Octava entrega: Los Hellenistai, el Rey Milinda y los amantes de Wadi an-natuf

OCTAVA ENTREGA VERTICILS OF PSYCHOHISTORY THE HELLENISTAI KING MILINDA THE LOVERS OF WADI AN-NATUF

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OCTAVA ENTREGA PHILIP CONOVER LAZO

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The Huautla Press/Prensas Editoras de Huautla México D.F.

Primera edición, Mayo 2018.

ISBN 968-6744-05-7 Número de registro: 03-2018-051412191200-01 DR copyright

Philip Richard Conover Lazo

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher´s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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A verticil of leaves

OCTAVA ENTREGA

THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY VERTICILS OF PSYCHOHISTORY THE NOOSPHERE THE DECLINE OF OTTOMAN POWER THE PROBLEM OF PARENTING IN THE XXI CENTURY THE CHECHEN BROTHERS, THE LONE WOLF KILLERS IN ORLANDO AND NICE

We come back to our concept of The Noosphere whereby the collective psychic energy generated by mankind throughout history stays latent as one more of the telluric layers circling the planet to which mankind as a biological entity or phenomena contributes directly. This is the effect of Human History upon the planet. The historical and ethnographic phenomena of Islam as the concretion of psychological and cultural currents during the first five centuries of our Common Era,(CE), saw the competition of Judaism, Christianity and Autochthonous Arab Religion for spiritual primacy in The Arabian Peninsula.

This competition continued after the birth of Islam and probably accounts for the rapid spread of Mohammed’s Koran in its vigorous infancy, although 4

checked at the walls of Constantinople twice, in 674 and 717, facilitated by the void left after the collapse of The Western Roman Empire in North Africa and the fragmented nature of Mesopotamia and Central Asia until the Turkic peoples who had become Islamized strongly established themselves in what had been the territory of The Eastern Christian Roman Empire in an Anatolia dominated by Greek Culture.

For some centuries the competition between the Islamic Ottoman Empire and The Christian West had maintained a certain Equilibrium until the development of Science in the west and the subsequent industrial revolution with its new techniques in warfare and industrial production gave the economies of The West an edge over The Islamic World which had lagged behind in this respect specially in the creation of a modern Navy which gave the western powers an edge over The Ottoman Empire in the control of The Mediterranean. The invasion of North Africa by the Western Powers during the XIX Century came as a great shock to the Islamic World from which it has not yet recovered.

Clearly the decline of Islam since the fall of Ottoman power created a dangerous vacuum in the World. During the Middle Ages Islam became a center of culture, tolerance and enlightenment far in advance of the West. Inquisitive young people flocked to Cordoba and Damascus in search of Knowledge. This is what we are waiting for; from Samarkand to Alexandria, Fez, Marrakesh and Timbuktu a Renaissance in creativity instead of the frustration and violence personified by jihad‌ The psychological pressures on marginalized Islamic youth in the west should find and outlet in opportunity for economic advancement, Culture and Education. It is dangerous for Islamic youth in the West to be confined in ghettos from where many end up in the prisons of Western Europe instead of their Universities. If once their parents were allowed asylum in the West it does not make sense to deny their children participation in Western Culture, indeed in World Culture because the implosion of information in electronic media is creating a new World Culture in which we all participate in a daily basis. It must be understood by Islamic parents that Culture is Universal, that if they live in France they should become interested in the language and history of France, they could participate in the wine harvest or in the restoration of French castles and cultural monuments and in this way show their gratitude for the hospitality 5

of France…but they cannot pretend to ignore France while living in France as if they were still living in their country of origin because they would be putting their children in jeopardy like the parents of the Chechen Brothers did when they continuously disparaged The United States while living in that country as refugees; they were undermining the psychological foundation of their family.

Parenting in The XXI first century anywhere in the World requires a universal, all inclusive, attitude that goes beyond national borders and inherited prejudices, this is one of the more important premises derived from the study of Psychohistory and will be fundamental in creating any sense of identity no matter where one is living or how deep are the national or ethnic roots we claim to have. Just like modern families cannot ignore the realities of Freudian Psychology, such as incest, because they do so at their own peril, Islamic people living in the West should study and reflect on the history of Islam and the country of their residence. So that we could say that the History of The Ottoman Empire is still expanding and reverberating in The Noosphere through its present day off-shot, The Turkish Republic, which only recently went through an attempted coup d’état, itself the product of cultural tensions between the secular heritage of Ataturk: that is, the need to separate the religious elements of Turkish society from Islamic fundamentalism, has not been fully assimilated.

The Chechen brothers so far as they were not conscious of History became victims of History and in the process destroyed their own lives and the lives of several other people. Such is the importance of education. Self-awareness through knowledge is a liberating factor, it will free us from the atavistic prejudices that we have inherited from our ancestral cultures. National folklore is all very well within family circles and celebrations but it has no place in the modern World as a vector of supremacy and power. Just as there is no place in the world today from a Psychohistorical point of view for the narcissistic projection whereby we pretend to reduce the Whole World to the confines of our private religion or national identity be it Islam, Christianity or European Culture, no part is greater than the whole; no “Deutschland uber alles”, no “Let’s make America great”, the United States is great when it contributes to World Culture and Civilization as with Henry Ford, Edison; in so far as mass production has contributed to raise people out of poverty without destroying their original culture , but it is definitively not great when it is led by 6

demagogues and the worst elements of reactionary, racist and supremacist capitalism.

Hypnopaedeia and psychological engineering in education and control of the masses through state or religious propaganda to create docile populations in cultures closed to the outside world and restricted by ideologies that circumscribe thought are examples of what Wilhelm Reich called “The Mass Psychology of Fascism”, have no place in the world today and should be repudiated by the world community in the United Nations. Neither should there be a place in the modern world for theocratic states that do not separate religion from public affairs and unilaterally proclaim that every single human being inside their borders should militate in that particular state’s religion, irrespective and superseding international standards of human rights, specially the rights of women, for today no state stands isolated, independent of the world community and above International Law. These theocratic States or totalitarian States violate the human rights of their citizens generating very dangerous levels of tension that radiate into the Noosphere and affect everyone in the Planet as is the case with the Syrian civil war and the ongoing tension between Israel and The Palestinians or North or South Korea, which then becomes the object of ‘The Grand Game’ of Super Power competition.

Another symptom of Fascism is the control of the sexuality of Youth, especially women’s sexuality and reproductive life, where a male dominated society imposes its rules that generally lead to hysteria and violence and increased criminality. A close analysis by agencies of the United Nations should lead to reports on infractor states; and if deemed necessary, intervention by the international community in the countries, where the violation of the human rights of oppressed minorities are deemed a menace to the security of all. This intervention should be carried out by The United Nations to prevent damaging civil wars that threaten the security of the whole World like the disastrous civil war in Syria whose consequences the whole World is suffering today. A false concept of National Sovereignty in The XXI Century should not give authoritarian anti-democratic regimes the excuse to perpetuate their power and oppress their populations, like in Venezuela where a perverted interpretation of Simon Bolivars Legacy has led to an oppressive, corporative bureaucratic state.

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ARE THE PRESIDENTIAL AND POLITICAL PARTY SYSTEMS OBSOLETE, AN OBSTACLE IN THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY?

Mexico and The United States should leave the Presidential System. It is a fiction to think that one person is going to solve the problems of society. The presidency is authoritarian by nature in any formal definition of a General Theory of The State. It is an atavism, a survival from another era that is now coming to an end. It represents the political dramatization of the child-parent relationship at a moment in history when mature individuals should come forward and participate as full citizens. It is obsolete in the era of internet and direct democracy.

The very complex demands of The XXI Century necessitates individuals who are mature citizens, politically conscious, capable of full participation in public administration from the block level, borough, town council, county, state and federal spheres.

In this sense, The Swiss Federation of 26 Cantons, with their Executive Council of Seven Members elected by The Federal Assembly, becomes the executive branch. The Federal Council is the seven member Executive Body which constitutes The Federal Government of Switzerland and serves as the Collective Head or Government and State of The Swiss Federation of Cantons. While the entire Council is responsible for leading the Federal Administration, each Councilor heads one of several departments of state. The position of Federal President rotates among the seven councilors on a yearly basis, with the year’s vice president becoming the next year’s President (Wikipedia).

The very Theory of The State can be questioned and is an open subject for public debate, no system of government was meant to last forever. We question the right that the political class abrogates unto itself to immobilize to their benefit functions in public administration indefinitely with patrimonial results.

It is for this reason that the reform of public administration to abolish the bureaucracy and open the functions of public administration to the people is the only path for direct democracy which is the only viable solution to break 8

the undemocratic hold of the party system over the lives of the general population.

So that a new law focusing on general social responsibility in public administration shared by all could emerge as a new political consensus based on the use of an Intelligent Card based on a universal citizen data bank that would contain pertinent information on academic standing and work experience. A computer could then assign a place in public administration to any person on the basis of verified information that would lead to an opening without any hindrance of any kind being placed by anyone to deter a qualified individual, who would then have access to such work,( or function), in any department of public administration for a period no longer than six months to forestall any conflict of interest or the rendering to an immovable state public functions that would then rest solely in his own hands. This system would guarantee mobility, wide public participation, transparency and efficacy in Public Administration. Similar systems could be derived from our investigations on Direct Democracy in www.peregrinoenelcamino.blogspot.com, La Huerta del Macehual: La Tarjeta Inteligente, 2013.

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THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY: EIGHTH DELIVERY THE ANCIENT SYMBOL OF THE SPYRAL

Before it is to late I should deliver my message, The Kerygma, A vision of The Eternal, outside time, through the Portal of The Heart onto to an integral vision of The Self, that places us in the within of things and brings back the memories that are key to our recovery of Time in the innermost Heart. The flow of memories is a steady stream that clarifies the mind and helps us put into perspective the interconnected unity of what Is. We are This. We see unity everywhere, the significance of the World and of our lives‌ In Huautla I entered the Portal but it was much latter that I realized where I had been, when I read The Issa Upanishad and The Bardo Thodol‌And the poets, St. John of The Cross and The Songs of Kabir that I understood the gift and the appreciation of the gift in terms of History, of Psychohistory. The immense gallery of saints that gather at the feet of The Divinity in the conclaves of Heaven. What I write is a laborious exercise in praise of The Divine, a circuitous byway to reach the minds of the rationalists, in their language, to help them see, to awake into the life of The Spirit.

At Gobekli Tepe and The Hypogeum of Malta, at Newgrange in Ireland and at Stonehenge the very many people in Antiquity who entered into astral voyage through The Portal and The Spiral provided by the Sacred Plants had a glimpse of The Eternal, The Mystery of life.

The Olmec Cult of the Jaguar: the circle of warrior-priests who sat in the forest floor of the jungle and let loose a jaguar from a sacred stone cage, ate stropharia cubensis or psilocybe Mexicana and awaited The Jaguar to choose one of the company and take him to Xibalba, The Underworld were they both entered as Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the Sacred Twins, who then became oracles and consulted the Spirits of the Ancestors, became shamans through their tutelary-nahual, The Sacred Jaguar and The Mushroom. the Egyptian priests at Abydos in the Cult of Osiris, The Druids during the trance of The Mistletoe, The Hierophants at Eleusis, Sidartha Gautama and Mahavira, Padma Sambhava and Milarepa, the Tibetan Lamas adept at Pho-Wa and Tantra Yoga, the Hindu Yogins who practice Raja Yoga and Samadhi Yoga, the shamans of 10

Siberia who use amanita muscaria, the medicine men of the Amazon who prepare Ayahuasca, The Pygmys of The Congo who use Tabernathe Iboga, the Huichol, Yaqui, Tarahumara and Pueblo Indians during the ceremony of Peyote in their sacred Kivas, the Mazatec curanderos who partake of The Sacred Mushrooms and the adepts in self-hypnosis who have described entering into altered states of consciousness like Michel de Nostradamus and Carl Gustav Jung.

Since the discovery of Gobekli Tepe it is becoming increasingly apparent that there was a Neolithic Civilization in late Pleistocene times some 14 000 years ago. A pyramid was discovered underwater off Yohiwara Island in the Sea of Japan by marine geologist Masaki Kimura and submarine archeologist John Anthony West. Large megalithic ruins were first discover by Dr. Manson Valentine off the coast of Bimini Island in the Bahama group. An entire complex of architectural structures was photographed with sonar scanner by oceanographer Pauline Zalitzki and Cuban marine geologist Manuel Iturralde in a sandy plain 600 meters under the surface of the sea, near Guanahacabibes peninsula, off the tip of Western Cuba.

Dr. Masaki Kimura thinks the submarine pyramid off Yohiwara Island could be 16 000 years old. This is in the Pleistocene before the melt dawn during The Terminal Pleistocene Event, ( TPE ), raised the level of the sea approximately 90 meters. If we consider that for that pyramid alone there most have existed a formative period of paleo-anthropological evolution in culture several centuries long; then we could consider a Neolithic Period in late Pleistocene times.

The Gulf of Khambhat Cultural Complex, ( GKCC ), which includes the modern and the ancient City of Dwarka were studied over the course of several years

by The National Institute of Ocean Technology headed by Dr. S.R. Rao, dean of Hindu Archeology. In the process of decoding The Mahabarata the ancient city of Dwarka was established to be the mythical Kingdom of Krishna mentioned in several religious texts. Some of the artifacts found in the ancient underwater City were found to be 16 000 years old.

The Hypogeum of Malta was carelessly and irresponsibly dated to be 5500 years old when in fact the ruts made by the moving implements used to transport the 11

monoliths were later discovered to continue under the present sea level for a considerable distance along a plain that is now submerged and which was over water more than ten thousand years ago thereby placing the antiquity of the site long before The Pleistocene Terminal Event. The Vatican with British and Maltese authorities came into collusion, destroying evidence by disappearing the results of the report by the original archeologist who first worked at the site in 1907, Immanuel Macri. These self-proclaimed censors destroyed several thousand skeletons of a curiously elongated skull race found inside the Hypogeum during WWII and erased rock paintings along the passages of this remarkable man made cavern, that in the testimony of Macri showed animals that became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene.

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Another most astonishing fact occurred some ten thousand years ago when someone carefully backfilled with rubble the Sacred Kivas at Gobekli Tepe, very possibly, a short time after The Great Terminal Pleistocene Event. Where the people who did this trying to erase the memory of a by- gone era, suddenly terminated, disillusioned with their gods whom they thought had abandoned them?

All this coincides with the oldest extant Mayan date recorded in the inner court of the palace of Pacal in Palenque: June 5, 8498 BCE. Indeed, why would the Maya want to remember such an exact date, even they, who are famous for their astonishing calendar? Unless it was an epoch making event that literally saw the end of an Era ‘in a single day and single night’ as Plato wrote in his Critias. An event so world shattering that its memory survived the ages and was passed dawn generation after generation- the collision of Asteroid A with The Planet Earth.

We remember Otto Muck’s description of the event: a ten kilometer wide asteroid comes hurtling dawn from the Eastern sky as a great ball of fire larger than the visible sun, splitting in two in a great explosion, throwing debris over a large area of Eastern North America and then plunging into the sea deep in the Puerto Rican Trench, fracturing the Atlantic Ocean Plate all the way to Iceland. Hecatomb and volcanism followed, mass evaporation of sea water, gigantic tsunamis and earth quakes, the sinking of continents, the subsidence 13

of tectonic plates, ( Guanahacabibes ). Massive volcanic ash clouds filled with the vapor of scorched seas spread over the Northern Hemisphere only to rain for more than the proverbial ‘forty days and forty nights’. It was not just one event but a series of interconnected planetary disasters that precipitated the mass extinction of multiple species, mega fauna and unknown millions of men…erasing an ancient Pleistocene Civilization the world over.

Those who survived knew that the old world had ended. Perhaps that was why they filled up places like Gobekli Tepe and started reckoning time with extreme care, as a way to remember that most portentous Event that had brought about the End of an Era…and to read the stars for any signs of a possible future return of such a Meteor charged with destiny and doom.

The World which followed began to take shape in the Eurasian Steppes some ten thousand years ago, in the fertile Sahara, in the valleys of the great rivers: the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Indus, The Mississippi, The Amazon; in Palestine at Jericho and Catal Huyuk in South Eastern Turkey. But the History of Religion started long before that. The History of Religion is incomprehensible without first understanding The Pharmacopeia of Entheogenic Plants and their relationship with ecstatic experience, its cultural and ritual forms in Pre-History as seen in the very ancient Cult of The Spiral, The Vortex, The portal between this World and The Plane of The Bardo and its derivation into Religious Literature and Theology in Historical Times.

First, for many thousands of years there was the ritual use of Entheogenic Plants which forged a powerful link of awareness between the nascent mind of men and the surrounding Natural World. Indeed the very birth of clearly articulated Language can be attributed to the necessity of elocution during shared Entheogenic Experience. Not only language but song was developed during Entheogenic rite as a need to harmonize one distinct sound that could be shared by all participants as it has been suggested by the acoustics in certain chambers of the caverns at The Hypogeum of Malta or within the enclosed chambers of places like Gobekli Tepe or Newgrange; a common sound recognized by all, that would come to symbolize the momentous cognitive breakthrough of shared inner experience as in the songs of The Huichol, The Hopi and The Navajo, composed and sang in the Kivas during Entheogenic Experience.

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Yet no only music or speech but Art would evolve at the same point in time and become necessary to establish the shared reality of Entheogenic or ecstatic experience and to represent this, the living image of the natural world, in Rock Art as in Altamira, so as to leave a material evidence, a sign post of It happening in time and place. A Spiral was designed and represented in Rock Art. It became the First Religious Logo or hierophany, extant in Human Pre-History. It was the pictorial representation of the vortex sometimes seen during the visions leading to ecstatic experience latter associated with ‘astral traveling’, immortalized by Stanley Kubrik in his magnificent Space Odyssey; probably known to the Druids who could have experienced The Vortex in their rites of initiation to The Order as I, myself did during my Experience with The Sacred Mushrooms of Huautla. The Egyptian Priesthood within their Temple-Pyramids most have experienced it in their advanced training as did the Warrior-Priests of Chichen-Itza seated on the Jaguar Throne at the center of the Pyramid or the Aztec Order of The Eagle Warriors,(Caballeros Aguila), at the Sanctuary of Malinalco; in the Lamaseries of Tibet in some form of Tantra or Pho-Wa that had to do with the moment of death as in The Tibetan Book of The Dead.

The experience of Death was probably first conceptualized as a transit of human consciousness through a psychic portal right then, and this was synthesized in the image of The Spiral. Another such symbol was the stenciled print of a human hand on the cavern wall or rock shelter- the first ‘human signature’. These were signs of the emerging spirituality of Mankind, the birth of Consciousness, its first signature. As if affirming to themselves:’I am’, an ancient Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’; saying to posterity - ‘Here I am’, ‘I was here’.

The last Glacial Maximum was the last period when the Ice Sheets were at their greatest extensions 26,000 years ago. Deglaciation commenced in the Northern Hemisphere 19,000 years ago and in Antarctica 14,500 years ago approximately, which is consistent with evidence that this was the primary source for an abrupt rise in the sea level.

At about this time vast sheets of ice covered much of North America, Northern Europe and Asia. These Ice Sheets profoundly affected Earth’s climate causing draught, desertification and a dramatic drop in sea levels. It was followed by The Late Glacial Maximum.

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The Late Glacial Maximum circa 13,000 to 10,000 years ago or Tardiglacial as it is sometimes known, is defined primarily by the beginning of the Modern Warm Period in which climate in the Northern Hemisphere warmed substantially causing a process of accelerated Deglaciation following The Last Glacial Maximum circa 25,000 to 13,000 years ago.

At this time human populations retreated into biogeographical refugium, refuge areas like the Crimean Peninsula and the high valleys of The Caucasus, as the result of The Last Glacial Maximum climate conditions and gradually began to repopulate The Northern Hemisphere’s Eurasian Land Mass, particularly The Pontic-Caspian Steppe which here interests us specially because it was the Home or ‘Urheimat’ of The Kurgan Culture of the Proto-Indo Europeans who latter introduced a Patriarchal civilization to India and The Mediterranean World.

Evidence of Climate Change is gathered from oxygen isotope stages, (OIS), in stratified deep sea sediment cores like those taken in Oceanographic research during the 1970’s by ships like NOAAS Glomar Challenger and the Soviet Academician Petrovski. Also the observation of certain reappearing fauna and flora, fossils that can only survive in temperate climates, the appearance of periglacial loess in the European plains and pine-birch woodlands replacing the tundra.

Human site occupation was most prevalent in the Crimean Peninsula from 16,000 BP, a most likely refuge during the coldest periods of The Last Glacial Maximum. Here populations of the Magdalenian Cultural type constructed tumulus graves latter known as ‘Kurgans’ by Soviet Era archeologists like Lithuanian, Marija Gimbutas. The Cultural horizon of these proto-indoeuropeans Kurgan builders most have included the use of Entheogenic Plants such as amanita muscaria in their funerary rites similar to their contemporaries at other refuge sites like Gobebli Tepe in South Eastern Anatolia and The Hypogeum at Malta along the mountain range that then united Africa to Sicily and southern Italy.

These people repopulated the Pontic-Caspian Steppe and domesticated the horse in the course of their wanderings. They would use horses to drag the bundles of tent skins tied to the tent poles which they fastened to their horses 16

by means of leader thongs much like the Comanches did with the horses they bought from the Spaniards at the Fairs in Taos, New Mexico, several millennia latter. The kurgans invented the wheel, tired of the slow pace of dragging their camp gear behind their horse’s hooves.

In the steppes west of the Urals at Khvalynsk in the Volga region horse remains were found interred in human graves alongside horse headed maces of the Samara and Botai Cultures some 7000 years old. The earliest remains of a wheeled cart were found at the Storozhova Mohvla kurgan in Dnipropetrovsk in the Ukraine and are 4000 years old. Yet wheeled vehicles must be much older than that. These people are believed to have spoken a Proto-Indo-Iranian language ancestor of the Indo-Iranian Language family. ‘this identification is based primarily on similarities between sections of The Rig-Veda, with ancient Indo-Iranian hymns recorded in Vedic Sanskrit with the funerary rituals of the Sintashta culture, 2100-1800 BCE, within ‘The Andronovo Horizon’, as revealed by archeology.’ (Wikipedia, Sintashta Culture) The Maikop, Yamna and Afanasevo cultures of central Asia, the Altai Mountains and Southern Siberia are ancestral to the Historical Skythians, Cimmerians and Tokarians who are related to the Europoid Mummies of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang. These people were described by the ancient Chinese historian and traveler Zhang Qian, 164-113 BCE, as being tall, red or blond hair, blue or green eyes, straight noses and speaking an ancient Tokarian Language that had a rather ‘guttural’ sound…They were the Sogdian and the Bactrians encountered by the Greeks of Alexander when they ventured into ‘Maracanda’ and ‘TransOxiana’ in Central Asia.

What is Psychohistory?

We are talking about the evolution of the Ideological Superstructure of Humanity, of the Formation of The Noosphere. Humanity is a psychic and biological mass in continuous evolution- a continuum. Before the appearance of writing, language was perhaps man’s greatest invention. A generation may pass away but its language remains, employed by their children: thus the IndoEuropean corpus of languages remained to become the modern languages of the world spoken in the Western Hemisphere. These languages had their origin 17

in the Late Pleistocene among the people of The Steppe who domesticated the horse and invented the wheel. Some of them went west from a point North of the Black and the Caspian seas; others went East. In Ethno-linguistic terms the Indo-European linguistic matrix of the West became known as ‘Centum’ and the linguistic matrix of the East as ‘Satem’. Languages like Greek and Latin emerged from the Centum root and languages like Hittite. Iranian, Sanskrit and Tokarian grew out of the Satem matrix.

‘The separation of proto-Indo-Iranian language into Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit is estimated, on linguistic grounds, to have occurred around, or before 1800 BCE. The date of composition of the oldest Hymns of the Rig Veda is vague at best, generally estimated to roughly 1500 BCE’. The center of the division of Indo-Aryan from Iranian languages was at The Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex. BMAC, around 1700 BCE. This Bronze Age Central Asian Culture was the fulcrum and matrix of the Aryan Civilization that radiated into North India, which was in effect, contemporaneous with the Indus Valley Civilization with which it had great commercial and cultural exchange; so that the supposed invasion of ‘the Aryans’ into North India was more like a pacific, continuous flow, movement of populations and commerce over the centuries, than an outright military conquest that probably never took place.

An early Indo-Aryan presence is assumed in the Late Harappan Horizon around 1900 BCE. The intrusion in the Punjab of “Proto-Rigvedic” elements in the Gandhara Culture at the end of the Bronze Age in India show the way in the composition of the Sacred Language in the Liturgical Vedas. And here I would like to emphasize the hymns to the God Soma as representing some of the oldest shamanistic elements that came dawn into India from the Steppes of Central Asia. By the time of the Sanskrit Grammar of Panini, the Ashtadhyayi, 3959 “verses”, or rules of linguistics and grammar, syntax and semantics, the scholarly disciplines of Sanskrit Vedic studies were established in the 6-5th Centuries BCE. Panini’s highly systematized and technical method in linguistics and semantics inherent in his approach to the concepts of phoneme and morpheme and the root describes algorithms to be applied to them for the formation of well defined words was highly advanced for its time. It had no equivalent in Greek or Roman times and was not equaled until the XXth Century when it became the basis for research in semantics and semiotics.

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Theories which I studied with Professor of Philology and Comparative Linguistics, Maurice Wissman at The Sorbonne in 1968-1969. Professor Wissman advanced a very interesting theory of Pre-History on the formation of Culture determined by Environment and Geography from the late Pleistoce on; a comparison of the Northern European Tundra and woodland park with the Mediterranean environment of coast lines and sea side plains were visibility and eyesight prevailed over the ‘auditory´ nature of living in the forests of Northern Europe. So that two differing kinds of structural logic in perception arose: The Mediterranean Visual Experience which eventually gave rise to the predominance of the Visual Arts: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, on the one hand, in Southern Europe; and on the other, the development of Symphonic Music, the Additive Art par excellence, in Northern Europe. This wonderful observation represents a true Verticil of Psychohistory. You have on the one hand Mediterranean’s like Le Notre, Velazquez and Caravaggio and on the other northerners like Bach, Mozart and Hyden, to name a few.

