.
Uh as part of this tradition, a woman known to be a prophetess dressed in the ritual attire of a goddess Fria Diana or Hela would travel to farmsteads and hamlets with a group of girls to give divinatory transessions. So essentially as the church gained power, you know, anybody who claimed to possess uh knowledge for themselves of the spiritual realms or the elemental realms had to be kind of demon demonized and and even killed. And it was um you know part of a process um that led to the situation where we now are in still where the the sort of um leftbrain consciousness focus on analytic rationality materialism. You know our culture totally um kind of gives primacy and weight to the the left brain aspects of of consciousness the left hemisphere and denigrates the right hemisphere. vision, the intuition, the connectivity and so on.
Um, a fun little fact about the witch's broomstick. Um, so the theory is that um the w the witch's broomstick was actually um one of the best ways to introduce dangerous psychoactive chemicals to the body would be to apply them to the vaginal membrane. Uh and you do this using a stick. So the stick would be used to create, you know, visionary flights. Um, and I I had known that this was the case or read this was the case for Dtora and Henbane, but apparently um it's also argued that this is the case for air. Um, so according to this quote from an article, and I'll post a bunch of these links when I create the um the group for for the course.
So if you want to review any of them, when Aragot is eaten, there was a risk of death. When absorbed through the thin tissues of female genitals, the hallucinogenic effects were more pronounced with less ill effects. The modern image of witches riding their broomsticks was inspired by the sight of a woman rubbing herself on the drugcoated smooth stick of her broom, writhing in the throws of hallucinations and no doubt some intense orgasms as well. Um, yeah. So I I don't know actually about Argot. I' I've really never heard of positive reports of Argot. Just it's really rarely heard of positive reports of ammonita bascaria. Um but it may very well be that there are ways to use these substances uh to get their to get their psychoactive benefits without without the negative effects.
Uh so yeah so we had the inquisition and in breaking open in the head I I wrote about how um there was a kind of a like you know I'm interested in the idea of a sort of dialectical historical process um that on the one hand there was this sort of demonization of visionary knowledge intuition direct connection to spirit and maybe this uh demonization as violent as it was was somehow necessary in this dialectic to allow for, you know, scientific reason, analytic reason, technology. You know, may maybe there's an evolution here that involves kind of the suppression of one hemisphere of the brain for a period of time and then maybe the integration of both brain hemispheres. Um, you know, in in this time that we're in now, in the future, this is just a quote from from the book. or the dialectical process that created the possessive mindset of the capitalist and the rational outlook of the technocrat required a destruction of the preodern vestigages of communal and animistic beliefs. Whether these beliefs were found in isolated pockets in Europe uh among you know people who practice plant knowledge or in the indigenous populations of the new world where I mean when when you know during imperialism we definitely you know the western colonialists would really attack the holders of plant knowledge um you know the shamans and so on across across uh you know the Americas.
uh this destruction uh was part of the process that Karl Marx described as the alienation of all our physical and intellectual senses into one sense the sense of having uh which isn't actually even a sense it's a kind of a conceptual framework uh but um this idea of having possessing um you know which which was necessary for the sort of capitalist accumulation um required the suppression of kind of the facilities of of being, you know, of connecting, of communing, of of our connection to nature and so on. And um yeah, I really still believe that we're in the uh the legacy of this um you know, kind of denial of of the visionary and intuitive and the over primacy of the rational and the analytic and and the the control and the possessing aspects of of the psyche. Um you know just very simply the brain hemispheres you know modern and contemporary civilization are clearly very leftbrain dominant. Um you know the left focuses on logic skills daily activities, language, grammar, memory, analysis, details, science, strategy, facts. Um the right the right hemisphere is creativity, feeling, concentration, uh visualization, imagination, um intuition, multitasking, arts, you know, rhythm and so on.
