THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY An ongoing project Philip Conover Lazo
THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY An ongoing project by Philip Conover Lazo
PART I: THE CONCEPT OF PSYCHOHISTORY
The concept of psychohistory refers to a series of reflections on the nature of History that have been taking place since antiquity inspired first by philosophy and ethics and in more recent times by psychology and anthropology.The Republic of Plato, The Politics of Aristotle, The philosophy of Confucius, The Utopia of Thomas More and Machiavelli’s The Prince are examples of these ideas.
From the XX century onwards the development of psychology and psychoanalysis awoke a number of interdisciplinary reflections that when combined with certain philosophical and ethical considerations arising from a reflection on the special brutality and general degradation in the decline of politics that lead into genocide and war during the XX century, have inspired certain thinkers in the necessity of expanding historical analysis with an interdisciplinary approach. And here the development of psychoanalysis has been crucial as well as a knowledge of anthropology and prehistory.
It is in order to save ourselves from ourselves that such an interdisciplinary approach has been necessary. Self-knowledge was the original purpose of philosophy as well as the very origin of ethics. From Pleistocene times the use of entheogenic plants led to the refinement of language. Expanded awareness necessitated clear elocution. The discovery of formal relationships between the elements of nature led to new discoveries, to practical applications of these discoveries which in turn led to new language, to the elaboration of new words to describe new functions.
Such is psychohistory, it is a new tool.
THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY
The purpose of the method of psychohistory is to organize certain insights derived from the association of historical events, or even current political events, with their phenomenological relation in time-space and known psychological realities. And as we mention phenomenology we should define what phenomenological logic is.
'Phenomenological origin' as Edmund Husserl defined it in his Pure Phenomenology and Investigations in Logicrefers to Noema (noumena as in Kant), nous or noos, mind in Greek, which is a thing in itself, extant in time-space, independent of the human mind, different from perception or a psychological event, or from phenomena as an object described by man.
Then, to approximate Psychohistorical Noumena, we would have to use an interdisciplinary approach. As an example we shall take a Noumena from contemporary politics: gun control.
What would a gun be? In terms of psychohistorical duration in time-space (from Brentano’s Psychology of Intentionality and Bergson’s concept of historical duration) a gun is an extension of the arm, a continuation of the historical function of the sword and the poignard. But like them a gun is in psychological terms an unconscious extension of the male penis and with it men define territoriality and power. Here we should note that territoriality is an anthropological concept and that power is a political idea. So that in psychohistorical terms a gun becomes a phallocratic tool that expresses territoriality and power.
As in the sphere of individuals so in the domain of nations: guns are used to assert supremacy and power. Internationally, guns, in terms of world culture (following Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message) and the very existence of arms, signify war. And here is a case in point: Guns are a Noumena, a thing in themselves, independent of men, they ARE war. Or rather they are the expression of “I will punish you if you do not do as I want” (“A child is being punished” in On Psychopathology from Sigmund Freud; Wilhelm Stekel: Sadism and Masochism). Also in the psychopathology of violent crime involving guns and murder there is a strong element of repressed homosexuality as in gang warfare (e.g. la Mara Salvatrucha, the brownshirts of Eric Rohm vs. Himmler’s Gestapo or the tragic murder in Kansas described by Truman Capote in his novel In Cold Blood, a clear case of repressed homosexuality between the two murderers).
So that gun control to the ultraconservatives in the United States signifies castration. This is why you see such hysterical reactions to the possibility that a law banning guns might literally do away with their penises (see, e.g., Piers Morgan’s interview with an anti-gun control fanatic in a recent CNN television program).1 The whole question of gun control is a psychohistorical problem that has tremendous implications for the future welfare of humanity.
This reaction to gun control in the United States is part of the ‘fort apache’ complex, another psychohistorical phenomenon that has to do with collective paranoia and supremacist phallocracy in which large sectors of the American public see themselves threatened by the outside world, particularly by the United Nations and ‘hostile’ countries that allegedly possess atomic bombs. Also part of this syndrome is the fear of certain conservative elements of the population of a threat by the ‘native’ populations of the world. This syndrome contains a certain element of historical guilt and sexual domination in which the threat of the possession of their women or even of themselves by the ‘native populations' they have harmed in the past is an unconscious psychological possibility; so that it is particularly offensive and threatening that a ‘black man’, President Obama, wants to take away their guns.
1
Interview available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtyKofFih8Y (last visit, February 23, 2013).
PART TWO: WAR AFTER WAR, April 22, 2013
The Boston Marathon… Two Chechen brothers, a little American boy, a Chinese girl, an American girl and many more victims… A psychohistorical tragedy with world reverberations.
Reverberations of the War in Chechnya?
The intentionality of murderers is aleatory, they might take out their anger on anyone, the contagiousness of violence is a shock wave that stays in space around us, no one is immune to it, it saddens almost everyone. The etiology of violence is multiple, but perhaps its most pernicious cause is in the alteration of personality as a perversion. Violence can be induced as the ideology of hatred. Who perverts the most, the politician full of hatred or the religious ideologue who transfers his own hatred to the minds of the young? Where does responsibility lie?
Violence generates more violence, and guns and bombs are its agents. Guns and bombs are not merely inanimate objects. The tremendous energy needed to manufacture a single gun is inherent in it. It is potential energy and we transfer our psychological projections to them. In moments of great stress the very availability of guns can tip the balance from ire to tragedy. Even a knife can become a deadly weapon any moment. Just as you don’t leave a sharp knife around children you should not exhibit machine guns in store racks. What is the purpose of this, are you commercializing paranoia? It is a dangerous, obscene and irresponsible commerce that should be outlawed.
