Recommendations for Entheogen Scholars

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Summary of Recommendations

Summary of what I want Letcher & Hatsis to change, for the health of the field, instead of trying to destroy wholesale the field of Western mushroom scholarship and wholly deny Psilocybe in “our own”, Western religious history.

Applies to Ruck, Hoffman, & Heinrich as well.

  • Encourage people to find, upload, and tag many more images of mushroom shapes in Christian art and in Greek art.
  • Categorize images or text descriptions into 3 types or levels:
    • Literal depictions of mushrooms.
    • Stylized depictions of mushrooms.
    • Depictions of effects.
  • Discuss matching those images to either Liberty Cap, Cubensis, Amanita, or other Psilocybin-containing mushrooms.
    • Specimen photos side-by-side with art images.
      • Cubensis
      • Liberty Cap
      • Amanita
      • Fantastical-looking actual mushrooms
      • Italian Pines
      • ancient crucifixion nails
      • Amanita-styled containers
      • Parasol of Victory
      • Surrounding associated themes (not only mushroom shapes in isolation):
        • vine, ivy, grape leaves, snakes, Maenads.
        • grape-baskets, mushroom-shaped grape clusters.
        • Billowing cloth, lifted garment.
  • Shift the Focus from Allegro-Amanita-Christianity, to Graves-Psilocybe-Greek&Christian.
    • Move people away from the words ‘Allegro’ and ‘Amanita’ and only ‘Christian’.
    • Move people toward the words “Robert Graves” and ‘Psilocybe’, psilocybin, Liberty Cap, and Cubensis; and “Greek & Christian” (broadly; Hellenistic & Christendom).
    • Focus on the Mixed-Wine Banqueting Tradition throughout Antiquity; in Greek & Christian religion. Don’t separate that across two far-separated book chapters; it’s a single topic. The objectively ideal engine for Mixed-Wine is Psilocybe – not Amanita, Cannabis, Opium, or Scopolamine.
  • Discuss the preconceptions, bias, and a priori rejection of entheogen theory of religion, and committed skeptics who cannot possibly be persuaded by any evidence.

Moving the Field Away from Allegro-Amanita

I don’t follow the Allegro-centric crowd, I feel alienated and out-of-the-loop there.

Apparently, book sales are up, regarding the Allegro-Amanita focus, which I have no interest in, and want people to transition away from.  

Letcher, Hatsis, and I have some in common here: transition people away from Allegro-Amanita and a developing mythology around that.

I want to transition people toward a better approach, not deny the existence of the topic, of mushrooms in “our own” religious history.

I advocate an approach to the field of mushroom (or entheogen) historical scholarship, that is centrally focused around Psilocybe & the Mixed-Wine Banqueting Tradition in Antiquity.

My leverage-point, my center-of-focus, instead of Allegro-Amanita-Christianity, is: Mixed-Wine Banqueting.

The Mixed-Wine Banqueting Tradition applies to Christianity and Hellenistic religion & culture, and Mystery Religion initiation.  

Graves Instead of Allegro (but Shouldn’t Define the Field by a Personality)

Graves is the closest I can find to covering the correct scope, of Psilocybe in Greek & Christian religious history.  

Robert Graves completely lacks the pop punch of Allegro’s dust-jacket thesis and striking diagrammatic image of the Plaincourault tree.

Pope Wasson, and this fevered, controversial figment popularly called “Allegro”, stole the limelight from soft-spoken and mild Graves.

Ruck wrote that (Pope) Wasson dissuaded Graves from writing any more than his ~83 pages (according to my inventory) about entheogen scholarship.

Robert Graves’ Writings About Mushrooms
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/robert-graves-writings-about-mushrooms/

I read Graves’ writing, saying that he stopped covering the topic of mushrooms, in order to protect his poetry book sales.  Graves’ Greek Myths book sold zillions of copies forever, and it talks about mushrooms in Greek religious myth, in the Foreward.  

Kicking Allegro Out of the Field of Entheogen Scholarship, to Save the Field

We should beware of defining a controverted scholarly field in terms of any one personality, as disastrously happened with Allegro.  

‘Allegro’ has come to mean a highly politicized idea, rather than a particular person who wrote a particular theory.

Allegro’s theory is an emphatically linguistic & (mouldering 19th C-type) anthropology theory — it’s not actually an entheogen-history theory.

Allegro’s book is not useful or relevant for entheogen history scholarship, and is actually harmful for the field, and should be considered an outlier, not properly within the field, as the field needs to be defined.

Cyberdisciple’s critical assessment of whether Allegro can be placed at all within the boundary of the field of entheogen history scholarship:

Addendum to Allegro article; How to accurately assess Allegro; quotations from Allegro’s introduction about philology and against history
Cyberdisciple, December 16, 2020
https://cyberdisciple.wordpress.com/2020/12/16/addendum-to-allegro-article-how-to-accurately-assess-allegro-quotations-from-allegros-introduction-about-philology-and-against-history/

See Also

https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/nav/#Entheogen-Scholarship — includes links – I copied a couple Nav sections to below, flagging recommended pages.

Entheogen Scholarship

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Author: egodeaththeory

http://egodeath.com

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