I have always loved tales which involve magic. As a child, by the time most other kids my age had graduated into the realist Janet&John adventure type books, and worldview, I was still hooked on fairy tales--where anything could and did happen, and there were always whirls and spirals of magic fairy dust sparkles inspiring mysterious events. But eventually, owing to the sadistic onslaught of culture on my sensitive impressionable young mind, I graduated, not to Janet&John books, which tended to bore me, but to Pan Horror books which were still magical, but in a more gruesome way.
[It is very notable that in searching for an image of a faery from Google images, predominantly the version of faeiries presented are the twee Walt Disney variety, little slight winged creatures, not human-sized anywhere (they do the same with their twee New Age images of the Goddess!) This again is the manipulation and suppression of stories and images by the same mindsets I reveal below. For more authentic artistic depictions we have to look to ancient Greek art, and other indigenous peoples mythological images.]I know this: I know that both orthodox religion and orthodox science denigrate faeries, the former demonizing them, and the latter dismissing their existence, and pathologizing people having had, in contact, or being open to the reality of such realms.
It was LSD finding me when I was 15 years old that brought me back to the magical feeling I had as a child regarding nature, for when experiencing inspired ecstatic states I
saw 'fairy dust' spiralling off played guitar strings, in the swirling wind. peoples eyes like deep jewels, and all other forms of interdimensional playfulness, seeing faeries, feeling them, hearing, observing nature as alive and full of wonders.
I have also had two out of the body experiences, the latter one which was very powerful. I had not taken any psychedelics, and had gone to bed, but when I found myself seemingly out of my sleeping body this began an adventure where I encountered faeries, including sexual contact with one; such experiences as these and others described above radically transform one's sense of reality.
After such experiences then comes the search for integration, and the looking for books to help this process. I couldn't go back to children's fairy tales. First I got causght up in Carlos Castenada books of shamanistic magical happenings, and later was drawn to Eastern explanations of reality.
It was author Alan Watts, however, who was the first to
really turn me on with his
words----how he explained so eloquently and playfully the interconnectedness of polar~related reality; how there cannot be light
without darkness, life
without death--This is the language of the Goddess mythos and religion, the 'Old Religion'--though it was going to be a time before I discovered about all that in more depth, when it registered to me that 99% of my growing little library were male authors, but Alan was sure talkin' it! His central theme though was towards the Eastern side of things, his love for Zen, and although much of it is more deep than western forms of religion, there still in Eastern philosophy this negation of sensual magical reality---of
ecstatic participation with nature.
I have had communications with Zennists - Zen being the supposedly mystical side of Buddhism - who, when asked their thoughts on psychedelic experience, would give a warning how such experience can 'entangle one in "
Mara"'~~they translated that term to mean "delusion"; in Buddhism there is a more personified description:
In Buddhism, Māra ... is the demon that tempted Gautama Buddha by trying to seduce him with the vision of beautiful women who, in various legends, are often said to be Mara's daughters.[1] In Buddhist cosmology, Mara personifies unwholesome impulses, unskillfulness, the "death" of the spiritual life. 'He' is a tempter, distracting humans from practicing the spiritual life by making the mundane alluring or the negative seem positive.
The early Buddhists, however, rather than seeing Mara as a demonic, virtually all-powerful Lord of Evil, regarded him as more of a nuisance. Many episodes concerning his interactions with the Buddha have a decidedly humorous air to them.
In traditional Buddhism four senses of the word "mara" are given.
Klesa-mara, or Mara as the embodiment of all unskillful emotions.
Mrtyu-mara, or Mara as death, in the sense of the ceaseless round of birth and death.
Skandha-mara, or Mara as metaphor for the entirety of conditioned existence.
Devaputra-mara, or Mara the son of a deva (god), that is, Mara as an objectively existent being rather than as a metaphor.
