Website review: The Road to Eleusis - Chapter I.
KingBoy discovered this in Drugs
•2 reviews since Jul 11, 2006
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•psychedelic-library.org/eleuch1.htm
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KingBoy discovered 26 months ago- 'In the days of Early Man his whole world was shot through with religious feeling and the unseen powers held him in thrall. Our sacred "mushroom" must have been wondrous indeed, evoking awe and adoration, fear, yes, even terror. When that early cult gave way to new religions and to novel ways emerging with a literate culture, the emotions aroused by the old cult would survive, truncated from their roots. In one area the fear and terror would live on, either of a particular mushroom (as in the case of A. muscaria); or else, as the emotional focus through tabu became vague, of "toadstools" in general; and in another area, for a reason that we cannot now tell, it was the spirit of love and adoration that survived. Here would lie the explanation of the mycophobia vs. mycophilia that we had discovered... The advantage of the mushroom is that it... permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence, even (as the Indians say) to know God. It is hardly surprising that your emotions are profoundly affected, and you feel that an indissoluble bond unites you with the others who have shared with you in the sacred agape... This newness of everything - it is as though the world had just dawned - overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty. Not unnaturally, what is happening to you seems to you freighted with significance, beside which the humdrum events of everyday are trivial. All these things you see with an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to yourself, "Now I am seeing for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention of mortal eyes...." As your body lies there in its sleeping bag, your soul is free, loses all sense of time, alert as it never was before, living an eternity in a night... At last you know what the ineffable is, and what ecstasy means. Ecstasy! The mind harks back to the origin of that word. For the Greeks ekstasis meant the flight of the soul from the body. I am certain that this word came into being to describe the effect of the Mystery of Eleusis. Can you find a better word than that to describe the bemushroomed state?... As man emerged from his brutish past, thousands of years ago, there was a stage in the evolution of his awareness when the discovery of a mushroom (or was it a higher plant?) with miraculous properties was a revelation to him, a veritable detonator to his soul, arousing in him sentiments of awe and reverence, and gentleness and love, to the highest pitch of which mankind is capable, all those sentiments and virtues that mankind has ever since regarded as the highest attribute of his kind. It made him see what this perishing mortal eye cannot see.' From R. Gordon Wasson's chapter 1 of The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, a book co-written with Albert Hofmann & Carl Ruck. Wasson was a pioneering ethnomycologist and anthropologist. He coined the term "entheogenic" and was in the first group of westerners to participate in a Mazatec shamanic ritual. Text © R. Gordon Wasson Estate
- Ogmin rated 26 months ago
- The Road to Eleusis Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries R. Gordon Wasson
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