The Monthly Salon: October
Discover more from The Abbey of Misrule
The Monthly Salon: October
Plus, a reader asks about making connections
Hello readers. Apologies first of all for the slowness in offering up the first of my tales of the wild saints. It was supposed to be with you by now, but the business of life has intervened. We’re nearly there, though. Ewan, our in-house artist, has put together a beautiful carving for the story which surpasses even his usual standards, so I hope it will be worth waiting for. On my return, we will begin the journey.
In the meantime, here is your monthly opportunity to take the floor and talk about anything you like.
While I’m here, I’m going to pass on a thought from a reader. Last week we held one of our regular online Founders’ Gatherings, where Founder Members of this little Substack gather to talk with me four times a year about whatever’s on their minds. One reader brought up a familiar issue: how to find, and connect with, like-minded people. Sometimes, when we see the world in a certain way, it can be hard to find others who share the understanding. Despite my general e-phobia, I recognise that this is one area where the Internet can come in handy.
I suggested on that call that it might be worth putting this quandary out to all of you here. It seems to me that there might be a few of you who would like to talk to each other about building networks, communicating with each other outside of this Substack, and working out how to build spaces for your jellyfish tribe, either online or in actual reality.
Perhaps this is something you’d like to bring up below. It’s up to you. What I have also done is to fire up Substack’s ‘chat’ facility in case this proves useful for this discussion. You can access this via a laptop or a phone, I’m told, and it’s open to all subscribers, who can either join in an existing chat, or begin their own.
If you want to know how to set it up, please look here rather than asking little old Luddite me. I have just started up a chat thread on this topic, which you should hopefully be able to see here. Or, as I say, feel free to start your own.
With all that said, the floor is open as usual, to talk about anything you want.
The Monthly Salon: October
Quick note to say, it was great to meet you last week at the Front Porch Republic Conference Paul, and thank you for answering my question regarding the UK and agrarianism - I had not considered the issue of land shortage before and that has given me lots of food for thought (and the Land magazine looks excellent - just a shame they are not accepting new subscriptions at the moment due to the chaos that their community is currently experiencing!)
Hope not to offend anyone, as many seem to be religious here. Just wondering what you think of such as these four different ways to explain religion.
• God exists: He created everything, knows everything and have been actively communicating and interacting with humanity regarding His plans throughout history, often in symbolism through prophets, sages and churches. Accessed through prayer/meditation/rituals. Whether a personalized deity or more pantheistic cosmic mind, or every nuance in between.
• The atheist way attributes religions to the needs of both individuals and power structures for existential explanations about unknown aspects of our origins, death and ethics. God and mythology are humanity’s way of satisfying this need, by creating Him in our own image. A human-created structure to live comfortably within, a way of centralising and monopolising spirituality. Alleged divine visions are testament to an impressive neurological capacity, or cynical control-mechanism.
• Aliens: Scriptures and prophets describe actual historical occurrences through mythic lenses, though they happened by the hand of extraterrestrial beings, who throughout deep-time have interfered, colonized, warred, genetically modified, taught and/or tampered with Earth’s natural evolution.
• Entheogens: Mythologies describe actual mystical visions experienced (inter)subjectively, oftentimes induced by psychotropic plants and fungi. The visions are in turn attributed to divine powers, either celestial or earthly, communicating and revealing reality to the visionary.
This is a rough sketch, and the divisions can easily be sub-divided and overlap with each other. Especially the last two, if we think of entheogens as a key to access higher dimensions, wherein more evolved extraterrestrials reside. Or one and four, where mythic divinity exists and is accessed by certain techniques or substances, as a sort of Sufi mundus imaginalis or Buddhist Nirvana. Actually, number four works with either of them in some manner or another.
With regards to this psychedelic way of understanding religion, a lot of exciting research and theories have been made. I’ll just briefly touch on some of them:
• The Amanita Christmas Theory traces Santa, flying reindeer and decorating pine trees back to shamans gathering, prepping and sharing the psychoactive mushroom fly agaric with nearby villages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz_JZJkqsEc&t=64s&ab_channel=AfterSkool
• Brian Muraresku’s “The immortality key” delves into ancient religious practices, such as the Eleusinian mysteries and paleo-Christianity (particularly Eastern Orthodox), and the potential use of psychedelics like ergot in shaping mystical experiences for them (especially the Eucharist sacrament).
• John M. Allegro argues in “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross”, mainly through meticulous etymological research into cognates and symbolism, that the use of psychedelic mushrooms played a central ritualistic role in the religious experiences and symbolism of early human societies, and was transferred in morphed forms into the Common Era we still reside in. A bit weird and sexually reductionist, but nonetheless quite intriguing. Initially received as controversial, it’s since been somewhat rehabilitated and vindicated by respected scholars such as professor of classical studies Carl A. P. Ruck.
• Terence McKenna’s “Stoned Ape hypothesis” in Food of the Gods may be more fanciful, but nonetheless quite intuitive with regard to the evolution of human imagination and spiritual inclinations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxn2LlBJDl0&ab_channel=AfterSkool
• Plants containing DMT have been found on the Sinai peninsula and Negev desert, and some researchers attribute f.ex Moses’ vision of the burning bush to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byQ-dgOJuv8&ab_channel=TheCuriousMinds
• Another entertaining theory implies that the balm Jesus the Anointed used to miraculously heal the sick was made from cannabis, or Kaneh Bosom as described in the Bible.
https://www.academia.edu/44695043/Did_Jesus_Heal_With_Cannabis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC8g_26f0qE&ab_channel=TheHempFoundation
• According to recent research from Johns Hopkins and others, a substantial number of participants in experimental psilocybin treatment reported having life-changing mystical experiences, often described as moments of profound interconnectedness, unity, and a sense of transcendence. In some studies, more than 2/3 described it as one of the most spiritually significant of their lives.
By all means, props to those who find peace and spiritual breakthroughs by their own craft. However, given the deep-seated conditioning many suffer under, in an anthropocene age of bicameral mind, Cartesian split and Machine capitalism, my position is that such remedies, and their adjacent theories about the psychedelic roots of religion as mentioned above, may loosen trauma and awaken grounded and forceful spirituality once more, for those who can’t. After all, shouldn’t we enable every tool available to counteract the shitstorm we’re in?
The great Martin Shaw has however stated how unimpressed he often is when youthful seekers tell him about trips they’ve had, because such activity are shortcuts out of rooted cultural contexts and tribal traditions, which often leaves the visionary without long-lasting meaning or capacity to digest the experience – “all sizzle and no steak”, as he puts it.
At the risk of verbosity and a moment too long of your precious time, I simply wonder if these perspectives are interesting, indeed potentially liberating, for believers invested in Paul’s project of enticing the flocks back to the woods and roots of it all, or merely regarded as immature heresy. Or something in between?