The mixing of religious and non-religious beliefs in an individual.

The God in the Flowerpot

In 1957, a former Wall Street banker named R. Gordon Wasson posited the idea that Adam and Eve were ancient Siberians who plucked psychedelic mushrooms from birches near the artic, which became the forbidden Tree of Knowledge that led to Original Sin. This was a soberly vision:

“ … It was as though the walls of our house dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of Mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens … The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries?”

Thirty centuries ago, in the early days of our culture, before we made use of reading and writing, Somas was a psychotropic plant-god used by poet priests of the original Aryan people to endow that race with bliss and immortality, the only record of which comes to us by way of 120 hymns taken from the Rig Veda (1700 – 1100 B. C.)

Huston Smith, whose The World’s Religions remains after three decades, the standard collegiate text, writes: “In the pantheon the Aryans brought with them when they swept into Afghanistan and the Indus Valley in the second millennium B. C. Soma occupied a unique position. Indra with his thunderbolt was more commanding, and Agri evoked the awe that fire so readily inspired before the invention of matches made it common place. But Soma was special … because of what one become: immortal.”

Psychedelics may be as old as the mind. We remain illiterate of Neanderthal metaphysics, but many if not most “B. C. and back” anthropologists find it likely that earliest hunter-gathers, eating whatever they could, lay their hands on, ingested plants with hallucinogenic properties, and acid analogs as a metaphysical “stairway to heaven” date to prehistoric times. Likewise, the true is the largest living entity to most pre-dynamic people’s existence; it also bears sustaining fruit and if it hosts mind-zonking mushrooms, it doesn’t take a Yale-educated Bible scholar to understand a logical mystical genesis for the Tree of Life in the Book of Genesis.

That fungus or vegetation common to Eurasia which, if ingested, produced profound hallucinations, it might easily have influenced the evolution of religious experience since prehistoric times. Consider the serpent’s promise from the Old Testament, “You shall not surely die. For God do know that in the day you eat there of, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods.”

Long a symbol of slithering, low-shadowed immortality, Eden’s serpent made man die. God placed the tree of life in Eden, where its fruits conferred life everlasting. God instructed Adam and Eve that they were welcome to eat from every tree in the Garden, except for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. According to Genesis, had Adam and Eve resisted the serpent’s temptation to eat from that tree they would have been free to eat from the tree of life with God’s approval and enjoy its benefits.

There are theories common as crabgrass that civilization occurred only when hunter-gatherer man ate himself out of psychedelics, that until the dawn of recorded history man had existed in shaman-led tribes who tripped the light fantastic across veldt and steppe as part of pre-agricultural “goddess cultures” who worshipped female deities and who might never have sobered up to invent beer, bread, alphabets, the printing press and the atom bomb had they – our great-grand parents to the X power – not run out of hallucinogenic plants.

In retrospect, acid was a no-brainer. When LSD came of age in the 1960s, it invited a higher purpose. And soon found one as the savior of, if not the soul, at least the self. The mind-expanding metaphysical wonders of LSD soon proved an ultimate elixir, God’s alchemy for the Cosmic Consciousness.

What America wanted in 1965 was a new divinity, a magic sacrament to enfranchise a new religion: a religion not of God but of the self; a perfect virgin arena for magic. In the age of empowerment, self-awareness became the last frontier of the almost total unknown and the new stamping grounds for endless possibility. This was also a form of revelation gone too far. But this was never a tendency in Abraham and the ancient Hebrews– quite the opposite.

Tags: Adam, Bible, Consciousness, Eve, LSD, Myths

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Kernel John on February 15, 2011 at 7:52pm

Nice Hugo van der Goes painting you posted but it's a flower pot forgery - a fake.

The face of the serpent gave it away. It looks like Jack Nicholson but it could be Khem or maybe David T. Not sure.

Here's copy of the real painting.

Too much soma in your tea Claudia?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeff H on February 15, 2011 at 11:40pm

interesting that the Greek word often translated "Sorcery" in the Bible has a root that is worth mentioning in this conversation.

The word is "pharmakeia" and it is from "pharmakon" (a drug, i.e. spell-giving potion). it inferred the use of drugs to find the gods.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Claudia M. Mazzucco on February 16, 2011 at 8:14am

In the Louvre there is a famous painting of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden. In the background of the painting we see in the distance cherubim with a flaming sword barring the gates of Eden so that they cannot return. But against all expectation, the eyes of Adam and Eve are not turned back towards the gates. In the dark sky, dim but not recognizable, there is a shining cross. That is what Adam and Eve are gazing it. According to the guide-guy at the Louvre, “this painting illuminates for us the central conviction of the gospel: to restore a right relationship with God.” To reconcile with God, as at the beginning, humans must rely on the cross.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeff H on February 16, 2011 at 8:32am

to which I would reply with a hearty "Whoooooooooooooot!"

