"I think that all the religions of Eurasia and the New World sprang out of cults that employed natural plant products [hallucinogenic mushrooms] as a mighty medium for reaching a state of ecstasy" (High Times, Issue 14, Oct. 1976 p. 26)."Here was the Secret of Secrets of the Ancients, of our own remote forebears, a Secret discovered perhaps sporadically in Eurasia and again later in Mesoamerica. The Secret was a powerful motive force in the religion of the earliest times (Wasson 1980, p. 53).
According to Wasson:
"Until lately it [the Amanita muscaria mushroom] has been a central feature of the worship of numerous tribes in northern Siberia, where it has been consumed in the course of their shamanic sessions. Its reputation as a lethal plant in the West is, I contend, a splendid example of a tabu long outliving the religion that gave rise to it. Among the most conservative users of the fly-agaric in Siberia the belief prevailed until recent times that only the shaman and his apprentice could consume the fly-agaric with impunity: all others would surely die. This is, I am sure, the origin of the tabu that has survived among us down to our own day" (from Wasson's, Soma of the Aryans: ttp://www.iamshaman.com/amanita/soma- aryans.htm).
Quoting Wasson:
"A prodigious expansion in Man's memory must have been the gift that differentiated mankind from his predecessors, and I surmise that this expansion in memory led to a simultaneous growth in the gift of language, these two powers generating in man that self-consciousness which is the third of the triune traits that alone make man unique. Those three gifts - memory, language and self-consciousness - so interlock that they seem inseparable, the aspects of a quality that permitted us to achieve all the wonders we now know." (R. Gordon Wasson, p. 80, Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. Yale University Press, New Haven MA.)
"The divine mushroom stepped up our drab existence to heights of great poetry and music. Those who commune with them find opening before them the portals to the playing fields of the gods" (Wasson, 1980 p. 119).
" With the aid of certain magical herbs and plants, man may have invented religion. When the Aryans came down from Siberia they brought with them their Ur-religion and an urgaritic language, which became the Vedic and Persian religious expression and later the Indo-European language, which includes Sanskrit and Persian, and the dialects of Greek, Finnish, German, Hindi, and Urdu" (Richard J. Williams 2009 p.7).
In 1968 Wasson traced the mushroom tabu back to the Vedic Soma:
"That which is tabu is both feared and loved, unclean and holy, shunned and worshipped. As the old beliefs slowly faded away, each cultural community, no longer able to maintain alive the balanced tensions of the original involvement, clung to one face or the other of the primitive emotions, either rejecting the mushroom world or embracing the strange growths with a quasi-erotic devotion."(Wasson &Wasson,1957)
Quoting Paul Johnson, author of A History of the Jews, 1988:
"As it becomes more understood the entheogenic theory on the origins of religion will come to be seen as much of a threat on organized religion, as much as Darwin's theory of Evolution was to the myths of the Creation in Genesis. In that it reveals the shamanic and plant based origins of religions themselves. The Gates to Eden our open"...
"Soma is a very difficult deity for many outside of India to comprehend. He works on numerous levels, all of which are tied together rather strangely. Soma is firstly a plant. He is also an intoxicating drink which was brewed from that plant. As the blood of animals and the sap of plants, Soma courses through all living things. He is Inspiration to those who seek it, and so is the god of poets. He is also the god of the moon. He is the dwelling place of the venerated dead, as well as the divine cure for evil. The ancient Hindus did not differentiate between these divergent aspects; all were the god Soma." (from SOMA /CHANDRA -GOD OF THE MOON)
After the conquest of the New World, Europeans were horrified by the stories of the native inhabitants eating mushrooms and worshiping idols, making offerings of human sacrifice to pagan gods and partaking in rituals of human cannibalism. To most Europeans, Mesoamerican religion appeared to be devil worship, consisting of an endless array of bloody rituals which were thought to be demonic and bizarre. However, in the minds of the Indians these rituals represented the highest praise one could spiritually devote in honor of the gods who made water plentiful, and food possible.
The Eucharist, also called Holy Communion or the Lord's Supper, is a Christian rite of receiving bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. It was regarded as the substance of Christ himself. Allegro points to Christianity's obsession with consuming Christ's body or becoming one with God by consuming the "body of Christ." Could the consumption of the body have actually been the consumption of the mushroom as sacrament?" ( Dead Sea Scroll Conspiracy By: Gaia Staff | Sept. 29th, 2017).
According to Spanish chronicler Fray Diego Duran (The Aztecs; 1964)…
“The prisoners were then given a sacred wine to drink which is called teooctili meaning literally “Divine Wine”. “After drinking it, they were taken to the temple where one by one they were forced to pass by the feet of the idol, making signs of great reverence to it.”
According to Fray Diego Duran (1537—1588), who was one of the first Spanish chroniclers to record the Aztecs use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, that before the sacrifice of prisoners at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the victims were presented to the public as honorable victims, claiming that by offering their chest and throats to the obsidian knife they will die here but their fame will live forever.
Duran records (The Aztecs; 1964 p.225)…
“When the sacrifice was finished and the steps and courtyard were bathed with human blood, everyone went to eat raw mushrooms. With this food they went out of their minds and were in worse state than if they had drunk a great quantity of wine. They became so inebriated and witless that many of them took their lives in their hands. With the strength of these mushrooms they saw visions and had revelations about the future, since the devil spoke to them in their madness”.
“It was common to sacrifice men on feast days as it for us to kill lambs or cattle in the slaughterhouses. I am not exaggerating; there were days in which two thousand, three thousands or eight thousand men were sacrificed. Their flesh was eaten and a banquet was prepared with it after the hearts had been offered to the devil. That to make the feasts more solemn all ate wild mushrooms which make a man lose his senses. That the people became excited, filled with pleasure, and lost their senses to some extent”.
" Christianity adopted as its most sacred rite an act of self-proclaimed cannibalism, a form of god-eating that goes back to those early cults of the deity who died a violent death and whose body was transformed into food and consumed by his worshipers" (Nigel Davies 1981 p. 164-165).
According to Allegro (1970)
"The Christians put the matter thus: “If the Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead through sin, your spirits are alive through righteousness".
According to Allegro (1970):
"If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you” (Rom 8:xo,ii)........ Not only could the drug contained under the skin of the sacred fungus give to the initiate at will this illusion of spiritual resurrection, of victory over death, but in the conception and growth of the mushroom he could see a microcosm of the whole natural order. Before his eyes the cycle of life and death was enacted in a matter of hours. The Amanita muscaria was the medium of spiritual regeneration and at the same time in itself the supreme example of the re-creative process in the world of Nature. No wonder the fungus attracted so much awesome wonder among the ancients, or that it inspired some of literature’s greatest epics".
Gordon Wasson was the first to call attention to the pervasiveness of the toad and it's association with the term toadstool, with the intoxicating or poisonous mushrooms in Europe (Wasson 1980, p.184-185). In Old World folklore the toad is linked to mushrooms, and that the "toadstool" mushroom was linked with the gods of thunder and lightning in the Indo-European world. The earliest reference to mushrooms and lightning or the "thunder-mushroom" in Sanskrit literature, is in Kalidasa's lyrical poem Meghaduta, 'The Cloud Messenger', written about A.D. 400. According to Wasson (1957) in verse 11 the exiled yaksha or demigod addresses the rain-cloud drifting northward over India:... and when they hear thy sweet-sounding, fertilizing thunder, which is able to cover the earth with mushrooms. The Rig Veda even asserts that "Parjanya, the god of thunder, was the father of Soma. Of the more than 1000 hymns in the Rig Veda, 120 are devoted exclusively to Soma.
According to Wasson (1957):
"Is not the odd phenomenon of mycophilia vs. mycophobia a latter-day echo of early man's shattering experience when he discovered the potent mushrooms, a response, positive and negative, divine and diabolic, to these holy miracle-workers? The toad of our 'toadstool' is that daemon which the Great Lightning Bolt seeded in the mother earth and which sprang forth in the little mushrooms."
Allegro (1970) linguistically linked the names Jesus, James, and John, the Fruit of the tree of Knowledge, and the symbol of the cross, to the Amanita muscaria mushroom, by stating that all of these names and terms (and others) were synonyms and wordplay for the hidden identity of the mushroom.
The Fleur de lis is a divine symbol meaning "Lord", linked to a Tree of Life, a Trinity of gods, and a mushroom of immortality; the mushroom being the medium through which one achieved ecstasy and thus communion with the gods.
"Thousands of years before Christianity, secret cults arose which worshiped the sacred mushroom — the Amanita Muscaria — which, for various reasons (including its shape and power as a drug) came to be regarded as a symbol of God on earth. When the secrets of the mushroom cult had to be written down, it was done in the form of codes hidden in folktales. This is the basic origin of the stories in the New Testament." (John Allegro, Sunday Mirror, April 19, 1970, p. 35).
According to Allegro (1970)" The fungus recognized today as the Amanita muscaria, or Fly Agaric, had been known from the beginning of history. Beneath the skin of its characteristic red and white-spotted cap, there is concealed a powerful hallucinatory poison, its religious use among certain Siberian peoples and others has been the subject of study in recent years, and its exhilarating and depressive effects have been clinically examined. These include the stimulation of the perceptive faculties so that the subject sees objects much greater or much smaller than they really are, colours and sounds are much enhanced, and there is a general sense of power, both physical and mental quite outside the normal range of human experience".
"Flow onward, Soma, as a mighty sea, as Father of the Gods to every form".
The ability to enter this spirit world and communicate with the unseen forces provided a certain measure of divine power over the other members of the society. By instituting and overseeing religious ceremonies they could manipulate the cosmic forces to ensure the people’s success and prosperity. These sacred rituals became the responsibility of the priest who through divine intervention became arguably the most essential part of the elite ruling class.
Quoting Alegro 1970:
"Above all, the sacred fungus, the Amanita muscaria, gave them the delusion of a soul floating free over vast distances, separate from their bodies, as it still does to those foolish enough to seek out the experience".
According to Wasson the religious use of the Amanita muscaria mushroom was widespread in the Old World. This remarkable mushroom as Wasson has demonstrated (1968, 1971) was the mysterious divine inebriating plant deity called Soma worshiped by the Indo-European peoples who called themselves Aryans who invaded India from the north around 1600-1500 BCE. The Aryans introduced a way of life that was to persist for centuries.
"The equilibrium of the world was maintained through sacrifices and the ritual offering of Soma, the juice of a plant that could well have been Amanita muscaria or Amanita phalloida mushrooms. The meaning of that rite is worthy of reflection: The world exists only on condition that humans inebriate themselves on certain fixed dates and circumstances, thus partaking of the nature of gods. This is the basic principle of the Greek mysteries" (Gerald Messadie, 1997, p.38-39)
We know from the Rig Veda, that Soma was an intoxicating plant worshiped as both a god and holy beverage by a people who called themselves Aryans. The Seers and Sages, who composed the Vedas describe the mountainous habitat and brilliant red and gold appearance of the Soma plant. According to Wasson, the whole of the Rig Veda is permeated with Soma and one of the ten books of the Rig Veda is wholly concerned with the sacred plant beverage (Wasson 1969).
"It is common for cultures to adopt surrogates (such as alcoholic “spirits”) in the traditional role of the entheogen [God producing mushroom] which then becomes known to only a small minority, or lost completely. In such cases, artistic or mythological elements often preserve some distinguishable traces of the plant-god"(Mark Hoffman 2004, p.115).
Quoting Wasson:
" I believe that Soma was a mushroom, Amanita muscaria (Fries ex L.) Quel, the fly-agaric, the Fliegenpilz of the Germans, the fausse oronge or tue-mouche or crapaudin of the French, the mukhomor of the Russians. This flaming red mushroom with white spots flecking its cap is familiar throughout northern Europe and Siberia. It is often put down in mushroom manuals as deadly poisonous but this is false, as I myself can testify" (Wasson, 1968).
Soma is portrayed in the Rig Veda as a lightning-born god, and an elixir of health and strength, as well as being praised for as the direct means of communion with the gods. "We have drunk the Soma and become Immortal; we have attained the Light, and found the Gods". (Rig Veda, 8.XLVIII.3)
"Soma, immortal sacred plant, is life transcending and reveals visions to humans of the other world, the realm that is not created and therefore is not subject to change (Religious Traditions of the World, 1993 p.743)
According to Wasson:
"What was this plant that was called "Soma" ? No one knows. Apparently its identity was lost some 3,000 years ago, when its use was abandoned by the priests. The earliest liturgical compositions of the Indo-Aryans, called the Brahmanas and put together after the hymns had been assembled, discuss the surrogates to be used for Soma in the ritual but fail to describe the original plant." (Wasson 1968)
Quoting R. Gordon Wasson:
"I submit that the legends of the Tree of Life and of the Marvelous Herb had their genesis in the Forest Belt of Eurasia". "The Tree of Life, is it not the legendary Birch Tree, and the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Life, what else is it but the Soma, the fly-agaric, [the Amanita muscaria] the pongo of the Ugrian tribesmen?" "In Genesis, is not the serpent the self-same chthonic spirit that we know from Siberia?" (from Peter T. Furst,1972, p.212)
Quoting Allegro, “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross”
"Even as late as the thirteenth century some recollection of the old tradition was known among Christians, to judge from a fresco [above left] painted on the wall of a ruined church in Plaincourault in France. There the Amanita muscaria is gloriously portrayed, entwined with a serpent, whilst Eve stands by holding her belly.”(Allegro p. 48)"The cunning reptile prevails upon Eve and her husband to eat of the tree, whose fruit ‘made them as gods, knowing good and evil’ (Gen 3:4). The whole Eden story is mushroom based mythology, not least in the identity of the ‘tree’ as the sacred fungus, as we shall see.In the King James Version of the Old Testament there are 33 verses that contain both the words "tree" and "fruit", most frequently in the books of Genesis, Leviticus and Jeremiah.According to Allegro (1970):
"In the case of the Tree of Life, whose fruit made Adam and Eve like gods, the apocryphal writing says it had “the height of a fir, leaves like a carob, and fruit like a vine-cluster”.
"Each of the comparisons bears upon the sacred mushroom, the Amanita muscaria. The “fir” because it is a denizen of the conifer forests ; the “carob” because this “pod” name was given to both the mushroom and the food of pigs and “Prodigal Sons” ; and the “vine-cluster” because the red cap of the fungus was so pictured".
According to Allegro:
"It is not surprising that the mushroom should have become the centre of a mystery cult in the near east which persisted for thousands of years. There seems good evidence that from there it swept into India in the cult of Soma some 3,500 years ago; it certainly flourished in Siberia until quite recent times, and is found even today in certain parts of South America" (Allegro 1970).
"...today the Pope is said to be Jesus' special representative on earth"..."Jesus, like Soma, was a personification of the sacred food and drink of the Eucharist." (Clark Heinrich, 2002 p.114).
According to Allegro (1970)
"Paradise was for none but the favored few. The incantations and rites by which they conjured fourth their drug plants, and the details of the bodily and mental preparations undergone before they could ingest their god, were the secrets of the cult to which none but the initiate bound by fearful oaths, had access" (Allegro 1970)."For such a glimpse of heaven men have died. In the pursuit of this goal great religions have been born, shone as a beacon to men struggling still in their unequal battle with nature, and then too have died, stifled by their own attempts to perpetuate, codify, and evangelize the mystic vision" (Allegro 1970).
Above is an early Christian mural 3rd, 4th century Catacombs of Peter and Marcellinus, Rome Italy, that depicts the sacrament of Holy Communion as a probable mushroom (source Clark Heinrich, author of the book " Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy" 2002 )
According to Allegro (1970) the secrets of the mushroom cult was an oral tradition, forbidden to be written down, but between 66 and 74 AD, the cult was all but wiped-out in a Jewish rebellion that the Roman authority crushed, brutally, and mercilessly.
According to Allegro:
"When the time came for the secrets of the mushroom cult to be written down to preserve them intact in a hostile world, it was done in a kind of code. – (John Allegro, Sunday Mirror, April 19, 1970, p. 35)
To my knowledge the author is the first to point out the mushroom iconography encoded in the 12th century Guienzo Bronze doors, located at the southern entrance to Gniezno Cathedral, in Gniezno Poland. The bronze doors (below) have been the object of deep interest to historians because of the many questions concerning the identity of the doors creator, and where it was cast (Jadwiga Irena Daniek: 1966 p.10). The doors esoterically encode what the author believes are elements of a world-wide mushroom religion that include the images of felines, a ritual beverage, ritual decapitation, a trophy head cult, a Tree of Life a bird deity, (in this case a dove) and the Fleur de lis symbol, both of which represent the Holy Spirit.