The movements in population due to climate change and pressure on the food supply generate cultural encounters between different human groups and the challenge arising from this is one of Synthesis– of a new cultural synthesis. This is the challenge of Psychohistory we are seeing in Europe today, where people from Africa and the Middle East are arriving in large numbers similar to the migrations of Antiquity.

In defining what Psychohistory is we want to determine how the Aurignacian and Cro-Magnon populations of Eurasia at the End of The Pleistocene became the civilization of today. What forces in Culture intervened. And for this purpose we would like to divide this period of time into 5000 year cycles: The Late Pleistocene from 15,500 to 10,500 BP The Mesolithic Period: 10,000 to 5,500 BP The Historical Period: from 5,500 years ago to the Present.

Towards the end of the Pleistocene Gobekli Tepe and Malta were great sanctuaries and centers of pilgrimage of related tribes and lineages of the large areas that surrounded them. The Malta Plateau is a shallow shelf formed from the high points of a land bridge between Sicily and North Africa that became 19

isolated after sea levels rose following the last Ice Age. This Plateau was at one time fertile land and must have been inhabited by semi nomadic hunter gatherers of the Ibero-Maurisian Culture similar to The Natufian Culture of Palestine and North-East Africa. At that time there was a land bridge connecting the African Continental Shelf with the Adventure Bank of South-west Sicily and The Malta Plateau. The Maltese Archipelago and the Island of Pantelleria were the high points over this ground, (see National Geographic Oceanographic Maps of The Mediterranean).

Here lived the people who built The Hypogeum of Malta and its surrounding sanctuaries comprising a veritable late Pleistocene megalithic underground cathedral standing over a sea side plain facing the ancient Mediterranean. It was the work of many generations over several centuries of careful spiritual development leading to the great portal and the spiral‌ the inner chamber of the Sleeping Lady where The Sacred Plants were eaten and transcendental experience encountered and shared in the solemn ceremony of The Kiva, not unlike those experienced by The Anasazi of North America several millennium latter, (image of the Sleeping Lady in Third Delivery).

Over the last one hundred years archeological evidence concerning The Hypogeum of Malta has been destroyed or disappeared by the Catholic Church and the succeeding governing authorities of Malta in such a manner as to hide the antiquity of the place and the nature of the people who used it; all of which was seen as a threat to established academe and the authority of the JudeoChristian tradition.

The Spiral is the symbol of Entheogenic Rites, it is the representation of the vortex of light seen upon entering the Portal (as in the painting of Hieronymus Bosch painting of The Vortex or Psychic Continuum); more than twelve thousand years ago human beings were eating the Sacred Entheogen at the Hypogeum of Malta. The sculpture of The Sleeping Lady found in the inner chamber of the sanctuary is the proof of this, this sculpture is the representation of the Entheogenic trance that brought our ancestors face to face with The Portal, as they entered the vortex between the two worlds, as they stepped in to the parallel world of the Unconscious and lived the wondrous experience of the Divine as It was understood at the time. This is what scared the Vatican and the British authorities of Malta: that the World should know 20

about this and that their authoritarian hold on the fragile minds of their subject populations dissolve‌.this was and continues to be the most elemental of their fears- the loss of their power; so they suppress knowledge and destroy evidence and do everything that is in their power to keep people ignorant and subject to the Abrahamic, Judeo Christian illusion, which the oligarchies of London, New York and Paris consider an essential cultural induction to the authoritarian systems of the Western World now threatened by Islam, an even more authoritarian and ignorant world culture in decadence for several centuries now.

For places like Gobekli Tepe and the Sanctuaries of Malta hold the key to the origin of religious ideas in the World before The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event that inaugurated The Holocene and a new Era in human history that separates us from the world that preceded it, lost to our historical memory by a psychohistorical event of such magnitude that our collective memory has erased it, does not have access to it, has refused to face it for centuries and in such a convenient manner that the dark powers that be, do not want us to remember. We are entering an age of political reaction and theological obscurantism in the West, and if we want to survive this Dark Age that is coming we should be applying the new technologies in communication to enlighten ourselves and create a new world culture based on knowledge and inclusive pluralism.

This transitional period that obscures our lives to this day was backfilled with rubble like at Gobekli Tepe by a mnemonic accident we have defined as ‘The Great Deluge´, which continues to block our tired minds, our tired historical conceptions to this day. Perhaps it would help if we reconstruct the past in order to recover it, in order to recover our historical memory in a healing psychohistorical process, Some twelve thousand years ago the now submerged Malta Plateau of the Southern coast of Sicily was a large sea side plain were lived hunter gatherers of the Iberomaurusian culture who had learned to cultivate certain plants in family plots and possibly kept goats, pigs, sheep and cattle and lived in simple oval-shaped huts made of wattle over low stone foundations, ( see figure in following section ), in what pre-historians and archeologists call an 21

‘Epipaleolithic´ culture, transitional from the late stone age to the neo-lithic agricultural, more settled life.

At the southern end of this plain stood a hilly terrain overlooking the sea of what would have been an ancient straight separating Pleistocene Europe from Africa. This hill country was wooded, what paleontologists call the Mediterranean Woodland Park, in the Epipaleolithic, in what today are the Islands of Malta, Gozo and Comino . Standing by the sea side, this area most have had something special: limestone caves and perhaps Sacred Groves that contained amanita muscaria. Perhaps these were their ancient hunting grounds at the time of the preceding Kebaran Culture and they had continued to live there in a more settled fashion. The fact was that these healthy and enterprising Iberomaurusians started constructing Megalithic Structures that survive to this day.

Over the millennia more than twenty temple sites were constructed perhaps by different matrilineal clans who recognized a certain kinship similar to what happened at Gobekli Tepe; where more than twenty associated sites have been discovered, the center of a large cultural area more than a hundred kilometers in diameter serving a similar purpose as a center of pilgrimage for the local Clan Ecumene.

These two great sanctuaries shared many characteristics in common for they were contemporaneous even though the dating of the sanctuaries at Malta and Gozo is in dispute on purely ideological grounds because the Catholic Church which dominates the religious and intellectual climate in Malta feels uncomfortable or threatened by the antiquity of the Maltese spiritual heritage along with thousands of elongated skulls that were destroyed and disappeared.

A few remaining specimens sequestered by official academe remain hidden in a vault at the Museum in Barletta, and have purposely not been described to humor the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Be that as it may, there is no doubt in my mind about the contemporaneous nature of Malta and Gobekli Tepe. There is multiple evidence for this, the ‘cart ruts’ of ‘clapham junction’ named after a famous rail station in London, strange parallel lines hewn on the basalt rock that go dawn to the sea and disappear under the waves at Misrah Ghar il-Kbir. These were the ruts that were formed by the stone balls used to slide and transport the megaliths from their quarries to their resting place in 22

the sanctuaries and are evidence that the Sanctuaries of Malta were built before the end of the Last Ice Age when sea levels rose upward to ninety meters in The Mediterranean Basin, The Old World region where olive trees grow.

There are also reports of large megalithic structures under the sea near the coast of Malta. In 1999 Hubert Zeitlmeier discovered a megalithic temple one mile off the coast of Sliema and made an underwater film that was recognized by fellow underwater archeologists. It is also known that a megalithic structure once existed inside Valletta’s harbor at the foot of Fort Saint Angelo. According to Jean Quintinus this temple extended, ‘over a large part of the harbor, even far out into the sea’, recorded in 1536. In 1606 it could still be seen under the water as reported by Megeiser who saw, ‘rectangular blocks of unbelievable size’ standing on the sea bed.

These facts place all the megalithic temples of Malta several millennia before the dates proposed by ‘academic officials’ that have a political, bureaucratic or ideological axe to grind. It seems very strange to me that the Bronze Age inhabitants of Malta would be building Pleistocene megalithic buildings similar to those at Gobekli Tepe of eight thousand years before, when their neighbors in Egypt were building pyramids and mastabas of a more advanced design. The Early Minoans of Crete, another Mediterranean island not far from Egypt were building impressive structures 5000 years before the present when according to ‘official’ archeology the Maltese were dragging huge monoliths along ‘Clapham Junction’. This is to ignore the History of Architecture that even in remote Antiquity followed certain patterns of development in areas that were connected by trade and cultural radiation.

14000 years ago the Iberomaurusian culture of Pleistocene Malta was similar to that of Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia. The prototype for these cultures had been the Natufian Culture of Palestine, North Africa and the Near East of two thousand years before; so that along the Maltese Plain that connected Malta to South-East Sicily you would be able to see groups of oval shaped wattle huts with stone foundations in forest clearings along meandering rivers and beyond, near the sea, the hills with the megalithic temples of Ggantija, Tarxien and The Hypogeum among others.

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Possibly more than ten thousand people lived there at one time or another over the millennia. Some whose crania were found at the Hypogeum had very large elongated skulls, the priestly caste representing several lineages, which had their sacred ground within the different oval shaped chambers of the temples.

This priestly caste with artificially elongated heads practiced temple sleep and divination, the analysis of dreams and ‘astral travelling’ with amanita muscaria, claviceps purpurea and psylocibe , Entheogens that were known to homo nearthentalensis thousands of years before, ( Soleki: Shanidar Cave, Irak ).

These people were like you and me they were our ancestors. We have a very real connection with them through the syntax of our language and the daily magic of our lives, we share with them our secret dreams that come from the unconscious. In their time began the pursuit of the Eternal, there is no other way to explain the stunning splendor and the originality of places like The Hypogeum of Malta and Gobekli Tepe. You have to have eaten The Sacred Plant, to realize the secret meaning of The Spiral, to cross The Portal and come back to this life, to have been given the tremendous opportunity to see The Other Side, to contemplate with lucidity the vibrant Telesis that animates All. The world will end when everyone has achieved Illumination. This is The Message left by The Ancients.

We should consider the Mediterranean woodland park were the Iberomaurusian and Natufian population roamed in their character of huntergatherers very near the sphere of the animals they hunted or were in the process of domesticating. This they expressed in their wonderful Cave Art. This extensive woodland that covered the shores of an ancient Mediterranean that did not look at all like the one that exists today, contained a large variety of plants and animals that are now largely extinct like the Aurox, an oversize bull, that became a central figure in Entheogenic rite and in the rites of passage throughout the Mediterranean world as is observed in the religious iconography of The cave paintings of Alta Mira in the Upper Paleolithic, at Kattal-Huyuk and in Minoan Crete.

Although it should be remembered that the nature of the rites changed in ways that are difficult to determine after The Pleistocene Terminal Event as is evidenced at Gobekli Tepe were the site was mysteriously filled with rubble, ‘ceremoniously buried’, so to speak, around the year 8000 BCE; that is, some 24

ten thousand years ago. The psychology of mankind changed about that time, the shadow of the cataclysmic Pleistocene Terminal Event, (PTE), literally hung over mankind for many centuries, great clouds of volcanic ash, the remnants of the extremely violent volcanism that tore the Earth’s crust along the Mid Atlantic Rift hung over Northern Europe for a couple of millennia after Asteroid A impacted Earth in the Puerto Rico Trench, The Night Of The Hyperboreans still remembered in Herodotus time.

The difference in culture before and after this event can be noted in the different architectural layout at sites such as Gobekli Tepe and Catal Huyuk. The first was the sanctuary of a large ecumene of hunter-gatherers that existed in the region that later became Cilicia in South-Eastern Turkey. Catal Huyuk, two thousand years later, became the center of a nascent Neolithic society of an entirely different character to the preceding civilization of Gobekli Tepe. The people of Catal Huyuk were physically smaller, more gregarious, with more advanced industries that included the exploitation of obsidian, the elaboration of cosmetics and the beginnings of agriculture, husbandry and metallurgy.

Consequently their religious rites were different from those of the Gobekli Tepe civilization. In the kivas of Catal Huyuk the Aurox and The Mother Godess figured large; whereas the religious culture of Gobekli Tepe seems to have been more abstract, centered on dreams and on the crossing of The Portal as in The Hypogeum of Malta, Stonehenge in England, and Sandscomb in Ireland, The Dolmen at Gavrinis a small island in Brittany, were the Spiral, the Symbol of Entheogenic Rites, of the Dreamtime as in Australia, and the Crossing of The Portal seem to have been the definite aim of The Rites.

At Catal Huyuk we observe a different civilization, a different race, we could say, of people who lived under the Shadow of The Deluge, who had somehow become humbler and preferred to live gregariously in settled towns like Jericho and Catal Huyuk. They were no longer ‘roaming about’, so to speak; they had lost the élan, the freedom of mind and the sense of security afforded by the Paradise like forests of the Late Pleistocene Mediterranean Park. After The Pleistocene Terminal event few people attained the level of awareness and confidence enjoyed by our distant ancestors of epi-paleolithic times; If anything, those elegant and sturdy, dressed stone pillars at Gobekli-Tepe, express that.

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THE LOVERS OF WADI AN- NATUF

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The lovers of Wadi an-Natuf could very well be the symbolic Adam and Eve of The Abrahamic Tradition, this Natufian Sculpture of some 14 000 years ago is the first representation of a frontal coitus by humans in Art that is known to Archeology up to this time. It celebrates the Birth of Love between men and women as a cultural phenomenon, the Invention of Love or the spiritual dialogue, the mutual acceptance of ‘The Other’ in erotic contact or romance that leads to the desire for frontal coitus and eye to eye contact during love making as opposed to the solitude of the ‘back’ or ‘dog posture’ that could have been the standard since the days of Lucy, the Australopithecine of 3.3 million years ago.

The Natufian Culture is important in that it supported a semi-sedentary population before the introduction of agriculture 12 500-9 000 BCE. They founded the earliest Neolithic in Palestine and built Jericho, one of the first villages in the World. The archeologist Dorothy Garrod excavating in Wadi anNatuf and the Mount Carmel region in 1928-1931, found very primitive stone sickles in Natufian assemblages that point towards the possibility of very early agriculture. This is evidence, along with the knowledge that Iberomaurusians cultivated plants in North Africa and the Maltese Plain, for an early development of farming in The Fertile Crescent.

The cultural sequence in prehistorical Palestine could have been something like this: ‘Caananite Culture developed in situ from the earlier Ghassulian chalcolithic culture. Ghassulian itself developed from the Circum-Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex, which in turn developed from the fusion of their ancestral Natufian and Harifian cultures with Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) farming cultures, practicing the domestication of animals during the 6200 BCE climatic crisis which led to the Neolithic Revolution in the Levant.´ (Wikipedia, Phoenicia).

The Natufians built small oval shaped huts, semi-subterranean, with a small wall of dry-stone surrounding the perimeter over which a lose structure of bush and wattle was erected similar to those of the contemporary Iberomaurusians of Malta. No traces of mud brick were found, they became common in the following Pre-Pottery Neolithic. The houses have a diameter of from three to six meters and contain a central fireplace. (Wikipedia, Natufian Culture) 27

There is evidence for the domestication of the dog. They lived by hunting gazelles, aurochs, wild boar as well as onagers and Ibex along with water fowl and fish in the margins of the Jordan River. They ate pistachios and almonds and various plants, legumes and cereals, some of which they probably cultivated. They probably spoke a Proto-Afro-Asiatic language that could have originated from a linguistic matrix extending from The Eastern Sahara to the Sudan and Ethiopia.

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VERTICILS OF PSYCHOHISTORY WHERE THE UNKNOWN BORDERS THE KNOWN THE OXUS RIVER CIVILIZATION, THE BACTRIA-MARGIANA ARCHEOLOGICAL COMPLEX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE RITUAL USE OF THE ENTHEOGEN SOMA AS FOUND IN THE RIG-VEDA

In the phenomenological continuum of psychohistory we want to show the development of Culture from the Samara and Botoi Cultures dawn to the Universities of Taxila and Nalanda in North India. Including the origin of The Horse Sacrifice, an important collective memory in Hindu-Aryan Brahamanic ritual tradition as was The Cult of the God Soma. Also we would like to underlie the importance of King Menander I in the spread of Buddhism from Bactria and Gandhara to Central Asia, to Ceylon and; possibly, the introduction of GrecoBuddhist thought from Bactria into Alexandria and the Eastern Mediterranean World through the ports of Barygaza near the Delta of river Narmada on the Gulf of Khambhat and Berenice in the Red Sea.

We quote from Edmund Husserl’s Pure Phenomenology section 63 on The Special Importance for Phenomenology of Considerations of Method. “If we observe the rules (Normen) which the phenomenological reductions prescribe for us; if, as they require us to do, we strictly suspend all transcendences; if we take experience pure, in accordance with their own essential nature, then after all we have set dawn there opens before us a field of eidetic knowledge, (an ability to vividly recall images after only a few instances of exposure). Once the difficulties of the first beginnings have been overcome, we perceive it stretching endlessly in every direction. The variety of the species and forms of experience with their essential natures real and intentional is indeed inexhaustible; and correspondingly endless is the variety of essential connections and apodeietically necessary truths that have their ground in these. Thus this infinite field of the apriori of consciousness which in its unique singularity has never yet come to its own, never strictly been seen at all, must now be brought under cultivation and the full value of fruitage drawn 29

from it. But how to find the right beginning? In point of fact, the beginning is here the most difficult thing of all and the situation out of the ordinary. The new field does not lie spread before our gaze crowded with given products, so that we could simply grasp them, confident of being able to make them objects of science; nor can we be sure of the method we need for our advance.

For when we seek to press forward on our own account and increase our knowledge of this new field, we lack the data of the natural standpoint, natural objects in particular, which through long-standing experience and the thoughtpractice of millenniums have become thoroughly familiar through their various distinctive properties, their elements, and their laws. Here the unknown still borders on the known. All methodical labor attaches itself to fact, all improvements of method to methods already in use; our concern generally is merely with the developing of special methods which fit in the already prescribed and well established requirements of an approved scientific canon of method in general, and in the work of discovery they take their lead from these requirements.� ( Ideas, Edmund Husserl, George Allen & Unwin, 1967 p.

187 ).

And for this we have the agency of Paleolithic Art and Culture in the image of The Reindeer, spiritual god-father to Humanity. Certain contemporary seers, if taken to the scene of a crime are capable of visualizing the event as it happened in the immediate past establishing a connection with it. Well, that is exactly what the art of reconstructing the past is- a door to the mental and spiritual life of our ancestors. All we have to do is to open this door and be the ancestor.

And we want to mention Werner Herzog’s excellent documentary film on The Chauvet Cave in Ardeche as an example of this methodological approach that throws light on the daily life of Paleolithic men through an appreciation of the wall paintings they left behind.

A work of art is charged with the spiritual energy of its creator. It is a code of thoughts, feelings and emotions and if we are capable of reading this language we can become to a certain extent the person who created the original work of art, see through his eyes and feel the vibrancy of life as he lived it.

The portrait of a shaman executed by an old Aurignacean artist some 14 000 years ago is such a door.( Joseph Campbell, The Hero of a thousand faces p.

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112 ). The image of intimate symbiosis between a man and an animal, the image of a shaman impersonating a reindeer will introduce us to the astonishing spiritual world of The Late Pleistocene.

This extraordinary figure, the oldest known of a shaman, is dancing in the skin and antlers of a reindeer, on a wall of the “Trois freres” Cave in Ariege, France, surrounded by the figures of a multitude of animals from the world which he knew. His attitude is ecstatic, possibly in Entheogenic trance , for it was in the process of domesticating reindeer that ancient man discovered amanita muscaria, ( Wasson, Furst. Reindeer in Siberian Shamanism, Wikipedia ).

The hunters of the Aurignacian and Magdalenean world observed reindeer in the Tundra of Eurasia while they ate amanita muscaria a mushroom early man well knew, conspicuous in the floor of the forest, with its bright orange cap sprinkled with white specks, a powerful ambrosia that beckoned any would be forager of the early world to voyage into the unknown of his own inner self. A special symbiosis developed between man and Reindeer through the eating of this sacred entheogen. The physical, psychical and spiritual boundaries between the two species were crossed – man and reindeer became partners, coexist together to this day in certain parts of The Old World around The Artic

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Circle, and we could consider them to be Veritable Spiritual God-Fathers to Humanity.

It is in this deep state of heightened awareness produced by Entheogenic plants that the beginning of Enlightenment is found, of man’s power of association in the cognitive process, of self-awareness that leads to religious expression as in The Rig-Veda, the oldest of the Hindu texts that joyfully declares: ´We have drank The Soma; we have become immortal…’ and this is what the ancestors of The Sami, The Nenets, The Evenks, The Chuckchi shared with their reindeer and later transmitted to the World of Central Asia.

The urge to communicate this wonderful experience to his fellows possibly engendered the first ritual dance on the part of a shaman in his effort to communicate the unique experience he had shared with a reindeer. He wore its pelt and its antlers and mimed the encounter in the forest very much like The Cora and The Huichol of the Pacific North West of Mexico mime the dance of deer who in Mexico is the tutelary totemic deity of the Sacred Entheogen since it transports the spores of the mushroom psylocibe Mexicana in its belly and disseminates them with its excreta in the floor of the forest. The shaman of the ‘Trois Freres´ cave of Ariege was acting out the eating of The Sacred Mushrooms for the benefit of his fellow tribesmen as he presided over the ceremony.

That amanita muscaria and reindeer formed part of sacred rite from very ancient times is preserved in the story of Santa Claus, a westernized image of a jolly lap dressed in red, speckled in white, just like the Mushroom. Santa is the owner of a sled and a fabled team of reindeer that can actually fly through the Night Sky of an imaginary Scandinavia, taking Santa on his errand of Christmas celebration; which by the by, is a story of birth, death and rebirth just like the phenomena of The Sacred Entheogens was to the ancient Greeks in The Cult of The Mother Demeter.

There exists a vertical sequence of cultural transmission, a true verticil of psychohistory, that descends along the axis of Central Asia from Siberia following a line along The Caspian-Pontic steppe of The Samara, Botoi and Andronovo Cultures from the Mesolithic Period to The Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex of The Oxus River Civilization to Bronze Age Harappa 32

and Mohenjo-Daro of The Indus Valley Civilization. This Historical vehicle carried the matrix of Indo-European culture into The Indian Subcontinent and it includes The Horse Sacrifice and the ritual use of The Sacred Entheogen amanita muscaria both described in The Rig-Veda.

Beyond The Pontic-Caspian Steppe and the Aral Sea runs the Amu Darya River through the fertile valley of Samarkand, the Trans-Oxiana of Alexander the Great. At Kopet Dag in the Gorgan Plain in North-Eastern Iran, people were making mud brick houses 8000 years ago. The inhabitants were farmers who kept herds of goats and sheep and were planting wheat. By some 5000 years ago, in the Early Copper Age the Oasis of Kopet Dag developed an urban society at Altyn Depe that maintained a brisk commerce with Harappa and MohenjoDaro. At Gonur, according to Victor Sarianidi, the Soviet Era archeologist of Greek origin, who excavated the place; the Palace he found, measured 150 by 140 meters, and other material remains reveal a Bronze Age Civilization rich in fixed wheel pottery and advanced metallurgy, with a ‘Palace Economy´ like Minoan Crete and Mycenian Greece; a civilization in contact with The Indus Valley and Mesopotamia.

The Andronovo and Afanasevo cultures of South Western Siberia East of the Aral Sea and the Altai Mountains descendants of The Samara and Botoi Cultures which domesticated the horse more than 7000 years ago, went on to develop the Wheel and later the spoked wheel chariot around 4000 BP. According to David W. Anthony, author of The Horse, the Wheel and Language, Soma was introduced into the Indo-Iranian Sphere from The Bactria-Margiana Culture.

The old Hindu Religion of the Aryan shamans who later became the Brahman caste probably originated through cultural interaction between these peoples in the ancient urban centers of Bactria-Margiana “as a syncretic mixture of old Central-Asian and new Indo-European elements”.

The God Soma of The Rig-Veda was brought by these people into India circa 3500 BP. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, translator into English of The Rig-Veda, together with R. Gordon Wasson, the notorious and celebrated bankeradventurer, author and amateur ethno-micologist who ate the Sacred Mushroom, psylocibe mexicana with Maria Sabina in Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, have coincided, and I agree with them, that the fabled mushroom, amanita muscaria, was the prime substance that went into the elaboration of 33

The Sacred Drink, Soma, which reactionary cultural resistance aside, constitutes the origin of what is known as The Phenomena of Illumination .

We can clearly, and without a doubt, trace to the use of amanita muscaria along The Eurasian Tundra from Norway to Siberia, to the original inhabitants of this region following their mushroom eating reindeer, in the Late Pleistocene and Mesolithic, on through to the Bactria-Margiana Civilization, to prehistoric India and the later formation of Hindu-Yogic Philosophy, Buddhism and Hinduism, the different currents of thought and religious practices that stem from them. It is true that these religions are cultural constructions that stem back several millennia in the evolution and transmission of religious ideas that underwent a transformation of their assemblages and ethnographic components, of their corpus theologicum, over the generations; yet it can be said that at their very core stands The Phenomena of Illumination giving unity, coherence and continuity to the living experience, as it is expressed within individual souls, of such people like Sidartha Gautama, Mahavira, Kabir, Gandhi, Tolstoi and Ramakrishna.

In the Western World, this same Proto-Indo-European religion or current of thought, introduced into the Mediterranean World of Matriarchal Eleusis the very word “God” with all its linguistic variants of the Centum and Satem branches of philological research, such as: Daeus-Pithar, Zeus, Theo, Deus, Dios, Dieu, God and Gott, to mention a few. But more to the point, we should mention The Ritual Use of Entheogenic Plants as the true origin of religion throughout the Whole World. More so than the prophets and avatars who were at best the popular “explicators” of the Phenomena of Illumination, as it derived from ancient tribal Entheogenic rite like that of the Aurignacean shaman of The Trois Freres Cave, within the different contexts of ethnographic regions of the World, throughout History.

