The Tree of the Western Sisterhood, with the Gorgon head as its fruiting apple, first sprouted at the spot where the sun goes down, and the narrow Straits of Gibraltar suggest a gateway to a world beyond. There, Zeus consummated his wedding to Hera with a lightning bolt molded in the volcanic forge and plunged into her receptive vulva. Thus the upper and lower realms were joined along the fiery pathway, the volcanic vulva of Gaia or earth in the persona of Hera with the inseminating fire of the cosmos. Semen, fire, and the plant of divinity are analogous metaphors, as is also the blood of the menstrual flux. Semen is fire in water. The metallurgist who fashioned the molten bolt was Hera’s own son, the lord of the volcano, Hephaestus/Vulcan. It was he who chained Prometheus to the mountain.
In Ovid’s playful account of Zeus’s courting of Semele—Metamorphoses 3, the mother of Bacchus/Dionysus, makes it clear that Zeus always mated with his wife via the thunderbolt forged in the volcano by the smith and his henchmen with the thunder hammer.
The intellect is aflame. Ideas are aflame. Consciousness at the intellect is aflame.
—Fire Sermon of the Buddha
The sexual metaphor of fire is implicit in the tale of its theft. It glows at the tip of the narthex reed, like the exposed blood-suffused glans of the erect penis. Traditionally, this is how fire was borrowed, carried from one place to another in the smoldering matrix. In some tales, it is the fire-stick that is stolen, making the sexual innuendo even more explicit. This is the stick that is drilled and twirled in a receptive hole to generate fire by friction. It was only this trick that made fire truly accessible. Fomes fomentarius fungus is highly flammable and was used at least as early as the Neolithic period as kindling for the fire.
Commonly called hoof fungus, this shelf fungus looks like the hoof of a giant horse when attached to the trunk of the tree, suggesting the metaphor of the magical steed and the stairway to heaven, like Odin’s tree-horse Yggdrasil or the flying Pegasus. Interestingly it is often found on birch trees which also host the psychoactive Amanita red mushroom as the golden fruit at its base. Metaphoric names for the mushroom abound, identifying it as either the penetrating penis or the receptive vulva. The highly flammable tinder mushroom was indispensable to early man for making fire, and mushroom names often elaborate the motif of sex and love. The word ‘spark’ belongs to this linguistic cluster. The word itself derives ultimately from the metaphor of the sponge that yields fungus in Latin.
Fire is both the heat perceptible in living creatures and the clear transmutation of matter as it dissipates into the fumes of spiritual transcendence. It is the mediator between gods and men. The burning of sacrificial offerings ritually enacts this significance of fire, returning the inedible portion of the victim to the skies.
Prometheus, the fire thief, taught man the trick of sacrificial fire. So, too, did Loki, the Norse trickster who was god of fire, and the father of Odin’s Sleipnir. Loki stole the apples of Idunn, making clear the analogous motifs of fire and shamanic plants. Prometheus played his trick with the sacrificial offering at a settlement called Opium-town. In cremation, the corporal body was thought to dissolve back into plants and water, while the spirit ascended with the flames.
The ancients believed the empyrean to be the abode of God and the angels; a realm of pure fire or light in the highest reaches of heaven—paradise.
Fire is cognate with consciousness, intelligence, the scintilla animae or “spark of the soul”. As one of the four elements, it alone has no substance, no material existence. Fire leaps upward from any source, even the volcanic forge. It must go on in that ascending flight forever until it reaches the farthest limit of the cosmos. There it collects, forming the fiery surround of the entire universe. That outer limit is the empyrean, the conglomerate of every fire ever lit, every mind that ever lived.
If there are beings that inhabit the empyreal realm, they are anthropomorphized as creatures so pure that they are composed solely of ethereal light. Ether is another name for this mythological realm. In computer technology, the term has been updated as Ethernet.
Ether is another name for this mythological realm.
In Euripides’ Helen tragedy, the clairvoyant priestess called “God-Perception” or Theonoë merged her mind with this network of cosmic consciousness, which is higher even than the gods themselves. This source of inspired knowledge allows her to act while the gods are locked in bitter debate. She is free to choose an ethical principle beyond their selfish bickering. So, too, did the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart posit a Godhead beyond God, for which he was tried as a heretic.