The bronze doors represent the life and death of St. Adalbert, a 10th century Czech missionary, and the Guienzo Cathedral, which holds the silver reliquary that hold his remains. The door on the left portrays the early life of St. Adalbert, who was born in Libice, Bohemia; the right door portraying his missionary activities, as well as his eventual death by ritual decapitation.
Above St. Adalbert, Bishop of Prague is decapitated by pagan Prussians (April 23, 997), because he denounced the pagan practices of tree-worship and human sacrifice.
The Gniezno Bronze doors describe the life and death of St. Adalbert on eighteen separate panels, nine on each door. Two bronze lion heads act as door knobs to the rear entrance of a church that held the coronation of four Polish kings from 1015 to 1300.
"The Prussians were mostly pagan at the time the doors were made, and remained pagans until the end of the Middle Ages. To illustrate the life of a single saint on such a monumental scale was most unusual at this period, and the doors are the only Romanesque ones in Europe with such a programme.[11] The designs perhaps followed a now lost cycle in an illuminated manuscript of the life of the saint, though even in this sort of works such an extended pictorial treatment of a saint's life was unusual. The Two lives of Adalbert have survived, written around 1000, soon after his death, but no illuminated copies that throw light on the visual sources for the doors, though their texts help explain the scenes.[12] Whatever the origin of the designs, the compositions show the borrowings from more common subject compositions to which early medieval artists usually resorted when confronted with a novel subject; devising new compositions was not part of their training. Some scenes adapt subjects from the Life of Christ and other models (Wikipeda).
Above, "Hidden in Plain Sight", are mushrooms in associations with a ritual drink, felines, a Tree of Life, and the Fleur de lis symbol, all associated with ritual decapitation and a trophy head cult.
In Genesis 3.22 God says....."The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; what if he now reaches out his hand and takes fruit from the tree of life also, eats it and lives forever?"
The Book of Genesis never mentions apple or forbidden fruit, only the "fruit of knowledge" and the "fruit of everlasting life". Ethno-mycologist Gordon Wasson, and other notable scholars have written that the mythological apple is a symbolic substitution for the Amanita muscaria mushroom.
Genesis 3: 3-5, "The fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ye shall not eat of it neither shall ye touch it, lest you die."
4. "And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die."
5. "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
Quoting Carl A. P. Ruck and Jose Gonzalez-Celdran
"...as the evidence continues to mount up that all of the ancient religions of the Old World, not just the Eleusinian Mystery, had entheogenic Mystery sacraments..."The original identity of the Tree and its fruit was always restricted knowledge, concealed by metaphors and symbols that only a few could know" (J.R. Irvin 2008 p.104)
"It goes without saying that the mushroom comprises the expression of immortality, the birth with no seeds (parthenogenesis) and the continuous rebirth, a fact that surprised the ancient people even more when the consumption of some entheogenic mushrooms caused visions, inspiring thus the religious sentiment to the man who felt restricted by new invisible powers, that were interpreted as contact with the deity. (source: 2015, Stavros D. Kiotsekoglou: Thracian Megalithic Sanctuaries from the Prefecture of Evros Greece)
Often the visionary mushroom assumes the role of the "plant teacher", revealing previously unknown or inaccessible information and offering a reliable means to induce a hallucinatory trance state to enter the spirit world and communicate with the unseen forces, exchanging intimate thoughts and feelings on a spiritual level.
Quoting Mark Hoffman:
"Among both the earlier hunter-gatherers and the subsequent agricultural peoples, entheogenic plants have always been revered and feared. Such respect is demonstrated by their exalted status in mythology and by the secrecy and taboos that often surround their use. Thus, the seriousness and danger attributed to these plants have always been a defining characteristic" (Mark Hoffman 9-9-2004, "Entheogens (Psychedelic Drugs) And Shamanism" p. 116).
Allegro studied the beliefs and rituals of the Essenes of Qumran, and discovered that the Dead Sea Scrolls tell a story of a leader of the Essenes who they called the "Teacher of Righteousness" who was crucified on a cross in 88 BCE. for leading a failed revolt a hundred years before Jesus, and who had similar teachings. "Allegro boldly claimed that this was the proto-Jesus, reinvented and restructured circa 30 C.E. to appeal to gentiles in a time of persecution by Rome and the orthodox Jewish religious establishment" (Clark Heinrich 2002 p.23).
Dead Sea Scroll Conspiracy:
"A number of similarities between the Essenes mysticism and the story of Christ perplex scholars of the scrolls. The use of the term, "Son of God", was found to have been used long before the time Christ was presumed to have lived and was often used in the imagery of the Essenes. There is also mention of a council of Twelve, a communal meal, baptisms, healings, and the coming of a messiah; all analogous to the story of Jesus".
According to researcher Julie Brown, May 2005...JOHN ALLEGRO AND THE CHRISTIAN MYTH:
"John Allegro observed the way the Jesus story echoed events and ideas in Gnostic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Old Testament, and he identified the doctrine of divine light as the unifying theme. This is expressed in myth and imagery and is a key to understanding a range of mythologies – including Christianity.
"The obvious links between the practices at Qumran and those of Jesus' disciples are well known. They include the Council of Twelve, the communal meal, healing and exorcism, sharing possessions, baptism, antagonism towards the main Jewish sects, looking to the end of the world and the coming of a messiah.""If we compare the Christian story with other contemporary writings and also with recurrent themes in the mythology of other cultures, we see it in the context of a much older and deeper current of religious thought. And if we observe this as students of human thought rather than as devotees of a particular religion, it is not to belittle Christianity as a phenomenon of history but to strengthen it as an expression of human understanding" .
Jesus says at the Last Supper.....
“I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever” (John 6:51)
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whosoever eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, has eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:53-54)?
Quoting James Arthur, author of “Mushrooms and Mankind” 2003:
"The statement that Jesus makes ‘Unless you eat and drink you have no life in you’ would seem to condemn the replacement of whatever the real thing is with a placebo (substitute).”
“This is saying pretty clearly that the eating and drinking is physical. My body is flesh indeed, and my blood is drink indeed, and the added statement that when you eat, it is inside of you leaves little room for debate that this is a substance, not a phantom symbol alone. For those who choose to debate this I ask that they show me their substance because according to Jesus' words unless you eat and drink of ‘It’ you have no life in you.
Thus Christians (Pope Innocent III 1198-1216) officially declared the concept of transubstantiation, and the elevation of the host, when the priest raises the bread and wine for all to see in the Mass and physically changes the wafer and the wine into the body and blood of Christ.
"The very name Christmas, is a Holiday name composed of the words …Christ (meaning the Anointed with the Magical Substance) …Mass (a special religious service/ceremony of the Sacramental ingestion of the Eucharist, the Body of Christ.) In Catholic Tradition this Substance (Body/Soma) has been replaced by the doctrine of Trans-substantiation, Whereby (in magical ceremony) The Priests claim the ability to transform A cracker into the literal Body of Christ.. IE. Substitute/Placebo (Lee Sayer Dec. 25, 2014)
Quoting James Arthur, author of Mushrooms and Mankind, 2003:"The substances that Jesus referred to are not communion wafers and grape wine. The Amanita muscaria mushroom had long before Christianity been known as “the flesh of the gods” and “the blood of the gods” and this is what Jesus meant""The discovery that, although the Sacramental substance is unquestionably present, the organizations themselves have obscured the knowledge of it, it was enigma. That is, until the political nature at the roots of religion itself had been uncovered. Today's religions do not answer this important question. They explain it away as purely symbolic, or of no importance. Religion has polluted itself by denying its own source, and by removing the individual's ability to experience the effects produced by the substance that imparts GNOSIS (the joining together of the consciousness with the consciousness of the Divine). By the removal of this key knowledge, religions themselves become lies; especially when the same systems inspired by Entheogens condemn their usage"
"I’m glad to tell you whatever I can about the Mazatec mushroom. Someday I may write up my observations for publication, but in the meantime you may make what use of it you can. The Mazatecs seldom talk about the mushroom to outsiders, but belief in it is widespread. A twenty-year old boy told me, “I know that outsiders don’t use the mushroom, but Jesus gave it to us because we are poor people and can’t afford a doctor and expensive medicine.” Sometimes they refer to it as “the blood of Christ,” because supposedly it grows only where a drop of Christ‘s blood has fallen. They say that the land in this region is “living” because it will produce the mushroom whereas; the hot dry country where the mushroom will not grow is called “dead.” They say that it helps “good people” but if someone who is bad eats it “it kills him or makes him crazy.” When they speak of “badness” they mean “ceremonially unclean.” (A murderer if he is ceremonially clean can eat the mushroom with no ill effects.) A person is considered safe if he refrains from intercourse five days before and after eating the mushroom. A shoemaker in our part of town went crazy about five years ago. The neighbors say it was because he ate the mushroom and then had intercourse with his wife. When a family decides to make use of the mushroom they tell their friends to bring them any they see, but they ask only those who they can trust to refrain from intercourse at that time, for if the person who gathers the mushroom has had intercourse, it will make the person who eats it crazy."
In 1955 Wasson participated in a mushroom ceremony in Mexico with the now famous Mazatec curandera (shaman) Maria Sabina. She described the god-given powers of the divine mushrooms, that she uses in her ceremonies...
"There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It it they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me " (Schultes & Hofmann p.86).
Above is a quote from ethno-botanist Clark Heinrich author of the book " Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy" Heinrich (2002) has presented a great deal of evidence supporting his theory that the alchemist's pursuit of immortality revolved around the covert ingestion of the Amanita muscaria mushroom.
"Most people read Christian art as pictures, as snap shots representing historical events, but that is not what Christian art is about. An icon is a representation of something that cannot be represented; icons are spiritual renderings of another world, a spiritual geography; what you see is not what you get. A cross is not a cross, a book is not a book, an angel is not an angel, and a mushroom is not a mushroom. This being the case the Apostle’s Creed is likewise an icon, a mega-icon because it encapsulates all others. Again, this is not history; it is an elaborate, artistic, spiritual attempt to explain and pay homage to the mushroom experience."
Above is an image of the Holy Trinity, that I propose esoterically encodes the red and white spots of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, "Hidden in Plain Sight". A common depiction of enlightenment is a glowing halo that resembles the mushroom.
The author's research proposes that the mushroom cult of Soma, as well as other Vedic traditions, migrated to the Americas sometime around 1000 B.C.E.,with the rise of the ancient Olmec, and that the Indians of the New World modeled their religion on Vedic beliefs and ritual practices. Mushrooms were so cleverly encoded in the religious art of the New World, "Hidden in Plain Sight" that prior to the author's study they virtually escaped detection.
I'm honored to have been a contributing author in these groundbreaking books edited by Dr. John Rush, Dr. Philip Wexler and Kevin Feeney on the role of entheogenic mushrooms in the development of culture and religion.
In the Greek Eleusinian mysteries, dedicated to the god Dionysus, there included a communion rite involving a ritual beverage which the initiates drank to gain salvation or immortality by death and rebirth.
Quoting Wasson:"The Eleusinian Mystery, a sacred rite of purification and initiation related to deities of the earth, was celebrated in September or early October, the season of the mushrooms in Europe. At the heart of the Mystery of Eleusis lay a secret. In the surviving texts there are numerous references to the secret, but in none is it revealed. Yet Mysteries such as the one at Eleusis played a major role in Greek civilization, and thousands knew the experience" (Furst 1972, p.193).
"Greek wine may have been diluted with hallucinogenics at the Dionysian Anthesteria festival that celebrated the completion of the wine's fermentation. That specific mention was made of a drug in the wine that was responsible for opening graves and allowing the departed spirits to return to Athens for a banquet with the living" (Ruck 2006, p.96).
The Invocation of Dionysus:
"I call upon loud-roaring and revelling Dionysus, primeval, double-natured, thrice-born, Bacchic lord,wild, ineffable, secretive, two-horned and two-shaped. Ivy-covered, bull-faced, warlike, howling, pure, You take raw flesh, you have feasts, wrapt in foliage, decked with grape clusters. Resourceful Eubouleus, immortal god sired by Zeus. When he mated with Persephone in unspeakable union. Hearken to my voice, O blessed one, and with your fair-girdled nymphs breathe on me in a spirit of perfect agape"."In intoxication, physical or spiritual, the initiate recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of everyday preoccupations. The Bacchic ritual produced what was called 'enthusiasm', which means etymologically having the god enter the worshipper, who believed :that he became one with the god" (Wikipeda)(Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy).
Above is a Classical vase painting of the Greek god Dionysus, the god of Vine, and Wine-making, and god of Ritual Madness, and dispenser of divine ecstasy. Note the encoded mushrooms in the image above, emerging from the two-handled vessel held by Dionysus, a clue "Hidden in Plain Sight" suggesting to me, a mushroom infused ritual beverage.
The archaeological remains from the mystery sanctuaries are the characteristic two-handled drinking vessels like the two in the photo above. The features of the Dionysian ecstasy are enraged stimulation, sexual arousal, remarkable muscular strength, prophetic vision, identification with the deity, and that the Dionysian festival was actually an ecstatic festival which had to do with visions of the dead (source: 2015, Stavros D. Kiotsekoglou: Thracian Megalithic Sanctuaries from the Prefecture of Evros Greece)
Quoting ethno-botanist Clark Heinrich author of the book " Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy" (2002)
"I found this relief carving of Dionysus [above], beneath a tree, holding a drinking vessel (kylix) carved to closely resemble a mature fly agaric specimen (Amanita muscaria). The carving photo, from wikipedia, has no other information. In my books I identify Dionysus as a fly agaric god. This carving depicts this perfectly. Notice that he pours liquid on the roots of the tree, making the connection to the mycorrhizal relationship of the mushroom with tree roots, and the necessity of water to bring the fruit. Some will also note the "mushroom's" remarkable resemblance to the images on an ancient Russian tapestry that was discovered several years ago".
"Ancient Thrace was seen as the origin of the cult of Dionysus. Thrace was known for its wine whose potency was of epic proportions.
"Wine was recognized in antiquity as the product of fungal growth and the drink was a cultivated version of wild intoxicants, among which was the mushroom" (NeuroQuantology | September 2016 | Volume 14 | Issue 3 | Page 544)
"In Homeric times, it required dilution twentyfold with water (Homer, Odyssey, 9.208-211), and still in the second century BCE, on the testimony of the Roman governor of the Thracian province, it needed eight parts water to be drunk safely (Pliny, Historia naturalis, 14.6.53; Pollux, Onomasticon, 6.16.4).
The mushroom ritual was similar to Holy Communion in which the initiates gained salvation by death and rebirth, similar to the mystic death, rebirth, and resurrection rituals in Mithraism.
Quoting Donald E. Teeter (2005 p.8):
"It is well known that Mithraism, which was very widespread throughout the late Roman Empire, had a profound impact on early Christianity with Mithra’s birthday, Dec. 25th adopted by Christianity as Christmas or Christ’s birthday and the adoption of Mithra’s day of the week, Sunday as the day of worship and rest, instead of the Hebrew Sabbath of Saturday. The sacred wine of Mithra was a type of Haoma not alcoholic wine since it was said to posses exceptional properties compared to ordinary wine. It is reasonable to believe that the original Eucharist wine of early Christianity was identical to the Mithraic wine.
According to Carl A. P. Ruck:
"Mithraism was the way that Zoroastrian monotheism spread the mushroom haoma sacrament of the Persians into Europe as an element in the sevenfold stages of its secret drug-induced initiation" (Ruck 2013, p.367)
Quoting Gerald Messadie, author of "The History of the Devil"
"A prototype of Jesus, as the legend of Zoroaster's birth goes to show, he was the founder of the first true monotheism, as his "evangelical" hymns, the Gathas, prove and as Pahlavi texts and Greek historians confirm (Messadie 1993, p.82)."By all accounts, both in his own day and over later centuries Zoroaster was considered not just a prophet but a supernatural being, which has led some Iran experts to call him a myth, mush as some historians have called the existence of Jesus into doubt" (Messadie 1993, p.82).
Above is a portrait of Pope Clement VII, dressed in the sacred Popes attire that pays homage to the Amanita muscaria mushroom, as the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. History tells us that Pope Clement VII died from what has been described as mushroom poisoning. According to Wasson the date of his death, September 25, 1534, "falls in the season of the deadly Amanita" (R.G. Wasson, 1972 p.110). The Amanita muscaria's supposed toxicity reflects the tabu, and Holiness placed upon it, therefore unclean for all, save the King or Pope.