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EL REY MILINDA

GOLD STATER OF EUCRATIDES, BACTRIA, II CENTURY BCE, LARGEST GOLD COIN OF ANTIQUITY, 169.2 gramms, 5.8 cen, found near Bukhara, was bought by NAPOLEON III

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SILVER COIN OF MENANDER I – BASILEUS SOTERUS MENANDROUBRITISH MUSEUM

Out of this matrix of Central Asia accompanied by Alexander of Macedon, the progenitor of Transculturalism, who wanted Greeks to marry Persians, emerged The Hindu Greek Culture of Bactria that produced the outstanding figure of King Menander I, who reigned between 165 and 130 BC, known in the Indian Subcontinent as ‘King Milinda’.

Menander I was an Indo-Greek ruler of Bactria of the second century B.C. He was known to the Hindu as “King Milinda”, having a reputation of great wisdom, wealth and power and of longevity. He expanded his kingdom from Central Asia to North Western India that included the Valleys of Kabul and Taxila in the region of Gandhara. He is remembered in Hindu and Buddhist folklore for being the king who inspired The Milinda Panha or Milinda Pañña, a popular text in Mahayana Buddhism that recounts simply, in beautiful and lucid prose, the essential tenets of Buddhism; given in a sirdar, or public debate, that took place between King Menander and the Hindu sage Nagasena in the city of Sagala by the River Hydroatis in North-Eastern Punjab. It was from this time during King Milinda’s reign that Buddhism expanded into Central Asia.(include image of the sirdar) During his sirdar with Nagasena, King Milinda first poses a series of questions to the sage on life and the coming to terms with man’s place in the World, to ascertain the authenticity of the spiritual claims of Nagasena, who had been 36

recommended by his trusted advisers as the wisest man in North India on matters of religion. Once the King has ascertained the great lucidity and strength of Nagasena’s answers he lets him speak on, only now and then interrupting him with a difficult question: ( Milinda Paññah, The Questions of King Milinda, translated by T.W. Rhys Davis)

And the venerable Nagasena said to Milinda, the King: ‘ you, Sire, have been brought up in great luxury, as beseems your noble birth. If you were to walk this dry weather on the hot and sandy ground, trampling underfoot the gritty, gravelly grains of the hard sand, your feet would hurt you. And as your body would be in pain, your mind would be disturbed, and you would experience a sense of bodily suffering. How then did you come, on foot, or in a chariot?’

‘I did not come, Sir, on foot. I came in a carriage.’

‘Then if you came, Sire, in a carriage, explain to me what that is. Is it the pole that is the chariot?’

‘I did not say that’ ‘Is it the axle that is the chariot?’ ´Certainly not.’

‘Is it the wheels, or the framework, or the ropes, or the yoke or the spokes of the wheels, or the goad, that are the chariot?’

And to all these he still answered no.

‘Then is it all these parts of it that are the chariot?’

‘No, Sir.’ ‘But is there anything outside them that is the chariot?’

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THE BHARHUT YAVANA, INDIAN MUSEUM, CALCUTTA

And still he answered no.

‘Then thus, ask as I may, I can discover no chariot. Chariot is a mere empty sound. What then is the chariot you say you came in? It is a falsehood that your Majesty has spoken, an untruth! There is no such thing as a chariot! You are king over all India, a mighty monarch. Of whom then are you afraid that you speak untruth? And he called upon the Yonakas,(the Greeks from Bactria), and the bretheren to witness, saying: ‘Milinda, the king, here has said that he came by carriage. But when asked in that case to explain what the carriage was, he is unable to establish that he abered. Is it, forsooth, possible to approve him in that?’

When he had thus spoken the five hundred Yonakas shouted their applause, and said to the king; ‘now let your Majesty get out of that if you can?’

And Milinda the king replied to Nagasena, and said: ‘I have spoken no untruth, reverend, Sir. It is on account of its having all these things—the pole, the axle, 39

the wheels and the framework, the ropes and the yoke, the spokes and the goad—that it comes under the generally understood term, the designation in common use, off “chariot”’.

‘Very good! Your Majesty has rightly grasped the meaning of “chariot”. And just even so it is on account of all those things you questioned me about—the thirty two kinds of organic matter in a human body, and the five constituent elements of being—that I come under the generally understood term, the designation in common use, off “Nagasena”.

For it was said, Sire, by our Sister, Vagira, in the Presence of The Blessed One: Just as it is by the condition precedent of the co-existance of its various parts that the word ‘chariot’ is used, just so it is that when the Skandhas are there we talk of a ‘being’’.

‘Most wonderful, Nagasena, and most strange. Well has the puzzle put to you, most difficult though it was, been solved. Were The Buddha Himself here He would approve your answer. Well done, well done, Nagasena!’ (Book II, chap. I).

1. The King said: ‘What is the root, Nagasena, of past time, what of present, and what of future time?’

‘Ignorance. By reason of ignorance came the Confections, by reason of the Confections, consciousness, by reason of consciousness, name and form, the six organs of sense, by reason of them contact, by reason of contact sensation, by reason of sensation thirst, by reason of thirst craving, by reason of craving becoming, by reason of becoming birth, by reason of birth old age, death, grief, lamentation, sorrow, pain and despair. Thus is that the ultimate point in the past of all this time is not apparent.’

4. The King said: ´are there any confections that are produced?’

‘Certainly’ ‘Which are they?’

‘Where there is an eye, and also forms, there is sight, where there is sight there is contact through the eye, where there is contact through the eye there is sensation, where there is sensation there is a longing, where there is 40

longing there is grasping, where there is grasping there is becoming, where there is becoming there is birth, and at birth old age and death, grief, lamentation, pain, sorrow and despair begin to be. Thus is rise the whole of this class of pain. Where there is neither eye nor form there is no sight, where there is no sight there is no contact through the eye, where there is no contact there is no sensation, where there is no sensation there is no longing, where there is not longing there is no grasping, where there is no grasping there is no becoming, where there is not becoming there is no birth, and where there is no birth there is neither old age nor death, nor grief, lamentation, pain, sorrow and despair. Thus is the ending of all this class of pain. (Book II, chap. III. 1)

The king said: ‘Nagasena, is there anyone who after death is not reindividualised?’

‘Some are so and some not.’

‘Who are they?’

‘A sinful being is reindividualised, a sinless one is not.’

‘Will you be reindividualised?’

‘If when I die I die with craving for existence in my heart, yes; but if not, no.’

‘Very good, Nagasena!’ (Book II, chap. I, 6).

In his Edicts, King Ashoka, another King of North Western India, the third Mauryan Emperor who reigned between 268 and 232 BC, mentions, (Edict 13), that he had sent Buddhist emissaries to Greek rulers as far as The Mediterranean. And that he developed herbal medicine in their territories, for the welfare of humans and animals, ( Edict 2 ). ( Wikipedia: Hindu-Greek Kingdoms . ( This most have happened in Alexandria where the Therapeutae profited from the knowledge of Yoga, and possibly, from the knowledge of medicinal plants, including Entheogenic Plants brought in from India.

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PILLAR OF ASHOKA IN VAISHALI

According to The Mahavamsa, The Great Stupa in Mahavamsa in Anuradhapura, Siri Lanka,(shown below), was dedicated by a 30 000 strong “Yona”, ( Yonakas or Yavanas, as the Greeks from Bactria were known in NorthWestern India), delegation from “Alexandria”, ( Sagala, modern Sialkot in the Punjab, Pakistan, capital of King Menander I ), around 130 BCE. The inscription 42

above is from an Edict of Emperor Ashoka written in Greek and Aramaic which were the international languages of diplomacy since the time of Alexander of Macedon. Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 285-246 BCE, sent a certain Dionysius as ambassador to the Court of Ashoka and he in turn received Greek Buddhist missionaries headed by the monk Dharmaraksita who started a tradition of contact between Buddhist Bactria and Hellenistic Alexandria which had consequences both for Mahayana Buddhism and The Neo-Platonist School of Alexandria of Philo, Amonius, Plotinus, Clement and Origen among others.

The Greeks in Bactria and Ghandara played an active role in the propagation of Buddhism in North West India, and Central Asia. Also they could have introduced Buddhism in the Eastern Mediterranean through the ports of Barygaza, (modern Baruch), and Berenice in the Red Sea, on to The Library of Alexandria where its manuscripts were later lost but which nevertheless could have been studied there and served as an influence on Neo-Platonism, the Philosophy of Philo Judaeus, the early Christian Theology of Origen, and the Neo-Platonists: Amonius Saccas, Plotinus, Iamblicus and Porphyry among others. Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata mentions the influence of Indian gymnosophists and Bactrian Sramanas, Indo-Greek Buddhist priests, on Western Philosophy, especially Neo-Platonism, the Philosophy of his fellow Alexandrians, Amonius Saccas, Plotinus and his own disciple, Origen .

After the rise of The Parthian Empire under Arsathes, (or Arsaces), the GreekoBactrians were cut off from direct contact with the Hellenistic World of Seleusia around 238 BC. Overland trade continued at a reduced rate, while the trade 43

through the Indian Ocean with Ptolemaic Egypt increased through the ports of The Red Sea, Myos Hormos and Berenice.

Han China’s ambassador an explorer Zhang Qian visited Bactria in 126 BCE and reported in his dispatch to Emperor Wudi, transmitted by the Historian Sima Qian, having seen products from China being sold at the bazar in Bactra, (modern Balkh) and seen coins of a nickel-copper alloy whose technology originated in China. When he asked where these products came from he was told that they were brought in by merchants from India.

Upon his return to China Zhang Qian informed Chinese emperor Han Wudi of the sophisticated level of Civilization in Bactria, Ferghana and Sogdiana, to the effect that Emperor Wudi desired to open a special route to market Chinese products directly to Central Asia and beyond to the Mediterranean World to circumvent the Indian trade, thus inaugurating what later came to be known as The Silk Road, the same one being advocated today by the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, as The Belt and Road Initiative, in 2017 of our Era, so that a True Verticil of Psychohistory was started by Diplomat-Explorer , Zhang Qian, 2143 years ago.

Xuanzang was a Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveler and translator who was born in Henan province around 602. He made a historical journey from China to India and back through Xinjiang Province, Samarkand and Balkh; entered North-Western India through The Kyber Pass and continued to Nalanda where he stayed for three years studying Mahayana and Yogacara under Silabhadra who was then a hundred and six years old. On his return to China after a sixteen year sojourn through Central Asia and North India where he collected hundreds of the more ancient and important Buddhist texts and met thousands of Buddhist monks, jains and Brahamins from whom he learned all he could, he returned to China were he was much honored by Emperor Taizong of The Tang Dynanty. Emperor Taizong helped him set up a translators’ bureau and academy with the best help available from Buddhist monks who came from all over East Asia. His school translated many works, perhaps the most famous being The Heart Sutra and texts of The Yogacara School of Mahayana Buddhism of which he, Xuanzang, became the founder and most important exponent within Chinese Buddhism. His pupil, K’ei-chi, 632-685, wrote an encyclopedia of The Doctrines of Mahayana.

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The travels of Xuanzang along the Ancient Silk Road are of great importance, an example of cultural diffusion and the transmission of religious ideas in the Formation of The Psychohistorical Noosphere that surrounds this Planet with many verticils that interact with each other and that together form World Culture. And here I would like to remember Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and The King of The Wood, an ancient priest of The Celtic World. One of his functions was to cut a branch from a tree in The Sacred Grove which then became ‘The Golden Bough’- a description of a true Verticil of Ancient History come dawn to us in the Form of Sir James Frazer’s magnificent History - The Golden Bough.

The Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism is an example of this; with which the present author is much related, through his contact with the Lama Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen, which although brief, became significant, because it united The Yogacara with the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the Author’s transcendental Visions in Huautla, which from a purely perceptual or psychological point of view, helped clarify the similarity between ecstatic experience and a direct vision of Noumena as a unified phenomenon equivalent to Husserel’s Phenomenology and the ontology derived from the metaphysics of Yogacara.

From generation to generation the understanding of key points in the visualization of interior experience that will help us in the knowledge of being is the very essence behind the transmission of spiritual ideas. We wish to exemplify this transmission through a sequence of some of the revered teachers of The Mahayana and Yogacara traditions, another verticil of Phychohistory.

The Patriarch Asvaghosa, c. 80-c.150 CE, wandering poet and ascetic who wrote an epic life of Buddha, The Buddhacarita, The Sandaurananda, a poem on the conversion of Ananda, the half-brother of Buddha, and the Mahalankara, or Great Ornament, in the first century CE. Nagarjuna, (c. 150-c.250 CE), was the first to compose a ‘systematic exposition of The Doctrine of The Voidness’, in Sanskrit: Shunyata.

Asanga, 4th Century, Xuanzang wrote that Asanga would teach in a mango grove and that he often visited The Tusita Heaven in his dreams to converse with Maitreya Bodhisattva and receive His Teachings which he then communicated to his disciples at the mango grove. He is the author of The Lamkara Sutra.

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Vasubandhu was the half-brother of Asanga and with him one of the founders of The Yogacara School of Mahayana Buddhism. He composed the first organized system of metaphysics. In his Critique of The Self he argues against the Hindu concept of a personal soul stating that the sense perception of the individuality of soul is a psychological misconception stemming from the sequential and transitory nature of perception and that it is not conductive to Nirvana because it is a form of (personal) attachment. He is considered one of the founders of systematic Buddhist Metaphysics.

Silabhadra, 529-645, had been born a Brahmin into a royal family before converting to Mahayana Buddhism, was Head of Nalanda University, a teacher of Philosophy who taught Xuanzang in the more advanced aspects of Yogacara.

He lived to the great age of 116 years, was a 106 when he taught Xuanzang for three years.

Shantideva, 687-763, born into a royal family decided to attend Nalanda University a day before his coronation at the age of 20, succeeded Silabhadra eventually as head of Nalanda; wrote The Siksha-Samacaya and the Bodhicarya Vatara, treatises on the functions of an incarnate Bodhisattva.

Padma Sambhava a near mythological figure in North India and Tibet has a long history in the popular lore of Tantrism where he is believed to have achieved a special form of “Phowa rainbow body” through secret tantric consort rituals with Mandarava, the daughter of a king of Odisha in India. There was, nonetheless, a historical Padma Sambhava who in 749 founded the Ningmapa School in Tibet and is thought to have written The Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of The Dead, (Oxford University Press, edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, 1927).

Tilopa, 988-1069, was a tantric practitioner from Bengal who was advised by a dakini, a female Buddha who inspires devotees, to work in a brothel for a prostitute named Dharima as her pimp. One day he received a vision in which the entire Mahamudra of Raja Yoga leading to Samadhi was revealed to him.

From then on he started a wandering existence and began to teach. His most important student was Naropa.

Naropa’s devotion to his teacher Tilopa ensured that he achieved his goal of enlightenment in one lifetime. He spent twelve years with Tilopa, he underwent many hardships during his training and had to overcome many obstacles and 46

received many transmissions of secret knowledge from his guru until he achieved the Mahamudra of Self-Realization.

Marpa spent several years translating many texts of the Buddhadharma for the benefit of his native Tibet. After his second visit to India Milarepa became his disciple. Marpa was married to Dakmema and had several sons, they lived in Southern Tibet in the village of Lhodrak. He was the first Tibetan Guru of The Kargyutpa Succession. He built the Monastery of Stongdey in Zanskar in 1052.

Milarepa, 1052-1135, famous Tibetan poet and Yogin. He achieved Mahamudra in less than a year. His teacher, Marpa, had him build a nine story tower singlehandedly, in Sekar Gutok, Lhodrag, Tibet, that is still standing. He was said to be able to tele-transport himself great distances and to do Yoga naked on the snow and be able to melt it creating a hollow space around him.

Guru Gampopa Dagpo Lharge, 1077-1152, was a Doctor of Medicine at Dagpo in the region of Kham of Western Tibet and the best student and successor of Milarepa; wrote The Precious Rosary,(in Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, Oxford University Press, edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, 1958), founder of the prestigious Dagpo Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. His disciples founded the four Kagyu Branches that are active to this day. He was thought to be a reincarnation of King Song-tsen Gam-po, the first Buddhist ruler of Tibet who lived some five centuries earlier and died in 650.

Rechung Dorje Tagpa, pupil of Milarepa and friend of The Guru Gampopa wrote a biography of Milarepa, (Tibet´s Great Yogi, Milarepa, Oxford University Press, edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, 1928).

Having come this far we should not here forget one of the precepts of Zen Buddhism regarding the written word: that we should keep in mind the richness of daily experience and its power to surprise us with the unsuspected event that arrives full of meaning and coincidence to prompt us to reflect and meditate on the Here and Now; cultivating Consciousness, remembering what the Fifth Patriarch of the Zen sect, Hung-jen, said about his successor, Hui-neng: “four hundred and ninety-nine of my disciples understand well what Buddhism is, except one Hui-neng. He is a man not to be measured by ordinary standards.

Hence the robe of faith was handed over to him. The lay-disciple, Neng, was quite unique in this respect, for he did not at all understand Buddhism. He 47

understood The Way only and no other thing.” (D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, pp.

27-28).

The Way it is; this is what the pilgrim is seeking and this is what I understood in Huautla in June 1968. Some years later, when I came to study Buddhism in the Books of Evans-Wents, especially after I read The Bardo Thodol, I realized that I had been treading along The Same Path like the disciple Hui-neng and that I need’nt call that Buddhism; but The Way. Even while I was experiencing these Visions in Huautla, I realized, that to remain in this state of All-Seeing Grace, I would have to devise a Method to maintain Full Consciousness throughout the reminder of my life. And that this was The Way of Yoga.

We wish to give a table of the various aspects or parts of Yoga and their general relationship to one another: The Part yogic control of

Giving Mastery of

I.Hatha Yoga

breath

physical body and vitality

II.Laya Yoga

will

powers of mind

love energy sound form

powers of divine love energizing forces of Nature powers of sound vibrations powers of geometrical form

(1) Bhakti Yoga (2) Shakti Yoga (3) Mantra Yoga (4) Yantra Yoga

and leading to

III. Dhyana Yoga

thought

powers of thought-processes

IV. Raja Yoga

method

powers of discrimination

Knowledge activity Kundalini self

powers of intellect powers of action powers of psychic-nerve force powers of ecstasy

(1) Jñana (2) Karma Yoga (3) Kundalini Yoga (4) Samadhi Yoga

From Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, Edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, Oxford University Press 1935, p. 33.

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THE GOLDEN BOUGH: VERTICILS OF PSYCHOHISTORY

a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h.

Siberian Shamanism: Proto-Indo-European, Bactria-Margiana Mahayana Buddhism: Tantra, Yogacara, Kargyutpa, Zen Hinduism, Jainism, Vedanta Theravada Buddhism Islam Judaism Egyptian, Amarna Atemism Eastern Christianity: Syrian, Armenian, Greek Orthodoxy; Coptic, Abyssinian i. Mesopotamian: Gobekli Tepe, Katal Huyuk, Sumerian, Babylonian, Persian, Zoroastrian j. Hellenistic k. Roman Christianity: Catholicism l. Phoenician, Punic, Etruscan, Tartessian m. Traditional African Shamanism and Religion: The Dogon and The Entheogenic Religion of The Pygmies and their use of tabernanthe iboga (Richard Evans Schultes) n. West European Christianity: Gallic, Germanic, Scandinavian o. Iberian Catholicism p. Entheogenic Pre-Hispanic Survival, Syncretic Mexican Catholicism: Guadalupe-Tonantzin-Cihuacoatl, Tlaloc (Peter T. Furst) q. Andean Syncretic Christianity: Inti, Viracocha, Pacha-Mama. The Entheogenic Religions of The Amazone: YajĂŠ among the Tukan and VaupĂŠ (Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff) 49

This is The Medium through which he Divine crosses The Shadow and projects Itself in the within of things; into every individual human consciousness that is lit by Divine Awareness. The Verticil is the conductive branch, which gave Origin and Life to all these religions that vibrate in The Noosphere; it is to be found in Entheogenic Ecstatic Experience, in the ritual use of The Sacred Plants from Pre-History to this day.

The Greeks of Bactria had an agreement on Epigamia with the Mauryan Court of India, that is, an accord to recognize officially the unions between Greeks and Hindu. Ambassadors were exchanged, the Historian Megasthenes went to live at Pataliputra, the Mauryan Capital. Some of Emperor Ashoka’s emissaries to the Mediterranean world were Greek-Buddhist monks who lived in Alexandria as resident savants, still remembered by Clement of Alexandria who, some four centuries later, had an interest in Mysteric Religions and Oriental Philosophies, (Stromata, book I, chap. 15 ).

The Pre-Chritian monastic order of The Therapeutae in Egypt, is possibly a deformation of the Pali word “Theravada”, a school of Buddhism, and this movement may have drawn its inspiration from Buddhist asceticism which later was an influence in Egyptian monasticism personified by Saint Anthony and his band of desert anchorites. (Perhaps Clement’s wide ranging interests persuaded Pope Sixtus V, on the advice of Cardinal Baronius, in 1586, to remove him from the ranks of The Church Fathers as being too subversive for the interests of The Counter Reformation ).

Clement continues in his Stromata: “The Indian Gymnosophists are also in that number, (of the Therapeutae), and the other oriental philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called Sarmanae, (Shivaite Sadhus?), and others Brahmins. And those of the Sarmanae who are called “Hylobii”, neither inhabit cities nor have roofs over them, but are clothed in the barks of trees, feed on nuts, and drink water in their hands. Like those called encratites in the present day, they know not marriage nor begetting of children. Some too of the Indians, obey the precepts of Buddha, whom on account of his 50

extraordinary sanctity they have raised to divine honors.” (Stromata, book I, chap 15) We read in Wikipedia: “Greco-Buddhism”: “Buddhist gravestones from the Ptolemaic Period have also been found in Alexandria in Egypt, decorated with depictions of The Dharma Wheel. The presence of Buddhists in Alexandria at this time is important since “It was later in this very place that some of the most active centers of Christianity were established."

After King Menander I, known in India as “King Milinda”, converted to Buddhism the Dharma extended as far North as Alexandria Echaste, modern Tashkent, and to the South as far as Ceylon, modern Siri Lanka. Menander I, ( 165-130 BCE ), is one of the few Hindu-Greek Kings to be mentioned in both Hindu and Greco-Roman sources. Plutarch represents Menander as an example of The Enlightened Ruler and relates that upon his death the different cities of his kingdom fought for the privilege of enshrining a part of his ashes in a sacred stupa just as had been done with The Buddha. After Menander several IndoGreek kings used in their coins the title: “Dharmakassa”, which means, “Follower of The Dharma”. They would also show themselves in their coins performing the Buddhist Vitarka mudra.

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We find in MacEvilly’s “The Shape of Ancient Thought” p. 378: “ the spread of Ghandaran Buddhism may have been stimulated by Menander’s royal patronage as may have Greco-Buddhist Art as well as the development of Gandharan sculpture which seems to have accompanied it.”

At Sirkap near Taxila Buddhist Stupas have been excavated standing side by side with Greek and Hindu temples. The Milinda Pañha scriptures, a Pali language discourse in the Platonic style held by King Menander and the Buddhist monk Nagasena is a beautiful testimony of The Dharma; exemplifies the encounter between Hindu and Greek thought. Buddhist manuscripts in cursive Greek have been found in Afghanistan praising Avalokiteshvara, The Buddha of Compassion, a Theological figure not unlike Christ, from the 2nd Century BCE. Sven Hedin and Sir Aurel Stein in their expeditions to Central Asia in the Early XX Century, recovered many Buddhist relics and manuscripts in the Taklamakhan desert and The Tarim Basin; at Dan Dan Oilik near Khotan and at Bezeklik in The Thousand Buddha Caves, between the cities of Turpan and Louland, near the ancient ruins of Gaochang in the Mutou Valley of the Flaming Mountains of Sinkiang in North-Western China. Some of these manuscripts were written in Bactrian Greek and Sanskrit and several other Ancient Central Asian Languages, texts of The Mahayana School that include, a very ancient copy of The Diamond Sutra, thought to be the World’s first Printed Text dated to AD 868.

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THE DIAMON SUTRA, OLDEST PRINTED TEXT IN THE WORLD, 868 CE

A procession of 30 000 Buddhists from Alexandria on the Caucasus, modern Bagram in the Kabul Valley, was led by the Greek-Buddhist monk Mahadarmaraksita to Sri Lanka to dedicate a Stupa. According to the Mahavansa, the Ruwanimelisaya Stupa in Anuradhapura, was dedicated by 30 000 pilgrims, “Yonas”, Indo-Greeks from Bactria.

The Mahayana Movement may have originated in a dispute among the Nikaya Buddhist sects at the end on the 2nd Century BCE about the nature of the humanity or the super-humanity of The Buddha and related questions of metaphysical essentialism surrounding His figure influenced by Greek Philosophy, especially by Platonism, not unlike the controversy between Arianism and Nicean Orthodoxy that split Christianity between the 4th and 6th Centuries. This form of Mahayana may have been carried along The Silk Road to Central Asia and China under Greek and Kushan influence.

His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama has written this: “The Greek stylistic influence on the representation of The Buddha, through its idealistic realism, permitted a very accessible, understandable and artistic visualization of the ultimate state of Enlightenment described by Buddhism, allowing it to reach a wider audience.

One of the distinguishing features of The Gandharan School of Art that emerged in North West India is that it has been clearly influenced by the naturalism of Classical Greek Art Style. Thus while these images still convey the inner peace that results from putting the Buddha’s doctrine into practice, they also give us an impression of people who walked and talked and slept much as we do. I feel that this is very important. These figures are very inspiring because they do not only depict the goal but also the sense that people like us can achieve if we try.”