Early Buddhism acknowledged both a literal and "psychological" interpretation of Mara. Mara is described both as an entity having a literal existence, just as the various deities of the Vedic pantheon are shown existing around the Buddha, and also is described as a primarily psychological force - a metaphor for various processes of doubt and temptation that obstruct spiritual practice.
"Buddha defying Mara" is a common pose of Buddha sculptures. The Buddha is shown with his left hand in his lap, palm facing upwards and his right hand on his right knee. The fingers of his right hand touch the earth, to call the earth as his witness for defying Mara and achieving enlightenment. This posture is also referred to as the 'earth-touching' mudra. [Emphasis mine]
When we hear religious (and secular) males speak of being tempted, engulfed, seduced, tempted, entangled,
by 'mundane and sensual ecstatic experiences we are hearing loud and clear the patriarchal fear of nature, their own nature, and the Goddess!
Her
whole being including her Dark aspect, also known as the Womb/Tomb, Underworld, and more modernly, "the unconscious",
is the greatest fear of the male-supremacist psyche, and as seen in this Buddhist account which personifies the main 'demon' as male, this narrative and psychological sex-change reveals the deep taboo regarding the real identity of the enemy of this patriarchal 'heroic' mindset being female!
Same is so in the other patriarchal beliefs, particularly in Judeo-Christianity-Islamic beliefs and their mystical and occultist-magico 'heretical' branches [such as Kabbalah, etc], where the chief 'demons' said to rule Hell/ the Underworld are also a male, for example, the Devil/Satan/Sammael/Iblis.
These male demon-leaders, were mythically created to hide the far more ancient understanding and experience of the Deep, the Underworld, and Womb, and
expropriate the realm of the Goddess; so this exposed, we now can see the taboo is that it is the very Goddess herself , in patriarchal myth~~which is deeply feared of tempting the 'hero' away from his
'righteous spiritual path' who therefore seeks
'escape' from nature, and being born again from the mother, (nature, and human), and being naturally interelated with cyclic dynamic reality.
This is not to claim there may not be other spiritual dimensions which are eternal, and so on, but rather than assume their dissocation from earthly reality~~thus dividing 'eternal' from 'temporal', or to wish to 'make earthly life 'eternal'~~to understand
continuum of being, and that earthly life is not an enemy or trap.
When once strolling through town, I was drawn to this bookshop window by the sun causing this book to glow this mushroom like colour (the deep golden brown colour of psilocybin cubensis) on a bookshelf inside, I entered and went to this book and found it was titled The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (TSMC for short), by John Marco Allegro. This book turned out to be a milestone, turning me onto wanting to study and understand mythology, and helped me resolve the Christian guilt-trip, because although I wasn't brought up in a Christian household as such, yet Christian values and morality seeped into most aspects of peoples life, and especially for me who was secretly gay (a benevolent term that had not even come to be in those times), and all the 'moral baggage' and guilt-making of that, some said, some un-said, but registered---and the 'shame' all over the place then, in schools, films, TV, media, peers [even today there are children who kill themselves because of their guilt, and abuse from others, for being gay]. So finding and absorbing TSMC was a great relief, because I could now see through the myth by understanding the mythic roots!
I could see its motifs from earlier pagan myths, and how it was made to differ dramatically from the Pagan mythic stream by being historicized, and literalized.
This book learned me how mythology can be used to manipulate people via narrative techniques usually composed in layers, the superficial layers for the naive readers, and the deeper, core, layer for the initiated. Patriarchal mythology which is the main literary genre, coming to its oppressive fore with the invention of writing, did this to a fine literary art, because they could use the 'Word' to obscure and denigrate ancient imagery which had anciently been understood as ambiguous, poetic, and benevolent. Images are are truly mythical in that they symbolize an eternal meaning of ecstatic experience in continuum with life in general. We dream in images, and psychedelic experience is an awesome journey of imagery.
The core meaning of the Christian myth, according to Allegro, is that a mind-altering fungi is the real meaning of 'Jesus Christ', who was said to be 'God made flesh' ;
"1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...14And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us..."John 1:1-14,
This idea, of plants and fungi being gods derives from earth-based Pagan , and indigenous cultures, where mind-altering vegetation is understood to be spirits/gods/plant-teachers, and this understanding is very ancient.
