Amanita Muscaria Mushrooms and Religion

JLF catalog - supplier of Amanita. I do not recommend the low-grade, powdered form. It seems like the kind from Spain might be best, since American amanita is supposed to be inferior to European.

Amanita muscaria and cannabis sativa - keys to Christianity?

James Arthur: Ethno-Mycology - Mushrooms and the effect they have had on humanity culturally, religiously, and philosophically (site for book Mushrooms and Mankind)

http://www.stainblue.com/links.html - Psilocybin mushroom links

James Arthur's material mirror at BlueHoney

Psychedelics page at bluehoney http://www.bluehoney.org/bluehoney.htm http://www.bluehoney.org/Links.htm - Mushrooms, entheogens, religion, philosophy.

http://people.etnoteam.it/maiocchi/fabbro.htm -- Mushrooms and Snails in Ancient Liturgy of Early Christians Of Aquileia. Franco Fabbro

Blue Honey book reviews - good.

Mushrooms from Heaven - [duplicates text with another link here?]

http://www.lycaeum.org/drugs.old/plants/mushrooms/manna.shtml - Mushrooms from Heaven

The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East

John Allegro

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0340128755

A Christian View of the Mushroom Myth (response to Allegro's book)

John C. King

http://gnosticgarden.com/articles/mushroommyth

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0340125977

1970. HTML produced in 2000 by Gnostic Garden.

AMANITA MUSCARIA: Mycopharmacological Outline and Personal Experiences

http://gnosticgarden.com/articles/molecula.htm - Molecular Mysticism: The Role of Psychoactive Substances in Shamanic Transformations of Consciousness. By Ralph Metzner, Ph.D. From Shaman's Drum, Spring1988

A Christian View of the Mushroom Myth. King, John C. (1970). - response to Allegro

commentary on Allegro by Revilo - includes criticism of religion more about religion and amanita

Manna of Heaven - book about Amanita and Christianity. Impossible to get. Email me if you ever find it. Normal channels didn't find it.

religion and amanita: The Forbidden Game. Brian Inglis. Drugs and the Priesthood

Article: One route to religious ecstasy (Amanita muscaria), by Daniele Piomelli. Nature, Vol 349. Jan 31, 1991, 362. Does it mention Christianity?

Two (Or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship - Alvin Plantinga - "Thomas Sheehan The First Coming: Jesus, while neither merely legendary, or actually a mushroom, was in fact an atheist, the first Christian atheist."

Mushroom, Star of the Ground - Comet - Allegro Ezekiel - part 2 part 3. This webspawner site is a messy research site, apparently. Some good links and material. non-amanita: Ezekiel flying machines http://www.webspawner.com/users/pagesitelink/

psilocybin and Christianity

MUSHROOMS AND SNAILS IN ANCIENT LITURGY OF EARLEY CHRISTIANS OF AQUILEIA

Connections between Nazi's occultic leadership and American industrialist cannabis prohibitionists - non-Amanita

ask-linguist posting - Subject: "Sumerian and Indo-European"

THE NATURE OF EGO DEATH AND SPIRITUAL REBIRTH - looks like an outstanding page

American Entheogenical Society - [Is there a better version of this page with gifs?]

egyptian mushroom argument

fig and amanita

wasson-type material - find "amanita" section of this page.

Fraser Clark:
Moses and His Great Mushroom, eh, Mission (Fraser Clark's ideas on the subject are derived from Clark Heinrich's book Strange Fruit/Magic Mushrooms.)
Was Santa a Doper?
Manna? From Heaven?

review of The World of Classical Myth: Gods and Goddesses; Heroines and Heros - "As the Mycenaean Greeks imposed their own way of life upon the former female rulers of Mycenae, they even gave the city's name a new interpretation. By a false etymology, they could claim that it was named for their own Indo-European religious traditions, rather than the sisterhood of the Goddess. Along with their deities and other aspects of their culture, the migrators brought with them their ancestral attitudes toward sacred plants. The classification of plants and animals would have been their earliest science. In the botany of foods and medicines, a specific mushroom had special sanctity for the Indo-Europeans and they maintained remembrance of the tradition wherever they migrated, often substituting other plants as surrogates for the original, either because it was no longer easily available in their new lands, or because it better suited their evolving notions of religion or culture. This plant was a mushroom, the fly-agaric or Amanita muscaria. By this new interpretation, Mycenae (Mykenai, in Greek) was named for the mushroom or 'mykes.' The city got its new name when the hero Perseus, a son of Zeus born at that place, refounded it for the Indo-Europeans. That, too, is a story that we will return to later. Other cities that were taken over by the Mycenaean Greeks have similar traditions realigning the former peoples and their religion to the culture of the Indo-Europeans."