So yeah, we're still very out of balance. And you know maybe that's one reason for this the psychedelic you know movement right now the psychedelic renaissance feeling like such an incredibly important vitamin you know for humanity like a nutrition that we need uh at this point in our development. Uh so as I said the development of science and analytic reason maybe it actually just required even on a very large scale and and in this dominate dominant form a repression of those aspects of you know kind of cognition that we could look at as feminine uh intuition vision feeling communing connecting with nature and it was almost as if all vestigages of nature relationship to the unconscious um as that's expressed as spiritual connection spirit connection had to be eliminated as much as possible. Um and we shifted over the course of you know Christianity to the early Christianity and the late Christianity from shamanism fromnosticism from initiation to indoctrination where your only access to the word of God is through the the the priests to can read the Latin and kind of you know you don't have any you're not supposed to have any direct access to to spirit and along with that you know an area that really interests me which we'll talk about more is suppression of the paranormal normal, the supernatural and the psychic uh which for me are very legitimate aspects of reality and no no model of reality that's complete can can avoid them. Uh you know we can also talk about yeah the you know 13 is the unlucky number.
Uh you know western culture is kind of based on the demonization of 13 but 13 is actually the number of feminine and natural cycles. uh the word months uh we have 12 months in a year but originally months comes from moons right and there were 13 you know moons in a year the moon cycle is about 28 days so with the Roman calendar and then the Gregorian calendar we uh negated we we stepped away from the natural patterns of the moon cycles and and constructed an arbitrary kind of model of the year uh where the months have no relationship to natural cycles and that was just part of this process kind of desynchronizing us from nature um putting us in separation in a way um and um demonizing the feminine the intuit the intuitive and so on um yeah that's something that I wrote about in in one of my books in the 2012 book um in terms of the the problems with Gregorian calendar and uh the possibility that we need calendar reform to re re-synchronize with natural cycles. Um so yeah just continuing this kind of review. So you know it also see seems quite likely that that there was a psychedelic influence in Islamic culture. Uh which is you know seems kind of surprising because we don't see much um you know in in Islamic culture that seems very you know psychedelic as we understand it today.
But a Syrian rue or peekabala uh was used as an incense as a dye for the flying carpets and it also contains a harm and homalene like the iawaska vine and in fact you can use a Syrian rue and the mosa hostilis together and they basically create the same chemical effect as the iawaska vine benister benedisteropsis cappy and psych psychotria ritis in the Amazon uh and the um essentially there's the mao inhibitor from the Syrian rue and then the DMT from the um the Loa hostilis or from the acacia. Uh and um so it's it's it's quite possible that different Sufi sects or Islamic groups had you know made use of the Syrian room and if they were burning it as incense they might have been you know smelling the incense. um you know if they were doing that while they were weaving the patterns uh it may have been very uh intrinsic for uh this type of patterning that you find throughout uh Islamic art. Uh also the word halma which is um the sort of um sacred plant of Islam is very similar phonetically to s and it suggests there might have been a historical connection or relationship. S is the one from India from the riga.
Um and recently actually in 2014 uh the Ayatollah Roani who's the head of the Shiite uh uh side of Muslims there's Shiite and Sunni Sunni the Shiites are more seems more of the sort of you know experiential open-minded group of the Islam Islamic orders but he issued a formal legal ru ruling that said that the use of antio and psychoactive substances is illicit and permissible for Shiite Muslims provided and they do it under the direction and supervision of qualified experts. Uh and that moreover such plant sub substances as a rule do not impair the mind. So that's quite fascinating that that major sect of Islam is now open to u you know psychedelic and it really suggests that um there were strands in the history of Islam uh that that that led to the present um that that you know have allowed for this potentiality. that makes sense. Uh and then of course if we look at the patterning of um you know Islamic architecture, mosques and so on.
I mean um you know an experience that I've had a number of times uh is a substance called 5 Mod DMT or Puvotonine. Uh and when you take it, you have a sense of a kind of a complete dissolution of ego identity and uh you enter this realm where these kind of exquisite patternings that go off in all directions kind of infinitely. But there isn't at the height of that experience. There's no you having the experience. You simply are that experience. So So it's an experience of non-duality. It's an experience of ego death. Uh and and it's totally blissful and um um peaceful. Uh it's only when your ego begins to come back, you're you're kind of in shock because you you you've seen this kind of eternity.
