I wrote and posted this review today. The ASIN book links resolve when
reading the review at Amazon.
Review title: Maximal entheogen theory of religion in late antiquity
Rating: 5 stars
Tags: entheogens, late antiquity, psychedelics, psychedelic drugs, visionary
plants, religion, altered state, mystic experiencing
Reviewer: Michael Hoffman
The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization
By David Hillman, Ph.D.
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0312352492/
Aug. 2008, 243 pages.
David Hillman’s book “The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western
Civilization” is a required book in the field of entheogen scholarship. It
presents a maximal entheogen theory of religion in Late Antiquity; it is the
first book to present such a strong, clear view. The use of psychoactives
was utterly normal, commonplace, mainstream, and culturally integrated.
Hillman forces a revision of the assumption-framework that is used by some
other entheogen historians. John Allegro’s book [[ASIN:0340128755 The
Sacred Mushroom & The Cross]] postulated that the early Christians were
motivated to use coded story-figures such as the figure of Jesus in order to
hide their deviant, unusual practice of use of visionary plants (mushrooms)
from mainstream culture, which persecuted and disallowed such use. Hillman
doesn’t address Allegro’s explanation, but that aspect of Allegro’s theory
is soundly disproved by the culture that Hillman reveals, a culture
thoroughly saturated with psychotropic drugs, and must be abandoned.
The cover art shows Plato with red eyes, which today has culturally
distorting connotations of “Plato smoked pot.” Hillman should’ve chosen
instead something like the fresco showing Dionysus’ victory procession, with
Dionysus on a chariot drawn by four tigers with mushrooms above their backs.
The book would benefit from ancient pictorial evidence of psychoactive
plants and their use, of which there is no shortage.
The book ought to have subheadings. The author omits subheadings, thus
obscuring what specific topics are covered in the book. This lack of
topical entry points can also make the book seem more boring, when one gets
caught in a topic of less interest and cannot see where the next topic of
interest begins. I have extracted some potential subheadings below.
Introduction chapter. Hillman’s thesis committee forced him to remove his
chapter on ancient world’s recreational drug use, saying “the Romans just
wouldn’t do such a thing” — a baseless anachronistic presupposition,
projecting today’s outlook onto the past, thus censoring and obscuring the
outlook that characterized the past.
Chapter 1: The Ancient Crucible. This chapter emphasizes the misery and
anguish of ancient life. I too felt miserable and filled with anguish after
reading most of it, since I was expecting to read about entheogens instead.
The reader starts wishing for some opium to ease the pain of reading this
chapter. Skip this chapter and read it afterward. It is of peripheral
relevance and gives the wrong impression that the book justifies entheogen
use because opium lessens misery.
Chapter 2: Ancient Medicines. Skip this chapter and read it afterward. It
is of peripheral relevance and would give the wrong impression that the book
prefers a medicinal paradigm. Chapters 1 and 2 are appropriate to provide
background and peripheral information, but act as a hurdle in their
placement in front of the expected chapters about entheogens.
Chapter 3: Greeks, Romans, and Recreational Drugs. The classical world was
well aware of the effects of cannabis, scopolamine plants, opium, mushrooms,
ergot, wormwood (thujone), and hemlock.
Chapter 4: Promethean Euphoria. Covers drugs in myth, including the myths
of Prometheus, Demeter, ambrosia, Dionysus, Odysseus & the Cyclops giant
Polyphemus, and Narcissus. Mixed wine is partly covered here.
The scope of the book is Greek and Roman culture in Late Antiquity; there is
little comment on the transition to Christendom. Hillman doesn’t address
the question of “To what extent were visionary plants used throughout
Christian history?” But he does conjecture that Jewish and earliest
Christian practice included visionary plants. He uses the noncommittal term
“Christian mythology”, and discusses political struggles in antiquity, but
doesn’t address the origins of the Jesus figure or the motives for creating
Christianity. The investigation of the history of the mystic altered state
must extend far beyond this books’ focus on the sheer use of visionary
plants, such as commentary connecting social structures with the specific
phenomena that are encountered within the intense visionary state.
Hillman doesn’t cover mythic metaphors, cognitive phenomenology (per Benny
Shanon’s book [[ASIN:0199252939 The Antipodes of the Mind]]), and
altered-state metaphor. Hillman’s treatments of myths remain as superficial
as any uninspired scholar’s. He focuses on the sheer fact that the plants
were used, rather than on cognitive phenomenology resulting from the
plant-induced altered state. Like Carl Ruck’s work, Hillman doesn’t provide
interpretations of mythic metaphors except in terms of the physical plants
and the sheer fact of using them. He assumes simple literalistic readings
of the mythemes, as opposed to reading them in terms of mental experiences
from visionary plants.
He doesn’t cover self-control instability in the altered state, or the
common experiential phenomenon of ego death. He reads all mythic references
to “death” as literal death, rather than metaphorical description of
specific cognitive phenomena encountered in the mystic altered state. The
mythemes of ‘death’, ‘mortal’, ‘divinization’, and ‘king’ are bandied about
unreflectively in these pages, rather than considering them as aspects of
plant-induced experiencing. What does ‘death’ mean to the person during the
altered state which Hillman writes about? He ought to consider, for
example, ‘death’ as the altered-state suspension of the self as controller
and mental construct, and the overpowering of the personal self by the
broader space-time world in which the self is embedded.
As another example, the Introduction discusses Actaeon being killed for
looking upon the goddess Artemis, but Hillman superficially treats this
death as a simple literal death as punishment for (vaguely) “seeing too
much”, rather than as the specific death of the pseudo-autonomous self
during the mystic altered state. Hillman doesn’t tie-in the myths from late
antiquity with today’s mystic-state reports of the cessation of the egoic
conception of oneself, or perceiving a higher level of control that trumps
and originates one’s own power.
He reads the themes of ‘maiden’ and ‘youth’ flatly and literalistically,
rather than matching them with the idea of the uninitiated mind prior to
ingesting the sacred meal in a mystery-cult initiation. Hillman’s line of
thought needs to develop further by applying cognitive phenomenology to the
interpretation of mythemes — by explaining mythemes as metaphorical
descriptions of the cognitive phenomena that are encountered in the
plant-induced, altered cognitive state.
Chapter 5: Drawing Down the Moon. This too-vaguely titled chapter actually
covers sorcerer/druggists; ancient magicians were somewhat comparable to
“drug dealers”. Zoroastrianism and the Magi. The practice of magic was
tantamount to the use of drugs. Magic was a matter of control &
manipulation, including manipulating the mind of a desired lover, through
seeming manipulation of reality in the drug-induced altered state. Medea &
Jason. Scholars intentionally mistranslate words to avoid writing “drugs”;
Circe’s mastery is specifically of drugs, and yet scholars deliberately
mistranslate words for her drugs instead as vague “charms”.
Hillman affirms the ancient Greeks’ belief in Fate (heimarmene), but without
detailed elaboration, without considering how the belief in Fatedness was
connected with altered-state experiencing.
Chapter 6: The Divine Gift of Mind-Bending Intoxication. Scholars
standardized on mistranslation of words for opium as “poppy seeds”.
Hillman writes that drugs were “a” means of entering into the divine realm,
“just another means of invoking the Muses”, but he never says what the
implied “other means” of entering into the divine realm were. That raises
the question, which he should’ve addressed, of whether drugs were the only
effective means of entering into the divine realm. If plant-drugs were the
chemical muse, then was there some non-chemical muse as well, some non-drug
technique of entering into the divine altered state? It is surprising that
Hillman is silent about the existence of that debate among entheogen
scholars.
The Muses, divine poetic inspiration, and ancient literature. Psychoactive
drugs were a primary, standard concern of ancient literature. Homer’s
bardic works: the Illiad; the Odyssey, including the Lotus-Eaters. Virgil’s
work: the Aeneid, including stories of Dido and Amata. Ovid’s works:
Amores; Heroides; and Ars amatoria. The audience used psychoactives and
understood the authors’ incorporation of themes involving psychoactives.
Chapter 7: The Pharmacology of Western Philosophy. The pre-Socratic
philosophers, drug-sorcerers, or sages. Diogenes. Epimenides:
Root-cutters, mandrake, and Epimenides’ stimulant. Pythagoras: his
initiations into mystery religions, and Magi. Empedocles and the birth of
natural science. Mixed wine included opium, henbane, and psychoactive
herbs, unguents, and spices. Plato’s Phaedrus: Divine madness, inspired
mania, divine possession, and the Muses.
Chapter 8: Democracy, Free Speech, and Drugs. This chapter opens with 8
pages about the creation of democracy in ancient Athens, with no connection
to entheogens. This puts a strain on the reader’s patience, waiting so long
to get to the claimed subject matter of the book.
The political and drug aspects of plays. Until recently, scholars
deliberately mistranslated or suppressed Aristophanes’ ribald wording, but
they continue to deliberately mistranslate drug references to suppress,
distort, and censor those. Plato’s work The Laws. Aristophanes’ play
Thesmophoriazusae. Aristophanes’ play Wealth. Euripides’ play Andromache:
free speech, personal freedom, and civil liberties. Athens vs. Sparta:
egalitarian democracy vs. authoritarian oppression. Euripides’ play Medea.