The 14th Dalai Lama 53

Standing Bodhisattva, Gandhara, MusĂŠ Guimet

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THE HELLENISTAI

The Hellenistai were those Jews who lived in the Diaspora of The Eastern Mediterranean World after the death of Alexander, invited by his successors to settle in the cities they founded: Antioch, Alexandria, Tarsus, Pergamum; and latter in Greece, the Western Mediterranean and North Africa in Cyrenaica and Carthage where they were quite numerous and thriving before the time of The Kittos War in 114. These were Aramaic, Greek and Latin speaking Jews, who intermarried with local populations of Greek and Syrian origin and had mixed families, but who nevertheless preserved their Jewish heritage, even if they read The Torah in Greek, The Septuagint, and were also familiar with Greek culture and philosophy. To identify them Luke uses the term, Hellenistai. When he had in mind Greeks, gentiles, non-Jews who spoke Greek and lived according to Greek fashion, then he used the word Hellenes (Acts 21, 28). In Acts 6, Luke makes clear that the Hellenistai were not Hellenes. And here it is pertinent that we should quote Josephus, to establish from the point of view of the time when Alexander of Macedon entered Jerusalem, just how important it was for the orthodox Jews, the question of mixed marriages: ( Antiquities, Book Eleven, chap. 8.2 ).

‘But the elders of Jerusalem being very uneasy that the brother of Jaddua, the high priest, (who received Alexander of Macedon at the gates of Jerusalem after his conquest of Tyre), though married to a foreigner, should be a partner with him in the high priesthood, quarreled with him for they esteemed this man’s marriage a step to such as should be desirous in transgressing about the marriage of foreign wives, and that this should be the beginning of a mutual society with foreigners…’

The conquest of Tyre by Alexander of Macedon after a seven month siege, (332), and his entrance into Jerusalem after having been invited by the High Priest Jaddua and welcomed by the people of Jerusalem, all dressed in white, at the outskirts of the city, was an earth shaking moment in the History of The Middle East with truly pychohistorical consequences that are still reverberating today in the cultural formation not only of the Jewish people but of the whole Mediterranean world and Asia as far as Bactria and North Western India. It 55

could be said that in Bactria and North Western India the philosophical influence of Greece affected the development of Mahayana Buddhism and in the West the very origin of Christianity which was precipitated by the irruption of the Macedonians into Asia and the hybrid culture that Alexander desired, which later became known as Hellenism and which inadvertently, through Judaism, fathered Christianity.

These Hellenistai had friendly relation with the Ptolemaic who ruled in Alexandria, indeed they had strong commercial ties with this dynasty and had their own quarter in The City, East of The Palace, according to The Jewish Encyclopedia. But what interest us here is the role The Hellenistai had in the origin of Christianity because we believe that the great mental tension between Jewish religion and Greek Culture was personified by this new population of mixed blood that came into being with the marriage of Greek and Jew. The necessity of creating a psychological ground to stand on and thus be able to coexist within Judaism and Greek Culture simultaneously gave birth to Christianity.

Who not more exemplary of this predicament than Saul of Tarsus with all his inner psychological conflict and spiritual dynamic so prevalent in the cultural atmosphere of Antioch and Tarsus alive in the synagogues of the Diaspora, resounding to the many voices of a plural theological debate between the many currents of Jewish, Persian and Greek religious thought: Sadducees, Pharisees, Essene, Zoroastrian, Manichean, Stoic, Platonic, Eleusinian and other Middle Eastern Mysteric Cults like those of Mitra, Isis, Adonis and Attis, as seen in the paintings of the Synagogue of Dura-Europus.(figure below)

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Saul of Tarsus after years of struggle and soul searching came face to face with The Divine in The Road to Damascus, which he resolved in the elaboration of Christianity, a spiritual synthesis that had been in the making for several generation latent at the very center of a people who like him were neither Jewish nor Greek. In this, The Hellenistai were like the Chicanos who are neither Mexican nor American but are condemned to live in the middle world between Mexico and The United States , a perilous and conflicting borderland between two countries with very dissimilar, often conflicting, cultures just like Ancient Greece and Palestine: “Ethnic, cultural and social tensions within the Hellenistic Jewish world were partly overcome by the emergence of a new typically Antiochian, Middle Eastern Greek doctrine ( doxa ), either by: 1. Established, autochthonous Hellenized Cilician Jews, themselves descendants of Babylonian Jewish migrants who had long adopted elements of Greek culture and civilization while retaining a generally conservative strict attachment to Halakha, 2. ‘heathen’, Classical Greeks, Macedonian Greeks and Greco-Syrian gentiles, or 57

3. The local autochthonous descendants of Greek or Greco-Syrian converts to mainstream Judaism known as proselytes,(‘those who stand at the gate’), and Greek-speaking Jews born of mixed marriages (my italics).”(From Wikipedia: Hellenistic Judaism).

These last are especially important to our study and an understanding of the origin and the development of Christianity since they were widely disseminated throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and their very psychological make-up provided the dynamic for the conflict between Judaism and Hellenism that was resolved by Christianity.

The process of deification of a teacher by his disciples is well documented

by D.T. Zuzuki in Zen Buddhism, (pp. 28-41), and by Edward Conze in Buddhism: its essence and development, (pp. 120-161). It could be said that Saul of Tarsus played the same role as Saliputra in the deification of Jesus Christ as Saliputra did to Gautama Buddha. None the less, where as we know that Buddhism appeared associated with the historical person of Siddartha Gautama the origin of Christianity is much more complex because it was deliberately obscured by latter generations. A lot of documents were evidently suppressed some by Bishop Eusebius and his associates during the Council of Nicea and some fabricated by him, like the letter of King Abgaro to Jesus Christ. The History of Early Christianity was re-edited on several occasions and continued to be reinvented throughout the many Church Councils of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The story of Christ should now be taken as a Psychohistorical event part of a Verticil of Phychohistory and as an archeological event: many superimposed layers of facts and events are to be considered. Some deal with the religious myths of the ancient Middle East, with its mysteric religions which have a very long History in that part of the world, beginning with The Great White Mother Goddess of the Earth which had its origin in the Pleistocene in the fertility cult of ‘The Venus Figures’. It was during those very ancient times, but very fertile times from a religious point of view, that the idea of The Earth Mother, The Solar God and The Son of God were generated.

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For several millennia this was the central myth: The Earth Mother, the Sun Father and progeny, their sons and daughters as intercessors and intermediaries. In early Hebrew religion, before the patriarchal cult of Yahweh became exclusive, the earth mother, the consort of the sun god, Yahweh, was The Godess Asherah. We do not know the names of their progeny or if they had any, but it was not the Messiah; that came later, during the time of The Essenes, between 154 BPE and 72 CE. But there was a fertility cult associated with the Godess Asherah that around the years 641-609 BPE, (politico-religious reforms during the reign of King Josiah?), was denounced by the priests of Yahweh as being a ‘Cannanite abomination’. The Matriarchal Era was coming to an end.

So Saul of Tarsus and the Evangelists, who like John and Luke were born of mixed marriages of Greek and Jew, performed a great service for The Hellenistai. They created a spiritual-religious synthesis for them to be able to stand on and live. This is the real reason why Christianity was accepted immediately and spread so rapidly among the hundreds of thousands of peoples of mixed Jewish-Greek blood all along the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean; because originally, Christianity was an urban phenomena and The Hellenistai were eminently and urban population who spoke Jewish Koiné Greek, the language of The Gospels: WRITTEN FOR THEM, IN THE JEWISH QUARTER OF ANTIOCH, THE KERATEION, WHERE CHRISTIANITY WAS BORN.

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TETRAPYLON OF APHRODISIAS Antioch

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ANCIENT THEATER AND CIRCUS MAXIMUS OF ANTIOCH

If Paul and The Evangelists had originally intended to convert the Jews of Palestine they would have written The Gospels in Hebrew or Aramaic and not in Greek, but the fact was that the majority of the Hellenistai could not understand Hebrew very well just as Chicanos in the United States have largely forgotten Spanish.

The proud Jews who had suffered so much for Yahweh in Babylonian captivity could not bear to see their sons and daughters showing of their legs at the stoa, nor in the marketplace; much less wrestling naked at the gymnasium nor being massaged at The Baths‌this Greek Culture was an abomination‌.yet hundreds of thousands of young Jews married Greeks and Syrians and lived in the Greek cities of The Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa were most people had adopted Greek-Roman culture by the time of Augustus and Herod the Indumean, who was a great Hellenizer, who contributed regularly to the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphos.

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By the beginning of our era the extreme political tensions generated by the Roman presence in Palestine unleashed the powerful creative forces of the collective unconscious of these peoples; manifested in Philo Judaeus and Saul of Tarsus who began synthesizing the long standing confrontation between Greek and Jewish religious ideas which we see blending with Neo-Platonism, derived from the Timaeus, into the idea of the logos that appeared in the Epistle of John and the philosophy of Philo were he sought to approach Jewish theology from a Platonic point of view and apply to it a Greek Philosophical language .

In the words of Max Dimont, Jews, God and History, p. 78: “The Jews absorbed everything intellectual which the Greeks had to offer. To everything intellectual they borrowed they added a Jewish touch. The Greeks then took these retouched ideas back from the Jews, The result was something neither had foreseen. The Greeks emerged in a Jewish-made mantle known as Christianity; the Jews wore a Greek-philosophical tunic labeled, “Talmudism”.

Also, the Jews of Alexandria saw fit to translate the Torah into Greek as many Jews, sons and daughters of mixed marriages could no longer read Hebrew.

Jews of the Diaspora who took part in Greek Mysteric Cults, who partook of the Sacred Entheogens as in Eleusis, became specially influenced by mysticism and desired a religion of Love that would harmonize the problem of Ethics with the politics of an imperial society dominated by the economics of slavery and the violence of the Coliseum that fed on constant wars of conquest; with a universal desire for a sense of justice that could no longer be provided by the exclusivity and ethnic purity demanded by the orthodox theology of the Pharisees who insisted on circumcision and a strict observance of the laws prescribed by The Torah, if one was to be considered a Jew. Those who could not or would not live by these standards became Christians and ceased to be Jews. From this point on two very different religions emerged: Christianity and Post Second Temple Judaism.

Even before the destruction of The Second Temple by Titus in 71 CE the Ebionite Christians who lived in Palestine went to Transjordan, to the country of The Nabataeans, and the Jews who survived the destruction of Jerusalem were sold into slavery, or went to the Parthians, or fled to Arabia Felix were they later constituted themselves into different tribes and settled as far South as Yemen.

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In Yemen they became warriors and merchants and participated in the political and cultural life of Arabia until the coming of Mohamad, (see the interesting History of Yemen in Wikipedia).

Certain Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora who took part in the Greek Mysteric Cults and who achieved Spiritual Illumination, became the Didascali, who elaborated and preached Early Christianity, The religion of Chrestus, The Sacred Mushroom and The Sermon of The Mount, (see John Alegro, The Mushroom and The Cross), which is a great metaphor of The God Within, The Same One that later inspired Marguerite Porete, Tolstoi and Gandhi; the Same Far encompassing Divinity That brought Extraterrestrials to this Planet seeking Manifest Proof of The Eternal.

For it is The Soul that resurrects, that never dies, once having seen and understood the meaning of What Is. It has conquered death as it recognizes Itself in The Divinity- in the manifold interrelationship of what Is, in the love of Love and Compassion. Jesus Christ is a Symbol of Illumination. And This the Didascalii clearly understood.

A close analysis of the text of The Dead Sea Scrolls of The War of the Sons of Light, (Allegro, Gringoire), reveals that The Essenes were waiting for a Messiah, The Orthodox Master of Light in the War between The Sons of Light and The Sons of Darkness, the Quiteii, The Greeks and The Romans of The Hellenistic World, who so threatened the orthodox Jews, Essenes and Pharisees and offended them with their licentious culture of public baths, naked wrestling, Greek Theater and the threat of intermarriage between Jews and the KoinĂŠ Greeks of Greater Syria . But why was the Essene Sacred Meal so important and secret, reserved only for the full membership of the Essene Community, those who had successfully accomplished their novitiate. (Josephus: Autobiography Complete Works, Kregel, 1999).

Why should it had been less sacred, if the secret was broken, unless the Sacred Meal consisted of The Baaras Plant, an entheogen that grew near the shore of The Dead Sea in a ravine behind the Fortress of Macharaeus, (Josephus, Allegro); and might it not have been that the Monastery of Qumran was built in the vicinity precisely because The Baaras Plant grew there and that this Plant was essential to The Essene Sacred Meal? Why would it have been sacred if it 63

was only bread and wine, fish, olives and cheese? It was none of these. It was The Sacred Mushroom that was at the center of The Essene Sacred Meal. Many people in the world of academe who have a vested interest in their own sinecures and tenures and fear for their jobs will deny this; but they will come around trooping in like buffaloes the moment they see that these ideas are coming ‘into vogue’.

At what point in time did a young politically oriented Essene, possibly sympathetic to the Zealot movement, yet a pacifist, take The Sacred Mushrooms to the people? Thus breaking the most sacred rule of The Essene community, that of holding ‘the sacred meal’, The Holy Entheogenic Communion, a secret reserved for the initiated in the Order. The manual of discipline of The Essene Order reveals striking similarities with the sitting order observed at The Last Supper according to Leonardo Da Vinci who had closely investigated the Esoteric Message and symbolism of The Rite in order to communicate The Mystery in preparation for his fresco of The Last Supper --and The Mystery was an initiation into The Entheogenic Experience of Illumination which was the original meaning of The Christian Communion lost after Nicea; after the political reforms of Eusebius and Constantine had established a more streamlined, State controlled version of Christianity.

Was this the real birth of the early Christian movement: The Chrestus or Christ, The Sacred Mushroom, The Sacred Entheogen that produced The Ineffable Vision of Divinity, the same as in Eleusis, the One that springs from the common fountain of the unconscious as we connect to the elemental archetypes that flow from the Cosmos as a living Telesis, during Illumination. The reason why the early Christians were persecuted by established authority, both Roman and Jewish? A careful study of Josephus’, The Jewish War, (in a new Penguin Edition sanctioned by the Israeli Government and printed by The Steinmatzky Agency), is essential to understand the emotional climate in Palestine prior to the War in 66 CE. The grave transgression of the fundamental Taboo, taking The Mushrooms to the people, making The Sacred Entheogens public property with their power to emancipate the masses through self-generated knowledge, just like the Hippie Culture of the 60’s threatened The State that desired The Viet Nam War, created an underground movement that questioned established authority and the conservative values of the Pharisee plutocracy of The WASPS. 64

Is this the secret esoteric meaning of the ‘miracle of the multiplication of the fish and the bread, in Essene lore; the descent of The Holy Spirit infusing Illumination and Knowledge of The Self, the very essence of The Sermon of The Mount, equivalent to the Dhammapada or the Milinda Pañña that were possibly copied at the Scriptorium of the Monastery of Qumran? The quintessential Entheogenic Message, the Kerigma of a Messiah or of a Boddhisatva if we are to understand that the transmission of religious knowledge took place along the routes of The Silk Road and during the Periplus of The Erithrean Sea through the ports of Barigazza, Aden, Berenice and Aqaba on to the Nabataean City of Petra and to The Monastery of Qumran by the Dead Sea. These are the visions that any sincere initiate might experience during the taking of The Sacred Mushrooms, the transcendental revelations that involve the heart, the mind and the soul, unfold as the vision of ‘an inner eye’ – are we not all potentially Christ? The Sermon of The Mount, a composition by a Jewish Hellenistai, was written in Koiné Greek like the Septuagint and became The New Testament. All religions are interwoven in the tapestry of The Soul and are derived from The Phenomena of Illumination, The Supra Cosmic Source, The Fountainhead.

Apollodorus of Artemita in a letter to Strabo mentions a young man from the household of king Milinda who journeyed from Alexandria on the Caucasus, ( modern Bagram in the Kabul Valley), to Eleusis in Greece for the purpose of attending The Mysteries. On his journey this young man whom we shall call Demetrius, stopped in the City of Petra Nabataea with a friend who invited him to visit the Monastery of Qumran by the shores of The Dead Sea. His friend was an Essene from Galilee named John of Gisala. This John of Gisala was interested in The Milinda Pañña, (The wisdom of King Menander in Pali), a book of Buddhist Doctrine he wanted to translate from the original Greek into Hebrew for the benefit of The Essene Order. This was one of the papyri stolen from the archive of Father Roland de Vaux in Jerusalem more than two thousand years later. It had been copied at The Scriptorium of Qumran and hidden in a cave near the Monastery before the soldiers of Emperor Titus burned the place in 71 A.D.

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Demetrius and John of Gisala escaped this particular conflagration and made their way to Alexandria in Egypt. There they deposited at the Library several papirii that had been entrusted to them for safe keeping by the Essene brethren. On the Port while strolling along the West Harbor toward the light House they ran into two girls, Berytho and Koré, hetairai from the Temple of Aphrodite.

Berytho was from Byblos and Koré from Thessaloniki, they lived in The Garden of Aphrodite were they kept house and received their numerous suitors and admirers for they were both very beautiful. Koré played the lute and Berytho the harp and they both could sing and dance, discourse on philosophy and recite the poetry of Sapho. The two friends were delighted and accepted the girls’ invitation to visit Aphrodite’s Park. Their shared secret ambition was to visit Eleusis and become mistoi.

They then proceeded to the Port of Piraeus and from there to Athens were they took their lodgings at the house of Onesicritus of Thera who instructed them in the right practices leading to their initiation in The Rites of Eleusis. They dutifully memorized the Homeric Hymn to The Goddess Demeter and purified themselves by ritual immersions, fasting, abstaining from meat and sexual intercourse.

After a few weeks of this in the month of September they joined the procession of the Mistoi on the Road to Eleusis, wearing white robes and holding an olive branch as a sign of Pease while singing the joyous songs of Iacchus, the intercessor, brother to Koré-Persephone, while crossing the bridge of Erebus that led to The Gate of Eleusis where they gathered inside the Telestherion to hear the Hierophant sing the Hymn to The Mother Demeter, see the phasmata and the sacred Dromena, drink from The Sacred Kukeon and immerse themselves in the transcendental visions that would change their lives.

The Visions of Eleusis like The Visions of Huautla will teach us Detachment through Knowledge of The Self. The Ka of The Egyptians was represented by a bird and like the sweet warbling’s of a bird whispering close to or ear messages from the Unconscious, will reach us, will prepare us to receive Visions of The Eternal, The Powerful Telesis that unifies the different elements of the Cosmos with the flow of our thoughts and our memories, gently make the associations 66

that will help us see where we had never reached before and clearly understand the events of our lives that need be illuminated so that our eyes will be free to see The World as we had never seen it before. And thus be able to understand who we are, what we are, and what is it that we will do to fulfill to plenitude the potential of our lives.

So our friends emerged from Eleusis restored. Berytho to teach future generations of girls at the Temple of Aphrodite in Alexandria, KorĂŠ to accompany Demetrius on a pilgrimage to Siri Lanka and John of Gisala to lead a project at The Library of Alexandria that was to become The Septuagint. Years later he would join a small group of Theravada Buddhist monks who had come to Alexandria as ambassadors of Emperor Ashoka and had decided to stay on and found a community of contemplative ascetics in the shores of Lake Mareotis not far from Alexandria, who were later known as the therapeutae.

They were buried in a cemetery where their gravestones bore the sign of The Wheel of Darhma and other Buddhist symbols like yogic mudras.

Jews of the Diaspora in the Ancient World of The Eastern Mediterranean who took part in the Greek Mystery Cults of The Sacred Entheogens and who experienced Illumination there off, gave a Jewish interpretation of this Sacred Experience out of the cultural matrix of their own time. The interpretation they gave after much soul searching is exemplified by the story of Jesus of Nazareth.

A story that describes through simple parables, accessible to a large audience, like the fables of the Hindu Sage Aesopus, the successive stages of The Entheogenic Phenomena of Illumination in a way that was attractive and comprehensible to the common people of Jewish-Greek origin in the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean.

This new religious synthesis was preached at the Synagogues of Antioch by inspired didascalii of mixed heritage who could have also been initiates in the Greek Mysteries, students at the Stoic School of Tarsus, at the Libraries of Perganum or Alexandria, the meeting ground of most of the spiritual currents of the time. Christianity became a new religious ideology that emerged as a compromise between Hellenized Jews of The Diaspora, mainly from Antioch and Alexandria and some Essenes from Palestine, possibly from Qumran and Galilee, in a common project to interpret The Phenomena of Illumination and make it accessible to the non-initiated. Many solutions were proposed, many 67

versions of the Story of Christ; some Agnostic with Manichean, Zoroastrian or Platonic influence, some more Essene in content or Pharisaic or Orthodox.

What bonded them in common was the secret use of The Sacred Entheogen and this they symbolized in the religious figure of Christ and The Sermon of the Mount, The Son of God of immemorial times, who speaks in parables the Kerygma of Love, to the effect that public devotion was concentrated in the figure of Christ, in a very similar manner to the transference performed on the image of Buddha, concentrated in the anthropomorphic image of Hindu-Greek Buddhist Art. Pauline Christology came later and it distorted The Phenomena of Illumination with sentiments of guilt, sin and misogyny, good and evil, heaven and hell, some derived from Persian Eschatology or from Paul’s pharisaic background. The Crucifixion and the Cross were a reminder of The Jewish War, The Kittos War and The Bar-Cochba revolt, full of the heavy political connotation of Jewish nationalism, the terror and the anguish suffered at the hands of the Romans in the wholesale massacres of The Kittos War that saw the violent death of hundreds of thousands of Greeks, Romans and Jews; echoes of which we find in The Apocalypse of Saint John, which was written a short time later.

Unfortunately Pauline Christology was the ideological current that in the hands of Monarchic bishops like Irinaeus, Athanasius, Eusebius and later, Augustine, became the basis of the Later Roman State created by Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian. It has made possible the power of the Patrician Roman Class to this very day. In Roman Catholicism they found the very instrument to perpetuate their political power and influence throughout The World. They suppressed the memory of The Essenes and of The Eleusinian mysteries and of a large part of the corpus of Ancient Philosophy and Knowledge that did not survive their circumscribed and reductive criteria which became Catholic Orthodoxy.

Such was the effect of the religious intolerance of the triumphant Church that it has taken more than fifteen centuries to reconstruct a valid image of a banished world and a real sequence of psychohistorical events. Religious ideas have grown and developed around two fundamental religious needs: the need of the individual to construct a spiritual life for himself, to enhance his 68

consciousness of his place in the world, to furnish him with an ethical blueprint for his life and to provide for him a meaningful death. The second human need is a deeply felt desire for harmony in the world among human beings and with all the elements of Nature.

And towards this end The Phenomena of Illumination is crucial, It is indeed central, It has been the Wellspring of Spiritual Life since man became man and he awoke to the phenomena of Consciousness during the process of hominization. It emerged through Entheogenic Rites which then gave form to the religious pantheon of ethnic variety, the names of the gods, the hierophanies and spiritual ideas concerning the nature of life and death in different cultures; the nature of time, the origin of the tribe and its relationship to the Earth and to the stars. The religion of the Dogon of The Bandiagara Escarpment of West Africa described by the French Anthropologist Marcel Griaule in his conversations with the blind Dogon poet-hunter Ogotemmeli is an example of this. The Dogon collectively refused to convert to Islam one thousand years ago.

For it was inside the kiva during Entheogenic trance that a religious consensus was arrived at, was created, by all participants, not just the shaman. Religion as such, as it evolved in the Ancient World, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, around the kurgans of Eurasia and the megaliths and passage tombs of Ancient Europe between 20 000 and 5 000 BP. Religion was-and is- the collective construction of the living, Universal Unconscious, giving a concrete material reality in Art, Rite and Literature.

And yet, these ideas became political factors- the private, spiritual life of The Jews of Antioch and Tarsus, the two gates of Syria-Palestine, eventually became the ideology of The Mediterranean. The great, centuries old, cultural, political, metaphysical tension between Hellenism and Judaism was finally resolved in Christianity, it became a political factor in The Mediterranean between the years 66 and 322.

That the story of Jesus of Galilee became mixed with Mediterranean politics was inevitable. It was from its beginning a psychohistorical event as the transcultural synthesis of Neo-Platonic philosophy and Eleusinian Mysticism

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with the Mosaic tradition and Jewish messianic political thought with elements of Essene and Persian Mysticism.

In the story of Jesus, later to become The Pauline Christ, his crucifixion by The Romans was an inevitable reference to The Jewish War, a traumatic event that ended an age of coexistence in The Ancient Eastern Mediterranean between The Jews and Hellenism, the outcome of the ideological struggle between the Jews and The Romans of which Christianity became an inevitable part, as children are sometimes involved in the divorce of their parents; as it becomes clear from a close study of Josephus Antiquities and The Jewish War. The divorce ended tragically, after three wars, Palestine was razed and the Jews expelled from their homeland until 1947, (the year this author was born).

What became of The Symbol of The Cross, The Crucifixion, is from a historiographical point of view more complex. In Hoc Signo Vinces, could be interpreted as the revenge of The Jews on The Roman Empire for the destruction of The Temple of Jerusalem, the very theme of The Apocalypse.

But why did the Romans persecute the Christians? Is the mention of The Christians in Tacitus account of the burning of Rome apocryphal? If not, why were the Christians held in odium humani generis? Why were they subversive, more so than the Jews who were giving the Romans so much more trouble.

Unless the persecution of the Christians is an exaggeration designed to enhance their aura of sanctity and veritas teologicorum. Which seemed appropriate during the triumphant age of Nicea. After all millions of Jews died between 31 and 145 AD. Whereas only a few thousand Christians at most are thought to have suffered martyrdom, a tiny fraction of the millions of people massacred in the name of Christ since then.

Why should the very small Christian community at Rome the night of the fire, 19 July, 64 CE, be more socially repulsive than the many other ‘Oriental Sects’ in vogue tolerated at the Roman Capital; when hardly anybody in Rome knew the difference between Jews and Christians; why should they, exclusively, be blamed for ‘the burning of Rome’? Is this passage in Tacitus a later interpolation by a zealous Christian apologist? ( Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, Penguin Classics pp. 62-67 ).

