Kannabis Spirituality in the Ancient World: Drugwar.com

Kannabis Spirituality in the Ancient World
by Dan Russell

Bhang is a Sanskrit word, describing a strong boiled decoction made from marijuana, milk, sometimes olive oil, and spices. The evidence abounds for strong brews of various kinds, and, since the recipes varied, there is no certain way of knowing the ingredients of the various ancient brews. We just know, if the ancients are to be believed, that they got you ripped. As the Rg Veda of 1500 BC puts it: "This bull, heaven's head, Soma, when pressed, is escorted by masterly men into the vessels, he the all-knowing....thou sittest in the vessels, having been pressed for Indra, inebriating drink, which inebriates, supreme mainstay of heaven, who gazes in the far distance."

Whether Soma was pressed from magic mushrooms, brewed from cannabis, opium or other herbs, no one can say for sure. Many of these brews describe themselves as powerful herbal combinations. The most famous of these bhang recipes appears in Exodus 30:22-30, describing the original holy anointing oil of the Israelites. The Hebrew 'kanehbosm' ('much kannabis') is an Indo-European word, often mistranslated, for obvious post-shamanic reasons, as 'calamus.'

Sumer was among the first of the ancient empires founded during this transition from the relatively placid Neolithic to the warlike Bronze Age. The Sumerian Mother Goddess was called Tiamat, ‘primeval waters.’ Her daughter, Iahu, was the Sumerian and Babylonian Spring Goddess, the original Persephone. This is the culture that gave birth to the Israelites. ‘Iahu,’ portrayed by the Sumerians as the Exalted Dove, literally means 'juice of fertility.' That is the name of an entheogen. The Sumerian Goddess was also called Inanna. 'Ishtar,' the later Akkadian-Babylonian name, is derived from the Sumerian ‘ushtar,’ 'uterus' in Latin. Iahu was the original Yahweh – her name is the root of the word.

The Babylonian Odysseus, whose legend is the original basis of the Odyssey, was called Gilgamesh. The earliest representations we have of this ritual legend were carved on Sumerian stone, 3000 BC, and fragments of it were found in numerous sites, including Megiddo, Amarna and Khattusha, all dating to 1400 BC. The library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh yielded the most complete version of the Gilgamesh epic, in fully deciphered Akkadian cuneiform, dating to 650 BC. Gilgamesh's quest is specifically shamanic.

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. Having usurped Lilith's prophetic and transformative powers, Gilgamesh was enabled to present her tree to the all-powerful Goddess Inanna, who turned it into a shaman's drum and drumstick for Gilgamesh. But Gilgamesh plunged his ancient Sumerian city of 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 shaman king’s 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 scroll juice with the sacramental goat, was engraved on a Sumerian harp, 3000 BC.

Gilgamesh finally reaches the land of the magical fruit trees. Impressed, Utnapishtim's wife asks Utnapishtim what boon he will bestow on Gilgamesh for the heroic effort he has made to arrive at their exalted doorstep. Replies Utnapishtim:

"'I will reveal a secret of the gods to you: a thorny plant that will prick your hands like a rose. But if you can get your hands on it, it will give you life anew! As soon as Gilgemesh heard this, he lit his water pipe, he tied heavy stones to his feet. The stones pulled him under to the bottom of the ocean, where he found the magical plant. He grabbed it, not minding the thorns. He cut the weights from his feet, so that the sea cast him up on the beach." That right! Gilgamesh got “stoned,” and this ancient text uses that phrase almost exactly the way we use it today!

On the beach, Gilgamesh explains to his waiting boatman Urshanabi that the plant is so powerful that its name must be "Old Man Becomes Young." But on the way home, as Gilgamesh stopped to bathe at a well, a giant snake, alerted by the plant's magical aroma, arose from the depths and stole the plant of immortality. The plant-stealing snakes below were carved onto a green stone vase used to hold the sacramental drink in one of Hammurabi's temples, 1700 BC. Like the scorpion men, their bite escorted Babylonians to the land of the magical fruit trees, there to visit Utnapishtim.

