The Bible indicates Christ to be a seven-days-a-week workaholic, a non-mistletoe eating Pisces (fisher of men) with an Access All Areas guest pass to all the hip, exclusive, and high places. So why make out he was a Sunday-kipping, earthbound druid born as a Capricorn in December?
The first Christian kingdom was ancient Britain under King Arthur before the English (Angles), French (Saxons) and Germans (Vikings, kind of) grabbed it. Those gallant Knights of the Round Table got well stoned and tenaciously devoted themselves to magical swords, dope-dealing Welsh wizards, shagging and the discovery of the Holy Grail, a goblet containing an inexhaustible supply of mind-bending red wine, carefully mixed with the menstrual blood of Mary Magdalene, the first holy hooker. Why are we these days expected to drink at communion, very infrequently, a mere thimbleful of sickly liquid not as potent as the average shite lager? What kind of communication is that? Even when reindeers do their trolleying thing in the sky, Rudolf is allowed to get plastered, show off his red nose, and form part of the bizarre indoctrination we suffered as kids.
Aleister Crowley
Magick in Theory and Practice
ONE OF THE simplest and most complete of Magick ceremonies is the Eucharist. Take a substance symbolic of the whole course of nature, make it God, and consume it. A Eucharist of some sort should most assuredly be consummated daily by every magician, and he should regard it as the main sustenance of his magickal life. The magician becomes filled with God, fed upon God, intoxicated with God. Little by little his body will become purified by the internal lustration of God; day by day his mortal fame, shedding its earthly elements, will become in very truth the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Day by day matter is replaced by Spirit, the human by the divine; ultimately the change will be complete; God manifest in flesh will be his name.
Majick in Theory and Practice, 1926
Jim Hogshire
The Pill as Holy Eucharist
THE UNREALISTIC VIEW of pills is possible because of what we could call the ‘holy pill’ syndrome. Pills are viewed by society as something holy, sort of a Eucharist.
In this analogy the pill – or host – is capable of miraculous things but only if it is treated in a certain ritualistic way. Thus, a high priest (your doctor) must first authorize its use in accordance with proper canon. It must be further consecrated by another level of priest (your pharmacist) who will place it into your outstretched hands from a counter three feet above your head.
You must not vary from the bottle’s holy procedures. You must not transfer any of the pills in the bottle to another person or else something unspeakable may happen.
When pills are handled by lay people, they can become hideous things, instruments of death, sowers of discord. Drugs routinely used by psychiatrists in the USA to treat schizophrenics were the very ones used by the evil Soviets to ‘torture’ patients in its mental hospitals. Mom’s Darvon is good for Mom only. If anyone else takes the pill consecrated for Mother’s use, they are abusing it. To give anyone else one of your sleeping pills is a heretical act. To act on your need for an antibiotic without prescription is also heretical. It is also irreligious, not to mention illegal, to manufacture your own medicine without proper license – tantamount to permission from the Bishop.
Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill Marketing, Art, History & Consumption, 1999
I am a mushroom
On whom the dew of heaven drops now and then
John Ford
John Allegro
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
THE FUNGUS RECOGNISED today as the Amanita muscaria, or Fly Agaric, had been known from the beginning of history. Beneath the skin of its characteristic red- and white-spotted cap, there is concealed a powerful hallucinatory poison. Its religious use among certain Siberian peoples and others has been the subject of study in recent years, and its exhilarating and depressive effects have been clinically examined. These include the stimulation of the perceptive faculties so that the subject sees objects much greater or much smaller than they really are, colours and sounds are much enhanced, and there is a general sense of power, both physical and mental, quite outside the normal range of human experience.
The mushroom has always been a thing of mystery. The ancients were puzzled by its manner of growth without seed, the speed with which it made its appearance after rain, and its equally rapid disappearance. Born from a volva or ‘egg’ it appears like a small penis, raising itself like the human organ sexually aroused, and when it spread wide its canopy, the old botanists saw it as a phallus bearing the ‘burden’ of a woman’s groin. Every aspect of the mushroom’s existence was fraught with sexual allusions, and in its phallic form the ancient saw a replica of the fertility god himself. It was the ‘Son of God’, its drug was a purer form of the god’s own spermatozoa than that discoverable in any other form of living matter. It was, in fact, God himself, manifest on earth. To the mystic it was the divinely given means of entering heaven; God had come down in the flesh to show the way to himself, by himself. To pluck such a precious herb was attended at every point with peril. The time – before sunrise, the words to be uttered – the name of the guardian angel, were vital to the operation, but more was needed. Some form of substitution was necessary, to make an atonement to the earth robbed of her offspring. Yet such was the divine nature of the Holy Plant, as it was called, only the god could make the necessary sacrifice. To redeem the Son, the Father had to supply even the ‘price of redemption’. These are all phrases used of the sacred mushroom, as they are of the Jesus of Christian theology.