It is the sickness in culture, a culture of violence, a cult of violence. A supremacist culture that imposes its power through the cult of violence; be it class warfare or hatred of pacifists, or as in the case of religious hatred of infidels (the Chechen brothers)… They all lead to the same thing: WAR. Nothing good has come out of hatred, notwithstanding the platitudes of the purveyors of hatred, the golden rule is still valid: ‘Do unto others as you would wish to be done unto you’. It still stands today: It is the discipline of compassion, self- control and moderation.
The culture of violence should not be encouraged. It starts at home with the toleration of ire and the adulation of violence and the cult of guns. A supremacist culture requires this. The nations of the world united in their international forums should not permit this. Peace should be the culture of the World, no matter how utopian it sounds today, it is the way to universal consciousness and enlightenment.
The Method of Psychohistory
The diversity of cultures and of historical experience, of varied and contrasting anthropological environments cannot be denied. Humanity speaks different languages which are learning processes, implanted on a biological foundation, in vocal cords that produce different sounds.
The Chinese civilization, the Egyptian civilization and Mayan culture are three very clear examples of differentiated psychohistorical experiences evolved from the Pleistocene and later Neolithic cultures. There is a continuity of human evolution in Northern China from Pekin man to the earliest cultures of the Yellow River rooted to the soft, rich loess of the land. The migration of the people of the Sahara at the end of the Mesolithic Period into the fertile valley of the Nile, the spread of Olmec civilization from its central core in the Gulf Coast of Mexico into the high valleys of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guatemala was a learning process in new climates and environments, also a linguistic achievement evidenced in hieroglyphs and architecture.
This is dynamic human psychic evolution molded by historical events: The Shang Dynasty, the unification of Egypt by Nemes, the arrival of the Teotihuacan ambassador, Fire-is-born at Tikal, (378 A.D.) , were all linguistic achievements of the first order. The Spanish Conquest of Mexico and the Norman Conquest of England were intense formative periods that produced entirely new cultures from what had been before, and this is a true psychohistorical event, in the anvil of the collective mind, suffering profound transformation.
The structural logic of language studied by philology and linguistics corresponds to the first mnemonic effort implicit in early formative poetry like the charming Canterbury Tales of Chaucer or the delicious poetry of Sor Juana InĂŠs de la Cruz. In a way these works of art reveal traces of a broad psychohistorical synthesis that is operating in time and still continues. This process testifies the emergence of a cultural genotype which is in itself a psychohistorical noumena.
This is the process of Psychohistory, its Rosetta Stone, its transcultural complexities deciphered reveal our provenance as a people and help us recover our historical memory from the ashes of History, sometimes violent and full of grief, sometimes sweet and beautiful, constructive‌ into the components of our national psyches, ethnical and cultural differences, Islamic or Christian; Western or Oriental.
The Noosphere
The Noosphere is the last of telluric layers after the atmosphere and the biosphere, visualized by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It is a useful concept for Psychohistory because it describes the collective biological and psychic energy generated by mankind throughout its process of evolution and history and like the other layers it is subjected to its own dynamics in time-space and duration. It forms a corona with the other telluric layers of planetary existence.
This layer, The Noosphere, (from Greek: sphaira, sphere; noos, mind; thus, sphere of the mind), resonates and vibrates with creativity or destruction depending on the irrational moods of the species. It also reacts to certain events that alter its composition like great natural catastrophes or cosmic events.
Before we come to a description of contemporary psychohistorical reality and its multiple manifestations, it would be helpful to trace the psychohistorical events that have most contributed to the formation of the Noosphere. To recuperate the Historical Memory of what was; to see again the mysterious panorama of the great megalithic centers at the end of the Pleistocene‌ to contemplate again the stupendous cosmic tragedy of the fall of The Great Asteroid that fractured the Earth and drew forth magma from Iceland to Puerto Rico and changed the face of the Earth forever. This we will designate The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event or GPTE from its initials.
Paleoclimatology
Terminations: (Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Arqueology, p. 53) Rapid Ice Retreat. Each corresponds to a major rise in sea level causing a Marine Transgression in low laying coastal areas. The last mayor cold period - The Full Glacial or Pleniglacial, lasted from about 23 000 to 14 000 BP. The last 10 000 years from 8000 BP are known as The Post Glacial or Holocene.
The Megalithic Cultures of the Late Pleistocene
Before we come to The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event we would do well to describe The Megalithic Cultures of The Late Pleistocene. In media res, we come to Gobekli Tepe, a most extraordinary archeological site in south eastern Turkey that has completely revolutionized our understanding of Prehistory, for no hunter gatherers constructed this site at least they were no simple hunter gatherers as previously understood.
The people who built Gobekli Tepe inhabited a different frame of mind from the simple hunter gatherers. These people were motivated by cultural phenomena of a different order. To begin with they possessed a remarkable idea of architecture in stone with a striking sense of esthetics quite out of place in a conventional conception of late Pleistocene civilizations. Those extraordinary pillars in the shape of a mushroom are very abstract and atemporal in conception, they could have been designed by Inhotep for The Temple complex at Sakkara (4778 BP) or by Pier Luigi Nervi in his Palazzetto dello Sport (1957). They are a 13 000 year old mystery of a culture we cannot fully comprehend. Entheogenic rites took place there under those mushroom shaped columns.
Gobekli Tepe, images from National Geographic (Historia NG No. 104).
King Zoser's tomb, Sakkara. Images from K. Lange and M. Hirmer, Egypt: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, in Three Thousand Years (Phaidon Press, 1957)
Pier Luigi Nervi, Palazzetto dello Sport, Rome
So that these elegant megalithic structures are 2000 years older than Katal Huyuk, the oldest known Neolithic site. Gobekli Tepe, is nearly 13 000 years old. Up to now twenty similar round structures have been found and many more are believed to be awaiting excavation, which in the words of the head of the German archeological team working at the site, could take more than fifty years.
