"Analysis of the material on two Iron Age altars discovered at the entrance to the 'holy of holies' of a shrine at Tel Arad [next video] in the Beer-sheba Valley, Israel, were found to contain cannabis and frankincense, according to new article." Source: Science Daily.
Arad temple. Video from 2011.
The altars were found lying at the entrance to the "holy of holies," i.e. the inner sanctuary where YHWH supposedly manifested in the shrine:
"Evidently, they [the altars] had played an important role in the cult practices of the shrine. An unidentified black solidified organic material was preserved on the altars' surfaces ... The study reveals that on the smaller altar cannabis had been mixed with animal dung to facilitate heating, while the larger altar contained traces of frankincense that was mixed with animal fat to promote evaporation.
"These unique findings shed new light on cult practices in biblical Judah, suggesting cannabis was used here as a deliberate psychoactive, to stimulate ecstasy as part of cultic ceremonies."
Note: Frankincense, an aromatic resin, also has psychoactive properties:
According to Science Daily (2008), "Burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses."
Note: Tel Arad dates back to around 4000 BC. A Canaanite settlement during the Bronze Age, it was apparently deserted for over a millennium before the ancient Israelites moved in during 11th century BC.
This suggests that the Israelites and Canaanites were two separate ethnic groups, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Despite the fact that the Old Testament says that the Israelites defeated and wiped out the Canaanites, they were probably just two separate tribes of the same people:
"Biblical scholar Mark Smith notes that archaeological data suggests "that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture... In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature."
"In Hinduism, bhang(1) is associated with Lord Shiva, a popular deity who is often regarded as the religion’s supreme god. Some passages in ancient Hindu scriptures describe a plant with spiritual properties that Shiva discovered and brought down from the heavens for humans to consume. Shiva is often depicted with a chillum, or smoking pipe." Source: The Atlantic (2014).
(1) "In India, Cannabis Indica has been used for literally thousands of years in the worship of the god Shiva. Cannabis is used in an orally administered form called bhang which can be either the wet resinous leaves formed into pills of a drink made of milk, cannabis, and various spices consumed by worshipers of Shiva on festival days or by smoking the flowering buds of cannabis -- a practice generally reserved for holy men who dedicate their lives to ascetic practice and the worship of Shiva." --"Shiva, Lord of Bhang," PubMed.
"Cannabis has a long history in India, veiled in legends and religion. The earliest mention of cannabis has been found in The Vedas, or sacred Hindu texts. These writings may have been compiled as early as 2000 to 1400 B.C. According to The Vedas, cannabis was one of five sacred plants and a guardian angel lived in its leaves." Source: Psychology Today (2011).
"During the Hindu festival of Holi, people consume bhang which contains cannabis flowers. According to one description, when the amrita (elixir of life) was produced from the churning of the ocean by the devas and the asuras as described in the Samudra manthan, Shiva created cannabis from his own body to purify the elixir (whence, for cannabis, the epithet angaja or 'body-born'). Another account suggests that the cannabis plant sprang up when a drop of the elixir dropped on the ground. Thus, cannabis is used by sages due to association with elixir and Shiva." (Wikipedia)
The audio in this video is pretty bad, but this is an interesting documentary. There's a lot of speculation that the fumes inhaled by the oracle at Delphi could have been from burning marijuana or some other kind of psychotropic plant, and the use of psychedelic mushrooms has been suggested to explain the trances that priests were said to enter at various sites, but the whole subject of drug use in ancient religions is extremely obscure.
Marijuana was known and used in the ancient world. According to The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist (footnote, p. 147), the Scythians used a kind of "cannabis steam bath" for ritual purification (Herodotus), and the ancient Hebrews might have done something similar. "The first solid evidence of the Hebrew use of cannabis was established in 1936 ... Cannabis, usually thought to be of Scythian origin, has a much earlier occurrence in Semitic languages and appears several times throughout the Old Testament."
The theory that marijuana was used by the ancient Greek oracles may sound absurd, but the idea isn't really all that outlandish. If the Scythians and Hebrews used the plant, there's no reason why the Greeks couldn't have been aware of its psychotropic properties as well. I don't have any particular evidence to support this, but the use of marijuana and other drugs may go all the way back to the Stone Age shamanic rituals which some scholars believe were the distant ancestors of all our modern religions.
