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Showing 7 similar quotes for quote #1238 from The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John M. Allegro

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Publisher: kindle import (0)

Publisher: Paperjacks (1971)

188-189

The demand made by Islam upon its adherents for 'self-surrender' and submission to the will of Allah, was carried to its greatest extremes in the fanatical sect known as the Assassins. Theologically they were of the Shi'ite branch of Islam, but their external policies were marked, like the Jewish Zealots, by utter ruthlessness in removing from their path any person who disagreed with their ideas. This they achieved by raising within their group a band of young fanatics called the Fida'is, the 'devoted ones.' They were known generally as 'Assassins' because their complete subservience to the will of their religious masters, without regard for personal danger, was the result of their taking a drug known as khasish, our 'Hashish.' \r\n\r\nThe sect was formed as a secret society around 1090 when they won control, by stratagem, of the mountain fortress of Alamut in Persia. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries they and their successors spread terror throughout Persia and Syria, and were finally only put down after some 12,000 of them had been massacred. For some time small bodies of Assassins lingered on in the mountains of Syria, and some think the cult is not entirely dead even now. \r\n\r\nThe herb which gave them their name, khashish, 'Hashish', means in Arabic no more than 'dried herbage.' If used of a particular drug, it properly requires some qualification, like 'Red Hashish', meaning Belladonna, Deadly Nightshade. The word Hashish alone has become attached to one particular form Cannabis sativa, or Hemp, and the enervating drug made from its resin. But it is difficult to believe that the 'pot'-smokers of today, the weary dotards who wander listlessly round our cities and universities, are the spiritual successors of those drug-crazed enthusiasts who, regardless of their safety, stormed castles and stole as assassins into the strongholds of their enemies. If their 'Hashish' correctly interprets Cannabis then the latter must represent some more potent drug. \r\n\r\nThe Greek word Kannabis may now be traced to the Sumerian element GAN, 'mushroom top', followed by the word which we saw earlier was part of the name of the New Testament Barnabas, and mean 'red, speckled with white', denoting, in other words, the colour of the Amanita muscaria. As well as the transfer of its name to the less powerful 'Hashish', it underwent a jumbling of its form to produce the Greek Panakes, a mysterious plant also called Asclepion (elsewhere used of the mushroom), which required atonement to the earth of various cereals when pulled up. It seems therefore probable that the original Cannabis was the sacred fungus, and that the drug which stimulated the medieval Assassins to self-immolation was the same that brought the Zealots to their awful end on Masada a millennium earlier. Indeed, we may now seriously consider the possibility that the Assassin movement was but a resurgence of a cultic practice that was part of Islam from the beginning, and had its real origin thousands of years before that. It seems to be a pattern of religious movements based on the sacred fungus that long periods of relative calm and stagnation are interspersed with flashes of violent extremism which die away again after persecution, only to re-emerge in much later generations. In this, history is reflecting the action of the drug itself on its partakers. After hectic bouts of uncontrolled activity, the fungus-eater will collapse in a stupor from which only a resurgence of the stimulatory poison in his brain will arouse him.

36-37

An added difficulty in botany', wrote Pliny some nineteen hundred years ago, 'is the variety of names given to the same plant in different districts.' The more 'strange' the herb, the more noteworthy its characteristics, the greater the number of folk-names. Dioscorides, for instance, gives some two-score names to the Mandrake, that famous aphrodisiac with which Leah purchased a night of connubial bliss with Jacob (Gen 30:14ff), and whose narcotic properties could not suffice to give poor Othello 'that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday'. \r\nUntil comparatively recently, botanists lacked adequate methods of classification, so that plants tended to be grouped together on the basis of what we nowadays would consider secondary characteristics. Thus speaking of the Ground-pine, Pliny records that 'a third variety has the same smell and therefore the same name.' Even now, the inexactitude of local plant names is the despair of field botanists. Pliny felt as sorely frustrated: 'The reason why more herbs are not familiar,' he writes, 'is because experience of them is confined to illiterate country-folk, who form the only class of people living among them. Moreover, when crowds of medical men are to be met everywhere, nobody wants to look for them. Many simples, also, lack names, though their properties are known...The most disgraceful reason for this scanty knowledge is that even those who possess it refuse to teach it, just as though they would themselves lose what they have imparted to others.