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 1970
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye, and what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Kevin Rushby
Eating the Flowers of Paradise – 2
It was during Rasulid rule that the mystical movement of the Sufis became a major social force, as followers of men like Shadhili arrived with the promise of guidance for those seeking closer understanding of God. Missionaries passed through Mokha and Aden on their way to Africa, including one Abu Zarbay who is credited by some Hararis with funding their town, and by others with introducing qat to Yemen in 1400. The name Sufi itself comes from the Arabic word meaning wool, perhaps a reference to the simple cloth they wore. This ascetism was one major part of the Sufi tariqa, or path; but even more revolutionary, was their use of stimulants to help them along to spiritual enlightenment.
Certainly, drugs seem to be able to push experiences in the directions people are hoping and expecting to go. And for the Sufis, like the ancient Cretans on the island of Aphrodite, that direction was religious ecstasy. Their beliefs were varied but centred on the idea that, by repetitive rituals of prayer and meditation, the individual could approach God. From this developed an idea of a secretive select group, above the laws of man. Some took this to be licence for a life of sensuality and luxury but most advocated simplicity and austerity. One of these was a certain Ahmed ibn Alwan whose father was a scribe at the thirteenth-century Rasulid court.
Ibn Alwan moved to Yufrus on the western side of Jebel Saber where he founded a religious school and became noted for his outspoken attacks on the kings. In legend he is credited with using qat in his meditations and prayers, the drug lifting him and his followers on their path to religious ecstasy. It was a time when the ‘mystic saint’ was a figure of great influence and importance, and qat, with its power to work some strange alchemy of the mind, must have been a valuable tool: that mix of dreamlike unreality and sharpness of thought that bestowed instant mystical experiences – a short cut to sainthood. As ascetics too, the holy men were sympathetic towards a substance that tended to deprive users of sleep, appetite and libido.
The first coffee and qat trees to arrive in Yemen were probably planted on Saber or its neighbour, Jebel Habashi, a word from which the old
name Abyssinia is derived. Initially they may have arrived in the form of powder, mixed up as teas, rather than as seeds or plants. What is clear is that both substances began to be used as part of religious ritual by Sufistic sects, knowledge of them spreading anywhere that the Sufi missionaries travelled. But the secular world was not far behind, and when qat and coffee moved out of the narrow circles of the Sufis, they became controversial almost immediately.
Eating the Flowers of Paradise, 1999
Die, my dear Doctor, that’s the last thing I shall do
Viscount Palmerston
Rene Daumal
A Fundamental Experiment
MY MEMORIES OF childhood and adolescence are deeply marked by a series of attempts to experience the beyond, and those random attempts brought me to the ultimate experiment, the fundamental experience of which I speak. At about the age of six, having been taught no kind of religious belief whatsoever, I struck up against the stark problem of death. I passed some atrocious nights, feeling my stomach clawed to shreds and my breathing half throttled by the anguish of nothingness, the ‘no more of anything’. One night when I was about eleven, relaxing my entire body, I calmed the terror and revulsion of my organism before the unknown, and a new feeling came alive in me: hope, and a foretaste of the imperishable. But I wanted more; I wanted a certainty. At fifteen or sixteen I began my experiments, a search without direction or system.
Finding no way to experiment directly on death – on my death – I tried to study my sleep, assuming an analogy between the two. By various devices I attempted to enter sleep in a waking state. The undertaking is not so utterly absurd as it sounds, but in certain respects it is perilous. I could not go very far with it; my own organism gave me some serious warnings of the risks I was running. One day, however, I decided to tackle the problem of death itself. I would put my body into a state approaching as close as possible that of physiological death, and still concentrate all my attention on remaining conscious and registering everything that might take place. I had in my possession some carbon tetrachloride, which I used to kill beetles for my collection. Knowing this substance belongs to the same chemical family as chloroform (it is even more toxic), I thought I could regulate its action very simply and easily: the moment I began to lose consciousness, my hand would fall from my nostrils carrying with it the handkerchief moistened with the volatile fluid. Later on I repeated the experiment in the presence of friends, who could have given me help had I needed it. The result was always exactly the same; that is, it exceeded and even overwhelmed my expectations by bursting the limits of the possible and by projecting me brutally into another world.