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Furthermore the judicial cases against Christians were more a matter of a private initiative on the case of supercilious individuals than actual State Policy as is shown by Pliny the Younger’s letter to Emperor Trajan on the subject. Only until 250 with the unprecedented edict of emperor Decius was the persecution of Christians throughout The Empire officially decreed for a short time in 250.

In 303 there was a generalized persecution proclaimed by Emperor Diocletian who wanted to restore Roman Pietas et Puritas through a universal acknowledgement of Roman State Religion and the granting of a certificate of compliance and loyalty which many Christians refused to sign, although some complied. This edict was not applied uniformly, especially in the sector of The Empire governed by Caesar Constantius and his son Constantine who were sympathetic to Christianity. In 313 Constantine and Licinius declared a respite to official persecution and a policy of toleration in the Edict of Milan; differing versions of which are quoted in Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum and Eusebius of Cesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica.

The controversy of weather God The Father anteceded The Son or The Son was consubstantial with The Father from all Eternity was constructed around The Platonic concept of logos which was better understood by Origen than by any of the subsequent Christian Theologians who participated in The Council of Nicea convened by Emperor Constantine precisely to finally settle the controversy which dragged on until the Seventh Century.

By the time of the Council of Nicea practically no one remembered how The Phenomena of Illumination had been substituted by the anthropomorphic theological figure of Christ, so that in absolute terms it did not matter if the Son was consubstantial with the Father as Athanasius proposed during The Council, or The Father anteceded The Son, who became The Logos, The Word, God’s kerygma to Humanity as Origen thought. And to this day no Christian theologian has dared to explore the matter for the simple reason that The Sacred Entheogens are Taboo, anathema, to any Christian layman or theologian who dares explore the matter.

But I am not a Christian, so I am free to explore the very frontiers of Western Theology. I could mention other predecessors that have come this way: Teilhard de Chardin, Allan Watts, Ram Das Terence Mckenna, (Jacobo Grinberg 71

Sylverman?). In any case I speak for myself. During my Experience with The Sacred Entheogens at Huautla, (see Teo Nana Acatl, The Food of The Gods, The Huautla Press, 1994. In www.peregrinoenelcamino.blogspot.com), it became evident that a door opens, we find access to Le Milieu Divine . Yet not everyone is a theologian; no matter, The Divinity in Its infinite Mercy might inspire us with Its Discerning Light, yet we cannot blame our ancestors of two thousand years ago for mistaking the Entheogenic medium with Le Milieu Divine. The Total Neural Synaptic that goes on inside the brain during the process of Illumination, if you are interested in a scientific simplification, involves our whole self with The Message, The Kerygma, connects with The Source… and more to the point; after the free use of The Sacred Entheogen has been banned for two thousand years in ‘the civilized parts of The Western World’ and left as a curious anthropological event in the marginal regions of the autochthonous world.

Indeed The Origin of Christianity is now lost among the many layers of Archeology and Psychohistory, layers or srata, of censure, the editing of History for political purposes across the ages; the control of the masses through the varying needs of Christian catechesis and apologetics to suit the political exigencies of the times over a period of nearly two thousand years.

So that it is necessary to redefine what The Phenomena of Illumination really is: a New Kerigma for the World we live in, that should be renewed every generation.

KERYGMA We have followed a verticil of psychohistory dawn the axis of Central Asia, Nous, Noumena wishes to indicate a single profile in the History of Religion. The Hero of a Thousand Faces suggested by Joseph Campbell fulfills its quest, dissolves, in the Sands of The Taklamakan, near The Dunhuang Caves of The Thousand Buddhas. Only great Compassion and Love for Mankind will help dissolve the Illusion of diversity in the ethnographic variety apparently shown by ethnic diversity.

The different religions are the different projections thrown by different cultural superstructures yet The Phenomena of Illumination is One. The All 72

Encompassing Vision of The World that manifests the elemental Unity between all beings is asking us to recognize ourselves in the Other.

We do not have to relinquish our essence, our Jewishness or our Christianity or our Islam but to recognize it in the other, until such a time when the need for a religion will drop of itself when we have learned to recognize The One. Then the canon of our religion will be the canon of the other religion and so on, until we drop it because we no longer need it because we have seen The One. For there is unity in variety as we are beginning to learn from the nearly infinite beauty in the billions of faces of Mankind, some brown, some black, some Asiatic, some European. The one World Religion has always been there for there is hardly any difference between the Visions of the Pure Mysticism of Bistani, the certitude of Tostari that Mystical experience was there even before all knowledge; Yonaid’s certitude that Total Love is the return to Our Origin, Rabi’a´s reconciliation of her two Loves: ‘I love you according to two loves: interested love, interested In my happiness, And perfect Love which I wish to give you, Worthy of you.

Thus I occupy myself in loving…

For I think of you only ( in exclusion ), As for this other love, the one you are worthy of, It is my wish to drop all veils and see you!

No glory for me in either one of them.

Oh no! all praise to you, for this and for the other…! ( Translated by this author from the French of L. Massignon ).

Very near Saint John of The Cross: En mi pecho florido.

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Que entero para él solo se guardaba, Allí quedó dormido, Y yo le regalaba, Y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.

Ramakrishna: ‘He…alone can describe the attributes of God who has associated with Him in his different aspects, now as a servant of God, then as a friend of God, then as a lover of God, or as being absorbed in Him…the sunlight is one and the same wherever it falls, but only bright surfaces like water, mirrors and polished metals can reflect it fully. So is the divine light. It falls equally and impartially on all hearts, but only the pure and clean hearts of the good and holy can fully reflect it.’

Saint John, again:

El aire de la almena, Cuando yo sus cabellos esparcía, Con su mano serena En mi cabello hería, Y todos mis sentidos suspendía.

Quédeme y olvídeme, El rostro recliné sobre el Amado, Cesó todo y déjeme, Dejando mi cuidado 74

Entre las azucenas olvidado.

So the Romans tried to suppress Christianity until Constantine realized the futility of it from a political point of view and decided to publish an edict of toleration while he was in Milan. Yet this was not a move against Hellenism for he was very much a Helen like his grandson Julian some fifty years later, and most other Roman Patricians until the time of Theodosius when the monarchical bishops of Nicea had consolidated their power.

At the Council of Nicea The Christians organized themselves into a Church, a system of power that was understood by the Patrician Class. Yet at first, there were two clearly defined currents which were disputing power: The Arians who believed that The Father was graeter, anteseded, The Son and on the other side, the filioque consubstantialists, who believed that The Son had been with the Father from all Eternity. Nonetheless, both branches excluded all those who would not recognize the authority of the monarchical orthodox bishops, be them Arian or Trinitarian. This was a controversy that was already present around the time of Trajan but that came to a head at The Council of Nicea in 325. The deal at Nicea with the Roman Patrician Class represented by Emperor Constantine was that the Christian Bishops would share in the power of The State; and consequently, who was a bishop and which group he supported became of paramount political importance. The Orthodox Bishops would soon inherit the power of The State with Theodosius in 27 February, 380, by the Edict of Thessalonica; and they immediately started the suppression of the rival sects, just as the Julio-Claudians and the Flavians had once tried to suppress Christianity‌and they were more successful in this.

For the idea of the resurrection of Christ to hold, necessitated the suppression of the rival Mystery cults. And most important it was paramount to suppress the ritual use of Entheogenic Plants by brandishing them as black art, sorcery and witchcraft so that The Sanctuary of Eleusis was closed at about this time, 392.

Both the Essenes and the Hellenized Jews of Greece and Asia Minor were familiar with the Greek Mysteries and Entheogenic Plants; Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had been initiated into the Sacred Mysteries at Eleusis so were 75

Emperors Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Saul of Tarsus certainly knew about them, the idea of The Son of God is of Greek Mystery origin, the Divinity that dies and is resurrected. Yahwe had no sons. There were many devout Jews who conversed with devout Greeks in a continuing dialogue between the cultures that could easily have been a family affair since many people intermarried in places like Antioch and Alexandria.

There were over four thousand Essenes living in Palestine according to Josephus, (The Jewish War, exordium). Any interested person among returning Jews during Passover could converse with them in the Temple Court or in the streets of Old Jerusalem. These were ‘the original Christians’ if we are to believe the story of Jesus in the Gospels about John The Baptist baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River according to Essene Rite. Very many currents of thought influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism and Manicheism, Alexandrian Agnosticism, Neo-Platonism found expression in the various Gospels of the Didascalii; even the Christology of Saul of Tarsus competed with them for some centuries until the monarchical bishops established canonical orthodoxy at the Council of Nicea.

After Nicea many blows were struck at Hellenism: the death of Emperor Julian in 363, Emperor Gratian, 367-383, renounced the title of Pontifex Maximus which had been up to that time the prerogative of all Roman Emperors as heads of The State Religion of Rome, he removed the Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate. This office was transferred to the Bishop of Rome who from that time was imbued with the highest religious karisma previously held by the Emperors of Rome. So was the statue of Victory, symbol of Roman Power, removed from The Senate in 382, in opposition to senator Symachus and many other senators of the old roman aristocracy who were Hellenists. Sometime later the statue was reinstated but it was finally removed by Emperor Theodosius in 394.

The destruction of the temple of The Mother Demeter at Eleusis by the Arian Alaric in 396 was another blow. The condemnation to death by Theodoric in 524 and 526 of Senator Quintus Aurelius Symachus, another member of the illustrious family of The Symachii, and of the philosopher Anicius Manlius Boethius, his adopted son, who was an orphan of the ancient Anicii family, marked the end of The Hellenistic Era. So did the closing by Emperor Justinian I in 529 of The Academy of Athens, founded by Plato, mark the End of Antiquity.

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Symmachi-Nicomachi dyptich, one of the last works of Art of Roman Hellenism.

From this point on the revitalization of the towns and cities of Western Europe would take several centuries to accomplish, and were it not for the libraries of the Omeya Califate of Cordoba and later for the school of translators established at Toledo by King Alphonso X and other places of learning throughout Europe specially in Constantinople, Greco-Roman Hellenism would not have survived.

Something departed from the world at this time, the innocence and magic of the childhood of Mankind: a gallery of extraordinary cultures and people never to be seen again, never to be repeated‌ an era that began with Akhenaten and Nefertiti and ended with Justinian and Theodora.

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2. The fact that people preached spontaneously: ( the didascalii, saints, itinerant preachers, also known as apostles ), is evidence of Entheogenic activity and of a possible secret mushroom cult in the Baraas region in TransJordan in the area where Jesus was ‘baptized’ by John ‘the Baptist’ near the Essene Monastery of Qumran when he became the Zadokite Kohem, The Teacher of Righteousness, The Messiah awaited by the Order of The Essenes; ‘to guide the children of Israel who had gone astray in The Way of His Heart´ and ‘to reveal the hidden things in which Israel had gone astray’. This was probably the true Origin of Christianity and latter a smoke screen was thrown over this at Antioch by Saul of Tarsus to divert the attention of the urban ´gentile’ populations whom he wanted to ‘convert´ to the ‘Christianity’ he had devised and to distract them from the complexities of Orthodox Judaism and its requirements. Within a few decades of the Fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple the true origin of Christianity was lost. By then only the initiated Didascalii would have understood that behind The Sermon of The Mount stood the Phenomena of Illumination and The Entheogenic Mushroom Cult.

The story of Jesus evolved later as a cultural myth to give a poetical-religious content to the preaching of the Didascalii. ( Josephus, Guignebert, Allegro ) Just as the Concept of the Holy Ghost and the idea of glossolalia which are clear popularizations of The Entheogenic Phenomena of Illumination were introduced to explain the death and resurrection of Jesus as a preamble to the introduction of the theological figure embodied in the Pauline Christ.

The Son of God or the holy soter, carrier of The Experience of Illumination, came to be identified by the Jewish Hellenistai in Antioch and Alexandria as The Jewish Messiah formulated in Essene theology at the time of Alexander Jannaeus, 103-76 BCE and the High Priest, Judah, who founded The Order of The Essenes and who was later killed by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was proclaimed to be The Master of Righteousness by The Order, and later became the prototype for Jesus as Messiah, was later transported into the political arena as the figure of The Messiah, politicized by the Zealots and the Sicarii as their vindicator and redeemer during the War with the Romans in 6673 CE . All these elements became components of the religious-cultural matrix that produced the Pauline theological figure of Christ- several times removed 78

from the Original Vision of The Divinity, experienced by unknown didascalii later personified by the theological figure of Jesus-Christ in The Gospels written by the Evangelists, Jewish Hellenistai who founded Christianity.

This is the Psychohistorical Strata we have identified over the years in our research and historical investigations of the Jewish component of the Christian religion. On the other hand, if we place ourselves, following the order of phenomenological research described by Edmund Husserl above, on the plane of Greek religious thought that influenced Christianity as part of the sphere of the religious and cultural experience of that segment of Jews known as The Hellenistai founded on Greek Culture, we will come to the conclusion that Pauline Christology was influenced by the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were the two deep Psychohistorical verticils that were present in the gestation of Christianity: Greek Mystery Religion and Essene Theology and Mysticism as we can derive from a close study of The Texts of The Dead Sea Scrolls,(Pedro Gringoire).

There was nothing in Jewish religious thought, to suggest a Son of God in the sense of a physical or hypostatic union with The Father, descent from God- on the contrary, the Jewish Patriarchs had banished the Godess Asherah, the consort of Yahweh, today revered by Jewish Neo-pagan groups, many centuries after the birth of Christianity, thereby associating themselves with Mother Earth, who was, in the figure of The Mother Demeter a highly important element of Greek religious thought and feeling, the feminine element in religion, no less: contrasting heavily with Jewish traditional religious ethos which was-and is- exclusively patriarchal to this day.

The Godess Asherah 79

Nor was there anything in Essene Mysticism according to the manual of The Order, (Pedro Gringoire), to suggest a hypostatic vision of Divinity that might incorporate the triad: Father, Mother and Son. The Essenes believed in the contrast between Light and Darkness and were closer to Persian Zoroastrian Theology than to the Vision of Eleusis. The Master of Light and The Master of Darkness were men who represented more than anything else what was luminous and spiritual in contrast to Darkness, its spiritual antithesis, but they were not part of The Divinity or equal to The Divinity- like the Eleusinian Soter who was a vehicle to Illumination- Iaachus-Dionysus. But to the Jews of Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus and Ephesus this was a familiar image, as they were well informed about The Mysteries.

We have the superposition of two key religious figures in this transcultural and psychohistorical act of collective creation: the theologico-religious figure of The Son of God and the Messiah, a redeemer with strong nationalist political connotations for the Jewish people in their struggle for independence from The Romans as we can observe in The First Jewish war of 66-73 from the consensus arrived at by the three main Jewish sects; but more explicitly during the Third Jewish War of 132-135 when Rabbi Akiba confirmed Simon bar Kochbar’s claim that he was a messiah.

The fourth Jewish sect, that of the Christians, evolved a different concept of The Messiah which was more in accord with their cosmopolitan situation outside Palestine in the Hellenistic cities of The Easter Mediterranean. This is why The Septuagint had an essentially official status in the early Christian world as opposed to early post Second Temple rabbinic scholarship that favored Hebrew versions of The Torah. They believed, and this they confirmed in their Gospels, that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. Although this assertion came after the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple when the Gospels were written.

The Romans crucified thousands of Jews before and during the First Jewish War. It was their common practice, their policy of suppression and terror.

According to Josephus, during the siege of Jerusalem up to 500 Jews were being crucified daily atop the second wall that Titus had built to isolate Jerusalem, to intimidate and starve out the will of resistance of the Jews inside Jerusalem.

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In psychohistorical terms, for the collective memory of Mediterranean peoples, The Cross and crucifixion came to be associated with Roman Supremacy since the time of Spartacus and before. This the Christians well knew and used this symbol to help establish the Christian concept of the Messiah as a cultural redeemer to such an effect that to this day The Cross is the symbol of Christianity, although that might not have been the original intent of the Apostles and the Didascalii, for what died at the Cross was Jewish Independence, the Cross being the most painful and dramatic reminder of the fall of Jerusalem and of the destruction of The Temple of Herod.

The Jews did not convert to Christianity en masse but rather devised the idea of “The Portable Torah”- Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai had himself sequestered out of burning Jerusalem inside a sealed coffin to establish his Jewish Academy at Jabneh. This was the origin of Rabbinic Judaism and of The Synagogue: “Christianity at first had been regarded by the Romans as a sect of Judaism, but eventually as a distinct religion requiring separate legal provisions. The distinction between Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism was recognized by the Emperor Nerva around 98 CE in a decree granting Christians an exception from paying the fiscus judaicus, the annual tax paid by Jews. From that time Roman literary sources begin to distinguish between Christians and Jews.” (Wikipedia, Split of early Christians and Jews).

Sometime after the bar-Kochba revolt, 133-135, Marcion, Bishop of Sinope, proposed for the first time in the History of Early Christianity, a Canon, a list of officially sanctioned works, that would define Christianity as opposed to Post Second Temple Judaism, an era that was finally coming to an end after the failure of the Jewish rebels in creating a new independent Jewish State.

Interestingly enough, the nascent Catholic Latin branch of Christianity in Rome felt obliged to publish its own canonical list in what it appeared to be jealous opposition to Marcion who with his action had founded the Marcionite branch of Christianity which survived for several centuries.

Yet long before The Jews and The Christians, The Son of God had been The Mukkes in Sumeria, The Sacred Mushroom; in Ancient Greece, The Sacred Entheogen that grew in the Rarian Plain near Eleusis in the stalks of barley, a fungus, claviceps purpurea; and all over The World along the margins of the great rivers and in the forested mountain. In Sumeria It was known as Enkkil, in 81

Egypt Osiris, at Eleusis Iacchus-Dionysus, in Mesoamerica, Kukulkan and Quetzalcoatl, in prehistoric India it was the God Soma…It had many names, The Mazatecs call it Dni Shi To. It is a paleo-ethno-botanical Fact.

The Son of God was the paramount religious idea in the Eastern Mediterranean, essential to many religious synthesis of the region. This is why a true rendition of the Story of Jesus seems improbable as historical fact. Religious Myth it is.

From the moment that Jesus affirms to be The Son of God the story gives itself away, The Son of God was a very ancient religious concept that involved Entheogenic Experience since Pre-Historical times. Indeed, The Sermon of The Mount alone is a true rendition, a clear representation, of The Phenomena of Illumination. But neither the person who experienced it nor the phenomena itself, nor The Sacred Plant, is the son of any god. The Divinity has no sons. The son of God is an anthropomorphic figure that has no meta-cosmic content; when we accede to Illumination this becomes clear. Only The Divinity Exists and we form part of it. All else is illusory. It exists within us as we form part of MetaCosmic Memory and we perceive this as we awake within The Phenomena of Illumination.

More so, the story gives itself away when centuries later the Catholic Church declared ‘the mystery of The Trinity and the resurrection of The Body’. This was the formula that intended to substitute through the mechanism of ‘faith’ the Phenomena of Personal Illumination and was a clear substitution of the reality of The Event perceived at Eleusis by The Eucharist in the Christian Mass. At The Council of Nicea during The filioque controversy when the forces of Arius and those of Athanasius came to a head over this point, it helped obscure the very origin of Christianity, which had been The Phenomena of personal illumination symbolized by the story of Jesus.

In pure personal religious experience, only The Phenomena of Illumination is real- yet no medium or agency can guaranty the personal experience of Illumination, this is only attained by the Grace of The Divinity and the nature of our own personal Karma and our own humble, deep desire for Illumination in a direct Vision of The Divinity revealing Its Teleological Mysteries.

This ‘transference of faith’ operated at Nicea, from The Charismatic experience of Eleusis, an authentic Gift of Grace, to the recitation of the Creed of Nicea, 82

an authoritarian reduction of thought, an exercise in thought control, was in effect the beginning of a dark age that continues to this day in The Spiritual life of The Western World. It served to hide The Mysteric Origin of Christianity; particularly, The Eleusinian Rite in The Telesterion from which Christianity lifted the idea of Spiritual Resurrection symbolized in the Return of Persephone from Hades and substituted the awakening of Consciousness into spiritual life experienced by the mystoi at Eleusis, with the actual physical ‘resurrection’ of Jesus after his death at the cross and the simulation of this ‘mystery’ in the Eucharist of the catholic mass.

In the ancient Pre-Greek Bronze Age, the religion of The Augean and The Eastern Mediterranean Seas, was dominated by the antecessor of The Mother Goddess Demeter: The White Goddess, procurer of Life, who supervised the flow and continuity of life. Mankind was Her agent, in a sense Her children.

Rhea, Gea, Demeter at Eleusis, by the agency of the Hierophant, the mystoi partook of the body of The Son of God symbolically, Iaachus-Dionysus, through the mushroom, claviceps purpurea, and became co-participant with The Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone of the Mystery of Death and Resurrection as it is given in Nature with the renewal of life each spring so in personal spiritual life a rebirth into a Life of Consciousness as a consequence of the inner spiritual renovation which were the gift of The Rites of Demeter at Eleusis, (the Homeric Hymn to Demeter being the ritual text of reference).

This was the essential transference, the same as is symbolized in the Christian Mass through the communion in the body and blood of Christ except, and this reveals the Mysteric origin of Christianity, that at one point The Sacred Entheogen was substituted by bread and wine. The Way of Life and the way of Death as expounded in the Didaché (90-150 CE?) is similar to the Manual of the Order of The Essenes, where the Way of The Master of Light is contrasted with that of The Master of Darkness. The wandering ‘apostles’ and the ‘didascalii´ of the early Jewish Christians were continuing the traditions of The Essenes such as ‘The Last Supper’ which could have been similar, at least in spirit, to the Rites of Eleusis and ‘the eating of The Sacred Entheogen´ known to many of The Jewish Hellenistai.

To the Mass Psychohistorical Continuum, The Golden Branch or Verticil, no religion had an original beginning nor can it be understood or appreciated in 83

isolation from the historical transmission of ideas throughout time. From KatalHuyuk to Eridu, from Sumer to Babylon, from Saqqara to Abydos and Amarna; from Eleusis to Ephesus and Tarsus, from Jerusalem to Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople and Mecca. From Teotihuacan to Tikal, Tula, to Chichen-Itza…is realized the transmission of religious ideas from culture to culture, there for all to see.

In the case of Christianity two different religious cultures were operating simultaneously: The Greek and The Jewish. The Story of Jesus of Nazareth who died at The Cross is curiously woven with Neo-Platonic and Essene elements, mysteric ideas of Death and Resurrection, of the Son of God, The Incarnate Verb, and The Teacher of Righteousness, The Messiah, a remarkable combination that would have seemed proper to an observant political Pharisee like Saul of Tarsus in the highly charged religious environments of Antioch and Alexandria.

In the Beginning was The Word, and The Word was made Flesh…that is pure Eleusinian Mysticism inspired by Neo-Platonic Philosophy that could have been coined in Alexandria…( by Philo Judaeus?). Jesus Christ, (Joshua Ben-Joseph), seems to be the story of a rebellious young Essene, or someone very much like it, Who was full of The Vision of Love, who like an ancient Che Guevara,( yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of his death ), was struck by the misery and the poverty of the common people of this Earth. Prophet and Messiah, albeit he disappointed the Jewish people because he was not military and died at the Cross, an extreme humiliation reserved for ‘criminals’; though He resurrected and was believed by The Christians; so the story goes…or was His resurrection symbolical? As at Eleusis, and he came to signify The Rebirth into Divine Consciousness experienced by The Mystoii…

Full of The Vision of Love in The Sermon of The Mount, the Mystoi comes forward and performs miracles out of great compassion, like Che Guevara, alas!

Without a rifle, was of no political use to the Zealots and The Sicarii, at Jerusalem, in 71. He healed with His hands. His Story is an Esoteric Code for those seeking Illumination. In Huautla, full of The Vision of The Divine, I felt The Presence of The Divinity, and wished to communicate This Mystery, perhaps this is the reason why I wrote TEONANACATL. 84

This young Jewish Messiah was not recognized by the Jews, was killed by the Romans, was deified by Saul of Tarsus, like Saliputra who deified Siddhartha Gautama. But who would want to transform the story of Jesus into that of a Jewish martyr at a time when the whole Jewish Nation was being martyred by The Romans? The answer could be The Hellenized Jews of The Diaspora who sorely needed a cultural hero to raise their hopes at the time when The Roman Procurators in Palestine where driving The Jews to madness? Witness the desperate embassy of Philo Judaeus and Josephus to Rome to intercede for The Jews before Caligula. To no avail, the whole atmosphere in The Eastern Mediterranean was charged with dire destiny. The Apocalypse of Saint John come true at Holy Jerusalem with the burning of the Temple by Titus.

A remarkable example of a family that lived intimately the bicultural experience of being Jewish in a Hellenistic Culture is that of the Philosopher Philo Judaeus who was born into a wealthy, aristocratic, Jewish family of Alexandria around 25 BCE. ( Other examples of remarkable Jewish Philosophers who lived in a transcultural environment are Moses Maimonides of Cordoba and Don Isaac Abrabanel of Lisbon 1437-1508 who wrote “The Pinnacle of Faith”, “Rosh Emunah” and other notable works). Philo received an impeccable education in both Greek Philosophy and Biblical Studies along with his brothers, Alexander the Alabarch and Lysimachus. His paternal grandfather had been granted Roman Citizenship by Julius Caesar himself during his stay in Alexandria, (48-47 BCE). His brother Alexander had business interest with Antonia Minor, a daughter of Mark Anthony and mother of the future Emperor Claudius. King Herod Agrippa of Judea was another of his business partners, whose daughter, princess Berenice married his son, Marcus Julius Alexander.