But we cannot wait fifty years, we must reach some conclusions now given the unsettled nature of geopolitical circumstances. So we must draw intelligent conclusions and carry on with our reconstruction of Prehistory over and beyond the passivity and political procrastination of the scientific community on this subject, or is it the desire of the western establishment to suppress anything that threatens the validity of the Judeo-Christian tradition? There will always be exceptions, and we wish to remember here the great names in recent Middle Eastern archeology: James Mellaart and Kathleen Kenyon.
The problem of financing scientific research is paramount; it is important to establish priorities. For instance, some of the money spent in finding the Titanic, then filming the sinking of that emblematic boat overloaded with atavism and full of dire catastrophe, and now comes the making of a replica, a new vehicle of morbidity for the pampered and the idle in this latter age of decadence in the West, to tempt again the fates. Some of that money could be well spent in exploring and photographing the Pyramids of Guanahacabibes Peninsula that lie a mere 600 meters below the surface of the sea.
The point that we wish to make is one that we feel has been clearly established by submarine archeology in recent times: that there was a worldwide Megalithic Civilization in the late Pleistocene that came abruptly to an end on June 5, 10498 BP. We accept Otto Muck’s date, derived from a careful analysis of a large spectrum of scientific evidence for this terminal event, a veritable Noumena of Psychohistory, carefully remembered in the tradition of Maya astronomers. It is the oldest Maya date extant to be found at the Temple of the Sun in Palenque.
Other late Pleistocene sites include: several in the Bahamas Bank consisting of interminable megalithic walls with groups of pyramids; specially the pyramids on the submarine plain off the coast of the Guanahacabibes Peninsula in western Cuba. To these we should add the two submarine cities in the Gulf of Cambay near the modern city of Dwarka; the underwater archeological site in Mahabalipuran in southeast India and the now famous underwater pyramid of Yonaguni Island in the Sea of Japan. There are also many megalithic sites around the Mediterranean whose dating should be revised. These include the megaliths in Tartessos Spain; the Island of Malta, Baalbek in Lebanon and Nevali Cori and Cayonu in Turkey. There should be many more sites on the submarine plains bordering the present coast lines of the north Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Oceans; the result of Glacial Terminations and Marine Transgressions; of eustatic and isostatic processes in the level of the sea and of tectonic subsidence.
So that near 1 p.m. June 5, 10 498 BP, a great asteroid (“Asteroid A”), possibly ten kilometers in diameter, came in from the Northwest, travelling much faster than the Earth herself, penetrated the Earth’s atmosphere, caught fire, exploded, broke in half and its two larger segments penetrated the Atlantic Ocean a few miles north of the Island of Puerto Rico. These two huge masses of iron ore, like two cosmic missiles, fractured the Earth’s crust all the way to Iceland and precipitated a cataclysmic eruption of lava all along the line of fracture accompanied by a 500 meter high tsunami that swept the coasts of the north Atlantic and all the former Islands that existed in that Ocean.
We should visualize that late Pleistocene world before its final day, very different from our own in terms of geography and climate. For instance, the peninsulas of Florida and of Yucatan were twice as large as they are today, the Bahamas Bank was one big island the size of Yucatan and around the Azores there was probably a big island that sank. Hesitant England was then connected to Europe by a large sea side plain through which flowed the Thames, a longer Rhine and Loire. Also on the other side of the Atlantic the Hudson and The Delaware continued to flow along broader sea side plains before they emptied into the Atlantic Ocean opposite the Island of Atlantis, lost in memory until Plato rescued her, had already given her name to that surrounding Ocean. It was altogether a striking and beautiful world holding a veritable kaleidoscope of cultures that we cannot even begin to imagine let alone describe… But we do have the image of Gobekli Tepe even though that place flourished some two thousand years before the cosmic event. A few objects have emerged from the two sunken cities near Dwarka in the Bay of Cambay that show a level of culture similar to that of Sumer. The sonar photographs of the architectural complex at Guanahanacabibes shows signs of having been built on platforms similar to those in Olmec architecture as in La Venta and San Lorenzo. But without proper submarine archeological surveys we cannot have a more developed understanding of this very important site like we might have at Gobekli Tepe if investigations continue.
There have been interesting observations made about the nature of this world wide civilization. Graham Hancock has noted in a recent interview that this Pleistocene Civilization mapped the then existing world. There is a map, the Piri Reis map, formerly in the possession of a Turkish admiral of that name who lived in the early XVI century. A map that shows the Antarctic continent clearly
represented as two large bodies of land separated by a straight. This knowledge was not arrived at until the middle of the XX century. We surmise that the Piri Reis Map is a copy of older maps that found their way to Constantinople from Alexandria where such knowledge was miraculously preserved from a time in the IX millennium before the present when the Antarctic was free of ice and someone cartographed the whole continent.
Plato vindicated, we should consider the terrific psychohistorical shock delivered by Asteroid A on the collective conscience and memory of mankind. We cannot here analyze all the geological, oceanographic and paleoclimatological evidence there is on the impact produced by Asteroid A. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) and its Russian equivalent have all the data collected by The Glomar Challenger and The Academician Petrovsky, the oceanographic vessels that conducted extensive research in the North Atlantic during the 1970’s. This data has not been fully reported and interpreted. Here we are concerned with the impact of Asteroid A on the Noosphere and its reverberation to this day.