"The archaeological evidence for ritualized consumption of cannabis is limited and contentious. Here, we present some of the earliest directly dated and scientifically verified evidence for ritual cannabis smoking. This phytochemical analysis indicates that cannabis plants were burned in wooden braziers during mortuary ceremonies at the Jirzankal Cemetery (ca. 500 BCE) in the eastern Pamirs region. This suggests cannabis was smoked as part of ritual and/or religious activities in western China by at least 2500 years ago and that the cannabis plants produced high levels of psychoactive compounds." Source: Science Magazine (2019).
"A chemical residue study of incense burners from ancient burials at high elevations in western China has revealed psychoactive cannabinoids. The finding provides some of the earliest evidence for the use of cannabis for its psychoactive compounds. " Source: Science Daily (June 2019).
Note: "The 2,500-year-old Jirzankal Cemetery lies at nearly 10,000 feet (3,000 meters), in present day Xinjiang Uyghyr Autonomous Region, a large province in northwest China. Excavated tombs revealed mummies buried with wood containers, called braziers, used for containing hot coals. Researchers found that the braziers contained cannabis residue." Source: Glacier Hub (July 2019).
"...While modern cannabis is used primarily as a recreational drug or for medical applications, cannabis may have been used rather differently in the past. The evidence from Jirzankal suggests that people were burning cannabis at rituals commemorating the dead. They buried their kin in tombs over which they created circular mounds, stone rings and striped patterns using black and white stones." (Science Daily)
This isn't the first time evidence like this has been found in Asia. According to Science News (June 2019), "Cannabis remains of comparable age have been found in several other Central Asian tombs, including a site in Russia’s Altai Mountains located about 3,000 kilometers northwest of the Pamir Mountains. But the discoveries at Jirzankal Cemetery offer an unprecedented look at how cannabis was initially used as a mind-altering substance, the researchers say."
"In the Old Norse written corpus, berserkers ... were warriors who purportedly fought in a trance-like fury, a characteristic which later gave rise to the modern English word 'berserk' ... Berserkers are attested to in numerous Old Norse sources, with their name literally rendered as 'bear-coats', along with úlfhéðnar ('wolf-coats')." Source: Wikipedia.
"...It is proposed by some authors that the northern warrior tradition originated in hunting magic. Three main animal cults appeared: the bear, the wolf, and the wild boar." The legend of the werewolf may be related to these ancient stories:
"Old Norse had the cognate varúlfur, but because of the high importance of werewolves in Norse mythology, there were alternative terms such as ulfhéðinn ('one in wolf-skin', referring still to the totemistic or cultic adoption of wolf-nature rather than the superstitious belief in actual shape-shifting). In modern Scandinavian also kveldulf ('evening-wolf'), presumably after the name of Kveldulf Bjalfason, a historical berserker of the 9th century who figures in the Icelandic sagas." (Wikipedia)
Berserkers, like Shieldmaidens, may be completely mythological. According to the National Museum of Denmark, there is little to no archaeological evidence that they ever existed. Assuming that they were real, however, and that the stories about their ultraviolent frenzies are accurate, what could account for their deranged behavior?
The Viking berserkers, we are told, went into battle in a trance-like rage and were supposed to be almost uncontrollable killing machines. Dressed in wolf and bear pelts, they would attack friend and foe alike and their homicidal madness sounds a lot like a drug-induced frenzy of some kind:
"This fury, which was called berserkergang, occurred not only in the heat of battle, but also during laborious work. Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power. This condition is said to have begun with shivering, chattering of the teeth, and chill in the body, and then the face swelled and changed its colour. With this was connected a great hot-headedness, which at last gave over into a great rage, under which they howled as wild animals, bit the edge of their shields, and cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe. When this condition ceased, a great dulling of the mind and feebleness followed, which could last for one or several days." -- Fabing, Howard D. (1956). "On Going Berserk: A Neurochemical Inquiry. (Subscription-access only)
Note: A detailed commentary on berserkers in general and Fabing's paper can be found here.)
