The Fungi-Pareidola of The Psychedelic Gospels cannabisculture.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cannabisculture.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
CANNABIS CULTURE –
The Immortality Key is a bestselling book, which suggests a entheogenic role in the ancient Christian Eucharist, that originated with and was passed down from the cult of Dionysus and the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. In this article Chris Bennett, who has written about some of these same themes and areas of history offers his views on where the book wins and fails.
Warning, biases ahead….
To be clear, this is as much of a ‘response’ and ‘discussion’ about
The Immortality Key as a ‘review.’ With that said, this article is in no way intended to dissuade the interested reader away from
Was the vision of the burning bush a psychedelic experience? Did use of drugs inform early Christianity? Scholars who linked the emergence of religion to altered states of consciousness once paid a heavy price, but that may be changing
Vito Corleone/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
We’re in the middle of a psychedelic renaissance.
Mainstream books like Michael Pollan’s
How to Change Your Mind (2018) and a wave of promising research on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics have produced a ton of interest in a class of drugs once considered taboo.
But a new book,
The Immortality Key, has opened up a fascinating discussion about the historical role of psychedelics in the Western world, going all the way back to ancient Greece. The best way I can describe it is to say it’s an old-fashioned detective story, like
There is general agreement with the view of Dawson (1934a) that
shemshemet means cannabis, and the identification was strongly supported by the use of hempen rope making. As a drug, it has remained in active use since pharaonic times. It… was administered by mouth, rectum, vagina, bandaged the skin, applied to the eyes, and by fumigation. However, these applications provide no clear evidence of awareness of the effects of cannabis on the central nervous system. (Nunn, 2002)
Although most modern Egyptologists acknowledge a role for cannabis as a source of fiber and as a medicine, few see a role for hemp as a ritual intoxicant, and many researchers claim that the Egyptians were unaware of these properties. As noted in The Mummy Congress: