Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)
Contents
Icon: Mark/lion halo w/ white dots
on red edge
Amanita table on Bible Review cover
Good pictures of Amanita in icons,
Mary Magdalene, Last Supper
Art: Virgin Mary with Amanita cap
cap
Check out
the very distinct white dots against red background on this Amanita halo edge
in this iconographic painting on the cover of this book. I think the Lion is Mark's symbol. This is the first time I've seen a lion with
an Amanita halo.
Authority
and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
by Peter
Brown
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521595576
Click the
cover picture to zoom it, which displays:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0521595576/reader/1/
In the book
Medieval Panorama
Robert Bartlett
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0892366427
2001
page 53 shows that picture and says it is from the "Gospel Books of Godescalc"
in Aachen, northern Italy, 781 CE.
Bible
Review current issue, October 2001.
Focus: Last Supper.
http://www.biblereview.org/bro01/brcover.html
When
looking at the magazine cover at the newsstand, though Clark Heinrich has
taught me to actively look for Amanita in iconography
(http://www.promind.com/bk_stf.htm, http://www.entheomedia.org), I thought that
this Eucharist scene on the cover was noteworthy because each disciple had a
loaf/ plain tan cap at his place setting.
Fortunately I bought the issue, and was embarrassed to plainly and
immediately see that the tan loaves are off-white veil-remnant spots on the
wrapped-around red edge of the table.
The table
surface is golden honeycomb, a simile for honey-smelling, golden Amanita -- to
the taste and smell, this honeycomb is a literal representation; to the eyes,
you must mentally replace the honeycomb lines by straight lines to form the
usual Amanita-underside sun-halo.
I was able
to recognize this pattern because I've been looking for not only
Amanita-underside rays in Christian halos, but also for a rim, often red, with
dots, representing the underturned top of the cap.
Other
mushroom shape elements: the blue awning forms a thick stipe. Since the iconographically stylized table
top has "poor" perspective, it is a semicircle which, combined with
the blue awning, forms a perfect mushroom shape. The "poorly" drawn red container in the middle of the
table forms the Holy Grail shape of the mature upturned Amanita (Heinrich,
_Strange Fruit_ page 85 plate 35; Heinrich plate 5 page 54, Issue 1, Entheos
journal).
In the
Passover Seder meal, the significance of the food served during the Seder must
be explained during the meal.
After Dan
Merkur's book _Mystery of Manna_*, this would mean explaining the story of
Moses poisoning the leavening in Egypt with a toxic strain of ergot (the
"yeast of malice"), and forbidding the Jews to use the leavening, to
walk away with booty and redemption from slavery while the Egyptians were incapacitated
with ergot poisoning.
*Correction:
The ergot Exodus hypothesis was described in detail and published by Clark
Heinrich. Dan Merkur's book _The
Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible_, 2000, is packed with
excellent ideas about entheogens (specifically, ergot) and the Bible, but I
don't see the ergot Exodus hypothesis there.
_Strange
Fruit_, Clark Heinrich, 1994/1995, pp. 78-79 -- "Could Moses have poisoned
the Egyptians' bread supply with ergot?"
This book has some coverage of ergot as well as Amanita, and considers
how to integrate the two possibilities.
After
Clark Heinrich's book _Strange Fruit: Alchemy, Religion and Magical Foods: The
Hidden Truth_, this would mean explaining that Christ is consubstantial with
Amanita, which causes a dramatic ego-death and rebirth experience when ingested
after fasting. This rebirth experience
amounts to transcendence of, and emancipation from, enslavement in the
spacetime cosmos.
Jonathan
Klawans, the author of the article "Was Jesus' Last Supper a Seder"
(Bible Review, October 2001, page 24), puzzles that the requirement to explain
the meaning of the Seder was not introduced until 70 CE -- "But the
requirement may not have even been in place in the time of Jesus. ... Gamaliel
... lived ... after the temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. ... then Jesus'
symbolic explanation of the bread and wine cannot be connected with [the Seder
meal explanation requirements]."
This
objection is easily solved by assuming that the details of the life story of the
Jesus figure were not invented until 70 C.E., or later, and back-projected to
around 35 C.E., per Earl Doherty's book _The Jesus Puzzle_ and Timothy Freke
and Peter Gandy's book _The Jesus Mysteries_.
The details of the Jesus story were worked out over hundreds of years
and mythically, we have every reason to read the Last Supper's Eucharist
explanation as a Seder type of explanation, simply because the story of the
exodus and the story of the passion are largely isomorphic mythic and mystic
allegories for psychoactives leading to ego-death and the emancipation of the
spirit.
>Good
work, Michael. You nailed it. I hadn't seen this picture before.
I think
it's an unusual, key picture, drawing the "tasted sweet as honey"
connection to the scriptures. I just
stumbled across the issue last night. I
can't believe I didn't see the table-as-cap when I was at the newsstand
deliberately looking -- I didn't have eyes to see, at that point. The newsstand guy said he liked Entheos a
lot, they received only a few issues.
They have more on order. I have
a subscription. I pointed out that the
newsstand likely carried it because I asked them to some time ago.
The
newsstand also has a stack of Trip magazine (http://www.tripzine.com), so I
bought an extra copy. It has Erik
Davis' (_TechGnosis_) keynote speech from MindStates conference in
Berkeley. I wanted to grab a copy of
Entheos for the philosophers I met with the other day -- I did give them James
Arthur's book Mushrooms and Mankind (http://www.jamesarthur.net), and showed
them Clark Heinrich's book _Strange Fruit_ and Entheos.
Of the
Amanita photos, I especially like the Holy Grail photo and want a flag etc.
with this Holy Grail, equivalent to the "Hell Is Hot" banners the
fundies have at Rock concerts. I also
wish for an online animation of the Amanita lifecycle mixed with its similes --
that would say a lot quickly.
Jesus
Mysteries originally contained more material critiquing the entheogen theory of
the origin of religions, but that was cut to less than a page, to concentrate
on the single controversy, the Christ myth.
If liberal
scholars must limit what they say, how can we possibly expect straight talk
from the Christian archives? Even in
our enlightened postmodern age we experience how the Amanita Christ is
suppressed; witness John Allegro's problems from publishing his groundbreaking
book The Mushroom & The Cross, which covered both the Christ myth and the
entheogen theory. Even my own online
discussion area is far from being a truly open forum. I get tired of "watch what you say and be careful how you
say it". How many people would
post if they could do so anonymously?
At least anyone can read the postings, because I have made the archives
public (which has pros and cons).
I was
amazed that Merkur's book omits the ergot Exodus hypothesis even while filling
in tons of material all around it -- quite an omission from Mystery of
Manna. It's been many months, many
ideas since I read Strange Fruit and Mystery of Manna (both thoroughly). I was startled today at how rich and
profound the Christianity explanations are in both books, seeing with my latest
intepretative lens."
The image
is now available at http://www.egodeath.com/entheogenpicfinds.htm.
I now have
a webpage with decently high-resolution images.
Virgin
Mary wearing an Amanita-cap cap
Last
Supper around an Amanita-cap table
Mary
Magdalene giving Judas the sacrament at the Last Supper
http://www.egodeath.com/entheogenpicfinds.htm
http://www.egodeath.com/entheogenpicfinds.htm
Andy wrote:
>There are a couple pictures here on my personal site:
>http://www.rutajit.com/Images.htm
>
>I have also put lots of them here:
>http://www.bluehoney.org/SymbolismGallery.htm
I like jesusjoseph.jpg. It may be misnamed -- that's God holding Jesus; Jesus was born from a mortal woman and from a male god.
I like the mushroom door -- was Jame Arthur the first to point that out?
In Sacred Cows, I would show psilocybin. No one answered my question: if you own a cow, how many psilocybin mushrooms per year do you get?
I have been asking for awhile for someone to make a flash of the Amanita lifecycle.
You probably should give credit to James Arthur about Lord of the Plants.
In ladders to God, note that dreaming is a good tangible metaphor for tripping. It is perhaps hard to physically portray a person tripping, but easy to show dreaming/sleeping.
Mithtaur-
Here's one discovery I patented -- show Mithras' bull blood with dog licking, next to the painting showing a monk drinking blood from Jesus' side on the cross. I've seen lots of Isis=V. Mary comparisons, but never Jesus and the Bull side by side.
I would expect to see a halo=Amanita underside comparison.
Possible -- show Mithras being born from the deterministic cosmic rock, next to Jesus coming out from the cave and Jesus peering through the almond-shaped cosmic tear in deterministic spacetime. Is there a picture of the starry curtain in the temple being torn top to bottom, or the tearing of the heavens at the start of Jesus' ministry (beginning & end of Mark?) (David Ulansey's webpage)
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/mithras.html
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/appendix2.html
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/eighthgate.html
A good layout would be water as representing visual distortion, waving perception, walking on water, ark, passing through water, sea storm.
Another might be Odysseus tied to the mast and Jesus fastened to the Cross and Ixion fastened to the wheel, and Prometheus fastened to the high rock, and perhaps Amanita fastened to a tree.
At http://www.rutajit.com/caduceus.htm
you could add a link to Magne's book on the Serpent as Jesus, giver of the sacrament:
http://www.egodeath.com/JeanMagneEarlyEucharist.htm
>From Economist magazine, Dec 20 2003-Jan 2 2004, p. 29 -- currently
on the newsstand.
This icon painting shows the mother of God (Queen of Heaven) holding
the christ child. Her headdress is an Amanita cap cap.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/files/virginmaryamanitacap.jpg
I will move this file to the main site.
I also have others to upload -- ideal instances of entheogen finds
in religious art. For example:
o The cover of a book showing the Last Supper with Mary M. giving
the sacrament to Judas.
o Bible Review magazine cover showing the table as an Amanita cap.
The image
is now available at http://www.egodeath.com/entheogenpicfinds.htm.
Roger
wrote:
>I have
uploaded some of my visionary artwork.
http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/lst
About the
Photos feature:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/photos
Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)