Crazy Mushroom/Bolond Gomba

Bolond Gomba
speculation about a mushroom's relationship to Genesis, Soma, Jesus and Santa Claus

Essay by Joseph Szimhart
(2002; edited 2021)

Among the Magyar (Hungarians) bolond gomba (foolish, mad or crazy = bolond; mushroom = gomba) is an ancient expression that means crazy-making mushroom, and it can also refer to a crazed person acting foolishly; a lunatic. Pronounced with the o somewhere between the American book and awe, bolond gomba finds expression in both the Ostyak and Vogul tribal languages that still exist in the Ob River districts of northern Siberia. Magyar, Ostyak and Vogul are from the Ugrian branch of the Finno-Ugric cultures, yet Magyar today hardly resembles its closest kin, the Ostyak, much less Finnic. The groups split both culturally and linguistically more than 1500 years ago. The Ostyak version of bolond gomba is ponx or panx, the latter also being the Vogul or Mansi word for it. (There are around 3,000 Mansi speakers left today, fewer than 14,000 Ostyak/Khanti speakers, but over 15 million Hungarian/Magyar). All these terms specifically refer to the mushroom pictured above, the sacred mushroom, Fly Agaric or Amanita muscaria made famous in many western fairy tales and fantasy illustrations of toadstools. Knowledge of this mushroom's effects as an entheogen or God substance goes back at least 4,000 years.

The adjective madcap has similar meaning as bolond gomba. Madcap relates to mad as a hatter (a hat maker mentally and physically debilitated from years of accumulated mercury nitrate he used to cure felt), or the term may be the result of ingesting hallucinogenic toadstools or poisonous mushroom caps. The mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland tea party fame caricatures a real condition, i.e. mercury poisoning. Speaking of Alice, the caterpillar Hooka spoke to her miniature self astride a Fly Agaric in many illustrations. In Magyar the gomba can be either ehető (edible) or mérges  (poisonous or, literally, “mad”). Being poisoned or going mad often have interchangeable meaning as some toxins also have a hallucinogenic affect inducing psychotic ideation, visions, hallucinations or ecstasies. The latter are hallmarks of the sacred journeys of shamans and mystics.

Prior to the introduction of alcohol by Russians several centuries ago, Siberian tribes like the Ostyak/Khanti turned to the panx for intoxication as well as for spiritual or visionary experiences. In the Amanita family of fungi are several types that can kill a man, for example the white Amanita pantherina (panther amanita), Amanita phalloides (death cap), and Amanita ocreata (death angel). Amanita muscaria, or Fly Agaric from its ancient European reputation as a killer of flies (a juice concoction in a bowl would allegedly attract flies and stupefy them), contains neurotoxins that can be crazy-making or lethal in high doses. In recent news (Nov. 29, 2002), a Russian soldier went amok and shot and killed many border guards after mushroom intoxication.** . A shaman (from the Siberian word for the tribal healer/mystic/prophet) would normally ingest it only after proper preparations that included drying. The active ingredients in the Amanita are ibotenic acid and muscimol and the combination has hallucinogenic properties. Sacred mushrooms vary in quality with the Siberian variety touted as allegedly less toxic and more hallucinogenic, but this may have more to do with knowledge and preparation. 

Siberian tribesmen from ancient times herded reindeer that contributed clothing, food and transportation as well as spiritual inspiration and mythology. By tapping a neck vein a tribesman would drain some deer blood for either a nutritious drink or blood pudding. Reindeer were known to eat the red and white Amanitas, and the animals appeared to be inebriated after ingestion. Tribesmen learned of the Amanita’s effects through trial and error, but they may have also observed animals eat them first. Ritual ingestion possibly occurred three thousand years ago or more. In any case, we do know that panx intoxicated reindeer when slaughtered and eaten transferred the hallucinogenic properties to the diner through the ingested flesh and blood. Also, the hallucinogenic chemical survived in and transferred successfully through the urine of the shaman or reindeer (Wasson, p.75-76; www.solsticestudios.net/santamushroom.html ).

The beverage apparently had an even purer, less toxic, visionary effect when drunk in this latter form. Metaphorically through the eating of the flesh and drinking of the urine or blood the spirit of the Amanita mushroom (the god, Soma) could be “born again” or “twice born.” For the Tibetan connection to this Soma-urine "riddle" see Mike Crowley (Fortean Studies, vol. III, 1996: "When the Gods Drank Urine: A Tibetan myth may help solve the riddle of Soma, sacred drug of ancient India"). 

Soma

Indeed, if we accept the impressive, painstaking research of R. Gordon Wasson in his Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968, 1971), the Amanita muscaria is the entheogen and the “god” that inspired the foundation of the oldest Hindu scriptures in the Rig Veda. Soma in Sanskrit means literally "pressed" juice or plant. "After Indra and Agni the god Soma has the most recognition in the Rig Veda; the entire ninth book of the Rig Veda is dedicated to him" (The Perennial Dictionary of World Religions). Entheogen means literally becoming God within and refers to plants and chemicals that produce entheogenic experiences. Soma was prepared and drunk ritualistically but mainly by priests, and it was colorfully described and worshiped as a god: "Splendid by Law! declaring Law, truth speaking, truthful in thy works, announcing faith, King Soma!...O [Soma] Pavāmana, place me in that deathless, undecaying world wherein the light of heaven is set, and everlasting lustre shines....Make me immortal in that realm where happiness and transports, where joy and felicities combine..." (Book 9 of the Rig Veda, Radhakrishnan and Moore. 1957. Indian Philosophy, p.28, 34).