Uh but there's no you in the eternity. There's just this this experience of bliss and this um you know vision of of of infinity in a way. uh and yeah I guess the question is you know did could it be that Islam in its early you know period had direct access to that type of uh nosis through some visionary compound and armalene and so on hama siran ru I think it's quite possible um sufism has a concept called fauna uh fauna is a kind of spiritual ecstasy a state of intoxication that occurs when the self is annihilated this self annihilate ation is known as fa and sufism. It means to die before one dies. Dying before you die is also a basic concept of alchemy.
It's something we'll come back to. Uh it means to die before one dies and it entails the intimate realization of God's unity with the universe and the individual self. In psychedelic parliament this would be referred to as ego death. Uh so yeah so to me you know what you experience on a highdosese famo DMT trip is fauna. this kind of absorption into the godhead, elimination of any sense of self um experience of pure bliss uh unending yet with this kind of loss of any um individual bounded uh uh self. Uh okay, so I'm getting towards the end of my this is the last slide in this Power Point then we can have some discussions and questions.
Um but yeah so so you know a question that really intrigues me is um you know I mean many people in the secular world are kind of against religion. Um but you know maybe actually there is a psychedelic future of religion that um you know m maybe um this capacity that we now have through these compounds to directly access these visionary and transcendent states is something that can be integrated into new religious forms. uh and I've I've worked a bunch and we'll talk about it uh more with the Santo da uh which is a iawaska based syncric religion from Brazil. Uh I so santodime was one of several such religions that developed I believe starting in the 1920s or 1930s. So essentially what happened you had in Brazil you had mystitos who you know had been separated from their indigenous past who grew up uh Catholic and then they were sent back to the Amazon where they were working as you know rubber tappers or border guards and they started to make friends with the local indigenous communities and they started to drink iawaska in ceremony with them and when they experienced the zenosis of the iawaska it came in a form that was you know sort Christianized uh a form that kind of melded together the indigenous uh pantheistic spirituality and Christian monotheism.
Uh so for Santa Da Mary is also the mother of the forest and um and they have a very much of a prophetic uh tradition in Santa. They understand this time as being this, you know, prophetic kind of um time of apocalypse and and and they they see both, you know, kind of the breaking apart of the world and and the coming together in in divinity for those those who are ready for that. Um and um yeah, so that that's one model of of of how um psychedelics can be incorporated into religious structures and a very interesting one. Uh I love um the work of Tom Roberts uh who wrote a book called the psychedelic future of the mind. Uh and um Tom Roberts has a kind of riff where he talks about how the modern world's rediscovery of psychedelics uh could be seen as something like a second reformation.
Um the the original reformation, the first reformation is when Martin Luther translated the Bible which had been Latin and then therefore cut off from the common languages, the common people into German. And then after he did that, it was translated into English and French and Spanish and so on. And that that was the reformation. Suddenly um people no longer needed the priests. They could read the word of God and the words of the prophets and the visions of the prophets for themselves and interpret them for themselves. And it was actually a very um crucial event in modern history. It led to the English civil war actually where um you know suddenly as people read the Bible for themselves they actually believed they were in time of the book of revelation and they believed that they had to oppose you know that the church was like the the evil the the the antichrist or whatever.
Uh so anyway it had a lot of repercussions uh but basically it gave people a direct access to the word of God which they'd been cut off from you know since since the you know 4th century AD and um so so Robert's idea is that yeah so the first reformation people were able to access the word of God for themselves um learn about directly read about the visionary experiences of the prophets and now with the return of psychedelics the second reformation people now can have those visionary experiences those revelations for themselves directly without the mediation of a book and they can verify and validate what the prophets talked about and have their own direct relationship to uh you know spirit to divinity and so on. Uh so I find that a very very beautiful and very fascinating idea and um yeah look forward to see um you know where things go in in the near future. So that's the end of my uh sort of formal Power Point uh for today and I'd love to yeah have a conversation have a discussion. I'll see if you guys put any questions in the comments and then also please raise a hand and jump
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.