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kernel John on February 16, 2011 at 8:35am

And Claudia, what is it that the cross symbolizes to in your words?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Claudia M. Mazzucco on February 16, 2011 at 9:48am

The Cross is a symbol of the union of complements.

Hence in it God and religion are not juxtaposed simply, but rather mutually. In the vertical dimension (between God and humans) tradition is a communicative process of divine self-communication, calling for a response. In the horizontal dimension this self-communication continues in the life of the church.
Because of the union of lines, the vertical is taken as representing the active principle (God) and the horizontal line the passive one, however, the horizontal line can also be considered as the projection of the entire horizontal plane upon the vertical plane.

In this connection, religious scholars use the terms “horizontal” and “vertical” in ways that correspond to the essence of religious experience: the vertical describes the singular relationship between human being and God while the horizontal dimension of religion is all about practical benefits in terms of what religious belief causes people to do.

A given belief or practice might exist because it enhances survival and reproduction – for example, by causing the group to function well compared to other groups. That, perhaps, is the ultimate explanation and it elegantly expresses the scientific vision of the nature of religion.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeff H on February 16, 2011 at 9:52am

Another aspect of the horizontal could be the spreading of Christ's arms to gather us to himself so we might enjoy the vertical fellowship with God.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeff H on February 17, 2011 at 8:13am

Thank you again Alexander. I remember a period of about a month where you debate Jesus against Jesus' existence.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Claudia M. Mazzucco on February 21, 2011 at 4:36pm

We think of hominids on the Savannah requiring an accurate way to discern leopards, and conclude that parts of our ancestral schemes of representation, having evolved under strong selection, must accurately depict the environment. This view implies that out brains must be minimally competent at representing nature, that they must be able to alert us to the threats and possibilities of the environment.

However, where selection is intense in the way it is here, the penalties are severe only for failures to recognize present predators. The hominid representation can be quite at odds with natural regularities, lumping all kinds of harmless things with potential dangers, provided that false positives are evolutionary inconsequential and provided that the representation always cues the subject to danger.

The human brain, it appears to me, is the product of evolutionary tinkering. And when natural selection will favor organisms who play for safety, it is easy to conclude that we will consequently develop inaccurate systems of representation. My questions concern (1) the possibility that we began in so primitive a state that we are incapable of working ourselves into any accurate representation of nature, and (2) the possibility that there are constrains on the process of modification that prevent us from making significant improvements.

If the historical process out of which contemporary religious beliefs have emerged was reliable in the sense of having a high chance of generating truth, then the theistic reply to atheism would succeed.

A promising and popular defense is to find encouragement in Darwin. If our initial state was so bad that there was nothing we could have done to escape our misrepresentations, then, the suggestion runs, our ancestors would have been eliminated by natural selection. They weren't, so it wasn't. In this way, we can appeal to Darwinian evolutionary theory to support the idea that our initial religious beliefs must correspond to objective regularities in nature, and our modes or reasoning must work reliably in establishing the historical process out of which contemporary religions have emerged.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeff H on February 21, 2011 at 8:03pm

you know better... google Tacticus or Pliny the younger. I've posted about them before.

You said "Around the time of Christ" so you all ready admitted His existence.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kernel John on February 21, 2011 at 9:51pm

I thought it was the fish that early Christian used as their sign but you make a good point. Why would the Roman Church adopt a symbol that was used by the Roman Empire who was in charge. Good point Alexander. I wonder when the Cross became a Christian Church symbol?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kernel John on February 21, 2011 at 10:17pm

Geez Jeff,

Alexander did say, "around the time of Christ", so this becomes unshakable evidence of what? You logic astounds.

As for Tacticus and Pliny the Younger, their accounts were written decades (dare I say it) after the time of Christ.

I think the point you consistently fail do address is this - if there was a guy who really did feed the multitude out of a couple of baskets, why did news of this miracle not get recorded by historians of that time. Were miracles like this that common back then that no one took note - or maybe no one took note back then because miracles like this didn't happen back then.

If Jesus really did all those miracles in front of real people, including his followers, why did it take so long before anyone documented the stories?

There are some who suspect that the stories did not get documented until they had properly matured. And that took decades.

As I have said before, you are entitled to believe what you wish but please don't feel offended when others challenge the authenticity of your sola scriptura understanding of the bible.

▶ Reply

▶ Reply to Discussion

‹ Previous
1
2
Next ›

RSS

Welcome to
Open Source Religion

Sign Up
or Sign In

Or sign in with:

Just mention Open Source Religion, Proprietary Religion, Belief Genome, Belief Modules, or Prerequisite Beliefs in a tweet to appear in this twitter feed.