His other son, Tiberius Julius Alexander, as a young man left the Jewish Faith and chose a political and military career in the Roman Empire. He fought in Germany and Asia with the prominent General, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, whose daughter, Domitia Longina married Emperor Domitian. Tiberius Alexander was named Procurator of Judea in 46-48 by Emperor Claudius; became Prefect of Egypt in 66-69, and was instrumental in Vespasian’s rise to power. He was later Advisor and Second in Command to Emperor Titus, (the lover of his Sister-in-law, Berenice), at the siege of Jerusalem and was present when The Temple was burnt dawn, including its magnificent Doors of which his 85

own father, Alexader, The Alabarch, had donated the gold and silver plates that adorned those very Doors. He ended his career by becoming Prefect to the Praetorian Guard for Emperor Titus, a very high honor for a Jew after The Jewish War. He was a friend of the Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus, another protégé of The Flavian Dynasty. He appears in two of his uncle’s philosophical dialogues making arguments against divine providence which Philo attempts to refute, (Wikipedia).

The Story of Jesus is a parable and synthesis of the century’s long struggle between Judaism and Hellenism. This struggle was finally resolved by The Collective Unconscious in the tragic flowering of The Jewish war and in the Flowering of Christianity which might have remained a Jewish sect but for The Holocaust of the Jewish People which after The Three disastrous Jewish Wars split into Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. Gone was The Second Temple, in a collective traumatic event, to be mourned for thousands of years – to this very day, at The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, so powerful has been the Psychohistorical resonance through time and space of this momentous event in History.

The Apocalypse of Saint John is pregnant with mixed feelings, revealing unconscious desires of a Second Coming of The Messiah; that if not Bar-Cochba, then Some One to make them forget the bitterness of The Kittos War, with its horrendous wholesale massacres of Jews, Greeks and Romans in The Cities of The Eastern Mediterranean. Historians forget the resonance of Collective Grief and its permanence in The Noosphere of Psychohistory as a continuous vibration. But if ever there was a time when Humanity was marked by collective events it was during The First Century of our Common Era. It seems that early Christianity was not very successful in Palestine where the Sanedrin and the Pharisees frowned on simple preachers from the country side, especially if they were from Galilee or Indumea, regions that had only recently converted to Judaism, ( For the environment in which the Apostol Paul grew and later preached, see Charles Guignebert, Le Christianisme antique, Flamarion pp. 62-86 ). More luck was obtained when after the death of Jesus, his Apostles converted some Jewish Hellenistai who had come to Jerusalem for Passover. Then, when they returned to their cities of origin, they in turn, spread the Good News, The Kerigma, and the seed fell in good ground at Antioch, more 86

cosmopolitan and more open to external influence than Palestine. At Antioch the disinherited of mixed culture were waiting with great thirst for just such a message of Love and Redemption and where, moreover, the setting was one of religious heterodoxy; where many currents of religious thought met, brought in by merchants who came in from Persia and Central Asia, The Silk Road, bearing papyri of sacred texts from India, Bactria and Babylon.

Such was the success of Christianity in places like Antioch that The Apostles sent a trusted agent named Barnabas to ascertain the matter. Now if we are to follow John Allegro, The sacred Mushroom and the Cross, the name barnabas was at the time a Middle Eastern cognomen, a vehicle, for The Sacred Entheogen. And here we plunge deeply into the transcultural currents of Mysteric Religion of which Early Christianity formed part. For it was in such a syncretistic religious environment as that of Antioch that many Jewish proselytes began to transfer on to the figure of Jesus, whom they had never met, but in whom nonetheless, they placed all their hope. Paul transformed his theological entity, the figure of Christ, into a divine entity of salvation and redemption, a soter, a divinity, like other mysteric divinities: like Dionysus, Adonis or Attis, imbued with the messianic power of redemption. In this novel transformation, in this novel Hellenistic circumstance, not as a Jewish national, political, vindicator, but as a universal Messiah, Christ appeared, as a harbinger of a New Era of Peace and Love for the whole of Mankind.

This aspiration not originally taken by Saul of Tarsus but by earlier Hellenistai converted by the Apostles and other Didascalii at Jerusalem, was later taken up by him and transformed into his Pauline Christology, into a religious idea nearer to Greek religious sensibility than to Jewish messianic aspirations; just like in the Mysteric rites of Eleusis, the mystoii felt The Divine Presence during the secret ceremonies, so did the latter Christians who followed Paul imagined they partook of ‘the body and blood of Christ during the ceremony of the Christian Mass.

This Pauline Soteriology later derived into The Kristos Redentoribus, the divinization of the original figure of Jesus transformed into a Judeo-Greek divinity who had ´died at the cross for our sins’, an entirely Pauline construction that unfortunately passed onto Western Civilization and became the cause of 87

much misery as the conquering symbol of genocide, cultural and physical, throughout much of subsequent World History.

Not all the ideas of Christianity were positive and some, quite frankly, have generated a lot of misery from the time when Christianity became the official religion in the Mediterranean with Theodosius, and more definitely with Justinian, and the closing of The Academy founded by Plato in Athens. The most destructive aspects of militant political Christianity was the wholesale destruction of autochthonous cultures considered ‘pagan’ or ‘heretical’ like the Paulicians of Byzantine Anatolia or the Cathars of Medieval Provence in Southern France who had inherited an interest in Agnosticism through The Bogomils of Byzantium. In The Americas, The Tainos of the Caribbean and millions of autochthonous peoples of the so called, ’new world’, fell victims to the greed of Cristophoro Colombo and his hordes of followers. For they inflicted an irreparable damage to World History and the patrimony of Mankind throughout The Americas by burning the Codices of the Nahua and the Maya.

It was not ‘The Barbarians’ who destroyed Rome but the armies of Justinian, Belisarius and Narses who depopulated Italy in the VI Century.

Another serious damage operated by Christianity was the introduction of misogyny and guilt into the experience of love and sexuality which has deformed Western Culture for the last two thousand years. We must now disentangle the web of contradictions created by two thousand years of Christian Culture that have immobilized the development of religious ideas in The Western World. We must operate a new synthesis that will get Humanity moving again in the direction of The Spirit.

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THE ENTHEOGENIC THEOLOGY OF HUAUTLA

The very humble and simple Entheogenic plants that grow on the mountainsides of The Mixtec Knot have been placed there miraculously to provide us with ‘a return to the beginning’, or as we say in Spanish ‘borrón y cuenta nueva’, or as the ancient Mesoamericans thought: ‘ to start a New Count of The Years’. To start from scratch could not be more inspiring. To lift from our spirits all the ancient meanings, to empty our souls of content, to fill them anew with the iridescent light of the Direct Contemplation of Divinity, The Divinity that is Within Us. Before the gods had any names there was Noumena, Nous, the pristine world. We slowly and laboriously gave names to things. In The kiva we sang the First Song, we discovered the initial frequency, The Sound of Silence. The Hypogeum of Malta, Gobekli Tepe, Newgrange were sealed for several millennia to this day; awaiting The Sign of The Spiral, announcing the Birth of Consciousness. So does The Sacred Mushroom, Ndi-Shi-To, courtesy of The Mazatec Indians, announce The Birth of Consciousness.

The Message was simple: access to Integral Cosmic Knowledge through the agency of ineffable Divine Love was opened to all.

I know that this will sound strange to the scientific community but I have been ‘de-constructing’ it for their benefice, translating it into a scientific language, through the method of Phenomenological Logic and Epistemology for the past fifty years, ( November 2017 ). So has His Holiness, The Dalai Lama who is much interested in Science and wishes he had become an engineer if he had not been a Lama. He has said, and I think so too, that there is nothing in the Phenomena of Consciousness that contradicts the Theory of Knowledge accepted by The Scientific Method.

Knowledge expands continuously, and so does our Consciousness of The Universe to the point where the most elemental particles perceived by the Cyclotron Accelerator of Particles ´compose’ matter as if it were a musical score forming ‘themes’ and ‘ideas’ through energy waves very similar to Teleological Entelechies. You could call that, the language of celestial quantum Mechanics, in which everything existing behaves at a specific frequency which is in fact a language that represents an Idea.

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This is not to say that I might not have differences with Mahayana Buddhism but they are inconsequential, as you might find between one galaxy and another, and they are all different; yet all galaxies respond to the same Cosmic Order and are ruled by The Same Laws of Astrophysics and have some sort of similar black hole at their center.

Mahayana Buddhism is extremely abstract and what I felt in Huautla was an extremely warm sensation in my heart associated to the presence of The Divinity, an overpowering sense of compassion aligned to a great vision of Unity between the various forms presented to me by the natural world. This was certainly Avalokiteshvara, The Buddha of Compassion, but It could have been The Lord Krishna worshiped by the XIXth Century mystic Ramakrishna just as well. The true Vision of Divinity is devoid of earthly cultural content, it is metacosmic and elemental and I am sure that all Conscious beings throughout The Universe have access to It. THE AGE OF ANTHROPOMORPHIC RELIGION IS OVER The bulk of religious humanity most raise itself above the purely representational anthropomorphic image of Divinity into the realm of Pure Consciousness akin to that of the mystic in which the inner structure of things is left to Science and the Meaning, the Telesis of things, becomes the essence and unity of pure Consciousness.

The word God is a political concept otherwise why should the word Goddess seem blasphemous and heretic to the Western Abrahamic religions? Why should the female element of Divinity frighten the patriarchs if it did not threaten their power, power being an eminently political category?

Yahwe had a wife, the Goddess Asherah, ( Anatha in Cannanite ), She was banished from his sight by the VIIIth Century BCE priests of his cult who wanted power for themselves exclusively . James Henry Breasted described the market places of Ancient Palestine around the Fortress City of Armageddon also known as Megiddo, which he excavated in the early XXth Century, during an expedition with The Oriental Institute of The University of Chicago. He writes: ‘strange faces from many a foreign clime crowded the market places of Palestine, amid a babel of various languages. Here the rich jewelry, bronze dishes and ivory furniture of The Nile craftsmen mingled with the pottery of The Aegean Islands 90

and of The Highland Civilizations of Anatolia and with the gay woolens of Babylonia.’ ( Ancient Times, History of The Early World, Ginn & Company pp.

217-228 ) This is where the Religion of Akhenaten took hold. Moses was his prophet, his ‘St. Paul’; the Hebrews latter remembered this period and tried to establish their origin there off, mixing Egyptian with desert memories in ‘The Exodus’.

Some had been slaves in Egypt others came into Palestine after wandering in the deserts of Arabia to meet the ‘Cannanite’ Civilization thousands of years old descended from the Epipaleolithic inhabitants of Jericho and The Natufian culture that preceded it. This Cannanite civilization had walled towns, government, industries, trade, writing and religion- a civilization which the rude Hebrew shepherds would soon adopt.

In the year 407 BCE the Jewish community of the town of Elepantine in Upper Egypt wrote a letter to Bagoas, the Persian governor of Palestine, asking him for his support in rebuilding their temple which had been plundered and destroyed by jealous Egyptian priests who had incited a mob against them. The letter had been written in Aramaic and it is one of the oldest Jewish papyri now extant. ( Breasted ) The trials of the Babylonian captivity had transformed the warrior god Yawhe of Isaiah of around 700 BCE into the Divinity of Love and Compassion, Adonai, which appears in the Psalms written during the post-Exilic period.

From Akhenaten’s Sun-hymn

from the 104th Psalm

How manifold are thy works!

O Lord, how manifold are thy

They are hidden before men

works!

O sole God, beside whom there is

In wisdom has thou made them

No other.

all:

Thou didst create the earth

The earth is full of thy riches.

According to thy will.

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The Epithalamiom of Judah Halevi reminds us of the songs of Salomon to Pharaoh’s daughter and yet these, like in the Poetry of St. John of The Cross, may be an approach of the soul to the Source of Love.

‘There are certain Christological problems arising in the New Testament writers when citing the Jewish scriptures, or when quoting Jesus doing so, freely used the Greek translation,( of The Septuagint ), implying that Jesus, his apostles and their followers considered it reliable.’ (Wikipedia: Septuagint) Yet Jesus spoke Aramaic, the current language of Palestine in his day, and did not know Koiné Greek the language of The Septuagint, unless Jesus and the Pauline Christ are theological constructions hiding a deeper truth, a deeper phenomena: that of Entheogenic Rite and the Experience of Illumination.

Perhaps there was a Circle of Initiated Mistoii, Hellenistic Jews at Antioch who gathered at the Sacred Grove of Daphne near The City and partook of The Sacred Mushrooms and conceived there off the Neo-Platonic Idea of Christ as Logos, The Word.

Yet the emergence of Zeus, Jupiter, Christ, and Allah was a political event. The suppression of the cult of The Goddess Asherah, consort of Yahweh, by the Hebrew priesthood some 2700 years ago was first and foremost a political event designed to intimidate women into submission, in a political sense. The Age of The Patriarchy did not have a formal beginning, it was a gradual, continuous process that in my view started with metal weapons, private guards for the chiefs and the struggle for the control of public granaries like at Mojenjo-Daro and Sumer, and ended up in the formation of the first kingdoms as opposed to the ancient matriarchal queendoms of early Neolithic times such as the one described by James Maallart at Katal-Huyuk.

These set of circumstances announced the emergence of The Patriarchy as the new political reality of The Iron Age up to the present when females are still giving political battle all over The World. Witness the feminicides of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, victims of ‘machismo’, and the Nobel Peace Price awarded to Malala Yousafzai, a young champion of women’s education, a victim of The Taliban in North Pakistan who very symbolically grew up in a town near The Khyber Pass, an ancient thoroughfare of Asia that has witnessed the transit of Conquerors dawn The Ages.

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In the realm of spirituality there are three levels.

The lowest one is political; it is the level of public, exoteric, institutionalized religion with its public cult. It is defined by the word God, the concept of God; weather theological or political.

The next level is the level of the Spirit, of personal religious mysticism in whatever region of the World; be it Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or other. It is usually, but not always, accompanied by piety and love. It belongs to the sphere of The Individual as opposed to the public one which is collective and political. This level is defined by a sense of The Divine and thus is the level in which Divinity is found. This is the sphere of devotion and sensibility, of private experience and Love.

The last level is the level of Ultimate Reality, of What Is; the highest form of Love, Consciousness and Knowledge, of The Spiritual Experience of Illumination…of Who we are and What The Universe is all about; and it is only through Illumination that we have access to such Knowledge because scientific knowledge alone is at best fragmentary and episodic dealing with specific phenomena, not unified and comprehensive as in Philosophy.

This last is The Sphere of The Psychic Continuum of the moment of Death described in The Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of The Dead, this is what is understood by the Transference of Consciousness and ‘The Fundamental Clear Light of Pure Reality’. ( Chikhai Bardo I ) Most people subsist in the first level….if at all. Very few people make it a daily commitment to live in the second and third levels…..if ever. The idea should be to make the second and third levels a universal experience shared by all. This is The Religion of The Future.

The original ‘sin’ for the Abrahamic religions was Matriarchy, the Cult of The Mother Goddess that lasted for thousands of years: from The Venus of Holhe Fels, 40 000-35 000 BP, the Venus of Wilendorf, 26 000-24 000 BP and many others dawn to the Cretan and Caananite Cultures at the end of The Bronze Age circa 1200 BCE. The Mother Goddess of Fertility The Goddess, Gea, the Greek word from which our word Geography comes from, was one of the names of The Mother Goddess of Fertility and Entheogenic Rites, the eating of The Sacred 93

Mushrooms that gave ‘the knowledge of Good and Evil’, The Fruit that Eve, the temptress, ate that revealed the secret of Telesis, the relationship between the perceived elements of the natural world: plants, animals, humankind as existing in the Plane of The Divine, as in the painting of Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach, The Elder.

The priests of Yahweh, the Caananite El,(from which the word, Isra-el, comes from), with his consort Asherah, introduced the ‘Patriarchal Myth of Genesis to bolster up the power of The King; it was a political matter and has remained so to this day, first by rejecting Baal-worship in the ninth century and then through the 8th to 6th centuries the condemnation of Asherah and Sun-worship in high places and mountain tops. The Nature and the interpretation of ‘God’ is a political matter controlled by The Patriarchy and The State. (. Women are subordinate and this was sanctioned by myth in Genesis, Torah and Coran. Eve as the temptress initiated Adam into sensuality, gave him ‘the forbidden fruit’ and made him fall. This was dangerous, so women were banished; as Dido was, fled her brother Pygmalion in Tyre and founded Carthage…It was an attempt to banish all that was feminine from the realm of the Spirit and have men wield the religious symbols of Power…with all the consequent distortions in the realms of human life and Culture.

Need we say that there was never an ‘original sin’; it was a mental trap set up by the forces of The Patriarchy to enslave Mankind in Guilt- the most selfdestructive of all sentiments, the psychological mechanism of power employed

by The Roman Catholic Church to this day, and it works for them in the more ignorant parts of The Planet.

The implantation of Patriarchy with its systems of power necessitated the suppression of Entheogenic rites. This became a long psychohistorical process that was best illustrated by Robert Graves in his introduction to his Greek Myths in which he describes how the Tanits or co-regents of the Matriarch took hold of the Dromena, that is, the sacred implements of the Rites and eventually supplanted the Matriarch as officiating hierophant and ultimately became priest-kings. (see also Marija Gimbutas, Godesses and Gods of Old Europe) We may infer that the Caannanite Civilization, presided by the god El, which gave rise to Isra-El, went through a similar process and this is what the Hebrew 94

pastoralist learned except that they will have us believe that their experience was unique. It was not. Many other peoples had rich processes of cultural evolution; witness The Hindu and The Maya who have had a continuous spiritual evolution to this day.

In many ways the Abrahamic religions have imposed an Age of Darkness on a large segment of the Globe because they are intolerant and exclusive, phalocratic and authoritarian and their respective theologies depend on hardly credible myths that have no grounding in Cosmological Reality. A male dominated society who lives by the abuse of power, which has generated endless wars the product of a phalocratic cult: of swords and guns and rockets; all extensions of the penis, is not credible in a spiritual or metaphysical sense.

The Phenomena of Consciousness of Consciousness interdicts absurdity. If you have once seen The Order of The Universe and you cannot restrain yourself, without any self-control, you should not have access to Government, because you do not comprehend The Privilege that is Life. Jerome, Agustine and Orosius were perpetuating a phantasy. Better should they have sat on the ground and commenced to practice Yoga, like Clement of Alexandria, than to have launched the Western World on The Christian Adventure of endless genocide presided

by The Cross. December 25, 2017. (see The Reactionary English Catholic University of Douai in France established by Philip II of Spain and Pope Paul III after The Council of Trent, with William Allen as the founding President, 1569.

Wikipedia).

For a time Early Christianity promised Mankind a return to a Reign of Love and Communion with God through compassion and self-restraint as if Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of The Garden of Delights had all of a sudden come true, (the original message of Christ? ). This was the Redemption of Love suppressed at The Council of Nicea when Catholic Orthodoxy was established through the rule of The Monarch Bishops aided by the misogyny of Pauline Christology against the more philosophical, agnostic views of Arius, Clement and Origen. The free expression of Eroticism, Sexuality and Love were dead, repressed and replaced by intolerance, guilt, sin, confession, repentance, penitence, obedience and authority. As never before, the concept of Authority associated to the State, had been loaded for the first time in History with guilt, self-censure and repression; the dawn of a psychological malaise and lack of self-esteem in The 95

Western World. A New Age of Darkness dawned in Late Antiquity that has not yet lifted.

Today, in the political level, Religion answers to State and Corporative needs that have an ethnic and nationalistic background. The Idea is to establish a certain uniformity that facilitates political control and is enforced through ideological purity in the establishment of orthodox systems of belief associated to State control throughout the different geographical areas of Abrahamic religions.

The content of beliefs, ‘The Canon’, is secondary, what is important is that it be applied uniformly and in some cases like the modern Theocratic States, mercilessly. This might permit a certain variety, country to country, nation to nation, but the desired effect is the same: total political control and discipline and obedience in the work bench to insure the capitalist his projected economic added value. This is the sine qua non of control and power which is exactly the medium of Politics.

Within this structure of things individuals that have spiritual qualities are superfluous. This is why I say that in the contemporary world the last purpose of Religion is to foment Spirituality; this is why today the individual that seeks true spirituality is obliged to seek liberation first in personal, mystic experience even though he or she continues to live within the political-religious community he or she were born to, be it Christian, Jewish or Islamic.

The mystic by definition is a lonely person, he or she is an artist of the Spirit, creating a new path, a new form, all to himself or herself. A New World most perforce arise to give space to this new religious culture and it could very well be the World Community of Internet, that is why it will be very important to maintain the freedom and non-profit accessibility to The Net and to clean it, as best possible, from the Dark Side of criminal intent and political opportunism and censure.

The fact is that this new kind of mystic is living an intensely personal experience, quite often in a transcultural context that involves the study of many spiritual currents of the religious History of The World available in the spiritual centers of cosmopolitan metropolis the world over. And the clearest spirits are seeking not only knowledge but Illumination. And this is The Religion of The Future.

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When this is achieved the person is outside Culture. Is outside any specific historical culture and starts to identify with the phenomena of life from its very deepest roots so that the World Community started by internet may eventually lead to a shared sense of Consciousness across national borders that will dissolve those borders as it dissolves the little identities of regionalism and sectarian religion that exist day.

The Divinity does not care whether you are Orthodox or Arian, Nestorian or Paulician, Catholic or Protestant, Jewish, Moslem or Buddhist. This is the reason why to maintain an orthodoxy has more to do with the cult of power and the opportunistic advantages of social connections than to devotion to Love and Compassion. There is no Love, only manipulation and hierarchy since the days of the Roman Aristocracy of Emperor Trajan who sent his Correctors to Greece to remind The Greek Urban Oligarchy that they were not equal to The Romans because it rankled the Romans that The Greeks looked dawn on them because they were not as cultured as Greeks… and it continues to rankle the Vatican Roman Aristocracy to this day that anyone might not kiss the hand of a Cardinal or a Monsignor…They might lose Grace but they never lost Power. Like Emperor Gratian who relinquished his title of Pontifex Maximus in 384 so that nothing might change for the Patrician Class and they govern as before as if nothing had happened; notwithstanding the fact that they were now Christians…and so eventually these same Roman Patricians became Cardinals… Power remaining within The Family.

But before The Phenomena of Illumination can be experienced by All a new World Culture would have to emerge, one in which the enjoyment of all cultures on their own merits would be possible; enjoyment of all cultures by everyone through The Net. Just as we can watch a program about a foreign country and enjoy it we might travel to a foreign country and like it. We thereby learn to live simultaneously in many different cultures and become tolerant; one culture becomes all cultures, we learn to see the universality of culture and this makes us human and makes us spiritual as we learn to enjoy what is different.

This interchangeable person in interchangeable cultures is the person of The Future. When such people are a majority in The World then we will be able to say that a New Era has begun.

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The religious superstructure of The World most advance on to a higher plane: that of The Phenomena of Personal Illumination. This is impossible within the context of organized religions under the control of hierarchies or priesthoods because these suck away the spiritual energy of the laity which then becomes the source of power of the elite. The canonical ideology of institutionalized religions serves the purpose of immobilizing the individual in a state of perennial childhood dependency which serves to perpetuate false religions for centuries or even thousands of years.

Each one of the major religious traditions of the planet is circumscribed to a geographical area that has an Ethnographic and Historical origin that has been superseded by the globalizing effect of World Culture created by Internet. The future of World Culture will be decided by the need to create a broader spiritual identity than that provided by the present World Religions.

Folklorist considerations aside, these systems of thought are now anthropological relics dangerous to World Peace and The New Transcultural flow of Information. The growth of a new spiritual language is more instantaneous associated to the power of images and visions as Marshall McLuhan predicted decades ago, visions that flow instantaneously and become Telepathy. That flow from individual consciousness and become shared spiritual experience almost without words‌ The Phenomena of Consciousness is Paramount, Consciousness of Consciousness only possible in freedom of conscience- freedom from the tyranny of integrist religious pressure such as that observed in countries with theocratic regimes without the fundamental freedoms of a lay civic society.

A certain level of cultural, emotional and intellectual maturity is needed in order to leave behind religion as a psychological prop, as a means of individual or political power. Also a certain level of independence and detachment, love of Historical truth to discover what actually happened in the History of Religion in order to recover our Historical Memory, essential in a democratic society.

We have to make use of several disciplines in order to arrive at this level of Consciousness. First and foremost we should further develop Psychohistory in association with several branches of Anthropology and schools of Psychoanalysis so that our endeavors should conduct us to an interdisciplinary 98

approach to The Phenomena of Illumination as it reveals the movement of World History.

The ideological superstructure of the Planet is a historical construction that is no longer in accord with the movement of culture towards a common human identity vis Ă vis the Extraterrestrial presence in the vicinity of our Planet.

Indeed, if they do not already have bases on this Earth. It is possible that the military have forbidden the political class to divulge this secret; but the fact remains that it will not be able to be contained much longer and that sooner rather than latter we most begin to adequate our overall interpretation of reality if we are to cope successfully with the phenomena of intelligent extraterrestrial life which primarily has to do with our own sense of identity, rather than what or who are the Extraterrestrials, whose very existence will instantly force us to widen our metaphysical perceptions if we do not wish to enter into a state of collective cultural shock that will be extremely painful and costly for humanity.

The Global Culture of the Global Village demands an extreme form of ideological simplification which is to lift the Historical, Ethnographic, anthropological constructions of mainstream religions out from the spiritual content of Illumination and leave That, what is left, as our new reality and sense of identity vis Ă vis The Extraterrestrial Presence. And in this way we shall be restoring the fundamental meaning of Illumination which is to find our common ground with the Unity of Cosmic Reality and our place within It which has been in existence from All Time as we recover our Memory, as we awake.

Also the theory of The National State and the idea of a National Identity should be discarded in favor of whatever shall emerge of World Consciousness- which would not be wise to define in advance since Humanity shall generate a new sense of Being along with a new spiritual Language, which we do not yet know and is now in the making‌but runs along the lines of horizontal democracy and self-government.

The intimate knowledge of God was direct in Paleolithic times when the whole tribe participated in direct Entheogenic Experience through the ritual use of Entheogenic Plants and each individual sang his individual spiritual song as the Huichol and Hopi still do.