[In today's pharmaceutical world, we have a new medicine, carisoprodol, a.k.a. Soma, that is a sedative and indicated for muscle pain relief. Soma was also the name of the drug sedative that dominated society in Brave New World , the enduring novel by Aldous Huxley (1932)].

The Vedic tradition of the Aryans swept through India from the “north” around 1500 BCE. These peoples brought their culture and lore with them, including the stories and rituals of Soma. The substance or plant that was Soma was long a point of speculation until Wasson’s research. Vedic priests apparently suppressed the knowledge of Soma deliberately over 2000 maybe 3000 years ago. “The Bramanas, codified around 800 B. C. E., contain no mention of it” (Smith, p. 49). Abuse of the substance may have been the reason, or that particular variety of Soma/Amanita may have been more difficult to procure away from its northern territory. However, Soma’s impact in the Vedic tradition remains pervasive:
     “In deed, if one accepts the point of view that the whole of Indian mystical practice from the Upanishads through the more mechanical methods of yoga is merely an attempt to recapture the vision granted by the Soma plant, then the nature of that vision—of that plant—underlies the whole of Indian religion, and everything of a mystical nature within that religion is pertinent to the identity of that plant (O’Flaherty, Wendy. D. quoted in Smith,  49). 

Gordon Wasson’s interest in mycology (study of mushrooms) was partly inspired by his Russian wife, Valentina, who naturally felt an affinity to mushrooms through her Slav culture. Gordon, an Anglo-Saxon, was a mycophobe, a hater of mushrooms. Valentina, a pediatrician, discovered that whole areas of Europe were mycophiles, lovers of mushrooms, and this included the Slavic countries, pockets of Bavaria, Austria, and Italy, and parts of Spain and southern France. The rest of Europe and the Untied Kingdom were mycophobes. During their research that covered many years, the Wassons established another mushroom as sacred in Mexico in 1955. In the native Nahuatl, the teonanacatl literally meant “God’s flesh.” Gordon, after an arduous journey around Oaxacan mountains into Huatla de Jimenez found curanderos (shamans) who initiated him. Gordon became the first outsider to “partake of the agape of the sacred mushrooms.” Gordon “glimpsed a higher order of reality, against which our daily lives are a ‘mere imperfect adumbrations’” (Stevens, 77). This teonanacatl is now known as the magic mushroom or psilocybin, and it was introduced to popular culture by an article about Wasson’s adventure and discovery in the July 1957 issue of Life magazine.

psychedelic experience in perspective

Not everyone who uses psychotropic plants or chemicals reports “good trips,” but many, like Wasson and Huston Smith, have reported an extraordinary direct experience of sacred states and eternal philosophy: “Plotinus’s emanation theory, and its more detailed Vedantic counterpart, had hitherto been only conceptual theories for me. Now I was seeing them, with their descending bands spread out before me. I found myself thinking how duped historians of philosophy had been in crediting the originators of such worldviews with being speculative geniuses. Had they had experiences such as mine…they need have been no more than hack reporters” (Smith, 11).

In any case, all experiences of entheogens have a kind of psychological “half-life” in that the visionary effects lose their magic or revelatory power with continued use. I’m speaking to some degree from experience as well as repeating Huston Smith’s opinion (Smith, 63). My experience with the Fly Agaric came in the early 1970s when I was yet a mild user of some drugs that included hallucinogens. During one of my landscape painting excursions to the steep hills of the Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania, I found and painted several, yellow/orange Amanita muscaria’s. This yellow phase is identified in mushroom manuals with the red-capped version in Eurasian areas. 

I knew enough about this variety from reading that eating a small one would most likely give me a “buzz,” and it did with no apparent ill effect. The pleasant sensation lasted perhaps two hours and gently wore off. I picked a few to show a fellow art student. He too was curious about the hallucinogenic effects, so we returned to the Delaware Water Gap to pick and eat several. We found many and each ate four caps. Within a half-hour we began to suffer many of the symptoms of sacred mushroom poisoning described in the literature—nausea, dizziness, blurred vision and visual and auditory distortions, and, yes, those psychedelic perceptions. The effects subsided after a cold dip under a mountain waterfall, and several hours later we began to feel better and safe enough to drive home. For at least two years thereafter I could not stomach a raw mushroom of any kind. Obviously we had no idea how to prepare these mushrooms—stupid experiment is how I remember the event.

(NB: Amanita poisoning is generally treated with Alpha-Lipoic Acid , an anti-oxidant.
I mention this because there is ongoing trade and marketing of Amanita muscaria, a "legal" substance purchased easily via entheogen.com and erowid.org , for example). [noted in 2002]

There is some evidence that the Manicheans, an early Gnostic Christian sect that emerged 1800 years ago, incorporated vestiges of the cult of the sacred mushroom. Manicheism derived much from ancient Iranian/Persian religion of Zoroasterism. The sacred mushroom cult may have influenced early Persian culture. The ex-Manichean St. Augustine in CE 386 berated his former sect for eating mushrooms, and Wasson reports that as late as thirteenth century in China, the official, Lu Yu, condemned a Manichean group for ingesting certain sacred, red mushrooms (Wasson, 72). With Wasson’s discovery of the sacred mushroom and its history more scholars, and amateur speculators like myself, find some intriguing influences of the sacred mushroom on folklore and foundations of religions.

