Ancient World Review

The Hallucinogenic Honey That Poisoned A Greek Army

"When bees feed on the pollen of rhododendron flowers, the resulting honey can pack a hallucinogenic punch." Source: Atlas Obscura.

"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. (Source: 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."

Ancient Pre-Columbian Psychedelic Kit Discovered

"A small pouch, made from three fox snouts neatly sewn together, may contain the world’s earliest archaeological evidence for the consumption of ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant preparation indigenous to peoples of the Amazon basin that produces potent hallucinations." Source: National Geographic.

"The pouch likely belonged to a shaman in what is now southwestern Bolivia around a thousand years ago, according to José Capriles, an anthropologist at Penn State University and an author of a paper published on the discovery today in the journal PNAS."

Note: An analysis of the pouch's contents "revealed traces of bufotenine [found in toad skins and mushrooms, among other things], benzoylecgonine [a cocaine metabolite] and cocaine (likely from coca leaf), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), harmine [an alkaloid found in ayahuasca], and possibly psilocin, a chemical component of psychedelic mushrooms."

Drugs In Early Americas Included Magic Mushrooms And Toad Skins

"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."

Hallucinogens & Hieronymus Bosch

"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."

As far as I know there's no evidence to support this theory, but Bosch's paintings are all the evidence I need 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)."

(2) Amanita Muscaria can be found in the Netherlands, according to the The Vaults of Erowid.

The Mysterious Prehistory Of Ibogaine

"Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in plants in the Apocynaceae family such as Tabernanthe iboga, Voacanga africana and Tabernaemontana undulata. It is a psychedelic with dissociative properties." Source: Wikipedia.

Next video shows several examples of the Apocynaceae or Dogbane family. The audio's terrible, the narration almost incomprehensible, but this is one of the best Apocynaceae videos I could find. For some reason, most of the YouTube videos about these plants were made in India. I'm not sure how many of the plants shown here actually contain Ibogaine, but at least the video shows what they look like.

"The psychoactivity of the root barks of [the] Iboga tree, from which Ibogaine is extracted, was first discovered by the Pygmy tribe of Central Africa who passed the knowledge to the Bwiti tribe of Gabon [see below] ... Ibogaine-containing preparations are used for medicinal and ritual purposes within African spiritual traditions of the Bwiti, who claim to have learned it from the Pygmy peoples." (Wikipedia)

Video from 2015.

The origins of the pygmies is a mystery. "A commonly held belief is that African Pygmies are the direct descendants of Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers of the central African rainforest, who were partially absorbed or displaced by later immigration of agricultural peoples, and adopted their Central Sudanic, Ubangian, and Bantu languages. This view has no archaeological support, and ambiguous support from genetics and linguistics." (Wikipedia)

Considering the fact that these are hunter-gatherers living in the African rainforest, the lack of archaeological evidence isn't surprising. The prehistory of Ibogaine is just as obscure, but it seems likely that the Stone Age ancestors of the pygmies used the plant for ritualistic and healing purposes. According to the Crossroads Treatment Center, "The Iboga plant — found in West Africa’s Gabon and Cameroon — has existed, most likely, for thousands of years. As a psychoactive guide, traditionally, the root bark of the plant was eaten to induce visions and heal an assortment of ailments."

Next video shows a traditional Bwiti ritual in Gabon which makes use of the Iboga plant.

Full version of this documentary here.

According to Wikipedia, "Bwiti is a spiritual discipline of the forest-dwelling Babongo and Mitsogo peoples of Gabon ... and by the Fang people of Gabon and Cameroon. Modern Bwiti incorporates animism, ancestor worship, and Christianity into a syncretistic belief system.

"Bwiti practitioners use the psychedelic, dissociative root bark of the Tabernanthe iboga plant, specially cultivated for the religion, to promote radical spiritual growth, to stabilize community and family structure, to meet religious requirements, and to resolve pathological problems. The root bark has been consumed for hundreds of years in a Bwiti rite of passage ceremony, as well as in initiation rites and acts of healing. The experience yields complex visions and insights anticipated to be valuable to the initiate and the chapel."

Note: Some people believe that Ibogaine can be used to treat heroin addiction and other problems like alcoholism, but from what I've read there isn't enough evidence to support these claims.  According to Wikipedia, "clinical studies of ibogaine to treat drug addiction began in the early 1990s, but concerns about cardiotoxicity led to termination of those studies."

Hunter Thompson, in his classic book, Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, famously claimed that there was a "rumor" floating around that Democratic presidential candidate Ed Muskie's strange behavior was caused by his secret use of ibogaine. Thompson later expressed incredulity that so many people took the rumor (which he started himself) seriously. In the next video, he talks about the ibogaine rumor at 1:30.