20-22

Quite simply, the reasoning of the early theologians seems to have been as follows: since rain makes the crops grow it must contain within it the seed of life. In human beings this is spermatozoa that is ejected from the penis at orgasm. Therefore it followed that rain is simply heavenly semen, the all-powerful creator, God. \r\nThe most forceful spurting of this 'seed' is accompanied by thunder and the shrieking wind. This is the 'voice' of God. Somewhere above the sky a mighty penis reaches an orgasm that shakes the heavens. The 'lips' of the penis-tip, the glans, open and the divine seed shoots forth and is borne by the wind to the earth. As saliva can be seen mixed with breath during forceful human speech, so the 'speaking' of the divine penis is accompanied by a powerful blast of wind, the holy, creative spirit, bearing the 'spittle' of semen. \r\nThis 'spittle' is the visible 'speech' of God; it is his 'Son' in New Testament terms, the 'Word' which 'was with God, and was God, and was in the beginning with God; through whom all things were made, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life ...' (John 1:1-4). In the words of the Psalmists: 'By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth' (Ps 33:6); or, 'when you send forth your breath they are created, and the face of the earth is restored' (Ps 104:30). \r\nThis idea of the creative Word of God came to have a profound philosophical and religious importance and was, and still is, the subject of much metaphysical debate. But originally it was not an abstract notion; you could see the 'Word of God', feel it as rain on your face, see it seeping into the furrows of mother earth, the 'labia' of the womb of creation. Within burns an eternal fire which every now and then demonstrates its presence dramatically, by bursting to the surface in a volcano, or by heating spring water to boiling point where the earth's crust is thinnest. It was this uterine heat which made generation possible, and which later theologians identified with the place and means of eternal punishment. \r\nAlso beneath the earth's surface, lay a great ocean whose waters, like those of the seas around and above the firmament (Gen 1:7) were the primeval reservoirs of the god's spermatozoa, the Word. They were therefore 'seas of knowledge' as the Sumerians called them, and could be tapped by seekers of truth, whether they looked 'to the heavens or to the earth beneath' (Isa 51:6), that is, by means of astrology or necromancy, 'divination from the dead'. This notion that mortals could discover the secrets of the past, present, and future by somehow projecting themselves to the 'seventh heaven' or down into the underworld gave rise to much mythology and some curious magical practices. Since common observation showed that dead and decaying matter melted back into the earth, it was thought that the imperishable part of man, his 'soul' or spirit, the creative breath that gave him life in the womb, must either float off into the ether or return through the terrestrial vagina into the generative furnace. In either case he was more likely to have access to the fount of all wisdom than when his spirit was imprisoned in mortal flesh. \r\nSince it was given to few men to be able to visit heaven or hell and return to tell what they had seen and heard, there arose the ideas of 'messengers', or angels, those 'workers of miracles' as their name in Greek and Hebrew means. These demigods, or heroes, had access to both worlds and play an important part in ancient mythology. They could come from above in various guises or be conjured up from the ground, like the ghost of Samuel drawn to the surface by the witch of Endor for consultation by King Saul (I Sam 28). One important aspect of this idea of heavenly and subterranean founds of knowledge is that since plants and trees had their roots beneath the soil and derived their nourishment from the water above and beneath the earth, it was thought possible that some varieties of vegetation could give their mortal consumers access to this wisdom. Herein lies the philosophical justification for believing that hallucinatory drugs distilled from such plants imparted divine secrets, or 'prophecies'. \r\nSuch very special kinds of vegetation were, then, 'angels' and to know their names was to have power over them. A large part of magical folk-lore was devoted to maintaining this vital knowledge of the names of the angels. It was not sufficient simply to know what drug could be expected to have certain effects; it was important to be able to call upon its name at the very moment of plucking and eating it. Not only was its rape from the womb of mother earth thus safely accomplished, but its powers could be secured by the prophet for his 'revelations' without incurring the heavy penalties so often suffered by those misusing the drug plants.

