Cave drawings and the related phallic stone pillars indicate that entheogens were at the origins of humankind’s spiritual awakening. Plato’s Myth of the Cave is the most enduring paradigm for the journey to the empyrean. An earlier version of it from the mythical inheritance of oral tradition is the Cave of the Cyclops in the Homeric Odyssey. Entheogens can be shown as the origins, not only of the oldest religions, but also of new ones now being formed. Psychoactive sacraments are not a sign of decadence, but of the earliest occurrences, later strenuously denied by the official theology and reserved for its ecclesiastical elite.
Humans have left a record of cognitive experiences dating back to the first emergence of Homo sapiens in the late Paleolithic Age roughly 32,000 years ago. This period is characterized by the creation of tools and weapons, but also by paintings in caves and rock shelters, which indicate a spiritual awareness at the very dawn of the distinct hominid species. Since the paintings require some preconceptions for their interpretation, investigators often prefer merely to record their occurrence rather than to burden them with religious significance or compare them with rituals still practiced today after the passage of so many millennia. Religion is unscientific. This is unfortunate, since it defines humans at their origin as materialistic manipulators of their environment, without communion with its indwelling spirits. The species is named Homo sapiens, whereas perhaps spiritualis would be better.
The paintings have common themes. They also often occur in situations that made their creation extremely difficult, in dark subterranean chambers nearly inaccessible, suggesting that they may have been the sites for sacred ceremonies for which the paintings were either the result, as a record of experience, or more probably created at considerable effort as an aid for accessing such experience. The caves were not used as ordinary dwellings and are totally unsuited for habitation. The animals depicted are often large honorific wild beasts, not necessarily, however, the most typical prey of the actual hunt, as indicated by bone deposits of beasts eaten or sacrificed in the surrounding areas.
Aquatic animals like fish and turtles are also depicted from areas as distant as Siberia and Africa. Other themes are male or female hunters and dancers, indicating the ecstatic nature of the hunt or more probably the preparation or interpretation of the actual hunt. One famous scene from Lascaux depicts what is apparently a shaman, with a bird-topped scepter, who has fallen prostrate into a trance that he has accessed apparently by something metaphorically depicted as a bull anally transfixed by a spear. This is not a likely hunting scene.
The paintings were probably not intended as magic to encourage the abundance of the herds roaming outside, but as a means of empowerment, accessing communion and spiritual empathy with the beasts, including the aquatic ones. Zoomorphism, combining the animal’s features with the human, yields mythical creatures like bull-men—the Cretan Minotaur), antlered men—the Celtic Cernunnos, goat men—satyrs, horsemen—centaurs, and aquatic mermen and mermaids—Gorgons, tritons.
In later art, this motif is represented by the configuration of the Anatolian mistress of beasts or potnia theron, of great Minoan antiquity. Although as Artemis she is a hunter, she is the animals’ patron and exacts vengeance upon anyone who slaughters her protected animal or inadvertently stumbles upon her and her entitled entourage in the hunt. In the case of the goddess Artemis or Diana, this happens while they are bathing, suggesting that they derive from half-aquatic manifestations. In the myth of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the maiden is a byname of the goddess as a birthing midwife, and she substitutes a doe at the last minute upon the altar.
Satyr—goat-man and faun—deer-man, dancing, with drinking cup and a panther, the animal familiar of the god of ecstasy.
The same theme occurs with the hunter Actaeon, who intrudes upon the hunt of the goddess. Artemis turns him into a stag, the prey of the hunt, dismembered by his own pack of hounds. Although a perpetual virgin, Artemis is interchangeable with menstruating females, the wet-nurse, and the midwife.
Painted handprints and finger flutings have recently been identified as female, rather than male, some quite young as indicated by the small size and low elevation from the ground; and figurines of the Venus type suggest that birthing women played an essential role, perhaps as initiators for pubescent males or females. The so-called Venus of Willendorf is remarkable for the thinness of her arms, despite the corpulence of her maternal body. She also has no face, merely a cap, with a scabby coiffure arranged in seven concentric circles. She is probably best described as an anthropomorphized Amanita fairy, with her skinny arms masquerading as the annulus ring, the remnants of the shattered spore membrane.
Among indigenous people today who still enact cave rites, women and men have separate caves. The cave is seen as the site of their tribe’s primordial emergence from the ground, the home of their ancestors, and the place where their most secret myth is retold. The handprints are interpreted as proof of their ancient ancestry, and new ones are traced in the course of bloody puberty rituals. If there is a common theme in all these paintings worldwide, it is probably religious ceremonies of a shamanic or initiatory type.
Human zoomorphism in these paintings almost certainly indicates shamanic rituals. Certain paintings, in particular those from the Tassili n’Ajjer Saharan plateau in Algeria, also suggest the involvement of entheogens in the ceremonies. One shows an antlered male with a bee mask and a body sprouting multiple mushrooms. Mushrooms replace his fingers and there is a handprint tracing next to his antlers. Others depict women warriors with ‘round heads,’ fungal caps spotted with white, suggesting the identity of the mushrooms as Amanita muscaria.