Mushrooms were the only food that were prepared by the host at Roman banquet tables. This practice did not insure safety, but at least it would cast suspicion on the possible perpetrator (In the Company of Mushrooms: A Biologist's Tale 1997).
"a pot of mushrooms changed the history of Europe"
According to anthropologist Mark A. Hoffman:"The concept of tapu, as the source and translation of our word “tabu,” is close in meaning to mana, an important concept in Polynesian religion that describes a contagious spiritual power that lasts only a short period of time. The word tapu is similarly used in describing transitory states such as shamanic ecstasy—or “being under the influence of the Gods”—and the sacredness of the ceremonies whose main function it was to channel this divine “energy” where it was desired (Eliade 1987). Because this energy is characterized by its motion, tapu-infused or “sacred” foods, [objects], etc., must be carefully managed to avoid accidental exposure to potentially dangerous spiritual influences. The proscriptions are assigned “forbidden” status, and special preparations and precautions are established for entering states of “divine possession.” (Mark A. Hoffman 2002, "Mushroom Myth and Imagery in Hawai'i")
Like Wasson, the author's own study would conclude that the Amanita muscaria mushroom was one of the principal entheogenic (God-producing) substances through which humans aspired to ecstasy and communion with the gods. Like the god plant Soma of ancient Vedic-Hinduism, the ancient god myths of Mesoamerica contain a sacramental food or beverage associated with a "Tree of Life" self sacrifice and immortality.
While one can argue that the simultaneous appearance of encoded mushroom imagery in the early cultures of the Old World and that of the New World, could be the result of parallel outgrowths of the same Paleolithic shamanistic mushroom religion proposed by Wasson, there are other, more complex, similarities that suggest possible transpacific contacts between the two areas. One of these is the method of extraction of the hallucinogenic drink used in both areas.
"Sometime in the second millennium B.C. the "original" Aryans had marched into India from the northwest, sweeping across the land in their great military and cultural conquest, bringing with them new customs and sacred traditions, some of which have survived to this day in the Vedic texts, such as the Rigveda. It is distinctly possible that the ancestors of the Ob-Ugrian Ostyaks and Voguls, who still today imbibe the Amanita drink on the banks of the Yenisei, had passed the secrets of Soma to the Indo-Iranians, who apparently developed improved methods for the ritual preparation of this substance by removing successfully the toxic ingredients, and thus bypassing the occasional need to rely on the urine of those with apparent immunity. In this "recycled" state, Soma loses its toxicity without forfeiting its effects" (Michael Ripinsky-Naxon 1993, p.164).
"Since the appearance of R. G. Wasson's "Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality", different writers have published a divergence of postulates and hypotheses, some new and others not, concerning the identification of the Vedic Soma and the Avestan Haoma. In the main, they try to disagree with Wasson's conclusions, but fail to do so convincingly. Some are unsuccessful in properly accounting for, while others ignore completely, the significance of the psychotropic urine, something that rightly is very fundamental to a segment of Wasson's theory. In fact, we are presented with inapt research and forced reasoning by a few who thrive on controversy rather than profoundness" (Ripinsky-Naxon author of, "The Nature of Shamanism: Substance and Function of a Religious Metaphor" 1993, p.248)
Wasson supported his Amanita muscaria-Soma-urine-hypothesis by citing Chinese accounts of the "evil" practices of the Manichaeans, among them the practice of using urine in their rituals. Wasson also noted "that the modern Parsi religion is a descendant of the Zoroastrian religion and that in Parsi rituals they drink token amounts of bull's urine which, Wasson believed, is probably a throwback to the practice of urine drinking in the ancient Haoma religion of pre-Zoroastrian times, and that the veneration of urine is prevalent even today among Hindus in India" (Clark Heinrich 2002, p.21).
"The swollen men piss the flowing Soma, full bladders, piss Soma quick with movement" (Schultes & Hofmann 1979 p.83)
The Buddhist prophet named Gautama Buddha, like the Vedic god Soma, was also a personification of the sacred mushroom, as can be seen above, "Hidden in Plain Sight". Is it just a coincidence that the Vedic god named Soma had a son named Budha (spelled Budha) (source http://www.crystalwind.ca/mystical-magical/pantheons-and-myths/hindu/soma-chandra-god-of-the-moon).
According to Wasson (1957) in China, long before the Buddhist era, in the Taoist philosophy of Lao-Tse, there is the legend of the ling-chih: wherein 'ling' means spiritual or potent or divine, and 'chih' is a word for 'mushroom'. According to the legend as it survives today, the ling-chih was a mushroom that bestowed immortality on the eater.
"Buddha" National Museum, Karachi Pakistan. photograph by Sabrina Alexander.
Above on the left is a 7th century sandstone sculptural relief of Jina Parsvanatha the 23rd of the Jain saints originally adorned a temple at Gyaraspur, in central India. As the story goes, Buddha becomes enlightened while sitting under the Bodhi tree. The word bodhi which means enlightenment, is I believe a metaphorical reference to the "Tree of Life" and the Amanita muscaria mushroom (Drawing on the right by Rory Eade Arte).
Sallekhana, mushroom suicide in ancient India ?
"Hence the Soma god [of the Rig Veda] has no name, Soma being a metaphor of him as the "Pressed One"; and his botanic identity lies hidden beneath a plethora of metaphors, such as the parasol or wheel with spokes, both perfectly applicable to a mushroom". (from Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess, 2006, p.34)
Above is a rubbing of a Bas Relief at the temple of Angkor Wat" (12th century) in Cambodia, that depicts the Hindu god Shiva holding what may be an Amanita muscaria mushroom in his right hand. In Hindu mythology, Shiva is known as the "destroyer and the transformer" within the the Hindu Trinity. The Vedic inspired Hindu concept of a Trinity of gods, called the Trimurti, personified the cosmic functions of creation, maintenance, and destruction as the deities Brama, Vishnu, and Shiva. (image of rubbing from Trinfinity & Beyond by Dr. Kathy J. Forti).
Parallel to Mesoamerican mythology, the early Vedics, Hindus, Buddhists, and Persian Zoroastrians, all had a similar belief in four great eras or world periods that ended in cataclysm prior to the present, fifth, and final world. Hindu scriptures, like Aztec legends, speak of four past ages, the fifth world age being that of the present age. That each of these ages was ended by a great cataclysms that nearly destroyed mankind. These world ages are terminated by three kinds of destruction,
involving wind, fire, and water."The influences of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of southeast Asia in Mexico and particularly, among the Maya, are incredibly strong, and they have already disturbed some Americanists who don't like to see them but cannot deny them....Ships that could cross the Indian Ocean were able to cross the Pacific too. Moreover, these ships were really larger and probably more sea-worthy than those of Columbus and Magellan" (from "Man across the Sea" Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts, published in 1971, Third Printing 1976)
The Amanita muscaria or fly agaric mushroom and the psilocybin mushroom appears not only to have played a role in the early history of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrian, Judaism and Christianity, but also may be the metaphorical key to decoding the esoteric religions of ancient Mesoamerica, and South America, including Easter Island.
In both the Old World and the New World the sacred mushroom evokes an imaginary world of little people more or less the size of mushrooms (Wasson 1980 p.52). According to ethno-mycologist Gastón Guzmán, one of the effects of the Amanita muscaria mushroom experience is to see objects as gigantic in size. (Guzman, 2010) (Schultes & Hofmann p.84).
Above on the top right is a close up of a hero stone (Varagallu in Kannada, Natukal in Tamil) that depicts a person under what appears to be a giant mushroom, in this bas relief scene at the temple of Tripurantaka, built around c. 1070 CE in the historically important town of Balligavi, modern Shivamogga district, Karnataka state, India. These memorial stones, called "Hero Stones", were raised in medieval India to honor noted Jains who committed Sallekhana (photograph by Thomas Alexandar). There are similar suicidal practices in other Vedic inspired religions like Prayopavesa in Hinduism, and Sokushinbutsu in Buddhism.
Very little is known about the religious beliefs of the earliest inhabitants of Mesoamerica, although we can assume based on later religious concepts that they brought with them certain religious beliefs from Asia. They conceived of their gods as supernatural beings some of whom were in the image of man others who took the form of jaguars, birds, dragons and serpents with human characteristics and supernatural powers.
In the mythology of ancient Mexico, there is a Nahua (Aztec) legend of a paradise of nine heavens that was dedicated to the Wind God Quetzalcoatl, called Tamoanchan where there was a sacred tree that marked the place where the gods were born and where sacred mushrooms and all life derived... "In Tamoanchan...On the flowery carpet...There are perfect flowers...There are rootless flowers" (Hugh Thomas 1993, p.474).
(Photo of convent mural by Higinio Gonzalez of Puebla, Mexico)
Above is a mural dated 1558, that was painted in a convent in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, that depicts the mushroom and the jaguar. According to the photographer of this mural Higino Gonzalez, "they say the mural was heavily destroyed and it was reconstructed in a neoclassic style in 1897.
The Aztecs use of hallucinogenic mushrooms was reported by such prominent Spanish historians as the Dominican friar Diego Durán (Aztecs: The History of the Indies of New Spain, translated with notes by Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas, Orion Press, New York, 1964, pp 225-6), by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun
Fray Duran tells us that the Catholic Church, in its zeal to obliterate all aspects of native culture which could threaten Christian religious belief, ordered the destruction of all native documents pertaining to history, myth, and legend. The Church also banished all aspects of native religion in favor of Christianity, and made no attempt to study or further record mushroom rituals.
Above are images from native manuscripts, called codices, that link the Fleur de lis symbol with the sacred mushroom, and a beverage of immortality. These pictorial documents contain much valuable information pertaining to native history, mythology, and ritual, related to a pantheon of supernatural gods.
Above is a scene from page 20 of the Codex Selden, also known as the Codex Anute. On the right are what appear to me to be three Fleur de lis symbols encoded onto a trio of mushrooms. This esoteric symbolism is I believe code for immortality, the Tree of Life, and a Trinity of Gods. The footprint motif is a common one in pre-Columbian art, symbolizing "a journey", and in this case alluding to a very long journey into the underworld by the "bemushroomed".
According to Wasson:
"The successive scribes who copied the manuscript of Dioscorides [Old World Byzantine Codex] seem to have followed various traditions in their illustrations, imitating the predecessor whose work lay before them. The earliest mushroom miniature known to us is in the 9th century codex of Dioscorides now lying in the Bibliotheque Nationale.192 There the mushrooms look like balloons or cherries or gooseberries. In the same library there is an nth century (or slightly later) Arabic manuscript of Dioscorides, and it is clear that here the miniaturist was working in the same uninspired tradition, if indeed he was not copying from the 9th century manuscript directly" (Wasson and Wasson, 1957)
In 1656, a guide for missionaries denounced Indian idolatries, including mushroom intoxication. Not only did the Spanish reports condemn the use of mushrooms (teonanacatl means "God's Flesh" in the language of the Aztecs) but so did the illustrations, for example the image above from the Magliabechiano Codex in which we see the devil enticing an Indian to eat the demonic mushrooms.
Quoting Wasson (1957):"The illustration [from the Magliabechiano Codex] offers us three elements - mushrooms, a man eating mushrooms, and behind and over him a ghost. The reader will notice that the man holds a mushroom in each hand. According to Professor Jimenez Moreno, the ghost is probably Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Underworld, who is depicted on other pages of the same Codex. How far removed from the Spaniard's conception is the Indian's! Not only is the craftsmanship of these artists, contemporaries of each other, poles apart; their message is likewise. The Spaniard reports rather prosaically the existence of a demonic mushroom to his European public. The Indian, though undoubtedly a baptized Christian, conveys a sense of the awe that he still felt in the presence of the mysterious teo-nanacatl. That the mushrooms in this miniature are green should not disconcert the mycologist: green, the color of jade, meant in Mexican iconography that the object so depicted was of great worth".
Archaeological artifacts from Mexico, and Central America called "mushroom stones" associated with the ancient cultures of the Maya, and Olmec, have been interpreted as evidence for the usage of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mesoamerican religion spanning almost 3,000 years (S.F de Borhegyi 1961). That the Amanita muscaria mushroom was used in Mesoamerica in Pre-Conquest times, is also suggested by early dictionary sources which describe a mushroom the ancient Maya called xibalbaj okox meaning “underworld mushroom” (The Ancient Maya: Morley, Brainerd, and Sharer, Fourth Edition 1983, p.484).
Quoting Wasson:
"I believe the whole corpus of surviving pre-conquest artistic expression should…be reviewed on the chance that divine mushrooms figuring therein have hitherto escaped detection” (Hugh Thomas, 1993 p.644 11-17n).
I would like to gratefully acknowledge the valuable database of photographs by Justin Kerr, using a roll-out technique which he pioneered that allows the viewing of vessels as vase paintings. His work, and the vast inventory of pre-Columbian artifacts made available online by F.A.M.S. the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies have given me the opportunity to explore fully these images in great depth.
Photograph © Justin Kerr
Maya Vase painting K2797 from the Justin Kerr Data Base, represents a great example of mushroom-inspired art. The individual on the far left clearly holds what can only be a sacred mushroom in his hand. The Maya god just to the right of this individual being offered a mushroom has been identified by scholars as God K. Maya glyph expert David Stuart (1987) found a syllabic spelling for God K's name which reads K'awil, meaning "sustenance" in Yukatek Mayan, but also meaning "idol" or "embodiment" in the Poqom and Kaqchikel Mayan languages (Freidel, Schele, Parker: 1993 p.410 n). The Maya god K'awil is commonly recognizable by the smoking tube, (and obsidian mirror, or axehead) that penetrates his forehead. These attributes are metaphors of the power to penetrate, or enter, into the Underworld. In Maya mythology K'awil who is often depicted as a one legged god, symbolic of a mushroom and bolt of lightning which, by penetrating the ground and entering the underworld, could create new life in a place of death and decay.
Photograph © Justin Kerr
Above is a Late Classic period (A.D. 600-900) Maya vase painting, photographed in roll-out form by Justin Kerr. I propose that this Maya vase painting depicts the offering of an Amanita muscaria mushroom, and that the drinking vessel itself may have been used in a mushroom ceremony.
According to Allegro:
"All roads in the Near East lead back to the Mesopotamian basin, to ancient Sumer. Similarly, the most important of the religions and mythologies of that area, and probably far beyond, are reaching back to the mushroom cult of Sumer and her successors"."No one knows where the Sumerians came from, but about 4000 B.C. they were already developing a culture which was to affect the whole world for over five thousand years" (Allegro, p.31)
The Sumerians were the creators of the first high civilization in Mesopotamia. Famous Sumerianologist Samual Noah Kramer, in his book (1944) "Sumerian Mythology", writes that "the Sumerians were a non-Semitic, non-Indo-European people who lived in southern Babylonia from 4000-3000 B.C.E. they invented cuneiform writing, and their spiritual beliefs influenced all successive Near Eastern religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam."
The first written records of religious practice are from ancient Sumer dating to c. 3500 BCE. The first written record of a plant of immortality is also from ancient Sumer, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, datable before 2000 BCE. The Epic tells the story of Gilgamesh's adventures, and heroic deeds, one of which was a visit to the island abode of Utnapishtim, the so-called Babylonian Noah, who had survived a great flood, by constructing a boat to save his family and various animals, and saves humankind and in return was rewarded with eternal llife by the gods. Its Utnapishtim who tells Gilgamesh where to find a plant that can restore his lost youth, but once he finds the plant that holds the secret of eternal life, it is stolen from him by a serpent.
According to both Allegro and Wasson, in the epic, the hero Gilgamesh, 5th king of Uruk, (also spelled Erech) and "lord of Kullab", goes on an obsessive quest for immortality, but after he has finally acquired the secret plant to everlasting life (a plant that restores youth) a guardian Serpent steals the herb that grants immortality from Gilgamesh, and its the Serpent who acquires immortality by eating a magical plant. The Bible story of Adam and Eve, takes a different twist on the story: the Serpent offers the herb to Eve and she to Adam, but as Wasson points out, both stories have the three essential props in the legend, there is the Tree of Life, the Marvellous Fruit of the Tree, and the Serpent.
"The idea of a herb of immortality was not at all a new invention of Indo-Iranian cultures, for we can find it already in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, datable before 2000 BCE. What relation that legend had to hallucinogenic mushrooms or other plants remains completely in the dark, but an extrapolation backwards would make such a connection not at all implausible" (Joseph Needham 1974).