Set in Egypt, Helen tells the tale in which the beautiful woman who caused the Trojan War actually never went to Troy. It was only a hallucinatory image that the warriors fought over in the disastrous war. Meanwhile, the real Helen is a faithful wife of her absent husband Menelaus who determinedly fends off sexual attacks at home in Egypt. The scenario involves confusing appearances where things are never what they seem. The priestess Theonoë must have been costumed as an Egyptian, probably resembling Isis.
Euripides’ play was the first fantasy in the Egyptian Mysteries. Mozart’s Magic Flute belongs to this tradition. Euripides was condemned by fellow Freemasons for revealing their secrets of the goddess Isis. In the stage setting designed by the Prussian architect Shinkel, a screen depicting an Egyptian temple implausibly lodged within a Cave is raised to reveal the humorously obscure and incomprehensible Queen of the Night, singing her Mystery, as she stands on a crescent moon amidst the stars, glimpsed in the background of the Cave. The libretto is a play of the Enlightenment, portraying mankind’s progression from chaos and superstition to Illumination. The couplet that is sung at the completion of each of the two acts declares: “Then is Earth a heavenly kingdom and mortality like onto the gods”. The Isis Mystery will resurface, as we shall see, in an occultist sci-fi religion of the 20th century.
Just as sparks fly upward to coalesce at the outer surround of the cosmos, conversely, individual sparks from the empyrean descend for the incarnation, yearning to quench their burning thirst in the wetness of flesh. This cosmic fire is the origin of life. The sun, which lies lower than the empyrean, and the planets glowing with reflected light are gateways for the descent. They are also stages upward for the divestiture of the burden of corporeal existence as the fire returns to the empyrean. Incarnation and its opposite, ex-carnation, occur along the axis of the sacred mountain with its volcanic core, where the planetary metals are recast in the metallurgy of the soul. In Christian mythology, fire burns both in hell and in paradise.
Psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs.
—Timothy Leary
Ralph Metzner
Richard Alpert
The Psychedelic Experience
The empyrean thus becomes a mythical destination, a spiritual realm conceived as a topographical place. This simplifies the matter since it makes something immaterial material. Empyrean has the verbal idea of fire in it, as in pyrotechnics, “fireworks.” With the multiple metaphoric motifs symbolized by fire, the empyrean is the fiery core of consciousness, the reservoir of being, the source and home of perfected intellect, knowledge beyond division into categories. The ecstatic journey to this mythical realm affords not only knowledge or cognition, but also Platonic recognition—re-cognition—of things familiar but half forgotten. It is the ultimate secret of religions, a mystery. It is a place familiar, suggesting the notion, despite its overwhelming strangeness, that one has been there before.
In Greek, ecstasy means one stands outside oneself, enters another dimension, a world apart. Mystics have achieved this empryrean cosmic consciousness by a variety of means: sensory deprivation, meditation, corporeal mortification, sexual abstinence, dancing, chanting, and rhythmic breathing. Sometimes the experience is spontaneous without the limits imposed upon human consciousness by the incarnation. It offers the opportunity, while still alive, to merge with the totality and to benefit from a realm not delimited by the physical dimensions of ordinary reality.
Through ecstasy, stepping out of one’s wits, the Other is free to journey to distant realms, leaving the shell of the former Self behind. The ecstatic journey offers the potential for clairvoyance, shape shifting, zoomorphism, bilocation, which is the ability to inhabit two places at the same time or the projection of a double persona, the comprehension of the speech of animals or the verbal communion with the spirit of plants, and similar phenomena reported by those adept in the art. Called shamans today, these people they have had a variety of designations throughout history, including mystics, healers, witches, visionary philosophers, and Gnostics.
In Greek, ecstasy means one stands outside oneself, enters another dimension, a world apart.
The mythical empyrean provides a road map, a record of others who have gone there. In the 5th century BCE Parmenides described the experience as an exhilarating journey in a chariot drawn by mares to the gigantic gate through which Day and Night pass each other along a cosmic axis that reached all the way from the heavens to the netherworld, the shining column of light.
