Egodeath Yahoo Group – Digest 69: 2004-07-16

>>This act of faith fervently repenting/converting/turning-around of

consciousness, and actively emphatically “believing in God”, shown as King
David repenting and praying


This is also metaphorized as repenting from one’s previous polytheistic
idol-worship (per Islam, Jewish, and Christian religions) — “previous
polytheistic idol-worship” is a metaphor for believing in the delusion of
separate-self for oneself and for everyone; thinking of people in terms of
separate-selves, each person falsely conceived by the mind as a primary-level
control-agent, like many autonomous sovereign kings, when actually, each
person should be thought of as merely a *secondary*-level control-agent.

>Book:
>Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Illuminated Manuscripts
>Thomas Mathews, Roger Wieck
>http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0691037515
>June 1994

This book (as I recall) also has a fairly good mushroom tree in a bronze door,
same type as page 30 of Entheos issue #1, upper left. The mushroom cap is the
awning over the door that Abraham’s wife is holding open, and the right side
of the door is the mushroom stem. I missed the opportunity to copy this.
Caption is Abraham greeting the 3 angels – that scene is the upper half of the
door’s illustration.

This text file is automatically posted to the Egodeath Yahoo group every two
weeks.

The Egodeath Yahoo group is a newsletter or Weblog sent out by Michael Hoffman.


This Yahoo group covers the cybernetic theory of ego death and
ego transcendence, including:

o Nonreductionistic block-universe determinism/Fatedness, the closed
and preexisting future, tenseless time, free will as illusory, the
holographic universe, and predestination and Reformed theology.

o Cognitive science, mental construct processing, mental models,
ontological idealism, contemporary metaphysics of the continuant
self, cybernetic self-control, personal control agency, moral agency,
and self-government.

o Zen satori, short-path enlightenment, and Alan Watts;
transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber, and integral theory.

o Entheogens and psychedelic drugs, the Eleusinian mysteries and
cracking the allegorical code of the mystery religions, mythic
metaphor and allegorical encoding, the mystic altered state, mystic
and religious experiencing, visionary states, religious rapture, and
Acid Rock mysticism.

o Loss of control, self-control seizure, cognitive instability, and
psychosis and schizophrenia.


To post on these subjects, you can join the group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeathunmoderated
and then send email to:
egodeathunmoderated@yahoogroups.com


— Michael Hoffman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath
http://www.egodeath.com

Pictures of clear mushroom trees in Christian art, found by Michael Hoffman on
Thursday, July 15, 2004:

http://www.egodeath.com/christianmushroomtrees.htm

The potential routinization of finding allusions to visionary plants in
scholarly books about Western religion and Western esotericism

>—–Original Message—–
>From: Michael Hoffman
>Sent: Sunday, July 11, 2004 11:57 PM
>To: Egodeath Group
>Subject: [egodeath] Pace of scholars’ awareness of enth. th. relig.

>>…
>>A problem or question arises as I, as an entheogen scholar, look through all

these books and at a regular rate, discover hooks and evidence for the
entheogen origin and ongoing wellspring of religions, emphatically including
the Jewish and Christian religions along with the rest of Western
religion-related areas or traditions. There is sufficient evidence there; you
can be assured that every third book has some substantial clues.

>>What then to do with these clues, which are guaranteed to keep steadily

coming, perhaps at an increasing rate? Report and collect each of them? That,
for some purposed of entheogen theorizing, has diminishing returns in some
sense.

>>We can confidently predict the clues are there. According to the definition

of science as prediction, which I don’t particularly agree with, this can be
considered a confirmable prediction: the maximal entheogen theory of religion
predicts that if you look for entheogen references such as divine special
foods and ambrosias of immortality in scholarly books about Jewish roots of
Christianity, you will find confirmation: the roots of Christianity are
shamanic, are based on mystic states, and go hand in hand with ingesting
visionary plants.

>>Most modern scholars have not been looking for these clues, but the

prediction is that the clues forcefully manifest themselves and can be
perceived the moment you attempt to look for them.

>>…

Many books on Western esotericism have a page or two amounting to hooks for
the entheogen theory of religion-related domains. It’s almost a question of
“In this book, where is the standard passage implying entheogens?”, rather
than “Does this book have any pointers to entheogens?” Lately, you can assume
and take for granted as normal, that in any typical book on Western
esotericism or experiential religion, there is a page or two about
breathing-in sacred inspiration that is connected with an experience, or
ingesting sacred food or drink.

So the question now is, “What do we do with the fact that books on esotericism
normally have a page or two about ingesting sacred food or drink, anointing,
or inhaling spirit?” It so happens that many such passages are not far from
passages covering entheogens briefly and disparagingly. A fairly small and
easy change of emphasis and assumptions brings these books toward the truth,
that drugs are the ongoing origin of religion.


Some books from the past few days I found:

Drury — as I already pointed out, Neville Drury is one of the relatively
enlightened writers about magic and esotericism, as far as recognizing the
predominant relevance of psychoactive drugs to the history of religious
experiencing. For example, this book, appropriately, has ample tie-ins to
psychedelics:

Exploring the Labyrinth: Making Sense of the New Spirituality [also read as
“of the New Age”, per the author]
Nevill Drury
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0826411827
1999
Sample pages online. Many index entries for ‘psychedelics’.

Drury’s books I have read and mentioned before:

Inner Visions: Explorations in Magical Consciousness
Nevill Drury
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0140192832
1979

Magic and Witchcraft: From Shamanism to the Technopagans
Nevill Drury
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0500511403
2003

__________________________

From Ritual to Romance (about the Holy Grail)
Jessie Weston
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0486296806
Click “All Editions) to see both “Look Inside” and “Search Inside” pages
online.
1920
Chapters (sequential) — includes paragraphs about ‘holy meals’, Grail, and
Eucharist:
o The Secret of the Grail (part 1)
o The Secret of the Grail (part 2)
o Mithra and Attis


Most modern scholars are clueless about the entheogenic nature of sacred
eating and drinking — but the traditions they are studying and comparing were
heavily inspired and engendered from entheogens, and therefore the traditions
themselves put some emphasis on the sacred meals, and therefore, a reliable
common trait between Christianity and other traditions is this strikingly
familiar and same emphasis on sacred meals. As a result, the books by the
clueless modern scholars always remark on this common trait.

And recently, they also are struck by how similar, too, by the same token,
psychoactive drugs are. They notice, only through piecemeal connections, the
similarity between a few of these:

A. Last Supper
B. Agape love feast
C. Eucharist
D. Sacred meals in mystery-religions and Western esoteric traditions
E. Psychoactive drugs

But these scholars typically comment on C and D together, remarking on their
similarity but reducing it to a “spiritual communal meal”; and separately,
they take a couple seconds to diminish entheogens as a degenerated artificial
simulation of the mystic-state which is supposedly a result of generalized
Christian practice. The scholars *don’t* line up neatly side-by-side,
specifically, all these specific elements.

__________________________

The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art
Julius Evola
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0892814519
1971?

Pages ix-x, in the Foreward by H. T. Hansen, mentions that Evola studied with
a certain Indian guru Aiyar (Aiyan?) to learn a breathing technique to help
with ingesting special smoke or spiritual pneuma vapors — worded in a way as
to clearly and pretty definitely imply or insinuate that Evola was smoking a
psychoactive drug such as for example, cannabis with henbane.

133-137 — Evola discusses Greek use of Botania, psychoactive plants, as an
“artificial” inducer of ecstasy, then continues on to disparages drugs as
“artificial” — and in support of his view, quotes the earlier scholar ___,
who — ironically — puts actually an ambiguous and relatively positive view
of drugs, that drugs actually *are* helpful for inducing ecstatic
consciousness on the mere condition that drugs be combined with esoteric
study.

The quoted sentence from the earlier scholar is something like “Drugs by
themselves are insufficient; their potential is dependent upon having
perennial study as well.” That sentence is tricky, sort of a glass-half-empty
statement that implies that the glass is half full. It logically implies,
intentionally or not, that ecstasy is readily available to anyone by combining
psychoactives with Traditional esoteric study, nullifying the idea of certain
people possessing superior capability of accessing “ecstatic states”.

This is a fairly good and fairly concise book about esoteric alchemy, partly
because it does not use modern psychology/psychotherapy concepts.


Generally, during the 20th Century, the attitudinal arrow was pointed from
weaker to gradually stronger suggestions of psychoactives as authentic in
esotericism/religion. There has been a stream distinctly moving toward the
entheogen theory:

o Hashish was available via mail order in the context of circa 1880
occult-style Theosophy.

o Weston (1920) doesn’t appear to hint that he ever considers the role or
“simulation-ability” of psychoactive plants. One must guess what Weston
thought or would have thought about the entheogen theory of esotericism and
religion.

o Crowley in the early 20th Century wrote about drugs in the context of
magic-religion.

o Evola (1971?) comments on psychoactives, in a diminishing and disparaging
way, in the context of esotericism.

o Manly Hall’s 1923(?) book Hidden Wisdom of the Ages positively mentions
plausible use of psychoactive plants in the mystery religions.

o Drury’s books (e.g. 1999) somewhat integrate psychoactives positively into
esotericism.

o Heinrich’s book Strange Fruit/Magic Mushrooms (1995) tends more toward
strongly in the direction integrating psychoactives positively into the roots
and history of all esotericism, especially if you choose to interpret his book
as implicitly advocating the maximal entheogen theory of religion.

This book is a particularly representative example of the spiritual
reductionism and loss of valuable content that results when the perspective of
analytical psychology is forced upon the subject-matter of Western
esotericism. If you attempt to explain the real meaning of Western
esotericism by adhering to and applying, with emphasis, the analytical
psychology conceptual system of analytical psychology, a grand flattening
occurs: the ecstasy is lost, leaving just the word ecstasy.

The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino
Thomas Moore
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0940262282
1990

Reviewer Courtney Field wrote: 3 stars out of 5. “Could have been real
good… Marsilio Ficino was an astrologer and mystic … Thomas More seems so
deeply uncomfortable with this singular fact and … attempts … to cram all
of Ficino’s depth into the little box of analytical psychology …
Psychological insight can be of incalculable value in making mystical and
esoteric treatises of the past more comprehensible to the modern reader but
these are things which speak to man’s heart and guts and soul… not just his
psyche … by contorting Ficino into the proto-psychologist of the renaissance
you end up disavowing the greater part of his genius …”


The paradigm-lens of Analytic Psychology tends to do about as much damage as
help in studying ecstatic experiential insight; it provides 50% distortion.
The fundamental problem is that analytic psychology is based in the ordinary
state of consciousness, so when used as the predominant or sole interpretive
lens/perspective, it forces ecstatic-based subject matters into the mold of
the ordinary state: we end up with the all-too-familiar weird grotesque
chimera of esotericism expressed in the conceptual categories of
ordinary-state psychology, or the ordinary state of consciousness.

When I looked through this book, it was striking how even the most
ecstasy-focused passages seemed to completely miss the spirit and gist — it
managed to discuss ecstatic experiential religion in such a way as to destroy
all traces of ecstatic experiential religion; the author read as one who
clearly had not the slightest grasp of direct religious experiencing — not
even a *theoretical* grasp of it.

Nearly all scholarly books are off-base and uninformed, but usually some
glimmering of light usually manages nonetheless to accidentally force its way
through the modern shield of ordinary-state denseness. Not so with Moore: his
modern ordinary-state-based interpretive paradigm is so completely dense, the
primary ecstatic-state light is totally blocked. Never have I seen such a
perfectly completely flat and lifeless application of the Psychology paradigm
to the esoteric experiential subject-domain.

Another writer who seems to equally smother-over his subject matter in
essential incomprehension is Jacob Needleman, such as his book or cassette
set, Lost Christianity. I even disliked his survey of Philosophy, even before
I connected Philosophy with altered-state experiential-based esotericism.

As always, first I discover in my feelings that an author is a dry canal whose
every book is dull and lifeless, and later, after much critical analysis, only
then is it possible for me to state exactly and specifically, with example
sentences, what is flawed in the author’s paradigm or assumption-set he
operates within.

That is how I zeroed in on the tremendously rampant and serious fallacy,
perhaps the main fallacy of the 20th Century or modern rationalistic
Enlightenment era — the ordinary-state fallacy, which assumes that
Philosophy, Religion, Myth, and Psychology are to be understood from an
interpretive framework that is based in the ordinary state of consciousness —
actually this fallacy is directly intimately interlocked with the “two states
of consciousness: waking and dreaming” fallacy.

Charles Tart makes this point, but less strongly, in advocating
“state-specific sciences”. I don’t think he successfully recognizes the
primacy of the connection between myth and the entheogen state. You can read
Tart’s book States of Consciousness without coming away enlightened with the
key principle that myth is based in the visionary-plant state.

The Analytic Psychology perspective is a poison that forcefully destroys the
ecstatic experiential realm, practically as bad as Freud “explaining” or
explaining-away religion as some infantile, literally sex-fixated
parent-fantasy.

I am curious enough about this to study his book further, in terms of sentence
construction and word-choice — I could formally identify some fallacies of
assumptions he is making, that results in such “flat and lifeless” portrayals
of what ought to be the most bright and shining sections in his study. Such a
clearly flattening book could provide the easiest, starkest example of the
usual mistakes that are made in over-application of the Analytic Psychology
perspective.

Also helpful toward such clarification of what’s wrong with the Analytical
Psychology as an approach to the higher potentials of the psyche, now in a
more positive sense, might be James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, which I
found in the Jung section (Analytic Psychology) of the esoteric bookstore.

Re-Visioning Psychology
James Hillman
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0060905638

Interestingly, one reviewer found about this book through Thomas Moore, who
reads like he has no feeling at all for the ecstatic experiential state.

Reviewer Edwardson Tan wrote: “… This is one of the few 20th century books I
have come across that does indeed deal with psyche-ology–understanding the
soul. … Many may be repelled by Hillman’s seeming anachronistic and
animistic return to gods, daimons, and personifications; as if taking the
field of psychology on a regress. Hillman may even seem to some as living in a
fantasy world concocted out of what he’s read between Plato and the
Renaissance period.”

I generally hate Archetypal Psychology and Analytic Psychology — the typical
Jung-oriented studies of Esotericism — but Hillman at least attempts to
present a theoretical argument and systematization of this approach done
right: expansively and non-reductionistically. A modern attempt to do better
than the esotericists, if it attempts to replace and surpass their forms and
verbal constructs, faces a difficult challenge.

My theory of transcendent knowledge (centered on determinism, self-control
cybernetics, and entheogens) should succeed, as a scheme that surpasses and in
some sense replaces the previous myth-religion systems, where Modern
Psychology and Symbolism has failed. Because my theory *is* grounded in the
altered state — unlike “Psychology” — my attempt works where the previous
attempts have failed.

