Contents:
- Recovered this Old Page
- My “Letcher-Hatsis” Joke
- Hatsis’ Confusing Position: Entheogen-Affirming, Mushroom-Denying
- Book: Psychedelic Mystery Traditions: Spirit Plants, Magical Practices, and Ecstatic States
- Hatsis Adheres to the Moderate Entheogen Theory of Religion, Which Is Inherently Incoherent
- Meetup Announcement for Hatsis’ Lecture “Psychedelics in Ancient Orthodox Christianity”
Recovered this Old Page
Hatsis denies mushrooms in Christian art. See also:
Psychedelic Mystery Traditions (Hatsis)
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2020/10/31/psychedelic-mystery-traditions-hatsis/
I bulk-deleted almost all my WordPress weblog posts around 2018 (they were probably the same as postings to the soon-to-be-defunct Egodeath Yahoo Group). The below is a 2018 post that survived in a Drafts folder.
At the end of this post, in a lecture titled “Psychedelics in Ancient Orthodox Christianity”, Hatsis argues in favor of orthodox (mainstream, normal) Christian psychedelic use: “Primary source materials show Church leaders discussing and debating the merits of psychedelia in the ancient and medieval worlds.”
My “Letcher-Hatsis” Joke
It’s been so long since I wrote about Hatsis, I forgot what my joke meant.
For the joke about (Andy) “Letcher” Hatsis, see my extensive comments & comments, at Cyb blog.
Hatsis’ Confusing Position: Entheogen-Affirming, Mushroom-Denying
The main problem with my assertion that Hatsis “retracted” his “position”, is that Hatsis, like Letcher, had too vague and shifting of a “position” in the first place. It’s like saying that the Egodeath theory is better than “the old theory”: the old theory was a less-than theory; it was an incoherent, often self-contradictory heap, like kettle logic.
The earlier generation of entheogen scholars were the pioneers, and Hatsis needs to be rightly situated within that development, as a latecomer, starting with Robert Graves who recognized the mushroom basis of Greek religious mythology in 1957.
In 2006, I wrote up my main summary article explaining my Maximal Entheogen Theory of Religion (developed around 1999-2003) in which I pushed significantly further the Moderate entheogen theory of religion which is exemplified by Ruck, along with Heinrich, Hoffman, Staples et al. I first published and announced the Maximal Entheogen Theory of Religion around 2001, at the Egodeath Yahoo Group, copied to the Egodeath site.
In my main, 2006 article, I unified the Maximal Entheogen Theory of Religion with the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence.
I discovered and formulated the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence in 1988, and I summarized or outlined it on the World-Wide Web at the Principia Cybernetica website in 1997.
Hatsis’ late-incoming scholarly contributions, subsequent to Brown & Brown’s book The Psychedelic Gospels (which cites my work), are welcome. Hatsis’ scholarship must be kept in its real place in the sequence of scholarly discovery.
Hatsis should retract & rewrite his would-be critiques of Irvin and acknowledge any ways in which Irvin was correct. Meanwhile, we must treat Hatsis’ book “Psychedelic Mystery Traditions” as a retraction or clarification of his position that was expressed in his earlier “critiques” of “the mushroom theory” of Irvin and others.
Irrespective of back-of-book bibliographies, the linked books at Amazon, with copyright & publishing dates, provide a record of research in the history of visionary plants in Greek & Christian history, roughly such as:
Graves 1957 – The Greek Myths – Look inside: Foreward – summarizes his 1958 article What Food the Centaurs Ate (Amanita & psilocybe)
Heinrich 1995
Ruck
Arthur
Irvin
Staples
Hoffman
Rush
Brown
various other authors covering entheogens in Dionysian religion
Finally, following after those 60 years of pioneering research: Hatsis, 2018
— Michael Hoffman, November 2, 2020
Book: Psychedelic Mystery Traditions: Spirit Plants, Magical Practices, and Ecstatic States
Book:
Psychedelic Mystery Traditions: Spirit Plants, Magical Practices, and Ecstatic States
Thomas Hatsis
http://amzn.com/1620558009
September 11, 2018
Park Street Press
288 pages
Publisher’s info etc. condensed by Michael Hoffman:
“A comprehensive look at the long tradition of psychedelic magic and religion in Western Civilization.
Use of psychedelics and entheogens from Neolithic times through Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance to the Victorian era and beyond.
The discovery of the power of psychedelics and entheogens can be traced to the very first prehistoric expressions of human creativity, with a continuing lineage of psychedelic mystery traditions.
Psychedelics were integrated into pagan and Christian magical practices.
Psychedelic agents for divination, magic, sex magic, alchemy, and communication with gods / god and goddess invocation.
Entheogens in the Mysteries of Eleusis in Greece, the worship of Isis in Egypt, and the psychedelic wines and spirits of the Dionysian mysteries.
The magical mystery traditions of the Thessalian witches.
Jewish, Roman, and Gnostic psychedelic traditions.
There is a long tradition of psychedelic magic and religion in Western civilization.
How, when, and why different peoples in the Western world utilized sacred psychedelic plants.
The full range of magical and spiritual practices that include the ingestion of substances to achieve altered states.
Psychedelics facilitated divinatory dream states for our ancient Neolithic ancestors and helped them find shamanic portals to the spirit world.