Thus another way of looking at cosmic consciousness is as the reunion with the totality of creation, the center of all being that birthed from the volcanic womb of Gaia or ‘grew’ or was ‘born’ as Nature—physis in Greek, natura in Latin. In this sense, the ultimate topographical goal is not the outer limits of the cosmos, but the absolute center, retracing the pathway of incarnation. The underworld as a geocentric mythical topography is equally this realm of unified existence, coalescence with the primal source of all that came into being. Gaia consciousness is synonymous with the empyrean, defined differently only by another mythical topography.
Gaia consciousness is synonymous with the empyrean.
As a metaphoric destination, it requires a vehicle for the journey, like the chariot of Parmenides, an alteration in the ordinary state of mind. Myth has many ways of describing this vehicle, a vast array of miraculous beasts or fantastic companions to convey you to the imaginary place. Since it is only metaphorically a place, the vehicle is actually a means of altering the state of mind, but the simplest and most ancient transport is to eat the food of the gods, a sacramental plant, like the fiery herb that Prometheus stole from the jealous gods, or the fruit of the Tree in Eden, of which it was forbidden to eat.
What they call the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the conscious perception of the Light… it was I who brought about that they ate.
—The Words of Christ
Apocryphon of John
Thus the mythical conveyances often betray attributes indicating that they are a metaphor for a botanical agent that alters consciousness, such as the winged horse Pegasus, son of the Gorgon, from whose hooves spring fountains of inspiration, or Odin’s Sleipnir. In the 6th century the prophet Mohammed had such a magical horse, al-Barack, named the Bolt of Lightning and colored red with white spots. It took the enraptured prophet from the cave where he meditated in the Holy City of Mecca to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in a single night, and thence upward to the seventh heaven.
In the 3rd century CE, a syncretistic Christian sect arose in the marshlands of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that survived in various forms until the 19th century. The Roman Church persecuted its adherents in medieval Europe in the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars. It is known as Manichaeism, from the name of its prophet, and St. Augustine was originally one of its adherents. From various sources in a variety of languages, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Greek, Coptic, and Latin, a mythology of the magical plants of fire can be reconstructed, a mythology that probably is much more ancient and implicit in the motifs connecting the forbidden fruit with the metaphor of spiritual fire.
O happy sin that brought us such a savior.
—Roman Missal
Exultet Hymn
The essential doctrine is the concept of dual forces in constant battle. One is the realm of the empyreal light with its connotations of revealed knowledge or cosmic consciousness. The other is its opposite, the realm of darkness. The battle was waged as a weird dietary contest, with each side destroying the other by eating it. Whatever one side ate, however, was put at risk by sexual copulation, which was inevitably with the other side, as opposites attract. These themes of foods and sex have obvious suggestions of mystical orgasmic experience and shamanic rituals.
In order to recapture the illumination that had been engulfed by the darkness, the forces of Light created a ravishingly beautiful hermaphroditic angel called Sophia or Wisdom as the goddess Athena and sent her to seduce the agents of Darkness and bring back to the empyrean their uncontrollable ejaculations of light. In this ecstatic encounter some of their semen of stolen light missed its mark and fell by accident to earth, instead of entering the womb of Sophia and replenishing the empyrean. From this coitus interruptus of spilled semen sprouted the entire botanical realm of plants. All plants have empyreal light within them. They are animate with the illumination of revelation. Unlike animals and the other fleshy beings of creation, plants have escaped the entrapment of Light in the incarnation matter. Plants don’t exhibit the sin of lust.
The essential doctrine is the concept of dual forces in constant battle.
The Manichaean sect prescribed a vegetarian diet to engulf as much light as possible, and ideally refrained from sex for fear of losing it, or at least procreative sex for the highest grade of the elite. Among the plants honored, as a sacrament for this sect, the most pure, the ones with the highest concentration of illumination and fire, were the mushrooms, particularly the red ones. The psychoactive Amanita muscaria was reserved as a secret for only the most elite. They alone might achieve reunion with the empyrean, assisted by the sacrifices of the congregation. Unlike the other plants, which reproduce sexually, the mushrooms have no seeds and, despite their sexual metaphoric manifestations, appear to have no manner of reproduction except the fall of the bolt of light from the empyrean.
Mushrooms have no seeds and appear to have no manner of reproduction except the fall of the bolt of light from the empyrean.
In this scenario, the forces of darkness retaliated by creating Adam, the man of clay, to lock up in his incarnation their dwindling supply of stolen light. Then they nefariously created also the eternal seductress in the form of Eve. The two were set free to lust for each other as the concupiscent agents to further lock up the light with each of their ever-increasing offspring, forever diluting more and more the light in corporeal entrapment, as the race of humans proliferated.