Mushrooms and Religion: Amanita muscaria
Mushrooms and Religion: Psilocybe, Conocybe, Stropharia, Panaeolus

posting: "Amanita wasn't around Palestine"

Queries

Google query: amanita and christianity

Google query: muscaria and christianity

Google query: agaric and christian [test this]

Newsgroup query: amanita and christian - 85 hits

Newsgroup query: amanita and christianity - 43 hits (might be a subset of the above query)

General Amanita Info

(not necessarily mentioning Christianity)

Lycaeum amanita page

Entheocrawler search: amanita

Erowid Amanita vault - lots of references

Amanita info at Erowid

Book Review of Strange Fruit: Alchemy and Religion -- The Hidden Truth

1st Ed.

Strongest possible recommendation: the book Strange Fruit

Title on the cover: Strange Fruit -- Alchemy and Religion: The Hidden Truth
Title on the title page: Strange Fruit -- Alchemy, Religion and Magical Foods: A Speculative History

Strange Fruit: Alchemy, Religion and Magical Foods: A Speculative History

Clark Heinrich

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0747515484

1995. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2 Soho Square, London WIV 6HB. ISBN 0-7475-1548-4

236 pages hardbound
49 full-color plates, with additional margin illustrations
Includes book background, postscript, fairly short endnotes section, illustration attributions, 6 columns of index entries.
Promind.com ordering: #STF $44.95. Cover price: pounds 20.

2nd Ed.

Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy (2nd ed. of Strange Fruit)

Clark Heinrich

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892819979

Sep. 2002

Promind.com description: "The Amanita mushroom as the philosopher's stone and the body of Christ. Traces a path from Vedic and Tantric myths, through Moses and the prophets, to the quest for the Holy Grail and the alchemists. Ends with the author's personal experiences with the Amanita. Poetic and outrageous."

Covers these topics:

Centrality of A. Muscaria in Tantric sex -- insertion and absorption via oil and via insertion of rehydrated caps to make the participant as a female making love with God's flesh. Essentially, discusses the wide variety of threesomes of man, woman, and mushroom.
Amanita allusions in renaissance art.
Centrality of A. Muscaria in Soma myths
Centrality of A. Muscaria in Hebrew prophets and myth, ancient Jewish mushroom cult
Centrality of A. Muscaria in Jesus' life story and inner circle
Shows how A. Muscaria is the fruit of the tree of knowledge
Full coverage of the entire lifecycle of A. Muscaria, including drying, extraction, and reingestion
Two milestone experiences of the author and friend in 1977 (!), their first completely successful sessions.
Centrality of A. Muscaria in Gnosticism
Almost a complete history of A. Muscaria use, showing evidence of a continuous, unbroken tradition in Indo-Europe
Centrality of A. Muscaria in alchemy. Proven here, with illustrations and explanation of the unambiguous symbolic encoding.

The author has been researching A. Muscaria in the forest and in the library, as his main pursuit since at least 1977. This book represents at least 23 years of dedicated, driven, obsessive investigation. Lesser investigators would make a career of publishing a series of books, at $15 apiece, while Heinrich refined his one book for 23 years, creating a high masterpiece.

I would recommend this book without hesitation were the price $100; $45 is *nothing* for a book of such import, insight, and scholarship, as well as high production values and eloquently transparent and natural writing style. I have found some of the scholarly books about the history of entheogens in ancient religion to be dignified and stultifying, but Heinrich remains engaging, fun, surprising, and no-nonsense throughout. I was dreading studying the ancient Hindu myths, but his telling of these stories and analysis of them was fun and

He completely vindicates Wasson's assertion that Soma was primarily A. Muscaria -- I wish Wasson could see this book. He also certainly vindicates the spirit of Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, although hardly anyone is equipped to critique Allegro's assertions about A. Muscaria punning in dead languages.

This book makes a convincing argument for A. Muscaria as the entheogenic food and drink of the Bible. Such books contribute essential evidence that some psychedelic was involved. Heinrich shows how a use of ergot could be possible as a decadent or substitute line of Biblical entheogens. Dan Merkur wasn't the first to publish the ergot hypothesis in Judeo-Christianity; Clark Heinrich first wrote about it in the book Strange Fruit (Magic Mushrooms). It is likely that Merkur read Heinrich's book before he wrote his first book dealing with ergot. Heinrich was the first to suggest that ergot bread may well have been used by the ancient Jews as well as by Christians (e.g., the mass feedings, the wedding at Cana, Pentecost).