The legends suggest that the berserkers might have taken some kind of drug that caused these fits of berserkergang. Whatever it was, it came on with a rush of "shivering, chattering of the teeth and chill in the body," caused a spike in blood-pressure ("the face swelled and changed its color") and body temperature ("a great hot-headedness") and ended with a hangover with could last for days. No one really knows if the berserkers were high on something, but various candidates have been suggested:
"While some researchers believe the Berserkers simply worked themselves up into a self-induced hysteria before fighting, others maintain that it was sorcery, the consumption of drugs or alcohol, or even mental illness, that accounted for their behaviour. Some botanists have claimed that berserker behaviour could have been caused by the ingestion of the plant known as bog myrtle, one of the main spices in Scandinavian alcoholic beverages." Source: Ancient Origins.
The problem with the bog-myrtle theory is that the plant was commonly used to make beer back then and doesn't appear to produce this kind of dramatic effect on people. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn't find any mention of it in The Vaults of Erowid, a site which covers psychotropic plants and herbs in exhaustive detail.
Bog Myrtle (Myrica Gale) is a natural insect repellent, among other things. It was used (along with other herbs) to flavor beer in the middle ages until "hops supplanted gruit herbs for political and economic reasons." (Wikipedia). Bog Myrtle itself isn't psychedelic, as far as I can tell, but various mixtures of gruit herbs could act as euphorics and some of them had hallucinogenic or deliriant properties, so the idea that the Berserkers were stoned on some kind of herbal drink when they went into battle isn't all that outlandish.
"Helpful for enhancing lucid dreaming and astral work generally, bog myrtle was a flavoring for a type of European beer known as gruit up until the introduction of hops. The other components of gruit (1) were yarrow and wild rosemary. Some say this brew was behind the Berserkers [sic]. In northern Europe, bog myrtle and yarrow have been ingredients in fermented drinks made from grain, honey, or fruit since the Iron Age, and it is still used in Scandinavia to make a liqueur called 'snaps.'" Source: Alchemy Works.
(1) Medieval brewers used a wide variety of gruit herbs in their beer.
If the berserkers were high on something, the most likely candidate is gruit beer, but if they were that drunk it's hard to see how they could function very effectively. Some sources I've found speculate that they were tripping on the psychedelic amanita muscaria mushroom, but the psychoactive ingredient in the mushroom is muscimol, which is described as a "sedative-hypnotic," i.e., a tranquilizer -- just the opposite of what you would expect. Also, I've never heard of a psychedelic that consistently produces outbursts of violent rage. If the berserkers were taking a drug, it sounds like it was a medieval form of PCP.
Were the berserkers mentally ill? Again, it doesn't sound like it. Their furies seem to have been situation-specific, only occurring during battles or perhaps when they were working in their villages. If they were crazy they would've been prone to go berserk for no reason at all, but none of the sources I've found describe them flipping out at random. So, unless they were elite warriors who ate some plant that drove them into a homicidal rage the most plausible explanation for their reported behavior is that the berserkers are simply characters from Old Norse mythology. In other words, maybe they never actually existed.
Bosch (1450-1516) was a Dutch painter -- one of the greatest in the world, if you ask me, and one of the strangest. Anyone who has ever taken mescaline will find something very familiar about his paintings and I've always liked to think that he was a member of an ancient secret society that used hallucinogenic plants in its rituals and had to conceal its activities from the church.
There's no evidence to support this as far as I know (other than the paintings themselves), but there has been speculation that he may have been afflicted with what was then called St. Anthony's fire, now known as ergotism, an infection caused by the grain ergot fungus which was apparently rampant at the time Bosch was alive. Ergot baked in bread can produce a kind of LSD-like substance and is known to cause delirium and hallucinations, among other things.
"There is no denying that the world Bosch shows us is a world of dreams. Can these strange visions have been due to drug-taking? Dare we assume that the painter resorted to some [phantasmagoric] drug so as to give free rein to his subconscious self and attain one of those 'abysses of the psyche' to which Henri Michaux had access under the influence of mescaline?" Source: The Alchemy Website.
The Alchemy Website suggests that Bosch may have used a "stimulant named 'witches' pomatum,' the recipe for which was apparently discovered in a "16th century book' by Professor Will Erich Peuckert of Gottingen University, who "made some, and tested it on several persons. All, after a deep sleep of twenty hours, had the same tale to tell; all had dreamed of flying, of orgies in the company of satanic creatures, of visits to the netherworld."