Santa Claus and the Amanita

For example, the modern story of the American Santa Claus and his eight tiny reindeer is a myth with Amanita muscaria as its hidden source. How is this possible? You can go to many websites* that elaborate, but I will summarize here: 

Folk legends and myths have a way of changing over time as cultures and generations adapt new images and characters to old stories. Once written down or recorded, the tale becomes a testament, a scripture or a book. Our modern Santa Claus is less than 200 years old and was established by a writer and an artist. “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” appeared as "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore who wrote the popular version in 1822. There is a strongly disputed claim that Moore plagiarized his poem from Major Henry Livingston Jr. (1748-1828). In 1860 Thomas Nast immortalized Santa Claus with an illustration for Harper's Weekly and subsequently refined the image of Saint Nicolas after studying Moore’s version of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Artists standardized the modern Santa in a red suit with white fur trim by the 1920s, the Santa illustrations for Coca-Cola Christmas ads from 1931 through 1964 being the most memorable. 

Some researchers ponder how a 4rth century Saint Nicholas, a saint who most likely emerged as a composite myth from pre-Christian influences, managed to end up in a red and white suit, live at the North Pole and ride in a sleigh pulled by reindeer with powers of flight? And why the bag? Why the time of winter solstice when the birthday of Christ was never established by the Gospel? Most scholars believe that December 25 is a reasonable date although some place the birth in September. But Santa or St. Nick is another matter and “he” appears to be a mythic conglomerate that includes the shaman tradition of the Siberian tribes and Lapps. Back to our sacred mushroom: I learned from the websites mentioned below that the dried mushrooms were traditionally brought in a sack, and the shaman entered through a smoke hole by sliding or climbing down a birch pole that held up the ancient Siberian conical log abode or yurt.

Santa Claus by name and type is a variation of earlier legends of a saintly gift giver at the winter solstice. In Greek, St. Nicholas is known as Hagios Nikolaos, Bishop of Myra (in the present day Turkey). St. Nicholas reportedly died about 342 C.E. Around 1000 C.E. a St. Nicholas tradition arrived in Russia, and it began to replace the role of the shamans of the nomadic tribes of Siberia. This is when reindeer began their relationship with Nikolai Chudovorits (St. Nicholas). The latter tradition helped to revive Christmas that had nearly died out in Europe due to earlier Papal suppression. Subsequent legends claimed that St. Nick brought gifts to good children and punished the bad ones, sometimes with a switch made from a birch branch. In China he is called Shengdan Laoren. In England where he has a longer coat and a longer beard his name is Father Christmas. In France he's known as Pere Noel. In Morocco he is Black Peter. In Germany, children get presents from Kris Kringle or Christ Kindl, the Christ Child, as they do in Hungary from Jézuska. The American Santa is a direct descendant of the Dutch Sint Klaas. This Saint Nick is the merry old elf with red and white clothes, eight flying reindeer, a home located on or near the North Pole, the habit of filling socks or stockings with presents on Christmas Eve, carrying a sack over his shoulder, and the tradition of entering houses through the chimney. 

From  Who put the Fly Agaric into Christmas? :  “All who ate the flesh [of Amanita intoxicated reindeer] became intoxicated. Jonathan Ott, an American mycologist, suggested in 1976 that the use of Fly Agaric in the midwinter festivals of deepest Siberia may have inspired some of the modern features of Santa Claus. The Siberian winter dwelling, or yurt, had a smoke hole in the roof, supported by a birch pole. At the midwinter festivals, the shaman would enter the yurt through the smoke hole carrying a sack with dried Fly Agaric or urine from already intoxicated people, perform his ceremonies, and ascend the birch pole and leave. Ordinary people believed that the shaman could fly, either himself or on flying reindeer.” 

Western Indians who built the round ceremonial rooms called kivas into the earth also had a “rooftop” entry. Though not chimneys in our modern concept, these entries also served as vents for the pit fires. The solstice ceremony of Siberian tribes included inebriation both by ingesting the mushroom and the urine of the shaman or others to extend the effects. The shaman of legend wore a ruddy (red), fur-lined cloak and cap. The mushroom intoxication was not unlike the peyote ceremonies still practiced by the Native American Church that uses peyote buttons as both purgatives (many vomit after ingestion) and a stimulant to experience “God” or the Spirit in visions. 

The shaman (Santa) flies in his sleigh pulled by reindeer. Many of the old sky gods, like Odin and Wotan, flew around the North Pole (North Star) in a sleigh or chariot (Big Dipper, Ursa Major). According to James Arthur  “these Nordic/Germanic gods are tied to Mushrooms in their mythology. Thor throws his hammer shaped like a mushroom to the ground with a mighty thunderous lightning crack and [a mushroom, amanita] appears. Odin rides the sky in his chariot pulled by horses which are exerting such an effort that their spit mingled with blood falls to the ground and the places where it hits mushrooms (Amanitas) grow.” These Amanitas grow widely in Siberia and reindeer eat them taking “flight” from the effects. In Central Europe chimney sweeps have adopted the Amanita as their emblem perhaps echoing the Siberian ritual. Also, the Fly Agaric has appeared on Christmas cards in Central Europe for a long time.

Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life

The sacred mushroom myth extends back to the origin myth of man in the Hebrew scriptures, in Genesis as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God forbade Adam and Eve to eat of the “fruit” of this tree as they would “die.” The serpent convinced Eve that she surely would not die if she ate of this fruit. In fact, the serpent promised Eve that their eyes would be “opened” and she and Adam would be as “gods” (Elohim is both a singular and plural form of the deity) and live forever. The “tree” was most likely a birch or a pine, as Amanitas typically grow at the base of either an evergreen or a birch, and both trees had sacred significance to Siberians. The snake, as a ground dweller, had intimate knowledge of the mushroom. If somehow this primal “fruit” that ancient Aryans called Soma influenced creation myths as far south as the middle east, it would explain a lot about why “God” (Elohim) or certain rulers forbade "man" from eating of the fruit:
"And the Lord God said, 'Behold, the man has become as one of us to know good and evil: and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.'" (Genesis 3:22)

A modern Gnostic  view believes that the Elohim lied and that mankind were slaves to a priest class or rulers. When the slaves, Eve and Adam, dared eat of the forbidden fruit, their eyes were “opened” to the fact that they were no different than their masters who wore clothes. This view believes that mankind were “liberated” by eating Amanita even if they were cast out of the garden and condemned to work the land. Liberation comes with gnosis or realizing that they too were gods. New Age gnostics in our day proclaim this same revelation and condemn the Church for hiding this knowledge from the masses. I am not arguing here which side is right or wrong.

