Dionysos
Real mythology is the understanding of polar relationship between what is known about, which is always changing, and the unknown as always eternally present and the foundation and source of the living known, and creative imagination explores this Mystery as a celebration.
Toxic mythology demonizes the unknown,which it calls darkness and evil. And in the present culture renders the unknown unimportant and even unreal until science has methodically brought 'it' into the known and made it 'real' according to their interpretation of what is real and what is unreal.
When I was 15, some 'heads' turned me onto LSD. Even at that very young age, and even though I'd hated school (which are indoctrination factories to fit victims into mechanization), I still was made dull, by it, and the general culture, depriving me of a natural sense of sensual spiritual connection with nature!
I'd had some kind of magical sense of nature when very little, but roundabout 8/9 years of age the industrial machine was grindingly working on my tender young mind. I became bored in nature, threw litter when in it, but was absolutely obsessed with big cities.
I had this horrendous nightmare about that age I will never forget. I was drifting off to sleep, and was aware of the clock ticking...tick. tock. tick. tock. tick. tock,. The mechanical sound became more and more utterly incongruous and out of sync with my natural rhythms I was feeling, and the sense of disconnection was hellish, and even though this was years before my LSD experiences this was one hell of a nightmare. An early difficult pre-psychedelic trip shall we say!
I see now it was some kind of sense of how I was existentially, my young life, and what the culture was doing to me, and how I was being made to be alienated from the more organic cyclic flow of nature. The relentless ticking mechanical clock represented the world I was being dulled and destroyed by, and this caused my natural rhythms and feelings to feel crushed and oppressed by the inhuman relentless mechanical tick tocking.
So some years later when 15, the LSD trips I had, the most powerful parts of the experiences were the so-called 'come downs' (meaning when the affects of the psychedelic are gradually waning), which was when we would leave the flat we had usually tripped all night in, and leave to go exploring outside at dawn.
Trippily gliding past people's gardens, and into local parks,. nature was now not dull, far from it, but unutterably alive, magical, wonder-full!! At last I felt deeply connected with my natural surroundings! This was fun, erotic, playful, magical.
These early experiences inspired me on a life-long journey looking into the roots of this sense of feeling a-part from nature that I had been caught up in, and that I was seeing the world was suffering, from thinking and actions of those such alienation affected..
I went on this book search in the years following my psychedelic initiation, to try and find support, integration. I was disillusioned with many of the books, till I found a book by Alan Watts called, Cloudhidden Whereabouts Unknown, especially where he talks eloquently about polar~relational reality, and how, for example, you cannot have light without dark, or know light without dark, good without bad, life without death, etc. IE all the extremes of experience your led by this dualistic culture to think are in conflict were on a deeper level relational and complimentary. Dynamically polar related.
This dualistic idea of conflict between opposites extremes goes far back into patriarchal history, in fact the patriarchal mythologies are founded on this premise. And I wanted to really delve into this, because I knew that being unaware of this has an even more powerful affect on you.
Another book which had a great influence on me was The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, by John Allegro. I was utterly shocked and fascinated to find how these ancient myth-makers would compose their scripts in layers, from a literalist superficial surface layer meant for the gullible literal readings of the stories, and deeper into core layers where they used all forms of literary devices, including transliteration, wordplay, and pun, using dead languages like Sumerian and so on to communicate what they really believed. I further learned from others how they would also use numbers, and symbolism also. So it was all rather complex, and devious, because these hidden layers were only for the understanding of an initiated elite. The ones who got to ingest the psychedelic vegetation!
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The book made me realize the central importance of how mythology could be used as a powerful form of in-doctrin-ation. Via these literalist tales they could have people believing in 'gods' and 'Gods' and 'saints' and basically that they must obey an author-ity, and that they must sacrifice to these mythical characters.
I am not anti-mythology, because in its original pre-literalist lunar mythic form it is image-based, and deeply connected with natural creative imagination and how we relate to our unique perspective of reality which very much involves the land and other species. . Reality which is dynamic, interconnective and mysterious. But with the rise of the patriarchal solar mythos, where writing is used as the new technology, it can be used to denigrate benign ancient imagery which encouraged connection with nature.
