Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Mystery Religions


The Buddha passed into final nirvana after eating mushrooms. Christians believe Adam and Eve, the first humans, were forbidden to eat from a mysterious "tree of knowledge." Could the connection to mushrooms go deeper?
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In Plaincourault, France, there is a mural showing the "Tree of Knowledge" with a snake wrapped around it, and Eve talking to the snake. The Tree is a Fly Agaric mushroom.
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The Fly Agaric is, of course, a hallucinogenic mushroom. John Allegro, who translated the Dead Sea Scrolls, went as far as to suggest that the early Christians used it as a sacrament. Gordon Wasson wrote a book called Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, identifying the Fly Agaric with Soma, the sacrament of the Hindus, meaning “body” (which gives us the word somatic).
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Andrija Puharich also wrote a book about Fly Agaric, called the Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity. A summary of all this can be found in James Arthur’s book, Mushrooms and Mankind.
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Shamanic themes formed the Osiris cult, then found their way into other Mystery religions, such as the Greek Mysteries of Dionysus at Eleusis, Attis in Asia Minor, Bacchus in Italy, and Mithras in Persia. They all involved a voluntary death, a flight from the body, a descent into the underworld, an ascent to heaven, and a resurrection. They also had a sacrament, which later came to be wine, but in the Mysteries of Mithras “developed from older rites which used consecrated bread and water mixed with the intoxicating juice of a psychedelic plant called Haoma.”
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The various cultures all adapted one of their gods to take on the role of the resurrecting god-man. But when a Jewish sect wanted their own Mystery religion, it was a bit more difficult, since they only had one god, so they based the Mysteries around the figure of the Jewish messiah.
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Every year at Christmas, we re-enact our own Mystery Play, which has survived to remind us of all this. December 25th used to be Winter Solstice. It is the birthday of the god-man Osiris/Dionysus/Mithras/Jesus, who, as Osiris, represents the polar axis (Djed) and its 72 x 360-year precession cycle.
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We pretend that a wise old elf called Santa Claus flies through the sky, pulled by reindeer, (having frozen time, so he can visit everyone), and enters via the chimney. He leaves traditionally wrapped red and white gifts under a pine tree that we have brought indoors, and in socks hanging over the fireplace. Then he flies off to the North Pole.
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In Siberia, since time immemorial, around Winter Solstice shamans have gathered the red and white Fly Agaric mushrooms from under the very same pine trees we put in our living rooms, and distributed them from a sack. In Siberia, the entrances to homes are in the roof, and double as a smoke outlet, so they really are entering via the chimney! The mushrooms are left to dry out by hanging them over the hearth. The mushrooms have to be gathered quickly, because the reindeer love them. However, it is a fact that the psychoactive ingredient can be recycled several times, and unpleasant side effects such as vomiting, are thus avoided. It is also a fact that the reindeer love eating yellow snow! If a reindeer herder wants to gather his herd, he only has to urinate, and they all come running.
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That is why the reindeer all fly along in frozen time. Even the reindeer names reinforce the encoding. The tree also represents the Axis Mundi, with the candles or lights and baubles representing stars, and the star on the top representing the Pole Star. It is usually a 5-pointed star, and therefore encodes 72, since a pentacle is formed by 5 x 72-degree angles. Santa lives at the North Pole, which encodes the out of body experience as destination, and Santa’s helpers, the elves, are either the fourth-dimensional astral beings encountered, or even our higher dimensional selves, also represented by the angel/fairy on the tree.
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What does it all mean?
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As I said just now, Jenkins has shown that the Maya were tracking precession with the Long Count calendar, but rather than the Vernal Equinox, they were tracking the movement of stars (the Milky Way) against the Winter Solstice. He also showed that the Mayan 13-baktun cycle (5,125 years), ends on Winter Solstice 2012. What is more, the Maya used to take hallucinogens, including toad venom, and psilocybin mushrooms. Jenkins has also found some evidence they may have taken Amanita muscaria (Fly Agaric), but they mainly used the psilocybin mushroom.
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This is the same mushroom that Terence & Dennis McKenna took, when they were “informed by an elf-troupe that the laws of physics would change in 2012,” and conceived the Timewave Zero concept – a hierarchy of waves governing all change in the universe, and terminating in 2012, encoded in the Chinese I Ching oracle. The psilocybin mushrooms contain DMT, which is also produced in the pineal gland, or third eye, which is shaped LIKE A PINE-CONE.
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Some have suggested that the Egyptians also took psilocybin mushrooms. They did take the blue water lily, which Paul Devereux says in The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia “was the form in which Isis restored the murdered Osiris, and was thus a symbol for him.” The lily has hypnotic effects.
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Devereux says the Egyptians also had access to opium (which gave Errol Flynn an out of body experience), and khat, which produces a dream-like state. In the Americas, a different species of tobacco was taken in huge doses. A near-lethal dose can give an out of body experience. We have heard recently of the “cocaine mummies” found in Egypt – well, they also contained large amounts of nicotine – another plant that should not have been in Egypt – which was very upsetting for Egyptologists.
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Devereux has shown that most of these power plants can cause out of body experiences when taken in large enough doses or in combination (though very dangerous or unpleasant in some cases), and that they have been used for just such purposes for thousands of years. In another book – Shamanism and the Mystery Lines – Devereux makes a very strong case that these magical shamanic flights were associated with the alignments we know as Ley Lines, where ancient barrows, standing stones, stone circles, and even pre-reformation churches (built on sacred sites), are aligned in straight lines.
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Will the “Galactic Winter Solstice” in 2012 allow a mass out-of-body experience? Will celestial and terrestrial grids align? Will a passing celestial body re-align the Axis Mundi to its pre-fall state? Or maybe the falling geomagnetic field will lead to a magnetic reversal, and switch our polarity (out of body researcher Robert Monroe found that the body’s polarity reverses while out of body).
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