Heinrich offers a coherent and plausible explanation for the transition in Hindu myth from A. Muscaria to the later use of S. Cubensis.

A. Muscaria session reports:

SESSION A

Conditions:

Fasted
Drank the urine
Dried caps
5 caps, various sizes
Mature specimens, unaesthetic

Effects:

o Vision logic - "the few thoughts that arose in my mind drifted through like enlightening holograms" o Thought stoppage (cessation of chain of thought-triggering), one-pointed concentration o Flooded with light from above, of utmost whiteness o Passively taken up and absorbed by the Godhead, mystic union/rapture o Timelessness; cessation of sense of time o Depression at relative flatness of mundane world after return o Great revelation of enfolded meaning when reading Gospel of John

SESSION B

Conditions:

No mention of whether fasted
Didn't drink the urine (implied)
Dried cap
1 large cap
Immature specimen

Effects:

Extreme sweating and salivation, hypothermia
Intense recurring nausea and throwing up
Cycles of ego death, nausea, and rebirth
Unable to sit up; hypergravity
Magnification of very near object to appear gigantic
Riot of shimmering unrecognizable blobs of color
Blurred, unable to see clearly beyond 2 feet, lack of definition

I hope that all entheogen researchers buy this book, which, among coverage of other cultures and groups, reveals Christianity as founded centrally on the use of a psychedelic plant, the Amanita Muscaria. The story of Jesus mythically maps to the lifecycle of A. Muscaria, particularly when you include the thesis presented in the book The Jesus Conspiracy and many other books and heretical traditions, that Jesus was merely as dead (like in Greco-Roman religious fiction) and was prematurely removed from the cross, becoming bodily unrecognizable due to the ordeal -- just as the rehydrated A. Muscaria (God's flesh come back to life) does not look like a fresh A. Muscaria specimen.

It is important that entheogen philosophers read this book. It is urgent that we know the difference between the true, underground, directly revealed gospel (of John & Mary) and the false, dominant, authoritarian gospel (of Peter). An argument of freedom of religious worship should not be corrupted from the start by assuming a gospel which was actually rejected and condemned by the Jesus figure; an argument of freedom of religion which *begins* with the full knowledge of the nature of the worship used in the inner circle of Christians starts from the truth, from the venerable continuous underground tradition of true Christian religion, the emphatically and necessarily entheogenic stream of Christianity. Gospels which have no entheogen, which lack Jesus *as entheogen* personified, are false gospels.

There is no salvation but through Jesus the Entheogen. Jesus the Entheogen (together with Jesus the symbol of reconciling the illusory nature of egoic sovereignty, I'd add) is the way, the truth, and the door to heaven. All who lack Jesus the Entheogen are condemned to eternal thirst and separation from the Knowledge of God (with the exception of an occasional glimpse, hard-won). Salvation is free and effortless: take this flesh of god, press out its vital blood, eat the flesh and drink the blood of the entheogenic plant realm, and your sins and errors shall be cleared, and you shall be given the fullness of self-knowledge and will recognize heaven.

Some entheogens and poisonous plants cause final bodily death. If you eat the flesh of Jesus Muscaria, you will not die, but will have new life. He has the power to make you die (mystic ego death) and to bring you back to life again, now reconciled with the illusory nature of egoic sovereignty. You will become immortal [in the sense of experiencing ego death repeatedly and recovering]. Eat this plant and you will have life everlasting [rather, you will not die from eating that plant].

While waiting for Strange Fruit -- it only took a few days to arrive -- read this site, which is comparable: Ethno-Mycology -- Mushrooms and the effect they have had on Humanity culturally, religiously, and philosophically. James Arthur: Ethnomycologist, Author, Lecturer, Theological Researcher. Includes A. Muscaria in Asia and as the underlying theme of Christmas. Also, commentary on the inner circle of initiation in secret societies. Essentially implies, indirectly, that the global elite in secret societies, such as Bush Sr., have drunk Amanita urine and are sworn to silence about it.

In The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross, page 188-189, Allegro argues that "assassin" derives from Amanita, not hashish. Along with tracing the etymological history of the term, his argument points out that Amanita includes an invigorating, strength-giving effect (in the final phase of a session), unlike hashish.