The first draft of my article, 1988, before I settled on “The Cybernetic
Theory of Ego Transcendence”, was titled “A Reinterpretation of some Key
Tenets of the Current Paradigm of Ego Transcendence”. The reinterpretation
involved, most distinctively, focusing on no-free-will and on “the function of
the disintegrated altered state to allow restructuring of menal functioning”.
An alternate title penciled in is “Ego Transcendence as the Acquisition of an
Alternative Conceptual System”.

J. J. wrote:

>>Stylized renditions of trees with mushroom caps speak more loudly than

simply including a few shrooms scattered about on the ground. The oddness of
the mushroom tree draws attention to it. It’s there for a reason.

J. J. wrote:

>>I have been trying to find online that word “scroll” in the book of

Revelations to see if it could be translated ‘book’ or ‘codex’ the way the
pages of a book resemble mushroom gills.


I doubt the metaphor of mushroom gills = pages was popular, but as a possibly
new/alternative, it’s legit: there is an isomorphism. There are degrees of
metaphorical/isomorphic validity; some orthodox Old/New Testament claimed
parallels were not the most legit. Certainly as Heinrich states, an Amanita
cap was metaphorized as a scroll with strange divine writing on the top
surface.

>>I read Allegro’s book a few years ago. I wasn’t ready for it. I could have

accepted the notion of Jesus and his followers eating mushrooms, but the idea
that the whole Jesus story was code for a mushroom was too much.


There are flaws of motive and mood in Allegro’s theory, such as the idea that
the Christians had to hide the mushroom to keep it secret from some bad guys.
That’s a misinterpretation of motive and conventions.

The entheogen is always somewhat hidden in religious scripture, and sometimes
to keep it secret from bad guys, but that’s never the main reason for
obfuscating and alluding; more a main reason is convention, and an attempt to
match the natural original cluelessness followed by revealing. The mind
innately hides then reveals the truth about agency, the entheogen is the
revealer, so we should initially hide the entheogen *in plain sight*, then
reveal it upon the right reading/recognition.

>>About the body and blood, the bread and the wine. Did they combine Amanita

with a lysergic acid [ergot strain] punch?


It is unlikely that the Amanita was used alone as a sole psychoactive in early
and later Christianity. More likely, the same blends that were used in
symposiums and in mystery religions and in the Jewish Passover meal were used
in the Christian religion.

o Early Christianity adopted the Amanita as the symbol for psychoactive
plants in general

o Dionysus thematically adopted the grape as emblem (Ruck/Staples’ Greek Myth
book) for psychoactive plants in general

o Grassroots anti-hierarchy Catholics in the Middle Ages chose to adopt
Virgin Mary (Queen of Heaven, Theotokos, Mother of God, God-Bearer, Star of
the Sea) with the Datura-lily as the emblem for magical/psychoactive plants in
general

Choosing to venerate the symbol of the Datura-lily rather than the Amanita and
mushroom-tree was a political move. The literalist and single-plant fallacy
applies to Dionysus’ grape wine, Jesus’ Amanita, and Virgin Mary’s
Datura-lily: in no case of this type can we rightly read the plant as
representing a single plant, nor emphasizing the plant shown. Per the
multi-plant entheogen theory, we must assume that the grape, Amanita, and
Datura-lily all represent the exact same thing, the same range and recipes of
psychoactive plant combinations.

We could see the same in the lotus flower. This could include a strain of
ergot per Eleusis. I dislike how Eleusis is always singled out as though it
used a distinctive elixir/tincture/potion/sacrament and the other mystery
religions used none.

‘Mixed wine’ cannot be rightly read as ‘wine and water’ in symposium “drinking
parties” and in the Jewish Passover meal. These all meant the same recipes
and we’d be better off, as a convenient mental shorthand, picturing these
plant symbols all as a recipe such as opium + cannabis + henbane + psilocybin
mushroom.

Same with alchemy: there’s reason to doubt that the indications of Amanita
literally meant focus on use of the Amanita; more likely, knowledge about the
potential of Amanita was a symbol or type serving to represent all
psychoactives, especially whatever plants and recipes/combinations were most
standard and common. Alchemists’ knowledge of Amanita doesn’t really imply
choosing the Amanita over other psychoactive plants.

The long article “Conjuring Eden” in Entheos issue 1 (
http://www.entheomedia.org/Issue%20one.htm ) centers on mushroom trees in
Christian art. This article takes every opportunity to point out Amanita, and
I haven’t yet found a mention of any plant species other than that one,
although James Arthur elsewhere puts a very different spin on the illustration
of Jesus blessing the 4 different plants.

Something elusive bugs me about the writing style used in Dan Russell’s books
and the writings of Ruck/Staples: there is never a plain, explicit abstract
stating the theory being put forward. They paint and paint, but don’t present
dry milestones describing the thesis and the argument development. So you
have to extract the *implicit* theory and argument progression from each
chapter. This article seems implicitly to be advocating a theory that Amanita
was the entheogen used throughout early religion, which is an incorrect
theory.

In his book, Arthur rightly describes the 4 different plants as opium,
cannabis, psilocybin/cubensis, and Amanita, thus clearly supporting the
multi-plant entheogen theory of religion. When non-Amanita mushrooms are
shown in the present article, the authors always fall back to the generic term
“fungus” or “mushroom”, but every chance they get, they write of the Amanita.

Yes, it’s true that the Amanita is the predominant plant chosen to represent
the rest, but it is not the case that the Christians *only* and exclusively
reverenced the Amanita: there are clearly other species of plant and mushroom
shown in the iconography as well.

This scholarship of Ruck/Staples/Mark Hoffman is exclusively over-promoting
the Amanita in such a way as to attempt to restrict the entheogen theory to a
single plant — a good example of how entheogen scholars are self-defeating
and argue against their own position, resulting in the merely liberal view
that religion usually didn’t involve entheogens — the minimal entheogen
theory of religion.

Then another comes along making the same mistake but implicitly, attempting to
exclusively pick a different plant instead: Datura (Jose Celdran), ergot (Dan
Merkur), cannabis (Chris Bennette, Robert Thorne). They *claim* that they
support the multi-plant entheogen theory of religion, but their emphasis
betrays that their thinking is shot through with the single-plant assumption;
they let their attention to the one plant blind them to the importance of all
the many other plants reflected in the iconography and metaphors.

Allegro even attempts to collapse cannabis (assassins) and mandrake into the
Amanita. Undeniably, something is amiss, stemming from a fallacy in the
assumption-set these scholars are usually using: their normal paradigm they
keep falling back to is the single-plant theory of entheogens in religion, a
mistake that is not fixed by merely occasionally showing a picture of another
species to support the general proposition that some psychoactive was used but
ultimately they show just to prop up their favored species.

Their thinking is necessarily inconsistent and waffling and incoherent because
they are operating from an unreal paradigm assumption-set, the single-plant
theory, while affixing just as an afterthought, other species — rather than
properly integrating the clear fact of multiple species in such a way as to
produce a significant paradigm shift from the minimal, single-plant entheogen
theory of religion, to the maximal, multi-plant entheogen theory of religion.

Despite claims to support multiple plants, in fact what we have today is no
entheogen theory of religion, but rather, a loose, contentious,
winner-take-all, set of competing and mutually exclusive single-plant bids for
predominance, a set of competing minimal-entheogen single-plant theories:

o The cannabis theory of religion (in effect, promoted by Chris Bennett
against the competitors)

o The ergot theory of religion (in effect, promoted by Dan Russell against
the competitors)

o The Amanita theory of religion (in effect, promoted by Ruck/Staples against
the competitors)

o The Datura theory of religion (in effect, promoted by Celdran against the
competitors)

o The cubensis theory of religion (in effect, promoted by McKenna against the
competitors)


These have not really been *integrated* together into a general, multi-plant
entheogen theory of religion, but that is what is needed. There is certainly
and definitely a single-plant fallacy now reigning, choking, restricting the
entheogen theory. Only when the scholars get over this fallacy can the
entheogen theory of religion blossom to manifest its fuller power. This is
part of the often hostile, overcompetitive spirit that sets these scholars
against each other.

Ott, Ratsch, and I adhere to a distinctly more maximal, radical paradigm than
the other scholars (I try to explicitly and firmly define it and take it all
the way). The Radical entheogen paradigm competes against all those
single-plant advocates in an attempt to jump far forward with a more powerful
and muscular, forceful theory, which I know conflicts with the predominant
current alignment of thinking among these scholars so far.

The single-plant fallacy is held to a greater or lesser degree by all the
scholars; they can’t help it because that assumption is a manifestation that
is just one part of the noxious general ‘minimal entheogen theory of religion’
that the scholars are unconsciously advocating so that they are restricting
and holding themselves back at the same time they think they are advancing and
promoting their cause: the problem is that they keep conceptualizing their
cause as “advocating and advancing the cannabis theory of religion” or
“Amanita theory of religion”.

I say forget cannabis! Forget Amanita! Forget ergot! Quit marrying one
species and using it as a club to refute, defeat, and block the other
single-species advocates! That strategic self-defeating error is the
ruination of the *general*, *multi-plant* entheogen theory.

You ought to love entheogens and fall out of love with your pet species, quit
trying to be the savior by simplistically bringing just a single species
forward. We need not *that* kind of simplicity, but rather, the superior
simplicity to be had in the general thesis that psychoactive plants are the
ongoing wellspring of religion.

What is the goal? The goal is not a single species; the goal is not some
minimal theory; the goal is psychoactives throughout the history of
religion-related fields. Yes, this can entail special focus on a single
species, but only if that focus is emphatically positioned in your own
thinking as merely one instance, one example supporting the multi-plant
paradigm.

>Then another comes along making the same mistake but implicitly, attempting

to exclusively pick a different plant instead: Datura (Jose Celdran), ergot
(Dan Merkur), cannabis (Chris Bennett, Robert Thorne).

>…
>o The ergot theory of religion (in effect, promoted by Dan Russell against

the competitors)


Correction: Dan Merkur

>>Ott, Ratsch, and I adhere to a distinctly more maximal, radical paradigm

than
the other scholars (I try to explicitly and firmly define it and take it all
the way). The Radical entheogen paradigm competes against all those
single-plant advocates in an attempt to jump far forward with a more powerful
and muscular, forceful theory, which I know conflicts with the predominant
current alignment of thinking among these scholars so far.

>>…
>>The single-plant fallacy is held to a greater or lesser degree by all the

scholars; they can’t help it because that assumption is a manifestatio


It is easy to identify where each scholar can be placed on a spectrum from the
single-plant assumption to the multi-plant assumption. Each scholar seems to
be aligned either with a single particular plant, or with the entire set of
plants, as a background assumption.

Ruck/Staples — Amanita to the near-exclusion of others
Bennett — Cannabis (occassional ack. others)
Heinrich – Amanita, some ergot
Arthur – Amanita, occassionally ack. others
…
Ott — full pharmacopaeia
Ratsch — full pharmacopaeia


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience. The essence, paradigm, origin, and fountainhead of religion is
the use of visionary plants to routinely trigger the intense mystic altered
state, producing loose cognitive association binding, which then produces an
experience of frozen block-universe determinism with a single, pre-existing,
ever-existing future. The return of the ordinary state of consciousness is
allegorized as a transcendence of Necessity or cosmic determinism. Myth
describes this mystic-state experience. Initiation is classically a series of
some 8 visionary-plant sessions, interspersed with study of perennial
philosophy. Most religion is a distortion, corruption, literalization, and
cooptation of this standard initiation system.

>>Then another comes along making the same mistake but implicitly, attempting

to exclusively pick a different plant instead: Datura (Jose Celdran),


I haven’t studied Celdran enough to claim he implicitly advocates Datura as
the lone psychoactive in Christianity. I just include him here for his
interesting key article in issue#2 revealing Datura in Christian art; he
brings another plant into the picture which ought to be taken as shattering
the current single-plant paradigm of Christian entheogens (“Amanita was the
Christian plant”) or Merkur’s competing single-plant paradigm (“ergot was the
Jewish/Christian plant”).

My criticism of the single-plant fallacy first came clearly into view when
reading the Datura-lily article — not because the Datura article committed
the single-plant fallacy (I suppose it doesn’t), but rather, because that
article implies, whether the single-plant advocates realize it or not, that
something is off-base in the predominant single-plant assumption of entheogens
in Christianity.

If Datura was a major popular Christian entheogen throughout the Middle Ages,
this clearly shatters the single-plant theory, casting a pox on both houses:
Ruck/Staples’ Amanita-only theory and Merkur’s competing ergot-only theory.

Most strangely, Celdran doesn’t view his revelation of the presence of Datura
in Christian art as a demonstration of the maximal entheogen theory
(Christianity always used psychoactive plants): he treats it more like proof
that entheogens were very rare throughout Christian history (the hiddenness of
the Datura in art is one more example of how Christianity was set against
psychoactives and wholly alienated from all psychoactive plants).

I read his article as a celebration of the victory of the maximal entheogen
theory (entheogens were present and popular throughout Christian history),
whereas he sees it as proof that entheogens were almost wholly *absent* from
Christian history.

“But didn’t the church officials insist that their placebo sacrament was the
only valid version, and psychoactives were demonic?”

*Officially* they did so. But it’s easy to see their motives for obscuring
the actually psychoactive nature of the Eucharist. If they were to explicitly
admit what they knew full well, that the real Eucharist has always been
psychoactive visionary plants, they’d instantly lose their financially
profitable claim to monopoly, to exclusive control of salvation. Supposedly
the Spaniards in Central America were shocked by the use of peyote and
mushrooms as the Eucharist — I doubt that view; that view is a late-modern
gullible projection.

Those bishops knew the truth but simply did the usual: denying what they knew
to be true, that the Eucharist was simply psychoactive plants, available for
free to anyone, obviating the enforced and falsely legitimated services of the
bishops in their job of performing the Mass of transubstantiation.

If we have to choose between “the bishops were to stupid to realize the
Eucharist was visionary plants” versus “the bishops were too evil to admit
that the Eucharist was visionary plants”, we should choose the latter.

In studying mythemes and mystic schemes before the Enlightenment, it is
striking how central and standard Ptolemaic earth-centered cosmology is, as a
clear schematic reference system. In Western esotericism, the standard
triumvirate of esoteric thematic systems is magic, alchemy, and astrology.

Of these esoteric thematic areas, astrology clearly serves as the reliable
structured backbone, into which were tied countless ideas such as lower and
divine kingship, inferior and superior Aeons, lower and higher Aeons/realms,
earlier and later Aeons/eras, demons and angels, earthly light and divine
light, impurity and purification, underworld and divine world, and so on.