The latter gnostic view, I think, is ambitious and naïve. Among some gnosis seekers there is a quest for sacred experience in the form of shortcuts to holiness or "wholeness" that befits a career narcissist, or one addicted to self-realization. Gnosis comes for these people from inner strategies like meditation and outer ones that range from mantras, yantras, and tantras to drugs. Again, I am not arguing that any of these strategies do not yield insight, agape, samadhi, union, or ecstasy. What I am arguing--and it may be the thesis of this entire article--is best illustrated by this story told to me in 1986 by, John Freesoul:
 

During the late 1960s John, of Arapaho/Cheyenne and European heritage, was of college age and taken up with the Red Power movement . He was intensely curious about the tribal vision quest he had heard about, so John went to his Indian grandmother on a reservation out west for advice. She knew the old ways, sat him down and gave instructions as best she knew. Following her instruction, John fasted for several days, hiked with only a robe and a staff into the sacred hills, found an auspicious-looking flat spot on a cliffside, and drew a sitting circle around six feet diameter. John fasted with water and sat in the circle for several days.

When John returned to his grandmother's small home, her told her of his experience. There is a long version of this, but I will recount briefly that John told of visions of the buffalo and other animal spirits. An actual coyote visited and appeared to talk with him. Real feathers fell around him one twilit evening. His spirit journeyed to what seemed to him to be ancient times. John stood while he told his story to his grandmother. He waited for his grandmother's response. She was washing dishes but appeared to pay keen attention. After a long minute of silence, grandmother turned and said, "A man who has many visions has a weak spirit."

John dropped his staff and sat down stunned. He soon learned that a vision quest was a serious attempt to find a vision that would guide his manhood, his dharma, his duty in life both to the Great Spirit and to his brothers and sisters. Later in life he came to appreciate the vision quest of Jesus and his mission after 40 days and nights of fasting in the desert. One man, one quest, one strong vision, one path of sacrifice for others. He did not have to be a Christian to grasp this. He said he came to Jesus after an Indian friend told him to read the “red parts” only. The red parts in the old King James Bible were the reported words of Jesus.

Yet, this New Age view that the Roman Church persecuted pagan ways to squelch gnosis, and that " Santa Claus is really the spokesperson for an ancient drug cult ," may have some validity. However, the reasonable truth might be that an ancient mushroom cult had deteriorated into ritual abuse, therefore use was “forbidden” to the common man. Seekers and devotees may have sought many visions and developed a psychotic path, not unlike an addict. Was the suppression of the Amanita an ancient version of prohibition? The high priests or shamans representing God (Elohim?) continued strict ceremonial use of the substance that gave them the “knowledge of the immortals,” and this enabled them to “know” good and evil in ways impenetrable to the layman or slave. Eventually the priests ceased using drugs as they too noted the ill effects and limited insight from drug dependency. They found drugless means to gnosis, the immediate knowledge of the Sacred.

Remarkably, many of our great traditional moral and ethical codes have come from seemingly visionary or supernatural events. Moses and the Ten Commandments being one example, the Islamic Shari'a (laws) of the Koran that was mystically dictated through Muhammad, another. And the Buddha’s eightfold path was another. This is not to say that social interaction had no bearing on formulating and perfecting such codes over time. It is to say that something that evolved in the human organism tends toward social order and justice, and tends toward a divine or sacred source for this inspiration or confirmation of a transcendent meaning to human affairs. Moses and Muhammad believed they received confirmation from God. 

However, as I mentioned above, use of these entheogens including LSD and hallucinogenic plants can easily turn to abuse once the sacred intensity and insight diminishes, if indeed the user ever had such insight. For a good synopsis of what transpired with the consciousness revolution in the latter half of the 20th century read Jay Stevens (1987) Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. “Bad trips [in 1967] became the most frequent trips (San Francisco General Hospital was treating an average of 750 panic reactions a month), and for the first time the LSD psychotic became something more than a media favorite” (p. 341). The sacred mushroom probably became a recreational drug, perhaps killing or harming many users by misidentification or over indulgence, thus earning the divine prohibition voiced in the Garden of Eden: Do not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you do you will surely die.

This prohibition is echoed when the adoration of Soma (Amanita) among the proto-Aryans “up north” disappears as a motif in the later Vedas. I indicated above that by the time of Christ, and perhaps earlier than the time of the Buddha, and certainly by the time of Moses, non-drug strategies for visionary insight dominated many ancient cultures. To avoid the damage and dangers of such substances fasting, chanting, trance dancing, drumming, breath work and meditation evolved to bring on the shaman’s ecstasies. Moses went up into the mountain alone. Ezekial went out and fasted in the wilderness. Buddha tried extreme fasting strategies. Jesus fasted and stayed alone for “forty days and nights.” In India Patanjali compiled the Yoga Sutras nearly 2000 years ago—they are yet a standard for union with the divine among monks. Yoga became an elaborate non-drug path for achieving spiritual “union” in India. During the social revolution days among Western youth in the 1960s I watched a wave of people drift from the drug culture to old and new spiritual rituals like meditation to “get high” and find “higher consciousness.” I heard many 1970s seekers claim that they got higher with yoga or “on Jesus” than they ever did with drugs.

