"Lacing the beer served at their feasts with hallucinogens may have helped an ancient Peruvian people known as the Wari forge political alliances and expand their empire, according to a new paper published in the journal Antiquity. Recent excavations at a remote Wari outpost called Quilcapampa unearthed seeds from the vilca tree that can be used to produce a potent hallucinogenic drug. The authors think the Wari held one big final blowout before the site was abandoned." Source: Ars Technica.
An old dig in progress at Quilcapampa. Video from 2015.
The Wari, and presumably other cultures of the time, used the Anadenantherea colubrina tree, aka the vilca tree, for a variety of purposes, and its beans contained a powerful entheogen:
"The beans of A. colubrina are used to make a snuff called vilca (sometimes called cebil). The bean pods are roasted to facilitate removal of the husk, followed by grinding with a mortar and pestle into a powder and mixed with a natural form of calcium hydroxide (lime) or calcium oxide. The main active constituent of vilca is bufotenin; to a much lesser degree DMT and 5-MeO-DMT are also present." (Wikipedia)
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 are thought to have been 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. Highly recommended.
Video from 2015. I can also recommend Ehrman's book Forged. Very interesting stuff.
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.
The rest of this 2010 interview can be found here.
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 and elsewhere, 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. 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 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 (and I'm not sure I do), Christianity evolved as a kind of "false front" to protect the truth about the cult and its practices from the Romans, and its sacred texts 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? For example, a fresco in the Chapel of Plaincouralt, France, shows Adam and Eve standing next to what definitely appears to be a giant mushroom. That's kind of peculiar, to say the least.
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.
The most basic question about Jesus is whether he actually existed. Most of these theories about "who he really was" simply melt away if he's just another mythical character like all the other gods of the ancient world.
"Just before going into a hallucinogenic trance, Indigenous Californians who had gathered in a cave likely looked up toward the rocky ceiling, where a pinwheel and big-eyed moth were painted in red." Source: Live Science (2020).
"This mysterious 'pinwheel,' is likely a depiction of the delicate, white flower of Datura wrightii, a powerful hallucinogen that the Chumash people took not only for ceremonial purposes but also for medicinal and supernatural ones, according to a new study. The moth is likely a species of hawk moth, known for its 'loopy' intoxicated flight after slurping up Datura's nectar, the researchers said.
"Chewed globs that humans stuck to the cave's ceiling provided more evidence of these ancient trips; these up to 400-year-old lumps, known as quids, contained the mind-altering drugs scopolamine and atropine, which are found in Datura, the researchers said."
Described as an anticholinergic deliriant, sacred datura is extremely toxic. Deliriants are a class of hallucinogens which get their name from the fact that they induce a delirium rather than "the more lucid states produced by such other hallucinogens as are represented by psychedelics [LSD, for instance] and dissociatives [ketamine and others]."
According to Wikipedia, "The delirium produced, particularly by anticholinergics is characterized by stupor, agitation, confusion, confabulation, dysphoria, akathisia, realistic visual hallucinations or illusions (as opposed to the pseudohallucinations experienced on other classes of hallucinogens) and regression to 'phantom' behaviors such as disrobing and plucking. Other commonly reported behaviors include holding full conversations with imagined people, finishing a complex, multi-stage action (such as getting dressed) and then suddenly discovering one had not even begun yet, and being unable to recognize one's own reflection in a mirror."
Sounds like quite a trip if you're into this kind of thing.
Video from 2012.
The girl in the video above looks like a typical drug tourist, but she clearly recognizes the dangers involved in taking datura. For instance, she mentions at one point that the plant is sometimes used to murder people in Peru. That didn't stop her from trying it, though. Apparently, the trick to surviving the experience is to only deal with shamans who are presumably more trustworthy than your standard South American drug dealer.
Speaking of shamans, Carlos Castenada, well-known to old dopers, wrote a paper about datura (referred to as "devil's weed" by his supposed Yaqui shaman teacher, Don Juan) when he was an undergrad at UCLA in the Sixties:
"According to Castaneda's ex-wife Margaret Runyan (1921-2011), in her book A Magical Journey (1996) ... Castaneda's paper included references to datura's four heads, their different purposes, the significance of the roots, the cooking process and the ritual of preparation, all information that Castaneda supposedly learns later from Don Juan on visits between August 23 and Sept. 10, 1961, as described in The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968)." Source: The Wanderling.
Datura is so dangerous I'm amazed that anyone would use it for recreational purposes. I'm even more amazed that the Indians would use it as a rite of passage for their children:
"Datura wrightii is sacred to some Native Americans and has been used in ceremonies and rites of passage by Chumash, Tongva, and others. Among the Chumash, when a boy was 8 years old, his mother gave him a preparation of momoy[a tea made from datura] to drink. This was supposed to be a spiritual challenge to the boy to help him develop the spiritual well being required to become a man. Not all of the boys survived." [Emphasis added]
"From hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti to alcohol-infused enemas and psychoactive dried toad skins, the array of consciousness-altering substances that people in the early Americas used was wider than thought, a new report suggests." Source: Live Science.(2014)
Note: "At least 54 hallucinogenic mushrooms in the genus Psilocybe were used by pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, and those mushroom species can still be found today in Mexico, according to the report. Psilocybin is the hallucinogenic compound in these mushrooms that produces mind-altering effects."
