Do you know which god you worship?

[sam-i-am]

I can remember reading how mushrooms were more closely related to us animals than them plant things we put them with in the supermarket and thinking that seemed to make a lot of sense in terms of understanding the mushroom experience.

[Cambium]

I can remember reading how mushrooms were more closely related to us animals than them plant things we put them with in the supermarket and thinking that seemed to make a lot of sense in terms of understanding the mushroom experience.

plants diverged first. Animals and mushrooms continued to evolve together. It is certainly why their proteins are so relevant and useful to us. Not read of even seen any work done on the hallucinogenic properties, but it makes sense. You can also use this thinking about the endocannabinoid system and how it relates to us. Plants branching off before animals and fungi, after the endocannabinoid system had evolved. Plants then went on to produce phytocannabinoids, likely as a response to p+d.

Edited November 1, 2014 by Cambium

[Cambium]

cambium

http://www.bible-quran.com/oldest-quran-tashkent-sana/

Cool. That's an old ass book

[distracted]

cambium

http://www.bible-quran.com/oldest-quran-tashkent-sana/

that link says that one of the oldest copies had the original text erased and replaced by a Uthmanic version of the Quran? Also when looking into what that means it seems that Uthman had all copies of the Quran destroyed and placed by his approved version?... how can you be sure that you still have the word as delivered then with such well documented censorship so early on?

[MD84]

that link says that one of the oldest copies had the original text erased and replaced by a Uthmanic version of the Quran? Also when looking into what that means it seems that Uthman had all copies of the Quran destroyed and placed by his approved version?... how can you be sure that you still have the word as delivered then with such well documented censorship so early on?

i think these were surah's from the Quran that could not be traced back or correlated in the same way, making them less reliable. so these were not included.

[mrchang]

sounds fishy to me..

[kc stoner]

thought the Vedic texts were the oldest books in the world

[distracted]

i think these were surah's from the Quran that could not be traced back or correlated in the same way, making them less reliable. so these were not included.

It was your link, what do you mean?

[namkha]

it is my belief that the shift to male dominated religion and power is one of the roots of all evil that has occurred in the name of religion

ever since, Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions all regard women as second class

it's a popular theory that kind of line of thought e.g. with stuff like Marija Gimbutas' work on the Mother Goddess and the rise of patriarchal male dominator cultures

but it's been pretty comprehensively debunked in works like The Horse, The Wheel and Language

and it suffers a major problem if you start looking at the existing cultures which worship a feminine goddess

e.g. in India, in places like Bengal and Uttarakhand, Nepal, Assam etc. where the mother goddess is worshipped as Kali, Durga, Parvati, Shakti etc.

in these places there is plenty of worship of the feminine, but women still get a very shitty deal... in Uttarakhand and Nepal the workload ratio is about 8:1 when you compare women and men... in North America and Europe it is about 2:1 or 1:1

[namkha]

Could be that that particular mushroom is confused with the Fly Agaric which is the common European mushroom, all of the images are

from European churches I think so they used a stylized version of a mushroom people would recognise as well as its folk lore pagan associations, the mushroom cult Allegro speaks of is based in Eastern fertility cults so what mushrooms were used or venerated there

is a mystery, perhaps it was only the symbolism that traveled rather than the use of mushrooms though given that they are potent dry

as well as fresh, movement of mushrooms through trade routes from the East alongside other drugs is not beyond the realms of possibility.

Fly Agaric is pretty endemic to anywhere temperate - esp. which has birches... and you get birches way to the east... there are names for it in early Indo-European afaik

Hindi = boj

you find it in the Himalaya

languages like Russian, Polish it is a very similar word

not that I buy the mushroom theory of early Christianity, but I expect you could find Fly Agaric in Syria for example

[MD84]

It was your link, what do you mean?

look into it yourself mate. is a real science the collection of the surah's and hadiths. the copies of the Quran that were destroyed were the ones containing surah's (verses) that were not reported by multiple companions and were therefore not as reliable as those that could be proven beyond doubt as to whether or not they cam from the prophet (s.a.w).

