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Author: Carl Ruck
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868524
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
This illustrated book traces the history of an unlikely force in the shaping of Western civilization: the use of psychedelic mushrooms, namely by a secret society called the cult of Mithras. Nero was the first emperor to be initiated by the group’s “magical dinners,” and most of his successors embraced the ritual as a source of spiritual transcendence. The cult was officially banned after the Conversion, but aspects of their rituals were assimilated or co-opted by Christianity, and the brotherhoods persist today as secret societies such as the Freemasons. This is a fascinating exploration of a powerful force kept behind the scenes for thousands of years.
Author: Carl Ruck
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868524
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
This illustrated book traces the history of an unlikely force in the shaping of Western civilization: the use of psychedelic mushrooms, namely by a secret society called the cult of Mithras. Nero was the first emperor to be initiated by the group’s “magical dinners,” and most of his successors embraced the ritual as a source of spiritual transcendence. The cult was officially banned after the Conversion, but aspects of their rituals were assimilated or co-opted by Christianity, and the brotherhoods persist today as secret societies such as the Freemasons. This is a fascinating exploration of a powerful force kept behind the scenes for thousands of years.
Author: James Arthur
Publisher: Book Tree
ISBN: 9781585091515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
For thousands of years on our planet, humanity has been involved in a symbiotic relationship with plants. Not only have plants supplied mankind with a never-ending food source, the necessary nourishment for our bodies, and life itself, but they have also served us in another way: an extremely important and intricate one, yet an often overlooked one. This book uncovers the natural link between man, consciousness, and God.
Author: Philippa Adrych
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198792530
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
This work presents six case-studies of objects from different periods and regions of antiquity that are labelled by variations of the name Mithra, including the Roman Mithras, Persian Mihr, and Bactrian Miiro. Each chapter places each object in its original context, before questioning its role in religious ritual, tradition, and belief
Author: Carl A. P. Ruck
Publisher: Ronin Publishing
ISBN: 1579511643
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
ENTHEOGENS, MYTH AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS is a much needed accessible exploration into the role of psychoactive sacraments - entheogens - in religion, mythology, and history, and also includes most treatments of the subject focus on modern scientific research, psychotherapy, are auto-bibliographic accounts, or are agenda-driven or otherwise naive and myopic. A great mystery of altered states of consciousness and species development is expanding with new archeological and anthropological discoveries. Religious story telling (myth) is a timeless journey. Surprisingly it’s not about truth. It’s about finding one’s self in the midst of the discovery of the “Other.” It is the story of what is separate and unknown that creates self-consciousness. Our entire life consists ultimately in the discovery of the “Other,” which gives meaning to the discovery of the self. The arts and language are the fossil remnants scattered on our path. ENTHEOGENS, MYTH AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS discusses the influence of psychoactive substances on consciousness, human evolution and mystical experiences. It explores how religion, mythology, art and culture stem from entheogenic consciousness and why it's important to us today. "Entheogens, or psychoactive sacraments, have a long, storied history that has played an essential role in the evolution of consciousness, mythology, culture, religion, art - and even history and politics. ENTHEOGENS, MYTH AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS outlines this suppressed - yet seminal - undercurrent of history, giving examples of the role of entheogens from the primal shamanic religions through, the historical religions, esoteric mystical traditions including the Mystery Religions, alchemy and Freemasonry, and into contemporary expressions. Authors Ruck and Hoffman draw upon decades of research and personal experience in discussing the best documented examples of historically important entheogenic evidences, various ongoing threads of research and speculation to muse upon the 'meaning' of it all..." Our hominid ancestors experienced a spiritual wakening at the very dawn of consciousness that set them apart from the other creatures of our planet. It was a journey to another realm induced by a special food that belonged to the gods. This was a plant that was animate with the spirit of deity. It was an entheogen. It was the visionary vehicle for the trip of the first shaman. The story was told over and over again until it achieved the perfect form of a myth. The realm was imagined as a topographical place, the outer limit of the cosmos, the fiery empyrean, or its geocentric opposite, our own planet Gaia. Myths multiplied over time, but they always preserved this primordial truth. These myths provide a road map, a scenario, if you can read them, for whoever today wants to follow. However, it is not an easy journey, and it is also fraught with many dangers, of getting lost, of finding no return. Access to the entheogens is now largely prohibited or strictly licensed. The restrictions constitute an infringement of cognitive freedom, limiting the further evolution of human potential into productive creative imagination and experiences that lie beyond the normal, the traditional province of shamans, who can understand the speech of plants and animals, change shape at will, and journey, both physically and in the spirit, to distant exotic realms. In addition, religions have staked out territorial claims to this realm of spiritual consciousness. They have colonized it, identified it with their god, often reserving the access for their own elite. Similarly, trade in drugs, both medicinal and illegal, has colonized the etheogens, making them only chemicals, rationally depriving them of their spirit. ENTHEOGENS, MYTH AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS is a guide for the curious that provides a historical overview of the role that entheogens have played in the development of our unique supremacy as a species and offers also pathways and advice for