First came the ordinary phenomena of asphyxiation, arterial palpitation, buzzings, sounds of heavy pumping in the temples, painful repercussions from the tiniest exterior noises, flickering lights. Then, the distinct feeling, ‘This is getting serious. The game is up,’ followed by a swift recapitulation of my life up to that moment. If I felt any slight anxiety, it remained indistinguishable from a bodily discomfort that did not affect my mind. And my mind kept repeating to itself, ‘Careful, don’t doze off. This is just the time to keep your eyes open.’ The luminous spots that danced in front of my eyes soon filled the whole of space, which echoed with the beat of my blood – sound and light overflowing space and fusing in a single rhythm.
By this time I was no longer capable of speech, even of interior speech; my mind travelled too rapidly to carry any words along with it. I realized, in a sudden illumination, that I still had control of the hand which held the handkerchief, that I still accurately perceived the position of my body, and that I could hear and understand words uttered nearby – but that objects, words, and meanings of words had lost any significance whatsoever. It was a little like having repeated a word over and over until it shrivels and dies in your mouth: you still know what the word ‘table’ means, for instance, you could use it correctly, but it no longer truly evokes its object. In the same way, everything that made up ‘the world’ for me in the ordinary state was still there, but I felt as if it had been drained of its substance. It was nothing more than a phantasmagoria – empty, absurd, clearly outlined and necessary all at once. This ‘world’ lost all reality because I had abruptly entered another world, infinitely more real, an instantaneous and intense world of eternity, a concentrated flame of reality and evidence into which I had cast myself like a butterfly drawn to a lighted candle. Then, at that moment, comes the certainty; speech must now be content to wheel in circles around the bare fact.
Little by little I discovered in my reading accounts of the same experience, for I now held the key to these narratives and descriptions whose relation to a single and unique reality I should not previously have suspected. William James speaks of it. O.V. de L. Milosz, in his Letter to Storge, gives an overwhelming account of it in terms I had been using myself. The famous circle referred to by a medieval monk, and which Pascal saw (but who first saw it and spoke of it?), ceased to be an empty allegory for me; I knew it represented a devouring vision of what I had seen also. And, beyond all this varied and partial human testimony (there is scarcely a single true poet in whose work I did not find at least a fragment of it), the confessions of the great mystics and, still more advanced, the sacred texts of certain religions, brought me an affirmation of the same reality. Sometimes I found it in its most terrifying form, as perceived by an individual of limited vision who has not raised himself to the level of such perception, who, like myself, has tried to look into the infinite through the keyhole and finds himself staring into Bluebeard’s cupboard. Sometimes I encountered it in the pleasing, plentifully satisfying and intensely luminous form that is the vision of beings truly transformed, who can behold that reality face to face without being destroyed by it. I have in mind the revelation of the Divine Being in the Bhagavad-Gita, the vision of Ezekiel and that of St John the Divine on Patmos, certain descriptions in the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo thodol) and a passage in the Lankdvatara-Sutra.
Not having lost my mind then and there, I began little by little to philosophize about the memory of this experience. And I would have buried myself in a philosophy of my own if someone had not come along just in time to tell me, ‘Look, the door is open – narrow and hard to reach, but a door. It is the only one for you.’
1959. From: Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader, ed. Mike Jay, 1999
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die
John Donne
William James
Mysticism
NITROUS OXIDE AND ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any worlds remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the eeriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.
Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
How to regard them is the question – for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish f
ormulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 1902
Man does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man
A.E. Housman
J.M. Campbell
On the Religion of Hemp
ONE
Such holiness and such evil-scaring powers must give bhang a high place among lucky objects, that a day may be fortunate to the careful man should upon awakening look into liquid bhang. So any nightmares or evil spirits that may have entered into him during the ghost-haunted hours of the night will flee from him at the sight of bhang and free him of their binding influences during the day . . . To meet someone carrying bhang is a sure sign of success. To see in a dream the leaves, plant or water of bhang is lucky; it brings the Goddess of Wealth into the dreamer’s power. To see his parents worship the bhang plant and pour Mang over Shiva’s Ling will cure the dreamer of fever. A longing for bhang foretells happiness; to see bhang drunk increases riches. ‘No good thing can come to a man who treads underfoot the holy bhang leaf.’