This oppressive propagandist use of text can be seen evidenced in the biblical Book of Genesis where ancient imagery belonging to a more ancient oral Goddess religion, where nature was understood to be sacred, the Tree, Serpent, Fruit, Woman, and even Nature itself all become denigrated by the 'Word of God'. And this 'God' was very much anti-image. This tactic is one of the earliest written forms of divide and control propaganda to drive a paranoid barrier between the individual and nature and even their own nature.
However, extraordinarily interesting, when we take psychedelics, and don't resist its inspiration to wildness, and celebration, suddenly and magically all the over layered and ancient suppressing toxic mythology is dis-solved and we are directly immersed in a dimension of real living mythos where nature is alive, sacred, and we feel ecstatically connected with it. We are nature, so to feel divided from nature is to feel divided from our very being and is thus the origin of dis-ease.!
When I eat psychedelics, I personally am not attracted to the written word at all, or numbers, but am very into deeply exploring form, colour, sound, taste, touch, eroticism, sensual awareness, and actual participation in the experience via singing, chanting, dancing, sexuality, walking and in nature.
Another turning point book comes to mind here~~~ I found: Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: Rise of the Patriarchy and the Drug War, by Dan Russell. He talks about how an ancient Greek term for the psychedelic sacrament was 'pharmakon', and along with it came the term 'pharmakos' , meaning sacrifice.
Russell clearly shows that the war on psychedelics was not some new event which happened once in history in 1970 via the USA and its Richard Nixon administration's so-called 'war on drugs', covertly used to control black activism, and the hippies, and protests against the Vietnam war, but is anciently prevalent throughout patriarchal history to control the many slaves of the powermongers.
The historical pattern consists of keeping the 'slaves'--most us --from not only having access to the psychedelics, and psychedelic experience, but even memory of the existence of psychedelic vegetation and potions and experience, whilst meanwhile only the elite, and priests, and initiates of the Mysteries, and secret societies could have access to the pharmakon.. And this secret is 'hidden' in their myths via sub-text, and symbolism.
Originally the pharmakon, psychedelic vegetation, were envisaged mythologically as the old gods, sons and lovers of the Goddess. In other words the psychedelic fungi, and plants, were personified as gods who willingly sacrificed themselves. These 'old gods' had fungi, plant, and animal attributes which the patriarchal systems, be they polytheistic like the ancient Greek Olympian Pantheon, or the monotheistic religions, demonized and suppressed. Thus cutting us off more from connection with nature and other species.
We harvest them the magic mushrooms, plucking them from Mother Earth, sometimes pulling them apart, chopping, grinding them etc, and chewing, and ingesting them, and this was mythologically envisaged as them sacrificing themselves, and when ingested the 'god' becomes 'born again/Twice Born' as the more expansive self the individual feels in deep ecstatic relationship with others, including other species, and nature. Feeling ecstatic union with nature as a celebration of ecstatic intensity.
The pharmakon, Dionysos, was the herb eaten, sacrificed, to satisfy the soul [when this is suppressed] it is replaced with a pharmakos/official scapegoat which becomes the focus of the group emotion.
It is very important we explore mythos in depth, because all these stories deeply affect our psyches and actions..
In extreme states of human experience, such as 'madness', which this culture claims is 'mental illness' which they diagnose, without any medical scientific evidence, as biologically-caused disease, it has been found that those undergoing these states often find themselves in mythical dimensions, and may act out the myths they experience, believing themselves to be mythological characters like Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Satan, etc and/or involved in dramatic mythic scenarios etc.
Also in these extreme states will be the dualistic themes which feature in dualistic patriarchal mythology such as the struggle between 'Good' and 'Evil', and Apocalyptic scenes of the 'End of the World'.