reconnecting with the primordial sources of nature’s power. ENTHEOGENS, MYTH AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS investigates the role entheogens have played in the evolution of humankind’s attempt to define reality in a context of metaphysical or theological dimensions. Although other botanical intoxicants will be considered (cannabis, daphne, opium, Syrian rue, datura, mandrake), none, with the possible exception of mandrake, seem to have lent themselves so readily to metaphoric personifications, which make this the subject for a course on mythology. The source of humankind’s fascination and repulsion for fungi, indeed, leads to a fundamental consideration of the psychological nature of mankind’s fascination or awareness of what in the categorization of religions is termed animism and rituals of ecstatic shamanism. In addition, the linking of bread and wine as sacramental foods is due to parallel concepts of controlled fungal growth as a simulacrum of the cosmos itself. The goal is not so much to acquire factual knowledge of this vast subject, but to open up pathways for reflection upon the basic nature of human existence and consciousness. The narrative is the awesome history of discovery and the findings of ancient rituals that meld into twentieth-century controversy and criticism of psychedelics. The future of humanity and the direction of twenty-first century brain science is challenged as well as our sense of social convention. Entheogens have been deemed be prohibited controlled substances and as such is an infringement of cognitive freedom. Whatever the danger of potential abuse, the substance is not the fault, but the user. The hammer is not guilty, but the carpenter who misuses it because of deficient training. In order to exonerate the executioner in Classical antiquity, the axe was brought to trial and found guilty. The prohibition has drastically retarded the investigation into the therapeutic potential of proscribed drugs, including their efficacy in curing addiction. Some of these substances also offer the potential for accessing levels of cognition and consciousness beyond the ordinary, the traditional provenance of mystics and shamans, like bilocation, clairvoyance, and zoomorphism.
Author: Hans Dieter Betz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Just hundred years after the first edition of Albrecht Dietrich's Eine Mithrasliturgie (Leipzig 1903; 1923), the present book offers a complete new edition of so complex a text. It provides the Greek text, an English translation, a punctual introduction, an extensive commentary, an index of Greek words and of the various voces magicae, and, finally, also an appendix, with photographic reproductions of the papyrus. ... Not only Hans Dieter Betz is one of the most gifted scholars in the domain of primeval Christianity and Hellenistic religions, but he already devoted to the Mithras Liturgy a monographic essay, which is here enriched and largely supplemented. We particularly appreciated how Betz deals with the critical debate which spread from Dietrich's book (in particular the criticism put forward by one of the most important scholars of Mithraism, the Belgian Franz Cumont) and how he sets Dietich in the historical and cultural milieu of his age.Chiara O. Tommasi Moreschini auf www.plekos.uni-muenchen.de
Author: Brian C. Muraresku
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 125027091X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As seen on The Joe Rogan Experience! A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations. The most influential religious historian of the 20th century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. Did the Ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians inherit the same, secret tradition? A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age? There is zero archaeological evidence for the original Eucharist – the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus. The Holy Grail and its miraculous contents have never been found. In the absence of any hard data, whatever happened at the Last Supper remains an article of faith for today’s 2.5 billion Christians. In an unprecedented search for answers, The Immortality Key examines the archaic roots of the ritual that is performed every Sunday for nearly one third of the planet. Religion and science converge to paint a radical picture of Christianity’s founding event. And after centuries of debate, to solve history’s greatest puzzle. Before the birth of Jesus, the Ancient Greeks found salvation in their own sacraments. Sacred beverages were routinely consumed as part of the so-called Ancient Mysteries – elaborate rites that led initiates to the brink of death. The best and brightest from Athens and Rome flocked to the spiritual capital of Eleusis, where a holy beer unleashed heavenly visions for two thousand years. Others drank the holy wine of Dionysus to become one with the god. In the 1970s, renegade scholars claimed this beer and wine – the original sacraments of Western civilization – were spiked with mind-altering drugs. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany and archaeochemistry have hinted at the enduring use of hallucinogenic drinks in antiquity. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers. But the smoking gun remains elusive. If these sacraments survived for thousands of years in our remote prehistory, from the Stone Age to the Ancient Greeks, did they also survive into the age of Jesus? Was the Eucharist of the earliest Christians, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist? With an unquenchable thirst for evidence, Muraresku takes the reader on his twelve-year global hunt for proof. He tours the ruins of Greece with its government archaeologists. He gains access to the hidden collections of the Louvre to show the continuity from pagan to Christian wine. He unravels the Ancient Greek of the New Testament with the world’s most controversial priest. He spelunks into the catacombs under the streets of Rome to decipher the lost symbols of Christianity’s oldest monuments. He breaches the secret archives of the Vatican to unearth manuscripts never before translated into English. And with leads from the archaeological chemists at UPenn and MIT, he unveils the first scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelic drugs in classical antiquity. The Immortality Key reconstructs the suppressed history of women consecrating a forbidden, drugged Eucharist that was later banned by the Church Fathers. Women who were then targeted as witches during the Inquisition, when Europe’s sacred pharmacology largely disappeared. If the scientists of today have resurrected this technology, then Christianity is in crisis. Unless it returns to its roots. Featuring a Foreword by Graham Hancock, the NYT bestselling author of America Before.