We know, since we have the remains, that hemp was the basic ship rigging and netting of the ancient world. The greatest sea trading center from 1800 to 1200 BC was the Phoenician port city of Ugarit in North Syria, modern Ras Shamra, a metropolis that connected the island sea power Crete with mainland Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Babylonia, Khatti (Turkey) and Assyria (Iraq). Syrian, Anatolian, Cretan and Cypriot kannabis, copper, tin, wine, grain, opium, olive oil, dyed wool, timber, rare stone, minerals, finished metal products and ships were traded for Babylonian, Egyptian, Somali and Ethiopian copper, gold, grain, wool, fabrics, incense, ivory, ebony, wine, beer, foodstuffs, medicines, jewelry and cosmetics.

Crete, the greatest sea power of this era, was conquered, about 1500 BC, by the Mycenaeans of southern Greece, the legendary seafaring heros of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. This is when ‘Gilgamesh’ became ‘Odysseus.’ The Mykenaikos were the people of the mykes, the ‘mushroom.’ Myesis, ‘initiation’ in Greek, mystes, ‘initiate,’ and mysteria, ‘the festival of the mysteries,’ all derive from the root of mykes.

Mycenaean transports hauled kannabis, copper ingots, bronze weapons, fine stones, textiles, pottery, slaves, olive oil, wine, opium, and ‘unguent’ throughout the Mediterranean. Mycenaean pottery was renowned for its high artistic and technical quality. The Mycenaean stirrup jar, holding what the ancients called ‘unguent’ or ‘ointment,’ was Mycenae’s most popular export. Archeologists judge the commercial reach of Mycenae by the appearance of its distinctive unguent jars in the finds, from the Hazor sacked by Joshua to Akhenaten’s Tell el-Amarna to Hittite Khattusha. The ‘stirrups’ were handles for pouring out of the circular spout, which was small enough to be easily stoppered.

One of the early full sentences Ventris was able to decipher in the proto-Greek known as Mycenaean Linear B was “How Alxoitas gave Thyestes the unguent-boiler spices for him to boil in the unguent.” On investigation, it was discovered that nothing inedible was ever used in the aromatic ‘unguent,’ and that some ingredients, such as wine and honey, were utterly inappropriate as a skin salve. That is, the ‘unguent’ was for ingestion. Kyphi, Egyptian incense, was also used as an aromatic and an interior medicine.

Many herbs were listed as ingredients, the identifiable ones including coriander, cyperus, henna, ginger-grass, mint, iris root, wine, honey, olive oil and ‘MA.’ The long list, only part of which is decipherable, indicates that the herbal concoctions varied at the whim of the mixer. Cyperus can be three or four plants of the genus cyperaceae, including papyrus, eaten like sugar cane by the Egyptians, or chufa, brewed as an aromatic tea or eaten by the root. It has been found in Egyptian tombs dating to 2400 BC. Henna, the ancient red-orange hair dye, was used by the Egyptians to cure headache. Its flowers have a delicious aroma, and Egyptian ladies colored their breasts with it. The fine foxes below, shown imbibing amidst the floating fruit, were painted onto the walls of the tomb of Userhet at Thebes, 1300 BC.

The last of the listed ointment ingredients, stressed by calling it ‘MA,’ ‘the Mother,’ is associated in the texts with Eileithyia, the Cretan/Greek Goddess of Childbirth, obviously an aspect of Demeter, ‘Earth Mother.’ The Mycenaeans made a point of importing herbal infusions from Crete, in stirrup jars with Cretan place names, marked with the sacred Double-Axe sign. Since they needed neither jars nor olive oil nor herbs for their large-scale unguent manufacturing process, and, since opium had always been a major Cretan crop, as the Cretan palace records show, it is likely that ‘MA,’ the ‘Mother’ ingredient, is mekonion, opium.

Demeter's name is often used as a synonym for ‘poppy fields’ in the palace records and she is often represented as either holding or wearing bulging poppy capsules. The Opium Mother below, sporting poppy capsules slit for sap extraction in her headress, is from Gazi on Mycenaean Crete, 1350 BC. Inscribed Mycenaean stirrip jars dating to the same time have been found in the earliest levels at the temple at Eleusis, near Athens, where opium was a sacred symbol. Opium’s contrived modern image intentionally confuses abuse of its refined alkaloids with the traditional uses of the whole sap. Whole opium sap is actually a safe, relaxing stimulant, which, given in the right dosage, would indeed be helpful in birthing, and therefore sacred to ‘the Mother.’

The ‘ointment’ was distributed to all classes, including the army and the slaves, by the priests of the temples, as in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The workers building the Theban necropolis actually went on strike because “we have no ointment.” The infusion was frequently used for ritual purposes, and was also a warm gift of kings, palace to palace.