Human zoomorphism in these paintings almost certainly indicates shamanic rituals
Paintings from Indonesia develop the motif of the bee-hunter as a psychoactive experience. Recently, Earl Lee has connected the motif of honey in these paintings with the cult of the dead and the incorporation of the corpse as a medium for the growth or fermentation of toxic additives to psychoactive potions. The ritual appears to have been Egyptian and imported into Minoan Crete. It is reflected in Latin traditions of swarms of bees emerging from the putrefying hide of a slaughtered bull. In addition to other possible fermented toxins, the corpse, as in the Tassili depiction of the bee shaman, provides a medium for the growth of mushrooms.
The fungal anthropomorphisms might be compared to the petroglyphs from the cliff faces above the Pegtymel River in the Chukota region of far-eastern Siberia. They date probably to the 1st millennium BCE and portray tiny females with mushroom crowns, engaging in a ritual dance, in a context with reindeer, wolves, a kayak, fish, and seals. The little girls are leading the hunt, but as children, that is an unlikely reality. They are anthropomorphisms of mushrooms.
Everything was going well. His wife gave birth to a son. Then Czelkutq left for the woods, where he met some pretty little mushroom-girls. He stayed with them and forgot his wife.
—Siberian folktale
Siberian folktales record that these little girls are found on the forest floor and are apt to seduce people into a trance that makes them forget their way back home. Another myth identifies them as wapaq spirits, with red hats, spotted with the spittle of the god who caused them to grow from the ground. In Nordic myth, the spittle of Odin’s horses similarly engenders the mushrooms. They endowed the culture hero Big Raven with superior strength. This is an attribute accorded to the Amanita muscaria, as in the battle rituals of the Nordic Berserkers. These latter materialized on the battlefield as wolves, although they are named as wearing the skin of a bear. The Koryak Big Raven—Quyqinyaqu—is a trickster like Prometheus, and he appears across the Bering Straits as Coyote and other figures in the indigenous folklore of the North American Indians.
María Sabina: I see the mushrooms as children, as clowns, children with violins, children with trumpets, child-clowns who sing and dance around me, children tender as sprouts, as flower buds.
—R. Gordon Wasson,
Wondrous Mushroom
The Siberian tale bears comparison to the myth of the sun mushroom of the indigenous Northeastern American Algonquin nation. There, Younger Brother journeys to the subterranean otherworld and returns as an ecstatic anthropomorphism of the Amanita muscaria, with a cure for every ailment in the form of his psychoactive urine. Petroglyphs from the American Southwest document similar anthropomorphisms with a variety of psychoactive plants. The urine as a psychoactive metabolite is a theme worldwide where the active agent is the Amanita muscaria.
Urine is commonly linked to reindeer and other stags because of the inordinate fondness of the Cervidae species for grazing on the mushroom, which leads them to attack anyone urinating the metabolite. The flesh of the deer that has ingested the mushroom is similarly psycho-active, and hence the deer hunt is analogous to the picking of the fungal agent. It would be impossible not to see a reflection of this special role of the Cervidae in the myths about Artemis, especially since she is associated with the Ceryneian hind, a female deer with a golden antler. The only antlered does are reindeer.
Every time the clouds darken the moon, he urinates. The People drink this liquid that has been given to them as a great boon by the Sun Mushroom spirits.
In southern Spain in the Selva Pasquala near Cuenca, quite a few of the rock shelters have paintings, some dating back to around 6,000 BCE. They may actually be earlier than the Tassili n’Ajjer paintings, and this whole region of northern Africa and southern Spain once shared a much more luxurious forestation in Paleolithic times. A rock shelter is a cliff wall protected by a rocky overhang. One particularly fine example is part of a total complex with related paintings on the other side of a natural fissure through the mountaintop. The totality indicates that the place was used as a sacred site related to solstice ceremonies, perhaps as a solar calculator.
The flesh of the deer that has ingested the mushroom is similarly psychoactive, and hence the deer hunt is analogous to the picking of the fungal agent.
In one spot, the rock surface has a natural configuration that, like a hallucination emerging from the stone, suggests the form of a bull. Like something materialized from a vision, the artist has summoned this into a remarkably fine painting of the animal. At the base line to the right, thirteen creatures, apparently dancing and hence ecstatic, are anthropomorphized mushrooms, probably of the psychoactive Psilocybe species, the hispanica with its characteristic crooked stipe. The number thirteen is significant as the approximate number of lunar cycles in a solar year.
Myths are traditional tales of extraordinary antiquity, existing long before they surface in written form, and traceable in many cases back to rituals of primordial shamanism.
Other depictions in the scene include an ithyphallic archer, more indicative of the ecstatic nature of the experience than of the actual hunt. He is shooting at a configuration above the bull that may be a depiction of the constellation Orion, suggesting a cosmological referent. In Greek mythology, Orion was born from a bull’s carcass on which the gods had urinated. His father was a beekeeper. Myths are traditional tales of extraordinary antiquity, existing long before they surface in written form, and traceable in many cases back to rituals of primordial shamanism. Hence the nativity of Orion may well be a version of the cult of the dead and the engendering of the honey drink from the ferments of corpses. This is a fungal growth traditionally associated with the bull.