Bosch's paintings strongly suggest that he had personal experience with hallucinogens of some kind. Ergot is a good candidate, but so are the gruit beers of the time (1). Before hops came along, these beverages were made with a variety of herbs, some of which had psychoactive properties. Just looking at Bosch's work, I'd guess that he had tried mescaline at some point, but peyote is apparently only found in North America, primarily Mexico. A more likely candidate is the amanita muscaria mushroom (2), but this is all speculation. It's possible that Bosch just had a particularly strange imagination.
(1) I'm not sure if gruit beer was still common during Bosch's lifetime (1450-1516 AD). According to Wikipedia, "The exclusive use of gruit was gradually phased out in favor of the use of hops alone in a slow sweep across Europe occurring between the 11th century (in the south and east of the Holy Roman Empire) and the late 16th century (Great Britain)."
In "The Secret Heresy of Heironymus Bosch" (1995), author Lynda Harris argues that the bizarre symbolism in Bosch's paintings reveal that he was a member of the heretical Cathar sect which was persecuted and driven underground by the Catholic Church. I'm no expert on any of this, naturally, but her argument makes a lot of sense in some regards. Bosch's religious paintings have something demonic about them which fits in with the Catharist's (apparent) belief that the Catholic Church in particular and the material world in general were totally evil.
Harris' theory has been criticized for various reasons -- including the fact that very little is actually known about the Cathars -- but even if she's right, it still doesn't explain the strangely organic and hallucinatory nature of Bosch's symbolism. As far as I'm concerned, his paintings are all the evidence I need. Even if his paintings do contain hidden Catharist and anti-Catholic meanings, the guy was definitely tripping on something. You can see it in every detail of the Garden of Earthly Delights.
The obscure origins of the Christian religion make it a natural subject for "hidden history" conspiracy theories. Dozens, if not hundreds of books have been written over the years, arguing, among other things, that Jesus was a magic mushroom, a solar deity, an Essene or a guerilla fighter sanitized to make him more palatable to the Romans. Some authors claim that Jesus was actually the deified Julius Caesar or that the gospels were propaganda written by the Flavian emperors to help pacify a rebellious province. Whatever the argument, the scarcity of original sources and the ambiguous nature of the evidence leave a lot of room for entertaining speculation.
Very little is known about the original Jesus cult during the first few centuries of its existence. No one really knows when the "official" canonical gospels were written, but the general consensus is that they appeared sometime after the middle to late first century, at least thirty or forty years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke were apparently written from an earlier account commonly referred to as the "Q document," which as far as I know has never been discovered. Its existence is assumed based on similarities in the manuscripts.
As for Jesus himself, the only independent documentary evidence (from the first few centuries AD) that he even existed consists of a handful of references in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and a few others. Most of these references, however, are about the Christians as a group, so they don't really support the existence of a historical Jesus. As far as I can tell, the only direct references to Jesus are found in "Jewish Antiquities" by Josephus and the Annals of Tacitus, but their authenticity has been challenged and Tacitus refers to a Christus (or Chrestus in some translations) rather than a Jesus. They could be insertions made by later Christian writers -- when it comes to ancient sources, you can't take anything for granted. Classical writers weren't very reliable to begin with and the church wasn't above forging references, gospels, apocalypses, epistles and martyr stories in order to market their new religion. For an interesting and extremely detailed description of the "Christian Forgery Mill," see "Forgery In Christianity: A Documented Record Of The Foundations Of The Christian Religion," by Joseph Wheless.
Christian origins get even more complicated when you consider all the parallels that exist between Christian doctrine and various Near Eastern fertility cults, Zoroastrianism, astrology, Roman and Egyptian mystery religions and Jewish ascetic, messianic and apocalyptic groups in existence at the time. These parallels aren't very surprising because all of these different movements appeared in the same general landscape, but they provide fertile ground for alternate histories.