The resistance applied on this point by the collective memory of mankind which does not wish to remember anything about Asteroid A explains among other things, the 2300 year old controversy between Atlantologists and their detractors. But beyond literature lies the region of the unconscious as any poet worth his salt well knows. In what varied ways did Asteroid A affect the planet Earth and the History of Mankind? The Mesolithic Period, the 5000 years following the beginning of the Holocene, which by the way, coincides with the impact of Asteroid A, was an age literally of darkness and of recovery. Darkness because for an unknown period of time, which has been calculated at upwards of two thousand years, a dark mass of volcanic ash hung over the Northern Hemisphere, which the ancient Greeks knew as ‘the night of the hyperboreans ’. The gloomy light of this northern mist must have had some sort of effect on the mood of the people who inhabited that part of the world (perhaps this is the reason why they ‘bleached white’ becoming ‘the white race’?). The population must have greatly declined after the catastrophe which came to be known as ‘the deluge’ due to the sustained precipitation after the evaporated sea water from such momentous submarine volcanism had fallen back as rain water for a period much longer than the proverbial forty days, one would surmise. Be it as it may, it took humanity nearly 5000 years to recuperate, perhaps to get to the point where culture was left off in 10498 BP. Around 5100 BP we see the rise of urban civilization for better or for worse because certain innocence was lost when walled cities appeared; if we are to quote the poet:
‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…’ ‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out…’ (Mending Wall, by Robert Frost)
Perhaps the wall symbolizes the trauma… for we have been building walls ever since.
The Spiral
The Spiral of History is its converging movement, resolving itself in a synthesis after a long experience of trial and error, Political History looking for the perfect formula between personal freedom and public administration. It could be happening now, the flowering of the past 5000 years of political experimentation. Historical experience compressed by an implosion and resolved into its simplest manifestations: simple councils of self-government by free men without bureaucracy or political parties. As people become more conscious, or educated if you will, they will want to be in syntony with each other without conflict or violence. And this state of things everyone will want to recognize as the natural state of being. Harmony will seize to be an utopia when a majority of people begin to want it. Perhaps after so much violence people will begin to inquire about the mechanics of peace.
There is a danger of involution if humanity refuses to learn, a decadent regression to perversion and brutality, when the State, influenced by corporate religion, wishes to block research into the expansion of the mind. There is a need to draw a line and say : ‘a historical era has ended’, we must begin anew, try something different; new political institutions with a spiritual life that goes beyond corporate formulas into the real inner discovery, inner direction, lucidity and autonomy, with the social and political institutions that define maturity, self-government and social responsibility shared by all.
The era that began with the unification of Egypt ends today, because it is salutary that it should be so, because new beginnings are healthy. Because the theory and practice of The State has been played out and any more procrastination will further brutalize humanity beyond recovery. It is childhood’s end: if he does not leave on his maturity, the grown child could be destroyed by his parents, Corporate Religion and The Nation State.
For this is no doubt the greatest of all psychohistorical problems: renewal. Some people will say: ‘who wants renewal, renewal is risky…’ ‘We will lose control’…there are some things that cannot be explained… they have to be experienced, people come into them, sometimes after catastrophe has hit them. I have already said in my book La Huerta del Macehual that public administration should be returned to the people… That little by little in a peaceful and democratic way, public office should be accessible to individuals bearing a card that contains in a microchip the sum of their abilities and past working experience… put it in a computer in all centers of public administration and the machine will tell them in detail where is an opening for them in real time where they can find work and be paid by the hour in any branch of public administration. Of course the mechanics of the system will have to be worked out by people who understand public administration, demography, economics and so forth… And it will work when people have arrived at the junction of consciousness, education and shared social responsibility. I believe that we are nearly there, all we have to do is make this project public knowledge in such a way that everyone will want to participate in it spontaneously as a shared endeavor that will free us all from history.
PART THREE: The Spiral, El Sue単o Florido
Paleoethnobotany
The spiral is a recurrent symbol in megalithic temples from Malta to Ireland. It is the Entheogenic symbol of the psychic continuum, of the passage between spheres of existence and parallel worlds. The use of The Sacred Entheogens was a common occurrence in late Pleistocene times. It was the central event at the temples of Gobekli Tepe, the Hypogeum of Malta and Newgrange in Ireland. The spirals at the entrance door to the passage corridors of these temples symbolized the psychic continuum of the experience of death and of Entheogenic experience that took place in the central chamber; these were parallel experiences that the ancients knew to be equivalent: The Little Death and the Great Voyage through The Portal. This is the reason why these temples were both temples and tombs.
The figure of The Sleeping Lady was recovered from the main chamber and may represent an Out of Body Experience while in Entheogenic trance and could be related to oracular functions. It is also possible that these temples are far older than they are supposed to be and that we should place all Megalithic Architecture before 10 498 BP. Men were different after that date, culture changed, perhaps that is the reason why Gobekli Tepe was deliberately filled with ruble sometime after 10 000 BP; they were ‘burying the past’ so to speak, after The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event. Social organization had changed and the cosmological outlook had changed. Chronology in prehistory is very important to determine the cultural sequence. That is why civil and ecclesiastical authorities should not interfere with the work of archeologists or historians in an attempt to censure or suppress knowledge. In Malta, at the beginning of the XX century, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities conspired to destroy evidence of the antiquity of the megalithic civilization there ( Philip Coppens ). Most interestingly they effaced the figure of a bison, an animal that became extinct in Europe around 10 000 BP, from the walls in one of the chambers of The Hypogeum. They also disappeared the work of Immanuel Magri in 1907, the investigator who spent two years working at the Hypogeum. What were they seeking to protect, the validity of the JudeoChristian tradition?