The loss of eternal life and the quest for immortality is the central theme in Mesopotamian myth, and can be traced back to Sumerain times, in the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh dating back to around 2000 BCE.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered the world's first great work of literature. In the epic, Gilgamesh and Enkidu undertake a long and perilous quest to discover the secret of eternal life. Above is a reproduced image from a Sumerian cylinder seal, 3rd millennium BCE, that depicts the decapitation of the Sumerian deity Humbaba, "Guardian of the Pine/Cedar Forest" a paradise where the gods lived. The scene above is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which god's guardian deity Humbaba is decapitated by Enkidu and Gilgamesh. Its my belief that the artist who carved this cylinder seal encodes the secret plant of immortality as a divine mushroom, encoded in the heels of the deity Humbaba, to which Enkidu and Gilgamesh quest for. Here we find what may be an Old World version of the twin myth, and their relationship to the Morning and Evening Star and the ritual decapitation of the aging Sun God in the Underworld. Humbaba is almost always portrayed in art with wrinkles, maybe because he represents the aged and dying Sun at the end of the solar year. In Sumerian mythology the Underworld or world of the dead was located in a remote and inaccessible area of the Earths surface far off in the west.
Most importantly, the three essential props in the Gilgamesh legend, I believe are depicted in this cylinder seal scene. There is the Tree of Life, a serpent, and the Marvellous Fruit of immortality, encoded as a mushroom on the heels of the deity Humbaba.
The Sumerian goddess Inanna (above) the "Lady of Heaven", and goddess of the morning and evening star (the planet Venus) was worshiped in ancient Sumer (c. 4000 BC – c. 3100 BC), and appears in more myths than any other Sumerian deity (Wikipeda). In the image above the goddess Inanna, known as Ishtar among the Babylonians and Assyrians, is portrayed as the World Tree, or Tree of Life under two stars that likely alludes to the duality of the planet Venus, as both a Morning star and Evening star. She also appears in this scene with what looks to me like psilocybin mushrooms emerging from her shoulders and back?
Above is a fragment of a stone plaque from the temple of Inanna at Nippur (c. 2500 BCE.) that portrays the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Inanna was also worshiped by the Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians as a Venus Goddess under the name Ishtar, and the Levant's Astarte, who is equivalent to the biblical Ashtoreth, an ancient Phoenician goddess of love and fertility. Once again Inanna appears to me to have psilocybin mushrooms emerging from the back of her shoulders ?
Storm and Lightning Gods and Mushrooms:
Wasson (1957) writes about the extraordinary range of the archaic belief in lightning as the generative agent for mushrooms:.
"We documented this belief in ancient India, Greece, and Rome, and in modern Kashmir, Persia, and the Pamirs. Outside the Indo-European world, we found it among the Semitic Bedouin, the Chinese, and the Polynesians of New Zealand. Now, thanks to the experienced handling of our difficult informant by Robert Weitlaner, we rediscover this self-same belief in a Zapotec village where the ancient Zapotec culture strongly survives. And in this Zapotec recension we pinpoint it with greater precision than elsewhere: for Don Aristeo and his people the divine mushrooms are the progeny of coitus between the lightning bolt and our mother earth.
According to Wasson (1957) in ancient Greece there was a mushroom that bore the name κεραύνιον. This word, like joudre in French, conveys the idea of both thunder and lightning, and the mushroom designated by it was therefore the 'thunderbolt-fungus'.
Quoting Wasson (1957):
"Many ancient writers refer to the common belief that thunderbolts made this fungus grow plentifully. Galen speaks of it. Plutarch in his Convivial Essays devotes a table conversation to the question why thunder should engender 'thunderbolt' fungi, an essay both graceful and unenlightening. Pliny the Elder in his Historia Naturalis, in Book XIX, is careful to distinguish between the influence of the rain and of the thunderbolts: it is not the rain but the thunder that makes the mushrooms grow. Pliny sounds as though he were simply repeating a tiresome adage, after the manner of those who say it is not the heat but the humidity that causes distress in summer. Juvenal in Satire V: 116 speaks of the longed-for thunder in springtime that replenishes the table with mushrooms."
Quoting Wasson (1957):
"No mycologist thinks that lightning causes or encourages mushrooms to grow. It is therefore impermissible to suppose that the various branches of the human family arrived independently at this notion by close attention to nature. (We must not wholly exclude the possibility that the mycologists will change their minds. Scientists are as dogmatic about the knowable as churchmen about the unknowable, but there is a difference: the dogmas of the Church are immutable, whereas men of science change theirs daily without a blush.) Perhaps someone will suggest that just as men of science, unknown to each other, often hit on the same idea at about the same time, so archaic cultures may hit on the same mythic beliefs. But the analogy in its application to our enigma is invalid. Scientists are working in a closely integrated, homogeneous intellectual atmosphere, and even if two workers have never heard of each other, they handle identical data and ideas. But who will assert that cultures far removed from each other in time and space must inevitably, in an early phase of their evolution, link lightning with fungal procreation? Surely independent genesis is highly improbable."
"But how about a simple diffusion of the idea? Today students of the neolithic and later cultures know that cultural communication was active in those early times over large areas. Technological discoveries, artistic and magical motifs, and certain kinds of products would spread quickly to distant parts, thanks to contacts from village to village or to travelers plying the trade routes. The alphabet was invented only once, in the Near East, and by diffusion, that first alphabet led to the birth of scores of alphabets elsewhere. When tobacco was released from the New World, it penetrated everywhere in a few years, faster than explorers and geographers could travel. But was it not always the new idea or gadget that spread thus by diffusion, rather than mythic beliefs as old as the hills? Sometimes with the birth of a new and aggressive religion, its mythology would burst forth like a tidal wave and inundate an area before its strength was spent. But if anyone is bold enough to say that the link between lightning and mushrooms was a belief propagated in this way, at what point in time did the diffusion take place and from what focus;"
In my examination of pre-Columbian art, I found that storm gods, rain gods, and lightning gods are also esoterically connected with psychotropic mushrooms. The idea of mushroom spores traveling to earth on lightning bolts hurled by powerful gods was also a common theme in the Old World. The ancient Mayas believed that this phenomenon was related to a magical alliance with the mushroom. Today the natives say that Amanita. muscaria is born in the place where lightning strikes, and that is the reason why mushrooms have such great power (Gaston Guzman, Vol. 50 . No. 1 . January - June 2016).
In Mesoamerica the rain, wind and lightning gods Tlaloc, and Quetzalcoatl are not only associated with rain, wind, and lightning, but they are also closely associated with decapitation and mushroom rituals associated with the planet Venus as a resurrection star. Like the storm-god Baal of ancient Carthage, and Canaan, the storm god Tlaloc also preferred children as a sacrificial offering.
Bartolome de las Casas, a Bishop of Chiapas in the mid 1500’s, and las Casas reported that "after the sun, which they held as their principal god, they honored and worshiped a certain star more than any other denizen of the heavens or earth, because they held it at certain that their god Quezalcovatl, the highest god of the Cholulans, when he died transformed into this star". Las Casas further noted that the Indians awaited the appearance of this star in the east each day, and that when it appeared their priests offered many sacrifices and ceremonies, including incense and their own blood". Although Las Casas did not identify which star this was, native Mesoamerican sources identify the Feathered Serpent deity Quetzalcoatl with the planet Venus" (Popol Vuh, 2007 Allen J. Christenson p. 205)
In Mesoamerica, both the Mexican god Quetzalcoatl, and Tlaloc are commonly depicted in art wielding lightning bolts, as well as an axe. Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Caso believed that the cult of Tlaloc was so popular that it influenced all the cultures of Mesoamerica.
Mesoamerican archaeologist Stephan F. de Borhegyi writes this about Teotihuacan's successful, and rapid spread of religious ideas, and the acceptance of the Teotihuacan-designed "earthly paradise" and after-world, called Tlalocan, described by Fray Sahagun in the sixteenth century (Sahagun, 1946: I, 317-318) as the second of the nine resting places of the deceased, on the arduous road to the Mictlan, the ninth and final resting place of the Aztec dead. (for the possible association of effigy mushroom stones with the cult of the nine gods of the underworld among the highland Mayas in Preclassic times, see Borhegyi de, 1961a: 501-503)
Quoting Mesoamerican archaeologist Stephan F. de Borhegyi:
"In the concept of the Tlalocan, Teotihuacan offered something tangible, something desirable, a rich and readily available compensation that no previous Mesoamerican culture was able to offer. Appropriate initiation rituals perhaps included bloodletting or self-torture, or baptismal rites by the use of holy water, or purification rites with copal incense (the "blood" of the copal tree) and the ceremonial consumption of such mind-changing hallucinogens as the sacred mushroom (teonanacatl, "the flesh of god"), or peyote."
In Aztec/Toltec mythology the gods Tlaloc, Xolotl, and Tezcatlipoca are all aspects of Quetzalcoatl as the Evening Star, and thus represent gods associated with sacrifice and rebirth and resurrection from the underworld. Its not surprising that the gods Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl, shared the same temple (twin temple) at the great city of Teotihuacan in the highlands of Mexico., where the remains of some 200 sacrificial victims, have been found buried under the twin temple, a ritual practice that was also very popular in ancient China at the time of the Cho Dynasty 1028 to 256 B.C.E.. (Human Sacrifice 1981 p.38).
Known as "The Master", the Mexican god Tlaloc as a rain and lightning god, was also known as “he who made things grow”, because he provided the sustenance needed for everlasting life, in return for the shedding of human blood on earth. The Quiché Maya of the Guatemala Highlands describe the Amanita muscaria mushroom as supernatural, and call this lightning mushroom, in Quiche Mayan cakulja ikox, ikox, and relate this supernatural mushroom with the Lord of Lightning, Rajaw Cakulja (Furst, 1976 p.82).
Ethno-mycologist Bernard Lowy, reported in 1974, "Amanita muscaria and the Thunderbolt Legend in Guatemala and Mexico" page 189, that cakulha was not only the Quiché term for thunderbolt but is also the Quiché Maya name for Amanita muscaria mushroom. Evidence of a trinity of gods among the ancient Maya was also supplied by Lowy, who linked sacred mushrooms with lightning and a creation myth, and a trinity of creator gods, associated with divine rulership.
According to Ethno-mycologist Bernard Lowy.....
"In the Quiché Maya pantheon the god Cakulja, he of the lightning bolt, one of a trilogy of supreme gods, is revered above all others, and in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book in which the traditions of the Quiche people are recorded (Edmunson, 7), his position of ascendancy is made clear" (Bernard Lowy, Ethnomycological Inferences from Mushroom stones, Maya Codices, and Tzutuhil Legend: Revista/Review Interamericana, vol. 11(1), pp. 94-103, 1980).
Quoting Bernard Lowy:
"Kakulja is one of a trinity of gods referred to in the Popol Vuh as "Kakulja Huracan" which enigmatically refers to "a single leg" that is, the single shaft of the thunderbolt. Where this shaft struck the earth the miraculous mushroom Amanita muscaria arose. Relating this to Vedic myth, we have a further, unexpected verification of the meaning of Soma. Does not this "single leg" also reveal the meaning of the riddle cited by Wasson in the traditional verse sung by German children..."Sag' wer mag das Mannlein sein Das da steht auf einem Bein ?" (Bernard Lowy, Ethnomycological Inferences from Mushroom stones, Maya Codices, and Tzutuhil Legend: Revista/Review Interamericana, vol. 11(1), pp. 94-103, 1980).
The Canaanite Storm God Baal ?
Canaanite religion was centered on the worship of the god Baal. He was a storm-god like the Aramean god Hadad, and like Yahweh of the Israelite s all associated with lightning and fertility. Canaanites chose the bull as their fertility symbol, and both Soma and Baal were associated with the animal. Ashtoreth, Baal's wife was the Canaanites principal goddess, she was the personification of fertility and the reproductive principal in nature. Ishtar was her Babylonian name; Astarte her Greek and Roman name. temples of Baal and Ashtoreth (Astarte) were usually together. The worship of Baal, Ashtoreth, and other Canaanite gods consisted in the most extravagant orgies. Ashtoreth (Astarte/Ishtar) was the deification of the sex passion, where her temples were centers of prostitution. Priestesses were temple prostitutes, and Sodomites were male temple prostitutes. The cult of Baal was once so widespread among the Israelite's that even Solomon (973-933 BCE) worshiped Baal. The prophet Ezekiel, just before the Jewish exile in Babylon in 597 BCE., complains that the children of Israel have slain their offspring to honor Baal. (Nigel Davies 1981, p.64-65). her
The Hittites and the Hyksos were the first people in the Middle East to use the chariot in warfare, giving them a huge advantage over the people they conquered. The cylinder seal in roll-out form above depicts the Storm god Baal of Saphon or Zephon, a Hebrew name which means 'lord of the north'. Second millennium B.C. stone and gold artifacts excavated from Hittite burials at Alaca Huyuk resemble mushroom headed figures. The Hittite hieroglyph for "King" found on royal seals also resemble mushrooms.
"There must have been a potent reason why from western Europe to Eastern Greenland people have believed down to our own days in the demonic nature of mushrooms, and we think that reason lies in the strange hallucinatory powers of certain species. From Eastern Siberia to France these mushrooms are linked with 'flies', i.e., the insect world that is itself saturated in demonic mana."
“The bemushroomed person is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not being seen….In truth, he is the five senses disembodied, all of them keyed to the height of sensitivity and awareness, all of them blending into one another most strangely, until, utterly passive, he becomes a pure receptor, infinitely delicate, of sensations”. (Wasson, 1972a:198; Borhegyi, 1962)
Phoenician is the Greek name for the inhabitants of Northern Canaan during the 12-9th century BCE. The origin of the Phoenicians is vague, but at the high point of their culture around 1200–800 BCE. they were known as a great sea peoples, who had developed a very high level of ship-building. The Greek geographer, and historian, Strabo (1st century BCE.), wrote, "...famed are the voyages of the Phoenicians who, a short time after the Trojan War (circa 1200 BCE.) explored the regions beyond the Pillars of Hercules". In 1972, a Carthaginian shipwreck containing a cargo of amphorae was discovered off the coast of Honduras according to Dr. Elizabeth Will, one of the foremost authorities on amphoras and their dating. Dr. Will describes an amphora as "a two-handled clay jar used by the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans to ship goods." The fact that ancient amphoras may have been found off the coastline of the Americas is important evidence pointing to the fact that amphoras and shipwrecks found in the Americas might be of Phoenician origin (David Warner Mathisen, February 6, 2012).
Most American scholars still scoff at the idea of transoceanic contact, and deny the possibility that Phoenicians, Canaanites, or their successors the Carthaginians discovered the Americas before Columbus. Some have argued that it was the Phoenicians who discovered the Americas, and that the Indians of Mexico, Central America, and South America describe their civilizers as "bearded white men" who arrived in ships from the east. (Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts: 1971, p.263).
It just so happens that the Phoenician and their successors the Carthaginians, have several (Aryan) traits very similar with those of the Olmec culture of ancient Mesoamerica, such as hieroglyphic writing, child sacrifice, cranial deformation, cannibalism, the flaying and wearing the skins of sacrificial victims, the use of incense, and the worship and veneration of the sun and moon and the planet Venus to whom they raised their pyramid temples for.
The worship of Baal Hammon flourished in the Phoenician colony of Carthage, located near what is now the city of Tunis on the north coast of Africa. The most famous of all the Phoenician settlements was the city of Carthage, founded by a Phoenician Queen named Dido in 825 B.C.E. Carthage quickly became the wealthiest and most important Phoenician outpost in the Mediterranean (Thompkins, 1976 p. 351). The Carthaginians and their kinsmen the Phoenicians and Canaanites are known to have sacrificed children on a massive scale for their Storm God Baal ( Human Sacrifice, Nigel Davies 1981, p.63).
There are a number of carved stelae at Carthage inscribed in Phoenician script, that were erected over the graves of children who were probably sacrificed to Baal, a practice noted by several Greek and Roman authors. The Phoenicians, is a Greek term for the Canaanites who moved north and developed a new civilization on the coast of what is now present day Lebanon. Carthaginian inscriptions record sacrifices to Baal that are identical to those of the Canaanites (Nigel Davies 1981, p. 63-64).
According to Stephen Perks, author of the book, Baal Worship Ancient and Modern 2010, "in the period following the death of King David the people of Israel became deeply entrenched in a syncretistic form of religion that fused elements of the worship of Yahweh with the ancient fertility cults of Canaan, identifying Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with the pagan god Baal. This corrupt form of worship, which predated the monarchy but had again become ingrained in the religious practices of the people following Solomon’s own example of idolatry, lasted up until the exile. Reforms instituted by good kings barely touched the religion of the people, whose cultic practices operated at the syncretistic folk-religion level, not in terms of the religious practices of the temple and the priesthood established in the Mosaic law, which was frequently forgotten, at times even completely lost".