This chapter touches on mystery cult initiation, Eleusis, Carl Ruck’s book
[[ASIN:1556437528 The Road to Eleusis]], and the scholarly suppression of
such academic investigation into ancient psychoactives use. Surprisingly,
Hillman provides no deep coverage of entheogens in mystery-cult sacred
meals, which most readers are expecting; he presents only 2 pages focusing
on this topic. The book has a surprising lack of detailed coverage of
entheogens in the sacred meals of all the mystery cults of late antiquity,
such as emperor cult. Hillman merely touches on, but doesn’t provide
sustained, in-depth coverage of “drinking” symposium parties; for example,
he doesn’t expound upon Dennis Smith’s book [[ASIN:0800634896 From Symposium
to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World]] to explain
“drinking clubs” in terms of visionary plants in mixed wine.
Conclusion chapter: The Western Pursuit of Happiness. Personal freedom and
democracy in Athens went along with psychoactives. The status quo claims to
endorse freedom, democracy, personal autonomy, and civil liberties, but
demonizes psychoactives, against the values of Athens which created our
valuation of freedom and personal liberties. The drug knowledge that is
embedded in antiquities would be a valuable resource, and is the kind of
knowledge governments and businesses are looking for. Moralistic censorship
rewrites history and creates a fictional image of the past to prop up the
status-quo powers. Factual historical knowledge about the integration of
psychoactive drugs into the culture of antiquity would provide conceptual
tools that would help society remain free from tyrants and aristocrats.
Notes section. The book uses endnotes rather than footnotes. These are
proper, correctly used endnotes (or footnotes): they are strictly citations
of where to find source material, rather than passages which ought to be in
the body of the book instead. Much more of the book needs such pointers to
the source texts, to help interested scholars quickly develop the material
further than Hillman takes it.
Bibliography. The only entheogen-scholarship book mentioned is The Road to
Eleusis. Hillman’s book seems to be research done in isolation from the
most closely related existing books. There is a surprising absence of Carl
Ruck’s other books, Dan Merkur’s books such as [[ASIN:0892817720 The Mystery
of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible]], Clark Heinrich’s
historical survey [[ASIN:0892819979 Magic Mushrooms in Religion and
Alchemy]], Entheos journal, and the dispute between Wasson and Allegro about
the Plaincourault fresco ([[ASIN:1439215170 The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of
Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity]]).
The game is up, for the status quo academic Establishment. Their effort to
censor out psychoactive drugs from the mainstream of late antiquity is
thwarted by this book. Scholars who care about their future reputation must
cease their alliance with the distorting forces of suppression of the
psychoactives aspect. Those who care about aligning with the facts of the
matter and are looking for longevity, need to divorce themselves from the
status-quo denial of the evidential facts, and work toward building a
drastically revised model of antiquity.
People make the false statement that there is little or no evidence of drug
use in antiquity. Hillman goes beyond merely asserting that scholars would
easily locate ample evidence if they began looking for it. He demonstrates
that scholars have already run into ample evidence, but are censoring,
deliberately ignoring, and deliberately mistranslating the evidence, in a
cover-up.
The effort of proving that the ancient evidence describes the visionary
plants themselves, too much follows the lead of the status-quo academics. A
continued heavy critique of the academic status quo is needed, but without
letting the status quo define the boundaries of the investigation.
This book aims to adequately prove the case that psychoactive drug use was
entirely normal and mainstream and ubiquitous in late antiquity. This book
doesn’t aim to be comprehensive in fleshing-out all use of psychoactives in
late antiquity. The field of entheogen scholarship needs expanded follow-up
volumes that put less emphasis on convincing the skeptical academic
Establishment, and more emphasis on comprehensively laying out more
connections between late antiquity, the culturally integrated use of
visionary plants, and the deeper interpretation of mythemes.
This book opens up a call for serious scholarship that engages the extent of
drug use in antiquity. Serious, substantial scholarship will need to go
beyond Hillman, beyond the sheer assertion and proof that visionary plants
were used, into explanation of mythemes that describe the experiential
content of the resulting mystic altered state. Hillman’s political focus on
personal freedoms needs to be expanded into the realm of altered-state
mythemes such as the death of the king, and gods as rulers — connecting
personal altered-state experiencing with social structures and governance,
as was done in the thoroughly drug-saturated culture of late antiquity.
The Egodeath theory 