A hundred years later we are still struggling against self-censure, passivity, complacency and immobility within the academic community and with retrograde authorities who want to shore up the Judeo-Christian tradition from the advancement of knowledge. At the end of the Pleistocene there was a land bridge between Africa and Europe that went right through Malta and connected that island with Sicily and Italy. The geography and the climate of the world were much different and the people most have been very different, living in a world of plenty with temperate climates. They were civilized, no doubt about it. If we cannot imagine how or reconstruct their world from the little evidence we have it does not mean that we are going to accept the indifference of the scientific community on this subject. We must use our vision to see and understand their culture from what we know of prehistory, early Neolithic civilizations and the lives of aboriginal people in more recent times. We can be certain that late Pleistocene men carried out Entheogenic rites in their temples, like the Celtic Druids did, that included travelling along the psychic continuum through an spiraling vortex of light into unimagined worlds of the spirit that revealed to them the unfathomable forces of nature that surrounded their fantastic world of mega fauna and gigantic ice walls.( See Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archeology and Peter T. Furst: Entheogens and Culture ) The Maya, The Hindu, The Sumerians, The Egyptians, even The Greeks remembered a world before The Deluge. These late Pleistocene people were giants compared to post diluvial humanity. If there was a mega fauna there were probably large human beings to go with it, those megaliths seem large to us today but they did not seem large to our ancestors in the late Pleistocene, at least they could handle them and place them in extraordinary fashion to build remarkable constructions like the Hypogeum of Malta and the temples of Gobekli Tepe. They must have been over seven feet on the average, the men, and the women over six feet. They lived in large communal houses made of wood as Plato says, like the Vikings did and the natives of British Columbia. They were big and powerful, these homo sapiens diluvialis, and they could move huge monoliths, (Baalbek). They were very intelligent and they might have had an urban civilization that is lying at the bottom of the sea; that the scientific community has the responsibility to explore. They could have come from the west into western Europe and not from Africa as was previously thought. Between 20 000 and 10 000 years ago the climate in Western Europe was similar to that of Siberia today whereas at that time, the large islands of the Atlantic ocean: Bahamas, Cuba and Atlantis and the peninsulas of Florida and Yucatan enjoyed a mild semi tropical climate and must have been very fertile and were larger than they are today. These were the centers of a civilization in the late Pleistocene that radiated East into western Europe, to the valley of the Dordogne, Malta and Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.‌ As I described it in my book Teonanacatl, our late Pleistocene ancestors held Entheogenic Rites for thousands of years ( Soleki in Furst: The Mousterian tombs in Shanidar, Syria ). They were not afraid to explore the phenomenon of death because to them it was an everyday occurrence . Like The Olmecs who would sit in a circle and let a jaguar out of a stone cage to see whom it would chose to eat‌ and in this way the Olmecs practiced self-control. Our ancestors would enter into trances and visit parallel worlds. That is what happened in the Hypogeum of Malta and at the round temples of Gobekli Tepe.
Yet with time, The Entheogenic Experience was refined until it produced the theology of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, The founding Father of The Western World.
El Sueño Florido
The Phenomenon of Illumination is the awakening of consciousness. It is the vision of Telesis, of the formal interrelationship between all the elements of nature viewed as a personal experience within a spiritual phenomenon. The person that experiences this vision changes with it, as his soul or her soul, it is the same thing in metaphysical terms, explores the confines of identity and moves beyond the boundaries of the body to identify with that unitary vision of Telesis that helps us find our place in this world, indeed in the Universe. This is a profoundly emotional experience that involves the totality of our beings until the ‘I’ disappears within the experience of Illumination. This is indeed a lonely journey; Akhenaten was trying to go back to a time when there were no gods; not Amon, not Aton but the Spiral and the journey through The Portal, The Flower of Illumination. Perhaps this is why The Toltecs called the experience of Illumination, El Sueño Florido, in Nahuatl Temixoch. And Xochipilli was the protective divinity, the embodiment of the experience that flowered into consciousness. For Akhenaten, the Sun, Aton, was the sole divinity that shed light on the living world and on the joy of life, our life, to live with open eyes, with clarity and truth, in the spirit of Maat which was to him impeccability of action, love and ethical consciousness. Akhenaten was a contemporary of the poets who wrote The Rig-Veda. And their time was one of momentous spiritual radiation, even reaching to our own time, for Akhenaten inspired Moses just as the Rig-Vedas led to the Upanishads, The Isa Upanishad: ‘Behold the universe in the glory of God: and all that lives and moves on earth. Leaving the transient find joy in the Eternal: set not your heart on another’s possessions…’ ‘He moves, and he moves not. He is far and he is near. He is within all, and he is outside all. Who sees all beings in his own self, and his own self in all beings, loses all fear.’ ‘The Spirit filled all with his radiance. He is incorporeal and invulnerable, pure and untouched by evil. He is the supreme seer and thinker, immanent and transcendent. He placed all things in the path of Eternity.’ (from the Issa Upanishad circa 2800 years before the present, Penguin Classics edition 1965). AKHENATEN’S HYMN TO ATON Though appearest beautifully on the horizon of heaven, Thou living Aton, the beginning of life! When thou are risen on the eastern horizon,
Thou hast filled every land with thy beauty. Thou are gracious, great, glistening, and high o0ver every land; Thy rays encompass the lands too‌ all that thou hast made: As thou art Re, thou reachest to the end of them; Though thou art in their faces, no one knows thy going.
When thou settest in the western horizon, The land is in darkness, in the manner of death. They sleep in a room with heads wrapped up, Nor see one eye the other. All their goods which are under their heads might be stolen, (But) they would not perceive (it). Every lion is come forth from his den; All creeping things, they sting. Darkness is a shroud, and the earth is in stillness, For he who has made them rests in the horizon.
At daybreak when thou arises on the horizon, When thou shinest as the Aten by day, Thou drivest away the darkness and givest thy rays. The two lands are in festivity every day, Awake and standing upon (their) feet, For thou hast raised them up. Washing their bodies, taking (their) clothing, Their arms are (raised) in praide at thy appearance. All the world, they do their work.
All beasts are content with their pasturage; Trees and plants are flourishing. The birds which fly from their nests, Their wings are (stretched out)) in praise of thy ka. All beasts spring upon (their) feet. Whatever flies and alights, They live when thou hast risen (for) them. The ships are sailing north and south as well, For every way is opened at thy appearance. The fish in the river dart before thy face; The rays are in the midst of the great green sea.