The Christian mythmakers would have known this and would want to out-do the 'competition' (by drawing into their cult both Judean, and Pagans), so to speak, by deviating from usual sense of mythology by historicizing and literalizing their myth for the uninitiated, and thus making out it was more important.
Authenic mythology, is not to be understood as linear, historical, and literal, but as coexistant with a sense of eternal time experienced in participatory ecstatic ritual, and in continuum with all modes of life.
How can we have time without eternity? When you ingest psychedelics there does not have to be a book to tell you about 'eternity', you feel it directly! A good example of what I mean by this:
When you ingest psychedelics--in my experience--you can both accept 'eternity' and 'time' as part of a same continuum.
If you see a clock, for example, and are tripping, you can see the ticking, and that five or ten minutes have past, but the sense of this moving time feels sacred, and is a whole different feeling from the sense of mechanical time where you feel trapped in time.
There is no such thing as only-time or only-eternity, because 'eternity' and 'time' are concepts abstracted from some reality far deeper which includes change, and eternity.
When I got online in the early 2000s,
I soon fortunately discovered the writings of Druscilla French , and read portions of her manuscript from her Doctorate of Philosophy dissertation,
titled, The Power of Choice (it is brilliant and was then unpublished!)
After getting in touch with her and telling her how much I enjoyed reading a chapter of it, she very kindly printed it all out for me and sent it from the U.S. to my address overseas!
In the Power of Choice, Druscilla French explains how there are very oppressively imposed, androcentric, 'Laws of Narrative' which span the generations, making sure that 'dissonant' and heretical worldviews are censored, so as to control and manipulate consciousness, and maintain an hierachical staus quo and maintain a power-based division between feminine and masculine, the 'rich' and the 'poor', and this censorship includes all forms of literature, metaphysical, cosmological, sociological, and psychological!
The critique of Northrup Frye's theory of Myth is an attempt to challenge the notion that his is "a rational account of some of the structural principles of western literature". This study will argue that Frye's "structural principles of literature" are instead an accurate description of western literary orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that, by definition, cannot hear the voices of "heretics" who do not view life through the filters of this world order...
As I began to discover the depth of this cultural baggage toward the masculine, I first felt bewilderment and a deep sense of betrayal. Regardless of how beloved are the women in Western society, ultimately the males will sacrifice them for the good of the patriarchy. Our fathers, our lovers, our brothers, and our friends have over and over, for thousands of years, participated in a conspiracy to privilege the masculine over the feminine. In the course of time, this has resulted in much humiliation and subjugation. There arose in me a great anger, a swelling of indignation so great that I could not keep the profanity out of my writing. Eventually I came to a process of writing whereby I allowed myself to vent in the first draft, then come back and create a more restrained version. Nevertheless the anger remains, and I hope it still sings in this work as a kind of energy fueling the argument. [The Power of Choice, Description introduction & page 3]
As Druscilla French reveals in her work, this hierachical bias imposes itself throughout all genres of literature, including the mythical, religious, philosophical, sociological, psychological, and even in fairy stories.
A closer look at The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe tale
On Christmas TV there was shown again the film, The Lion,the Witch, and the Wardrobe, based on the original book I read in primary school as a young child. The film begins with three children, in the Second World War period, under attack in their homes from falling bombs, and then all the children have to be evacuated from the towns to the countryside so they will be more safe (my mum actually experienced this as a child).
The main children characters are portrayed as fairly 'upper middle class', and so they get sent, not to a council house, or country hovel, but to a vast aristocratic country house where 
they have lots of space, and rooms, to explore all to themselves.
The story properly begins when it's raining outside, they are bored, and so play hide and seek in the huge house, and as the little girl runs to find a place to hide, discovers a room with a large wardrobe in it, enters it, and walks though the wardrobe into a magical land called Narnia where she first meets a mythical Fawn character, named Mr Tumnus. Mr Tumnus looks like Pan.