Almost everything we know about the rise of Christianity comes from texts and there are a lot of missing sources and "secret doctrines" so popular with conspiracy theorists. Besides the books in the "official" New Testament, there's a huge body of apocryphal literature which reflects the existence of dozens of "heretical" groups like the Gnostics which were gradually suppressed, often by violent means, as the Roman Catholic Church consolidated its control and standardized Christian dogma. More recent discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls fill in some of the historical context, but the general picture is still hazy and confused. "Suppressed gospels" and alternate histories have inspired books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the inspiration for the bestselling Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
If Jesus was a real person, he lived during an extremely turbulent period of history. Rome conquered Judea in the first century BC, allying itself with the Maccabees and later using the Herodians as client kings. The Jews revolted in 66 AD and Jerusalem was eventually destroyed around 70 AD by the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian. Titus took over the suppression of the Jewish revolt, a bloody conflict documented by Josephus in his classic history "The Jewish War," after Vespasian returned to Rome to stake his claim to the throne during the Year Of The Four Emperors in 69 AD.
It was a chaotic time of civil wars and bloody revolutions. The Jewish population in Jerusalem was either massacred, enslaved or scattered around the world (the Diaspora) and the temple was destroyed. The Jews (some of them, anyway) were in almost constant rebellion against the Romans and their puppet rulers in Judea during Jesus' lifetime and the desert was crawling with self-proclaimed messiahs. The idea that a religion like Christianity, preaching peace, forgiveness and universal brotherhood, would appear in this context is surprising, to say the least. "Render unto Caesar" could be seen as treason and collaboration to a population living under a brutal occupation. The Jews were waiting for a military messiah, a descendant of King David who would lead them out of bondage, not some hippy claiming to be the Son of God, which they would have considered blasphemy.
This secular background has inspired a series of books arguing that the real Jesus was actually a military messiah, a guerrilla fighting the Roman occupation. I read several of these books years ago, but I can't remember their titles. The best summation of the argument can probably be found in two chapters written by the anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book "Cows, Pigs, Wars And Witches". Both chapters ("Messiahs" and "The Secret Of The Prince Of Peace") fill in the historical context and argue that Jesus was a revolutionary transformed into a peaceful messiah by later writers in order to protect their underground resistance movement from the Romans. This is plausible enough as far as it goes, but the theory discounts the actual message of the gospels. If there's a hidden message in the New Testament, there's also a surface message which can't simply be dismissed as a kind of cover story designed to conceal an ancient conspiracy.
Speaking of conspiracies, Joseph Atwill's book "Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy To Invent Jesus" argues that Christianity was actually the invention of the Flavian Emperors -- Vespasian, Titus and Domitian -- the same Romans who crushed the Jewish rebellion. Faced with the problem of Jewish resistance in the province, the Flavian court (which included the turncoat Josephus) invented the story of a "peaceful messiah" as a form of counter-propaganda to the more militant religious doctrines causing so much trouble in Judea. According to Atwill, the gospels also include a coded message which reveals that the figure of Jesus in the New Testament is actually Titus -- a kind of Roman inside joke. This hidden message can supposedly be unraveled by reading the gospels together with Josephus' account of the war and deciphering the parallels. Atwill's book makes an interesting read and I particularly like his idea that the gospels were a form of early propaganda designed to pacify a rebellious population. Unfortunately, his argument depends on the numerous parallels which are supposed to exist between the gospels and Josephus and these are obscure, to say the least.
"Jesus Was Caesar" by Franceso Carotta also uses parallels to make its argument that Jesus Christ is actually "the historical manifestation of Divus Julius," i.e., the Divine Julius Caesar. I couldn't finish this monstrous tome, but the basic idea is that the Christian religion is a modified version of the cult of the Divine Caesar and that the gospels are a mythologized biography of Caesar from the time of the Roman Civil War to his assassination. In other words, the gospels are seen once again as a kind of code which can only be interpreted by reading them in conjunction with other books. Caesar was made an Imperial God after his death, but his cult disappeared around the time that Christianity emerged. "On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." Intriguing, yes, but is it actually true? Who knows? Like Atwill's book, whether you accept it or not depends on how strong these "mirror images" actually are.
"The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross" by John Allegro takes a different approach. This is a fascinating, scholarly and difficult book. Allegro believes that Christianity (through Judaism) originated in a very ancient Near Eastern fertility cult centered around the use of the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria. If I understand Allegro's argument correctly, Christianity evolved out of Judaism, which was invented as a "false front" to protect the truth about the cult and its practices from the Romans, and the sacred texts of both religions are supposed to be full of references to the magic mushroom. Once again, Christianity is seen as a code to be deciphered, an esoteric, multi-layered conspiracy. This is an excellent book, but Allegro bases his theory almost entirely on linguistic arguments, "deciphering the names of gods, mythological characters...and plant names..." by tracing them back to their Sumerian roots, and the average reader will have a hard time verifying or even following his arguments. Still, if there's nothing to this, how do you explain the mushrooms in Christian iconography? The photograph in this paragraph, for example, shows Adam and Eve standing next to a giant mushroom on a fresco in the Chapel of Plaincourault, France.