When investigating whether Jesus was purely mythic-only, and revising
Christian origins, it is required that we *recognize* where words were framed
against the implicit shared cultural ideas of earth-centered cosmology, which
was inherently a mystic-metaphorical scheme. Failure to recognize references
to this standard mystic cosmology when reading early Christian-related texts
and art would amount to failure to perceive and recognize the basic cultural
context of Christian origins, and is bound to result in misreading or an
incomplete reading.

Modern scholars often don’t bring Ptolemaic mystic cosmology into their
reading, but need to. The recognized fact that the Jesus figure was conceived
often in terms of the standard earth-centered mystic cosmology does not
constitute proof that Jesus was strictly, solely, exclusively mythic — but
understanding the basic earth-centered mystic cosmological system it is
required in order to be able to basically read and understand the texts, and
understand how the early Christian thinking understood the mystic aspects of
the Jesus figure.

When asking whether Jesus was only mythic, the most elementary ability
required is the ability to read the mythic aspects of the accounts of the
Jesus figure as the ancient or pre-Enlightenment Western spiritual thinking
read them. Otherwise, when moderns ask “Was Jesus only mythic?”, they would
not even be in the right ballpark to really begin asking the question and
investigating what ideational components the myth consisted of for its
audience.

An attempt to evaluate Christian origins and context that lacks comprehension
of astral ascent mysticism (= Ptolemaic cosmology) can’t possibly get far, and
is bound to founder upon encountering tie-ins to this standardized mystic
cosmology, which is a truly key part of the cultural context of early
Christian thinking. The Ptolemaic cosmology is shown in diagrams in countless
books about Hermeticism, alchemy, astrology, Zodiac, and Western esotericism.

Although this system is Earth-centric, in a way, the sphere of the fixed stars
is truly most central within the dramatic saga of astral ascent: it is the
central climactic reference point: reaching the state of realizing heimarmene,
then transcending it. Luther Martin’s book Hellenistic Religion serves to
point out the centrality of grappling with heimarmene to the mystery
religions.

Hellenistic Religions: An Introduction
Luther Martin
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/019504391X

In the earth-centric mystic cosmology, all stars are held to be the same
distance from the Earth, forming a sphere, which we can then talk of
travelling beyond or outside of — in contrast to today’s non-centered
cosmology, in which space is filled with widely distributed stars not arranged
in a sphere; we can travel among the stars but it is nearly meaningless to
talk of travelling “beyond the stars”, unless we have in mind travelling so
far so fast, as through a wormhole dumping out beyond the farthest star, we go
farther than the big bang-propelled expanding clump of star-matter.

We need to be much more careful and avoid talking too casually about aliens
*from* the stars, or ascending *to the starry heavens*, or divinity residing
*in the stars* — because the stars were held to be merely the outer eggshell
of the lower world, a shell that was only slightly divine; divinity was held
to be located specifically *outside* and *beyond* the stars, not *in* the
stars or *from* the stars.

Adherents to the earth-centered mystic cosmology would read our supposedly
elevated expressions as a monstrous confused worship of the lower realm as
though it were the higher realm: the stars defined the realm, the
heimarmene-governed prison, from which one desires to escape and be freed and
released — the very opposite of how modern thinking conceives of the stars as
emancipation from the world. For the pre-moderns, the stars *are* “the
world”, and are the outer boundary precisely defining what “the world” is.

Earth-centered cosmology was a cosmology that existed for the purpose of
postulating a realm outside and beyond the stars; its very existence, purpose,
and goal was to provide an *alternative* to the stars — the opposite of our
assumption that the stars are the goal.

The modern spirituality (such as 1970s) which includes the non-centered
cosmology tends to consider the Earth the problem and starting point, and the
stars the solution and goal; whereas the pre-modern spirituality which
centrally included the Earth-centered cosmology considered the realm of the
stars as the problem and somewhat of a starting point, with the heavens beyond
the sphere of the stars as the solution and goal.

So our modern concept of Heaven is hazy in location: before the Enlightenment,
when the earth-centered cosmology was more popular and respected than the
sun-centered cosmology, Heaven used to have its clear place: it was precisely
located and defined as the realm beyond and outside of the sphere of the fixed
stars, outside the kingdom-realm ruled by Heimarmene (Fate, Necessity, cosmic
determinism, astral determinism).

Here is my most simplified representation:

Divine heavens = transcendence of heimarmene
Fixed stars = heimarmene/fate/cosmic determinism
Earth and planets = ignorance of heimarmene

Here is my somewhat simplified representation:

Divine heavens
Fixed stars
Slow planets
Sun
Fast planets
Moon
Earth
Underworld

Here is the full system, though more details can be added:

Unknowable god

Third heaven
Second heaven
First heaven

Fixed stars

Saturn
Jupiter
Mars

Sun

Venus
Mercury
Moon

Fire
Air

Earth

Water
Underworld


The winds were apparently important too, somewhere in this system in some
transcendent way. Outside the sphere of the fixed stars is supernal light and
supernal winds.

The moon was sometimes associated with descent, and the sun with ascent, as in
the article “At the Seizure of the Moon: The Absence of the Moon in the
Mithras Liturgy” in the book Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and
Late Antique World.

Schemes of descent and ascent, as described in Freke & Gandy’s book Jesus and
the Goddess, were framed in reference to this Ptolemaic mystic reference
system. There are multiple distinct yet commonly related schemes of descent
and ascent. One main theme is the mystic-experiencing series of:

1. Start from earth.
2. Ascend, as a self-willing autonomous agent, to poke head through the sphere
of fixed stars into the heavens.
3. Cast out violently from the heavens, as one who is currently too impure.
4. Thrown down to the underworld prison.
5. Cry out for help.
6. Lifted up by divine helping powers, not primarily one’s own will-propelled
power, up once again to the heavens above the fixed stars, now purified and
divinized — though the mortal portion of one’s psyche remains down in the
underworld.

Fragments of this scheme are clearly and provably present throughout the books
on Western esotericism, but the latter systematization is not yet laid out
clearly in the books. Instead, the following system is laid out fairly
clearly in books about Gnosticism:

1. Start from heavens.
2. The Fall: Descend through the spheres to earth.
3. Re-ascend to heavenly home.

Both of these numbered schemes are presented against the Ptolemaic backdrop
and can therefore largely be considered equivalent.

All sorts of mythemes were tied into the earth-centered mystic cosmology, such
as virtually a doctrine of two crowns: the lower, inferior, mortal kingly
crown the person falsely wears prior to initiation, and the higher,
imperishable divine kingly crown the person wears after initiation; we must
sacrifice and reject the lower king aspect of the psyche, to allow the higher
king aspect of the psyche to manifest. Jesus dies as rebel king of the Jews
on the cross, but then ascends to the heavens, by tearing through the sphere
of the fixed stars, to reign in the midst of the divine throne of God.

In Mithraism, the initiate rejects a crown, and is eventually crowned upon
completion/perfection/immortalization: the initial crown they reject is the
lower, false crown of personal autonomous sovereignty; the later crown they
accept is the higher, true, divinized crown which includes the understanding
that personal autonomous sovereignty is essentially illusory and only a lower,
secondary level of steersmanship (kingship, kubernetes, power of governing,
charioteer).

Isis (who became Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, Mother of God,
Theotokos, God-bearer/God-birther), like the Jewish and Christian God and like
Mithras, was held to be super-naturally independent of heimarmene, independent
of the secret, invisible (but mystically revealed) prison of cosmic
determinism, and actually reigning over that realm of the Fates.

Divinity was held to reside outside the sphere of the fixed stars, as
described in the discussion of Isis’ power over Fate and power of bringing the
initiate into and through the series of initiations, in Apuleius’ ancient
comic/mystic novel The Golden Ass: The Transformations of Lucius. See Nicole
Denzey’s article “A New Star on the Horizon: Astral Christologies and Stellar
Debates in Early Christian Discourse” in the book Prayer, Magic, and the
Stars.

Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World
Scott Noegel, Joel Walker, Brannon Wheeler (editors)
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0271022582

Ancient Astrology (Sciences of Antiquity Series)
Tamsyn Barton
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0415110297
Shows how heimarmene, Fate, or cosmic determinism was the central idea of
astrology, and that divine rulers were held to be destined by heimarmene to
rule over heimarmene and over the determinism-controlled world.

This elementary and basic comprehension of standard pre-Enlightenment,
earth-centered mystic cosmology is required, to enable reading and
understanding the writings about Jesus, and therefore allows intelligently and
appropriately addressing the question against its actual assumed cultural
backdrop and context for the intended audience of the writings, of whether
Jesus was strictly and exclusively such a mythic figure, or whether he was
both a mythic figure and a single uniquely identifiable historical individual
who actually existed in a meaningful sense (as opposed to being merely a
generalization of a type of several actual individuals).

For comparison, imagine if the late modern era had a fairly standardized
systematic scheme of expressing ideas about divinely transcending determinism
in the mystic state of consciousness, expressed in terms of black holes, outer
space exploration, quantum mechanics, the big bang, time travel, and
higher-dimensional voyaging. A clear example of this is the Heavy Rock song
Cygnus X-I, by a mysticism-oriented lyricist, about travelling to and being
pulled into a black hole, losing control, and yet continuing to live but in a
changed form — then picture this space traveller as the way-shower and
transcendent rescuer/redeemer of those who follow, repeating that journey.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22cygnus+x-1%22+lyrics (to beware of scumware
installing itself, I click “Cached”)

Another lyric example of modern mystic cosmological-voyaging poetry is the
song Space Oddity, in which the astronaut — star-traveller — ingests pills
and dons a helmet, is sent off from ground control with God’s love, counts
down to blast-off, daringly leaves the space capsule, steps through the door,
floats peculiarly, sees the stars differently, travels far above the
world/moon/womb,
sees the planet earth as blue (depressed? through/finished?), the astronaut is
helpless, his circuit dies and something seems to be wrong.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22space+oddity%22+lyrics (to beware of
scumware installing itself, I click “Cached”)

Now imagine such a non-centered space-travel system, conception, and focus as
the taken-for-granted backdrop and cultural context of shared, assumed
meaning, and imagine a new religion that seeks to put together a modified
version of many existing religious and philosophical components that were all
tied into this shared scheme of understanding. This gives some idea of how
central the earth-centered mystic cosmology is throughout the early
Christian-related texts: understanding and recognizing allusions to this
cosmology is a matter of basic literacy for being able to read early
Christian-era writings.

The cover of the Dover printing of Franz Cumont’s book Astrology and Religion
shows yet another billowing cape behind the head. Other instances I recall
are:
o Mithras on the cover of Entheos Issue #3
o Villa of the Mysteries: young woman disconcerted.
I think I saw another instance.

Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans
Franz Cumont
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1564594599
1912

The billowing arch of the cape indicates and physically portrays the cognitive
mystic altered state of religious ecstasy and divine inspiration.

I concluded this upon reflection today on this question that has been a
background problem for at least a few months. Today I saw this book cover,
showing yet another instance, and asked a person with an art and design
background, who when asked about the meaning of the arched cap symbol,
proposed it indicated wind. Spirit = divine wind = breath = psyche. Ecstacy
is standing beside oneself while inspired by the divine spirit. Wind blows
sails forming an arched sheet. The person is being divinely sailed and blown
about by the divine wind or breath, inspired.

Here is a standard sequence for the vision of angels (divine and demonic)
ascending and descending.

1. Take entheogens, soar up. Non-divine angel ascending.
2. Soar up too high, trespassing in the transcendent realm while lacking
purity. Fall down to the underworld prison. Non-divine angel descending.
3. Call out in prayer for stability and rescue. Holy guardian angel descends
to rescue. Divine angel descending.
4. Holy guardian angel lifts up the psyche returning, now purified, to the
transcendent realm. Divine angel ascending.


This came together in my mind today while reading Versluis’ book Wisdom’s
Children, about Theosophy.

Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (Suny Series in Western
Esoteric Traditions)
Arthur Versluis
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0791443302
1999

In Cumont’s short Astrology book, there are ample hooks for entheogens, and
many more for heimarmene (Fate, Necessity, astral determinism, sidereal
determinism, cosmic determinism).

Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans
Franz Cumont
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1564594599
1912


Entheogens: p. 80-81, 92, 95, 109:

p. 80: “divine passion which transports him”. intoxicated. possessed.
corybantes in the delirium. gives himself up to ecstasy, which lifts him…
Borne on the wings of enthusiasm… lofty spirits … Ptolemy … sing(s) of
this intoxication… my feet no longer touch the earth. I ascend to Zeus
himself to feast me on ambrosia, the food of the gods. [Anthol. Palat., ix,
57.] … compare this … ecstasy with the transports of Dionysian
intoxication … in the Bacchae … under the stimulus of wine… it is with
pure light that reason quenches her thirst for truth; and “the abstemious
intoxication” [Philo]…

p. 92: the intoxication which will be wrought in him by the immediate prospect
of the stars and the full comprehension of truth. …. astral mysticism based
upon a psychological experience ….

p. 95: (Cumont stumbles and seriously misreads this as base, materialist
inferior intoxication that is contrasted with, and inferior to, astral
ambrosia intoxication; despite his supposed “expertise” of many years study —
that is, many years laboring under the ordinary-state fallacy digging himself
deeper into a trench of misconception — Cumont assumes that astrology was
rationalist, intellectual study with merely *metaphorical* intoxication): To
the followers of Bacchus or of the Phrygian Sabazius drunkenness is divine
possession. The devotee was to be admitted to the feast of the gods, there to
rejoice with them for ever in a state of pleasant intoxication.

p. 109: What conception was formed of the bliss reserved for the elect who
were raised to [or per a couple other pages, *beyond*] the stars? … the
mysteries of Bacchus and Thracian Orphism represented immortality as a sort of
holy intoxication: the faithful, sharing the banquet of the gods, rejoiced
with them for ever at a feast liberally supplied with wine. These beliefs
were combined with sidereal eschatology, only the locality of the repast was
transferred to the new Olympus, and the idea of a celestial banquet was to
survive … even on Christianity. But Plato had already ridiculed those who
looked upon e ceaseless wine-bibbing as the highest reward of virtue,


Heimarmene: e.g. p. 84-89, esp. 88 — many pages worth of quotes that are all
basically exactly aligned with what I’ve more clearly and systematically
written about grappling with determinism metaphorized as geocentric astral
ascent cosmology. e.g. p. 93 “liberation from Destiny, of which they were the
bondsmen here below…”

The mythic metaphor of being turned into a tree is a variant of the
block-universe ‘fixity’ theme, as in Jesus as lower king being affixed to the
cross to enable his higher kingship. A female pursued by a male in a Greek
myth is an instance of the mystic-state ‘spacetime affixion’ mytheme/metaphor.