[In his earliest appearance in literature, Pindar's Pythian Ode iii. 78, [4] Pan appears as the "agent", "guardian" or "attendant" of the Great Goddess (Cybele).]When the older bother and sister are eventually to meet the Fawn for the first time, the mythical creature calls them respectively the
"son of Adam" and the
"daughter of Eve", firmly placing their roles and this story within the confines of the Judeo-Christian patriarchal worldview.
. What is the deeper meaning of fawns in mythological symbolism? John Allegro reveals in his book, TSMC, mind-altering mushrooms were also called 'Fawns', particularly the spotted amanita muscaria, sharing the spotted pattern with woodland creatures such as fawns, and gazelles.
[Compare with the Indigenous Huichols who associate their sacred mind-transformative Peyote cacti with Deer]Carrying on with the story then, the little girl after her first adventure into Narnia returns through the back of the wardrobe into the house, and tells the others of her magical journey and experiences, but they are sceptical; her younger brother, Edmund, however, one day happens to see her enter the wardrobe, follows her into it, and finds himself in Narnia.
While in Narnia Edmund has a dramatic meeting with the "wicked witch", the Ice Queen, who keeps Narnia everlastingly cold, and icy, and she seduces him with his favourite toffees and a promise of a powerful royal title on condition he
will betray his brothers and sisters.
Later, in the story, when his older brother and sister also discover Narnia, they are immediately in danger, because Edmund will have already met them and tell the witch where they are for his hoped-for rewards. But she betrays him and chains him in a dungeon.
The other children then are soon pursued by the Queen's wolves and receive help from various animals, also Father Christmas, and are eventually introduced to the central character of the tale, Aslan, the Lion, Lord of the Beasts, who is "good, just, and forgiving" and teaches Peter "military strategies". Aslan is the 'solar hero' of this tale.
This solar myth is typically the story of the 'good righteous people led by a resurrecting solar hero' against an 'evil witch and her monsters'.
In a dramatic and horrific scene, after the Lion has chosen to have himself sacrificed rather than Edmund, he has to walk through gauntlet of monsters who torment and attack him, at the helm is the evil witch who stabs the lion to death.
The symbol of the 'Lion' has many patriarchal mythical associations such as the
Leo Zodiac sign for the sun, also the biblical "
Lion of the Tribe of Judah", which refers to 'Jesus Christ' in the N.T., and hence, in the film, Lion, like the mythical Jesus, willingly sacrifices himself for the 'sins' of the younger brother, Edmund, and his people, and then, through 'faith', physically resurrects and leads them to military victory, and bestows on the children hierchal positions of royal power.
Throughout the film the only reference to an alternative mythological worldview is the Fawn, and the Centaurs, but in this tale it is made clear right from the beginning that the fawn is under threat by the 'wicked witch'-- this narrative mythically meant to sever his original ancient connection, and loyalty, to the Goddess in both her dark and light aspects, and therefore the Old Religion.
We never meet, and hear stories of real pagan people/country dwellers, in the film,
the main human characters being 'upper class', and royalty. The children gain heraldic titles, and move into the upper eschelons of the Narnian royal hierarchy, and in the story are seen to grow up as princes and princesses until they find the place they emerged into Narnia from the wardrobe, vaguely remembering it, and again unknowingly wander into the back of the wardrobe and all tumble out as the 'upper middle class' kids they were to begin with.
The mythical, eternal, and otherworldy nature of their experience is shown in that once back to themselves, and the house, time has barely passed yet they had experienced part of a lifetime in magical Narnia.
Merlin
Following The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on the 'Christmas' TV schedule was the serial episode of Merlin. Here again, in this narrative, is a similar patterned theme of the solar heroic myth in action.