Creator of seed in women, Thou who makest fluid into man, Who mantainest the son in the womb of his mother, Who suthest him with that which stills his weeping, Thou nurse (even) in the womb, Who givest breath to sustain all that he has made! When he descends from the womb to breath On the day when he is born, Thou openest his mouth completely, Thou suppliest his necessities. When the chick in the egg speaks within the shell, Thou givest him breath within it to maintain him. When thou has made i his fulfillment with in the egg, to Break it,
He comes forth from the egg to speak at his completed (time); He walks upon his legs when he comes forth from it.
How manifold it is, what thou hast made! They are hidden from the face of (man), O sole God like whom there is no other! Thou didst create the world according to thy desire, While thou wert alone: All men, cattle, and wild beasts, Whatever is on earth going upon (its) feet, And what is on high, flying with its wings.
The rays suckle every meadow. When thou risest, they live, they grow for thee. Thou makest the seasons in order to rear all that thou hast made, The winter to cool them, And the heat that they may taste thee. Thou hast made the distant sky in order to rise therein, In order to see all that thou dost made. Whilst thou wert alone, Rising in the form of the living Aten, Appearing, shining, withdrawing, or approaching, Thou madest millions of forms of thyself alone. Cities, towns, fields, road and riverEvery eye beholds thee over against them, For thou art the Atem of the day over the earth‌.
Thou art in my heart, And there is no other that knows thee Save thy son Neferkheperure Waenre, For thou hast made him well versed in thy plans and in thy Strength. The world came into being by thy hand, According as thou hast made them. When thou hast risen they live. When thou settest they die. Thou art lifetime thy own self, For one lives (only) through thee. Eyes are (fixed) on beauty until thou settest. All work is laid aside when thou settest in the west. (But) when (thou)) risest (again), [Everything is] made to flourish for the king…. Since thou didst found the earth And raise them up for the son, Who came forth from thy body: the King of Upper and Lower Egypt…Akhenaten… And the Chief Wife of the King…Nefertiti, living and youthful for ever and ever.
From Leonard Cottrell’s , The Penguin Book of the Lost Worlds, 1966.
THE RIG VEDA
WE HAVE DRUNK THE SOMA
1 I have tasted the sweet drink of life, knowing that it Inspires good thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the Extreme, that all the gods and mortals seek it together, Calling it honey. 2 When you penetrate inside, you will know no limits, And you will avert the wrath of the gods. Enjoying Indra’s friendship (note), O drop of Soma, brings riches as a docile cow brings the yoke. 3 We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; We have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and malice of a mortal do to us now, O immortal one? 4 When we have drunk you, O drop of Soma, Be good to our hearts, kind as a father to his son, thoughtful as A friend to a friend. Far-famed Soma, stretch out our lifetime So that we may live. 5 The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space. You have bound me together in my limbs as thongs bind a chariot. Let the drops protect me from the foot that stumbles and keep lameness away from me. 6 Inflame me like a fire kindled by friction; make us see far; Make us richer, better. For when I am intoxicated with you, Soma, I think myself rich. Draw near and make us thrive. 7 We would enjoy you, pressed with a fervent heart,
Like riches from a father. King Soma stretch out our lifespans As the sun stretches out the spring days. 8 King Soma, have mercy on us for our well-being. Know that we are devoted to your laws. Passion and fury are stirred up. O drop of Soma, do not hand us over to the pleasure of the enemy. 9 For you Soma are the guardian of our body; watching over men You have settled dawn in every limb (note). If we break your laws, O God, have mercy on us Like a good friend to make us better. 10 Let me join closely with my compassionate friend So that he will not injure me when I have drunk him. O lord of bay horses (note), for the Soma that is lodged in us I approach Indra to stretch out our life-span (note). 11 Weakness and diseases have gone (note); the forces of darkness have fled in terror Soma has climbed up in us, expanding. We have come to the place where they stretch out life-spans. 12 The drop that we have drunk has entered our hearts, An immortal inside mortals. O fathers, let us serve that Soma with the oblations And abide in His mercy and kindness. 13 Uniting in agreement with the fathers (note), O drop of Soma, You have extended yourself through sky and earth. Let us serve Him with an oblation; let us be masters of riches. 14 You protecting gods, speak out for us. Do not let sleep or harmful speech Seize us. Let us, always, dear to Soma, speak as men of power in the sacrificial gathering (note). 15 Soma, you give us the force of life on every side. Enter into us finding the sunlight, Watching over men. O drop of Soma, summon your helpers and protect us before and after. ( From The Rig Veda, Penguin Classics, 1981, translated by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty )
Notes and correlations
The Indo-European known as the Aryans, not to be confused with the ‘aryans’ of Nazi folklore, migrated from the region of the Caspian Sea and the Iranian Plateau into North-Western India some three thousand five hundred years ago, about the time of the Pharaoh Tuthmosis III and queen Hatshepsut. Like many tribal nomads of Central Asia before and after them they were cattle breeders and horse tamers who moved about in their wagons looking for good pasture lands. They crossed the passes of the Hindu Kush into North-Western India around 1500 BC. All members of the tribe were familiar with amanita muscaria and other Entheogeic plants, as Gordon Wasson has suggested ( Soma ). They performed the horse sacrifice for their god Agni and drank the sacred Soma in honor of their god Indra from whose name the word India is derived, ( it could be said that the national emblem of Mexico, the Eagle and the Serpent is of Entheogenic origin, as the Aztec knights of The Eagle held Entheogenic rites at their sanctuary in Malinalco, under the auspices of Quetzalcoatl, The Plumed Serpent, and Xochipilli, the god of flowers and sacred plants, who were the tutelary deities of the rites The Temixoch). The Horse Sacrifice of the Aryans and the drinking of the Soma were their two principal rites celebrated in The Rig Veda. I have myself eaten The Sacred Mushrooms, psilosibe Mexicana, with the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, and can testify that the Vedic Hymn to the god Soma is a faithful rendering in poetry of Entheogenic Experience as I experienced it and wrote in my book Teonanacatl. I could say the same thing about The Tibetan Book of The Dead which describes the passage through The Portal into the Bardo Plain, ( Teonanacatl p. 67, note 20).