There is a Pop Sike song by the 60s group Rave, “Mother Nature”, that includes
this theme so clearly, it made me comprehend the “turned into a tree” myth and
cease being alienated from that myth.

I was alienated from post-Medieval, pre-modern esotericism, figuring it all to
be denatured, malformed, lesser reflection of transcendent knowledge. Also,
in the grid of attempting to identify entheogen use in all religions, all
eras, all regions, I previously chose around the 1700s in the U.S. as a good
example of a supposedly challenging data point, an instance of supposedly the
greatest suppression and forgetting of the primarily entheogenic wellspring of
religion.

Arthur Versluis’ book k, about quasi-Protestant Theosophy around 1650-1800,
has plenty of hooks and leads for not only the determinism-transcending theory
of ego death and transcendent knowledge (that’s the easy part to identify),
but also, for the maximal entheogen theory of religion, what with the talk of
‘tinctures’ and ‘alchemy’, ‘medicine’ and ‘elixir’.


Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (Suny Series in Western
Esoteric Traditions)
Arthur Versluis
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0791443299
1999


There is still a need to flesh out a convincing, compelling explanation of why
and how the entheogenic nature of religion and esotericism is not as explicit
and plainly stated as we would expect. Systemic filtering could help explain.
Lots of people wrote various materials, more or less explicit about the
entheogenic source of religion. Then, various works were destroyed by
negligence and by deliberate acts.

The mystics shunned and ignored works that lacked indications of entheogens
(destroying the works through letting them rot away without copying or citing
them), while the orthodox power-mongers for various simple-enough,
understandable reasons destroyed any works that plainly and explicitly
discussed entheogens.

Regardless of the exact details and motives, this kind of
process-of-elimination filtering does describe the character of what resulting
works we do have. They consistently and reliably contain just-clear-enough
hints and indications of the entheogenic nature of the trigger for the
visionary reflections. The hints are almost always present, and are almost
always borderline clear: hidden in plain sight, not deeply hidden, and not
plainly evident, but consistently riding the borderline between plain and
hidden.

One reason these works don’t centrally focus on entheogenic plants is that
they are concerned really with the experiential phenomena to be induced by the
plants, rather than the plants themselves. Entheogen scholarship so far has
put nearly all emphasis on the plants themselves, with only an incidental or
relatively subdued focus on the phenomena induced, and particularly not much
emphasis on how these phenomena are reflected in the history of myth and
religion.

This connection between modern reflections of psychedelic experiencing and the
mythemes and themes in the history of myth and religion, actually is where
some of the truly most exciting and fun sleuthing of isomorphic patterns is to
be revealed. Really, no more than hintful allusions to the entheogens
themselves is required, given that the plants themselves are alluded to *along
with* the metaphorical description of the intense mystic-state experiential
insights and phenomena.

There are lots of phrases and concepts that provide more confirmation of more
ultimately profound things than merely confirmation of the entheogenic doorway
into this realm of experience and experiential insights. It is time to
seriously move past the doorway of focusing mostly on the plants —
discovering plant proof is needed, but together with it, an even stronger
discovery of the descriptions of transcendent experiential knowledge that is
produced by the plants — rather than halting at the plants, and putting forth
just vague generalizations about them producing religious experiencing.

The specific ins and outs of how that religious experiencing was
metaphorically described throughout history is needed — as I have been
publishing online such as in the Egodeath discussion group and at
Egodeath.com.

It would be valuable to provide named categories of myth-religion mythemes,
showing that these are centrally present in Acid Rock lyrics, in schizophrenia
and near-death experiencing and temporal-lobe epilepsy, and in the
cybernetic/entheogenic theory of ego death and transcendent knowledge.

http://www.egodeath.com/lyrictechniquesmysticstate.htm – “Key themes of
lyrical allusions to mystic dissociative phenomena”

Columns in a table would reveal the isomorphism. It is important to loop-in
Acid Rock lyrics because we have ready, lab-confirmable access to the
psychedelics-induced state of consciousness, and Acid Rock lyrics (and art)
represents the clearest and most central manifestation of contemporary late
20th Century authentic Western esoteric tradition.

We can easily perfectly understand and make sense of the contemporary Western
esoteric tradition of Acid Rock lyrics, then use this perfect understanding of
that encoded system to decode the previous systematizations of concepts and
metaphors in previous traditions of Western esotericism, including Western
religions, Western mysticism, Kabbalah, Astrology, Alchemy, world mysticism,
and world religions.

That is a major part of the approach I’ve taken: first use decoded thematic
allusions in Acid Rock lyrics to confirm and validate my hypotheses about
mystic-state experiential insights, then further validate those insights using
the same type of decoding of thematic allusions in world religion including in
traditions of Western esotericism ranging from Greco-Roman hermeticism to
18th-Century Theosophy and on to 20th-Century occultism.

I’ve done the hard work already in summarizing the following framework of Acid
Rock themes and in my explanations of various myth-religion mythemes. Now
easier routine grad-student work within this defined paradigm is needed, to
routinely plug in themes from, for example, 18th-Century Theosophy, into this
defined framework that constitutes the cybernetic/entheogenic theory of ego
death and transcendent knowledge.

I will try to spell out instances and details as time permits, but my first
priority must be to just generally describe and point to key ideas and
guaranteed-successful routine research directions, such as looking up and
posting the Greek myth with the male chasing the female who turns into a tree,
or transcribing and posting the lyrics of the related song “Mother Nature” by
the 60s Pop Sike group Rave, or filling in and uploading the table with
columns for:

o Principles of the cybernetic/entheogenic theory of ego death and
transcendent knowledge.
o Acid Rock lyrics themes alluding to known-entheogenic, mystic-state
experiential insights.
o Myth-religion mythemes.
o Schizophrenia, near-death experiencing, and temporal-lobe epilepsy.

>o Principles of the cybernetic/entheogenic theory of ego death and
>transcendent knowledge.

It could be succinctly labelled as

The cybernetic/deterministic/entheogenic theory of ego death and transcendent
knowledge

Since all these terms are ambiguously understood, I could define ‘cybernetics’
to mean self-control cybernetics with a central focus on determinism and
attempts to trans-rationally transcend determinism. One could argue that
ultimately, ‘deterministic’ is more central and relevant than ‘entheogenic’.
‘Cybernetic’ does tend to virtually imply ‘deterministic’. Spelling out all 3
terms is good but raises the question of also adding yet another essential key
concept and area of central focus such as ‘mystic-metaphoric’.

The cybernetic/deterministic/entheogenic/mystic-metaphorical theory of ego
death and transcendent knowledge

James O’Meara wrote the following posting (edited and expanded; may need
corrections):


Evola’s book The Hermetic Tradition has lots of references to determinism,
“death of free will,” and other topics discussed here.

Oddly enough, Julius Evola was by far the most *active* Traditionalist (in a
Nazi/fascist/elitist kind of way). Lacarriere, in his book The Gnostics,
praises Rene Guenon’s book Crisis of the Modern World (which Evola
recapitulated in Evola’s book Revolt against the Modern World) but Lacarriere
disparages Guenon’s retreat into Islam (Guenon spent his last years as a
sheikh in Cairo), and Lacarriere disparages Tradition (the theory of
Traditionalism) in general, as too backward-looking, unwilling to confront and
usefully come to grips with the modern world.

The Gnostics
Jacques Lacarriere
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0872862437

The Crisis of the Modern World
Rene Guenon
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0900588241

The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art
Julius Evola
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0892814519


Consider Hoffman’s Ego Death theory that traditionally per world mysticism,
the level of no-free-will is the first of the two primary stages of
experiential revelation on the spiritual path. Perhaps Guenon was stuck in a
passive stance based on exclusively overemphasizing the level of no-free-will,
supposing that this era is the passive deterministic winding down of the world
via the 4 Yugas; there is nothing for us to actively *do* as personal agents
exerting change-directed activity, but wait for the Apocalypse.

Evola, in contrast, while affirming the first half of the revelation —
determinism as ruler reigning throughout the whole realm of the ‘natural’ or
‘astral’ world — wanted to *do* something, using the full path of spiritual
revelation, to actively work toward some sort of improving of the world or
advancing of man’s state. Evola has a more active, activist approach of
wanting to *do* something, rather than just backpedalling away from modernity
toward Tradition (conceived in retrograde forms such as Guenon’s conversion to
Islam).

Perhaps Evola’s more activist, change-directed approach involved use of drugs
(psychoactive visionary plants or derivatives), in contrast with Guenon’s
perhaps complete ignorance of the tradition of spiritual use of drugs. Some
Web pages vaguely claim that Evola used “psychedelics”, but I haven’t found
any details or purported evidence about which substances, when, and under what
circumstances.

The intro to Part Two of Lacarriere’s book The Gnostics [or Evola’s book?]
sounds distinctly similar to Hoffman’s Ego Death theory: it disparages
moralism (the conception of religion as being centrally concerned with
‘moralism’ conceived of, for example, as doing good to other persons in the
mundane world of daily life, and sexual ascetism, and mundane humility
conceived as general deprecation of the mundane self).

The book likewise presents Alchemy as a technology, a technology that simply
works for whoever has the skill of using it in a spiritual fashion — which
fits, as a description, with the entheogen theory of Western esotericism. The
book does not conceive of the regenerative outcome of successful spiritual
Alchemy as a reward for some kind of moral life in the mundane sense of daily
life in the ordinary state of consciousness interacting as one personal agent
interacting with others.


As far as an official hierophantic Bishop administering psychoactive
sacraments to a formal member of the church, the Church battled the Gnostics
(such as the Cathars) by promoting its doctrine of ex operatio: that the
priest’s salvific sacraments are effective even if the priest is corrupt and
fallen. Thus according to orthodoxy, a priest could be as immoral as
possible, but the sacraments were still valid; thus, no need to pry into Fr.
Letcher’s morality. This orthodox position fits with the efficacy of
psychoactives.

The Cathars, on the other hand, held that if a Perfect fell, or recanted, all
the people who had received the consolamentum from that person were proven to
have gotten an invalid and inefficacious sacrament, and had to receive the
sacrament again, now legitimately and efficaciously — this sounds like merely
placebo sacraments, not psychoactive sacraments that work independently of who
administered them to another person.

It seems counterintuitive that the orthodox had entheogen-aligned views while
these heretical later Gnostics had views incompatible with the
psychoactive-plant nature of the main, Eucharistic sacrament. [It’s easy to
see power-politics ramifications driving this battle. -mh]


As always, I look forward to more of your reflections on this and other books.

— James O’Meara

>>It seems counterintuitive that the orthodox had entheogen-aligned views

while these heretical later Gnostics had views incompatible with the
psychoactive-plant nature of the main, Eucharistic sacrament.


It seems surprising and counterintuitive that the orthodox had
entheogen-aligned, non-moralist views of the Eucharist (in line with the Ego
Death theory), while these heretical later Gnostics had a set of views that
seems to disconfirm a psychoactive-plant hypothesis of their main,
Eucharistic-type Consolamentum sacrament.

Surprisingly, the Cathar Gnostics by this measure appear to have held
non-entheogenic, moralist views, a set of attitudes that is paradigmatically
typical of inferior, literalist, non-experiential, non-initiated religion,
pseudo-religion — empty and inefficacious, non-regenerative, superficial
religiosity.

If the Cathars’ Consolamentum sacrament was visionary plants, as the maximal
entheogen theory of religion assumes by default as a matter of paradigmatic
principle, why did the Cathars apparently adhere to mere moralism and hold
that the recipient’s former initiation with the Eucharist-like sacrament could
be retroactively delegitimized and rendered inefficacious — views that
directly conflict with the hypothesis of the visionary-plant nature of the
highest sacraments in all authentic varieties of religion?


Each variety of religion is a real grab-bag mixture of vulgar
inferior-religion literalism, with sophisticated superior-religion
experiential/entheogenic views and interpretations — as in the mixture and
even deliberate mixture of vulgar magic and high magic, vulgar material
Alchemy with spiritual Alchemy. Also muddling this mix that we are burdened
with unravelling is power-politics and sociological forces, which tend to
distort and occlude, such as forcing many mystics to put on a great
exaggerated show of moralism and orthodoxy.

We have to always actively seek to identify these complicating, muddling,
distorting, occluding forces, which were both coerced and sometimes
voluntarily engaged it as ‘deliberate misleading’ that matches the natural
sequence: our minds are designed to do this deliberate misleading at first,
until our series of initiations then reveals the hidden meanings of religious
myth.

Versluis’ book Wisdom’s Children about 18th-Century Theosophy emphasizes how
much and how typically the ‘enthusiasts’ — experiential-oriented
religionists — were persecuted by members of orthodoxy; we really have to
think in terms almost of a constant state of warfare regarding
spiritual-experiential religion vs. hyperorthodox literalist mundane-state
religion. Even so, the sides are complex, as orthodoxy is precisely that
which is the product of this ongoing battle between spiritual-experiential
religion vs. hyperorthodox literalist mundane-state religion.

Orthodoxy is far more informed by entheogen-induced, intense primary/direct
mystic altered-state religious experiencing than the usual assumption that all
experiential religion lies on the side of the heretics, and all literalist
hollow empty superficial religion lies on the side of the orthodox. The
orthodox are, or orthodoxy is, a more sophisticated and powerful process,
which co-opts and takes over entheogenic authentic religion, rather than
simply opposing it.

Likewise, there is a ton of vulgar worthless junk-religion and literalism,
mere superstition, jumbled in with heretical religion as well; it is certainly
not the case as we are too used to simplistically assuming, that heresy is
purified authentic entheogenic primary religious experiencing, while orthodoxy
is totally a matter of superstition, literalism, and the suppression and
denial of entheogens and ecstatic enthusiasm-experience. Heresy and orthodoxy
are *both* a jumble of A) authentic ecstatic/transcendent religion and B)
bunk, confused superstition and mundane moralism.

So there are problems with the simple distinctions and labels Freke and Gandy
propose in their general use of the terms ‘Gnostic’ vs. ‘Orthodox’. Really,
there are two aspects of religion — ecstatic and mundane — and these are
jumbled together within any particular variety of heretical/gnostic religious
system or orthodox religious system.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Evidently, Robert M. Price, a single person, maintains multiple separate
identities as an author:

Robert M. Price is a Radical Bible scholar:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/price-bio.html

No, Robert M. Price is a comix and Lovecraft scholar:
http://www.heroesrhere.com/carticles.html

No, Robert M. Price is an assistant co-author of a book about Rush lyrics:
Mystic Rhythms: The Philosophical Vision of Rush
Carol Selby Price, with Robert M. Price
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1587151022

The two biographical webpages give no hint that the other exists, and neither
indicates that he helped his wife write a book about Rush lyrics.