For many centuries children were drilled in the religious dogma that if they were bad, then everlasting damnation in 'Hell' awaits the sinner! So these narratives become part of how we understand reality even if only on an unconscious level.
Imagination can be both conscious and unconscious. IMAGERY influences all consciousness as do words and text, though imagery is the most ancient and deepest. We dream in imagery. Our ancient pre-patriarchal history is mostly image-based. The invention of written text as a fairly recent technology.
This is how corporate advertising works, by influencing how we make an image of others, ourselves, of things, of reality. And the industry has got many of their ideas from religious propaganda!
It is very worthwhile to trace the origins and etymology of words, names, terms. Where do they lead us? If we dis-cover that some ancient mythological name of a 'god' leads us to a psychedelic mushrooms, this dis~covery is profoundly important because this awareness will undermine all the controlling sur~face layers of propaganda to do with the term/name, and the usual demands to sacrifice one's self to the god, etc. We are in other words immediately looking behind the scenes where we (the 'slaves') are not supposed to look! From there we can go deeper still.
For example, the initiates who would know that such and such a god name, etc, secretly referred to their chosen sacrament would interpret this know~ledge and experience according to their pre-existing worldview. And it is known that psychedelics, although anciently known for expanding awareness, if there is a wrong set and setting this can influence the outcome. If users of psychedelics, therefore, hold to a dualistic view of reality, whereby they deify, for example, 'gods', 'God', their 'rational' consciousness, and/or a spiritual realm they believe is above and superior to nature, and a masculine 'creator god' who is above nature, then they will approach their experiences with this preexisting perspective and exacerbate their dualistic mental set. This is what I see happened to prominent and very influential people who did take some form of psychedelic substance as an initiation in the 'Mysteries'. One notable example being the so-called Father of Philosophy, Plato.
Plato was known to have been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, which themselves had been influenced by the Orphic Mysteries. These Mysteries were based on a dualistic premise that 'spirit' was imprisoned in the physical body and nature, and so they saw sacramental ritual as a way of 'purification' and means to find release, eventually for ever, from a 'material prison' which they believed held the soul captive. Though initiates were not allowed, by an oath of death, to reveal what happened in these Mysteries rituals, Plato gives a good hint in his book the Phaedrus, also unconsciously exposing this dualism:
[W]ith a blessed company—we following in the train of Zeus, and others in that of some other god—… saw the blessed sight and vision and were initiated into that which is rightly called the most blessed of mysteries, which we celebrated in a state of perfection … being permitted as initiates to the sight of perfect and simple and calm and happy apparitions, which we saw in the pure light, being ourselves pure and not entombed in this which we carry about with us and call the body, in which we are imprisoned like an oyster in its shell.
So what can be seen regarding this delusion?
Although they may know of the sacrament being a psychedelic, their worldview is paranoid, seeing nature, and their own body and nature as 'impure' traps of their abstract idea of 'spirit'.
They have abstracted from this an idea of consciousness and 'spirit' being masculine, and superior to nature, and made it into a deity which they must sacrifice their 'impurity' to via their psychdelic-inspired rituals.
These Mysteries influenced Christianity within which came about an inevitable dualism between 'Flesh' and the 'spirit', and there was demanded of believers by its priesthood a sacrifice of their very sexuality so as to gain favour of their 'God', and secure a place in 'heaven' for ever and ever and ever~~~ This story/tale/narrative has had profound effects on generations and generations of people made to feel guilty of sensual, erotic, sexual desire, and even choosing life-long celibacy!
So, this idea of sacrifice is the ancient Greek meaning of pharmakos mentioned above when the sacrifice is not understood to have originally metaphorically meant the self- sacrifice of a 'god' who is the very psychedelic mushroom.
Once the liberating emotional and ecstatic release psychedelics can inspire is suppressed, is when the concept of pharmakos/sacrifice, especially blood sacrifice of animals, and humans, comes to prominence. And with this idea simultaneously comes the concept of a scapegoat, individuals and members of a community believed to be 'impure' and needing to be sacrificed and/or exiled, in order to restore order and purity to the community and land.