Hidden Christian history covers a huge amount of territory. I've only summarized three books, but there are literally hundreds of them available and I've only scratched the surface. For example, "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S argues that Christianity was "created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion." Her book "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled" explores the use of solar symbolism in world religions, arguing that Jesus is actually a sun deity. Whether you buy any of these various theories is irrelevant. The whole period is so interesting that they're worth reading just for their wealth of background information.
Trying to separate truth from fiction in these theories is an almost impossible task unless you want to spend the rest of your life tracking down sources and doing your own research. The problem comes when you step back and look at all the books that are out there -- all the different theories. One book, taken by itself, can be very convincing, but when you take them all together, it's obvious that they contradict each other in hundreds of different ways and the net effect is literary white noise -- a flood of information, speculation, questionable evidence and mutually exclusive conclusions. In this sense, the hidden history of Christianity is like the JFK assassination: an intractable mystery. The record's too sketchy and complex to come to any solid conclusions, but it doesn't really matter. Most people, as usual, will end up believing exactly what they want to believe and what they were raised to believe.
Still, you've got to wonder--what is that mushroom doing on a church fresco in France?
Item: "A young backpacker has died in Peru after taking hallucinogens in an ancient Amazonian 'cleansing ceremony'." Source: Daily Mail (2015).
"24-year-old Matthew Dawson-Clarke consumed ayahuasca [also known as yage], a hallucinogenic drink made from vines, as part of a seven-day retreat to foster a spiritual awakening."
Comment: This kid was another victim of "yage tourism" by westerners looking for enlightenment in the jungles of South America. Like the rise in interest in neopaganism and eastern religions, yage tourism is yet another example of the spiritual malaise that has spread through the West as a direct result of the decline of Christianity. It's also an example of what has been called commercial shamanism, the selling of ancient traditions to desperate or curious westerners.
Western knowledge of the plant is relatively recent. According to the Erowid Ayahuasca Vault, the "earliest known western record of the psychoactive effects of ayahuasca ... in the Brazilian Amazon" appeared in 1852 when the "English ethnobotanist Richard Spruce [described] the use of the ayahuasca vine ... by the Tukanoan Indian tribes in Brazil and Colombia." Jesuit priests observed the use of ayahuasca in the 1700s, but Spruce was the first scientist to actually conduct any kind of study of its properties.
Its origins are still a mystery, but there's good reason to believe that the ritualistic use of ayahuasca goes back to prehistoric times:
"Writers on ayahuasca have often proposed that the use of the drink is very ancient; the date of about 5000 years BP recurs frequently. Anthropologists Ana María Llamazares and Carlos Martínez Sarasola (2004), for example, write that the use of ayahuasca 'is so deep-rooted in the native philosophy and mythology that there is no doubt about its great antiquity, as a part of aboriginal life. Archaeological finds in Ecuador show that the indigenous Amazons have been using it for about 5000 years.' Anthropologist Jeremy Narby (1998) states that ayahuasca 'belongs to the indigenous people of Western Amazonia, who hold the keys to a way of knowing that they have practiced without interruption for at least five thousand years.' Anthropologist Peter Furst (1976) says that 'we are probably not far wrong in suggesting that [the ayahuasca drink] is at least as old … as 3000 BC or even before.'" Source: Singing to the Plants.
Aya-waska is a word in the Quechua language which is closely associated with Ayahuasca shamanism. This suggests that the use of the plant may have originated with or been spread by the Incas:
Quechua "is perhaps most widely known for being the main language family of the Inca Empire." (Wikipedia) "The Spaniards encouraged its use, so Quechua ultimately survived and variants are still widely spoken today, being the co-official language of many regions and the second most spoken language in Peru."