Here are some clear clues he is one person:
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/authors/Robert_M_Price.htm
This page shows the book Deconstructing Jesus, but not the Rush book Mystic
Rhythms (there are indications he merely assisted his wife on that).


Instead of wasting his talents on comic books, horror fiction, religious myth,
and rock music, he ought to research and write about serious subjects.

Brian T. posted Robert M. Price’ article about the Gnostic storyline of the
Matrix movies.

http://www.heroesrhere.com/carticles.html – Articles by Robert M. Price
http://www.heroesrhere.com/Articles/MATRIX.RTF — “The Legendary Morpheus”

This article ended on the topic of multiple levels of reality, or being, or
delusion and revelation, and multiple Red Pills involved in the multiple
levels of awakening: “he is prepared for the possibility that perhaps his
beloved Zion may itself turn out to be but another level of the Matrix. If it
does, he is willing to learn new truth and to take another Red Pill.”


Averaging together and generalizing about traditional myth-religion:

There are two stages of revelation:
1. Determinism rules the world.
2. Spiritual transcendence out from that heimarmene-ruled realm.

There are thus three phases of the spiritual path:
1. Naive freewill assumption
2. Experiential discovery of determinism (timeless, single-future,
frozen-future, block-universe vertical determinism; time as a spacelike
dimension)
3. Revelation of transrationally transcending determinism.

There are some 8 or so initiations (series of Red Pills, as in LSD tablets, or
mushroom sessions) required to get through those two stages of revelation.
Thus the best and most traditional model of the spiritual path is this
*specific* and *explicit* sequence of steps, phases, or milestones:


The Traditional Spiritual Path:

Phase 1: Naive freewill assumption.

Several initial, beginner-level entheogenic initiations.

Revelation 1: Determinism rules the world. Experiential discovery of
determinism (timeless, single-future, frozen-future, block-universe vertical
determinism; time as a spacelike dimension).

Phase 2: Believe the world is deterministic.

Several intermediate-to-advanced-level entheogenic initiations.

Revelation 2: Spiritual transcendence out from that heimarmene-ruled realm.
Revelation of transrationally transcending determinism.

Phase 3: Believe in transrational transcendent spiritual self and benevolent
transpersonal divinity outside determinism.

Several fully advanced entheogenic celebrations.


In the intermediate-to-advanced initiations after one has come to believe the
world is deterministic, a terrible travail that arises. The goal is not just
the initial wake-up into determinism, but rather, spiritual regeneration out
from that now-perceived determinism.

As Ken Wilber characterizes in the motives to jump to the next level when the
current sideways translations no longer are acceptable/viable/life-sustaining,
block-universe determinism is bound (I tentatively hypothesize) to lead to
chaotic panic, being helplessly dangled over the ‘wrathful’ disaster of
quasi-psychotic loss of control, and horrific Matrix-like, Giger-like
imprisonment: the dark side of “cosmic unity” which the American post-1966
selective pop Buddhists don’t tell us about; the wrathful and dire-straits
aspect of “all is one and one is all”.

In the Matrix movies, Neo does *not* only awaken upon taking the Red Pill,
awakening to some aspect of cosmic machine block-universe determinism — he
also undergoes at the end of the 3rd movie some more spiritual transformation
and regeneration that miraculously, transcendently halts a terrible final
escalating of the battle against the spinning drill-machines (Sentinels,
watchers, archons). Setting aside rigid details as we must do in Gnostic
myth, Neo’s Red-Pill awakening maps to the Ego Death theory’s first half of
revelation, that of block-universe determinism.

Neo’s light-transformation at the machine battle climax near the end of the
trilogy maps to the Ego Death theory’s second half of revelation, that of
transrationally, ‘spiritually’ transcending block-universe determinism, as
escaping finally from the prison of heimarmene which one began by being
oblivious of. One moves from child/animal, to astral man and mere rational
animal, to angelic spiritual man, Son of Man, the final and unperishing
regeneration.

Carnal asceticism could mean merely pre-initiation delusion of autonomous
personal sovereign control of one’s thoughts and future. It could mean
avoiding the astral body ruled by heimarmene. themes of purification,
adultery, and carnal purity.

The claims of some mystic groups of following all the hundreds of Jewish laws,
or extreme moralism, comes to us merely as *claims written on paper. Was
there ever a literal reality behind these supposed reports that claim extreme
ascetism? Ascetism may be nothing more than a deliberately misleading
metaphor, where carnality is a metaphor for the pre-initiation or the
half-initiated stage of consciousness maturation.

Fasting is similarly read gullibly today as being about moralist ascetic
penance, when the real nature of fasting is nothing but a mechanical technique
of strengthening the effect of visionary plants during the spiritual/religious
“feast” that follows the fast. Is this misreading the fault of the original
writers, or the censors, or modern denseness which is due to being not privy
to the entheogen-centric nature of the riddling parables?

In a book on Rock and Religion, which is interviews from Hard Music magazine
about Christian Heavy Rock, the interviewer asks Metallica guitarist Kirk
Hammett “How do you feel about Jesus Christ?”

“I don’t know whether He actually ever existed at all. I just know I believe
in God.”
(near-accurate quote)

This is interesting, that this important Acid Rock guitarist (specifically in
the Metal subgenre) has gone on record as doubting the existence of the
historical Jesus.


I am interested in Christian Heavy Rock bands that use LSD and other ecstasy-
and vision-inducing substances. I figure such is a significant, basically
standard, natural occurrence, when you give up the too-treasured assumption
that Christianity is simply against entheogens. If you assume per the maximal
entheogen theory of religion that Christianity significantly is in favor of
entheogens and significantly considers the Eucharist to be visionary plants,
then it is highly natural that Christian Heavy Rock is commonly based in
integrated use of LSD and other entheogens.

Appease divine wrath by divine-provided infin. sacrifice, gain love:
preliminary notes.

Dualism is ultimately based in the idea of the dipole movement from the
peak-state experience of personified transcendent/divine wrath to personified
transcendent/divine love:

o Heimarmene/wrath/Demiurge/semi-transcendence/rationality
vs.
o God/love/ultra-transcendence/transrationality

Picturing a ‘vicarious sacrifice’ of a super-bloody Jesus for us is one valid
and useful conception for one threatened with loss of control in the advanced
mystic peak state.

To ‘appease’ the divine wrath to turn away disaster, means to give up one’s
own low-self *along with* God giving to himself his own infinitely valuable
low-self; God gives his low-self to himself at the same time and in the same
action as bringing each of the Elect to do the same with each Elect’s
low-self; the primary master self-sacrificer reflects his same action of
lower-self sacrifice down to each individual Elect at the same (timeless)
time.

God struck a deal with the Devil to release Christ’s Elect along with Christ
(God’s low-self) when He was imprisoned down in Hades/heimarmene/Determinism.
Just as the individual initiate is placed down in Hades/heimarmene’s empire
and subject to it as a slave/prisoner, so is God himself so placed but God,
transcending heimarmene as Jupiter/Zeus/Isis were often said to, is able to
miraculously pull the Christ back out of Hades’ kingdom of Heimarmene.

‘Humility’ really means not mere mundane broad-brush self-deprecation (which
usually just bolsters egoic delusion anyway), but rather, the fear of being
made to lose self-control during the altered-state peak, forced by the
uncontrollable transcendent controller, whether the latter is conceived as
one’s higher self, holy guardian angel, or God.

Related:
o Transcribe and post the background radio preacher on “You can’t have the
love of God, without the wrath of God”, in the song by the Acid Rock artist
Chrome.
o The sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
o The threatening of Sol by Mithras and of the initiate by the Mithraic
Father.

I hope to post a mystic altered-state exegesis of this good Pop Sike song from
~1967. This is my transcription.


Song: Brink of Death
Artist: Childe Harold
Producer: Walter Carlos

[slow:]
As I lie upon
The brink of death
Knowing soon I’ll take
My final breath

I can see the golden kiles (tiles? aisles?)
With the clouds that reach for miles
Someone’s calling me to come and see
[slow:]
Soon I’ll be free

[slow:]
Thoughts and years go by
Race through my mind
Bringing back the time
I leave behind

In my eyes see new direction
Suddenly I feel the tension
Slowly draining outward from my soul
[slow:]
I’m growing cold

[classical pastoral building up to strident, shieking, escalating synthesizer
malfunction freakout, unstable analog feedback buildup and system seizure,
lock-up and crash]

[slow:]
Someone’s hand is reaching
Out for me
Lifting up the veil
To set me free

Now my eyes are not so weary
I can feel the presence near me
Casting to the joy upon my eyes
[slow:]
My friends goodbye

Here is a Pop Sike ~1967 song mentioning being turned into a tree, similar to
the greek myth of the male chasing the female who was turned into a tree.
‘Nature’ is equivalent to Heimarmene, the Demiurge, block-universe determinism
and its prison guard. This is my transcription.


Song: Mother Nature
Artist: The Raves


All your toys are broken down
All your dreams are tossed around
Not happy with what you see
Now you want to try
To break me

Hey
Mother Nature
Turn me to a tree
My roots tied to the ground
A tree she can not see

[organ freakout/rave-up, then electric guitar freakout/rave-up]

Hey
Mother Nature
When she passes by
Turn me to a bird
So faster I can fly

>>Transcribe and post the background radio preacher on “You can’t have the

love of God, without the wrath of God”

Closer to an accurate transcription of the sermon/lecture:

“You can’t have or know the love and mercy of God, without *first*
experiencing the wrath of God.”

The main experience of transcendent Love and rescue happens soon after the
main experience of divine wrath: first there is fear of loss of control within
the deterministic block-universe, and then only after that, there is the
release from panic when a transrational faith in the benevolence of
that-which-injects-one’s-thoughts is injected into the trembling android-like
initiate in the throes of control-feedback instability.

We must often look at these dynamics from at least two contrasting
perspectives: that of the active personal locus-of-control, and also from the
perspective of the uncontrollable higher controller, as an demonic vs. angelic
point of view. So we end up with metaphors of marriage of the higher and
lower aspects of a person.

The divine Love arises most importantly as a result, reaction, solution to the
previous, prior desperate life-threatening problem of the divine Wrath. The
initiate is extremely threatened from within or beyond, that’s the wrath, and
the greatest experience of love and release is that which occurs after the
wrath-experience, through a transcendent jump out of the system of reasoning
that brought one to the dire dynamic state of self-threatening self-control
power in the face of timeless determinism.

I was mainly a determinist rationalist but one could definitely say in some
sense now, that I am again a transformed person; I had only the baptism of
water, but after, the baptism of fire. Which is never to imply a denial of
cosmic determinism: rather, it’s an added assertion, that the world is ruled
by cosmic determinism but that the beyond-real thing, spirit, ultra-transcends
rational deterministic reality.

So in the end I can say that in some specific, clearly defined sense, I
believe in spirit, a belief brought about through faith by grace from the
must-be-assumed-benevolent ultra-transcendent, beyond-real, ultimate author.
Apophatic negative theology is onto something, but a heap of negatives is
insufficient as a theory.

Historians asking whether Jesus was strictly mythical need to be aware of the
main mythic/mystic/metaphorical readings of the Aeon concept and related
concepts. Historical study is largely and inherently the history of ideas, so
it is nonsense to imagine that we can discuss history without discussing the
ideas and their meanings.

A discussion of history (Christian origins) without analyzing the ideas as
ideas, including mythic and mystic ideas and readings appropriate for the era
under evaluation, is nothing but an ideologically stripped-down move, a ploy
to covertly advocate the historicist paradigm by only permitting considering
the most literal reading of the texts.

‘Aeon’ can be and probably was conceived of in multiple ways:
o Vertical levels, one reached before another during some ascent.
o Horizontal phases, one occurring in history before another.

The latter splits into two conceptions:
o A collective historical sequence of historical phases.
o Something that happens in-time but happens individually, one at a time, to
each initiate in the set of all the Elect. In mystical timeless time, all the
Elect enter into the new aeon at the same time, but from the perspective of
mundane time, each of the Elect enters the new aeon individually at a unique
point in time.

‘Aeon’ was read in the Hellenistic era primarily as ‘phase’ or ‘stage’ or
‘level’, against a mystic rather than mundane-literalist conceptual framework.
The merely secondary, pretend meaning of ‘aeon’ was a literal new era
corresponding to the advent of a new, truly good ruler (emperor, Caesar, king,
kingdom, empire). Everyone liked to mystically and literally imagine and
picture the coming of a new kingdom which was good both in practical literal
socio-political aspects and in mystical/religious aspects.

Wishfully imagining such a coming of a truly good and lasting, divine yet
practically helpful ruler, based on precedents in Jewish and Pagan variants of
ancient culture such as Ruler Cult, gave rise to the theme of ‘Christ as new
and better super-emperor’ that so centrally defined the new Christian
religion.


— Michael Hoffman

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/458273.html

This article puts ancient Jewish writings in a different perspective. “The
Community Rule” wasn’t uniquely Essenic. Many scrolls supposedly unique and
particular to the Essenes were actually mainstream to various Judaisms.

One entrenched scholarly assumption is that there were rare, unusual mystic
communities: only the Qumran community and only the Therapeuts were mystics,
and the rest of the Jewish religion was normally rationalist and legalistic —
the opposite of pagan experiential mystery-religions.

Actually there is reason to assume that these religions and varieties of them
were basically permeable as far as sharing texts and especially sharing deep
themes, even if the themes were, on the surface, dressed and stylized as
“distinctly and purely Jewish” or “distinctly pagan/hellenistic”. If we want
to look for thematic parallels and likely mutual cross-influence between
Jewish religions and pagan religions, very much including mystery-religion
type experiential/initiatory metaphors superficially dressed as though they
were opposed and independent, it is easy to find them.

If we, like Protestant theologians trying to pull Christian origins away from
Catholicism, attempt to focus on the surface stylization to divide
“mystery/experiential Paganism” from “rationalist/legalistic Jewish religion”,
we can manage to perceive that distinction and then exclaim that Qumran and
the Therapeuts are exceptions that prove the rule: we can imagine that Qumran
and the Therapeuts were unusual isolated deviant Pagan-like
experiential-initiation oriented pockets within the normally non-mystical
Jewish religion; we can imagine that Qumran was isolated and had its private
set of writings it hoarded, and that the Therapeuts were unique and isolated
too as a deviant, exceptional because mystic Jewish community.