King Arthur is the solar hero, and the main characters around him, who secretly help his cause with magic--magic, which Arthur, as did his father, disproves of--are all males, and the central powerful antagonist character who knows and uses magic is a female--depicted as the 'evil witch', Morgana. She is enemy both of the solar king and of his entourage's 'solar magic' which is cast for the purposes of helping the solar king and his military kingdom, and hierarchy.
The only 'benevolent' reference to the Old Religion, and the Goddess, in the televised story of Merlin, is the Dragon which Merlin consults, but Merlin is said to be the Dragon Master---so here we have established albeit, for many, unconsciously, that the males, and their magic, lord it over the Goddess and the Old Religion!
In the Oxford Companion to World Mythology, David Leeming lists Moses, Jesus, and King Arthur as examples of the "heroic monomyth",[73] calling the Christ story "a particularly complete example of the heroic monomyth".[25] Leeming regards resurrection as a common part of the heroic monomyth,[73][74] in which the heroes are resurrected, often as sources of "material or spiritual food for their people"; in this connection, Leeming notes that Christians regard Jesus as the "bread of life".[73] [Emphasis mine]
In terms of values, Leeming contrasts "the myth of Jesus" with the myths of other "Christian heroes such as St. George, Roland, el Cid, and even King Arthur"; the latter hero myths, Leeming argues, reflect the survival of pre-Christian heroic values—"values of military dominance and cultural differentiation and hegemony"—more than the values expressed in the Christ story. (Christian Mythology)[25]
The root meaning, mythical, and actual, of this 'food' is the actual ingestion of vegetation which inspires ecstatic experience!
Short summary of the themes of the solar myths:
They consist of a solar mythos, and military worldview. with its hierarchy of royals, and other elites at the top of the pyramid, and the 'peasants' at the bottom.
The enemy of the solar mythology is an 'evil female witch'.
This enemy of the solar hero is of course really the Goddess, especially in her Dark aspect--symbolizing depths of reality, both of nature and our very being.
All of this depth when feared and suppressed by a solar heroic, and superficial mindset, is 'othered' as threatening 'monsters', and the 'hero' fights this deeper aspect of himself, others, and reality which he has psychologically cut hisself off from, and he also suppresses ecstatic participatory interrelationship with nature, including others' freedoms for the same.
It has to be said that not only are some males affected by this psycholgical schism, but also females who become indoctrinated in it also. We are all enforcibly 'educated', both in schools children have to attend, and in all forms of literature, and mass media.
Is this harmless myth....? No!The promised salvific medicine is really a toxin that eats into the human spirit like acid...[W]hat wounds human dignity most profoundly and permanently? Alienation from the earth due to the placing its self image in a transhuman superearthly figure...It is a lie. We are created not in His image, but in...the image of the natural world we behold , according to how we behold it.
[Not In His Image, John Lamb Lash, pages 261-262]The toxic myth of the Christian"historical" crucifixion, sacrifice, salvationism can be resolved by exploring the very ancient roots of enthusiasm/possession which was felt to happen after ingestion of magical vegetation.
Often, after ingestion of a psychedelic substance, a limited sense of self is felt as being taken over, or dissolve, and revitalization spontaneously happens regarding ones awareness, and sense of interelationship with nature, one's self, the universe, and all reality. This 'possession'/ecstasy, would often be mythically related to a god, but, in a prepatriarchal context, a god who is not dissociated from nature, and sensuality, and sexuality, and the body, but deeply including all natural dynamic process. In other words, not a 'god' residing in the sky, guilting his creatures, and purported to be superior to nature.
This mythic dis-ease is actually playing out right now on the world stage, increasingly more and more destructive, and irreversable, as its technology becomes increasingly powerful---properly starting in the industrial age, and particularly the nuclear age!
War on Terror
The 'other' now is being called 'terrorism', 'TERROR'. Yet, the same purveyors of this myth have created the so-called 'war on terror'--so how do we make sense of this?
As I am exploring in some of my articles, there are two types of mythology, the benevolent and the toxic, or malignant.