Above is a mural depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac by the prophet Abraham. Note what I believe are three cleverly encoded mushrooms in the robe of Abraham.
"For your part of the bargain, I want you to cut off your foreskin, and the foreskin of all your descendants and anyone else who comes into your household and theirs, even if they are not related to any of you. The scars on your organs will prove to everyone forever after that we made this covenant. Any male whose foreskin is not cut off from his penis will be cut off from his people" (Clark Heinrich 2002, p.71).
The Bible never tells us exactly what manna was and where it came from, but there are many Old Testament passages which describe its physical qualities and conditions associated with its appearance. Manna easily fits the description of psilocybe mushrooms. The Bible's first reference to manna is in the Book of Exodus as the children of Israel are fleeing from Egypt and following Moses into the wilderness. After six weeks of wandering, they began complaining to Moses that they are tired and hungry. What happens next is truly extraordinary: (Manna from Heaven, by Steve Kubby)
Quoting James Arthur:
The Mannas are described in detail by Jesus in the book of John. In this story Jesus attempts to make clear; of manna, there are two different ones/kinds. He describes the manna that he is giving the disciples (last supper) as the Manna that bestows immortality".
"Manna is directly associated with the fruit of the Tree of Life in the 2nd chapter of the book of Revelation. It is the reward for those who overcome (the lies of the world). The "Fruit of the Tree", the "Hidden Manna" and the "Small White Stone" are spoken of separately, but in the same context. All of these are symbols for the Amanita muscaria" (Mushrooms and Mankind 2003).
Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law or no (16:4).And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground (16:14). And when the children of Israel saw if, they said one to another It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.
The Philistines who are described in the Bible, for their conflict with the Israelite s, may have been a development of the Canaanite culture. The Philistines are known to have settled on the southern coast of Canaan, but are also known to be among the so-called "Sea Peoples" who destroyed the Hittite empire around 1180 BCE., and later threatened Egypt until Ramses III defeated them around 1190 BCE. After 1180 BCE. no more information is available from Hittite sources.
Sri. A. Kalyanaraman, an Indian author who has studied the Vedas, strongly argues in his book Aryatarangini: Saga of the Indo-Aryans, that the Aryans of ancient India were a sun-worshipping sea-people, who sailed around the world, to the New World as well as to many parts of the Old.
The Phoenician (successors of the Hittites) and their successors the Carthaginians, as mentioned earlier, have several Aryan traits very similar with those of the pre-Classic Olmec and Maya cultures of ancient Mexico, and Guatemala, such as hieroglyphic writing, child sacrifice, cranial deformation, cannibalism, the flaying and wearing the skins of sacrificial victims, the use of incense, and the worship and veneration of the sun and moon and the planet Venus to whom they raised their pyramid temples for. Evidence of cannibalism from household refuse appears very early on at San Lorenzo, an Olmec ceremonial center dating around 1500 to 800 B.C.
Here may be the "Scythian-Phoenician Soma / Haoma connection" explained by the fact that the Hittites were associated with Canaanite tribes and that the Scythians or Sakas may have inherited many of their religious traditions. We can assume that Scythians and Saka are the same people that Scythian comes from the Greek skythai, while their Persian name was Saka. One of the Saka tribes called the Haomavarga Saka, or "Haoma-drinking/Haoma-consuming Saka". that occupied the region on the eastern border of the Persian Empire, called "Sakastan", were apparently very fond of Haoma, Haoma being an intoxicating beverage and the name of both a plant (mushroom?) and a deity in the Zoroastrian religion.
Trans-oceanic contact between the hemispheres prior to the voyages of Columbus is still considered highly unlikely despite the exception of the Viking outpost discovered in Newfoundland in the 1960's, and the recent awareness that early humans reached far distant Australia by boat, possibly as early as 50,000 years ago. It should be mentioned that several rock inscriptions found in the New World have been attributed to the Phoenicians (Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts: 1971, p.30).
Quoting Diane E. Wirth, author of Parallels: Mesoamerica and the Book of Mormon 2004
"One of the theories of our time in the field of archaeology and anthropology is the theory of diffusion, which happens to be an unpopular theory except for Latter-day Saints and several small research groups. But this theory is gaining support among several scholars from universities. Most prefer to believe that the Old and New Worlds developed in isolation, and any similarities between them are merely coincidental. They believe that people came from Siberia through the Bering Strait and filtered down through the Americas. But when we talk about diffusion and of world races, we speak of a scattering of races, a circulation of peoples over the continents and an expansion of cultural traits. It is the opinion of those who support the theory of diffusion that ancient people came to the Americas not only across the Bering Strait from Asia but also by way of the sea, from both the east and the west. This theory will take time to grow and develop, and it is getting stronger every year."
The Fleur de lis, first appears in the art of the ancient Sumerians. Historians propose that Sumer was settled between 4500 and 4000 BC and that ancient Sumer was known as the "land of the civilized kings". The Sumerian word for "Lord" is apu, the same exact word for "Lord" used by the ancient Inca civilization of Peru (Quichua language of Peru) (Hugh Fox, 2005 p.7). In Mesopotamia the Fleur de lis was a symbol of "Lord", linked to the Tree of Life, and the Sumerian-Babylonian Trinity of Nimrod, Tammuz, and Simerimas.
Note the photo above on the lower left, of a gold chalice from ancient Iran that may have once contained the Haoma elixir. The gold chalice appears to depict what looks to me like psilocybin mushrooms in association with iconography symbolic of the Tree of Life. The Haoma elixir was used in the Zoroastrian rituals of the Yasna, where the mystery plant, or possible mushroom was pounded in a mortar partly filled with water and then its juice squeezed into a cup to be drank by a Zoroastrian priest.
Mentioned earlier, according to Wasson, "as early as the first millennium B.C., the real Soma plant disappeared from Vedic ritual and the name came to be applied to various substitutes, of which none had the same psychic effects as the original Soma, and all of which were known at least to the priestly caste to be substitutes" (Furst, 1976 p.98). The same in the case with the Haoma plant in ancient Iran. Thus we do not actually know what plant the original Soma was. We know that Soma was the focal point of Vedic religion, and that drinking Soma produces immortality, and that the gods drank Soma to make them immortal".
In Zoroastrian cosmology Haoma grows in the World Tree, which stands in the middle of the world sea. The Haoma beverage of immortality was connected in myth with a Tree of Life that inspired the prophet Zoroaster to create a new religion (the Mazda religion) that became the state religion of the Persian Empire. Like Soma, the Haoma beverage, appears to be a source of divine power and strength, as well as bestowing the sacred knowledge that leads to divine immortality.
According to Wasson (1957):
"We discovered startling parallels between the use of the fly amanita in Siberia and the divine mushrooms in Middle America. In Mexico the mushroom 'speaks' to the eater; in Siberia 'the spirits of the mushrooms' speak. Just as in Mexico, Jochelson says that among the Korjaks "the agaric would tell everyman, even if he were not a shaman, what ailed him when he was sick, or explain a dream to him, or show him the upper world or the underground world, or foretell what would happen to him." Just as in Mexico on the following day those who have taken the mushrooms compare their experiences, so in Siberia, according to Jochelson, the Korjaks, "when the intoxication had passed, told whither the 'fly-agaric men' had taken them, and what they had seen," In Bogoras we discover a link between the lightning-bolt and the mushroom. According to a Chukchee myth, lightning is a One-Sided Man who drags his sister along by her foot. As she bumps along the floor of heaven, the noise of her bumping makes the thunder. Her urine is the rain and she is possessed by the spirits of the fly amanita.
In Mesoamerican mythology the World Tree, with its roots in the underworld and its branches in the heavens, represents the axis mundi or center of the world. In the mythology of ancient Mexico, there is a Nahua legend of a paradise of nine heavens that was dedicated to the Wind God Quetzalcoatl, called Tamoanchan where there was a sacred tree that marked the place where the gods were born and where sacred mushrooms and all life derived... "In Tamoanchan...On the flowery carpet...There are perfect flowers...There are rootless flowers" (Hugh Thomas 1993, p.474).
Above is a close up from a page in the Codex Selden, a pre-Conquest Mixtec manuscript from Highland Mexico, painted sometime around A. D. 1500. Its my belief that the artist intentionally encoded the Fleur de lis symbol emerging from the four branches of the World Tree, or Tree of Life, as a symbolic reference of the four cardinal directions, and it's sacred center. In Mesoamerican mythology the World tree, with its roots in the underworld and its branches in the heavens, represents the axis mundi or center of the world.
In both hemispheres serpents are associated with the Tree of Life as well as immortality by virtue of renewing themselves through the shedding of their skin. Above is a closeup scene from a pre-Conquest manuscript known as the Codex Laud, where we see the serpent and World Tree merge into a single symbol, tagged with the Fleur de lis emblem as a symbol of divine immortality. The scene, I believe, portrays the serpent deity Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent as the World Tree, encoded with three Fleur de lis symbols, alluding to a trinity of creator gods in Mesoamerica. (for a documentation of Snake or Serpent symbolism in Mesoamerica, signifying wisdom and knowledge see Ixtlilxochitl, 1952: I, 21)
The Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl, is one of the oldest and the most important deities of Mesoamerica. In Aztec accounts, the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, turns himself into a serpent and then back again into a god with human attributes and form. The Mexican God-king Quetzalcoatl’s name represents a blending of serpent and bird; the quetzal, a blue-green bird that inhabits the cloud forests of Mesoamerica, and coatl, the Nahua word describing both sky and serpent. Among the Mixtecs of Oaxaca, Quetzalcoatl was known by his calendrical name "9 Wind." The Maya of Yucatan called him Kukulkan.
According to researcher Diane E. Wirth, 2002, in her book titled, Quetzalcoatl, the Maya Maize God, and Jesus Christ; she writes that "Many scholars suggest that Quetzalcoatl of Mesoamerica (also known as the Feathered Serpent), the Maya Maize God, and Jesus Christ could all be the same being." Wirth writes that several stories in the native chronicles like the Popol Vuh, coincide with stories of the savior Jesus Christ in the Bible, such as the creation and the resurrection. She demonstrates that the role that both Quetzalcoatl and the Maya Maize God played in bringing maize to humankind is comparable to Christ's role in bringing the bread of life to humankind. Wirth draws attention to certain similarities in post-Spanish conquest manuscripts for example that Quetzalcoatl was the Creator, that he was born of a virgin, and that he was a god of air and earth (in his manifestation as the Feathered Serpent) that he was white and bearded, and that he came from heaven and was associated with the planet Venus. She mentions that Quetzalcoatl raised the dead, and that he promised to return again.
For more read The Return of Lord Quetzalcoatl: How the Symbol of the Fleur de Lis Changed the Course of New World History... ( https://www.mushroomstone.com/the-fleur-de-lis-conspiracy).
Much more on the Mesoamerican God-king Quetzalcoatl a bit later...
Here is the passage in the Annals of the Cakchiquels, (1953:82-83) translated from the original by Adrian Recinos and into English by Delia Goetz:
"At that time, too, they began to worship the devil. Each seven days, each 13 days, they offered him sacrifices, placing before him fresh resin, green branches, and fresh bark of the trees, and burning before him a small cat, image of the night. They took him also the mushrooms, which grow at the foot of the trees, and they drew blood from their ears.?
Here is the passage in the Popol Vuh, as presented in the English text by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus Griswold Morley:
"And when they found the young of the birds and the deer, they went at once to place the blood of the deer and of the birds in the mouth of the stones, that were Tohil and Avilix. As soon as the blood had been drunk by the gods, the stones spoke, when the priests and the sacrificers came, when they came to bring their offerings. And they did the same before their symbols, burning pericon and holom ocox. [University of Oklahoma Press, 1950, p. 192]
"The Nahua [Aztecs] before the Spaniards arrived called them [referring to the mushrooms] "God's flesh", teonanacatl. I need hardly draw attention to a disquieting parallel, the designation of the Elements in our Eucharist: "Take, eat, this is my body ..."; and again, "Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear son..." But there is one difference. The orthodox Christian must accept on faith the miracle of the conversion of the bread into God's flesh: that is what is meant by the doctrine of transubstantiation. By contrast, the mushroom of the Nahua carries its own conviction: every communicant will testify to the miracle that he has experienced (Peter T. Furst 1972, pp191-192).
Adoration of the Magi, 1569-1649 by Juan Bautista Maino of Spain (Wasson 1957).
Above are easily recognizable mushrooms encoded as the sacred fruit from the Tree of Life, in the mosaics at the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, over a cave that Christians believe marks the birthplace of Jesus. Built around 350 A.D. the Basilica was commissioned by Constantine the Great and his mother Helena.
“The Last Supper” portrayed in the Church of St. Martin, Nohant-Vic, France ca. 1120.
According to researchers Jerry B. Brown, and Julie M. Brown, authors of Psychedelic Gospels, 2016; they have identified what they propose are encoded mushrooms in the robes of several disciples beneath the table of the Last Supper, and suggest that several of the objects on the supper table as being sliced up mushrooms (photo by Julie M. Brown).
According to James Arthur:
"The Mannas are described in detail by Jesus in the book of John. In this story Jesus attempts to make clear; of manna, there are two different ones/kinds. He describes the manna that he is giving the disciples (last supper) as the Manna that bestows immortality" (Mushrooms and Mankind 2003)
A close-up view of “The Last Supper” mural portrayed in the Church of St. Martin, Nohant-Vic, France ca. 1120. clearly depicts a figure on the left cutting down a mushrooms with a knife, and on to the right, the probable sliced up mushrooms on the table of the Last Supper.
In my examination of pre-Columbian art I have discovered that the gods and kings that are crowned or encoded with the Fleur de lis symbol are also linked to a World Tree, or Tree of Life, a Trinity of gods, and a mushroom of immortality.
Although the symbol known as the Fleur de lis is perhaps best known through its association with French royalty, it's origin in the New World is of far greater antiquity. Descendants of the Mesoamerican god-king Quetzalcoatl, and thus all Mesoamerican kings or rulers, were also linked to the Tree of Life encoded in both the Old World and New World with the trefoil symbol, we recognize as the Fleur de lis emblem.
The pre-Conquest Quetzalcoatl, the banished god of ancient Mexico, was to return some day from the east and it is said that Moctezuma II expected him and his followers to be white (Wasson, 1980 p. 137).
In Mesoamerica the trefoil symbol we have come to recognize as the Fleur de lis, signified nothing less than the divine symbol of the Toltec-Aztec god-king Quetzalcoatl, who is described in post-Conquest literature as being of fair skin, with long hair and a black beard (Mexico, 1994, M.D. Coe p.123).
I believe that the reason that the Fleur de lis symbol, above all, signaled the fulfillment of Moctezuma's prophecy of Quetzalcoatl's return is that the trefoil, or Fleur de lis, had for centuries been a Mesoamerican symbol for "Lord", with a history dating back as far as the ancient Olmecs 1200 BCE to 400 BCE. I propose that it was this symbol alone that made it was possible in 1519 for a small band of 450 Spanish conquistadors under the command of Hernán Cortés to conquer the vast and powerful Aztec empire. For more read The Return of Lord Quetzalcoatl: How the Symbol of the Fleur de Lis Changed the Course of New World History... ( https://www.mushroomstone.com/the-fleur-de-lis-conspiracy).
According to ancient legend, the Aztecs expected their god Quetzalcoatl, who had departed their land many years earlier, that he sailed into the east on a raft of serpents, claiming to return to his people on the anniversary of his birth date. Such an event had been foretold by the Aztec priests. According to their divinations the "Children of the Sun, would come from the east to cast down their god and to annihilate the Aztec nation" (Diego Duran 1964, The Aztecs: p.139). Their returning god would be white-skinned, would have a black beard and would be dressed in black (Alma Reed, 1966 p.140).
John Taylor who was the third president of the Mormon church from 1880 through 1887, wrote the following statement... (from Jerry Stokes, Did Jesus Christ walk the Americas in Precolumbian Times ?)
"The story of the life of the Mexican divinity, Quetzalcoatl, closely resembles that of the savior; so closely, indeed, that we can come to no other conclusion than that Quetzalcoatl and Christ are the same being".