Author: Andrew Fear
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429957971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Mithras explores the history and practices of the ancient mystery religion Mithraism, looking at both literary and material evidence for the god Mithras and the reception and allure of his mysteries in the present. The genesis and spread of Mithraism remain highly controversial. This book examines our current state of knowledge on the pre-classical Indo-Iranian god, Mitra, and argues that Mithraism was a product of Mitra’s encounter with the religious thought of the classical world. It then charts the life history of Mithraism in the Roman Empire, exploring the social background of its initiates and the reasons for their attraction to the religion. The rituals and beliefs of the cult are as mysterious as its origins; in studying Mithraic "caves" and paintings found in some Mithraic temples, we can better understand and reconstruct the rituals the Mithraists practiced. While "bull-slaying", or tauroctony, lies at the core of the Mithraic mythos, this volume explores other incidents in the god’s life depicted in ancient art, including his miraculous birth and his banquet with the sun, as well as the disconcerting lion-headed "enveloped god". After a fall from grace in the post-classical world, Mithras has resurrected himself in the present, establishing himself as one of the most recognisable if elusive gods of antiquity. Mithras provides a fascinating study of this complex god that will be of interest to scholars and students of Roman and Late Antique religion, mystery cults, as well as those working on society and religion in antiquity more broadly.
Author: Jaime Lamb
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1732621403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
In MYTH, MAGICK & MASONRY, Jaime Paul Lamb develops four thought-provoking interpretations of the symbolism and allegorical content of Freemasonry and some of its appendant bodies. By viewing the craft through the interpretive lenses of ceremonial magick, solar and astrological lore and symbolism, classical mythology and the Roman Mystery cult, Mithraism, Lamb establishes four distinct vantage points from which to survey Freemasonry. Thereby, Jaime Paul Lamb enables Masons, new and old, to develop a more nuanced appreciation of the Craft and a deeper understanding of the Fraternity's priceless initiatory heritage.
Author: Sara Rich
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501386603
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms. The mushroom is an ordinary object whose encounters with humans are usually limited to a couple of species prepackaged at the grocery store. This book offers mushrooms as much more than a pasta ingredient or trendy coffee alternative. It presents these objects as the firmament for life as we know it, enablers of mystical traditions, menders of minds lost to depression. But it acknowledges, too, that this firmament only exists because of death and rot. Rummaging through philosophical, literary, medical , ecological , and anthropological texts only serves to confirm what the average forager already knows: that mushrooms are to be regarded with a reverence deserving of only the most powerful entities: those who create and destroy, and thrive on both. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Author: Carl A. P. Ruck
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fairy tales
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
It was mainly only the European urban centers that converted to Christianity, and often more for political or commercial interests, than as a matter of faith. The old religions persisted in the villages or pagani, from which the term Paganism arose. The Christians built their sanctuaries upon the pagan sites, expropriating their numinous past, assimilating the symbolism of the former deities, and commonly incorporating the actual architectural remnants. The wisdom of those deposed gods and their rites persisted in less objectionable forms -- disguised to delude the censors -- as country festivals and quaint tales often about the fairy folk, who coexisted with this world and could be accessed by magical procedures that perpetuated half-remembered methods of authentic ancient shamanism. Such shamanism always involved pharmaceutical expertise. Mircea Eliade was mistaken in concluding that drugs were characteristic only of the late and decadent stages of a religion. Rock paintings of the greatest antiquity and his own abundant citations indicate that, instead, a pharmacological Eucharist was the norm; and Eliade was himself about to reverse his stance shortly before his death. Encoded in tales seemingly as simple as Snow White with her poisoned red and white apple are themes traceable back to the great epics of Homer and the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh. These patterns of shamanic empowerment lurk also in the histories of the leading families of Europe, who could not completely divest themselves of the former religious basis for their right to rule, but instead they embraced, Christianized, and buried it in sanctified graves, as was the case with the great fairy Melusina, whose eighth abominable son, called Horrible, was murdered. A number of churches involved in the Albigensian heresy claim his body was laid to rest beneath them.