Mycenaean ointment jars were found in the Hittite palace at Khattusha, near Ankara, which yielded hundreds of clay tablets in the various languages of their empire in Asia Minor. These included bilingual tablets in the two major languages, Luvian (SW Turkey) and Hittite. The Phaistos Disk, below, 1650 BC, is a circular six-inch Luvian syllabo-pictographic magic text made with stamp seals, in effect moveable type, found in a Cretan palace. Among the clear pictures are numerous different plants, an eight-petalled rosette, spotted mushrooms and doves. Professor Gordon translates a sentence from the Phaistos Disk as: "I have eaten in the temple of Hadd." Hadd is the Bull, Baal. One did not go into the temple to eat doughnuts, one went in to consume potent herbal sacraments, to commune with the ineffable.

The Mycenaeans and the Welsh are related via the Tuatha de Danaan, the ‘People of the Goddess Danae,’ seafaring Mycenaean settlers of Denmark and Britain, 1500 BC. ‘Denmark’ is ‘the Kingdom of the Danaans.’ The eldest of the Danaid priestesses, Albina, ‘The White Goddess,’ gave her name to Albion, as Britain was called by the ancients. This is the same Druidic Albion that imported Egyptian beads from Akhenaten’s capitol city into Salisbury Plain, along with the Egyptian astronomical sophistication evident at Stonehenge. The floating mushrooms below were engraved on stone #53 by Stonehenge’s builders. The Rillaton gold cup, 1450 BC, taken from a chief’s grave in Cornwall, is virtually identical to the gold cups taken from the shaft graves at Mycenae in Greece. The Celtic Arianrhod was the Mycenaean/Cretan Ariadne.

In The Song of Amergin, which Graves dates to the Greek invasion of Ireland, 1200 BC, Duir, the Oak-God, says “I am a god who sets the head afire with smoke.” The Celtic shamans wrote the Beth-Luis-Nion, the “Birch-Rowan-Ash,” the originary Welsh/Irish Tree Alphabet consisting of Birch-Rowan-Ash-Alder-Willow-Hawthorn-Oak-Holly-Hazel-Vine-Ivy-Dwarf Elder and Elder, plus five vowel trees. An interested monk, 1250 CE, preserved enough of the ancient Druidic Battle of the Trees, still recited by the bards, to enable O'Flaherty and Graves to rescue the ancient tree alphabet for modern times. Robert Graves: "I noticed almost at once that the consonants of this alphabet form a calendar of seasonal tree-magic, and that all the trees figure prominently in European folklore."

‘Oak’ is drys in Greek, derwen in Welsh, dur in Gaelic. The Gaelic plural duir, derwydd in Welsh, ‘Druid,’ means ‘oak-seer.’ Odysseus was a Druid: “The man himself had gone up to Dodona, to ask the spelling leaves of the old oak. what Zeus would have him do - how to return to Ithaka, after so many years - by stealth or openly.” In all Celtic languages, trees means letters; to cast a spell thus had pharmaco-shamanic as well as phonetic implications. The Druidic mysteries consisted largely of the correct use of the various berries, leaves, barks, saps and woods in the appropriate season. Graves’ decipherment of the tree alphabet is largely pharmaco-mythological analysis designed to determine which trees were substituted for which in the sometimes political process of transmission.

The five vowels denote the five stations of the year: New Year’s Day plus the four 13-week seasons, which correspond to Birth, Initiation, Mating, Sleep and Death. The first vowel tree, Ailm, silver fir, was the tree of Druantia, the Gallic Fir-Goddess, ‘Queen of the Druids,’ whom the Greeks called Eileithyia. Theophrastus specifically says that the silver fir is Eileithyia. Druantia’s day was the first of the year, the extra day of the winter solstice, the day the Divine Child was born. It was celebrated by consuming Druantia’s offspring, the “seeds of a Pine,” as the Babylonians put it, that is, the Soma mushrooms, Amanita muscaria, that grow only in Pine forest.