The chroniclers of pre-Hispanic Mexico tell us of a culture hero, who was not only a governor, but also the high priest of the city of Tula, or Tollan, who at birth (in the year one reed) was known as the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl Ce Acatl Topilzin. This Quetzalcoatl may have been the originator of auto-sacrifice and of penitence. We know that other high priests also bore the name Quetzalcoatl, at the cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, Cholula Cempoala, and in other areas where priests were dedicated to his religion (B. C. Hedrick, 1971, p. 258) (see Vaillant 1951, p. 182).
The mushroom religion dedicated to the God Tlaloc-Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl, was so sacred that, if one gave one's own life in sacrifice, the act emulated Quetzalcoatl, himself. Appropriate initiation rituals likely included bloodletting or self-torture, or baptismal rites by the use of holy water, or purification rites with copal incense ( the "blood" of the copal tree ) and the ceremonial consumption of sacred mushrooms, or teonanacatl, believed to be "the flesh of god" (Borhegyi, 1971, p.90)
Quoting Stephan de Borhegyi:
"Through these individualized initiation rites...through auto-sacrifice and self-immolation of the Orpheus-like redeemer god, Quetzalcoatl-Nanhuatzin-Xolotl (the living and deified Quetzalcoatls), the peoples of Classic Mesoamerica were now able to hope for a compensation in the present, and for a happy continuation of life after death (Borhegyi de, 1971, p.90)
Spanish chronicles tell us that the Aztecs and Toltecs attributed their enlightenment to Quetzalcoatl. In the 16th century Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun recorded in his Florentine Codex, a multi-volume compilation of priceless Mexica ethnographic information, that the Toltecs were, above all:
"thinkers for they originated the year count, the day count; they established the way in which the night, the day, would work; which sign was good, favorable; and which was evil, the day sign of wild beasts. All their discoveries formed the book for interpreting dreams."
"They [the Toltecs] could do practically anything, nothing seemed to difficult for them; they cut the greenstone, they melted gold, and all this came from Quetzalcoatl - arts and knowledge." - Fray Bernandino Sahagun.
Fray Sahagun, writes that the emissaries of Moctezuma II thought that Quetzalcoatl had returned, and describes Moctezuma as saying "He has appeared! He has come back! He will come here to the place of his throne and canopy, for that is what he pronounced when he departed". All the signs and news given by the Castilians [conquistadors] suggested without doubt that the great emperor Quetzalcoatl had come, "he who had for a long time gone away over the sea where the sun rose and who had allowed it to be said that in time he had to return". One of the sign of Quetzalcoatl's return was when Cortés landed his ships on the eastern shores of Mexico in 1519, he dressed in black because it was Good Friday, coincidentally one of the colors of Quetzalcoatl (Conquest, by Hugh Thomas 1993 p.185). Sahagun is said to have reported that Moctezuma said “O our lord” at his first meeting with Cortés.
“thou hast arrived on earth, thou hast come to thy noble city of Mexico. Thou hast come to occupy thy noble mat and seat, which for a little time I have guarded and watched for thee…Lo, I have been troubled for a long time. I have gazed into the unknown whence thou hast come, the place of mystery. For the rulers of old have gone, saying that thou wouldst come to instruct thy city, that thouwouldst descend to thy mat and seat; that thou wouldst return. And now it is fulfilled: thou hast returned ….Arrive now in thy land. Rest, lord; visit thy palace that thou mayest rest thy body. Let our lords arrive in the land!” (Sahagun General History, vol. 12, p. 42)
Surprisingly as I discovered, the emblem of the Fleur de lis in pre-Columbian art and iconography carries the same symbolism of "King" or "Lord", and is linked to a triad or Trinity of gods, a World Tree, or Tree of Life, and a mushroom of immortality.
According to Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Caso, to understand Aztec mythology and the multiplicity of gods and their attributes one must understand that "Aztec religion was in a period of synthesis, in which there were being grouped together, within the concept of a single god (Quetzalcoatl) different capacities that were considered to be related" (Caso, 1958: p.23). Quetzalcoatl for example was not only the Morning Star but he was also the god of wind, the god of life and death, of twins and monsters and so on, and because of his many attributes he was known by different names: Eh'ecatl, Ce Acatl, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, Tezcatlipoca and Xolotl. The gods Xolotl, Tlaloc and Tezcatlipoca are aspects of Quetzalcoatl as the Evening Star, and thus represent gods associated with sacrifice (underworld decapitation) and rebirth and resurrection from the underworld. Its not surprising that the gods Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl, being one and the same, shared the same temple at the great city of Teotihuacan in the highlands of Mexico.
After the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in 1521 the Catholic Church ordered the burning of all native manuscripts. Called codices, these pictorial documents contained much valuable information pertaining to native history, mythology, and ritual, related to a pantheon of supernatural gods. Unhappily, due to Spanish intolerance of indigenous religious beliefs, only eighteen pre-Conquest books attributed to the people of Highland Mexico have survived to the present day. Spanish traveler in post-Conquest Peru named Pedro Cieza de Leon is quoted by Bartolome de Las Casas as saying...
"We Christians, have destroyed so many kingdoms....For wherever the Spaniards have passed conquering and discovering, it is as though a fire had gone destroying everything in its path."(Mann, 2005:143-145).
"We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction" (The Ancient Maya 4th Edition 1983, p. 513)
Throughout the 16th century historian friars accumulated long manuscripts giving excellent details of the conquered Indians history, religion and ritual customs. Very few of these manuscripts were ever published and most were hidden away in archives to hide from the world the disgrace of what the conquerors had done to the inhabitants and culture of the New World. The Catholic Church had given orders to destroy everything they could find of native culture, and burn all native documents pertaining to history, myth, and legend. Only the writings that glorified the church and its doings were worthy of publication.
Although a few culturally curious friars defied the ban to write detailed accounts of native history and religion throughout the16th century, their manuscripts remained hidden from public view in the archives of the holy Inquisition. So it was that the religious use of sacred mushrooms remained unnoticed for centuries. Fortunately for history and anthropology, a number of these early chronicles have since been discovered and translated.
Motolinía recorded...
“They had another way of drunkenness, that made them more cruel and it was with some fungi or small mushrooms, which exist in this land as in Castilla; but those of this land are of such a kind that eaten raw and being bitter they....eat with them a little bees honey; and a while later they would see a thousand visions, especially serpents, and as they would be out of their senses, it would seem to them that their legs and bodies were full of worms eating them alive, and thus half rabid, they would sally forth from the house, wanting someone to kill them; and with this bestial drunkenness and travail that they were feeling, it happened sometimes that they hanged themselves, and also against others they were crueler. These mushrooms, they called in their language teonanacatl, which means 'flesh of God' or the devil, whom they worshiped.” (Wasson and de Borhegyi 1962, The Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of Mexico and Psilocybin)
Above is a page from the Tlaxcala Codex (Lienzo de Tlaxcala), a mid Sixteenth Century Mexican manuscript of the history of the Tlaxcaltecas and the Spanish in their wars against the Aztecs and the evangelical battle for Christianity. The Caption in Náhuatl the language of the Aztecs, describes how people are killed in the "house of the devil". The scene depicts a human sacrifice ceremony observed by Hernando Cortes at a temple dedicated to Lord Quetzalcoatl adorned with what I propose are six Fleur de lis symbols (Lienzo de Tlaxcala Folio 239r). (Lienzo de Tlaxcala http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/jan2003.html)
Based on a passage of the Madrid Codices worked on by Dr. Dibble and Sr. Barrios, from Schultze Jena’s Gliederung des Alt-Aztekischen Volks in Familie, Stand und Beruf (pp.207 ff.), the eating of mushrooms is part of a longer ceremony performed by merchants returning from a trading expedition to the coast lands. The merchants would only arrive on a day of favorable aspect. A feast and ceremony of thanksgiving were organized by the returning merchants, also on a day of favorable aspect. In the Madrid Codex according to Dibble Barrios, there was a prelude to the ceremony of eating mushrooms in which they sacrificed a quail and offered incense to the four directions, all of which I found depicted in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala Folio 239r.
In the Lienzo de Tlaxcala Folio 239r,, the artists depicts a scene of human sacrifice and the ritual decapitation of quail birds, witnessed by Cortes and his men, at the temple steps adorned with six Fleur de lis symbols. In the scene the artist depicts the offering of quails, the burning of incense, and the sacrifice of a human being to the four cardinal directions (note the four attendants), to a mushroom inspired Death God of underworld resurrection.
The eating of mushrooms according to Fray Sahagun took place in the earlier part of the evening, and the mushroom eaters did not at least then eat food. At midnight a feast followed, and toward dawn the various offerings to the gods, or the remains of them, were ceremonially buried. Spanish chronicler Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, reported that mushrooms were eaten on the occasion of the accession of the famous Aztec King Moctezuma II to the throne, in the year 1502.
According to Fray Bernardino de Sahagun:
“For four days there was feasting and celebration and then on the fourth day came the coronation of Montezuma II, followed by human sacrifices in numbers. At the very first, mushrooms had been served. They ate them at the time when the shell trumpets were blown. They ate no more food; they only drank chocolate during the night, and they ate the mushrooms with honey. But some, while still in command of their senses, entered and sat there by the house on their seats; they danced no more, but only sat there nodding. One saw in vision that already he would die, and then continued weeping, one saw that he would die in battle; one saw in vision that he would be eaten by wild beasts; one saw in vision that he would take captives in war; one saw in vision that he would be rich, wealthy; one saw in vision that he would buy slaves, he would be a slave owner; one saw in vision that he would commit adultery, he would be struck by stones, he would be stone; one saw in vision that he would steal, he would also be stone and saw in vision that his head would be crushed by stones-they would condemn him; one saw in vision that he would perish in the water; one saw in vision that he would live in peace, and tranquility, until he died; one saw in vision that he would fall from a roof top, and he would fall to his death; however many things were to befall one, he then saw all in vision: even that he would be drowned. And when the effects of the mushrooms had left them they consulted among themselves and told one another what they had seen in vision. And they saw in vision, what would befall those who had eaten no mushrooms, and what they went about doing. Some were perhaps thieves, some perhaps committed adultery. Howsoever many things there were all were told-that one would take captives, one would become a seasoned warrior, a leader of youths, one would die in battle, become rich, buy slaves, provide banquets, ceremonially bathe slaves, commit adultery, be strangled, perish in water, drown. Whatsoever was to befall one, they then saw all in vision. Perhaps he would go to his death in Anauac. (Florentine Codex, Dibble & Anderson, Bk 9 pp.38-39)
It's my belief that the scene above in the Lienzo de Zacatepec, depicts the probable act of ritual self sacrifice, and that it portrays the Mexican god Tlaloc as a death god responsible for the act of underworld decapitation. Thus Tlaloc as the Evening Star aspect of the planet Venus, represents the god of underworld resurrection. Those who died for Tlaloc, and in this case willingly by decapitation, were under his watchful eye, and went directly to his divine paradise of immortality called Tlalocan. The footprints in this scene represents a long journey by one of the royal figures above. I believe this journey is to the underworld, via sacred mushrooms, where the soon to be willing victim, or victims of ritual decapitation, resurrect from the underworld. Note the flint knife at the foot of the temple steps, that esoterically represents the ritual of decapitation. The encoded Fleur de lis symbol in the glyphs above next to the one of the figures, is I believe code for immortality and divine resurrection. Note that the victim's severed head below, is portrayed with mushrooms, on top of what is likely a sacred mountain or hill, that marks a sacred portal to the paradise of Tlaloc called Tlalocan, described by Fray Sahagun in the sixteenth century (Sahagun, 1946: I, 317-318) as the second of the nine resting places of the deceased, on the arduous road or journey (note footprints) to the Mictlan, the ninth and final resting place of the Aztec dead. With the lightning bolt Tlaloc engenders the divine mushrooms.
Quoting Wasson (1957):
"If we were to postulate mushrooms in pre-Conquest art in Mexico, we would direct our search precisely to frescos dealing with Tlaloc and the Paradise of our mushroomic visions, to the very frescos where we have found mushroomic shapes.
Its worth mentioning again of the Nahua (Aztec/Toltec) legend of a paradise of nine heavens that was dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, called Tamoanchan where there was a sacred tree that marked the place where the gods were born and where sacred mushrooms and all life derived (Hugh Thomas 1993, p.474).
Its my belief that Tlaloc, who is also known as a Rain and Lightning God, provided the sustenance of divine mushrooms mankind needed for everlasting life, in return for the shedding of human blood on earth. It's my belief that in Mesoamerica there was a belief that the stars in the night sky represented the decapitated heads of deified ancestors.
Spanish chronicler Fray Diego Duran reported that mushrooms were eaten on the occasion of the accession of the famous Aztec King Moctezuma II to the throne, in the year 1502. After Moctezuma took his Divine Seat, captives were brought before him and sacrificed in his honor. He and his attendants then ate a stew made from their flesh. (Duran, 1964: 225).
“When the sacrifice was finished and the steps and courtyard were bathed with human blood, everyone went to eat raw mushrooms”. “With this food they went out of their minds and were in worse state than if they had drunk a great quantity of wine. They became so inebriated and witless that many of them took their lives in their hands. With the strength of these mushrooms they saw visions and had revelations about the future, since the devil spoke to them in their madness”.
“The Indians made sacrifices in the mountains, and under shaded trees, in the caves and caverns of the dark and gloomy earth. They burned incense, killed their sons and daughters and sacrificed them and offered them as victims to their gods; they sacrificed children, ate human flesh, killed prisoners and captives of war....One thing in all this history: no mention is made of their drinking wine of any type, or of drunkenness. Only wild mushrooms are spoken of and they were eaten raw.”
...“It was common to sacrifice men on feast days as it is for us to kill lambs or cattle in the slaughterhouses.... I am not exaggerating; there were days in which two thousand, three thousand or eight thousand men were sacrificed...Their flesh was eaten and a banquet was prepared with it after the hearts had been offered to the devil.... to make the feasts more solemn all ate wild mushrooms which make a man lose his senses... the people became excited, filled with pleasure, and lost their senses to some extent."
"In this land there are certain little mushrooms that are called teonanacatl. They grow beneath the grass in fields or moors. They are round, have a long little stem, thin and round. When eaten they have a bad taste, hurt the throat, and inebriate. They are medicinal for fevers and the gout. Only two or three are to be eaten, not more: those who eat them see visions and feel palpitations of the heart. The mushrooms incite lust in those who eat many, or even be they few. To wild or mischievous youngsters people say that they have eaten nanacatl.""One mushroom is called teo-nanacatl. It grows in the waste places, under the grass. The cap is round, the stem is elongated. By its bitterness it hurts, it hurts the throat. It intoxicates one, makes one dizzy, makes one violent. It helps in fevers, gout. Only two or three are to be eaten. It makes one suffer, causes affliction, makes one restless, causes one to flee, frightens one, makes one hide. He who eats many, many things sees. He terrifies people, makes them laugh. He strangles himself, hurls himself from high places, cries out, is afraid. When he eats it in honey he says, I eat mushrooms, I bemushroom myself. Of the boaster, the braggart, the vain one it is said, "He bemushrooms himself."
Above is a illustration from Book 11, of the Florentine Codex, by Frey Bernadino de Sahagun. The image was described by Sahagun as the sacred mushroom of Mexico, called teonanacatl by the Aztecs, which means "Gods Flesh". The image of a bird perched on top of the mushrooms is a metaphor that alludes to the bird deity that sits atop the world tree in Mesoamerican mythology. In Mesoamerican mythology the World tree, with its roots in the underworld and its branches in the heavens, represents the axis mundi or center of the world. The branches represent the four cardinal directions. Each of the directions was associated with a different color while the color green represented the central place. A bird, known as the celestial bird or Principal Bird Deity, usually sits atop the tree. The trunk of the World Tree which connects the two planes, was seen as a portal to and from the underworld.
In a manuscript written by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon between 1617-1629, called "Treatise on Indian Superstitions" known today as Treatise on the heathen superstitions that today live among the Indians, which records in great detail the religious beliefs and rituals among the Aztecs. Ruiz de Alarcon reported that the indigenous peoples believed that their sacred plants were gods, and described a tawny-colored mushroom made into a drink from its pressed-out juices.
Spanish chronicler Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon:
"Although I think that it will not be held against me to speak of my opinions about why these heathen customs and superstitions have remained and have been continued for so long in these natives after baptism, and even some that were not permitted to them in their heathen state, such as drunkenness-- which in their heathen state, had the penalty of death. And the others have a weak foundation, because a tradition of their false gods is hardly found among their stories as much because they did not know how to write as because one has not been able to find absolute clarity even about how they have come to inhabit this land or by what route."
