What’s There to Be Afraid Of? Identifying the Shadow Dragon Monster

Cybermonk, 6 am Saturday, November 30, 2024
Expanded 1:45 p.m. Saturday, November 29, 2025 (1 year later)

Crop by Michael Hoffman

Contents:

links work on desktop Edge/Chrome:

Dread ETCLOC: The Experience of the Threat of Catastrophic Loss of Control

2:05 p.m. November 29, 2025

Psychotomimetic: Psychosis-Type Peak Psychedelic Experiencing

1:21 p.m. November 29, 2025

God (Controller X), the pre-existing ground of being, the 4D block universe, can force the local control agent to will and think anything.

This is overwhelming and breaks the possibilism-reliant mind.

The mind needs possibilism-thinking, but that thinking is broken and threatened to be destroyed, when comprehending total vulnerability to the creator of all thoughts.

The same ultimate control source that gives the local control agent thoughts, also is experienced as the same source that gives harmful control agent/actors their thoughts.

Activism logic is destroyed or contradicted by the eternalism state of consciousness.

All future thoughts for the local control agent and all control agents, already are existing and forced upon everyone.

The mind can experience being controlled by the same Controller X that forces all other minds, too, to will and think harmful thoughts.

The Psychotic Psychedelic Peak State Can Break Control Stability

1:21 p.m. November 29, 2025

Angels and demons and armies and lions threaten personal control viable stability in the peak state, as depicted in the Great Canterbury Psalter.

Recommend Reading About the Psychotomimetic Divine Madness State Rather than Personally Experiencing It

1:21 p.m. November 29, 2025

Advaita (and maybe Neoplatonism or apophatic mysticism) is awful for saying that words cannot convey experience.

Words are able to convey experience of peak divine madness and the psychotomimetic state, to both describe the experience and to warn against personally ingesting psychedelics.

Merkavah (Merkabah) Mysticism in the Hekalot (palaces) literature prior to Kabbala has the main theme: a war of angels (divine messengers/ teachers) against mystics, such that the only thing saving mystics from experience of the threat of catastrophic loss of control is the mercy of God.

Metal Merkavah Mysticism: The Perfect Antidote to Fake Neo-Advaita Positive Unity (Sledge, 2025)

Motivation for this Page

section added Nov. 29, 2025 (1 year later)

Prevent evil future-me from out-radicaling me; define an extreme position that cannot be outdone.

Describe the experience of feeling local control agency as a helpless puppet that’s controlled by the same Controller X (the uncontrollable source of control-thoughts) that gives bad, harmful people their bad, harmful thoughts.

The personal, egoic mind shatters under this pressure, as warned in Merkavah mysticism: even the angels cannot withstand God’s radiation that burns up from the inside.

Warning – Black Sabbath

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W6wsH5717M

The lyrics are merely relationship, but song title in context is ominous per Metal. More eerie is later album, song Shock Wave. Or Metallica: For Whom the Bell Tolls.

List of Fears

What do people on Psilocybin have to fear? The four claws of the dragon:

helpless puppet unable to resist bad control thoughts coming from the hidden uncontrollable source of thoughts, made to look down a bad path of loss of control, can’t shield the eye of awareness from too clearly seeing the threat potential

experiencing the threat of catastrophic loss of control, being made to want and need to explore the vulnerability & susceptibility to sacrifice and cause to self-transgress

future control thoughts already exist frozen in timeless eternity, snake frozen in rock

Deja Vu vortex pulls you in, re-arriving here where you remembered the timeless incident where you received thoughts of loss of control

Image: Sages Pulled into Hellmouth – f101 Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Angel Harassing Army (Detail), f49, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Angel Harrassing Army, f49, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Christ Rescuing from Hellmouth, Golden Psalter

My page [not anchor section]:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/02/06/golden-munich-psalter-mushroom-trees/
Library source:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_08939/?sp=59

Image: Sacrifice of Isaac, Golden Psalter

https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/02/06/golden-munich-psalter-mushroom-trees/
Library source, zoomed:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_08939/?sp=29&r=-0.05,0.113,0.998,0.522,0

Image: Underworld Hellmouth, Golden Psalter

https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/02/06/golden-munich-psalter-mushroom-trees/

Image: Angels Harassing Over Net, f126, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Hellmouth with 3 Demons, f20, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Angel Harrassing over Hellmouth, f38, Great Canterbury Psalter

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10551125c/f11.item.zoom

Image: King Turned Upside Down, f190, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Youths Provoking Lion Threat, f60, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Fruitless Hell Tree, Golden Psalter

Features:

  • More branching on L than R, of tree

Image: Asp, Bestiary

Image: Apes, Bestiary

Image: Self-Threatening Psalter Reader, f134, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Self-Threatening Psalter Reader with White Light Sun Fire, f134, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Fool Receiving Mushrooms, f134, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Fool Receiving Mushrooms (Detail), f134, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: 2 Demons Pulling into Hellmouth, f102, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Rams in Hellmouth, f177, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Demolishioning Building, f47, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Furnace, f78, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Threatening Lion on Face, f34, Great Canterbury Psalter

Image: Angels Harrassing Above Hellmouth, f122, Great Canterbury Psalter

Letcher 4-Part Argument Won by 5th Part

The debate has 3 positions, not two:

  • Deniers of (SECRET) pilzbaum purposeful mushroom imagery. Panofsky, Wasson, Letcher, adult Hatsis, later Bennett, Ronald Huggins.
  • Secret Amanita Cult affirmers. Allegro, Ruck, Irvin 2006, J Rush, & almost everyone in entheogen scholarship.
  • Explicit Cubensis Mainstream affirmers – my position; & Brown if he would drop “secret” from book subtitle & end of 2019 article.