The song of the Welsh oak-seers that Graves extrapolated from the ancient Danaan Battle of the Trees is remarkably like parts the Odyssey. Bloduewedd, ‘Flower-face,’ the Welsh Kalypso, says that she was “spellbound by Gwydion,” the Welsh Odysseus or Odin. He was also known as Yggr. He rode Askr Yggr-drasill, ‘the ash tree that is the horse of Yggr.’ Explains Bloduewedd:

Not of father, nor of mother
Was my blood, was my body
I was spellbound by Gwydion,
Prime enchanter of the Britons,
When he formed me from nine blossoms,
Nine buds of various kind:
From the primrose of the mountain,
Broom, meadow-sweet and cockle,
Together intertwined,
From the bean in its shade bearing
A white spectral army
Of earth, of earthly kind,
From blossoms of the nettle,
Oak, thorn and bashful chestnut –
Nine powers of nine flowers,
Nine powers in me combined,
Nine buds of plant and tree,
Long and white are my fingers
As the ninth wave of the sea.

Odysseus found it very hard to overcome Kalypso’s seaborne powers. Troy, the fortress bottleneck through which the vast Black Sea trade emptied into the Aegean, fell to the Mycenaean war league, legendarily led by Odysseus and Agamemnon, in its twilight, about 1200 BC. Mycenae itself was destroyed less than a century later, as were the great Cretan centers the Mycenaeans had conquered, probably by the Dorians and their northern allies, the founders of classical Greece.

The Hymn To Demeter, written down 700 BC, is the foundation legend of Athenian culture, as the legend of Moses on the Mountain is the founding legend of Israeli culture. Classical writers and the Hymn itself attribute the origin of the Great Mysteries at Eleusis, 14 miles from Athens, to Crete.

Eleusis means ‘the place of happy arrival,’ ‘Advent,’ and is related to Elysion, ‘the realm of the blessed.’ The name derives from the Cretan Goddess of Childbirth, Eileithyia, also called Eleuthyia. The name itself is not Indo-European, but Old European, Cretan or Carian, related to lada, ‘lady’ and the goddess Leto.

‘Persephone’ means ‘she who brings destruction.’ Her shamanic trip into winter is described in the first lines of the Hymn To Demeter: “I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter, awful goddess - of her and her trim-ankled daughter whom Aidoneus rapt away, given to him by all-seeing Zeus the loud-thunderer.”

“Apart from Demeter, lady of the golden sword and glorious fruits, she was playing with the deep-bosomed daughters of Okeanos and gathering flowers over a soft meadow, roses and crocuses and beautiful violets, irises also and hyacinths and the narcissus, which Earth made to grow at the will of Zeus and to please the Host of Many, to be a snare for the bloom-like girl - a marvellous, radiant flower. It was a thing of awe whether for deathless gods or mortal men to see: from its root grew a hundred blooms and it smelled most sweetly, so that all wide heaven above and the whole earth and the sea's salt swell laughed for joy. And the girl was amazed and reached out with both hands to take the lovely bauble; but the wide-pathed earth yawned there in the plain of Nysa, and the lord, Host of Many, with his immortal horses sprang out upon her - the Son of Kronos, He who has many names.”

“He caught her up reluctant on his golden car and bare her away lamenting. Then she cried out shrilly with her voice, calling upon her father, the Son of Kronos, who is most high and excellent. But no one, either of the deathless gods or of mortal men, heard her voice, nor yet the olive trees bearing rich fruit: only tender-hearted Hecate, bright-coiffed, the daughter of Persaios, heard the girl from her cave...”

These late patriarchal renditions often turn ‘mothers’ into ‘daughters,’ as with Hecate, but, obviously, were quite uninhibited about preserving Hecate’s overt herbal shamanism. The root of narkissos, the fragrant ‘narcissus’ of a hundred blooms that ensnared Persephone, is narki, ‘drowsiness,’ likewise the root of narkotikos, ‘narcotic.’ ‘Ivy’ is kissos.

According to Ovid, the ‘narcotic ivy’ was opium. Persephone’s mother, Demeter, was the Opium Goddess every bit as much as the Grain Goddess. On the spectacular gold signet ring from Mycenae, above, 1500 BC, Demeter, seated beneath the Double Axe and the World Tree, hands three bulging poppy heads to Perse. On a gold signet ring from the Thisbe Treasure, a standing Persephone hands two bulging poppy heads to a majestically seated Demeter. The Cretan 'sleeping idol,' Demeter, from Isopata, wears a diadem of opium poppy heads, each painted with a slit for extraction of the sap. A sacramental vase in the National Archeological Museum of Taranto, below, 450 BC, depicts Demeter's son, Dionysos, wearing a crown of opium poppies, approvingly watching his maenad dance ecstaticaly beneath her magical herb carrier, called a thyrsos. The picture is a comment on the shamanic function of the vase’s contents.