The reigning paradigm has been an essentially isolationist one that begins
with the assumption that each religion and each variant of each religion was
essentially isolated. Or, the heathens were syncretistic but the Jews (the
supposed single ancestor of Christianity) were isolated. It builds up
elaborate studies of the differences between the supposedly isolated religions
of Persia, Greece, Egypt, and the Semitic near-east.

The Egyptians especially below Alexandria were also considered in antiquity to
be highly isolationist, resistant to syncretism. Purist anti-syncretism was
more of a claim or an ideal than a reality; these variants of Jewish
religions, Hellenistic religions, and Egyptian religions couldn’t help but
mutually share and borrow ideas, no matter how much some people put forth the
ideal of purist non-syncretism.

The picture of each religious community being isolated and having its private
collection of writings and its own unique religious themes and practices is
premised on the unlikely assumption that ideas didn’t travel in antiquity —
an assumption that amounts to an ideologically based denial of the evidence, a
denial that some ancients may have shared but which we should be skeptical of;
we should suspect that even though some ancient variants of religion in the
Hellenistic era claimed to be unique and isolated, even those variants were in
fact interpenetrated with other brands and varieties of religion, and this
interpenetration includes the collections of writings every brand of religious
community had.

Similarly, we should be skeptical about the very idea of a rigid, statically
bounded ‘community’. Rodney Stark and Burton Mack talk of different
communities with their respective gospel variants, but there was also a great
deal of borrowing, copying, influence, migration, and permeable boundaries
even though sometimes people made claims of being distinct, unique, and purely
isolated, and possessing unique inspired revelations. These various
assumptions can be grouped into two opposed paradigms, two conflicting
hypotheses about the nature of ancient religiosity and institutions and
writing, a paradigm conflict along the lines of fluid vs. static.

Scholarship has been biased in favor of the ‘static’ paradigm or
assumption-set, but we ought to consider the different whole picture of
ancient religion that results from instead developing and filling in the
‘fluid’ paradigm or assumption-set: suppose that ancient religion was
primarily fluid and permeable as far as community membership, deep themes
(rather than surface stylizations and claims of pure passing-down of ideas
from a single ancestry), and collections of writings.


— Michael Hoffman

This text file is automatically posted to the Egodeath Yahoo group every two
weeks.

The Egodeath Yahoo group is a newsletter or Weblog sent out by Michael Hoffman.


This Yahoo group covers the cybernetic theory of ego death and
ego transcendence, including:

o Nonreductionistic block-universe determinism/Fatedness, the closed
and preexisting future, tenseless time, free will as illusory, the
holographic universe, and predestination and Reformed theology.

o Cognitive science, mental construct processing, mental models,
ontological idealism, contemporary metaphysics of the continuant
self, cybernetic self-control, personal control agency, moral agency,
and self-government.

o Zen satori, short-path enlightenment, and Alan Watts;
transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber, and integral theory.

o Entheogens and psychedelic drugs, the Eleusinian mysteries and
cracking the allegorical code of the mystery religions, mythic
metaphor and allegorical encoding, the mystic altered state, mystic
and religious experiencing, visionary states, religious rapture, and
Acid Rock mysticism.

o Loss of control, self-control seizure, cognitive instability, and
psychosis and schizophrenia.


To post on these subjects, you can join the group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeathunmoderated
and then send email to:
egodeathunmoderated@yahoogroups.com


— Michael Hoffman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath
http://www.egodeath.com

—–Original Message—–
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 2:40 PM
To: gnosis_lumen@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [gnosis_lumen] The Inner West interview


Dear members of the gnosis_lumen list.

I wanted to let you know that I’m participating in an online interview
about the new book, The Inner West. The book is now out and can be
purchased at your local bookstore or by going to:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585423394/gnosismagazin-20
As I believe I mentioned in another recent post, The Inner West is
basically an anthology of articles that appeared in GNOSIS over the
years by many of our best writers. (The only exceptions are two pieces
that appeared in other magazines and one piece that was commissioned
for the book itself.)

The interview is happening on The Well, the groundbreaking online
community and discussion board that was originally founded by Whole
Earth nearly 20 years ago. I’m being interviewed there for the next
two weeks in posted exchanges with the interviewer, Bobby Lilly, and
other interested readers. This is a public interview in the Well’s
“inkwell.vue” conference and is directly accessible to anyone, whether
they are a Well member or not.

Check it out! You can reach it by going to:
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue

If you have questions that you’d like to ask, you can do so by
emailing one of the inkwell.vue hosts. See the web-site for more
information.

On other fronts, I’m still making GNOSIS back issues available and
holding the line at the present prices for as long as possible. Now’s
the time to fill in the gaps in your collection. Ordering info is at:
http://www.lumen.org/order_form/orderform.html#sale

Thanks to all for their support in keeping this information available.

Faithfully yours,
Jay Kinney

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosis_lumen/

0:01 — Well I’ll tell you what the problem is. The bible — if – If we’re
going to present the whole Word of God, there are — there is the bad news,
and there … [end of voice segment]

1:34 — [start of voice segment] … is that because there is, we’re under the
*curse* of God; we’re under the *wrath*, of God, and we’re doomed [headed?]
for eternal damnation; the Bible is very clear about that. … that the Bible
is… saved, from that curse. … Word of God … is mercy, that it’s …
salvation in our lives. Now, … because the mind is numb with the appearance
of righteous more and more … pastors rarely thought, about the curse of God.
[end of voice segment]

3:16 … in faith we know there can be … the curse of God. He doesn’t
*want* to talk about the curse of God at all; he wants to talk about the love
of God. But – but, the *only* way anyone can become saved, is if they *first*
know the *curse* of God … with their predicament … it’s sad, I …
salvation … it’s absurd, that, that … what does the *Bible* say? And if
the Bible says that’s absurd, then all right, that’s … and there … that is
*why*, they need salvation. [4:37, end of voice segment]



The above is from probably an radio preacher broadcast. This sermon, in
American English with no accent, is heard at the start and throughout parts of
the noisy, heavy Acid Rock song “Acid Rain” on the album Kiss to the Brain, by
the Acid Rock artist Helios Creed, associated with the Acid Rock artist
Chrome.

Track: Acid Rain
Album: Kiss to the Brain
Genre: Acid Rock
Artist: Helios Creed
Associated Artist: Chrome
Year: 1992 or 1993
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000004FZ
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=&sql=10:48rn28vr05oa

Surfing Amazon for books that mention Clark Heinrich’s work reveals
Rundquist’s so-called “bibliography” (?) including most of [all of?] the
Amanita Research page from Egodeath.com, which has lots of URLs and commentary
and photos from e.g. Heinrich and James Arthur. I cannot guarantee that my
webpages are themselves acceptable and fit for reproduction in print.

http://www.egodeath.com/amanita.htm
He printed my webpage as 22 pages, and included it in his “book” or
“bibliography” which has an ISBN, with my pages shown as his page numbering
31-52. 22/113 = 20% of his “book” or “bibliography”. The result is a real
mishmash of copyright questions.

This guy has published facsimiles of web pages, including some of
Egodeath.com.

Drugs, Sex in Religions: An Uncensored Bibliography, 2nd Edition
Thomas J. Rundquist
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1884239714 — 113 pages
Search for “egodeath” or “heinrich”.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/BookSearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=1884239714&PD
F=Y&ISBSRC=Y&userid=6F222uKPrF&SearchISBN.x=26&SearchISBN.y=19
Apr. 2004

2nd ISBN:
Sex, Drugs in Religions: An Uncensored Bibliography
Thomas J.Rundquist
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1884239722
— Apr 2004, 113 pages
http://www.china-history.com/item/1_1884239722_1_3_0_index.html


This might be the 1st Ed., note it is subtitled as an “autobiography” rather
than a “bibliography”:

Drugs, Sex in Religions: TR’s Autobiography 1962-1992
Thomas J. Rundquist
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0961856777
Jan. 1993


I will consider this 2nd Ed. book. Authors I discuss or excerpt should let me
know if they have thoughts about this. It involves some researchers’ photos.
I want to avoid mistaken views of others’ work. The Amazon watermark says
“Copyrighted Material”. The front matter says “(C) 2004 Nova Media Inc.”
Does this book violate the fair-use citation law or my permission I’ve
granted. He shows the URL on each page.

I have asked at the Web site to include my name and domain name. I have
chosen to develop a serious theory in public publishing only on the Web. I
have only recently emphasized the copyrighted and intellectual-property and
scholarly priority nature of my overall research and writings online; I ought
to be everywhere clear about it.

My webpage about Amanita rather than another page of my site was chosen for
the book because it is a research page with lots of URLs and leads shown about
entheogens in religious history. The page he used shows my words, but does it
define my theory (of ego death and transcendent knowledge) and attribute it to
me as an original set of ideas? Does my reproduced page give Heinrich, James,
Merkur, and other researchers correct credit?

He does sort of credit me, though my name doesn’t appear; he points to
Egodeath.com website.

http://www.egodeath.com/CopyrightPriorityInnovation.htm
http://www.egodeath.com/priorityofdiscovery.htm

I should place a bold copyright at top and bottom of each page, and more so on
home page not just “All material at this site not explicitly attributed to
others is Copyright (C) 1985-2004 Michael Hoffman” at bottom of home page. I
may need a full paragraph of copyright information at bottom of each page, as
well as a link to my detailed copyright page.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

So many books striving to discuss myth and storyline philosophically, use a
flattened-from-the-get-go conception of what “philosophy” is or was — as
opposed to Kingsley’s “Dark Places of Wisdom” and other books arguing that
Philosophy was originally what moderns would call “Gnostic” or “Shamanistic”.

Excellent examples of “flattening” of what ought to be mystic, by applying the
steamroller of an extreme ordinary-state rationalist conception of
“Philosophy”: the magazine “Philosophy Now”. The same flattening happens,
surprisingly, with today’s glossy Buddhism magazines, by applying the
steamroller of some strangely unmystical conception of “Spirituality”, what
Ken Wilber might describe as a flatland version of spirituality that worships
systems theory and glorifies the merely immanent.

I use the adjective “flat” when modern so-called “philosophy” attempts to
discuss what’s actually mystic-state metaphor: I don’t feel like I’ve yet
defined this idea of “flat” or “flattening” well enough – I would have to
mention Ken Wilber’s use of “flatland” as part of my explanation. A lot of
the explanation of the “flat” adjective as I use it — perhaps even the
essence — would have to do with misreading altered-state metaphor as
ordinary-state “symbolism”, but I feel more analysis and detailed explanation
is still needed.

Helpful toward such a detailed critique of the modern “flattening” of what’s
actually mystic-experiential would be more postings about Extreme Mysticism:
wrath, trembling, repentance, pleading for mercy, quaking, and fear: note that
the Classic Rock group Rush has a cross-album multipart work titled “Fear”.

One such flattening treatment of “wrath” is the chapter in Versluis’ book
Wisdom’s Children, which reduces the religious experience of “wrath” to merely
mundane-realm persecution of mystics by formally regulated societal religion.
In fact, the theme of “wrath” in religion has essentially nothing to do with
mere ordinary-state persecution of mystics, such as literal burnings at the
stake.

Look at the wrathful side of the goddess, or of paired deities of wrath and
compassion — these are plainly not concerned with the direction Versluis
attempts to go with the idea of wrath, as mere mundane-realm persecution of
mystics. He’s got the cart before the horse, as happens so often. If the
idea of wrath was mapped to persecution of mystics, that was merely a later
analogy, not the main meaning of ‘wrath’, which was really all about a kind of
extreme experience in the mystic state.

Hell, wrath, damnation, judgment, and salvation for immortality and
imperishable life *are* the ultimate utmost concerns and events a person can
undergo — but they are neither mundane-state symbolism metaphorizing
sociopolitical persecution, nor the vulgar type of supernaturalist literalist
conception of being judged and condemned after you die bodily in the mundane
sense of “dying”.

Acharya’s work, like so much, is a real mixed bag. Yeah, Jesus was the sun
(and lots of things) — but what did the sun connote? Hardly the connotations
we moderns have of it. As my book review says, her disproof is good but
essentially effectively just a repeat of what’s been written repeatedly, while
her positive theory of what Jesus *did* mean is flattened like a steamroller:
perhaps it is right, on the surface, but it misses the essence, the essential
*intense, overwhelming experience* of rising, Holy Spirit, falling headlong,
Hell, fear and trembling, judgment, Christ, and salvation.


Coming in Fall 2004 on PAX TV is the program called Faith Under Fire which is
devoted to the debate of religious questions. Robert M. Price, author of the
book Deconstructing Jesus ( http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1573927589 ) is
scheduled to appear on one of the shows. The theme of Price’s appearance on
the show is “Is the Bible Bogus”.

http://www.google.com/search?q=PAX+TV+%22Faith+Under+Fire%22

http://www.pax.tv/shows/faith


It is funny how extremely variable the expression “It’s really all just myth”
is. For some, this means that our savior Jesus didn’t really do all of the
miracles attributed to him; to others such as the later Edwin Johnson, it
means that none of the Bible characters existed, none of the Bible events
happened, and additionally, the years such as 700-1400 (for example) didn’t
exist, so that (for example) the year we number as “1400” was actually the
same as the year we number “700”. It’s all just myth.

Like the busy modern world in the Matrix is all just a virtual reality
computer program.
Or, like in the current movie Manchurian Candidate, in which a man wins the
vice presidency largely based on his act of heroism in war — an act of
heroism which was nothing but a false memory that was forcefully brainwashed
upon a lone squadron by an evil global corporation.

One coherent meaning of “Breaking free of the wheel of birth and death”: each
visionary-plant initiation in a series of some 8 initiations gives a temporary
ego death mentality (death), followed by a return of incarnation (egoic
thinking) falling back into the realm or mentality of personal control agency,
falsely conceived of as *primary sovereign autonomous* control agency.

When the mind is structured around the premise of personal control agency
being *primary* (sovereign, autonomous) control agency, the person is
inherently then held to be a true (absolute, simply straightforward) moral
agent, and is thus subject to moral pushing and pulling, accountability,
trapped and stuck in the unbroken chain and network of karmic culpability and
responsibility.


One coherent meaning of “Breaking free from the endless unbroken chain or
network of karmic moral cause-and-effect”: after a complete series of
visionary-plant initiations, the mind’s mental worldmodel is no longer
structured around the false assumption of primary (sovereign, autonomous)
personal control agency. One no longer thinks of oneself as an *independent*
kingly agent (per another metaphor, one no longer practices polytheistic idol
worship, worshipping the multiplicity-demon).

