Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: The Dove

The Cretan Eileithyia was understood to be the Babylonian Ishtar, a later incarnation of the Sumerian Iahu. She was also called Aphrodite ('Born of Sea-Foam') or Dictynna ('She of the Fishing Nets') by the Cretans, who traded extensively with the Sumerians and Babylonians, often through Phoenicia, where she was called Asherah or Astarte. The common epithet applied to the Goddess throughout this shared Semitic cultural orbit was 'the Exalted Dove.' The votary above, swinging on the dove-blessed horns, comes from Knossos.

Iahu, the Sumerian Exalted Dove, was the daughter of Tiamat, the primeval waters. As the renowned linguist Professor John Allegro, Secretary of the Dead Sea Scrolls Fund and one of the original translators of the Scrolls, teaches, IA, in Sumerian, means 'juice' or 'strong water.' The root idea of U, according to its usage in words like 'copulate,' 'mount,' 'create,' and 'vegetation,' is 'fertility,' thus 'Iahu' means 'juice of fertility.' That is the name of an entheogen, the fruit of 'the menses of Eileithyia.' The Sumerian Goddess was also called Inanna. 'Ishtar,' the Akkadian-Babylonian name, is derived from the Sumerian USh-TAR, 'uterus' in Latin. 'Dove,' peristera in Greek, also means 'womb,' as does its Semitic cognate yonah, Jonah.

Enuma Elish, 'When on High,' has the unrivalled Marduk creating order out of the corpse of Tiamat, the Primordial Ocean-Woman, specifically called a woman in the myth and portrayed as an enraged shaman, like Hera, creating poisonous monsters for self-protection. Marduk, Tiamat's son, volunteers to rescue the rest of her rebellious progeny from the enraged Goddess: "He looked toward the enraged Tiamat, with a spell on his lips. He carried a magical plant to ward off her poison....After slaying Tiamat the lord rested, pondering what to do with her dead body. He resolved to undo this abortion by creating ingenious things with it. Like a clam, her split her in two, setting half of her to form the sky as a roof for our earthly house."

Tiamat, above center, became the Tehom of Genesis. 'Firmament' means 'what is spread out,' and is a reference to the body of Tiamat. Marduk is Yahweh to Tiamat's Tehom. Marduk's rite involved ceremoniously cutting a dove in two at the Spring Equinox, an enormously powerful image for a culture that understood the meaning of the dove. Marduk, or his hero Gilgamesh, was craftily portrayed as a winged shaman bringing the herb of immortality from heaven to earth, thus usurping the function of Tiamat's daughter Iahu, the original Yahweh, the Exalted Dove. Gilgamesh brings magical opium poppies to earth on the relief, below right, from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II,c. 875 BC.

Hammurabi popularized not only his Code, but the Gilgamesh Epic, adopted by his Babylonians from their cultural mother, Sumer. Gilgamesh was the Babylonian Odysseus. The earliest representations we have of this ritual legend were carved on Sumerian stone, c.3000 BC, and fragments of it were found in numerous sites, including Megiddo, Amarna and Khattusha, all dating to c.1400 BC. The library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh yielded the most complete version of the Gilgamesh epic, in Akkadian cuneiform, dating to c.650 BC. Gilgamesh's quest is specifically entheogenic, as is the quest of Eve in Genesis. There are many variations of this popular sacramental motif.

Gilgamesh slew the snake living at the base of the magical huluppu tree planted by Inanna, causing Lilith, the 'Screech Owl,' to tear down her house, in the midst of the tree, and flee. The image of Lilith below dates to the time of Hammurabi, c.1700 BC. Having usurped Lilith's prophetic and transformative powers, Gilgamesh was enabled to present her tree to Inanna, who turned it into a shaman's drum and drumstick for Gilgamesh. But Gilgamesh plunged Uruk into unending warfare, therefore, "because of the cries of the young maidens," his drum and drumstick fell into the netherworld. Enkidu, the king's bold warrior, bravely descended to retrieve the drum, but was unable to return alive.

Grief stricken, Gilgamesh then set out on his odyssey in search of the secret possessed by Utnapishtim, 'Day of Life ,' the Ark-building Noah who had achieved immortality in the land of the magical fruit trees. On meeting the travelling Gilgamesh, the scorpion-man says to his wife, "The body of him who has come to us is flesh of the gods." The scorpion man below, about to share some goat juice, was engraved on a Sumerian harp.