According to some researchers and indigenous shamans, ayahuasca shamanism first appeared in the region along the Rio Napo river in the western Amazonian lowlands. There is some archaeological evidence to support this, apparently, but the story of how this powerful psychedelic drink was "discovered" and first put to use is lost in time. "Discovered" is the wrong word, of course, since ayahuasca is a manmade brew designed to produce a certain effect. The fact that DMT isn't effective when taken orally except in the presence of certain specific alkaloids shows that the shamans who first brewed ayahuasca must have done a lot of experimenting with mixtures using different plants before they stumbled across the right combination of ingredients. The prehistoric shaman who first tried the drink must have had a terrifying experience.
"It’s called mad honey, and it has a slightly bitter taste and a reddish color. More notably, a few types of rhododendrons ... contain grayanotoxin, which can cause dramatic physiological reactions in humans and animals. Depending on how much a person consumes, reactions can range from hallucinations and a slower heartbeat to temporary paralysis and unconsciousness."
"The intoxicating effects of mad honey have been known for thousands of years. Not surprisingly, there have been many famous episodes of human inebriation caused by its consumption. Xenophon, Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Columella all document the results of eating this 'maddening' honey, believed to be from the pollen and nectar of Rhododendron luteum and Rhododendron ponticum. According to Xenophon, an invading Greek army was accidentally poisoned by harvesting and eating the local Asia Minor honey, but they all made a quick recovery with no fatalities. Having heard of this incident, and realizing that foreign invaders would be ignorant of the dangers of the local honey, King Mithridates later used the honey as a deliberate poison when Pompey's army attacked the Heptakometes [1] in Asia Minor in 69 BCE. The Roman soldiers became delirious and nauseated after being tricked into eating the toxic honey, at which point Mithridates's army attacked." Source: Wikipedia.
[1] "In about 65 BCE, Pompey's army was approaching Colchis. Mithridates' allies there, the Heptakometes, were described by Strabo as 'utterly savage' mountain barbarians, dwelling in tree forts and living on 'the flesh of wild animals and nuts.' The tribe was feared for attacking wayfarers - suddenly leaping down on them like leopards from their tree houses. The Heptakometes may have received specific orders from Mithridates on how to ambush the Roman army. What we do know for a fact is that they gathered up great numbers of wild honeycombs dripping with toxic honey and placed them all along Pompey's route. The Roman soldiers stopped to enjoy the sweets and immediately lost their senses. Reeling and babbling, the men collapsed with vomiting and diarrhea and lay on the ground unable to move. The Heptakometes easily wiped out about one thousand of Pompey's men." - Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. (Quoted in Roman Times)
Taking mad honey sounds like a dangerous way to get loaded. According to the Drug Classroom, "[t]he core symptoms of mad honey poisoning include nausea, vomiting, salivation, headache, blurred vision, sweating, weakness, circumoral paresthesia, tongue numbing, fainting, drowsiness, drunkenness, tingling, and seizures." The toxins in the honey can also cause "1st to 3rd degree heart block, asystole, and myocardial infarction."
Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories
Very little is known about the original Jesus cult during the first few centuries of its existence.
No one really knows when the "official" canonical gospels were written, but the general consensus is that they appeared sometime after the middle to late first century, at least thirty or forty years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke were apparently written from an earlier account commonly referred to as the "Q document," which as far as I know has never been discovered. Its existence is assumed based on similarities in the manuscripts.
As for Jesus himself, the only independent documentary evidence (from the first few centuries AD) that he even existed consists of a handful of references in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and a few others. Most of these references, however, are about the Christians as a group, so they don't really support the existence of a historical Jesus. As far as I can tell, the only direct references to Jesus are found in "Jewish Antiquities" by Josephus and the Annals of Tacitus, but their authenticity has been challenged and Tacitus refers to a Christus (or Chrestus in some translations) rather than a Jesus. They could be insertions made by later Christian writers -- when it comes to ancient sources, you can't take anything for granted. Classical writers weren't very reliable to begin with and the church wasn't above forging references, gospels, apocalypses, epistles and martyr stories in order to market their new religion. For an interesting and extremely detailed description of the "Christian Forgery Mill," see "Forgery In Christianity: A Documented Record Of The Foundations Of The Christian Religion," by Joseph Wheless.
