Contents:
- Book Link
- My Book Review at Amazon
Book Link
Book:
Entheogens, Myth, and Human Consciousness
Carl Ruck, Mark Hoffman
http://amzn.com/1579511414
January 8, 2013
My Book Review at Amazon
Top reviews
Michael Hoffman
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3E82PDAXT9PT1/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00BSEQOPW
Reviewed on January 13, 2013
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5 out of 5 stars
Myth refers to entheogens & slight phenomenology of consciousness
“Entheogens, Myth & Human Consciousness” summarizes the Carl Ruck paradigm. This book is a short summary and survey of his work, of the books and articles in his school of thought, which includes Mark Hoffman, R. Gordon Wasson, Blaise Staples, Clark Heinrich, Jonathan Ott, and Jose Celdran. Ruck and Hoffman show that psychedelic entheogenic psychoactive visionary plants are the origin of religions and religion. Despite the word ‘Consciousness’ in the title, this book and the work of Ruck and his circle does not cover cognitive phenomenology.
Given that this book is a general survey and summary of Ruck’s work, I’m critiquing and commenting on his general approach: how Ruck’s coverage advances understanding, and what the limitations of that approach are. I won’t go into details here, such as some points Ruck makes about Wasson that are debatable.
It would be a mistake to focus on whether Ruck proves that religion and myth refer to entheogens. I axiomatically assume that priests and scholars agree with Ruck even if censorship artificially gives the appearance that scholars agree with the official entheogen-diminishing paradigm. Entheogen scholarship should, like Ruck, give little attention to the official, entheogen-diminishing view. This book reviews the 20th Century history of the reception of the Entheogen theory of religion. Ruck shows how Wasson told Robert Graves to self-censor Graves’ 1950s discovery of mushrooms as the foundation of Greek myth and initiation religion.
Ruck’s work, if extrapolated to the maximum, shows that religion comes strictly through visionary plants. This use of his work supports a simple coherent model of intense mystic experiencing. The theory-development work at hand is not to compel a change in the official dogmatic story of religion, but rather, to make a compelling, actual explanatory model of religion, given that religion is accessed through entheogens. Recognizing entheogens as Ruck does is only the starting point; we must not stop theorizing where Ruck stops.
As far as I’m concerned, the only scholars who matter are those, many scholars, who agree — silently or vocally — with Ruck, or at least who, under the reality of heavy censorship, ensure that their writing is compatible with Ruck’s entheogen theory. Ruck is certainly correct; actually he doesn’t go far enough in emphasizing that every religion or brand of transcendent knowledge originates from visionary plants. That aspect of Ruck’s thinking isn’t worth critiquing; it is the starting point or mere preliminary for a critique. The entheogen theory of religion is not controverted or in doubt, as far as I am concerned, as an entheogen theorist.
Rather, the necessary critique is: how well does Ruck explain the meaning of religious myth, given that all religion comes from visionary plants? Not very well; his explanation is a long way from satisfying meaning. Ruck’s approach is misleading in that it puts the main emphasis on the visionary plants instead of correctly putting main emphasis on specific cognitive experiential dynamics as the main referent which myth describes by analogy and metaphor. This book does not present a new kind of coverage of myth and cognitive phenomenology, as Benny Shanon‘s book does ( The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience ), and as my work focuses on.
The Ruck paradigm is that myth points to the sheer use of drug plants in religion, as if what is revealed in religious revelation and enlightenment is the sheer presence and the fact of use of the visionary plants in religion. But I have always treated entheogens as merely the threshold outside the area that needs theorizing, merely the starting point and given; given that visionary plants are the way that the mind accesses religion, what then, is revealed within the resulting cognitive state, after ingesting the sacrament? How does the mind structure its mental construct processing in the non-visionary and the visionary-plant states: what’s the difference?
What’s the difference in experiencing, thinking, feeling, sensation, and perception, in the non-visionary contrasted with the visionary plant state? Ruck and his school halt at the doorway, showing how religious experiencing is accessed, but not what the cognitive phenomenology are, that are accessed. The barely touches on the topic of “consciousness”, or cognitive phenomenology. Benny Shanon goes somewhat further past the doorway, as if Shanon has experience with the visionary plant state and Ruck does not. Ruck writes from an outsider, armchair-theoretical, non-experiential perspective: this book doesn’t cover entheogen-induced experiencing.
For example, Ruck frames the myth of the battle as the battle to get the visionary plant. But within the religious cognitive state that the visionary plant induces, battle occurs, but which you would hardly glean by reading Ruck. Ruck and his school are not useful within the mystic intense peak altered state; the explanation of myth halt at the threshold: his theory gives us the visionary plant, but doesn’t discuss what to do mentally with myth once the mind is within the visionary plant state.
After reading Clark Heinrich’s book Strange Fruit: Alchemy, Religion and Magical Foods: A Speculative History and Mark Hoffman’s Entheos journal issues, I gathered additional compelling evidence to define the simple extremist maximal position, that religion and the mystic state is and was always accessed through visionary plants. But my contribution to entheogen history scholarship is merely in support of my main focus, which is all on the “consciousness” aspect, the cognitive effects of the visionary plants, which is barely covered by Ruck, despite this book’s title.
