|
|
More from John's unpublished MS
Entheogenic Revelation The Paris Eadwine Psalter PARADISE DENIED was intended to be the first complete account written for mainstream readers of the entheogenic theory of religion, or Wasson thesis – so named after R. Gordon Wasson who proposed it in 1968. The thesis has two forms: In its general form, the thesis states that the primal religious experience of humanity was a visionary trance induced by the ingestion of psychoactive plants. This direct revelation of Divinity was ecstatic religion as it existed long before any doctrines, rites, rules, hierarchy, or institutions. In its specific form, the Wasson thesis locates the roots of entheogenic religion in cultic use of the fly agaric mushroom (amanita muscaria) in the Ural mountains of Central Asia around 6500 BCE. Wasson is also known, and primarily known to many people, for his book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968) where he identified the fly-agaric with soma, the divine inebriant of Vedic religion. In one twelve-section panel Jesus presides over four botanically distinct types of psychoactive mushrooms, including those that stain blue (right). This startling image, in which the Christian Savior appears to invite the faithful to partake in a sacramental mushroom mass, has appeared on some entheogenic sites on the Internet, wrongly identified as belonging to the Canterbury Psalter. There is much confusion, and scholarly obfuscation, around the precise identification of the Paris Eadwine Psalter, which closely resembles two other 12 C illuminated MSs. To my knowledge, I am so far the sole investigator to specifically identify BNF Latin MS 8846 as the unique psalter with entheobotanical imagery. Until now, the Paris Eadwine Psalter has been studiously ignored by scholars who refrain from commenting on the blatant mycological images used to illustrate Biblical narratives. The graphic contents of the MS are totally unknown to the general public. My secondary aim in PARADISE DENIED was to introduce this astonishing book to the world. The images in the Paris Eadwine Psalter are stunning, explicit, and unmistakable. They require no squinting and speculation, as occurs with esoteric doctrines allegedly encoded in great works of art. This one-of-a-kind manuscript presents vivid evidence complementary to the Wasson thesis. Currently, there is a rapidly growing body of research confirming Wasson's views, but nothing accessible to mainstream interest. I have not seen the original BNF Latin MS 8846—special permission is required to access and handle it—but I have closely studied the microfilm in the library archives. Some illustrations show an elaborate proliferation of mushrooms and elegantly branched mushroom-trees, recalling the surrealism of Dali's paintings (see below). Additional to the literal, botanically identifiable images are many examples of what I call the omphalos-bud: consider what looks like a blackberry behind the head of Adam in the image at the top of this page. The reddish fruit bedecking the top of the Tree of Knoweldge recalls the form of a a pomegranate with its juicy facets. The imagery presents white psilocybin heads side by side with the omphalos-bud and the promegranate motif. The prototype of the omphalos-bud is the world navel from Delphi. As explained in the Gnostic Gallery 2,
The capacity to perceive the molecular structure of nature plays a key role in my exposition of the Wasson thesis. Testimony on such perception, including artistic and artifactual evidence, can be found in numerous recent studies, particularly The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby. Ayahuasca shamans regularly report their ability to see into the molecular dimension, and their knowledge of the psychopharmacology of thousands of species of plants attests to special access to the secrets of nature. This mode of heightened perception is neither theory nor speculation: Narby recounts that the shamans of Peru told him they learned the secrets of the plant from the plants themselves.
I believe that the artistic convention of portraying psychoactive mushrooms by the omphalos-bud points directly to initiatory knowledge surving from the Mysteries into the 12th Century. The imagery of the Paris Eadwine Psalter shows both the botanical identity of sacramental mushrooms and the visionary effect they produce, extending to the perception of molecular structure, not to mention particular properties of the internal workings of the Organic Light. The omphalos imagery in the Eadwine Psalter confirms my statement (The Oldest Taboo in the World) that the Tree of Knowledge, the forbidden psychoactive fungus, conferred access to the secrets of biological evolution, represented by the Tree of Life—in modern terms, DNA, the human genome, ontogenic and phylogenetic evolution. This is why the Tree of Knowledge had to be forbidden, but not the Tree of Life. When Adam and Eve awakened to heightened perception by eating of the former, they had to be banished from parasidise, lest they should then access the latter and know, as gods know, the intimate secrets of life. This is how I decode the Genesis myth of the two Trees. My research suggests that R. Gordon Wasson and his wife Tina may have come close to discovering the Paris Eadwine Psalter. During their trips to Europe, they were often assisted by European colleagues who led them to source materials. In one instance, they were shown an Edenic scene from the Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, Germany, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 32/484), produced at Reims in France around 820 CE, about three centuries before the Eadwine/Canterbury psalters. As the illustration below shows, the Utrecht psalter also contains some imagery suggestive of entheobotany: the mushroom-like forms on wispy stems might be taken for psilocybin fungi. But this imagery is pale and indistinct compared to the outrageous illustrations of the Paris MS.
Typical half-page illustration from the Paris Psalter: As I was circulating the book proposal for PARADISE DENIED, a friend asked, "What does the Paris Eadwine Psalter prove, regarding the Wasson thesis?" Well, it does not prove anything in terms of Wassons' specific claim that the primordial mushroom cult was Eurasian and employed fly-agaric (amanita muscaria), rather than blue-staining psilocybin mushrooms. It does prove, however, that an entheobotanical cultic tradition, possibly a remnant of the Mysteries, survived into the 12th Century in Europe and profoundly influenced (better said: subverted) the religious art of the time. BNF Latin MS 8846 does not directly confirm Wasson, but it does confirm a more expansive model of entheogenic theory, allowing for global and botanical variations, and does so in a most spectacular manner. jll February 2008 Flanders |
|
|
Material by John Lash and Lydia Dzumardjin: Copyright 2002 - 2017 by John Lash. |