A beautiful ceremonial vase, below, 350 BC, shows the divinites adoring a huge poppy seed capsule growing out of the center of an ornate temple-tomb, surrounded by floating four-petal rosettes, symbol of the four-petalled opium flower. Persephone rushes up to the enshrined poppy, a huge speckled mushroom, unmistakably the unique Amanita, the size of a parasol, in her right hand. These too are references to the shamanic contents of the vase. Cannabis and opium, as well as magic mushrooms, are likely ingredients of the sacred kykeon ('mixture') drunk at Eleusis.

As The Bhagavadgita put it: "There is a fig tree, In ancient story, The giant Ashvattha, The everlasting, Rooted in heaven, Its branches earthward; Each of its leaves, Is a song of the Vedas, And he who knows it, Knows all the Vedas." As Revelation puts it: "On either side of the river stood a tree of life, which yields twelve crops of fruit, one for each month of the year. The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations."

As the pharmakos himself said, he was the pharmakon: "I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit…" Joshua was the Moshiya, the Moses, which means, as one of the Dead Sea Scrolls puts it, “the bull with horns of iron and hooves of brass who kills the wicked with the breath of his lips.” He was a war shaman, an herbal sacramentalist quite like Crazy Horse or Quanah, two other great tribal war shamans. ‘Saint’ Paul, the former professional assassin licensed by Rome to promulgate their industrial-strength version of events in Rome’s most famous and rebellious slave state, insisted that “Every person must submit to the authorities in power, for all authority comes from God.”

This was, as Acts admits, the exact opposite of the teaching of the real Joshua (‘Jah Saves’), executed by the Romans for militarily resisting their enslavement of Israel. But Paul, with the sword of Rome behind him, won his argument with “the Jews,” as the survival of the propagandistic Greek mistranslations of the original Hebrew New Testament prove. Joshua, after his execution, was turned into the official Roman lamb-idol, the Pauline “Jesus,” a Roman name no one ever called him during his lifetime. The Hebrew writings of the real Apostles, Israeli revolutionaries, were systematically burned. Joshua was no lamb, and conformity to Imperial authority was not his highest value. Nor were the sacraments he was talking about symbolic wafers.

Israel had been conquered by Alexander the Great 300 years earlier, and was, culturally, almost as Greek as it was Hebrew and Aramaic. It was Alexander's Greek empire that Rome conquered. Iasius, to use his real Greek name, the ‘Healer’ (cognate with Iahu and iatros, physician), was the pharmakos who was the pharmakon. Israel’s Hebrew and Greek speaking mystics, called ‘Essenes’ by the Romans, called themselves the Iassai, the ‘Jesuses.’ They wrote the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls. John the Baptist was raised in this community.

Here is the genuine article, preserved by an archeological miracle, one of the Qumran Thanksgiving Hymns of the Iassai, written in Hebrew in 50 BC. Part of the reason for their survival is that the scrolls were penned on sheep or calf skins, rather than the usual papyrus linen. This indicates their canonical character, as does the superb penmanship of these accomplished scribes. The other reason for the survival of the Dead Sea Scrolls is, oddly enough, the Roman attempt to destroy them. This scroll was buried under sand for nearly 2,000 years after the Romans, in 68 CE, entombed it by sacking and burning the Essene desert community of Qumran near the Dead Sea.

"For Thou didst set a plantation of cypress, pine and cedar for Thy glory, trees of life beside a mysterious fountain hidden among the trees by the water, and they put out a shoot of the everlasting Plant. But before they did so, they took root and sent out their shoots to the watercourse that its stem might be open to the living waters and be one with the everlasting spring....And the bud of the shoot of holiness for the Plant of Truth was hidden and was not esteemed; and being unperceived, its mystery was sealed. Thou didst hedge its fruit, O God, with the mystery of mighty Heroes and of spirits and holiness and of the whirling flame of fire. No man shall approach the well-spring of life or drink the waters of holiness with the everlasting trees, or bear fruit with the Plant of heaven, who seeing has not discerned, and considering has not believed in the fountain of life, who has turned his hand against the everlasting bud."