Another author starting to build on Ruck’s work to go further than Ruck through the doorway into the altered state is Luke Myers, Gnostic Visions: Uncovering the Greatest Secret of the Ancient World, but again we there get more of a tour of mythic philosophy and metaphors but without resolving those metaphors into their ultimate, non-metaphorical referent in terms of describing cognitive phenomenology and the difference between mental construct processing in the non-visionary versus the visionary state of consciousness.
This book is a good survey and summary of the essential Ruck paradigm. Ruck’s work is not the final word on myth and entheogens, but is an essential intermediate building block, which gives us the fact that religion and religious myth comes from religious experiencing which comes from visionary plants. The end of the book states: “… there always seems to be something more to explore, just a little bit further along the way.” Ruck only shows that religious myth is generally concerned with the entheogen state of consciousness. But no details within that subject are provided: what are the cognitive phenomenology that occur within the entheogen-induced state of consciousness, and how are those cognitive phenomena experiential dynamics themselves described by myth?
Ruck’s paradigm has nothing to say to the person who is in the intense mystic cognitive state, or to describe to scientists what the person is experiencing; in the final assessment, his theory’s contribution is just to repeat “Religious myth refers to the use of entheogens.” This is the point of failure or petering out, of the Ruck paradigm; its boundary past which his map shows only “terra incognita” and “here be monsters”. Ruck’s map only shows the shoreline of the new land; his map doesn’t extend within the land that’s given after ingesting the plant and then turning attention beyond the plant.
Ruck’s paradigm mainly maps mythemes to the physical plants and the sheer fact that they are used, but only slightly maps mythemes to “consciousness”, that is, to the cognitive dynamics that result from visionary plants. His mapping of myth isn’t equipped and capable of describing the difference between the dynamic cognitive phenomena in the non-visionary state versus the dynamic cognitive phenomena in the visionary state.
Benny Shanon points the way significantly further here. Shanon is more truly based within the visionary state, providing a starting effort at describing how the visionary state works (after ingesting the plant then turning attention away from the plant itself) and how the visionary state contrasts with the non-visionary state.
I have found Carl Ruck’s work, including this book, to be valuable at showing that religious myth comes from visionary plants (though he doesn’t take that idea to the simple radical extreme of my maximal entheogen theory). I also found Rucks’ work valuable for providing an initial hypothesis of myth: he shows us a myth and explains how it refers to the visionary plant, and I then read his mapping and say: yes, so far as you go, that mytheme maps to visionary plants, but you are missing the more important, more ultimate, non-metaphorical mapping and meaning of that myth you have informed me of; ultimately referring to certain experiential dynamic phenomena about self, time, control, and fatedness.
- Benny Shanon asserts: myth refers to visionary-state cognitive phenomenology, whatever they might be.
- Ruck asserts: myth refers to the use of visionary plants, with whatever experiencing results from that.
- The book Gnostic Visions asserts: Esoteric myth refers to experiential Philosophy describing the altered-state experiencing, whatever it consists of.
- My approach is more specific: religious myth refers to the use of visionary plants to cause a specific mental model transformation from a particular non-visionary mode and mental model, to another particular visionary mode and mental model, of self, time, control, and fatedness.
Thus Ruck and Shanon provide a subset of entheogen-revealed knowledge: they are correct so far as they go, but Ruck is incorrect in putting primary emphasis on the sheer use of visionary plants instead of putting primary emphasis correctly on the particular cognitive dynamics that result from the plants after having taken the plants — Ruck’s theory is not particularly equipped to focus on describing how myth maps to cognitive dynamics, as Shanon rightly calls for but as Shanon himself is not adequately equipped for.
Ruck’s paradigm is a transitional bridge to support explaining how myth points beyond the visionary plants, to the specific mental dynamics that the plants produce, such as the threat of loss of control, the snake monster guarding the specific visionary knowledge the mind desires and is attracted to, and divine help and rescue from the threat of the monster that’s part of the package deal, forming a gateway or boundary crossing — as a specific cognitive dynamic regarding our mental model and mode of experiencing, of self, time, possibility, and personal control agency.
That’s what wrong with Ruck’s school, though he contributes an essential building block toward transcendent knowledge: he puts the main emphasis on mapping myth to visionary plants, when instead, the main emphasis is correctly put on mapping myth to the specific dynamics of personal control power and mental model transformation that result from visionary plants. Visionary plants are the entryway, or the welcome mat outside, not themselves the content of what’s revealed in the peak window of the intense mystic altered state.
Carl Ruck and Mark Hoffman are absolutely correct that religion comes from visionary plants and that myth (to some extent) refers to the use of visionary plants, as summarized in this book; that’s the only explanatory theory of religion worth committing to developing. But their emphasis is mistaken and limited, mis-structured, missing the mark, and misrepresenting what myth means to the mind within the resulting intense mystic altered state. Their work is useful as a building block in support of a proper, well-formed focus on identifying and clearly modelling the true structure and concern that myth describes, with plants as a mere given and starting point but not the heart of what myth ultimately refers to and describes.
— Michael Hoffman
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