I am trying to show that this abstract 'need' for sacrifice can happen both without and even with the use of psychedelics when memory, free access, to psychedelics for all, and critical thinking are suppressed.
Now I am looking at critical thinking. This involves critically examining, questioning, and exploring mythologies/stories. Looking to the sources, the roots of terms, names, themes. Looking deeper than the text at the preliterate origins of imagery, imagination. And it is psychedelics which greatly inspire the creative imagination. We directly inhabit this world when inspired with psychedelics. I personally am rarely attracted to reading, and maths/numbers when having psychedelic experience; form, living transformational energy, and feeling, is FAR too interesting for me to become absorbed in abstract symbols on a page!
Lunar and Solar mythos
So let us look at the radical difference between a lunar based Goddess mythos approach to psychedelics and their inspiration, and a solar mythic dualistic approach:
In the lunar mythology of the Goddess, nature and 'spirit' are not in conflict but form a polar-related dynamic where you cannot have one without the other, or know one without the other. So in this reality there is no denigrating attitude towards nature, the physical body, and one's own nature and deeper consciousness, referred to as 'the unconscious' in modern terms.
There is no seeing and feeling 'matter' as a prison of the 'spirit'. Rather there is an ecstatic embrace of the cyclic play of dynamism; how light and dark mold all manner of forms, and feelings, and sounds, emotions; how life relies on death for life, and vice verse so there is regeneration.
How sensual participation in nature can feel ecstatic. All of this would be the set and setting of psychedelic experience. It would be celebration of this mystery of ever~changing living life. And there is no 'life' versus 'death' and vice verse.
But from the solar mythological perspective, there would be an emphasis on transcending nature, and also contacting and 'channeling' entities, 'gods', 'God', believed to be above nature and superior to it, and the need to eventually escape nature forever, once one became 'purified' through various initiatory rituals..
With the luminary, the Moon, there was observed by everyone this interplay between dark and light which cyclically waxed and waned, and from the Dark Moon the new slither of light was 'born again'. This was connected with the seasons, and womens menstruation cycles, and the cyclic changes of life, and infinite depth of meaning.
But with the Sun the most prominent feature is light, and therefore a stark concept came about between solar light and darkness, envisaged as an enemy of the light. So this cosmologically was used by the patriarchy to create divisions between aspects of life it judged to be dark, and aspects it judged to be light, the latter including what they thought was 'rational consciousness', also thought to be masculine, whilst the 'underworld' (and in modern terms 'the unconscious') was seen to be dark, and the enemy of the 'heroic masculine ego'.
How does all this relate to how psychedelics are being understood in our day and age?
The solar myth continues into the modern age, and is revealed as the linear drive of progress, which is being violently pushed on many people all over the world, to depend and hope for technology to be the saviour.
Transhumanism is the modern Gnostic dream, and is all about gaining 'immortality' via technology. Its exponents believe the natural death of people is 'murder'!
We are meanwhile supposed to be seeing a 'psychedelic resurgence', with those on the scientific and therapeutic community studying psychedelics chemical structure and effects, as well as with willing human participants, and what happens to the human nervous system, and so on.
A common agreement amongst therapists who accept psychedelics as a powerful healing medicine is that using psychedelics 'recreationally' is inferior to the therapies they emphasize.
The usually accepted therapeutic procedure will encourage the psychedelic volunteer to lay down, often covered with a blanket, with often one or two therapists very close by. The recipient will then be recommended to have music headphones on, and blindfolds, and in true psychoanalytical practice being encouraged to 'go within' and allow the 'contents of their psyche' to flow without any resistance.
I am in no way suggesting that form of psychedelic experience doesn't have healing potential. of course it will, but I am aware that the therapeutically-agreed accepted form of psychedelic ritual involves cutting the individual off from their surroundings, especially the natural world. WHY then, I question, should this be the only form of accepted therapeutic healing?
Nature is alive, magical, and is all around us. We are nature, and the natural is also experiencing the most worldwide assault by humans who are cut OFF from understanding their deep interrelations with the natural world.