Letcher adds the concept of “hidden secret cult”.

I doubt my review said that, because that framing is alien to my thinking.

The pop field fixates on the “Secret Cult” premise, but that is not my paradigm or position/ assertion.

My copy of the book Shroom is an early UK printing import to U.S. I probably wrote an early review.

It was when reading Letcher’s book Shroom that it struck me: Who, ie what position, does he think he is arguing against?

Letcher argues against the “Secret” concept/ scenario, even more than “mushroom” premise/ proposal, while he conflates the two:

  • sheer mushroom use, regardless of conditions & identity groups.
  • specifically SECRET HIDDEN SUPPRESSED HERETICAL SECTS mushroom use.

My main feeling whike reading the book Shroom was that Letcher keeps slipping between those two conflated distinct positions/ assertions, conflating them.

  • “Bait and switch” fallacy
  • “motte and bailey” fallacy
  • “moving the goalposts” fallacy
  • straw-man argument
  • misrepresenting the opponent’s position.

Letcher’s book Shroom argues against & fixates specifically on the proposed existence of a SECRET mushroom CULT, conflating that with the sheer basic proposal of mushroom use, eg the non- secret use of mushrooms, which is my assertion.

Letcher’s phrase “Hoffman et al” conflates others’ Secret Amanita position with my Explicit Psilocybin position.

I am totally apathetic re: whether Christian use of mushrooms is framed as “secret” or a bounded, walled-off group characterized as a “cult”, “community”, “sect”, etc.

Such a postulated, limiting boundary does my proof no good, and causes blindness to evidence.

My motivation is to interpret myth as corroborating my core theory, that religious transformation is mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism; psychedelic eternalism; analogical psychedelic eternalism with dependent control.

Introducing a “Secret Group” barrier explanatory construct does nothing to assist my objective and is entirely irrelevant; I couldn’t care less.

Stop relying on the word ‘secret’. That word is on the block list.

The less we use such “boundary construction” words, the more entheogen scholarship will advance. As I proved.

https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2023/05/28/shroom-a-cultural-history-of-the-magic-mushroom-letcher-2006-uk/#The-4-Part-Letcher-Argument —

find “hoffman” in http://andy-letcher.blogspot.com/2016/06/shroom-ten-years-on.html?m=1 – quote for my “Cubensis-driven entheogen scholarship” article.

definitely Letcher makes this argument chain.

i can trump all his denials: i proved PEAK religious experiencing is depicted, not just any relig exp, thus proving for free all the intermediate points in Letcher’s chain by which Letcher hangs himself.

The problem with [reviewer Michael] Hoffman’s position is this, why is there no corroborating evidence? We have records detailing the most obscure heretical sects from the Middle Ages, why not the mushroom cult?

The rule is this. Not everything that looks like a mushroom in art is a mushroom. Not everything that is a mushroom is a magic mushroom. Just because it’s a magic mushroom doesn’t mean that it was used intentionally for its psychedelic effects. Just because it’s used intentionally, doesn’t mean that it’s used for religious purposes (here I recommend Steve Beyer’s excellent book, Singing to the Plants. In Mestizo shamanism, people do not take ayahuasca to have religious experiences – though that’s what we in the West do – they do so to get well. Very different). 

In the absence of other evidence, each link in the chain remains inferential only, and the parsimonious explanation is that we’re not looking at a secret, or suppressed Christian mushroom cult. If any evidence turns up, I will be the first to admit I was wrong.

In any case, I don’t set out to prove or disprove anything, merely to assess what evidence there is and to see which theories fit the best. That may be none or many.

By contrast, Hoffman et al. use an outdated methodology whereby they start with a premise, and then selectively cherrypick as much evidence to support it as possible. It was used by scholars such as J. G. Frazer, Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade, but the new historicism of the 1970s found it severely wanting. I take my lead from Ronald Hutton, who is the master of the new methodology, and I thoroughly recommend you read his Pagan Britain to see how it’s done.

BTW, I have absolutely no problem with people having religious, spiritual or mystical experiences under the influence of psychedelics. My problem is with the assumption that that is the motivating factor for all people at all times. It is patently not true of our time, where people take psychedelics for all manner of reasons, recreational, hedonistic (that is, for aesthetic or intellectual pleasure), occult, psychological, animistic, shamanistic etc etc. To project it onto the past is an act of colonialism, one that silences the many other voices that rarely get heard.

Andy Letcher

Denial of psilocybin Christianity is the height of colonialist silencing of artist psychonauts’ voices.

Why do the Deniers not care at all about good argumentation?

These are obvious objections that Deniers should have addressed, instead of losing the pilzbaum debate — if an actual 2-way debate were to occur.

The “Single Reason” fallacy

A false dichotomy: recreational vs. religious use of Psilocybin mushrooms.

The “Single Reason” fallacy: The assumption that a person has a single reason for ingesting Psilocybin.

Which purpose does this psilocybin session have? For healing, or for therapy, or for recreation, or for religious experiencing, or for mental transformation, or for metaprogramming, or for developmental maturation.

See Also

pending

Unknown's avatar

Author: egodeaththeory

http://egodeath.com

Leave a comment