The Unconscious Roots of the Drug War
Excerpts from Shamanism
and the Drug Propaganda: The Birth of Patriarchy and the Drug War
Dan Russell
The central sacrament of all Paleolithic,
Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures known is an inebriative herb,
a plant totem, which became metaphoric of the communal epiphany.
These herbs, herbal concoctions and herbal metaphors are at the
heart of all mythologies. They include such familiar images as
the Burning Bush, the Tree of Life, the Cross, the Golden Bough,
the Forbidden Fruit, the Blood of Christ, the Blood of Dionysos,
the Holy Grail (or rather its contents), the Chalice (Kalyx: 'flower
cup'), the Golden Flower (Chrysanthemon), Ambrosia (Ambrotos:
'immortal'), Nectar (Nektar: 'overcomes death'), the Sacred Lotus,
the Golden Apples, the Mystic Mandrake, the Mystic Rose, the Divine
Mushroom (teonanacatl), the Divine Water Lily, Soma, Ayahuasca
('Vine of the Soul'), Kava, Iboga, Mama Coca and Peyote Woman.
They are the archetypal-the emotionally,
the instantaneously understood-symbols at the center of the drug
propaganda. A sexually attractive man or woman is an archetypal
image, the basis of most advertising. A loaf of bread is an archetypal
image. The emotional impact of the sacramental herbal images,
or, rather, the historical confusion of their natural function,
is central to the successful manipulation of mass emotion and
individual self-image.
Jung: "An image which frequently appears
among the archetypal configurations of the unconscious is that
of the tree or the wonder-working plant." When people reproduce
these dream images they often take the form of a mandala. Jung
calls the mandala "a symbol of the self in cross section," comparing
it to the tree, which represents the evolving self, the self as
a process of growth.[1]
"Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol
of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course
of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning
of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove
to be unalterable.”[2]
"...it is the decisive factors in the unconscious
psyche, the archetypes, which constitute the structure of the
collective unconscious. The latter represents a psyche that is
identical in all individuals.... The archetypes are formal factors
responsible for the organization of unconscious psychic processes:
they are ‘patterns of behaviour.’”[3]
Those patterns of behavior are rooted in
our evolutionary biology as surely as is the shape of our body.
Inebriative behavior is an oral behavior, related, physiologically
and psychologically, to eating and sex. It is as instinctive in
people as socializing or music making. I doubt there is a solvent
culture on earth in which breakfast isn't accompanied by a traditional
herbal stimulant, or in which some herbal inebriant isn't wildly
popular.
Inebriation-ritual, social, alimentary and
medical-is basic to all cultures, ancient and modern. Traditional
cultures don't separate inebriative herbalism from any of the
other 'archaic techniques of ecstacy'-dancing, musicalizing, socializing,
ritualizing, fasting, curing, ordeal-which are part of the same
shamanic behavior complex; nor do they separate medicine from
food.
Rome, the last of the great ancient slave
states, institutionalized the conquistador ethos of industrial
conformity in Western culture. That ethos translates itself today
as irrational fear of the shamanic experience; fear, that is,
of the unconscious itself and of primitivity in general.
We don't escape the thrall of our dreams.
The psychology of contemporary politics, 'history,' moves much
more slowly than technology, which is a mechanical, not a biological
process. We will cease to live in the world of the ancients only
when sex, birth, hunger and death become different for us than
they were for them. Our dream language, our spectacular automatic
creativity, is, of course, archetypal imagery, the evolutionarily-determined
picture-language that is the same for all peoples, regardless
of culture, just as the human body and emotions are the same.
1. Jung, Carl. (1956). The collected works,
volume 13: Alchemical studies, p 253. Princeton University Press.
2. Ibid., p 272
3. Jung, Carl. (1956). The collected works, volume 8: The structure
and dynamics of the psyche, p 436. Princeton University Press.
this article copyright 2001 Dan Russell
You Are Being Lied To copyright 2001
The Disinformation Company, Ltd.