As explained above, my life was turned around when I did take psychedelics recreationally, and walked about and contemplated in natural surroundings, and these experiences literally brought me to my senses again.
I have taken psychedelics in a recreational way always, and this will include all forms of explorations, including watching films, documentaries, music, and participating in dancing, and music, singing, chanting, and playing instruments, and doing other forms of art like painting and drawing, and all of this is an ecstatic diverse celebration of life, which itself diverse.
Why must people solely view psychedelics as some form of 'medicine' that I must take, administetred by 'experts' and become become therapeutically 'pure', and that once my 'depression', 'anxiety disorder', 'neurosis', 'OCD' etc etc--all very familiar psychiatric labels--are resolved, I never ever need experience psychedelics again and can continue my life with a clean bill of 'mental health'?
This emphasis escalates a 'medicalization' of the psychedelic potential, and contains psychedelic experience within psychiatric presumptions that 'mental illness' is biologically-caused disease which then becomes the myth that renders 'invisible' the questions about how mythos, and propaganda, and 'education' and therefore the culture, and system itself can traumatize people via coercion for all who blindly, unquestioningly, adhere to debilitating belief systems.
What is happening to the Earth, the ecocide, is very real, and we need to understand why this is happening, what is driving it, and what radical change is needed to resolve this massive problem. Becoming aware of the myths/stories which drive this insanity is extraordinarily important.
It is interesting to see how people bond together. There is always physical and emotional and sensual contact in bonding, and love and relationship. Mother and child, the mother will go through a profound dramatic birth, and this intimately ecstatic shared birth with her baby can create the incomparable loving bond between mother and child; there is the bond between lovers, emotionally, and sexually via intimacy and orgasm, and friends also share all kinds of emotional experiences together. Does it not follow then that to form a loving bond with nature we need to be sensually in ecstatic contact with it? Psychedelics inspire this feeling, and this feeling should be free for all humans to have access to.
Conclusion
I have been talking about myths. I said that there are toxic myths, those anciently (and into the modern world) founded on a dualistic worldview, and the more fruitful ancient preliteral and image-based myths which are not dualistic and do not try and divide and control those who explore them in deeper states of experience.
In our current system the central social controlling myth is the myth of mental illness, which has in its time made people believe that if they feel 'depressed', 'anxious' and other more extreme states of experience, this means they are suffering from a biological disease, a 'chemical imbalance', which needs psychiatric 'treatment' in the form of drugs. The purveyors of this myth try and make more and more human emotions a disorder which need treatment in the form of drugs!
So very first thing we need to be aware of when the new wannabe psychedelic therapists couch their therapy in the very same psychiatric lingo promoting the potential of psychedelics for 'treating' 'treatment resistant depression', and 'anxiety disorder', and 'addiction'. etc etc is are they aware of the mental illness myth themselves.
If not, they are keeping to a myth which forms the set and setting of the psychedelic experience itself! So like Plato above presumed he had experienced his 'spirit' freed from the 'prison' of his body, so people going through these kinds of therapies will presume their 'depression' was 'treated' by this 'great new psychiatric drug, psychedelics'!. I read a headline from an article the other day asking the question:
'Are Psychedelics the New Prozac?'
Psychedelics mean far more than for the exacerbating of toxic dualistic myths. Their most fruitful potential is for revealing to us, and inspiring, the actual living in nature which is spiritually alive and mysterious, and really understanding and feeling this we will not want in any way to exploit and destroy nature any more because of how we think and feel. because we have/are seeing through the toxic stories which fuel such insanity. For destorying nature is destroying our selves for we are nature.
Psychedelics should be for ALL, and not for those who consider themselves to be elites and superior, or only having the given authority to know how to use them.
The real radical revolution is that we all now are becoming aware of their primordial presence, as well as understanding the long history of suppression of psychedelics and their main inspiration for helping us see-through the psychological distance between between our selves and nature and all other species.