1 ( Verse 2 ) The god Indra was the tutelary deity of Entheogenic Rites. He was the personification of human wholeness and spiritual unity; of the reconstructed and born again self, thus of liberation; like Quetzalcoatl, Osiris, Dionysus and Christ 2 ( Verse 5 ) The chariot of Akhenaten and the chariot of the Aryan heroes, like that of Achilles most have looked alike: light, with spiked wheels, drawn by two horses, ( Romila Thapar, A history of India. Penguin, p. 42 ), This image of a chariot has helped me to place the date of the Vedic Hymn, We have drunk the Soma around the XIII or XII century B.C., The Age of Akhenaten and Moses.
Akhenaten in its war chariot with his image defaced by his enemies.
3 ( Verse 7 ) The phrase, ‘stretch our life-spans’, repeated throughout the Hymn refers to the general feeling and appreciation on the part of the participant on the rite of a recuperated self, possessor of recovered and expanded faculties, that if well nurtured will help prolong life This phrase clearly suggests to me the origin of Yoga… which was a science designed to PRESERVE not attain Illumination, AFTER HAVING PARTAKEN OF THE SACRED PLANT. Throughout the centuries the ancient Arhats and teachers of Yoga developed this science to help men preserve a spiritual resonance acquired while in communion with the god. The art of preserving and extending the duration of all the virtues attained during the gathering and the interpretation of the many experiences that compose the inner structure of a renovated self ( See Teonanacatl pp. 60-70 ). 4 ( Verse 9 ) The phrase, ‘ you have settled dawn in every limb ‘ refers to the somatic changes experienced in the body while the special alkaloid of the plant is enhancing neuro-transmission throughout the central nervous system and specially in the brain. Not surprisingly the medical term soma was derived from the Entheogen Soma. ( See Teonanacatl pp. 60-70 ). 5 ( Verse 10 ) ‘ bay horses’ were apparently much admired by the Aryan bards who composed The Rig Veda and this is another clue that places our hymn in the early nomadic pre-urban face of Aryan history in North-Western India more than three thousand years ago.( Thapar op.cit. ) 6 ( Verse 11 ) ‘ weakness and diseases have gone’ . Entheogenic experience may clarify many psychosomatic syndromes liberating the body and the mind of certain illnesses. This author experienced the improvement of his eyesight and other beneficent changes.
7 / Verse 13 ) ‘ Uniting in agreement with the fathers’ . This expression is very important because it establishes a continuity in time with all the generations past and present from Gobekli Tepe to the present passing through Akhenaten and the Rig Veda; constituting in effect a veritable psychohistorical noumena being this, Entheogenic Experience, the fountainhead of religious inspiration throughout the ages ( See Teonanacatl, Author’s Note p. IV, The Source ). 8 ( Verse 14 ) ‘in the sacrificial gathering’. It is my belief that Aryans because they had been or still were nomads at the time on The Rig Veda gathered together in places that suggested to them the power of Nature, of mother Earth, and forming a circle seated on the ground passed around the Soma which had been previously prepared in the traditional way with the sacred implements, the stones and mortars used for pressing the plant. In Greek times the sacred crucible, The Kukeon, contained mint, claviceps purpurea, honey and water. ( Gordon Wasson, The road to Eleusis ).
Was Akhenaten trying to liberate Egypt from the theocratic power of the priests of Amon? Was he unconsciously trying to recuperate the spiritual freedom that homo sapiens diluvialis enjoyed at the temples of Gobekli Tepe? We do not know the exact sequence of events after Akhenaten’s death. How many people remained loyal to the vision of Akhenaten after his death? Were some of his followers, the Habiru of Pi-Ramses, taken by Moses into the desert? Strabo, the Greek historian, geographer and philosopher of the first century of our era is one of the ancient non-Jewish writers who mentions Moses with reverence in his Geography (24 A.D. ). He writes that Moses was an Egyptian priest who had political control of an area east of The Delta of The Nile, ( Pi-Ramses? ) and was dissatisfied with the current political institutions. He left Egypt followed by a large body of people. Moses wrote Strabo referring to his religious ideas, believed that The Divinity should have no human or animal representation, for God according to Moses: ‘May be this One Thing that encompass us all: land, sea, the heavens, the universe and the nature of things…’, very close to the theology of Akhenaten. The historicity of Moses is an extremely difficult subject because one has to contend with a multiplicity of literary sources but no archeological or contemporary textual or paleographic evidence. There are biblical, rabbinical, Christian and Islamic sources, ( Moses is mentioned more than 500 times in the Koran ), not to mention contemporary critical historiography. On the other hand there is no doubt about the historicity of Akhenaten of whom we have a large selection of paleographic evidence in sculpture, reliefs, hieroglyphic inscriptions and tomb paintings. There were many Semitic and non-Semitic people living east of the Nile delta, for several centuries since the time of the Hyksos Semite refugees established themselves in the area of Pi-Ramses until there emerged a border culture half Semitic and half Egyptian to which Moses very easily could have belonged so that the people that he led out of Egypt were not completely Semitic and could have been partisans of Akhenaten, people who left Egypt after some civil strife of which there is an echo in The Bible story of Exodus. The monotheism of the Jews did not necessarily have to come from Moses but rather from a nucleus of emigrants who already possessed a monotheistic world view that was later superimposed to the polytheistic Habiru Bedouin tribes who worshiped the mother goddess Acera and a volcanic-