Related: Erowid Ibogaine Vault.

Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories

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 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 great book "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 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 once again 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?

Hieronymus Bosch And Psychedelic Plants

Comment: 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.

If Bosch did take psychedelic plants as part of some forbidden ritual, the only candidate for the plant that I can think of would be the fly agaric mushroom. It apparently grows well in northern Europe, but whether it was native to the Netherlands during Bosch's time is another question. The fly agaric mushroom, incidentally, is also known as amanita muscaria, the same mushroom that John Allegro believed was used in the ancient fertility cults that eventually evolved into Judaism and Christianity.

In "The Secret Heresy of Heironymus Bosch" (1996), 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) beliefs 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.

More of Bosch's paintings can be found here.

Were Prehistoric Cave Painters High On Hallucinogenic Drugs?

Item: A group of Tokyo researchers "...recently published a comprehensive study of over 40,000 years worth of cave paintings and found some pretty telling patterns (PDF). The spiral-like and labyrinthine designs that pop up in paintings from locations that are thousands of miles away from each other didn't just pop up by coincidence. Since these patterns are consistent with those that many humans see after taking hallucinogenic drugs, the scientists think that ancient cavemen had more in common than previously thought. They all loved to get high." Source: Gizmodo (2013). More here.

Item: "A cave mural in Spain suggests Europeans may have used hallucinogenic mushrooms in religious rituals 6,000 years ago, researchers say.

"The cave art may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties, which would make them the oldest evidence of their use in Europe...

"The Selva Pascuala cave mural near the town of Villar del Humo has as its central feature a bull, but it is a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests two researchers." Source: UPI (2011).

The Selva Pascula mural. The mushrooms can be clearly seen at the bottom of the lower image.

Ref: Rock Art Of The Iberian Mediterranean Basin.

Comment: The purpose of prehistoric cave paintings is still a mystery, but some  scholars think they had some kind of religious significance. For instance, the images of animals commonly found on cave walls could have been painted during shamanistic rituals designed to improve the tribe's chances during the hunt. 

If the cave paintings did have a shamanistic purpose, then it wouldn't be surprising to learn that the painters used hallucinogenic plants to enter into visionary trance states while they created their rock art. However, I'm not sure if the common patterns found in these cave paintings really constitute evidence of the use of hallucinogens. After all, patterns like this could simply be a natural product of our neurobiology, the way the brain creates patterns in general.

The mushrooms in the Selva Pascuala cave mural are suggestive, but who knows why they're really there? Until some hard evidence emerges, all of this is just speculation, a matter of interpretation. If these prehistoric cave painters were taking hallucinogenic mushrooms, we won't know for sure until the remains of the actual mushrooms are discovered, preserved in fossils, perhaps. Organic matter can survive for long periods of time, but it's very rare.

The Mysterious Origins Of Ayahuasca

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.

Note: The use of ayahuasca by Amazonian shamans is commonly referred to as "ancient," but it's hard to tell just how far back it goes. 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." Apparently, Jesuit priests first observed the use of ayahuasca in the 1700s, but Spruce was the first scientist to actually conduct any kind of study of its properties.

According to "Unraveling the Mystery of the Origin of Ayahuasca by Gayle Highpine, (Ayahuasca.com, 2013), "The history of Ayahuasca is intertwined with the Quechua language. The very word aya-waska is Quechua, and the language is closely associated with Ayahuasca shamanism, even in areas where Quechua is not spoken."

There has been speculation that ayahuasca may have originated with the Incas. "Quechua is best known as the 'language of the Incas,' so the association of Quechua with Ayahuasca has, not surprisingly, given rise to speculation that Ayahuasca may have originated with the Incas or been spread by the Incas."

According to Highpine, "Evidence strongly suggests that the [region along the Rio Napo river] is the place of origin both of the ... cultural complex that is now known as 'Ayahuasca shamanism.' From the north, indigenous shamans and researchers alike point to the Napo as the place of origin. Brabec de Mori (2011:24) says, 'Among most researchers, there is a consensus that an ‘origin’ of ayahuasca, however remote it may be, should be located in the western Amazonian lowlands around the Rio Napo.'"

Related:

On The Origins Of Ayahuasca
The Dark Side Of Ayahuasca
Peru - Hell and Back

Solanum: The Poison Plants Of Witchcraft

"Once a long time ago when humans still communed with plants, the spirits of the dead, and the gods, the people learned of the Solanaceae [nightshades] genus of plants  – of both their great powers and their dangers. Those who knew of the secrets of these plants, later branded as witches and poisoners, were greatly feared and cast out of society as the power of the Solanaceae could bring armies and kingdoms to their knees." Source: Sarah Anne Lawless.