"Thus the religion and devotion to their gods had few or no roots and the drunkenness which at present runs among them is so injurious and such a cruel enemy of Christian customs that it is today the worst of their vices. This is the cause of the total destruction of the health of their bodies and consequently the sufficient and principal barrier to their preservation and increase. And although one offers me the objection that, since it has not been possible to prevent the lesser, neither will it be possible to remove the greater which is idolatry relative to drunkenness" (Treatise on the heathen superstitions that today live among the Indians, p.39)
"The Nahua [the Aztecs] did not know they were dealing with a mere drug, as we say, a chemical compound with a known molecular structure and a known impact on the human mind. They were dealing with a miraculous, a divine gift" (Wasson, The Wondrous Mushroom; 1980 p.80-81)
On the left is a scene from the Codex Bodley, a Mixtec manuscript from Highland Mexico, painted sometime around A. D. 1500. I would strongly argue that the artist intentionally encoded a Fleur de lis symbol, as a symbol of divine immortality on top of a sacred mushroom, and that the three dots below the Fleur de lis is code for the sacred number three, and also for a trinity of creator gods. On the right is a close-up image from the pre-Conquest Codex Borgia, of a drinking vessel encoded with the Fleur de lis, which is symbolic of the Soma beverage, and "the mushroom of immortality".
"McKenna speculated on the idea that psilocybin mushrooms may be a species of high intelligence,[3] which may have arrived on this planet as spores migrating through space[8][64] and which are attempting to establish a symbiotic relationship with human beings. He postulated that "intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here [to Earth] in this spore-bearing life form". He said, "I think that theory will probably be vindicated. I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure," and also believed that "few people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential, because few people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of psychedelic effects that are unleashed."[3][7][18] (Wikipeda)"
Dr. Stephan F. de Borhegyi, an emigrant from Hungary with a Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology and Egyptology from the Peter Paszmany University in Budapest, had been invited to Guatemala to study American archaeology by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Working under a grant provided by the then Viking Fund of New York (subsequently the Wenner Gren Foundation) his project was to catalog the extensive archaeological collections of the Guatemalan National Museum.
Preclassic mushroom stones from the archaeological site of Kaminaljuyu in the Guatemala Highlands. Both sculptures depict a mushroom emerging from the back of a crouching jaguar. Mushroom stones with a double edge or groove on the underside of the cap, have been dated to the Late Pre-Classic period about 300-100 B.C. by Stephan F. de Borhegyi based on the few mushroom stones that have been excavated in context at Kaminaljuyu (Borhegyi, Stephan De: "The enigmatic mushroom stones of Mesoamérica," M. A. Research Records III. New Orleans, 1959).
According to Maya archaeologist Stephan F. de Borhegyi:
"My assignment for the so-called mushroom cult, earliest 1,000 B.C., is based on the excavations of Kidder and Shook at the Verbena cemetery at Kaminaljuyu. The mushroom stone found in this Pre-Classic grave, discovered in Mound E-III-3, has a circular groove on the cap. There are also a number of yet unpublished mushroom stone specimens in the Guatemalan Museum from Highland Guatemala where the pottery association would indicate that they are Pre-Classic. In each case the mushroom stone fragments has a circular groove on the top. Mushroom stones found during the Classic and Post-Classic periods do not have circular grooves. This was the basis on which I prepared the chart on mushroom stones which was then subsequently published by the Wassons. Based on Carbon 14 dates and stratigraphy, some of these Pre-Classic finds can be dated as early as 1,000 B.C. The reference is in the following".....(see Shook, E.M. & Kidder, A.V., 1952. Mound E-III-3, Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala; Contributions to American Anthropology & History No. 53 from Publ. 596, Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. letter from de Borhegyi to Dr. Robert Ravicz, MPM archives 1 December 1960 )
There is evidence that the mushroom stone cult lasted well into the Colonial Era. According to testimony recorded in 1554 in the Colonial document entitled El Titulo de Totonicapan (Land Title of Totonicapan), the Quiché Maya revered mushroom stones as symbols of power and rulership, and before them they performed rituals (of blood sacrifice) to pierce and cut up their bodies. (Sachse, 2001, 363).
" The lords used these symbols of rule, which came from where the sun rises, to pierce and cut up their bodies (for the blood sacrifice). There were nine mushroom stones for the Ajpop and the Ajpop Q'amja, and in each case four, three, two, and one staffs with the Quetzal's feathers and green feathers, together with garlands, the Chalchihuites precious stones, with the sagging lower jaw and the bundle of fire for the Temezcal steam bath."
It's likely that the connection to the number nine goes back to the Nahua (Aztec/Toltec) legend of a paradise of nine heavens, that was dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, called Tamoanchan where there was a sacred tree that marked the place where the gods were born and where sacred mushrooms and all life derived (Hugh Thomas 1993, p.474).
"These mushrooms were small and yellowish and to collect them the priest and all men appointed as ministers went to the hills and remained almost the whole night in sermonizing and praying" (Quest for the Sacred Mushroom, Stephan F. de Borhegyi 1957).
Hernandez included illustrations of his mushrooms in his manuscript, but those precious illustrations according to Wasson (1957) were apparently lost in the Escorial fire. After describing a lethal species named citlalnanacáme, Hernandez goes on:
... "others when eaten cause not death but madness that on occasions is lasting, of which the symptom is a kind of uncontrolled laughter. Usually called teyhuinti, these are deep yellow, acrid, and of a not displeasing freshness. There are others again which, without inducing laughter, bring before the eyes all kinds of things, such as wars and the likeness of demons. Yet others are there not less desired by princes for their fiestas and banquets, of great price. With night-long vigils are they sought, awesome and terrifying. This kind is tawny and somewhat acrid.
Dr. Hernandez studied the native traditions and also concluded that the Indians already believed in the Holy Trinity. He sent a letter to Bartolome de las Casas, a Bishop of Chiapas in the mid 1500’s, and las Casas reported what Hernandez wrote":
"They knew and believed in God who was in heaven; that that God was the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. That the Father is called by them Icona [Içona in the Spanish text] and that he had created man and all things. The Son’s name was Bakab who was born from a maiden who had ever remained a virgin, whose name was Chibirias, and who is in heaven with God. The Holy Ghost they called Echuac ".
The Rig Veda states that the gods consumed the Soma beverage in order to sustain their immortality, and a few hymns in the Rig Veda make a clear reference to healings, and the increased life spans of Soma users. Was Soma the secret to immortality, the "secret of secrets of the ancients" ?
"This here is Soma, never restrained, active, all conquering bursting forth, a Seer and Sage by sapience. All that's bare he covers over; all the sick he medicines, the blind man sees, the cripple walks." (Rig Veda 8LXVIII 1,2)
We are told that drinking Soma provides great physical strength and stamina, enough so, to pick up the earth itself, and the power of flight, to go beyond the limits of heaven and earth (Furst, 1976 p.97). Several hymns in the Rig Veda contain references of healing and increased life spans of Soma users. Vedic worshipers partook in the Soma ritual because it reportedly produced a divine sense of power and inspiration. They believed that the gods themselves joined in the ritual drinking. By pleasing the Vedic gods with sacrifice, song, drink and food, the devotees hoped to gain the support of nature and win favor with the gods. The Soma beverage, and the Soma sacrifice, was the focal point of Vedic religion. According to the Rig-Veda, sacrifice was both a symbol of fear and one`s affection towards the gods.
Above are nine miniature mushroom stones Early and Late Preclassic period (1000 B.C.-A.D. 200), now in the Nottebohm collection, found buried together in a Maya tomb at the archaeological site of Kaminaljuyu, along with nine miniature stone metates and manos (Soma stones?) used in the preparation of a ritual mushroom beverage. The taller jaguar mushroom stone was excavated from the Pre-Classic Miraflores E-III-3 tomb at Kaminaljuyu.
Michael D. Coe, today's unofficial "Dean of Maya studies"....
"These peculiar objects , one of which was found in an E-III-3 tomb, are of unknown use. Some see vaguely phallic association. Others, such as the late Stephan de Borhegyi, connect them with the cult of the hallucinogenic mushrooms still to this day prevalent in the Mexican highlands, and it is claimed that the mortars and pestles with which the stones are so often associated were used in the preparatory rites" (The Maya, 1993 fifth edition, by M.D. Coe, p. 60).
"I had heard of the theory that these stones might represent a narcotic mushroom cult, but I would think it a difficult theory to prove or disprove... I know of no reference to their use among the Maya, ancient or modern" (Thompson to de Borhegyi, March 26,1953, MPM Archives).
According to Ethno-archaeologist Peter T. Furst:
"The connection between these [mushroom] sculptures and the historic mushroom cults of Mesoamerica has not always been accepted. Though many mushroom stones are quite faithful to nature, they were, until recently, not even universally thought to represent mushrooms at all, and a few die-hards even now, in the face of all the evidence, reject this interpretation." (Furst, 1972)
"the presence of a divinatory mushroom is rare in human cultures: would it not be extraordinary to find a mushroom cult in the same area with the mushroom carvings - themselves unique - and yet unrelated to them? Whereas in the past no one was suggesting a mushroomic explanation for the mushroom stones, we think that the presumption favors such an explanation now, and that the burden of the argument must be on those who oppose it."
"Dr. Borhegyi's chart suggests to us that hallucinatory mushrooms were the focus of a cult in the highland Maya world that goes back at least to early pre-classic times, to B.C. 1000 or earlier, the earliest period when technically such artifacts could be carved in stone. Thus tentatively we trace back the use of the divine mushroom in Middle America to the earliest period from which a record could be expected to survive. Beyond that horizon may we project the mushroom agape back through millennia, to the Eurasian home-land whence our Indians' ancestors migrated?
"If the 'mushroom stones' were accessories in a mushroom cult, it is fair to ask why that cult disappeared long ago from the Maya highlands. We do not know, but the social institutions of the Maya world suggest an answer. Let us look again at the Mexican evidence. In the remote Mije country we found that the use of the sacred mushrooms was secular. Everyone there knows the mushrooms, and gathers and uses them. No curandero is needed for them. In the Mazatec country we find a dual cult. There was the superb performance by the Seilora, sharing the mushrooms with her coven and leading it by song and dance; and there was an intricate divinatory rite celebrated by Don Aurelio, with the aid of divers accessories, according to a complicated liturgical sequence. Don Aristeo in the Zapotec country followed the Señora's procedure, but withheld the Element from his congregation. Do we not discern here, in contemporaneous celebrations, the distinct phases of a cult that might mark a chronological evolution and in certain circumstances lead to its extinction? The sacred mushrooms with their miraculous powers could have been bathed in mana from an early time, and become the exclusive privilege of the priesthood, and ultimately of the highest priest-kings. As the mushrooms are not habit forming, there was no popular addiction to them that would have been an obstacle to this trend. When the regime of the priest-kings toppled over, the secret of the mushrooms, like so many other secrets of the Maya theocrats, disappeared with them".
While at first glance the face of the "Weeping God" above gives the illusion of a deity with dangling eye-balls. However as the author discovered, if you look closely at the Weeping God you will see that the dangling eyeballs are actually encoded Amanita muscaria mushrooms "Hidden In Plain Sight." This bearded and fanged deity shared feline, serpentine, and bird-like features. Identified as a Feathered or Plumed Serpent by archaeologists in his earliest representations, he took on many additional guises and attributes over the years, and became known by a great variety of names throughout the New World. I have elected to refer to him, as did the Toltecs and Aztecs, as Quetzalcoatl. (photo of a "Weeping God" above is from VanKirk, Jacques, and Parney Bassett-VanKirk, Remarkable Remains of the Ancient Peoples of Guatemala, Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1996.)
"...fanged anthropomorphic individuals with dangling eyeballs, are commonly associated with the god Quetzalcoatl in his form of Ehecatl the Wind God”. ( S.F. de Borhegyi 1980:17)
Quoting R. Gordon Wasson:
"It [the mushroom] permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence, even (as the Indians say) to know God." (Wasson and Wasson, 1957)
Much of our understanding of Mesoamerican religion has been pieced together from Spanish chronicles and pre-Hispanic and Colonial period manuscripts called codices. Above is page 24 of the Codex Vindobonensis, also known as the Codex Vienna, its believed to be a 14th century Mixtec manuscript, that depicts the Wind God Quetzalcoatl bestowing mushrooms to his children mankind.
Fray Diego Duran:
"They became so inebriated and witless that many of them took their lives in their hands. With the strength of these mushrooms they saw visions and had revelations about the future, since the devil spoke to them in their madness".
" Because of their nature we could almost affirm that they [the Aztecs] are Jews and Hebrew people, and I believe that I would not be committing a great error if I were to state this fact, considering their way of life, their ceremonies, their rites and superstitions, their omens, and false dealings, so related to and characteristic of those of the Jews" (Duran 1964 The Aztecs: p.3).
Duran writes that the Indians were ignorant of their origins and beginnings, but they have traditions regarding a long and tedious journey, and that they were led by a great man who gathered a multitude of his followers and persuaded them to flee from persecution to a land where they could live in peace. This great leader was said to have gone to the seashore with his followers, and fleeing his enemies, he parted the sea with a rod that he carried in his hand, and his followers went through the opening. The pursuing enemies seeing this opening of water followed them in only to have the waters return to their place, and the pursuers were never heard from again (Duran The Aztecs, 1964, p.149). Duran writes...
“I am convinced, and wish to convince others, that those who tell this account heard it from their ancestors; and these natives belong, in my opinion, to the lineage of the chosen people of God for whom He worked great marvels. And so the knowledge and the paintings of the things of the Bible and its mysteries have passed from father to son. The people attrib"ute them to this land and say that they took place here, for they are ignorant of their own beginnings" (Duran The Aztecs, 1964, p.5).
The Book of Mormon tells of an Ancient Hebrew People who came to America, leaving Jerusalem around 650 BCE. Like the Hebrews, the Aztecs considered themselves to be a "chosen people", and like the Aztecs, suffered plagues and wondered in the desert for many years before reaching their so called promised land.
John Taylor who was the third president of the Mormon church from 1880 through 1887, wrote the following statement... (from Jerry Stokes, Did Jesus Christ walk the Americas in Precolumbian Times ?)
"The story of the life of the Mexican divinity, Quetzalcoatl, closely resembles that of the savior; so closely, indeed, that we can come to no other conclusion than that Quetzalcoatl and Christ are the same being"
Duran writes that the Christianization of the Aztecs would remain arduous, and that the "heathen" religion of the Aztecs, and "the whole of their culture is impregnated with the old values." Duran mentions that his writings would most likely go unpublished claiming, “some persons (and they are not a few) say that my work will revive ancient customs and rites among the Indians”, and “that the Indians were quite good at secretly preserving their customs”.
Duran tells us that the Catholic Church, in its zeal to obliterate all aspects of native culture which could threaten Christian religious belief, ordered the destruction of all native documents pertaining to history, myth, and legend. The Church also banished all aspects of native religion in favor of Christianity, and made no attempt to study or further record mushroom rituals.
Not surprising, Duran’s writings were locked away and were more or less unknown to scholars until the 19th century, when it was discovered in the Madrid Library by José Fernando Ramírez. In 1848 Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg an ordained priest, came to the Americas in search of rare manuscripts and religious artifacts and while visiting Mexico City, Bourbourg obtained permission to have the Church archives opened to him, where he discovered a copy of Fray Diego Duran’s, Histories of New Spain.
Bishop Bartolome de Las Casas also believed the Aztecs were descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Trying to prove Las Casas's theory, Lord Kingsborough, (1831-48) spent years and a fortune in the publication of his colossal work Antiquities of Mexico (Miguel Covarrubias, 1954 p.10). In a manuscript written in Quiche in 1554 by several Maya Indians, its Spanish translator, Padre Dionisio-Jose Chonay, had this to say:
"It is supposed in the manuscript that the three great Quiche nations mentioned in particular are descendants of the Ten Tribes of the Kingdom of Israel, whom Shalmaneser reduced to perpetual captivity, and who, finding themselves in the confines of Assyria, decided to emigrate."
Most Book of Mormon scholars propose that Olmec culture relates to the Jaredite culture, referring to customs and traditions of those in and about Jerusalem and Egypt (Diane Wirth 2007) The Book of Ether (1:33) tells us that the Jaredites, Jared and his people, left the Middle East when the languages were confused at the tower of Babel, sometime around 2500 B.C., and that they voyaged across the ocean to the Promised land.