The fully initiated and completed mind no longer thinks of other people as
truly independent autonomous sovereign agents, either — though noninitiates
carry the delusion that everyone is sovereign primary control agents, primary
autonomous moral control agents.


One coherent meaning of “There is no birth and death”: Egoic control agency
was never real (in a certain sense) in the first place, so therefore it never
actually started or ended. Only a deluded mental shape of thinking, a type of
thinking based on essentially an illusion, began (in youth) and ended (upon
enlightenment).

There are additional meanings and speculations about transmigration of the
soul, immortality and imperishability, bodily death, the spiritual body, and
so on, but the above mode or type of thinking, and interpretations of the
above type, forms the *main* and primary meaning of expressions such as the
above: it is about intense mystic-state experiences of death, experiences of
rebirth, experiences of frustrating backsliding into regular body and thinking
again, while yearning to fully grasp and retain the temporarily comprehended
peak mystic-state insight and mental mode that is marked by a tendency toward
nonegoic thinking.

One test for comprehension is to assert seemingly contradictory views about
the relation of mind, body, free will, moral agency — this forms a trap and a
test of whether you grasp the essential ideas and mode of thinking, or whether
you are limited to simple rigid surface terms with simple fixed meanings. The
perfected mind can assign the one system of real meaning to several different
arrangements of surface terms, sets of terms.

“Body” doesn’t always mean body in the same sense; “mind” doesn’t always mean
mind in the same sense, same with the other key terms such as “free will”.
You have to penetrate beyond the surface of a single set of term-usages and
learn linguistic flexibility. This isn’t a flexibility of *belief* (theory,
model), so much as a flexibility of sets of meaning-assignments to surface
terminology-sets.

Norma wrote:

>>There is definite religious experience, universal experience, the same

within everyone. It has been attached to many things in nature, while not
directly speaking about those things, only using those things as a means of
describing it.


J. Z. Smith has a good passage about that, with a reference to another author,
putting to rest the notion that mystery religions were finally and ultimately
about phenomena in nature (crops, fertility, celestial and sun/moon
phenomena).

>>For those who want to say Jesus was not a man, but actually meant the sun,

doesn’t get the essence of the religious experience. What it does, is, it
attempts to kill literal Christianity, and by doing so, kills any chance for
anyone of seeing and correlating true religious experience with the Jesus
theme.

>>There is wrath, quakes and tremors and there is Christ and Salvation.

Against the modern “symbolists”, wrath, Christ, and salvation means something
beyond the seasons, beyond the harvests, and beyond the ordinary sun. It’s
like looking at a drop of water and seeing only the drop of water and then
looking at the drop of water under a high-powered microscope and seeing the
life within the drop.


The attitude from Acharya S’ discussion group was:

We don’t want to know about religious experience. Religious experience must
not be admitted to have anything to do with Christianity, as it would seem to
validate Christianity, and we have only a single interest, a single mission, a
single goal: smash Christianity. Not understand how Christianity expresses
religious experience — that risks validating and thus preserving and
sustaining Christianity.

Admitting religious experiencing into a discussion of Christianity must not be
allowed, because it is too great a risk, possibly sustaining Christtianity.
For the sake of killing off that which has been called Christianity, we are
willing to sacrifice religious experiencing and sacrifice comprehension of how
Christianity validly expresses religious experiencing.

We must strictly hold that Christianity meant the sun, because this view is
entirely alien to that which has been called Christianity; it is starkly
opposed to, and entirely different than, any recent conception of
Christianity; only this alien theme of “Christ is simply and strictly the
mundane sun” is sufficiently remote from what we’ve know as “Christianity”, to
enable somehow affirming Christianity — in a totally alien form — in order
to kill off what we’ve known as “Christianity”.

Explanations from *within* the familiar versions of the Christian thematic
range, must not be allowed, because the risk is too great that affirming some
reading of familiar Christian themes will sustain (rather than kill off and
exterminate) that which we’ve called “Christianity”.

— end of attitude characterization —

Faith Under Fire is hosted by the leading popular apologist Lee Strobel.
http://www.skeptical-christian.net/articles/stroble.html

One could claim that observations about Strobel’s popular book and
speculations about his planned show are off-topic for scholarly historical
research of Christian origins, just as with Josh McDowell’s popular apologist
book. Lee Strobel is about to be the host of a show whcih is not focused on
historically oriented debate about Christian origins — but the show will have
Robert Price discussing “Is the Bible Bogus?”

http://www.pax.tv/shows/faith — “… puts the topic of faith to the test …
fast-paced and entertaining face-off format … discussion involving …
atheism … Christianity or humanism … guests from the worlds of current
events, pop culture, academia, and the arts and sciences … selected for
their fascinating insights and passion for the topic. Guests will tackle the
toughest faith-related questions, creating fervent exchanges and igniting
strong debates over topics like: [no mention of debating historical origins of
Christianity].”

The list of topics seems to avoid any mention of recent significant debates
and controversies such as Dan Brown’s wildly popular book and all the
resulting tidal wave of interest in noncanonical scriptures and alternative
Christian histories. The tv show seems to be a case of defusing the potent
controversies by claiming to cover controversies but bringing on stage the
mere impotent, tired old discussions.

At the above URL: What an unappealing list of pedestrian, conventional, yawner
topics for those who are mainly interested in revisionist theory of Christian
origins. The show seems to consider Dan Brown and the recent decades of
scholarship based on the noncanonical scriptures (Ehrman) too highbrow to
mention — or too potent.

Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Bart Ehrman
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195141830


One reading of the fact that apologist Lee Strobel is the host of a supposedly
skepticism-centric program is that Strobel has carefully read both of Earl
Doherty’s books because Doherty wrote a book specifically presenting a
point-by-point rebuttal to Lee Strobel’s book The Case for Christ. We can
certainly assume Strobel has read Doherty’s book Challenging the Verdict —
I’d expect to find confirmation of this at Doherty’s site.

Strobel is not plain ignorant of the position Doherty has put forth.
Strobel’s program must be aware of some range of controverted points and
worldviews, after Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, and Doherty’s book
against Strobel and possibly Doherty’s book The Jesus Puzzle. Too heavy
handed of an apologist spin would dissolve the whole idea of the show right
out of existence.

Yes the show might be devoted to the activist strategic goal of diffusing
challenges to the conventional, recently predominant, 20th-Century conception
we’ve called “Christianity”. We can expect a series of titillating heresies
trotted out and then pooh-poohed and ridiculed by the host and treatment —
but the heresies will be trotted out and given airtime, even if in a way that
attempts to ridicule them.

Being a journalist, Strobel knows the power of titillating heresies,
especially after The Da Vinci Code (a theory which is a beginner’s first
discovery of the possibility of alternative Christian histories, no more
sophisticated than the Jesus in India theory). Strobel won’t be fair and
balanced, but could be more balanced than in his book The Case for Christ.
Hopefully the show is better, more truly controversy-engaging, than the
pedestrian list of topics at http://www.pax.tv/shows/faith .


Assessment of the situation at the Amazon page about Strobel’s book:

The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for
Jesus
Lee Strobel
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0310209307
Sales rank: 261 (extremely popular). Popular in: Chandler, AZ (#5) ,
Carrollton, TX (#2)
Customer reviews: 404

So in some locations, Strobel’s book is almost Amazon’s #1 selling book.

The most recent mention of Doherty’s book I found in a customer review of
Strobel’s book is June 29, 2003, a well-spoken critique from the mythic-only
Jesus perspective, which 7 out of 20 visitors rated as a helpful review.
Doherty’s book is not appearing on my screen as a related book.

4 people recommended Doherty’s book Challenging the Verdict in *addition* to
The Case for Christ, and 3 people, *instead* of. These recommendations form
two long hyperlinks, above the editorial reviews and customer reviews.

All the customer book lists that are appearing appear to be apologetics lists.


The Jesus Puzzle. Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging
the Existence of an Historical Jesus
Earl Doherty
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0968601405
Sales rank: 14K (very popular)
Customer reviews: 68 (including Jay Raskin Feb. 4, 2004)
Book lists include one by Peter Kirby, “Know if there was a historical Jesus”:
by “Peter Kirby, DidJesusExist.com creator” —
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/guides/guide-display/-/3OM9V6LI2015Z

http://pages.ca.inter.net/~oblio/CTVCourt.htm — Doherty’s page “CHALLENGING
THE VERDICT – Court in Session”

I wonder how much the tremendous popularity of Strobel’s book inadvertantly
leads to greater readership for Doherty’s book, lifting his sales as a
side-effect.

Instead of the details about the book The Jesus Puzzle, I meant to post
details about the book:

Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for
Christ”
Earl Doherty
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0968925901
Sales rank: 6.6K (very popular)
Customer reviews: 75 (that’s a lot of reviews, and the book is more recent
than Jesus Puzzle)
Both Doherty’s book pages here have lots of links to mythicist books such as
The Jesus Mysteries.

It seems that this mythicist book is being read by many people due to its
direct connection to the specific popular book by Strobel, who is about to
host a potentially popular tv show that’s supposedly positioned as covering
controversies about Christianity.

Hopefully lots of people will write email the producer and the show and ask
them to cover historical controversies, not the strictly contemporary and
“safe” abstract topical/philosophical topics listed at the show’s home page as
if a willful forgetting of history by forgetting the historical mentality.
Let’s see face-off debates about Christian historical origins, not just
timeless modern philosophical controversies about “faith today”.


— Michael Hoffman

http://www.thebeastmovie.com
Due out in 2006. There is a discussion forum and subscription newsletter.

Naturally, per today’s predominant ordinary-state-of-consciousness paradigm
and the limited alternatives it permits one to be able to formulate for
consideration, the debate is limited to two options: Jesus existed, or
didn’t — there is not a trace of sensitivity to interpretation of Jesus
Christ as an experience or mystic-state metaphorical description.

Regardless of the movie itself, the very fact that a movie on this subject is
in the works is significant news for mythicists.

http://www.thebeastmovie.com/about/index2.html — “The theory that Jesus
Christ never existed, while largely unknown to most lay Christians, is gaining
credibility among scholars. Historians do not consider the Gospels to be
historically accurate accounts. The authors of the Gospels, writing 40 to 90
years after the supposed life of Christ, never intended for their works to be
read as biographies. There are no credible non-Christian references to Christ
during the period in which he is said to have lived. … The Beast is directed
by internationally acclaimed filmmaker Brian Flemming. … Flemming won the
New York Times Claiborne Pell Award for Original Vision for his groundbreaking
feature film Nothing So Strange … in 2003 … Flemming is a former
fundamentalist Christian. An in-depth interview with him is available in the
first issue of The Beast newsletter. … Members of the media seeking further
information may contact producer Amanda Jackson …


This search may be useful in the future:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Brian+Flemming%22+%22the+beast%22+movie+jesu
s



A Beast discussion group posting asks for an alternative theory of Christian
origins that doesn’t rely on the axiom a historical Jesus’.

o I’d center this alternative theory around mystic experiential
mystery-religion initiation.

o I’d center this alternative theory around the idea of providing an
alternative, a rebuttal of Ruler Cult/Caesar Cult.

o I’d mention house churches with Eucharistic meals giving way to the Mass
after Constantine.

o I’d mention motives for falsely portraying the Jewish themes (a supposedly
purely Jewish-derived Jesus) as independent from Hellenistic themes.

o I’d emphasize the trajectory of Christian origins starting in Alexandria,
moving to Rome, then finally and feebly arriving at last in Jerusalem.


Naturally, per today’s predominant ordinary-state-of-consciousness paradigm
and the limited alternatives it permits one to be able to formulate for
consideration, the debate at the Beast group is limited to two options: Jesus
existed, or didn’t — there is little sensitivity to interpretation of what
the figure of Jesus Christ connoted to its audience, such as a mystic-state
metaphorical description of initiation experience, or an alternative/
modification/ rebuttal to the divinized Caesar figure.


— Michael Hoffman

To compose Revelation, bits and pieces, standard thematic types of apocalyptic
and astral-ascent mysticism passages, were pulled together, with the name of
Jesus tacked onto the result. Modern thinking misreads the kind of motives,
the spirit behind the composition and assembling of the canon.

The assemblers and creative rewriters who pulled together the Christian canon
didn’t think of themselves as pulling together a history of a historical man
Jesus; they were not bound and limited by that way of thinking moderns project
onto them. They thought of themselves as pulling together various different
portrayals and figurations of the Jesus figure, who was set up as a creative
rewriting of Caesar and the Jewish-styled writings and various Hellenistic
themes.

Inserting the Jesus figure into Jewish- and Hellenistic-styled apocalyptic
fragment-collections, to cobble together yet another mystical-literary
variation of the apocalyptic ascent mysticism, with political styling, was not
intended to serve the purpose of propping up the idea of a historical Jesus.
The spirit of the textual gatherers and reworkers is all-important. They
were, first of all, doing the usual Hellenistic mode of literary creation:
creative recombination and restylization of existing popular themes from
Jewish and from Hellenistic/Pagan literature and myth-religion.

On those terms, the literary production “Revelation” makes perfect sense;
there’s no mystery about it. The illusion of Revelation being a puzzling
mystery in its violation of Jesus’ historicity only seems to be a problem when
modern thinking imports mis-attribution and mis-assessment of the motives and
origins of early Christian writings. The Jesus figure was largely a reaction
against, and creative alternative modification of, Hellenistic and Jewish
themes, with a Jewish stylization.

Revelation gained power serving as a commentary against Caesar Nero and
various Hellenistic/Roman goings on in the realm of popular
mystical/political/astrological syntheses. Revelation is a Jewish-styled
commentary that is intended to powerfully bounce against popular Roman themes
of the time: it did not originate in isolation focusing upon and playing out
Jewish-derived themes.

There was full borrowing of underlying themes, with a thin overlay veneer of
Jewish *stylized* origins. There were competing brands, competing branding,
of the same underlying types of themes. For moderns, all the scriptures are
taken to revolve around the main Jesus figure assumed to be the historical
Jesus figure — not so for the authors of the canon (gatherers, redactors,
creative hack-togetherers). For the authors of the canon, the historical
Jesus figure is no more central than the visionary generalized godman figure
labelled ‘Jesus’.

We must not assume the priority of the historical-styled Jesus figure over the
purely, exclusively mystic-experiential Jesus figure, in the minds of the
authors of the canon and the original audience of the canon. The authors
weren’t confused about what they were up to; moderns are confused when
approaching the ancients with modern preconceptions.

Revelation was included in the canon for mystical-political-literary reasons,
because it is a fitting endpiece to balance Creation, and it makes a better
ending than the pathetic, pleading, out-of-place assertions of Jesus’
historicity in the pages that otherwise would have ended the New Testament
with a whiny authoritarian anti-Docetism foot-stamping that falls flat and
calls too much attention to itself.