[Cambium]

https://www.erowid.org/plants/amanitas/amanitas_writings4.shtml

2. A Short Ethnomycological Account

A review of the anthropological and historical data on the Fly agaric is impossible herein due to the tremendous bulk of work on this very subject. Nevertheless, it is possible to try to build a hypothesis which connects traditions and the roles of hallucinogenic fungi in man's history. This starts from the fascinating proposals of R. G. Wasson [Wasson & Wasson, 1957; Wasson, 1967a, 1967b, 1978] and those who, simultaneously also contributed to the growth of the subject of ethnomycology [La Barre, 1970; Harner, 1973; Furst, 1976; Ott, 1976; Schultes & Hofmann, 1979, and many others].

One can begin by supposing that primitive man, in his activities as food gatherer, had discovered plants (and fungi) with useful properties but not directly connected with hunger and eating and alimentary use.(2) It's likely that, in this way, man had his first contacts with hallucinogenic plants. Mushrooms, no doubt, had a very particular role herein.

The fact that they apparently are born "from nothing" with rapid development, the beautiful strangeness of their shapes, and all the other characteristics which distinguish them from other plants surely struck the hunter-gatherer man. This surely led him to discover the mushroom's amazing properties. The structure of the Mesolithic-Neolithic society -- surely one of the shamanic type (3) -- had no doubt a catalyptic effect in developing these theme characteristics. Such societal characteristics represent(ed) the ideal support for consciousness alteration -- including hallucinogenic plant use. This made connections with an animistic conception of the world stronger and more widespread.

Let's suppose proto-Indoeuropean man had already discovered the psychotropic properties of Amanita muscaria (and other plants) while these people were still living in the original region of the plants. This supposition is under discussion in order to revise the hypothesis accepted so far. This probably also included the lowlands of central Siberia. During this period the linguistic roots connected with the A. muscaria were transferred cross-culturally to the proto-Uralic people, maybe with the use(s) of the mushroom itself (which later were carried on to the Siberian peoples, at least until the beginnings of this century). Along with Amanita might have come Fomes fomentarius, used as tinder for fire.

A few millennia before this, man's migrations through the Bering Straits had come to an end. These were the peoples who would eventually originate the American peoples. These original explorers took with them the traditions connected with the original uses of cultural planning, the shamanism, etc. They did not, however, openly carry the traditions connected with use(s) of hallucinogens. It was because of the presence of societies originally based on the shamanic structure (including fungi) that the use of hallucinogens developed and continued in the Americas.

In Eurasia, when the Indo-Europeans moved towards Iran and India, they took with them the cult of the sacred fungus. This later became the Indian Soma (the God-plant of the Rig-Veda) and the Persian Haoma. Also carried were the fungi's relation to the Birch tree, sealed by the ancient shamanic religion. It's not impossible that the Tree of Divine Knowledge named in Genesis in the Bible was an echo of the original Tree of life (the Birch). The serpent might have been a metaphor for the sacred Mushroom, bestower of divine knowledge and wisdom. Also, the Indo-European fringe which spread over Europe took with them at least a part of the religious-social structure, characterizing the life in their original lands. The fusion between their animistic totemism and those of the preexisting peoples produced a religion with a shamanistic background. The train of elements include the following which are most interesting: the ritual ingestion of the Amanita muscaria (and maybe other psychotropic vegetables), the deep spiritual ties with nature, the consequent worship of nature spirits (among which were terrestrial ones, such as the toad and the serpent), and the magic interpretation of many events. The links between the many natural-supernatural fusion penetrated into the life of these ancient Europeans, cementing deep connections with their "cultural unconscious."

A particular element of this social structure, also present in the Siberian and Mexican peoples, was the taboo that only the shaman (or the one who took his place as mediator with the divine world) could use with impunity the sacred elements. All the other peoples were prevented from doing this because of the dread of the supernatural. In other religions this tie also involved the name of the sacred plant, and in this way some metaphorical, but self-referential, epithets could have been originated. These words contained reference to some more or less obvious characteristics of the fungus. These included fusion with other animals such as the fly, other insects, the serpent or toads, etc.