The former is for creating fruitful community, and deep sense of interelationship with ones own being, others, other species, and nature, and nature's depths of experience, whilst the latter is about manipulation, suppression, control, exploitation, division, sadism, and destruction.
Once deep down in one's own being an 'other' is alien-ated, and mistrusted, this cut-off from one's own depths causes the mindset doing it to alienate itself from others and nature and their depths also. It is a simultaneous process, inner and outer. As inward so outward, and vice versa.
If therefore I fear, and distrust my own potential depths of being, and/or want to control and master 'it', then this mindset will act out this same process onto others, and the very world. The control and suppression of the inner will mainfest--especially with 'power'--as the need to control others, and the whole world through whatever means, both 'mundane', words, and via the hidden, or occult!
A typical controlling strategy is to create an enemy, beit the 'Devil' as in Christianity, the 'Commie threat' as it was in the 'Cold War', and now it is the 'Terrorists', exploiting peoples fear of the 'other' which is indoctrinated into them via various means in cultural institutions, and our own parents, and peers, also under the spell of the various myths.
However let it not be thought that the ones who can push such myths are therefore in some kind of liberated place where they can create enemies and not have any driving their own insanity themselves, because as I hope is clear, their main enemy is their own depths of being which they shun, which includes feeling, empathy, compassion. For if they did feel (not just in a superficial, often sentimental, and maudlin way) they would not, and could not do, what they do.
We have seen as revealed in those three 'culturally approved' stories and myths above, how there are established characters re-occuring; the solar hero, the wicked witch, and how the former supports military imperialism and to be seen as wholly good and right-eous, and the latter is an evil powerful female in charge of a legion of monsters who seeks to corrupt the righteous, and please be aware how these myths even hide 'her' presence'--even as antagonist, by literally changing the mythically original Her into a 'He', so for example we see Satan, Lucifer the Devil, Sammael, Iblis, Mara, as powerful male antagonists in charge of these deep places much feared by the patriarchy.
In Greek myth the Underworld was said to be in the charge of Hades, or Pluto, and in Christian myth, Hell was in charge of the Devil, all males. So how does this 'story' differ from much older ones belonging to the Old Religion, before its mythic denigration in literary description and imagery by the patriarchy?
The Old Religion, although recognizing the significance of the Sol, or the sun, based its central mythos on Luna, or the moon, because the moon revealed both light and dark as a cyclic interelational dynamism of nature and reality, interelated with one's own sense of being.
In this context the moon god hero, unlike the solar hero, who seeks to suppresses this myth, and make it taboo, does not fear the darkness, and the Dark aspect of the Goddess [
Darkness, which also means mysterious, beyond reason]
, or seek to control or master it, but merge with it and thus transform being with deepening interelational awareness; having profound awe, yes, but yet does not 'other' that aspect of his or her being---does not fill it with monsters needing to be constantly feared, slain, controlled, mastered, created, to maintain 'goodness' and 'rightness' and sense of maintenance of an ' heroic self', and also simultaneously, via constant violence, maintain an unequal world where an oppressive cut-off mindset others those it considers inferior, including women, the 'poor', and animals, and very nature itself.
