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."