I've had some limited experience with magic mushrooms, but I always thought that the stuff about psychedelic toad skins was just a myth. It's for real, however, and the practice of licking toad skins (or taking the active ingredient in powdered form) to get high -- extremely high it sounds like -- has apparently become a fad in the United States:
"Comparable to the likes of ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, and mescaline, a new mind-altering drug is hitting the US psychedelic scene – toad venom. The drug comes from a rare species of toad native to the Sonoran Desert, Bufo Alvarius, which produces a venom known as 5-MeO-DMT: an extremely potent natural psychedelic. 5-MeO-DMT is about four to six times more powerful [!] than its better-known cousin DMT (dimethyltryptamine)." Source: Addiction Center (2019). Don't ask me why the Addiction Center has articles on non-addictive psychedelics.
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 Bosch 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 he 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 and the other cacti containing mescaline are apparently only native to Mexico, South America and parts of North America. 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 reveals 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.
"Marijuana users have had many occasions to wonder where their much-beloved — yet much maligned — cannabis plant came from. They need wonder no more: New genetic research reveals that the pot plant has its roots in what is now northwest China, where local strains are most like the original strain of cannabis cultivated more than 12,000 years ago." Source: Live Science.
"The study — the largest ever of the whole genomes of cannabis plants, adding a further 82 genomes to the 28 that had already been sequenced — shows that cannabis was probably first domesticated in early Neolithic times in the region of modern China near its borders with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and from there spread as different varieties around the world."
"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."
Most sources associate this plant with the Aztecs, but it seems that it was also used by the Maya.
"Scientists have identified the presence of a non-tobacco plant in ancient Maya drug containers for the first time. The researchers detected Mexican marigold (Tagetes lucida) in residues taken from 14 miniature Maya ceramic vessels. The vessels also contain chemical traces present in two types of dried and cured tobacco." Source: Science Daily.
"Originally buried more than 1,000 years ago on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, the vessels also contain chemical traces present in two types of dried and cured tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum and N. rustica. The research team, led by anthropology postdoc Mario Zimmermann, thinks the Mexican marigold was mixed with the tobacco to make smoking more enjoyable."
Note: Tagetes lucida, also known as Mexican Tarragon, Aztec Marigold, sweet mace, etc., was used for incense and as a herbal remedy; and it sounds like it had psychotropic properties. (The Vaults of Erowid site describes it as having "visionary potential".) According to Wikipedia, "It has been reported that the Huichol of Mexico use the plant as an entheogen by smoking Tagetes lucida with Nicotiana rustica, and that Tagetes lucida is occasionally smoked alone as an hallucinogen."
"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.
"It must have been something in the air. During a short time window at the end of the last ice age, Stone Age humans in Europe and Asia independently began using a new plant: cannabis." Source: New Scientist (2016).
"That’s the conclusion of a review of cannabis archaeology, which also links an intensification of cannabis use in East Asia with the rise of transcontinental trade at the dawn of the Bronze Age, some 5000 years ago."
(1)According to Eupedia, "The dead were inhumed in pit graves inside kurgans (burial mounds). Bodies were placed in a supine position with bent knees and covered in ochre. Wagons/carts and sacrificed animals (cattle, horse, sheep) were present in graves, a trait typical of later Indo-European cultures."
The migrations of the Yanmaya and other Eurasian cultures are a key feature of the Kurgan Hypothesis explaining the origin and spread of IndoEuropean languages. Note: the video below apparently spells "Yamnaya" as "Jamna." According to Eupedia, the Yamnaya culture was one of the first "to make regular use of ox-drawn wheeled carts. Metal artefacts (tools, axes, tanged daggers) were mostly made of copper, with some arsenical bronze. Domesticated horses [were] used as [a] pack animal and ridden to manage cattle herds."
It's also possible that they brought cannabis with them on their migrations.
Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories (Updated)
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 are thought to have been 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. Highly recommended.
Video from 2015. I can also recommend Ehrman's book Forged. Very interesting stuff.
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.
The rest of this 2010 interview can be found here.
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 and elsewhere, 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. 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 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 (and I'm not sure I do), Christianity evolved as a kind of "false front" to protect the truth about the cult and its practices from the Romans, and its sacred texts 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? For example, a fresco in the Chapel of Plaincouralt, France, shows Adam and Eve standing next to what definitely appears to be a giant mushroom. That's kind of peculiar, to say the least.
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.
The most basic question about Jesus is whether he actually existed. Most of these theories about "who he really was" simply melt away if he's just another mythical character like all the other gods of the ancient world.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient Literature, Ancient Middle East, Books, Caesar's Messiah, Christianity, Commentary, Culture, Hidden History, Psychedelic Plants, Religion, Videos | Permalink | Comments (2)