Beginner's Guide to Revelation: A Jungian Interpretation

Author: Robin Robertson

Publisher: Nicholas-Hays Inc (1994)

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

302

Listen: the chaos you experience under LSD is not an illusion. The orderly world you imagine you experience, under the artificial and poisonous diet which the Illuminati have forced on all civilized nations, is the real illusion. I am not saying what you are hearing. The only good fnord is a dead fnord. Never whistle while you're pissing. An obscure but highly significant contribution to sociology and epistemology occurs in Malignowski's study 'Retroactive Reality,' printed in Wieczny Kwiat Wtadza, the journal of the Polish Orthopsychiatric Psociety, for Autumn 1959. 'All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense. Do you follow me?' (In some sense, Joe mutters. . . .) The author, Dr. Malignowski, was assisted by three graduate students named Korzybski-1, Korzybski-2, and Korzybski-3 (Siamese triplets born to a mathematician and, hence, indexed rather than named). Malignowski and his students interviewed 1,700 married couples, questioning husband and wife separately in each case, and asked 100 key questions about their first meeting, first sexual experience, marriage ceremony, honeymoon, economic standing during the first year of marriage, and similar subjects which should have left permanent impressions on the memory. Not one couple in the 1,700 gave exactly the same answers to 100 questions, and the highest single score was made by a couple who gave the same answers to 43 of the questions. 'This study demonstrated graphically what many psychologists have long suspected: the life-history which most of us carry around in our skulls is more our own creation (at least seven percent more) than it is an accurate recording of realities. As Malignowski concludes, 'Reality is retroactive, retrospective and illusory.' 'Under these circumstances, things not personally experienced but recounted by others are even more likely to be distorted, and after a tale passes through five tellers it is virtually one hundred percent pure myth: another example of the Law of Fives.

Myths to live by

Author: Joseph Campbell

Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation (2011)

...let me conclude with the fragment of a Hindu myth that to me seems to have captured in a particularly apt image the whole sense of such a movement as we today are all facing at this critical juncture of our general human history. It tells of a time at the very start of the history of the universe when the gods and their chief enemies, the anti-gods, were engaged in one of their eternal wars. They decided this time to conclude a truce and in cooperation to churn the Milky Ocean -- the Universal Sea -- for its butter of immortality. They took for their churning-spindle the Cosmic Mountain (the Vedic counterpart of Dante's Mountain of Purgatory), and for a twirling-cord they wrapped the Cosmic Serpent around it. Then, with the gods all pulling at the head end and the anti-gods at the tail, they caused that Cosmic Mountain to whirl. And they had been churning thus for a thousand years when a great black cloud of absolutely poisonous smoke came up out of the waters, and the churning had to stop. They had broken through to an unprecedented source of power, and what they were experiencing first were its negative, lethal effects. If the work were to continue, some one of them was going to have to swallow and absorb that poisonous cloud, and, as all knew, there was but one who would be capable of such an act; namely, the archetypal god of yoga, Shiva, a frightening daemonic figure. He just took that entire poison cloud into his begging bowl and at one gulp drank it down, holding it by yoga at the level of his throat, where it turned the whole throat blue; and he has been known as Blue Throat, Nilakantha, ever since. Then, when that wonderful deed had been accomplished, all the other gods and the anti-gods returned to their common labor. And they churned and they churned and they went right on tirelessly churning, until lo! a number of wonderful benefits began coming up out of the Cosmic Sea: the moon, the sun, an elephant with eight trunks came up, a glorious steed, certain medicines, and yes, at last! a great radiant vessel filled with the ambrosial butter. This old Indian myth I offer as a parable for our world today, as an exhortation to press on with the work, beyond fear.