Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: Gnosis

Gnosis, the Greek root of our word 'knowledge,' means 'personal experience,' 'acquaintance of.' It is a pharmaco-shamanic term, a word used in connection with the personal experience induced by the herbal sacraments of the Greeks. The meaning and function of the sacraments was precisely the issue between Pythagoras (fl.550 BC), who studied among the Jews and the Egyptians, and the traditional meat-eating Greeks. "The Daktyls of Crete, the initiates of Idaean Zeus...initiated Pythagoras into the thunder-rites of the Idaean cave. If Picus the Bird-King was of their company, small wonder that he could make and unmake the thunder."

The difference between the 'thunder-rites,' the 'bloodless sacrifices' and 'sober offerings,' the nephalia shared with Demeter and Aphrodite at Eleusis, and the bloody hecatombs offered to Zeus was recognized by the Greeks to be historical and profound. It was expressed in sacramental terms understood to represent shamanic and historical realities. The significance of the sacraments was also the issue between the Essenes and their more worldly brethren; likewise the issue between the Gnostics and the Orthodox Christians.

For many Gnostics, Jesus' blood was more like Aphrodite's Heavenly Nectar, conceived of the Spirit of God, which is, and always has been, female in Hebrew, as in Genesis: "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Yahweh is the Son of Iahu, the Exalted Dove, who is the daughter of Tiamat, the originary creative waters. The Gnostic Sophia had a lot of Aphrodite, 'risen from sea-foam,' the fish, the unconscious, in her. The Church adopted the archetypal image of the fish as a symbol of baptism and coopted a Gnostic acrostic of Jesus' name which matched the Greek for fish (ichthys), but changed the originary feminine meaning to stress the masculine nature of spiritus and the Trinity; it was all Solar.

The Quaternity so many of the Gnostics insisted on included the awesome Moon Mother of the Mysteries, whose womb is the sea we swim in. She is the mother of the pharmakos in the liknon, the mother of the evolved body, instinct. As The Gospel of Philip put it: "Some said, 'Mary conceived by the holy spirit.' They are in error. They do not know what they are saying. When did a woman ever conceive by a woman?" The medieval alchemists, who traced their roots to the Gnostics, called her water succus lunariae, 'the sap of the moon plant.' This obvious code was understood by many, as was the importance of control of the iconography; the Cross, after all, is an archetypal image of the Goddess, Quaternity, extrapolated from her ancient wheel of life. The Theban sacramental vase above dates to 700 BC.

The Church organized the Imperial murder of many leading Gnostics and the systematic destruction of nearly all their writings. The lost Gnostic writings were known only by their titles and distorted legend for the better part of two millennia, but by a spectacular archeological miracle fifty-two Gnostic texts, thirty of them complete and unknown except by legend, were rediscovered on leather-bound papyrus scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in central Egypt. The scrolls had been buried in jars, about 370 CE, in meditation caves, obviously in fear of their discovery. They were written in Coptic, phonetic Egyptian, Greek transliterations of the original Greek. The care with which the texts were copied and bound indicates that they were canonical to the copyists.

"The tree of gnosis has the strength of God. It glows like the moon, and its magical fruit is sweet, like dates. And this tree is to the North of Paradise, so that it might arouse the souls from the torpor of the demons, in order that they might approach the tree of life and eat of its fruit and so condemn the authorities and their angels."

"A droplet of light fell from Sophia's hands onto the waters, immediately producing an androgynous human being. Sophia formed it first into a woman, but an andogynous woman, called Hermaphrodites by the Greeks. Her Mother is called Eve of Life by the Hebrews. She is the female instructor of life. Her progeny is the creature that is called lord. But the authorities called it 'Beast,' so as to tarnish its reputation among their modelled creatures. But 'the beast' is really 'the instructor,' the wisest of all beings."