There are several other books about the history of Indo-European mushroom use.

Did you know in Oct 99 Britannica went onto the web for free?!

Britannica drug cult -- History of drug use in religion

alchemind.org is an important new site. This organization and its publications is the successor to Boire's newsletter, The Entheogen Law Reporter. All the big names in cybercult and entheogen research are backing this site.

Extract of ergot might take a substantial toll on the body, perhaps the liver, I surmise after reading about risks of various inferior psychoactives. A lot of the inferior psychoactives work, but are significantly poisonous and detrimental to the liver. A. Muscaria and S. Cubensis are known safe, even with repeated use. A. Muscaria is typically listed as a poison, but some "poison" this is -- at the end of the descriptions of this poison, it gradually dawns on us that this is merely a "temporary poison", with no lasting harmful effects. Just the unfortunate and undesirable effects of "nausea and delirium/hallucinations".

We can confidently assume that drinking ergot extract is entheogenic. However, what toll would this take after doing this weekly, 10 times? The rumors are consistent in the literature: drinking ergot extract repeatedly causes serious cumulative toxic effects, according to folk herbal medicine.

I also have a little more sympathy for those who keep A. Muscaria a secret tradition. There are several reasons for not telling others how to produce muscimol extract. Yet I feel the time has come to reveal the mystery, amidst the turmoil and uncertainty of bill 486.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the omitted sacred texts all are full of eating and drinking sacred foods and sacred drinks at sacred meals. Heinrich's book proposed that the sacred loaves are ergot cakes, and then Merkur's book proposed the same. Heinrich also proposed that the loaves are A. Muscaria caps.

Thiering has mapped out Qumran rituals to the last detail by decoding the pesher form in the Gospels. She reports that each loaf was broken and shared between two people. This happens to fit Heinrich's tip -- he and his friend took 10 caps total, split each cap in half and distributed the halves, and thus consumed identical, though uncertain, dosages.

This is a high-priority, must-have book for anyone interested in visionary plants. Get ahold of the suppressed, true gospel of Jesus Muscaria, the personified Life Of The Mushroom who is our savior (a savior by providing the entheogen and by symbolically representing reconciliation of the illusory nature of egoic sovereign agency).

Knowing and revealing the suppressed and secret gospel of the inner circle is a powerful strategic advantage in the battle between darkness and light. The book certainly instructs the reader how to produce and use psychedelic substances.

Christians anticipate the return of the messiah. The messiah returns every 10 months, for the 2 month A. Muscaria growing season. The Christs, such as the Greek savior figures in general, are the bringers of entheogen experiencing; they are the personified entheogens and the model of the personal self which results after being fully instructed by the entheogens. I insist that we need the messiah to return to save us. Without the annual return of Entheogen the Messiah riding on the thunder-clouds, we would be eternally in darkness. We are responsible but dependent still on the availability of entheogens. We should not be too proud to eat God's flesh which is given to us for free. It is wrong to consider entheogens as a crutch rather than a gift. Being a responsible individual includes knowing that we are dependent on plant teachers for illumination.

All the mental activity and strategies we can think of will not bring us illumination as surely, reliably, quickly, and easily as eating the flesh of God and drinking his divine vital fluid from his nurturing body. Avoiding eating the plant paracletes (helpers who are called for assistance and rescue) would be an avoidance of responsibility, the responsibility of becoming mature and fully developed, spiritually and philosophically. To accept responsibility for spiritual development is to accept the necessity and practicality, the effectiveness, of using plant teachers.

If anyone attempts to use the Jesus figure against drugs would actually be an anti-Christ. The Jesus who is the embodiment of entheogens, such as, prototypically, A. Muscaria, is the true Christ. A prohibitionist Jesus would be a false Christ, a false gospel, and an anti-Christ. Jesus the drug-law reformer (and symbol of illusory nature of ego) is the true Christ and the true Church of Christ. There has always been a battle of two Jesus figures -- the one who brings the sacrament to everyone for free (though with some inner-circle secrecy, the Bible says, as is also the norm in the Amanita tradition esp. with regard to the drinking of soma/muscimol-urine and bodily insertion) -- versus the Jesus figure who gives us merely mundane, literal, cannibalistic flesh of a human, or a symbol strictly of that literal human flesh, as does the dominant Church, the Church of Peter.

The Jesus figure himself would need to wait for the messiah to return, where "the awaited messiah" is considered as the annually returning A. Muscaria crop, for which one must wait 10 months. (Actually, the Magi, the Persian magicians, may have been able to keep a steady supply available, at a price.) Every time this messiah returns in the flesh, he comes first with death and Armageddon, then leads the soul into resurrection and heaven.