Eating God's Body, Drinking God's Blood

Intriguing is the Last Supper of Jesus, who with this Passover meal challenged the Temple tradition of animal sacrifice and supplanted all sacrifice to God with his own “flesh and blood” in the form of bread and wine. We eat God as Jesus who is verily God in this mystery of faith. This is a purely spiritual feast in physical form—God is Jesus’s very self, and now his disciples can eat of his flesh and drink of his blood and participate in the divine experience. God is “born again” in each guest. What was forbidden in the Garden to Adam and Eve by the lawgivers, the Elohim, perhaps for good reason is now revealed spiritually in transcendent glory—no plant, mushroom, or chemical needed; no drumming, dancing, chanting or meditation necessary. Jesus preaches that this is God’s gift, simple and uncomplicated, to receive God fully. Do this in remembrance of me, he says. I am erasing the debt because I am the debt. Sacrifice and eat “me.” Keep my commandments. Feed my sheep. Love one another.

The mystery of Jesus in the sacrament of communion wherein Catholics believe they receive the real, not symbolic, flesh and blood of God might have its prototype in the ancient sacred mushroom cult. Wasson argued that the mushroom cult might be mankind’s oldest surviving religious institution (Smith, 50). If that is the case, we can only ponder how this God of Christians brings us out of danger (sin) and into His pure self so we can have heaven and live. Adam sinned by eating of the forbidden fruit. Jewish sacrifices of animals to God to ameliorate this separation due to sin peaked during the Temple period at the time of Jesus. The slaughter and burning of creatures, the holocausts, became an enormous industry in Jerusalem (Cahill, 176). Jesus removed the need for Temple sacrifice and restored the sacred meal into the household, to the people. This radical move was a revolution in the making and drew the ire of high priests dependent on it for livelihood and prestige (see Miles, Jack). Jesus also revealed that God himself (as Jesus) is the sacrificial lamb. By eating God in the form of blessed bread and wine, we participate in the forgiveness of God and we “live” eternally as God’s life becomes our own. Atonement through dead bulls and gnosis through mushrooms are deemed irrelevant. But such “blasphemy” could get one crucified.

I am not suggesting that Jesus consciously knew that his meal was a new type of Soma consumption. His meal was specifically a reform of the existing and elaborate Jewish customs that had long ago evolved beyond any semblance to the primordial mushroom cult--if ever there was a connection. However, the similarity of the metaphor of the actual god living in the meal (lamb, bread and wine, or mushroom) exists. In any case, Jesus may have been more restorative than radical in his challenge to the temple priests. Of the "line of David," Jesus affirms his Jewish scripture, Psalm 40 (New American Bible), that reads in part: "Sacrifice or oblation you wished not, but ears open to obedience you gave me. Holocausts or sin-offerings you sought not; then said I, "Behold I come, in the written scroll it is prescribed for me, to do your will, O my God, is my delight, and your law is within my heart." The God experience is immediate or in the heart to all who choose to partake of this meal, whether sacred mushroom or blessed bread and wine.

Value of Forbidden Fruit

In an attempt to extend this (my) direction of thought, I surmise that entheogenic experience can account for the prohibition in the Edenic garden to not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of this tree, their “eyes were opened,” an expression that could easily mean the utter revelation of the Absolute in themselves—the sense of being One with God and all things created, with the universe and beyond. Having this experience (as I and so many have had through use of LSD, psilocybin, Amanita/Soma or some other entheogen) makes one feel transcendent and transpersonal, but this does not mean that one has to use entheogens to have the transcendent state. Attending images and transcendent ideas emerge in the brain of the transcendee, images and ideas that careful contemplative writers from Pythagoras to Jacob Boehme to Aldous Huxley attempt to describe. In this “expanded” awareness of Oneness, one hurtles past judgement and distinction, past “good and evil.” All is suddenly and surprisingly resolved, all is forgiven and all is “saved.” All is Oned.

As I recall the culture partly spawned by LSD, the familiar (to me) 1967 hippie smile expands across one’s face reflecting an exquisite calmness of mind and spirit at times during particularly good acid trips. “Love is all there is” repeats over and over again at the end of the song All You Need Is Love by the Beatles. The band produced it during their drug (entheogenic) period of the late 1960s. The song spoke simply and eloquently to a generation tracked on the experience of higher consciousness whether they were using drugs, meditation or both. Getting high, higher and higher, and Eight Miles High (song by The Byrds) were familiar themes in many songs of that era. It was easy to feel utter peace and see the utter meaninglessness of war after such an experience. It was easy to forgive even the worst criminals if they would only smile back. This was God, and this made you feel like God. In contrast, when Jesus said in John 10: 34-38, "Ye are gods," he was referring to judges appointed/anointed to play the role of  “G-d” in the Jewish courts of law. But the entheogen-induced God self goes beyond any mere judge’s sorting out right from wrong. The tripper (Adam and Eve on forbidden fruit with "eyes opened") is a realizer * who knows that right and wrong are, in the end, in eternity, dispensable. Too many gurus have claimed to reach this “enlightened” status, proclaimed himself or herself  “enlightened,” thereby excusing abusive behaviors. A cult member might say: You may think my guru hurt me (took all my money, asked me to leave my family or career, raped me), but he did that to teach me a lesson that I needed to learn to advance spiritually. Enlightenment becomes banal when behavior is unethical or immoral.

