Direct hit! Emphatically vindicated!
In the spirituality shop, I again pick up Dale Pendell’s book – the TOC lists Amanita.
My reaction: let’s see if page 1 of the entry mentions that Amanita isn’t used.
Turn to page 1 of the section: sentence 1:
Amanita muscaria is the most famous entheogen in the world that nobody uses. It is the supreme symbol of all entheogenic religion: of secret cults and societies of initiates and whispered lost knowledge.”
Pendell’s book section’s intro 100% supports my claim – extremely so – that:
Amanita imagery never means Amanita, but always means Psilocybin.
Overthrow the Amanita Primacy axiom that mis-leads the field of entheogen scholarship, and overthrow the Moderate/Minimal entheogen theory of religion along with it.
Replace that by the Psilocybin Primacy axiom, along with the Radical Maximal entheogen theory of religion.
The field of entheogen scholarship, as Letcher Hatsis says, needs to stop being based on a soggy, muddled foundation of mythology, a token, a symbol: 🍄
The field is in the same sorry academic state as the academic field of the History of Western Esotericism was when the only game in town was Eranos religionism.
You cannot build scientific academic knowledge based on a foundation of mythology.
We must have sound, scientifically-based history: what Hanegraaff advocates, radical empiricism: what did the text authors actually mean, and when?
Though my own approach is not history, but rather, accurate interpretation of the referent of religious mythology, that referent being in the domain of Psilocybin eternalism experiencing, and the mental model transformation driven by that.
The Egodeath theory 