Quoting Diane E. Wirth author of Why “Three” is Important in Mesoamerica and in the Book of Mormon © 2012)
"The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya speaks of three creator gods, and many Mesoamerican sites had a triad of gods. Each polity had a different set of names for their three deities. Some speculate that is why Christianity was accepted so readily by the natives. After the Spanish Conquest, a Spanish priest by the name of Francisco Hernandez studied the natives and concluded the Indians already believed in the Trinity. He sent a letter to Bartolome de las Casas, a Bishop of Chiapas in the mid 1500’s, and las Casas reported what Hernandez wrote":
"They knew and believed in God who was in heaven; that that God was the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. That the Father is called by them Icona [Içona in the Spanish text] and that he had created man and all things. The Son’s name was Bakab who was born from a maiden who had ever remained a virgin, whose name was Chibirias, and who is in heaven with God. The Holy Ghost they called Echuac ".
"as the most ancient and sacred of all Maya deities, these three gods played a crucial role in the earliest symbolism of kingship that we saw at Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactun. " (A Forest of Kings 1990 p.245)
The mystery surrounding the ancient city of Comalcalco is its use of fired clay bricks for construction as opposed to the quarried limestone common in the vast majority of Classical Maya sites. In the 1950s, archaeologist Gordon Ekholm excavated several of the buildings at Comalcalco and removed some of the mysterious bricks. The excavations appear to indicate that the Maya, or the Olmec before them, employed fired brick technology, and that Indic motifs seem to have been inscribed on some of the bricks. Its even been proposed that Brahmi script may have once existed at Comalcalco.
Evidence of a trinity of gods among the ancient Maya was also supplied by the late Ethno-mycologist Bernard Lowy, who linked sacred mushrooms with lightning and a creation myth, and a trinity of creator gods, associated with divine rulership. As mentioned a bit earlier, Lowy reported in 1974, "Amanita muscaria and the Thunderbolt Legend in Guatemala and Mexico" page 189, that cakulha was not only the Quiché term for thunderbolt but is also the Quiché Maya name for Amanita muscaria mushroom. In the Popol Vuh, the mushroom gods of the Quiche Maya were named Thunderbolt Hurricane, Newborn Thunderbolt, and Raw Thunderbolt, alluding to a Trinity of gods also named in the Popol Vuh as Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz. The ancient Mayan word for stone, cauac, comes from the word for lightning.
Quoting Ethno-mycologist Bernard Lowy:
"During a visit to Guatemala in the summer of 1978, I stayed in the village of Santiago de Atitlan, a community where Tzutuhil [Mayan] is spoken and where ancient traditions and folkways are still maintained. There I learned that in Tzutuhil legend mushrooms are intimately associated with the creation myth. In the Quiché Maya pantheon the god Cakulja, he of the lightning bolt, one of a trilogy of supreme gods, is revered above all others, and in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book in which the traditions of the Quiche people are recorded (Edmunson, 7), his position of ascendancy is made clear". (from Lowy, Revista/Review Interamericana, vol. 11(1), pp. 94-103, 1980)
Anthropologist Dennis Tedlock who translated the Popol Vuh into English in 1985, mentions that the principal gods among the Quiché Maya are listed “again and again” as Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz (beginning on p. 171 and ending on p.222) and calls these three gods, "the three Thunderbolts". As mentioned earlier, the god Tohil, has been identified by scholars as a Quiché variant of the god-king Quetzalcoatl.
Diffusionist Gordon Ekholm postulated another wave of influence during the Late Classic period (600-900 CE.) and Postclassic (1200-1400 CE.) periods in Mesoamerica, from the Hindu-Buddhist civilizations of India and Southeast Asia.
"There are, of course, many problems concerning the kinds of evidence that have been presented in the area of transpacific contacts, but the principal difficulty appears to be a kind of theoretical roadblock that stops short our thinking about questions of diffusion or culture contact. This is true in anthropological thought generally, but the obstruction seems to be particularly solid and resistant among American archaeologists." (ethno-archaeologist Gordon F Ekholm...From Man Across the Sea; Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts, 1971, third printing 1976, Chapter 2, Diffusion and Archaeological Evidence, by Gordon Ekholm page 54)
The Vedic-Hindu gods and goddesses of East Indian philosophy are in many ways very similar to the pantheon of gods of Mesoamerica, for they too derived much of their strength from the sacrifices of men. Vedic Hinduism and the religions of Mesoamerica both believed in a three-tiered cosmos, with celestial gods traveling back and forth from the heavens to the Underworld, and saw a triadic unity in their gods that was essentially related to cosmic forces such as wind, rain-lightning, and fire, and the unity of creation, preservation, and destruction creating the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. In Hindu mythology Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma, make up the Hindu Trinity of gods.
The oldest postulated trans-Pacific contact with the New World is for the Early pre-Classic period, corresponding to the Early Bronze Age in China during the Shang Dynasty (1700-1027 BCE.) (source, "Man across the Sea" Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts, published in 1971, Third Printing 1976). Its at this time that Olmec culture appears to come from out of nowhere in full bloom at the site of San Lorenzo, in Veracruz, Mexico. Carbon 14 dates place Olmec civilization at San Lorenzo at 1200 B.C. E. (M. D. Coe, 1970, p.21). This is most likely when the mushroom of immortality cult was first introduced to the New World.
"It is tempting to suggest that the Olmecs might have been instrumental in the spread of mushroom cults throughout Mesoamerica, as they seem to have been of other significant aspects of early Mexican civilization......" It is in fact a common phenomenon of South American shamanism (reflected also in Mesoamerica) that shamans are closely identified with the jaguar, to the point where the jaguar is almost nowhere regarded as simply an animal, albeit an especially powerful one, but as supernatural, frequently as the avatar of living or deceased shamans, containing their souls and doing good or evil in accordance with the disposition of their human form" (Furst 1976, pp. 48, 79)."
Archaeologists Gordon Ekholm and Betty Meggers, have suggested that Olmec culture was inspired by China. Ekholm proposed that visitors from the Shang Dynasty are said to have crossed the Pacific to teach the ancient Olmec how to write, build monuments, and worship a feline god" (Charles C. Mann 2005, p.233)
Above is a pre-Shang Dynasty mushroom-headed jade figurine from the Shijiahe culture 2,300 BCE Yangtze river China.
"So many are the points of coincidence between China and Mexico on the use, the manner of carving and polishing jade, the artistic styles, and the beliefs in the supernatural powers of the stone that it is difficult not to believe in a common origin"(1954:104).
Diffusionists argue that many of the cultural similarities found in the New World are far to complex in their manifestation and associations to have evolved independently without the influence of Old World civilizations
"...the scientific world is now sharply divided into "diffusionists" (those who believe in an early diffusion of Asiatic and Pacific cultural traits through America) and "isolationists" (those who claim that all Indian culture was a local development). (from The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent: Indian Art of the Americas 1954)
Many of these cultural parallels were pointed out by such prominent art historians and archaeologists as Fenollosa, Osvald Siren, Leonhard Adam, Berthold Laufer, H.G. Creel, Carl Hentze, and particularly, Gordon Ekholm, Carl Schuster, Dr. Robert von Heine-Geldern and Miguel Covarrubias. In September of 1949, American Ethno-archaeologist Gordon Ekholm, in conjunction with German Ethno-archaeologist Robert Heine-Geldern, presented a list of cultural traits that the two believed linked Asia historically with pre-Columbian America (Heine-Geldern and Ekholm, 1951). Among American anthropologists, there seemed to be a growing skepticism about the possibilities of any contact between the hemispheres. Man was seen as coming across the Bering Strait in Pleistocene times, bringing little in the way of cultural baggage.
Quoting Diffusionist Dr. Robert von Heine Geldern:
“ Future research will probably indicate that Asiatic influences changed the whole structure of native society and transformed the ancient tribal culture [Mesoamerica] into civilization more or less comparable to those of the Old World.” (From Man Across the Sea; Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts, 1971, third printing 1976)
"It is known that through all the country was established a kind of baptism which changed, as to the ceremonies, in various places, yet remained the same everywhere in all essentials, a bath of natural water, reciting over the baptized some formulas, such as prayers and orations, imposing a name; and all this was considered as a rite of religion." (from Was the Apostle St. Thomas in Mexico 1881, p.421)
The
Vedic-Hindu religion of East India, and the religions of Mesoamerica
both venerated a Trinity of creator gods, as well as recognizing
hundreds of other named gods. Both cultures knew of the corbel arch,
shared sacred numbers, and the development of a place-value system
using the concept of zero.
"New data and new techniques of analysis will eventually show that a great many contacts have occurred between far separated cultures, and more sophisticated analyses of the processes of cultural change will eventually allow clear-cut positive or negative conclusions about many cases that now remain in doubt."
Below is an excerpt explaining the divine nature of Soma, from a Hindu publication SOMA /CHANDRA -GOD OF THE MOON:"Soma was one of the more important gods in the Rig Veda; 120 hymns and one entire book are dedicated to him. He has many different forms. He is seen as a celestial bull, a bird, a giant rising from the waters, the lord of plants, and as an embryo. He rarely is seen as a fully grown human."
"As a drink, Soma is the ambrosia of the gods. It was due to this influence that they could rise above all obstacles to achieve their goals. Indra was a great drinker of the substance; before his confrontation with Vritra, he drank rivers of it to gain the strength needed to overcome the fearsome dragon. Agni also consumed it in large amounts. Soma was what gave the Vedic gods their immortality. It was also a drink for mortals, a golden-hued nectar which was derived from the Soma plant, which may be a species known as ephedra vulgaris to botanists. This drink brought hallucinations and ecstasy to those who consumed it. It helped warriors to overcome their fears in battle, and it helped poets to become inspired to create. Soma was a bridge between the mortal world and that of the gods. This drink is the same as Haoma in Persian mythology."
"As the moon, Soma became equated with the god Chandra, who originally was the moon deity. The moon was considered the cup which held the drink Soma for the gods, and one reason that the moon waxed and waned was due to this fact. When the moon waned, it was because the gods were drinking down all the Soma; as it waxed, the god was re-creating himself, only to be consumed again once the cup was again full. As the Vedic age ended and the Brahmans asserted themselves, the power of the gods no longer came from Soma but instead from sacrifices made by humans; Soma came more and more to be just a god of the moon. In later times, the waxing and waning of the moon was due to a curse put on Soma. Soma had twenty-seven wives (who correspond to the twenty-seven stations of the moon). They were all the daughters of Daksha. Daksha felt that Soma was paying too much attention to one of his daughters, thereby neglecting the rest. He cursed Soma to die a withering death. But Soma's wives intervened, and so the death became only periodic; during half the month, the moon slowly dies away, but is reborn and comes around again to full vigor."
(source http://www.indianetzone.com/12/chandra.htm) (and from http://www.crystalwind.ca/mystical-magical/pantheons-and-myths/hindu/soma-chandra-god-of-the-moon)
Quoting Rig Veda scholar Wendy O'Flaherty:“In deed, if one accepts the point of view that the whole of Indian mystical practice from the Upanishads through the more mechanical methods of yoga is merely an attempt to recapture the vision granted by the Soma plant, then the nature of that vision—of that plant—underlies the whole of Indian religion, and everything of a mystical nature within that religion is pertinent to the identity of that plant " (O’Flaherty, Wendy. D. quoted in Smith, 49).
The Monkey God Hanuman above right, is portrayed holding an Amanita muscaria mushroom in his left hand. Hanuman is the ever-living (immortal) son of Lord Vayu the Wind God, and is one of the more popular deities in Indian mythology, and one of the central characters in the various versions of the epic Ramayana. Besides being a popular deity in Hinduism, Hanuman is also found in Jainism and Buddhism. The earliest mention of a divine monkey, interpreted by some scholars as the proto-Hanuman, is in hymn 10.86 of the Rigveda, dated to between 1500 and 1200 BCE. (Wikipedia)
On the left is a female figurine from the Harappa culture, Indus Valley civilization (3300–1300 BCE; mature period 2600–1900 BCE). The female figurine on the right is from Puebla, Mexico, Tlatilco an Olmec influenced culture, Early-Middle Preclassic period 1300-800 B.C.E. Both female figurines depict vulva shaped legs and hips and headdresses that encode Amanita muscaria mushrooms. Archaeologists contend that the Olmec culture appears to come from out of nowhere in full bloom at the site of San Lorenzo, in Veracruz, Mexico. Carbon 14 dates place Olmec civilization at San Lorenzo at 1200 B.C. E. (M. D. Coe, 1970, p.21).
Mirrors were a common ritual object in Central Asia, and China. Thousands of bronze mirrors of many different types are known from the late Zhou period c. 600-221 B.C.E
Quoting Scott Hajicek-Dobberstein......
"In the legendary biographies of some Buddhist adepts from the 2nd- and 9th-centuries there are some clues which can be interpreted to reveal that the adepts were consuming psychedelic Amanita muscaria, 'fly agaric', mushrooms to achieve enlightenment." (from Hajicek-Dobberstein 1995, Soma siddhas and alchemical enlightenment: psychedelic mushrooms in Buddhist tradition)
"Little is known of the pre-Hispanic mushroom use in South America, with the single exception of an early Jesuit report from Peru that the Yurimagua Indeans, who have since become extinct, intoxicated themselves with a mushroom that was vaguely described as a "tree fungus" (Furst, 1976 p.82).
The Andean portrait vessel on the left is from Peru, South America, Moche culture 100-700 A.D. now in the Museo Rafael Larco Herrera's private collection in Pueblo Libre. The Moche portrait vessels above clearly encode the Amanita muscaria mushroom in the headdress of these warriors or High Priests.
In Mesoamerica, Maya inscriptions tell us that the movement of the planet Venus and its position in the sky was a determining factor for waging a special kind of warfare known as Tlaloc warfare or Venus "Star Wars." These wars or raids were timed to occur during aspects of the Venus astronomical cycle, primarily to capture prisoners from neighboring cities for ceremonial sacrifice (Schele & Freidel, 1990:130-31, 194) These wars, waged against neighboring city-states for the express purpose of taking captives for sacrifice to the gods, thus constituted a form of divinely-sanctioned "holy" war. Those who were sacrificed to the gods, or who died in battle went directly to Tlaloc's paradise called Tlalocan, and were blessed with immortality.
One of the most renowned Spanish chroniclers, Fray Diego Duran, wrote in his Histories of New Spain (1537—1588) mentions that the word for sacrifice, nextlaoaliztli, in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, meant either "payment", or the act of payment. He writes that young children were taught that death by the obsidian knife was a most honorable way to die, as honorable as dying in battle or for a mother and child to die in childbirth. Those who were sacrificed by the obsidian knife were assured a place in Omeyocan, the paradise of the sun, the afterlife.
Franciscan friar Diego de Landa recorded that the Maya drank intoxicating beverages at every ritual occasion. "The drunkenness reported by the Spanish was undoubtedly related to an aspect of Maya ritual not well described in the ethnohistorical documents" (The Ancient Maya, fourth edition, 1983, p.484).
According to Landa:
"The Indians are very dissolute in drinking and becoming intoxicated, and many ills follow their excesses, in this way. They kill each other; violate their beds, the poor women thinking they are receiving their own husbands; they treat their own fathers and mothers as if they were in the houses of enemies; they set fire to their houses and so destroy themselves in their drunkenness"...."Their wine they make of honey and water and the root of a certain tree they grow for the purpose, and which gives the wine strength and a very disagreeable odor (Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, 1978 p35).
One of the ritual drinks that became the substitute for the Soma / Haoma beverage in the New World, was called balche, an intoxicating beverage made from fermented honey and the bark or root of the balche tree (Lonchocarpus longistylis). Anthropologist Thomas Gage reported that the highland Maya (Pokomam) of Guatemala added toads (Bufo marinus) to their fermented beverages to strengthen the results (The Ancient Maya, fourth edition, 1983, p.483-484).
In the creation story of the Quiche Maya Popol Vuh, we are told that there was a previous world that was created, destroyed, and re-created before the present creation. In the previous world age, twin brothers known as Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu represented the Morning Star playing a ballgame on the eastern horizon. The new world was created on the day when the first word was uttered. According to Maya inscriptions at the ruins of Coba and Quirigua, that day was 4 Ahau 8 Kumk'u, the day in the Mayan calendar when Venus rises from the underworld as the Morning Star. Considered the completion day or starting point in the Maya Long Count, it set all the cycles of the calendars in motion. There is a repeating cycle of 20 named days in the 260 day calendar each day represented by a unique symbol or glyph, the 20th day named Ahau, which means Lord, or Ruler. The 20th day name in Quiche is Hunahpu, a name we find in the Popol Vuh which means "the One Master of Magic Breath" (Gates, 1978 p.53).