As a Jew and a mystic, the VPLer cannot reach heaven except when the messiah, Jesus Entheogen returns. In the most traditional Jewish entheogenic practice, of the ancient Jewish A. Muscaria cult, this could be expressed as a dependence on the return of Muscaria the Messiah.

I am impressed with how neatly the various alternative investigations of Christianity are. One would expect alternative views and conspiracy theories to have an expanding combinatorial explosion, but instead, the alternatives tend to converge into one, which makes sense if the official religion is the real incoherent strand, while the alternatives strive for and achieve a simpler, more cogent and natural account. The Cathars, the shroud conspiracy theories, the swoon theory, the Mary Magdalene high priestess theory, the mature-mushroom grail theory, all fit together quite consistently to provide a single Other Church which is at least as coherent as the dominant church which claims to follow the Jesus figure. For support for the two rival churches theory (Peter's vs. John's or Mary's), this is suggested by numerous scholars, including in these books:

Barbara Thiering: The Book that Jesus Wrote: John's Gospel.
Evan Powell: The Unfinished Gospel: Notes of the Quest for the Historical Jesus.
The Templar Revelation

The original Gospel of John slammed Peter all the way through. The original Gospel of Mark praised Peter and portrayed Jesus unfavorably. To obscure this rivalry and improve the image of Peter, to hide the dispute over authority and the condemnation of their side's founder, Peter, the Church moved the end of the Gospel of Mark to the end of the Gospel of John, and made some adjustments so that suddenly, the end of the Gospel of John praises Peter. This is why we can see today how the books of Mark and John both have endings which are crudely attached and break the structural patterning and literary symmetry. We wonder where the original ending of the book of Mark went. Well, it's still in the bible, but now it is presented as the ending of the book of John, and has been slightly modified. (See Powell.)

This split of original Christianity into two rival churches (the semi-suppressed mystical versions and the dominant church of the false gospel) fits perfectly with the burgeoning new view, which I maintain, that there are two rival mysticisms: false mysticism/spirituality, which reveres religious experiencing without the crutch of drugs, and true mysticism/spirituality, true religion, which reveres entheogens wholeheartedly and emphatically as the premiere door to heaven, to religious and high philosophical fulfillment. Entheogenic fundamentalism is the belief that those who refuse to eat and drink the sacred plant, which is the flesh of God, condemn themselves to eternal torment, eternal unquenched thirst and unfulfillment, and separation from God.

If the entheogenic plant had not spilled its vital blood for us, we would have no way to be saved, no door to bring us into heaven. Here we have a foundation for the only religious freedom that matters: the freedom to eat God's flesh as he has admonished, and drink his Life-giving blood. If we are permitted to "worship" but only in such a way that we do not consume God's true entheogenic flesh and drink his true entheogenic blood, then there simply is no possibility of any true worship. Worshipping God *is* consuming entheogenic flesh and blood; there is no reason to worship and there is no worship, without consuming this. Strictly speaking, there is only one act that constitutes worship, only one reason to go to church, and that is to consume the body of God which he has given to us for our salvation, saying,

This is my body: Take; Eat; and give praise to the glory of the higher.

Most of these images are from James Arthur's site (they were there before here). Ethno-Mycology -- Mushrooms and the effect they have had on Humanity culturally, religiously, and philosophically.

Strange Fruit page 84 shows the holy grail: the metallic cup of the upturned mature Amanita cap, with the white "fleece" sitting in the blood red center.

When I received grade A+ dried caps, I was amazed at the orange-gold anodized surface of the largest specimen. Indeed the golden cup of the grail is not made of wood, nor metal, nor ivory, nor bone. I hope to capture this reflective texture with a digital camera.

The above photo is by Mark Niemoeller / JLF Primary Materials Inc. http://jlfcatalog.com

The above photo is by Clark Heinrich.

The little scroll from the angel with writing on it

Revelation 10:2 - He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land,... So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, "Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey." I took the little scroll from the angel's hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour.

Ezek. 2 - listen to what I say to you. Do not rebel like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you." Then I looked, and I saw a hand stretched out to me. In it was a scroll, which he unrolled before me. On both sides of it were written words of lament and mourning and woe. And he said to me, "Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the house of Israel." So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. Then he said to me, "Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it." So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.

Reviews of Entheogen and Western Religion books at this site

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