Christian origins get even more complicated when you consider all the parallels that exist between Christian doctrine and various Near Eastern fertility cults, Zoroastrianism, astrology, Roman and Egyptian mystery religions and Jewish ascetic, messianic and apocalyptic groups in existence at the time. These parallels aren't very surprising because all of these different movements appeared in the same general landscape, but they provide fertile ground for alternate histories.
If Jesus was a real person, he lived during an extremely turbulent period of history. Rome conquered Judea in the first century BC, allying itself with the Maccabees and later using the Herodians as client kings. The Jews revolted in 66 AD and Jerusalem was eventually destroyed around 70 AD by the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian. Titus took over the suppression of the Jewish revolt, a bloody conflict documented by Josephus in his classic history "The Jewish War," after Vespasian returned to Rome to stake his claim to the throne during the Year Of The Four Emperors in 69 AD.
It was a chaotic time of civil wars and bloody revolutions. The Jewish population in
Jerusalem was either massacred, enslaved or scattered around the world (the Diaspora) and the temple was destroyed. The Jews (some of them, anyway) were in almost constant rebellion against the Romans and their puppet rulers in Judea during Jesus' lifetime and the desert was crawling with self-proclaimed messiahs. The idea that a religion like Christianity, preaching peace, forgiveness and universal brotherhood, would appear in this context is surprising, to say the least. "Render unto Caesar" could be seen as treason and collaboration to a population living under a brutal occupation. The Jews were waiting for a military messiah, a descendant of King David who would lead them out of bondage, not some hippy claiming to be the Son of God, which they would have considered blasphemy.
This secular background has inspired a series of books arguing that the real Jesus was actually a military messiah, a guerrilla fighting the Roman occupation. I read several of these books years ago, but I can't remember their titles. The best summation of the argument can probably be found in two chapters written by the anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book "Cows, Pigs, Wars And Witches". Both chapters ("Messiahs" and "The Secret Of The Prince Of Peace") fill in the historical context and argue that Jesus was a revolutionary transformed into a peaceful messiah by later writers in order to protect their underground resistance movement from the Romans. This is plausible enough as far as it goes, but the theory discounts the actual message of the gospels. If there's a hidden message in the New Testament, there's also a surface message which can't simply be dismissed as a kind of cover story designed to conceal an ancient conspiracy.
"Jesus Was Caesar" by Franceso Carotta also uses parallels to make its argument that
Jesus Christ is actually "the historical manifestation of Divus Julius," i.e., the Divine Julius Caesar. I couldn't finish this monstrous tome, but the basic idea is that the Christian religion is a modified version of the cult of the Divine Caesar and that the gospels are a mythologized biography of Caesar from the time of the Roman Civil War to his assassination. In other words, the gospels are seen once again as a kind of code which can only be interpreted by reading them in conjunction with other books. Caesar was made an Imperial God after his death, but his cult disappeared around the time that Christianity emerged. "On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." Intriguing, yes, but is it actually true? Who knows? Like Atwill's book, whether you accept it or not depends on how strong these "mirror images" actually are.
Hidden Christian history covers a huge amount of territory. I've only summarized three
books, but there are literally hundreds of them available and I've only scratched the surface. For example, "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S argues that Christianity was "created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion." Her book "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled" explores the use of solar symbolism in world religions, arguing that Jesus is actually a sun deity. Whether you buy any of these various theories is irrelevant. The whole period is so interesting that they're worth reading just for their wealth of background information.
Trying to separate truth from fiction in these theories is an almost impossible task unless you want to spend the rest of your life tracking down sources and doing your own research. The problem comes when you step back and look at all the books that are out there -- all the different theories. One book, taken by itself, can be very convincing, but when you take them all together, it's obvious that they contradict each other in hundreds of different ways and the net effect is literary white noise -- a flood of information, speculation, questionable evidence and mutually exclusive conclusions. In this sense, the hidden history of Christianity is like the JFK assassination: an intractable mystery. The record's too sketchy and complex to come to any solid conclusions, but it doesn't really matter. Most people, as usual, will end up believing exactly what they want to believe and what they were raised to believe.
Still, you've got to wonder--what is that mushroom doing on a church fresco in France?
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient Literature, Ancient Middle East, Books, Christianity, Commentary, Culture, Psychedelic Plants, Religion | Permalink | Comments (2)