— Michael Hoffman

Michael wrote:

>>>The intro to Part Two of Lacarriere’s book The Gnostics [or Evola’s book?]

sounds distinctly similar to Hoffman’s Ego Death theory: it disparages
moralism (the conception of religion as being centrally concerned with
‘moralism’ conceived of, for example, as doing good to other persons in the
mundane world of daily life, and sexual ascetism, and mundane humility
conceived as general deprecation of the mundane self).


James O’Meara wrote:

>>It’s Evola’s book, although that’s only at a first glance. As I read more,

from the beginning, the anti-moralism is throughout. Also, La Carriere is
pretty anti-moral as well, but more from an urge to shock rather than as
presenting the technological alternative.

>>Also, p. xix of Evola sounds like something that could serve as a epigraph

from Ego Death: The Book:

>>”Our work will not be directed toward convincing those who do not wish to be

convinced. But it will supply firm points of support for anyone who reads it
without prejudice. On the other hand, anyone who is in accord, be it only
with a single one of our conclusions, will not fail to recognize its entire
importance. It is like the discovery of a strange land, alarming, sewn with
spirits, metals, and gods, whose labyrinthine passages and phantasmagoria are
concentrated little by little in a single point of light: the “myth” of a race
of “kingless” and “free” creatures.”

>>I found these regarding Evola and drugs:

http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/evola.html
“Coming to age on the dawn of the First World War, Evola joined the Italian
Army to serve in the Mountain Artillery with honor. He survived the war to
continue his search for meaning, incapable of returning to normal life,
overcome with “feelings of the inconsistency and vanity of the aims that
usually engage human activities.” Evola indulged briefly in
self-experimentation with drugs through which he attained “states of
consciousness partially detached from the physical senses, … frequently
approaching close to the sphere of visionary hallucinations and perhaps also
madness.”. But such experiences only aggravated his dilemma by intensifying
his sense of personal disintegration and confusion to the point where he
decided, at the age of twenty-three, to commit suicide. He was only dissuaded
from carrying this out by coming across a passage from the Middle Length
Sayings (Majjhima Nikaya I, 1) in the Pali Canon where the Buddha spoke of
those things with which the disciple committed to awakening must avoid
identifying. Having listed the body, feelings, the elements and so on, he
concludes: Whoever regards extinction as extinction, who thinks of extinction,
who reflects about extinction, who thinks: “Extinction is mine,” and rejoices
in extinction, such a person, I declare, does not know extinction. For Evola
this was “like a sudden illumination. I realised that this desire to end it
all, to dissolve myself, was a bond – ‘ignorance’ as opposed to true freedom.”


http://www.theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol2no3/gs-evola.html#_edn21
“In 1922 Evola was on the brink of suicide. He had experimented with
hallucinogenic drugs and was consumed by an intense desire for extinction. In
a letter dated July 2, 1921, Evola wrote to his friend Tristan Tzara:

“I am in such a state of inner exhaustion that even thinking and holding a pen
requires an effort which I am not often capable of. I live in a state of atony
and of immobile stupor, in which every activity and act of the will freeze. .
. . Every action repulses me. I endure these feelings like a disease. Also, I
am terrified at the thought of time ahead of me, which I do not know how to
utilize. In all things I perceive a process of decomposition, as things
collapse inwardly, turning into wind and sand.”

— Lettere di Julius Evola a Tristan Tzara, 1919-1923, Rome: Julius Evola
Foundation, 1991, p. 40.

“Evola was able to overcome this crisis after reading the Italian translation
of the Buddhist text Majjhima-Nikayo, the so-called “middle length discourses
of the Buddha.” In one of his discourses Buddha taught the importance of
detachment from one’s sensory perceptions and feelings, including one’s
yearning for personal extinction.”
— Guido Stucco

>>It may be that “orthodoxy” should be taken to mean what it says: the true

path, the mainstream. This would include some level of plant awareness, more
or less occluded, more or less deliberately.

>>Even if there was some original religious movement that was plant centered,

and orthodoxy represents those who took over, co-opted, and along the way
occluded plants, it still remains that there is some plant awareness in there,
while the later “heretic” may just be clueless.

>>Orthodoxy is hammered out between two kinds of “heretic”, those who stress

morality (in lieu, in ignorance of, plants) as well as those who abandon
concern with morality (“antinomians”) in favor of plants. There often seems
to be an assumption that all heretics are of the latter sort.

>>The entheogen aware/occluded distinction runs across, and may or may not

coincide with, the orthodox/heretic, even “gnostic”. The latter may be some
clueless, morality obsessed fanatics, like many of the Protestant movements.

>>The researcher may find more of value in the traditional Mass, than in some

modern “gnostic”‘s new and improved, “mystical” version.

>>In Against Nature, the protagonist finds endless amounts of decadent thrills

in his vast library of the Church Fathers and monastic poetry, while having
only a handful of modern, “decadent” writers on his shelves. The real
pornography is found in the manuals for confessors, not some tedious Parisian
novelist.

>>By analogy, the Republican party includes both religious fanatics and

staunch libertarians, who hate each other, and embarrass the party when either
gets “off message.” The majority of Democratic delegates oppose the Iraq war,
but you wouldn’t know it from reading the platform. (The analogy fails, to the
extent that the party is *just* a coalition of such self-sufficient groups,
rather than there being a real “dogma” that each has subsequently interpreted
in a clueless, extreme fashion)

>>– James O’Meara

Norma wrote (paraphrased):

>>How unfortunate it is that the true meaning of Christianity continues to be

lumped in with the literalizations. To ascribe the foundation of true
Christianity to the ordinary world, the sun, or any other ordinary-world
thing, is no different than the literalization of Jesus being a man.

>>Ascribing the foundation of Christianity to an ordinary-world physical

object may do away with the often noxiously abused Jesus as a historical
figure by replacing Jesus with the sun, de-personifying the Jesus figure, but
that type of portrayal and conception of the Jesus figure does not effectively
or accurately represent the state of consciousness from where the writings
came, and thus, is not merely a harmless and restorative reading, but actually
*stunts* growth while believing that such a conception *enhances* growth, in
that it does not allow people to even begin to see and realize the depths of
human nature and spirituality by the process entailed through *experience*.

This text file is automatically posted to the Egodeath Yahoo group every two
weeks.

The Egodeath Yahoo group is a newsletter or Weblog sent out by Michael Hoffman.


This Yahoo group covers the cybernetic theory of ego death and
ego transcendence, including:

o Nonreductionistic block-universe determinism/Fatedness, the closed
and preexisting future, tenseless time, free will as illusory, the
holographic universe, and predestination and Reformed theology.

o Cognitive science, mental construct processing, mental models,
ontological idealism, contemporary metaphysics of the continuant
self, cybernetic self-control, personal control agency, moral agency,
and self-government.

o Zen satori, short-path enlightenment, and Alan Watts;
transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber, and integral theory.

o Entheogens and psychedelic drugs, the Eleusinian mysteries and
cracking the allegorical code of the mystery religions, mythic
metaphor and allegorical encoding, the mystic altered state, mystic
and religious experiencing, visionary states, religious rapture, and
Acid Rock mysticism.

o Loss of control, self-control seizure, cognitive instability, and
psychosis and schizophrenia.


To post on these subjects, you can join the group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeathunmoderated
and then send email to:
egodeathunmoderated@yahoogroups.com


— Michael Hoffman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath
http://www.egodeath.com

jessito wrote to me:


I stopped into a local coffeeshop for one of my favorite legal drugs. I found
a book “History of Art” volume 1, by H.W. Janson. I got into an interesting
conversation with the owner of the shop, whose son plays in a local rock
group. He let me borrow the book.

I soon found myself enjoying the art and forgetting about my quest for
mushrooms. I probably looked at a lot of mushrooms without seeing them. In
cases where I thought maybe I saw them, I wasn’t sure.

Then I crashed into plate 442, “Page with Summer Landscape”, an illustration
from a manuscript of the Carmina Burana, early 13th century.

This landscape is a mixture of relatively realistic birds and beasts with very
fanciful mushroom trees of all varieties.

The mushroom trees are quite a mixture of realistic and symbolic elements.
Many of them are multistemmed. Some have clear “annulus” rings around their
trunks. Some appear to have veil remnants at their bases. Some bear multiple
fruits, leaves and flowers, the flowers being circles with crosses on them.
Some have umbrella shaped canopies. Some have canopies shaped like cubensis
caps that haven’t opened yet, made up of mushroomlike leaves. The birds
appear to be pecking at some of the mushrooms, while the beasts are not.

This picture has such a crop of varied and fanciful mushroom tree images that
it appears to be a tutorial in how to see mushrooms everywhere you look in
art. I have always marvelled at what a poor job Medieval artists did of
illustrating trees. I just figured it was either because they have such a
wood shortage there that they hack pieces off their few remaining trees, or
they were so anthropocentric they paid no mind to accurate depiction of trees.
I see things are not so simple.

I had seen another plate, 339, Virgin and Child Enthroned, in which Mary sits
with Jesus on a cushion embellished with red “spade” designs. They looked
like mushrooms, but I wasn’t sure. The “spade” motif is prominent in plate
442.

Plate 363 is a coronation cloak of German emperors, a fine work imported from
Sicily and created by Islamic artisans on red silk with gold embroidery.
Beautiful fractalized beasts share this space with a tree of life, which I had
not noticed until I ran into plate 442, which showed me how to appreciate this
motif and perhaps the inspiration source for the fractalized beasts.

Plate 377, Blustrade relief inscribed by the Patriarch Sigvald (ca. 725 ad)
contains inaccurate renditions of trees whose lowest limbs curl like an
annulus or the margin of a cap. The tree of life is there, and vines with
spade shaped leaves. Plant life plays a big role in this religious
illustration.

Plate 397 shows Adam and Eve ashamed and covering themselves before an angry
schoolmaster. They stand under a tree that has been pruned a lot and branches
into two trunks with “umbrella” canopies at the tops. This is on the bronze
doors at Prince Michael’s, Hildesheim Cathedral, ca 1000 AD. This door (plate
396) has many illustrations on it with similar mushroom trees, but the picture
is too small to scrutinize them well.

On the ceiling of this Cathedral is the beautiful image you can see at
http://www.entheomedia.org, where Adam and Eve stand before a background of
red with white spots. (plate 395). Clearly, this cathedral is a very sacred
space. The architecture is Byzantine, with columns, arches and domes, and the
colors are blood red and white. Truly, no Christian pilgrimage to Europe’s
sacred places would be complete without a visit to St. Michael’s at
Hildesheim.

Plate 427 is interesting. It’s called “The Mission of the Apostles” and it is
the “tympanum of center portal of narthex at Ste.- Madeleine, Vezelay, 1120-32
AD”. There are apparently two doors, and this semicircular frieze stands atop
the column separating the doors.

Christ is there, and in the folds of his robe there is at least one set of
folds that looks too much like a mushroom to be dismissed. Those around him
have similar wrinkles in their robes. I have always wondered at the way
medieval art reveled in draping fabric. This piece is very complex and the
photo is too small for adequate study, but I’m sure there is much there.
Astrological symbolism is also shown.

It’s interesting that robes so often fold into mushroom shapes, as in plate
426, the Last Judgment at Autun Cathedral, c. 1130-35. A haloed angel has a
couple of folds near his feet that just happen to take this shape. Folds of
tapestry sometimes remind me of mushroom gills. More and more, lately. Both
angels have very wrinkled robes, and haloes.

Plate 438 is an illustration of St. John the Evangelist from the Gospel Book
of Abbot Wedricus, from shortly before 1147. The illustration is small but it
appears there is a very clear image in the upper right inset of 3 mushrooms
growing on top of one mushroom. There appears to be a mushroom in the folds
of his robe near St. John’s right foot. Abbot Wedric stands with an oddly
shaped inkwell providing ink for St. John’s pen.

There are plenty of saints with halos and some odd trees in the book,
including those not very visible toward the right side of the picture of the
Baptismal font in pl. 431. They would just look like poor renditions of trees
if I had not seen plate 442. This font is illuminated with relief sculpting
of Jesus’ baptism. There may be much more than meets my untrained eye in this
picture and in the font itself, including its back side. What do bulls have
to do with the baptism of Jesus? They are part of the design.

This looks like a really interesting area of study. I am still not sure
whether some of the mushrooms I see are really deliberately placed mushroom
motifs, but it appears that the mushroom motif became stylized and can be
found in many places including perhaps every badly drawn, hacked up tree in
European art.

The architecture of the cathedrals is interesting. They are cross-shaped.
The foot of the cross is often very square as befitting the cross’s anchorage
in the ground. The “head” is often dome shaped, and the domes or half domes
are often very interesting. Of course a sturdy structural shape like that
might have nothing to do with mushrooms, but when so many mushrooms are seen
in the art gracing the cathedrals, one must wonder.


— jessito

(Copyright applies to the author of the respective text.)

The ancient theme of true knowledge as “remembering” is not just a symbol or
metaphorical idea — it is an overwhelmingly intense experience that is being
reported. During the peak mystic state window, the mind experiences
recollection, returning to a forgotten state now timelessly remembered:

Remember, realizing self-control seizure ego death thought injection and
calling for divine transcendent mercy as the last ultimate, transrational
resource: remember remembering the idea of all the egoic controllership
resources being brought to nothing because of the idea-that-kills, the idea of
perceiving all one’s thoughts as results thrust upon the mind frozen in the
block universe; remember the panic seizure control-loop realization, remember
arriving timelessly at it, then remembering there is only seizure, only
controllership-death in the egoic hyper-rational mode of thinking; in
rationality there is only death, only ego death and the control-seizure
singularity realization.

Restoration of viable control can only enter into the personal control system
from outside of it, an action done to a dead controller by a level of control
that is essentially outside the personal control system; restoration of
viability of controllership can only be brought into the system by being
pushed into the system by one’s holy guardian angel, one’s benevolent
transcendent genius, the uncontrollable unknowable transcendent controller
standing radically outside the entirely of all one’s resources as a personal
power-wielding agent.

This is all remembered; the remembering of it is the ego death experience; to
remember is to die, and remembering includes remembering being rescued by a
divine transcendent transrational paradigm, by the idea of unjustified (but
not unjust) benevolent life-preserving rescue, transcendent love, rescued and
restored by The Good which is beyond good and evil, by The True that exists
beyond truth and falsity (see Douglas Hofstadter’s book on strange loops and
Mu and jumping outside the system as a normal part of modern 20th Century
discoveries).