*[ Realizer in this context is a self-description used by one of  the late 20th Century's pseudo-guru/godmen, Adi Da, aka "Franklin" Jones, whose main commune is an island in the Fiji group. His cult with thousands of devotees (mostly westerners) presents Adi Da Jones as the Avatar or Sadguru par excellence of this age. His ex-cult members regard him as an abusive charlatan, and so do I. Jones during his colorful development feigned utter devotion to the pseudo-guru Rudrananda (a German man who died in 1973) and Muktananda, the controversial Indian founder of SYDA (South Fallsburg, NY) who died in 1982. Jones formed in his own cult in the 1970s] http://www.lightmind.com/library/daismfiles/ .

Beyond that, death simply loses its bite to the inspired tripper (one who journeys mentally under the influence of an entheogen). There is no death in the psychedelic experience in which all is Flow, all is born, decays and re-emerges in some form. The body is a “vehicle” and a mere illusion, a collection of atoms with a purpose, atoms or energy that could be just as happy dissolved all over space. Heaven is immediate and immanent, not out there. The conflict and contradiction of the physical universe falls away. It is merely here, now and along with it "I Am." However, the yearning to remain pure spirit, alive and just be can be overwhelming, if just for powerful instances during an entheogenic experience. How to sustain such ecstasy permanently? As I mentioned, strategies like Yoga provide a suggestion, a path.

Perhaps the mythic Adam and Eve were tempted to eat of the Tree of Life to disperse the self into immortality. How many mystics have reached this ineffable yearning and sensed the possibility? We have stories old and new of shamans in an altered state on a magic flight . Some of these stories say that the shaman can dissemble from an "assemblage point" and travel to supernatural worlds. (For example, Carlos Castaneda's popular fiction about don Juan and don Genaro who were allegedly Yaqui Indian sorcerers capable of appearing and disappearing at will. Castaneda's sorcerers achieved immortality in his stories). In Biblical lore, we have Enoch who walked with God and was apparently raptured (did not experience bodily death), Melkizedek, the high priest who blessed Abraham and who lives forever, and Moses, who in one story was taken directly to God. We also have Elijah, who was taken up to God in a fiery chariot. We all know the story of the ascension of Jesus in his glorified, post-mortem body.

On the darker side of this quest for immortal experience we have one devotee of Charles Manson’s cult who was tripping on LSD while having sex—he died by a pre-planned gun shot to his head at the moment of climax. Some Gnostic sects accepted the endura, a ritual fast from both liquids and foods until death released the soul back to Spirit, to the Pleroma of pure, eternal light. The persecuted Cathars of southern France in the 13th Century readily and happily went into the flames arranged by their Inquisitors—they found their goal to be dead totally and forever to this awful world. I recall this transcendent awareness most powerfully during my first LSD trip—it was never the same again during three more trips, which speaks to the “half-life” such drug experiences offer. My psychedelic experience was not unlike so many described, or about which Huston Smith and Gordon Wasson wrote. In my case, I chose to end all that experimentation after several trips as they got progressively more boring for me, not to mention the potential psychological damage from tripping that I saw among my peers.

So, here we have the experience of transcending good and evil through a kind of gnosis or “knowledge” by Adam and Eve after eating (tripping on) forbidden fruit. Then we read of the fear in God that (the) Elohim expressed: Now that the man and the woman have eaten of this tree, they cannot be allowed to eat of the Tree of Life (immortality) and live forever (Genesis 3:22). The primal humans' “eyes were opened,” and they realized that they were “naked,” so they made coverings from fig leaves. God asked (Gen. 3:11), “Who told you that you were “naked? You have eaten, then, of the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat.” The couple confessed their transgression. Naked here does not only refer to their sexuality or to a sudden sense of prudishness after an adulterous act. Naked, in the Biblical context, refers to vulnerability, defenselessness, stripped of all power (Job 1:21; Ecclesiastes 5:4; Isaiah 20:2-4; Micah 1:8). God (Elohim) saw that man should and must live a full, meaningful life. God also saw that by eating of the forbidden fruit, man’s next step could easily be a taste of heaven, therefore for heaven. Man could eat of the Tree of Life (immortality) and develop distaste for life on earth. Of course, God knew that man was not immortal--there is no evidence that man was created immortal in the Bible. But man could lose sight of his created  purpose: Love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, strength and mind and (in the same way) love thy neighbor as thyself. How many heroin junkies lose their taste for life, give up everything just to get high. When I worked as a drug and alcohol therapist at a Halfway House in 2000, I saw this effect of a drug induced heaven up close.

The God of Abraham and Moses will not allow man to falsely believe man is God or automatically immortal. The God of the Jews impresses man through history that man must continue to trust God and keep the commandments to remain in God’s grace. Through the Christian revelation, the Old Testament is reinforced with one twist: God through Christ restores man to God, and God offers immortality as a gift—not as a result of entheogenic or transcendent insight that is utterly flawed through human limitation. The latter is a pseudo form of Divinitis. Details magazine once quoted me in a feature article about my work as a “deprogrammer” (Disend, Michael. September, 1991. “New Age Exorcist”) as describing New Age gnosis as “premature divinitis.” I was not sure that was a real word then, but since I have found use of it in scholarship as well as in popular fantasy board games featured on the internet: http://www.angelfire.com/games4/charon/divinitis.html . Divinitis implies a divine condition or set of supernatural talents that include immortality and occult powers.