telluric deity named Yahwe. They did not have the intellectual resources to design a new theology nor did they have a political motive or the urge for union, nor did the need to produce a politicoreligious synthesis. But Moses. Was he a follower of Akhenaten? Was Moses Akhenaten? We know that the period between Akhenaten’s death and the reign of Ramses II was one of insecurity and strife, possibly of civil war between the followers of Akhenaten’s theology of love against the soldiers and merchants and the priest’s of Amon who favoured an imperialist policy. We should consider that Aye and Horemheb, the successors of Akhenaten, reverted to the worship of Amon. And as Sigmund Freud suggests in his book, Moses and Monotheism (pp. 62-69), out of the pact of Quadesh in the desert, the Hebrew tribes emerged with the new monotheism designed by Moses and adapted from the theology of Akhenaten. The idea that Moses and Akhenaten are one and the same person proposed by Ahmed Osman in his book Moses and Akhenaten seems to me fantastic, it would solve many problems indeed and revolutionize the history of religion but it does not seem probable. The date for Akhenaten’s death has been given as 1334 B.C. Osman’s thesis is that he did not die in 1334 B.C. but was exiled to north-eastern Egypt were he had relatives through his mother, Queen Tiye , and there stroke an alliance with the Semitic elements of the population and persuaded them to leave Egypt. Whereas the date for the Exodus is variously believed to have fallen anywhere between 1298 and 1232 B.C., during the reign of Ramses II, much would be gained in this debate if the mummy of Akhenaten were to be found and his probable age at the moment of his death established. The fact that his body has not been found leaves ground for a lot of speculation. ( The body in tomb KV 55 has not been positively identified as being that of Akhenaten ). The central idea behind the desire to link Akhenaten and Moses beyond the obvious one suggested by Freud that Moses must have been an Egyptian nearly contemporaneous to Akhenaten, is that the fountain head of monotheism is One and the same that is, The Phenomena Of Illumination. An individual has contact with The Source and he renders his message in contemporary language within the context of a specific culture, be this culture Egyptian or proto-Judaic. Moses delivered his message, so did Akhenaten. That Moses was influenced by Akhenaten there is no doubt in my mind but that they were the same person is entirely a different matter; no doubt a very attractive proposition involving much historical research and hard evidence that unfortunately has not been forthcoming, yet the possibility cannot be excluded for this is the very purpose of historical investigation; for one thing is what we know and another thing is what was, things not yet perceived by men- the noumena of History. These are psychohistorical moments, when the cross currents of political and religious history meet in one man who operates a great religious synthesis. During special periods of tension ideological forces come into conflict and must be resolved. Thus new visions of the world are created and new interpretations of The Divine are met with and transmitted with varying success. Akhenaten did just that out of his own original reality in the special political context that he lived. He was the son of Amenophis III, a many sided, athletic and outstanding man, who had already tried to reconcile the rival theologies of Heliopolis and Thebes, of Aton and Amon with the need for an imperial ideology, a unifying superstructure for the Egyptian Empire from Nubia to Syria created by his ancestor, Tuthmosis III, and which he visualized under the benevolent protection of Aton.
Akhenaten, his son ( Amenophis IV ), was an inspired man who combined many complex physical, intellectual, ethical and spiritual natures that led him to produce a remarkable politico-religious synthesis unique in world history, a vision of The Divinity infused with the miracle of beauty and the joy of life and love in great contrast with the violence of the male patriarchal world which is still acting upon us today. He operated such a vast synthesis that he must have experienced a moment of satori, a comprehensive vision. He was a talented man who was the leader of an artistic revolution in culture and art, and a spiritual visionary. His psychohistorical resonance is such that he is still a popular figure today; who has achieved an immortality of sorts must be the envy of all the other Pharaohs, including Ramses II his close competitor…So much has been written and said about him and his lovely wife, Nefertiti, that out of an affectionate respect for them both I will say no more. Akhenaten had six daughters, he was probably a biological hermaphrodite, and in antiquity hermaphrodites were sacred because it was thought that hermaphroditism was a symbol of the dual perfection of God as it combined both masculine and feminine in perfect proportions ( there is a wonderful image of this in Federico Fellini’s film, Satyricon, of an albino hermaphrodite child, or ‘semi-dio’, who is stolen from a sanctuary by two covetous rogues.) Plato presents us with a different interpretation in the Symposium. Through the voice of the dramatist Aristophanes, one of the participants in the dialogue, Plato sees, rather, in the longing and coming together of the proverbial separated halves into which we, ungrateful arrogant mankind, were reduced by the gods, an idealization of homosexual love raised to a ‘virile, spiritual communion’, in the words of the dramatist. It would seem that the love between Akhenaten and Nefertiti, that produced six daughters, was an ecstatic orgasmic love between male and female parts that led to a shared vision of The Divinity, that inspired the royal couple’s reformist ideas. And here we see the complexity of being in the dissolution of identity were male and female disappear in a carnal union of joyful celebration of life with all beings: men, animals and plants in humble recognition of the Sublime in a true sacralization of erotic love. Akhenatem and Nefertiti wanted to symbolize that to their people perhaps this is the reason why they were not afraid to show themselves naked in public and urged their artists to commemorate their love in painting and sculpture in realistic detail; to communicate to mankind the radiance and the warmth of the Sun as the One god, and to celebrate their love of life. This became the Hymn of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, their legacy to us.
The Judeo-Christian western world has underestimated the theological importance of Akhenaten’s message. His understanding of the sacred dimension of eroticism has only a parallel in Hindu philosophy and Yoga. It was only until the arrival of psychoanalysis and the literary art of David Herbert Lawrence ( Lady Chatterley’s Lover ) that western culture, after two thousand years of Christianity, discovered the spiritual dimension of eroticism without guilt, the fundamental equality between the sexes facing the act of love, the spiritual awakening into the beauty of the world motivated by orgasmic release when love is an art practiced by sensitive beings who interact constructively, creatively as Erich From suggested in his Art of Love. In this sense is Akhenaten very modern and perhaps this is the basis of his appeal to the younger generations of today.