This was the pattern: The sun hero who vanquishes “evil” in the form of monster serpents or dragons was originally a moon hero, like Hercules, and as such the son/lover of the Great Goddess. In moon mysteries he overcame death in ecstatic self-transcendence experiencing luminous oneness with her. But when he becomes the patriarchal sun hero, he kills the Mother Goddess in Her dark underworld-serpent aspect. Instead of transcending his ego, he “transcends” the whole world, cosmic union giving way to worldly conquest and destruction of the sources of life. He destroys life in the name of “conquering death”. Jungian psychoanalysts interpret this process as the liberation of the individual ego---the male ego, of course---from the “forces of darkness” and “the unconscious”, i.e., the mother. The hero’s action in rescuing the “maiden” from the dragon symbolizes, Jung says, the freezing of his own anima—his essential self—from the “devouring” aspect of the mother. This almost suggests that woman, in herself, is merely a projection of the male anima; and indeed that’s what women are in most patriarchal systems. Jungians have never shown an awareness of the politics of mythology---or of mythology as the history of the preliterate real world. The sun hero is doing more than “liberating his ego” from the mother; he is “liberating” his being from responsibility to the being of the world. He liberates himself by arrogantly and recklessly destroying the interconnecting webwork of which he is a part---and then the “tragic hero” is surprised when he looks around himself, and sees nothing but wasteland and death…The sun hero slashes through the timeless web of interconnecting life energy and lays it all waste, in order to enjoy swift satisfaction, fame, and conquest. Conquest of what? Of the fact that life is paradox: (1) the fact that psychic powers are deeply hidden and dangerous, needing to be guarded by wisdom (the serpent guarding the treasure), and (2) the fact that their release can cause destruction as easily as integration. The sun hero wars against the double-edged reality of the cosmic process, slashing through paradox, denying cyclic recurrence and the serpent wisdom that comes with it, refusing to believe that his ego must die before the true magic power can be safely revealed. From Marduk to Superman, he is a little boy warring against the subtle (serpentine) nature of life: demanding it be made neat, simplistic, logical, unambiguous, designed as a flat stage for his triumph---and nothing more.In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir catalogues men’s hatred and fear of woman because she presents him with the ambiguities with life and death, his classic response to these ambiguities is denial and conquest. (The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, by Barbara Mor & Monica Sjoo, pages 255-256)
Magic Medicine
This is where mind-altering vegetation and substances come into being as a magic medicine 
for this dis-ease, which when openly embraced and explored, and not having a 'war' raged against their natural growth in nature, and humanity's respecful eating and drinking of them for spiritual insight and potential, can help re~solve the rigid structures of thinking which bind the mind to the insanity it is stuck in.
Let me remind of a quote from above:
Leeming regards resurrection as a common part of the heroic monomyth,[73][74] in which the heroes are resurrected, often as sources of "material or spiritual food for their people"; in this connection, Leeming notes that Christians regard Jesus as the "bread of life".
There are two ways at present of looking at this:
a) that it is taken metaphorically with ignorance about its meaning actual psychedelic vegetation, and experience, and thus is just words, and empty rituals, like eating thin wafers of bread and drinking wine in a Catholic ritual where no radical change of consciousness occurs;
and b) That even Christian initates, as Allegro claims in his book TSMC, very much did partake of mind-altering vegetation, because they believed it was their 'God' made flesh.
We are very familiar with (a), but not usually that much with (b), and thus that's the one I want to explore about.
So question:
why would eating mind-altering vegetation not open ones eyes to a particular solar/patriarchal myth one maybe is cultically involved with, and therefore cut-off from deeper roots?
This question really interests me, and in exploring this, I see a connection with other forms of exceptional experiences like NDEs, and OBEs, etc., where it is the metaphysical presumptions of the experiencer which can limit the experience to stay within their own expected conceptual boundaries; hence someone who is religiously orthodox, or even someone who is an 'atheist', but is inevitably brought up a theistic cultural paradigm where all the suggestive imagery they defy will affect them unconsciously, at least, and who may then, in visionary states,
experience bibilical motifs, seeing 'Jesus' etc.
We are also familiar with some hippies who became 'Jesus Freaks' even after having had psychedelic experience--albeit maybe experiencing the belief system less dogmatically than your regular fundamentalist-- yet still not questioning the belief system and its patriarchal roots, and thus the political implications. I am not saying they cannot believe what they believe, but that I can choose to be critical and ask questions of others beliefs. I encourage the critical examination of myths, and to integrate this learning into one's psychedelic experience, because the reach of the dogmas can affect one in deep ways as I hope I have touched upon.