Mystery religions adopted psychedelics into their occult rites.
Use of psychedelics by Middle Eastern and medieval magicians.
The magical use of cannabis and opium from the Crusaders to Aleister Crowley.
From ancient priestesses and Christian gnostics, to alchemists, wise-women, and Victorian magicians, psychedelic practices have been an integral part of the human experience since Neolithic times.”
“Thomas Hatsis is a historian of psychedelia, witchcraft, magic, pagan religions, alternative Christianities, and the cultural intersection of those areas.
Hatsis holds a master’s degree in history from Queens College.
The author of The Witches’ Ointment.
Hatsis runs http://psychedelicwitch.com — Promotes the latest and best information pertaining to the Psychedelic Renaissance.”
“Imbibing kykeon preceded the revealers’ visionary trances during the Rites of Eleusis.
Academics of psychedelic history have posited that the beverage contained some kind of psychedelic pharmakon.
The rites lasted for over two thousand years uninterrupted and bestowed more or less the same experience upon everyone.
The potion contained a psychedelic, the identity of which probably changed over time, depending on what pharmakon was available.
It is possible for a skilled shaman to enter trance states without the use of a pharmakon.
Fasting, isolation, and dancing have been used as long as any psychedelic to achieve higher states of awareness.
Ensuring that sometimes hundreds of celebrants at a time (who were ordinary people, not shamans) would see a vision of Persephone required some kind of prompt; something no one who drank the kykeon could have missed.
There had to be a way for each mystai to generate a vision without fail, without shamanic training, every time, for over two thousand years.
The theory of a psychedelic kykeon has gained acceptance by many modern ethnobotanists and scholars who no longer question if a pharmakon played a role at Eleusis, but rather ask what kind of pharmakon did the congregants imbibe?
A recent debate between Ivan Valencic and Peter Webster outlines this deliberation. [Mixing the Kykeon https://google.com/search?q=Valencic+Peter+Webster+kykeon ]
Valencic argues on the side of Terrance McKenna and Robert Graves that the “astonishment and ecstasy” of the kykeon, contained mushrooms.
Peter Webster upholds the original view by Albert Hofmann: a form of ergot provided the necessary entheogenic additive.
The entheogen pantheon was such that the kykeon, at one time or another could have included ergot or a mushrooms or a variety of other plants, depending on what was available.”
— end of excerpts of Tom Hatsis
Condensed by Michael Hoffman
June 23, 2018
Hatsis Adheres to the Moderate Entheogen Theory of Religion, Which Is Inherently Incoherent
Tom Hatsis, like Carl Ruck, keeps piling up evidence against his own entheogen-diminishing theory of the history of religious altered states.
About kykeon, Hatsis argues “The entheogen pantheon was such that the kykeon, at one time or another could have included ergot or a mushrooms or a variety of other plants, depending on what was available.”
Against Hatsis, Hatsis’ argument also applies to Christian entheogen use, which included mushrooms, explicitly and abundantly evidenced in art.
Hatsis vs. Hatsis — who will win?
The Egodeath theory is not self-contradictory, but is simple, coherent, and consistent: the history of religious experiencing derives from mushrooms and other dissociatives, to loosen cognitive associations, producing the no-free-will, frozen-time experiential perspective, metaphorically described by religious mythological analogy.
— Michael
June 23, 2018
Meetup Announcement for Hatsis’ Lecture “Psychedelics in Ancient Orthodox Christianity”
Image: Feb. 4 2018 Portland OR Meetup announcement:
“Join Psychedelic Witch, Tom Hatsis, for a follow-up of his previous class on ancient gnostic [deviant, abnormal, exceptional] psychedelic use.
Has some conspiracy theorist told you that ancient Christians either rejected or “covered up” [a la Allegro -mh] their psychedelic use?
Told you that these priests jealously guarded the secrets of psychedelic transcendence from the larger Christian population? [a la Ruck -mh]
What if none of that were true? [as Hoffman’s been posting since like 2005]
What if ancient orthodox [normal, mainstream] Christians wrote openly about their experiments with psychedelics and had spirit plants that they preferred over others?
Primary source materials show Church leaders discussing and debating the merits of psychedelia in the ancient and medieval worlds.
There was no “cover up” at all. [against Allegro, Ruck, and Letcher -mh]
Now it is time to hear their forgotten voices.
The long, lost psychedelic mystery traditions of orthodox Christianity.”
Exact complete wording copied from the Meetup post
Details
Join Psychedelic Witch, Tom Hatsis, for a follow-up of his previous class on ancient gnostic psychedelic use!
Has some conspiracy theorist told you that ancient Christians either rejected or “covered up” their psychedelic use? Told you that these priests jealously guarded the secrets of psychedelic transcendence from the larger Christian population? What if none of that were true? What if ancient orthodox Christians wrote openly about their experiments with psychedelics and even had spirit plants that they preferred over others?
Primary source materials show Church leaders discussing and debating the merits of psychedelia in the ancient and medieval worlds!
There was no “cover up” at all.
Now it is time to hear their forgotten voices. Join us on Feb 4th when, for the first time in our modern day, Hatsis will outline the long, lost psychedelic mystery traditions of orthodox Christianity! Donation based event 🙂
The Egodeath theory 