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But in Neolithic Times in the city states of Egypt and Sumer intensive agriculture brought about a population explosion and the appearance of a priestly class who claimed to interpret the voice of what had once been The Spirit of The Clan. There and then some time during Neolithic times the freshness of the experience, the interior voice, was lost.

For it is one thing to experience a profound awakening and union with the World that surrounds us and quite another to be told about it. And this is precisely what the historical World has lost with institutionalized religion that substitutes the true and inner experience of Awakening and Self Knowledge, with a very weak counterfeit simulation that steals the Soul of the individual and robs him of the uniqueness of his spiritual autonomy and vision which is precisely that: the possibility of discovering himself and his relationship with what is immanent and eternal.

We are slowly imploding into a World Society, notwithstanding the many atavistic resistances, we travel and learn to enjoy the culture of other people, learning to take a mental holyday, a vacation, from our own culture. We do not want a supremacist culture from any one country to dominate all others through its strategic use of Aircraft Carriers Groups and the threat of Atomic Bombs. We want a World Community and a World Government of enlightened multicultural concourse.

Supremacist Christianity has had its moment in History. It represented an authoritarian society and a culture of mental dependence. Today we are relearning The Awakening into Spiritual Experience in a continuous process of self-knowledge, analysis and psychological reflection seeking the best ethical resonance possible.

Dependent human beings are not capable of learning, of spiritual advancement. We have to break away from fixed ideological systems in religion or politics, and learn to be able to think for ourselves. A ready-made religion that has been handed down by our parents and that we utilize for social functions will fail us in moments of great need when we have to make use of all our inner resources to analyze reality and choose from several options the road that we should take. If we let others make these fundamental decisions

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for ourselves we shall never know who we are. We shall be reduced to a symbiosis of dependence and derive our identity from someone else.

This Symbiosis of dependence has been the accepted public Ethics of The West, at least in Mediterranean and Latin countries where the Catholic Church jealously supervises Culture. But this is ending; someone has said that The XXI Century is either Spiritual or it shall fail.

Christianity, and more specifically Pauline Christology carries within itself its own limits beyond which Christianity is no longer useful, credible or necessary.

Just as the Hellenic Pantheon became an anachronism to survive only in the imagination of poets as Mythology. Hellenistic Culture was placed in a Museum during The Italian Renaissance, so is Christianity slowly becoming part of History and Mythology where it is contributing more to spiritual immobility with its, negative theology of original sin, guilt and punishment, with the terrible example of the, crucifixion symbolized by The Cross to operate as a dark and violent threat in the psychology of children during Sunday school, ( cathequesis). Well has expressed Dr. D.T. Zusuki, the Japanese philosopher of Zen Buddhism, that it was the symbol of The Cross that prevented him from making an ecumenical approach to Christianity. It contains too much suffering and irrationality, the psycho-pathological syndrome of sin, guilt and punishment, is diametrically opposed to the idea of Yoga, of self-knowledge, meditation and Illumination.

Also the fear of sexuality and of eroticism is implicit in the often expressed misogamy of Pauline Christology and the spirit of patriarchal Christianity in general. The idea that man is sinful and dependent on revealed religion in a closed ideology dominated by a priestly class who interprets it. This theology represents a psychology conditioned by exogenous forces that generate an irrational dynamic of action conditioned by guilt, repression and compulsion, in a neurotic circle that propagates basic misunderstandings of emotional reality mixed with ignorance. It is no wonder that Catholic priests, isolated in their seminaries, become pederasts once they have to deal with the real world devoid as they are of psycho-analytic knowledge and the elemental freedom of release given by adult erotic relations.

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Instead of freeing the mind to act as a generator of Self-Knowledge through meditation and reflection on the meaning of the experience of our daily lives so that we may become responsible for the consequence of our actions. Our spiritual development is the Awakening of Consciousness, of what is Divine Within us, of The Divinity within us, immanent in The Source of coded entelechies that pervades The Universe and reaches us as messages from The Collective Unconscious. This we share with all sentient beings throughout The Universe who experience The Phenomena of consciousness of Consciousness and Illumination originating from The Source.

The Gospel of Saint John is clear were it mentions The Logos was made Flesh, this is pure Late Platonism, probably derived from Philo. This is also the fundamental mysteric metaphor for the Experience of Illumination “made flesh” through the active agency of the alkaloid claviceps purpurea the active substance in The Sacred Kukeon at Eleusis and in other sanctuaries of The Eastern Mediterranean.

This is the bottom line- the Myth of Jesus is the dramatization of that idea- the logos, the kerygma received by man from The Fountainhead for the edification of mankind to be the vision of life and the foundation of Ethics, The Darma, as expounded in The Sermon of The Mount which is of clear Entheogenic inspiration. The fundamental idea, the Logos, was The Phenomena of Illumination which was at the time of Plato the unspoken mysteric content of The Reality behind the philosophic <Logos. Today there are no boddhisattvas, no messiahs, no christos redentoribus because the Kerygma is Within Us, It is immanent in the meaning of The Universe, scientifically or as theology, as you like it, as you prefer. Everyone has access to Illumination if you care, if it is for you.

The intention of The Timaeus was as a ‘translation’ of The Phnomena of Illumination into the language, method and logic of Philosophy as a philosophical Greek understood it in Athens and later in the Alexandria of Philo, Plotinus, Amonnius Saccas and Origen. It was the intellectual consequence of mysteric experience.

We are here most humbly and deeply moved by ecstatic experience and we think of Saint Seraphin of Sarov and Ramakrishna. We can only take the lives of 102

these Great Saints as examples. What is the difference between Hesychastia or Samadhi? We venerate these Great Saints just the same.

Saint Seraphin of Saratov

Ramakrishna The Neo-Platonism of Plotinus in The Enneads and the theology of Augustine in The City of God can be better understood if we approach them from the perspective of Ancient Mysteric Religious Philosophy rather than from a contemporaneous academic analytic approach, even though Augustine bent his philosophy to serve Catholic Apologetics. So is The Gospel of Saint John better understood in the light of ancient mysteric tradition whoever Saint John was and whatever his intentions were when he wrote: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC; The Word was made Fleshâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

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2000 years ago no one in the Eastern Mediterranean would have said: ‘I am The Son of God’, because in Hellenistic Religion the Son of God was a mysteric reference to the Phenomena of Illumination, The Sacred Entheogen. The metaphor came later, when both the Jews and the Christians were being persecuted for not worshipping the statues of the deified Emperors, and Christology had to be defined because it was a matter of life and death.

There seems to have been a transmission here, a parallel development of Christology to that of Saul of Tarsus, and I am here referring to John the Apostol, John of Patmos and John the Evangelist, whether they were or were not the same person. Then there is Polycarp who is said to have known and heard this person and finally Irenaeus who like Polycarp came from Smyrna and was supposed to have heard Polycarp in his youth.

Irenaeus conception of Christ as ‘The New Adam’, undoing Adam’s original Sin of eating The Forbidden Fruit, The Sacred Entheogen, was not popular in the East were the Orthodox Churches were more familiar with mysteric religion and the individual search of Illumination in hesychastic discipline. And here we see, as Charles Guignevert suggests, that Western Mediterranean Catholicism was beginning to take a different path from the East as it began to rely more on scripture than on personal mystical experience.

Also, for Jewish religious thought the Idea of The Son of God was impossible as we have already seen because Yahweh had no sons. Neither did The Essenes mention a ‘Son of God’ in a physical sense in any of the texts that emerged from the Caves of Qumram. The Master of Light and The Master of Darkness, yes; but no ‘Son of God’.

So that Irenaeus’ quarrel with The Agnostics and with ‘Eastern Cheistianity´ was a new thing, something that has characterized Western Mediterranean Catholicism, which having no philosophical tradition of its own in the Second Century of Irenaeus, chose to rely more on ‘the canonical texts´ than in the ‘dangerous ideas of the Gnostics’ that required more powers of the imagination than the ‘readymade canonical Gospels’ contained. And this set the pattern for future Roman Catholicism which was mentally lazier than the East and enjoyed much more a good argument full of Thomist syllogisms than the more arduous mystical path of experiential knowledge of The Divine.

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No young Jewish Rabi could have proclaimed himself to be ‘The Son of God’ unless he had been influenced by a Hellenistic Mysteric initiation cult and for that he would have had to have been a Jew of The Diaspora…Someone living in a place like Alexandria or Antioch or Tarsus… but not Galilee. So that The Story of Jesus seems to be more in the nature of religious allegory than of Historical fact no matter how many quotations about ‘The Son of God’ can be found in The Bible.

Even then the fact would remain that the experience received at the Telesterion of Eleusis- which had to remain a secret- would never have been confused by any Greek with a theological figure or deity since he understood that the story of Demeter and Persephone in ‘The Homeric Hymn to Demeter’ was a medium of expression for his own spiritual experience during the initiation rites at Eleusis that were to provide for him and overwhelming experience of discovery and self-knowledge that would change his life and remain with him giving meaning to his life at the moment of death.

Yet for a Hellenized Jew of the Diaspora the Pauline figure of Christ promised a reconciliation of his Jewishness with the Greek elements of his own Hellenistic Culture. Even more so if such a religious figure claimed to be The Jewish Messiah as a universal symbol of Love and Millennial Hope. Then indeed we would have a most potent an explosive combination: The Mysteric IaachusDionysus, intercessors in The Resurrection of life every Spring and the ChristosRedentoribus offering redemption and hope to the just in an afterlife that would not fail to capture the imagination of the oppressed peoples of The Mediterranean World who were already familiar with the promise of renewed spiritual life offered by Mysteric Religions.

This was the genius of Barnabas, Saul and their friends: ‘the apostles’, ‘saints’ and ‘didascalii’ who had created out of the turmoil of the Roman-Jewish Wars a new Half-Jewish Half-Hellenistic sect that was in effect a new synthesis of the two strongest religious currents in the Eastern Mediterranean World.

Nonetheless this was not enough for the Jews of Cyrenaica, Alexandria and Cyprus who still had grievances with the Greeks and the Romans in Judea, as it was shown during the three Jewish Wars between 66 and 137 CE. Yet the merit of the new religion of Christianity was that it introduced an element of 105

compassion and Love, though it did not last very long, once the early ‘monarchical’ bishops like Irenaeus defined ‘orthodoxy’ they started persecuting Jews, ‘pagans’ and ‘heretics’ supported by the instruments of the State. (Greek Christians, like Justin Martyr, evidenced a certain degree of anti semitism in his writings, as in ‘The Dialogue of Trypho’).

Curiously the early Christian rites were very similar to Mysteric religions, specially The Mass or Eucharist, the consecration and the sharing of the symbolic body and blood of Jesus deified as The Christ had a striking similarity to Eleusinian Mysteric rite with the consecration of The Sacred Kukeon or chalice and the eating of the bread and wine which could very well have been an Entheogenic Plant or Mushroom like at Eleusis.

This formula as a new religious synthesis of Greek and Jewish elements solved the fundamental religious questions for millions of people of mixed descent living in the urban areas of The Eastern Mediterranean which was the most populous part of The Roman Empire 2000 years ago. Caught half way between Rome and Jerusalem in the most dramatic way possible in the struggle between Jewish Nationalism and Roman Imperial Power in the brutality of the three Jewish Wars.

Entheogenic Experience can be so powerful that if it does not take place within the Path of Discipline of a great religious faith, it could lead to madness, as was probably the case with the Sicarii and the Zealots, two radical politico-religious sects in the early First Century before the events leading to 66 CE. On the other side, The Essenes of Qumran and The Therapeutae of Lake Mareotis were deeply committed to an ascetic spirituality; and if they ever used The Sacred Entheogens, (The Baaras Root or claviceps purpurea, see Josephus and Gordon Wasson), it most have been to great spiritual effect from what is known of them historically. Let us remember that in Antiquity there was no pharmaceutical industry to raise a hysterical campaign for mercenary reasons against medicinal plants and that their use was universal.

Some of these plants were part of the Soma or Entheogenic Vehicle contained in The Sacred Kukeon at the Mysteries celebrated throughout the Hellenistic World. Entheogenic Experience can be so powerful that it has been at the origin of many of the oldest historical World Religions. And it is clear that it was at the 106

origin of The oldest of them all: Hinduism, as the rites of The God Soma described in The Rig-Veda indicate, and as we wrote above when we followed The Verticil of Psychohistory from the Eurasian Tundra of the nomads and their reindeer to the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex and the Aryan tribes who invaded The Harappan Civilization of The Indus Valley.

It is also clear that Entheogenic Experience was at the origin of Mycenian Religion during the Bromze Age present in the lowest Archeological Level at Eleusis, sanctuary of The Mother Godess Demeter. And we can infer that it was present in the formation of the Cult of Isis and Osiris, a similar mystery in Prehistoric Egypt. And in Mesoamerica at TeotihuacĂĄn, represented in the Tepantitla Fresco and in The Mushroom Stones of The Miraflores Culture at KaminaljuyĂş in Guatemala.

And in many other places The World over, so that The Ancient Middle East was no exception, Palestine included, the spread of the Cult of The Sacred Entheogen was a form of cultural radiation over the World since Late Pleistocene times and here we should mention the very early cultures in Gobekli Tepe, the Gulf of Khambat and Java that have recently come to light.

These early rites and cultures constitute, indeed, the very Origin of the Religious Idea and of Entheogenic Experience and The Phenomena of Illumination during Its earliest phase and is the greatest cultural force in World History that continues to operate to this day.

Whereas the more advanced religions propose that you rediscover The Phenomena of Illumination within yourself and give you a guide and example of It; the other less developed, so called Abrahamic Religions pretend to give you a readymade simplified version of Illumination in a mythical form of outworn public content and ask you to believe in it so pain of ostracism or death in this world and terror and hell in the next. In these other religions there is no possibility of self-Knowledge or discovery since the priestly intermediaries rob you of this experience and make sure that you remain docile like a child to be exploited without dignity or freedom of choice.

These Authoritarian Religions want you to parrot a whole set of mythical belief whose original content they have long ago seized to understand. They will require of you submission and obedience and the adoption of a readymade 107

religious canon in exchange for social support and social advancement under the protection and patronage of corporatist religious organizations allied to The State or as in the case of Theocratic societies being The State themselves where you will not have to be responsible for your own spiritual development after you have placed it in their hands.

On the contrary you will be encouraged to remain dependent and childlike for the rest of your life. These Western Religions will interpret life for you and tell you how to live it. They will actually live your life for you- take it away from you ‘because they know better’.

These religions, with enormous self-satisfaction, take for granted the last three thousand years of Western History and make of their foundation myths the very origin of human events. Yet the mental configuration established by their laws, canons and dogmas is no longer relevant. Human Consciousness in The World is expanding beyond the naive simplicity of their theology and the repetitive and empty nature of their rites and practices.

Contemporary human Consciousness requires an Ethical dimension, techniques of meditation that are beyond the scope of these religions with their exogenous ethics based on guilt and patriarchal authority. The idea of sin, of Original Sin, of an elemental disposition for negativity is already conditioning behavior in that direction, in a congenital disposition for wrongdoing and the cult of violence as a sign of virility that should be substituted for self-analysis and meditation. Self-control: this Ethics is more advanced because it introduces the concept of Moral Responsibility derived from Self-Knowledge rather than ‘divine redemption from original sin’.

We should ask: What original sin, other than ignorance? Only thru Self Knowledge shall we gain self -control and love of ourselves, compassion and love of others, prevision instead of a rudimentary sense of guilt and punishment that destroys self-esteem.

This practice would create a habit of Self-Knowledge, self-analysis and meditation on the consequence and ramification of our actions, (Karma), and will establish a lucid base for Ethics other than culpability and punishment with its vicious circle of psychological ignorance and repetitive, compulsive and selfdestructive action that leads to low self-esteem and crime.

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The problem confronting Humanity is Humanity itself, its enormous complacency and self -satisfaction to which the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions have brought the World today- to a spiritual standstill. A complacency with The Theory of The State, Power, Control and the militarism of Patriarchal Phalocracy. This attitude has dangerously immobilized Humanity within a circle of self-destruction and the Cult of Violence permitted by the perversions and complicity of Science with Militarism in the technique of State Control, an economic and political vice of the Oligarchy of the World that General Dwight Eisenhower saw developing and warned against during his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961. ( see, Daniel GuĂŠrin, Fascism and big Business, 1936 ).

In the absence of a general public comprehension of the higher states of Consciousness, of self-control and self-government humanity is held captive, circumscribed within the mental and cultural limits of the authority of The Nation State and the superseded theology of traditional religions that submit the Life of The Spirit to outside forces dominated by politics; whereas in reality, The Human Spirit is ultimately irreducible and Free because It reaches into many other dimensions that underlie and reach beyond the very plane of existence in which we live.

No religion of the Ancient Middle East existed in isolation or was purely original in its ideological content. The transmission of religious ideas through cultural radiation from epoch to epoch, from area to area, from culture to culture, from generation to generation is a fundamental fact of History and of the History of Religion; notwithstanding the claims to originality by different religious traditions in their official canonical compendia.

The process of formation of religious ideas is very long as we have seen following the Verticils of Pschohistory. Religion is the most conservative sphere in human affairs, nonetheless imperceptible changes are going on all the time.

The process is very slow; the transition from the Upper Paleolithic of the Magdalenian Culture to the now inevitable Pleistocene Neolithic of Gobekli Tepe signifies a revolution in our present conception of Prehistory. This would make Altamira and Lascaux roughly contemporaneous with Gobekli Tepe so that you may imagine the fascinating religious spectrum that existed some 17,000 years ago. And when did the famous agrarian revolution take place, 109

20,000 years ago, 15,000, 10,000 or was it a continuous process that was interrupted several times?

We are here dealing with the transition from a Cultural Religious Complex of the Late Pleistocene that included the various fertility Venus Figures, (Wilendorf), the zoomorphic and possible Entheogenic content of the dancing shaman with a deer pelt and antlers of the Trois-freres Cave to the Mother Godess of Katal Huyuk and the First Temple in Eridu, a period of some 11,000 years.

This evolution of religious thought extends over very long periods of time from our contemporary perspective, through many generations of slow cultural growth that contrasts heavily with our rapidly changing world of the XXI Century. It involves the transformation of various elemental anthropomorphic symbols with a religious content, what Mircea Eliade called hierophanies, something that manifests The Sacred, like the churinga of an Australian shaman, into complex philosophical ideas like The Nous of Plotinus or theological systems like monophicism of the Byzantine Church or the idea of the Boddhisatva in Mahayana Buddhism.

All over The World this continuous and continuing process of spiritual creation derived from our Collective Unconscious generates similar answers to the phenomena of existence. The symbols of religious thought take different forms in different cultures yet the spiritual content of these symbols is similar in fundamental ways in spiritual experience shared by mankind all over the World.

The accretion of so many different religious currents converging on a single cultural product like the New Testament is such that a veritable work of philological analysis almost like stratigraphical archeology is needed to make sense out of the many layers of so diverse a corpus of ideas as those found in The Christian New Testament apocryphal or otherwise. Many currents flowed into the Christian mainstream during the first three centuries of its growth: the earliest and most important were Essene Mysticism and Hellenistic Mysteric religions, others were Persian dualism and angelology, Gnosticism, Manichaeism and Neo-Platonism. To all this we might add the influence of the Ancient Egyptian Religion on the School of Catechesis of Alexandria and elements of Buddhistic Hellenism from Bactria as shown in Clement and Origen 110

and The Yoga practiced by the Therapeutae which surely influenced Saint Anthony and the rise of monasticism since such a tendency already existed in Egypt prior to the appearance of Christianity.

In its beginning Christianity was a broad based, opened and dynamic movement of ‘apostles’ and ‘didascalii’ before the ‘monarchic’ bishops like Irenaeus started imposing ‘orthodoxy’ out of a corporatist and authoritarian impulse that eventually ended up mixed up with the policies of the Roman State in Late Antiquity and was co-opted by Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian. Yet originally, Christianity emerged as a movement in the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean that had large Jewish populations, it was a movement for the dawn and out, people who wanted to resist pacifically the violent culture of Rome and who wanted to reform Judaism and Hellenism through a new spiritual synthesis based on Love and Compassion as expressed in The Sermon of The Mount. The Myth of Jesus Christ was an idealized representation of this Hope.

And then something happened within the spirit of the Roman Aristocracy, the Patrician Class, between the time of Diocletian and Constantine that led to the Edict of Milan and The Council of Nicea. The Roman patrician class discovered Christianity and after Nicea perpetuated their power through it; they made Christianity the vehicle of the perpetuation of their power to this very day; they continue to control the Vatican and the Papacy through the College of Cardinals who are mostly Italians. Luigi Barzini has said, following Machiavello, that for Italians Politics is a Fine Art and it has shown how one of the greatest feats in History has been the perpetuation of the Roman Aristocracy in a position of World Power through the control of The Catholic Church, making out of Christianity the fine instrument of The Roman State policy dawn the road of History from Constantine to Justinian, Gregory The Great and Charlemagne…all the way to Philip II of Spain, the founder of modern Roman Catholicism, patron saint or the Counter Reformation and the Council of Trent…Where he was establishing an Eurocentric ideology for the domination of the World after the Discovery of America and The Treaty of Tordesillas. The powerful always co-opt certain ‘useful’ ideas and use them for the preservation of their Power.

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But to return to those inspirational spiritual currents that gave rise to Christianity, specially Essene religious thought and practice, which most have been held in great esteem by the Jews of the Diaspora before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, made it impossible to attend Passover in Palestine without some sort of contact with spiritual figures known to relatives and friends. It is true that The Essenes did not participate in the worship of Jehovah in the Temple at Jerusalem because they were the followers of Zadok, The Master of Justice, and did not sacrifice animals; witness Jesus setting free the doves from the cages of the merchants and overturning the tables of the money changers.

This was an Essene. Nonetheless the Jews of The Diaspora most have identified with the living example of simplicity and sincerity, hard work and righteous living of The Essene communities. They must have felt the purity of their mysticism and ascetic way of life, to want to preserve all these qualities in the story of Jesus, when the need arose after the destruction of The Temple of Jerusalem and the subsequent mass deportations and slavery of the Palestinian Jews who survived the holocaust of The First Jewish War, (Josephus).

We can understand the message of hope and Love and forgiveness, The Kerygma of Saul of Tarsus and other didascalii, not heeded, it is true, by many thousands of Jews of Cyprus, Alexandria and Cyrenaica who later rose and murdered thousands upon thousands of Greeks and Romans during The Kittos War of 115 CE. Saul of Tarsus apparently died sometime between 64-68 CE a victim to the Roman reaction to the disturbance in Palestine; although he had already been tried by Herod Agrippa II in Cesarea and sent to Rome to be judged there because he was a Roman citizen.

Paul asserted that he received the Gospel not from man but ‘directly by The Revelation of Jesus Christ´,(Gal 1: 11-16). He may have eaten of ‘the holy meal’, the Chrestus, the Sacred Entheogen, the amanita muscaria that grew in the forests above Tarsus or near the Sacred Grove of Daphné in the mountains outside Antioch. This was ‘the sudden conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus’.

The Jesus that emerged from the Gospels came out of the matrix of Second Temple Judaism and not out of a historical vacuum; he could very well have been in his youth, like many other young Jews, Josephus included, (Josephus, Autobiography), an aspirant to the Order of the Essenes, who after some time 112

decided to leave because of some differences with the discipline of The Order as expressed in their Manual of Discipline which he later subjected to analysis and refined after many years of reflection during his ‘occult life’. This is not the place to enumerate the many parallels between what is known of The Essenes and what is said of Jesus in the Christian New Testament – there is a vast literature on that. Just as Saul of Tarsus could very well have been influenced by the Stoic Philosophy for which the University of his home town was known he could also have considered Essene Theology as well as the orthodox current of the Mishnah he studied with Rabbi Gamaliel in his youth.

Unlike the Greek Mysteric influence on Pauline Christology the messianic turn given to the mysteric concept of ‘the son of god’ is of Jewish origin and could have been a Christian answer to the virulent messianic fanaticism of the Zealots and the Sicarii that lead to the war with Rome. A war the Jews could not win, as Herod Agrippa II well knew from his experience growing up in Rome where he had befriended Emperor Nero and been familiar with the Roman military machine. But there was too much blood between the arrogant Roman procurators Florus, Albinus, Festus and the Jewish people; The Zealots and the Sicarii exploited this, they wanted to show the Romans the combative spirit of Jewish youth…after the struggle, after Massada, came the dispersion of the survivors and with them, the spread of Christianity.

The Apocalypse of Saint John with its extremes of grief and passion, was the last cry of the Zealot Party, a cry that has rung dawn the ages to haunt Christian and Jewish mankind with the memory of burning Jerusalem. This episode in Psychohistory which forms part of the collective memory of the West, is symbolized by The Crucifixion, as an eternal reminder of the Holocaust so that The Jewish experience is intimately interwoven with the History of Christianity and of The West.

Central to the Origin of Christianity is the life of the Synagogue, mother and model to the Christian church and we think of the synagogue of DoraEuropos,(see image above), which was originally mistaken by the archeologists who excavated it for an early Christian church on account of its vivid and well preserved frescoes depicting passages of the Old Testament. And then there are the descriptions of Jewish religious life in The Septuagint and in the Historical works of Josephus and Philo Judaeus and in The New Testament all 113

written in Koiné Greek, the lingua franca of The Eastern Mediterranean during The Hellenistic Age, The Roman and Byzantine Empires. It was the place were destiny was being decided and ‘thither, the new missionaries went: Saul, Barnabas, Timothy, Mark and Luke…’

We should not forget that the New Testament was originally written in Koiné Greek, not in Hebrew or Aramaic so that it was clearly a product of The Diaspora of Jewish Hellenistai. It was supposedly written by four Jews and one Greek.

Most of them closely related to Saul of Tarsus, Barnabas and The City of Antioch, the place where the name ‘Christians’ first emerged.