Some scholars suggest that the “fall” of man had less to do with Adam’s sin of disobedience (original sin) that caused death, this being a common, inter-testament period typology. St. Paul alone among the New Testament writers emphasized this typology: Through Adam we died and through Jesus we live again. We can read the text more accurately if we see that man did not fall so much as he lost his innocence by rising in awareness (their eyes were opened) about who he was. The fruit experience changed man's way of thinking radically. He did not "die" but now he was forever changed. Man began to judge reality and all man’s judgements are more or less flawed. That is sin or error. Unlike animals, man was alienated from God's will and in danger of alienating himself even further from reality. His eyes were opened to the divine in a way he never imagined before, but God had to impress upon man that life was yet to be lived, not something to escape from. Man would toil for his food and woman would labor in pain during birth. Man was cast out of the garden. The fire in his brain ignited by the Soma experience was the angel, the Cherubim placed at the edge of the garden to keep man away from the forbidden fruit and Tree of Life. God would not allow man to commit suicide, literally or through false identity as "divine" to gain heaven. Crudely put, man would burn his mind if he went back to a drug or obsessive visionary path seeking experiences of  heaven or immortality. “He who is not busy living, is busy dying,” sang Bob Dylan.

   
And the Buddha   

One traditional story about the Buddha states that he died in old age from inadvertent mushroom poisoning. The record states that his disciple, Kunda the metal worker, fed the Buddha a meal containing mushrooms that “pigs eat.” That Kunda might have picked a Death Cap or Destroying Angel variety of Amanita or even the sacred mushroom is intriguing. Buddha, also known in texts as Tathágata, was eighty years old and quite frail, yet he survived several hours or even days and continued to teach lucidly to the end. His last words recorded were: "Behold now, Bhikkhus, I declare to you: all conditioned things are of a nature to decay. Strive on with earnestness." How odd that the greatest reformer of the old Vedic tradition, a tradition partially based on the effects triggered by Soma (God in an entheogen) should die from mushroom poisoning.

My essay is admittedly an exercise in speculation, but the facts, especially those discovered by Wasson, invite scrutiny.

In fact, Wasson’s theory has been disproved. Soma, it seems, has been in plain sight in India for thousands of years to this day:

To me, the role of the Amanita in human affairs, from Soma source speculation to Adam and Eve to Jesus and Santa Claus, has more than a hint of mythic if not historic validity. Brain science indicates lately that human intelligence has a biological basis for why we experience sacred or absolute union and a feeling of mystical wholeness. Why God Won’t Go Away authors just two years ago submitted a compelling argument for the God experience being hardwired, so to speak, into the human nervous-system, especially in the neo-cortex. It stands to reason, mine anyway, that certain rituals and substances can and did trigger these God awareness states if they are there in the brain as described. In any case, we are fairly certain that hallucinogenic plants were one pathway that inspired or helped humans integrate and experience states that later became the foundation myths of great and small religions. And now we have Santa Claus linked in the west inextricably with Jesus at Christmas and linked together in that inimitable if remarkable red and white mushroom, the bolond gomba.

References:

Allegro, John. 1971. The Sacred Mushroom and Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East. [Not recommended; scholars agree that this "study" is poorly reasoned and researched. In my view it is a bizarre attempt to revision the history and culture of Christianity, despite Allegro's probably accurate intuition that a mushroom cult had a seminal role in a pre-historic religious formation.]

Brown, Judith Anne. 2005. John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls [see my review]

Cahill, Thomas. 2001. Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus

Miles, Jack. 2002. Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God

Newberg, Andrew M.D., D’Aquili, Eugene, Ph.D., Rause, Vince. 2000. Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.

O'Shea, Stephen. 2001. The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars.

Radhakrishnan and Moore. 1957. Indian Philosophy

Smith, Huston. 2000. Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals. [A daring synopsis of Smith's personal experience and the value of the drug culture to the study of religions, an discipline in which Smith is a heralded international scholar]

Stevens, Jay. 1987. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream.

Wasson, R.G. 1968. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality.

Wasson, R.G. and Wasson, V.P. 1957. Mushrooms,Russia, and History.

*http://www.solsticestudios.net/santamushroom.html 
http://www.erowid.org/plants/amanitas_writings1.shtml
http://w ww.clearwhitelight.org/hatter/amanita.htm
http://www.the-gnosis-site.com/santa.htm
http://www.uio.no/conferences/imc7/NFotm99/December99.htm
http://www.buddhistinformation.com/how_did_the_buddha_die.htm
http://www.santaschool.com/dates.htm
http://www.erowid.org/plants/amanitas/amanitas_writings1.shtml

**
Friday, 29 November, 2002,14:14 GMT

'Doped up' Russian soldier runs amok

 Conditions are harsh in the one million strong army

A Russian soldier serving in theCaucasushas killed at least five of his fellow border guards in a shooting spree - reportedly after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms.

At least three others were injured in the incident onRussia's southern border withGeorgia.

The soldier fired his Kalashnikov assault rifle at a tent where his comrades were resting while deployed on patrol, the Associated Press news agency reported.

Some were killed on the spot, others died later of their wounds in hospital, it said.

Preliminary investigations suggested that the soldier - named as Denis Solovyev - was in a state of narcotic intoxication, Yuri Kolodkin, a spokesman with the Emergency Situations Ministry was quoted as saying.

Witnesses said he had eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms not long before the incident, at the Ptysh border guard post.

Collecting mushrooms, though not usually for hallucinogenic properties, is a Russian passion

Correspondents say tales of substance abuse are common in the Russian army, which suffers from poor discipline, low morale and under funding and is plagued by brutality, shootings and desertions.

In a similar incident in August, two border guards killed eight fellow-servicemen who were asleep while on patrol in the same part of the country, saying they did it to avenge bullying.