To reverse this insidious captivity, the forces of Light sent the shining Jesus in the form of the Serpent in Eden, to urge Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. This is the fruit that replenishes the diminishing store of empyreal light.
This tradition pervades Christian mysticism throughout Europe of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Jesus is already present at the Temptation, resident in the Tree of Eden, and Eve’s sin was no sin at all, but a happy fault, a blessed event or felix culpa, that would set the stage for the Redemption through the miraculous incarnation of the Savior in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. Jesus is the new Adam, and Mary as the Queen of Heaven is His spouse and the perfection of Eve.
Perhaps the most explicit example of this felix culpa is displayed in the van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece. The artist used the same model for the shockingly nude Eve and for the Virgin Annunciate and her elevation to the heavens as the Regina, married to her own resurrected Son. Similarly, the model whom he used for Adam reappears in the inner presentation of the Altarpiece as Jesus in the role of the Regina’s Spouse.
In the painted ceiling of the Michaeliskirche in Hildesheim of Lower Saxony, Jesus is depicted resident in the Tree of Eden at the Temptation of Adam and Eve. Similarly, the Serpent, as in Hugo van der Goes’s Temptation, is often female, as a prefiguration of the Virgin. Michelangelo depicted the serpent as a hermaphroditic coupling of Lilith and Samuel in the Sistine Chapel; and the Female Serpent became identified with the mermaid Melusina, whose antiquity can be traced back to the Gorgon Medusa.
Moses receiving the book no one could read,
The Manichaean myth provides a perfect exemplar of the fire within the plant. It is such a plant on-fire that Moses encountered as a burning bush, a fire that did not consume the bush and from which issued the voice of the Lord. Mount Sinai, which is also called Horeb, may not be the mountain now identified in the Sinai. Its biblical description is more appropriate for a volcano, and some scholars locate it in the Arabian Peninsula. In the biblical account, the summit was clouded with smoke.
There are two versions of Genesis, neither obviously written by Moses, at least not in Hebrew, since the Phoenician letters were not invented until five hundred years later. The entire Pentateuch could only have survived as oral teaching, and actually biblical scholarship today ascribes a variety of dates to its constituent parts. Whatever it was that Moses took down from Mount Sinai, the two stone tablets were not written in Hebrew, and if they were, there would have been no one who knew how to read them. Of course, as a prince of Egypt, Moses would have learned hieroglyphics. Since he didn’t take the blank tablets up to the mountain, it is likely that they were something he found up there, with markings that looked like Egyptian.
The Exodus account makes clear that the tablets preserved in the Ark of the Covenant, and which few ever saw, are reproductions or replacements for the original tablets that Moses destroyed. In later historical revisionism by the priesthood, Moses also is supposed to have received a lengthy legal document, detailing the terms for the relationship of Yahweh with his chosen people.
The motif of the book of knowledge imparted by God is a commonplace, as we shall see, in the shamanic experience of transcendence, and quite often the person who receives is not capable of reading it. All that is required is to eat it.
Often the person who receives the book of knowledge is not capable of reading it. All that is required is to eat it.
The second section of Genesis, which contains the episode of the forbidden fruit, was composed in the 8th century BCE as part of the patriarchal denigration of the female. Eve was earlier a version of the widespread Canaanite, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian goddess. The first Genesis, with its theme of the Light and without the prohibition, was later, probably in the 4th century BCE and influenced by neo-Platonism.
This fruit, like a burning bush, that can access the empyrean or the womb of the Cosmic Mother, a plant that alters consciousness to its boundless universal dimension can be called a drug only by someone who intends to devalue the experience as hallucinatory, not real, a fiction of a medically incapacitated mind. Because of the prejudice against drugs and their recreational and addictive misuse, a new word was required to recognize the great potential they offer for spiritual development and access to paranormal cognitive and physical abilities
Entheogen designates a sacramental plant that was considered to be animate, a food consubstantial with the ‘spirit’ of deity, on-fire with a spark from the empyrean. Combining the ancient Greek adjective entheos—inspired, animate with deity—and the verbal root in genesis—becoming, it signifies “something that causes the divine to reside within one.”