Clues as to why psychedelic users may have become disgusted with their animal aspect of being, their sexual needs, and so on, can be found in mythology, especially mythological imagery. We, for example see how many of the gods of the Old Religion are therianthropic--part animal and part human. In art we see this in depictions of the pagan god, Pan whose mostly lower half is reminding us of the animal's hairy hind-quarters, sexuality and so on, and he might also have animalistic ears, horns, nose. The Christian church used many of these characteristics to design their 'Devil'. So we see there very clearly the fear and disgust of an association between humans and animals. I am suggesting that the arising of a philosophical-dominant capacity caused the thinking rational part of the mind to create an aloof image of itself as being independent--though trapped--from its image of the the animal, the body, and nature. And so with such ideologies comes the felt need to 'purify' one's self from 'animalistic nature' and 'fallen nature' so as to escape to a pure realm above.
An ancient example of this change of mind from embracing earth-based paganism to world-denial even with those who would take a psychedelic sacrament can be found in Orphism which reformed the more ancient Dionysian Mysteries from which its philosophical branch arose. The latter were more akin to an open acceptance of the realitionship between humans and animals and nature, but the Orphics devised and writ down a mythology which gave the story of a divinity trapped in an evil human body, and natural world which could only escape through purification.
Also in the change in Greece from Totemistic mythos to Olympian polytheism there is clearly shown imagely how ancient gods related to animals and plants are suppressed for the wholly superhuman cartoon figures of the Olympian patheon.
Same is so for the myth of materialism, itself a myth which has grown out of the solar-hero-patriarchal mythos, but now even more dangerously dispenses with any notion of spirit, and rather glorifies 'Man's knowledge' and its technology.
To show the utlimate danger which already is decades old: as with the worship of Sol or sun, and all that entails, the sun patriarchally symbolized to mean light, reason, and masculinity, but also the very implementation of the power of the sun into their military weaponry as is the case with nuclear weapons, and industry.
Suddenly 'mankind' has the 'power of the sun' at his disposal, and no sooner was it put together in a phallic-shaped bomb (causing the infamous phallic and mushroom-shaped explosion cloud), its code name was "The Little Boy" , and"the agreed-upon message sent to Washington as a signal of successful detonation was " The baby was born"! Then 'mankind' dropped their "baby" on cities full of life!!
It is not hard to see the earlier toxic mythological dynamic acting out from their unconscious and into destructive action is it? For we see that since they historically dispensed with their concept of 'God', 'Man' has taken over from 'God' who is presumed 'dead', and now has given birth to a 'son' via his technology; a solar son. The First atomic test was code-named Trinity, signifying the same solar mythic symbolism, the Father, the Son, and Technology.
Many of us now horrifically find ourselves born into a world where the insanity of these unresolved solar myths are playing out all over the world. The souless exploitation, and control, over nature, over other species, other humans, and nature and of the Earth, of outer space, and they also have their mechanical eye on other planets that are 'earth-like', because they are driven and want to expand their empire, and so, like their previous psychotic invasion of the 'new world' starting in the 15th century, they would continiue taking their unconscious insanity to another unfortunate planet where they would continue with their rape of it, and exploitation of others if they could, because they are possessed by their destructive worldview.
However, unless they face what has happened to them historically and mythically due to inter-generational oppression, suppression, and repression, then whatever they do will be destructive, because they only experience reality with a shallow depth of their being, and they wage war on powerful vegetation and substances that could help them resolve the crises, experiencing the depths that they have shunned. And in order to experience the depths when taking psychedelics we must critically examine myths also.
It is precisely because the Deep part of us and nature is feared that it is believed to be filled with 'monsters'! And then in fear of our creations those very monsters (their creators) become the ones who suppress, and enforce repression in others. An infamous example of this inevitable process is the history of the religious Inquisition, and how in their crazed quest for destroying 'evil', and defeating their own mythical creation of the monster, the 'Devil', they instead unconsciously become their idea/myth/story as they sadistically torture defenseless women, children, and men, and perform mass murder, spreading horror and terror throughout communities, and even into the 'New World', and as we see this insanity continues unresolved.