Among the characteristics of the West (as opposed to the Test of the globe -- like America, where shamanism has persisted to the present) was the speed of socio-economic development and the relatively sudden changes in lifestyle. This historical evolution contained a base mode of property ownership and rigid role divisions, and class distinctions. The old religions, no longer functional to the powers-that-be, were replaced by new models of worship. These were modeled with ritual symbolism rather than direct share of the divine world. As a consequence, the ancient usages of the psychoactive plants able to modify consciousness was hampered and in some cases forsaken. This is the core of Wasson's hypothesis. He supposed that not all the Gods of these old religions were completely obscured when new religions (and new Gods) took over.

In the traditions fused with Amanita muscaria use, a connection with these natural, totemic forces remained. These remained alive, above and beyond the new taboos. These elements were, at first, only connected to the sacred uses of the mushroom, however. As time went on, this melting together of ideas, both terrifying and divine, lost all the connections with their original source. It soon spread on to the whole of the fungi's' world (and also to the original entities connected with the mushroom). Only the fear truly retained its potency, staying alive through our unconscious as maleficient and inexplicable. In this way we might understand our culture's connections between the evil or harmful and the fly, the serpent and the toad. Mycophobia and its corollaries are thusly explained.

This dichotomic division between mycophilia and mycophobia proposed by Wasson seems to complete itself in a convincing way with the hypothesis of J. Ott (1976). According to this author, the malefic character attributed to the mushroom the survivor of the old animistic religion -- was not the result of the survival of the taboo. Rather it was derived from the events linked to the establishment of a new cult. In fact, when a new religion replaces preexisting ones, consequences occur. One is the change of the social orders which restrict or hamper the previous cults (usually by any means possible). In this way, things not willing to adapt to the new creed become, by neces sity, malefic or demonic.

In our opinion, therefore, and after taking for granted the close bonds between shamanism and the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, different cultural attitudes relating to fungi can be explained.

Speaking of the European peoples, and taking into account several variables, we propose: the substitutive dynamic referred to the religions after its inception within shamanism; its impacts on the preexisting cultural heritages; the more-or-less distant age in which the passing from cults with shamanistic qualities to those of a dogmatic-fideistic kind occurred; the geographical proximity with people for whom this passing occurred; the geographical proximity for which this passing occurred in relatively recent times (for example, the Slavs); the kind of economic-social development and its bonds with the natural world.

It's certainly true that checks on these matters would request ethnological data newer and more precise than the ones we possess. We think, however, that it is correct to attempt it, with the serene objectivity that this subject deserves.

Edited November 2, 2014 by Cambium

[Cambium]

Fly Agaric is pretty endemic to anywhere temperate - esp. which has birches... and you get birches way to the east... there are names for it in early Indo-European afaik

Hindi = boj

you find it in the Himalaya

languages like Russian, Polish it is a very similar word

not that I buy the mushroom theory of early Christianity, but I expect you could find Fly Agaric in Syria for example

Russia, Poland, Himalaya, all likely regions of natural distribution. Eg being elevated regions of the Hindu kush. Syria, however is unlikely aside from human use. The climate and general environmental conditions are not conducive to myc growth and fruiting. There are obviously anomalies as I've previously stated, but naturalisation in those climates is not really possible. Edited November 2, 2014 by Cambium

[Camino]

My take on Christianity and hallucinogens (and I think Terence McKenna touched on this in Food of the Gods) is rather than being based on hallucinogens, the early Christian church was trying to replace the earlier European religions (that were based on the sacramental use of hallucinogens), which is where the ritual of bread and wine comes in - people were used to a sacrament, one with actual revelatory powers (or at least hallucinogenic ones), Christianity kept the idea of a sacrament but replaced revelation with ritual.

That sounds highly plausible, substitute something which brings spiritual "illumination" with something more physical like bread and wine, which the poor and hungry must have found very attractive.

This got me thinking about the holy communion ritual in Roman Catholic mass, I've never quite understood the bread and wine being magically turned into the body and blood of christ, nor the appeal of ingesting such material. I remember reading something about the Koryak people of eastern Russia, ceremonially ingesting Fly Agaric and other members of the tribe collecting and drinking their urine because the psychoactive compounds remain unmetabolized, so they become intoxicated too. This indigenous ritual of ingesting mushrooms and an intoxicating liquor sounds quite similar to holy communion.

[Guest]

The universe and everything in it is god. We are all a minute piece of god. It is all connected.