MARK, ‘a cousin of Barnabas´, also John Mark, one of the original seventy apostles commended by Jesus to publish His Gospel, accompanied Barnabas on his journey through Cyprus. It is thought that The Apostol Peter encountered Mark somewhere in his travels through Anatolia, in 43 CE, and that he served Peter as his secretary and wrote dawn his sermons for him, composing the Gospel according to Mark, before leaving for Alexandria in the third year of Emperor Claudius reign (43) or towards the end of his life,(65-70?). He is said to have founded The Church of Alexandria, today The Coptic Orthodox Church and The Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria. The Alexandrians resented his efforts to turn the population away from their ancestral gods, hung a rope around his neck and dragged him through the streets until he died.

MATTHEW is supposed to have been one of the Twelve Apostles and one of the four evangelists but according to internal evidence of the text of The Gospel according to Mathew the author was a Christian Hellenist probably ignorant of Hebrew. To the Encyclopedia Britannica, (1954): ‘these results are in many respects curiously at variance with the traditional account of the authorship of the Gospel. According to Irenaeus, Origin and Eusebius the book was composed in Hebrew by the Apostle Matthew,(between 70-80?), originally a tax collector named Levi whom Jesus summoned from his desk to follow him and be one of his apostles one day at Capernaum when He was passing through.

LUKE, a friend of Saint Paul who is thought to have been his travelling companion and physician is assumed to have been the only Evangelist who was not a Jew, but a Greek speaking Antiocene. He was a man of letters familiar with Greek Culture who wrote the Gospel attributed to him between 80 and 114

90, as well as the Acts of The Apostles which has been praised for its historical merit. Both works account for some 27.5% of The New Testament and are sometimes referred as Luke-Acts. A different view considers Luke to have been a Jewish Hellenistai of Antioch and to have been one of the first Christians there, who met Paul and accompanied him in his travels and was present at his death.

JOHN, a Christian of Judeo-Alexandrian formation, Irinaeus say John lived into the time of Trajan,(90-117), likely the son of Hellenized Jews of the diaspora, probably influenced by the Middle Platonism of Philo. His Gospel was published in Ephesus for the Church of Asia, (Anatolia), around 105? As late as 190? He was a chiliast by temperament, ‘one who believes in the second coming’ and ‘the one thousand year reign of the returned Christ’, as opposed to the Montanists who opposed this view. Apparently there remains a certain doubt as to who John really was; was he the beloved Apostle John who ‘reclined his head on the Lords Chest’, or was he John of Patmos, the author of The Apocalypse, or was he John, The Presbyter, quoted by Papias and Eusebius of Cesarea?

PAUL, or Saul of Tarsus or even Paulus, was the son of a Jewish merchant, a Roman citizen of the city of Tarsus, (Acts xxii. 28), himself a citizen of Rome by birth. Contradictory, a figure of great psychological and spiritual complexity he started out by persecuting Christians, participated in the martyrdom of Stephen, his first language was probably Koiné Greek. He was evidently a man of intellectual curiosity as is evidenced by his writings and his close friendship and association with Luke, another studious person. He most have been very intense and passionate, with great contradictory impulses of psychological cathexis and anti-cathexis sustained over long periods of time that found release during great cathartic moments during what I have called his Entheogenic Visions ‘on the road to Damascus’. He could have been what today is understood as a ‘bi-polar personality’. It is more probable that these vision took place in The Gardens of Daphné outside Antioch in the company of friends like Barnabas, Mark and Luke and possibly with amanita muscaria. He demonstrates in his writings a knowledge of Hellenism, Stoic Philosophy, Jewish Law, possibly the Middle Platonism of Philo and Greek Mysteric Religion which was very useful to him in Antioch, Corinth, The Athenian Areopagus, Perganum 115

and Ephesus where he met the Alexandrine Jew, Apollos, a Platonist disciple of Philo, who became part of his circle. Paul was the true founder of Orthodox Christianity through his Pauline Christology creator of the Figure of Christ; and was, like Saliputra to Buddha and Buddhism, the person who structured and gave form to Early Christianity, as much as Augustine of Hippo, his North African disciple, consolidated Christian theology for posterity. He wrote his famous letters circa 49-64 CE; and with his friends, the Evangelists, who were his disciples, he was responsible for practically the whole of what eventually became The New Testament.

BARNABAS could very well be the secret code name used by the Early Christians for The Sacred Plant, The Entheogens used during their ‘holy meal’ or ‘communion’, so similar to the Eleusinian Mysteries, the central and most important rite of Christianity, which at its very origin, most have used The Sacred Mushroom as at Eleusis, since bread and wine most have been a later substitution. Such a momentous experience as the sharing of the Eucharist, the gateway to ecstatic experience, consubstantial with the blood and the body of the Divinity, is not explained nor substantiated by bread and wine alone, which per force were a later, symbolic substitution. Ecstatic Experience is a very powerful Spiritual Event and in order to accord with the Visions of The Sermon of The Mount it would have to be an Entheogenic Experience within a group of participants, like at Eleusis, or inside The Kivas of The Hopi or The Huichol.

Nonetheless the person, Barnabas, described in the Acts of The Apostles by Luke, is a key figure in Early Christianity. His connection to the more important urban centers of Early Christianity and concentrations of Hellenized Jews close to Palestine at the time prior to the Jewish War places him at the very center of the nascent phenomena of Christianity and points to a special importance as if he were the conveyor or agent of Entheogenic Experience, a mentor to Saul of Tarsus and the authors of The Gospels: The very Word, The Logos, The Kerygma, that emerged from Divine Experience. Is he a secret reference to the initiation of Saul of Tarsus in the Grove of Daphne outside Antioch?

THE EPISTLE OF BARNABAS,(Britannica 1954, vol. 3, pp.118-9), apparently originated in Alexandria at the time of Vespasian,(70-79 CE), goes so far as to deny any connection between Christianity and Judaism by this ‘earliest of the Apostle Fathers’, states that Orthodox Judaism is foreign to the Spirit of true 116

Christian Insight, (Gnosis) and thus closer to Entheogenic Experience, which is intimate, personal knowledge of The Divine as opposed to Faith, (Greek- pistis), or hearsay. It possibly represents the Early Christian Gnostic point of view current in Alexandria after the Jewish War. We should keep in mind that the relationship between the Greek Mysteries and Gnosticism was very close.

(Evangelios Apócrifos, Cien del Mundo, Conaculta, 2006)

THE HISTORICITY OF JESUS AND THE GOSPELS The tradition of forgery started by Bishop Eusebius of Cesarea and the ‘monarchic bishops of Proto-Orthodox Christianity´ in their war against fellow Christians who would not comply with ‘orthodoxy’. His ‘letter of King Abgarus to Jesus Christ’ is an example of this. The political bias shown, in his panegyric to Emperor Constantine established a precedent in Christian censorship of the writings of Antiquity dawn to this day in the Vatican school of apologists, censors and black listeners who sidelined the literature of the Gnostics, Arians and other dissidents labeled ’heretics’ for political reasons in the name of ‘orthodoxy’. Suppressed also were most of what later came to be known as the ‘Apocryphal Gospels´, the literature of an heterogeneous Christian cultural movement that was otherwise lost to History. Nonetheless, what can we rescue of the historical Jesus Christ? Very little. We should avoid this controversy that reminds us of the Inquisition and the Wars of Religion to the point that the figure of Christ and The Symbol of the Cross are regarded with a certain degree of apprehension by millions of people victims of Imperialism and Western Eurocentric Christian Supremacy.

The famous forgeries and interpolations to the texts of Josephus and Tacitus, the forgery of The Shroud of Turin and the apologetic obsessions of Catholic catechesis leaves us with a bad taste in the mouth.

Nonetheless the figure of Jesus and his Sermon of The Mount arises a certain sympathy. He reminds us of The Essenes who were basically noble people and he is a more sympathetic figure than Saul of Tarsus.

We most here strongly insist on the Entheogenic Nature and Origin of The Figure of Christ from a strictly scientific and Psychohistorical point of view. We 117

most place ourselves in the context of Antiquity if we are ever to understand the true origin of The Religious-Spiritual Experience and here I am going to take two significant Examples: The Issa Upanishad and The Sermon of The Mount, to prove from internal Evidence, The Entheogenic Connection of Both to The Soma of The Rig-Veda and The Kukeon of Eleusis.

The associated chemical bond of Serotonine, Norepinephrine, Psilocin, Psilocybin, Epinephrine, Mescalin and LSD to the Indole Ring of Hydrocarbon molecules that act as Neurotransmissions is present in Stropharia cubensis.

Psilocybe Mexicana, Claviceps purpurea and Lophophora williamsii, Mushrooms and Cactaceae in immemorial use among Ancient Cultures the World Over used in religious rite that has led to the production of Great Religious Literature, foundational to many religious traditions or philosophical school of Antiquity. To continually deny this fact by certain sectors of the international academic community seems childish or interested or both in maintaining academic or bureaucratic tenure coute que coute, in universities and research centers.

Certainly, the philosophical ideas of people like Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Plotinus were influenced by Entheogenic Experience; why not Jesus Christ, specially Jesus Christ whose Sermon of The Mount corresponds very closely to someone connected to our Collective Unconscious and the Meta-Cosmic Font of Knowledge now believed to enter into play when great discoveries are made by outstanding individuals like Einstein, Tesla and the Hindu mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. Why could not BARNABAS have been a symbol for The Sacred Entheogen, a reunion with The Soul in renovation and Harmony, Love and self-love, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;love thyself as you love othersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, Compassion, The City of Light is within ourselves. This is The Kerygma received during Entheogenic Vision the World Over. This is what I saw and felt in Huautla.

THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE DIASPORA, The Hellenized Jews were equally familiar with Greek and Jewish Literature and Culture which included a very wide spectrum of religious literature most of it now lost, yet they had grown up studying The Septuagint, many of them like Philo Judaeus were familiar with Plato, others like Flavius Josephus were intimate with Roman power and politics. They were all men and women of The Eastern Mediterranean standing 118

between Hellenism and Judaism as it emerges from The DidachĂŠ and The Apocryphal Gospels.

THE DIDACHĂ&#x2030;, the earliest Christian Catechism from the first century, reveals traces of Essene influence in its proposal of Baptism by immersion, duality in the Way of Life and the Way of Death and the injunction of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays. Two primitive Eucharistic prayers are given, this was a time when Church organization was at its infancy and the wandering Didascalii and itinerant Apostles were active and many of its members were of Jewish origin and might have included people who had been Essenes. The Coptic Church preserves a Didascalia Apostolorum that could have been written by a Bishop with strong Essene sympathies.

PHILO JUDAEUS DE VITA CONTEMPLATIVA, Philo comments on the differences and similarities between The Therapeutae and The Essenes, (Eusebius p.76).

According to Eusebius, Philo comments the Sacred Book of The Septuagint through allegories that show the occult meaning under the words possess a sort of Soul in the renunciation implied in its asceticism that is reminiscent of The Essenes.

I think that the Therapeutae were a circle of high born Alexandrian Jews like Philo, and native Greeks who retired to the shores of Lake Mareotis in the manner of The Essenes of Qumran, who lived near the North-Western shore of The Dead Sea. They formed part of an Alexandrian elite who was familiar with Oriental Philosophy. The Therapeutae preserved a tradition introduced by Buddhist missionaries sent by Emperor Asoka to The West,(see above p. 27), and had also come into contact with Greek Buddhist monks from Bactria whose graves can be found near Alexandria and that the name Therapeutae closely resembles Theravadha and that they probably practiced Yoga. This closely parallels the contemporary influence of Buddhism in The West among people of the higher classes.

These early Christian apostles, gospel writers, missionaries, saints or didascalii wanted to preserve the spirit of their Entheogenic experience in stories that would serve to inspire their brethren in Roman captivity throughout The Mediterranean World in their hour of need after the destruction of The Second Temple by The Roman Legions. And what better story than that of Jesus of 119

Nazareth who rose from the dead and was The Son of God?(Britannica, Church History, vol. V, p. 678, Guignebert, El Cristianismo Antiguo, FCE, pp. 133-8) They could not reveal the origin of their Entheogenic Vision to the public they were addressing because this essentially mysteric vision required a personal, individual commitment that could not be made public. So they ‘translated’ their Vision for the benefit of their general audience into The Myth of Christ, based on the true story of a Galilean ‘prophet’ named Jesus. These wandering Didascalii were Jewish Hellenistai as were their public, as was Saul of Tarsus and his circle. On this point Saul had reflected and agonized for several years: how to take The Kerygma of The Jesus Vision to the people for he knew that the language and cultural content of this New Gospel, The Kerygma, was crucial. So finally he came out with his Christology and set out accompanied with Barnabas to preach.

And this Gospel, was it going to be directed exclusively to the Jewish Hellenistai and the Proselytes who stood at the door of the Synagogue? To the Gentiles of the Greek and the Roman World? Or was it going to be a Universal Message?

And in what vehicle of expression, under what literary form?

It is clear that great care and pain through meditation in associative mental and spiritual power had to elapse before the Vision of Christ, The Soter, at The Cross; Redeemer of Sins and Messiah, acquired full meaning for Saul of Tarsus.

It was one of the greatest creative efforts in religious thought in Psychohistory that emerged through the Gospels and Pauline Letters…as the New Religion of Christianity.

Paul chose the figure of a young former Essene aspirant turned rebel who had died at The Cross, judged by The Sanhedrin and turned to the Romans foe for execution to represent the historical tragedy of the Jewish People; to symbolize hope in a violent world of Empire and Coliseum…a comforting Message of Love for this World and the promise of Eternal Life in Another.

For at the time, the Roman Procurator, Florus (64-66), was savagely repressing The Jews; some rebels and many innocent victims had been crucified. The question of resisting the Romans by force of arms was the issue of the day, debated daily by the party of the Zealots who found a growing number of sympathizers among the general population- the figure of the young militant 120

zealot being the symbol of rebellion- as a Jewish nationalist and social revolutionary…

Yet in the Hellenized circle of the Diaspora the need for coexistence with the Greek-Roman world was a daily matter, paramount in the cities of The Eastern Mediterranean were the Jews were a minority. The more common name at the time was Joshua, (Jeshua, Jeshu; in Latin, Jesus), a belligerent name reminiscent of Joshua the conqueror of The Holy Land. The Jews were then in desperate need of a Joshua- the young Zealots and the Sicarii of a warrior Joshua, the more spiritual Jews of a redeeming Joshua, a Messiah, a Jesus Christ.

THE WAR BETWEEN THE SONS OF LIGHT AND THE SONS OF DARKNESS ‘Por estos años andara suelto Belial’ (‘During these years, the demon Belial shall be let loose’ ).

‘The day the Kittoii fall there shall be a confrontation followed by a great carnage before the God of Israel because that shall be the day set aside by Him from all time for the War of Extermination of The Sons of Darkness.’(The Dead Sea Scrolls, Pedro Gringoire, Edamex 2003, pp. 186-206) Ever since ‘the abomination of Antiochus Epiphanes’ profanation of The Temple’, the followers of Zadok, like many other zealous Jews had awaited the Day of Reckoning, and it came with the Destruction of The Second Temple which The Essenes had prophesied. Apparently the Jewish Christians were neutral in this quarrel so they fled to The Transjordan and became The Ebionites.

Yet to the innermost soul of the Hellenistai the Story of The Jesus of The Gospels emerged spontaneously out of a vast need for Hope in a turbulent World from the very depths of The Jewish Collective Unconscious came forth The New Religious Synthesis of Christianity in a Psychohistorical moment of great need.

There were dozens of versions, gospels and apocryphal gospels, gnostic gospels, the need was so great for a renewal of Faith and a new interpretation of the fundamental questions formulated by The Spirit confronted with this World. ‘A leap of Faith’ as stated by Rudolf Bultmann whose Theology to 121

‘demythologize’ the Gospels asked for a simple acceptance of the elemental Kerygma, The Message of Love and Compassion that underlies The Life of Jesus.

The Story of Christ emerged spontaneously among the survivors of the Holocaust between 65 and 135 CE, the generation of 66-71, as a memory of their lost youth and innocence, as a learning process from History. (See Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, Introduction). Much as the generation of 1956-1976 created The Hippie Vision of Peace and Love as an answer to the violence of State Power, Patriarchal Culture,(Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization), and The Viet Nam War. The Story of Christ was elaborated and refined to meet this moment of crisis – how traumatic the times were is exemplified by the story of Paul. Saul of Tarsus best personifies this great inner conflict between love and hate – his persecution of the Christians and his championing of the Christians is a desire to solve the inner conflict posed by his Pharisaic education and adherence to the letter of The Law with his Roman citizenship and loyalty to Israel. A difficult task lived by many Jews of The Diaspora such as Philo Judaeus who like Saul were undergoing a wrenching spiritual dilemma, a struggle for their souls: how to reconcile their loyalty to Rome with loyalty to Judaism. In Paul’s case the answer was Christianity – the new religious ideology painfully elaborated in the Synagogues of Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus and Alexandria.

For a Jew of the first century this was the greatest dilemma: witness the differing paths that the lives of Philo Judaeus and Paul took. The Issue was total war with Rome as The Zealots wanted or assimilation to Rome and Hellenism as The Sadducees proposed, (Herod Agrippa II). Between these two extremes lay the majority of the Jewish population caught between the prevarications of a man like the Procurator Florus and the daggers of the Sicarii. War was precipitated, and the middle ground disappeared. In desperation, Christianity arouse as the work of the creative Unconscious, very much like in a dream, out of a nightmare, a New Synthesis was born.

This momentous Historical Period is well described by numerous writers of Antiquity and in modern times; nonetheless the only writer that I know who has made the connection between the appearance of Christianity and the immemorial use of Entheogenic Plants is John Allegro in his book, The Sacred 122

Mushroom and The Cross. Yet erudite as he is he confesses to never having eaten The Sacred Mushrooms.

Well, I have, and I experienced Transcendental Visions as I related in my book Teonanacatl, and this coupled to my lifelong interest in the study of History have led me to discover that a lot of people throughout History have also experienced Transcendental Visions because you learn to recognize the shadow of the Experience, the signs left behind, like The Citadel of Uxmal, designed by a Priest-Architect who left This Evidence behind, The Sacral Unity of Uxmal is Homage to The Divine, so is Borobudur constructed in the 9th century in Java by the architect Gunadharma and restored by Sir Thomas Stanford Raffles, the founder of Singapore; and many more marvels scattered all over the World in Museums and Libraries.

So what is written about the conversion of Saint Paul is something I can understand from the point of view of the psychology of the intimate experience of the mystical vision. The subjective content of that vision may vary from country to country, from culture to culture â&#x20AC;&#x201C; its historical and philosophical content may differ but the nature of The Visions are timeless phenomena deeply etched in the genetic memory, (codes), of Mankind and it refers to the Cosmos. The nature of its associations leaves a recognizable pattern of spiritual entelechies recognized by the heart as in The Dahmapadha, in the Poetry of Saint John of The Cross and in the universal language that inspired The Sermon of The Mount; a Message of Love, against Power, Pride, Prejudice and Arrogance, Jealousy and Covetousness. Similar to the Damahpadhaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Message of Self Control, Knowledge of Causality, Meditation, Detachment, Love and Compassion.

These currents of Spiritual Life lead to Illumination, a prefigured event in the evolution of The Cosmos and in The Road to Consciousness in the life of man and at the Moment of Death we experience It During Transference (Chikhai Bardo I), so that we will remember it when the need arises, when we arrive, when we are ready, when the time comes. Here in this life, It is the kernel of Spiritual Experience.

There is a possibility that Christianity might have been inspired by a real historical fact: the life story and death of a Galilean Preacher. Yet the story of 123

the Gospels was constructed outside Palestine by Hellenized Jews, this is the internal evidence and the historical fact.

The Gospels were not written by Palestinian Jews, they were written by the Jews of the Diaspora based on Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria and possibly Ephesus,(Gospel of Saint John). The Evangelists belonged to the group of Saul of Tarsus, were his friends or relatives of his friends. One was a Greek Doctor who might have had some Jewish blood, (Luke).

On the other hand The Story of Jesus happens in Galilee and in or about Jerusalem. The curious thing is that none of The Twelve Apostles is credited with writing any of The Gospels… So why were the Gospels written outside Palestine, 30 to 70 years after the events they describe? Because they were describing a new Cultural Movement – not History.

It was as if the story of Emiliano Zapata or Che Guevara were written by a group of ‘Latinos’ based in Los Angeles and Miami decades after the deaths of Zapata or Che to provide a cultural Myth, to give spiritual refuge to Angeleno Pachucos and Latinos in Miami, Chicago and New York, who might feel threatened by Anglo Culture.

Of course this is a rough comparison but not very far from the mark, something similar could have been happening in the unquiet and fertile mind of Saul of Tarsus when he wrote all those letters to the Ephesians and The Corinthians.

He did not write to the Alexandrians because the Alexandrians were quite able to make a good story for themselves, witness The Alexandrian Gnostic Gospels of Nag-Hammadi. After all it was the City of Philo and they needed no help from a mere Tarsian.

The new Christian literature centering on what later became The New Testament was soon circulating around The Western Mediterranean and North African Coast; these works were resolving themselves into a tentative canon by the time the jealous Irinaeus was preaching in the streets of Lyon against his rivals, The Valentinians. Irenaeus was the first systematic defender of the idea of The Monarchical Bishop that should be obeyed in all matters civil and religious. With the supremacy of the idea of a canonical corpus, he started the politics of exclusion, of who was a heretic and who was not; he was the ideological originator of The Catholic Roman Church of The Western 124

Mediterranean World that was later the Eurocentric Instrument of Spanish Imperialism in America, he was the mentor of Orosius and Agustine of Hippo.

But it was a pupil of Amonius Saccas who was to be the first and last Christian Philosopher to try to make any sense out of the nascent Christian Theology, unsurpassed by Agustine, Aquinas or Jaques Maritan. I am thinking of Origen, companion of Plotinus in the School of Amonius, who was too much for the majority of Christians, especially of the West, who never understood his NeoPlatonist Philosophy and who preferred to play Politics and Power in the shadow of Constantine and his successors. Levels of Lucidity as Origen inhabited do not serve the purposes of Power; so he was marginalized from Church History. In his strong Pacifism, in his insistence on the pre-existence of All Souls and in his belief that The Universe shall not end until All Souls have achieved Illumination, his concept of Grace, he came close to Mahayana Buddhism. The Church deemed too much the mental effort to understand him, few were willing to make a serious effort because they considered it a waste of time. Nonetheless, if such intellectual and ethical rigor as that exemplified by Origen had been maintained there would never have been any need for a Reformation.

And this takes us to the very heart of the inner contradiction that lies at the center of Christianity and this is The Nature of The Mystery, The Same Mystery at the very origin of Greek Philosophy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Its Orphic and Eleusinian Origin, The Entheogenic Origin of both Greek Religion and Christianity that has never been really understood, explicitly discussed to this very Day, February 8, 2018. When did mankind first entered or had contact with Le Milieu Divine? The Symbolical Jesus of The Gospels, who is He? Divinity has no Sons, Christ is an anthropomorphic figure. We cannot personalize Le Milieu Divine, nor is it an Entity or an Individual. It is The Phenomena of Illumination, a Spiritual Frequency at which Cognition Dawns.

The Sacred Mushroom and The Phenomena of Illumination are a Vehicle to The Unconscious, a vehicle of The Word, The Holy Spirit, The Glossolalia, The Logos made Flesh through the Alkaloid psilocin that leads from this World into The Next. In the tradition of Yoga developed by the Aryan and Hindu Shamans who practiced Yoga not so much to achieve Illumination but rather as a spiritual 125

practice to preserve the gifts of Illumination â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Very Gift of The God Soma, amanita muscaria and psilocibe Mexicana, The Very Gates of Perception, of The Heaven and Hell of Hieronymus Bosch and of The Ineffable Vision of Eternity.

The original Christians were all killed by the Romans or escaped into the Desert of Transjordan and became The Ebionites as did the last of The Essenes, The Cross became their Symbol and it was in their memory that Saul of Tarsus founded Christianity. Christ and His Apostles are a symbol and a paradigm of the generations before Massada and the destruction of The Second Temple, epilogue to an Era for the surviving Jews. It was clear for them that something had happened that had altered their Center of Gravity and the Divine Order of Things and that a new order had dawned out of the matrix of great violence and destruction.

A new covenant with God was needed, a New Testament, and out of that great dividing line of History one great New Faith had been born, the harbinger of a nascent Truth: that only Love and Compassion could be the axis of Hope for Mankindâ&#x20AC;Ś of a New Relationship with The Divine such as we are trying to establish today, entering Now into The XXI Century. But this cannot be confused with anthropomorphic figures or militant political religions. The Dawn of Consciousness takes place in The Heart.

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THE ENTHEOGENIC THEOLOGY OF HUAUTLA

And it is at this point that we leave Christianity having experienced A Vision of Eternity in Huautla. We can affirm that Divinity is within Us and that It is a metacosmic Event that is beyond Time. Our bodies would dissolve in a second if we insisted on remaining here. The whole of The Universe would unravel before us and we would have known Its Secret.

It is up to us to assume responsibility for our own Spiritual Development to bring us to this point. No one can do it for us. To know is to see in an arc of 360 Degrees. The proportion of things, the unfolding of events around us, we should see them coming so that nothing can surprise us. Every act in our lives should be governed by Love and Compassion. Foresight is Ethics. We are here for a short while and every one of our acts counts to project us into The Eternal. We hold our lives in our own hands.

The stream of Consciousness is a Psychic Continuum only interrupted by Transference, Death and Rebirth; if we preserve our Lucidity and live an Impeccable Life we will not notice The Transference, The Death and The Rebirth.

Try to learn as much as you can and you will be rewarded by Coincidence, The message that comes from The Plane of The Divine. For The Tutelary Spirits of Your Dear Ancestors will help you if your heart is pure and you are not distracted by attachment so that you lose Consciousness of The Path.

The Path is there before you, self-evident all the time, follow the Roads that have a Heart and you will not fail to Arrive.

All else is Secondary.

Follow The Path of Love.

San Angel, February, 22, 2018

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