In September, more than 50 soldiers abandoned their unit and marched nearly 60 kilometres (35 miles) to the city of Volgograd to protest against beatings by their officers.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2527529.stm >

Amanita muscaria http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=amanita+muscaria&qpvt=amanita+muscaria&FORM=IGRE#view=detail&id=12E214B607E79708570374B1D4772FD9784BFF08&selectedIndex=34

 review of related book:

The Mushroom in Christian Art: The identity of Jesus in the development of Christianity

John A. Rush (author of Spiritual Tattoo and Failed God)

Berkeley,California:North Atlantic Books, 2011

ISBN 978-1-55643-960-5

Paperback, 385 pages with CD of illustrations included.

review by Joe Szimhart, 2011

I purchased this book because the topic fascinates me. My interest in the Amanita muscaria began in the late 1960s along with things shaman, but it got more serious after some research. As a young artist in the early 1970s I painted a few yellow-phase Amanitas ‘en plein air’ in oil above the Delaware Water Gap and then I ingested a small one. I got a pleasant buzz with some of the psychedelic bells and whistles described in the literature. A short few months later a friend of mine and I ate several each and we both got sick with some bells and whistles—the hours long nausea and blurred vision was just as described in the literature when one eats them raw. I could not stomach a raw mushroom of any kind for over a year. Decades later I wrote a long essay that I titled something like “Bolond Gomba: Santa Claus, Jesus, and Amanita Muscaria.” Bolond Gomba is Hungarian for the red Amanita or any gomba (mushroom) that makes you bolond or “crazy.” I traced the shamanic influences on the Santa Claus legend and speculated how that interprets Christianity, but it was speculation.

John A. Rush writes like someone who is a product of the Sixties movements but more so as a true believer in the modern myths about the Amanita. Rush views the popular white-flecked, red-capped, fairy tale mushroom as the primal drug and deity called Soma in the Rig Veda and by extension the “fruit” of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” in the Genesis story of Jewish tradition. He goes much further in finding indications of Amanita (and entheogens in general) in nearly every transformative tradition on the planet. Now, as I recall in my research, it is true that nearly 70% of all ancient religions and cults used some kind of psychotropic substance in their rituals and initiations. The Amanitas however were notably employed by tribes on the Eurasian steppe and among reindeer herders. Evidence for widespread use is lacking to support Rush’s enthusiasm. No one knows what was used to make Soma, for example, despite R. Wasson’s formidable study in his book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality that focuses on the red-capped Amanita.

But more importantly Rush seems to ignore the obvious limitations to entheogen use and abuse as a vehicle for sustaining communion with transcendence, limitations that ancient cultures did not ignore. One glaring example is in Hindu traditions that evolved early on, perhaps three thousand years ago, to supplant chemically induced ecstasy (Soma) with various forms of yoga and meditation as more effective, conscious means to “yoke” with the deity or sacred consciousness.

But Rush concentrates on the Christian tradition with his notion, which is more a fundamentalist belief: Jesus was not a person, rather “Jesus” was an experience of Amanita later disguised in Gospels as a person to—well, 1. To keep the experience secret from the hoi polloi who might somehow screw it up, and 2. To keep from being found out by Roman and later Church authorities who allegedly frowned upon mushroom cults. Only the inner sanctum, the high priests were trained and enlightened enough to properly ingest and interpret the mushroom experience. Rush goes on to suggest and assert (he does both frequently) that there were “many” Christianities based on the mushroom cult and these included Gnostics as well as Essenes and the John the Baptist movement.

This book probably should get no stars because it should never have been published—it is a poorly formulated thesis that ironically undermines itself by the evidence provided. Other authors (e.g., J. Allegro, 1970) pushed the mushroom source of Christian tradition but their efforts amounted to scholarly nonsense, not evidence. I tried but did not get through the entire file of illustrations on the included DVD. It soon became clear that Rush “reads” or reads mushrooms and entheogens into icons and religious art that are not intended or there. As I mentioned above, I have been an artist and have made at least a portion of my living through the arts since the late 1960s. Rush’s approach to the art referenced violates the evidence—he tortures any detail to find a mushroom. It could be in a strange fold in a garment or a fly that he asserts refers to Fly Agaric, another name for the Amanita.

But where does Rush get his authoritative attitude? And why bother when the façade is so easy to dismantle? I think he takes his cue from Joseph Campbell the pop-mythologist, for one, Campbell has long ago been discredited in interpreting basic cultural uses of myth—he was more a literary scholar who did almost no primary research of indigenous myths. Rush pushes the “follow your bliss” of Campbell many steps further into a kind of neo-Gnosticism based on his personal experience of art and mushrooms. Gnostics tended to position themselves among the elite few who could “know” the Mysteries after initiation—they were the self-proclaimed pneumatics. Others who might grasp the Mysteries after significant training were designated as psychics. Most of mankind to some ancient Gnostic cults was too dense to experience the truth in any form. These were the hylics or mud people with no potential for salvation.

Rush takes potshots at theistic religion throughout the text. He takes issue with clerics, rabbis and priests who hand down tradition rather than encouraging “individual spirituality.” On page 270 he writes: As Joseph Campbell stated many years ago, the Bible and Koran are “guidebooks to schizophrenia.” Now schizophrenia is well-known to me—I’ve worked in a mental hospital over twelve years. If schizophrenia indicates a split from testable reality due to a dysfunction in the brain, then Campbell is sorely off track with his unfortunate, poorly worded suggestion. On the other hand, if one were to take Rush’s ideas about Amanita to heart and stomach, schizophrenia may be what one steps into on the “other side.” Rush endearingly calls this stepping in and out of two worlds, the “hokey-pokey.”  

Rush’s personal experience with shrooms seems to have imbedded a certainty in his mind that proto-Christians ingested Amanitas. Rush reminds me of a zealous Christian who finds the face of Jesus in clouds, fried eggs, Walmart receipts and water stains. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it fails to qualify as scholarship to my way of thinking. The real reason for this book has less to do with Christian art and Jesus than with exploring a host of transformative substances named by Rush throughout his narrative—the reader will find that the author is an avid entheogenist who overvalues a wrongheaded thesis.