Another scene depicts a horse being led around in a circle. This may or may not be related to the bull episode, or added at some other time. Other depictions in the bull episode are too weathered to decipher. Additional doodles and graffiti suggest that the site was reused over a long period of time, some indicating its continuance in some way into the Christian era, not necessarily, however, as anything more than a place of rendezvous in the forest.
The pillars are natural phallic structures and complement the womb-like enclosure of the caves.
The prehistoric cave paintings are probably related to the very numerous rock pillars, termed dolmens and menhirs, found throughout Europe and Eurasia. Their remarkable resemblance to mushrooms sometimes shows evidence that the similarity was further enhanced through human intervention. Sometimes the dolmens are anthropomorphized phalluses. The addition of Christian crosses indicates the assimilation of pagan traditions into the new religion.
Similar designs serve as the architectural model for tombs, particularly in Etruscan necropolises and in India, and more simply as common grave markers in Greece and Anatolia. The pillars are obviously natural phallic structures and are the complement of the womb-like enclosure of the caves. They symbolize the two aspects of the Earth’s sexuality.
Subterranean altar chamber with dolmens, Isle of Guernsey
Paintings in caves and rock shelters, like the decoration of Egyptian tombs, are an evocation of the outside world and are meant both to summon a remembrance of it into the enclosure and to function as a permeable pathway for the journey of the spirit through the barrier to the world beyond. In the recently discovered Chauvet cave in southern France, paintings dating from the Paleolithic seem to elicit animals from the rock configuration, including a bull approaching a rock formation made into the likeness of a female’s genitalia.
The motif of the cave as the crucible for transcendence seems to trace far back into prehistory.
Caves are a magical locale for metaphysical birthing and for the shamanic transport to the realm we have summarized as the mythical topography of the column linking Gaia with the empyrean. Thus the motif of the cave as the crucible for transcendence seems to trace far back into prehistory.
In later religious rites, like Zoroastrian Mithraism, the entheogen-induced initiation progressed from a re-imagining of the initial incarnation from the fiery cosmos via the cooling lunar intermediary for the descent into the cave sanctuary. The seven sequential grades of initiation reversed the incarnation, culminating in the eventual final bursting from the subterranean chamber for the reunion with the solar deity in the realm of the empyrean. The roof of the subterranean sanctuary was sometimes painted with a map of the starry firmament. This suggests the amazing longevity of a primordial human programming, perhaps inevitable on a planet dependent upon the light and heat of the sun.
Medieval and Renaissance churches were intended similarly as gateways to the world beyond, channeling astrological phenomena by an evocation of potent symbolic forms into a talismanic configuration, simultaneously aligning the enclosed space with the cosmos or the empyrean and coaxing the planetary bodies into a propitious rearrangement. The ancient Greek temple had a similar relationship to the cosmos and the entheogen that afforded access to it. A temple is named as a designated space on earth for observing the heavens, and the design of a Greek temple, with its surround of columnar trees or pillars, is an architectural imitation of a sacred forest, on whose floor might be found the sacred plant stylized in the Ionic capital as a cross section of the curving cap atop the trunk-like stipe of a mushroom.
It would be easier to accept these as phalloi if any one of them bore the slightest resemblance to the organ with which Greek artists were well familiar. The asymmetry of the glans, and the duct and testicles are never shown, and the knob is often flat, hemispherical or spherical. The only group of objects which all these phalloi can be said to resemble is fungi.
—Kurt and Boardman
Greek Burial Customs.
Peter Webster asserts there was a First Supper, mythologized by the Tree in Eden.
Peter Webster argued that before the Last Supper, commemorated by the Christian Eucharist, there was a First Supper, mythologized by the Tree in Eden. Either driven by hunger to experiment with novel foods, or perhaps expressly directed by a shaman capable of communing with the indwelling spirit of the entheogen, humankind experienced a heightened level of consciousness that spurred the rapid dominance of the species over its competitors among the earth’s creatures. The evidence suggests that the evolution was not gradual, but triggered by some event that dramatically changed the species and led to the spread of culture out of Africa. This could well have been a spiritual awareness induced by eating the fruit of the First Supper. The archaeological record shows a sudden increase in the size of the cranial capacity. Such a change is generally assumed to indicate increased cognitive ability.
A prodigious expansion in Man’s memory must have been the gift that differentiated mankind from his predecessors, and I surmise that this expansion in memory led to a simultaneous growth in the gift of language, these two powers generating in man that self-consciousness which is the third of the triune traits that alone make man unique. Those three gifts—memory, language and self-consciousness—so interlock that they seem inseparable, the aspects of a quality that permitted us to achieve all the wonders we now know.
—R. Gordon Wasson
Persephone’s Quest
Terrence McKenna proposed a similar theory, suggesting that the entheogen provided some physical advantage, like improved visual acuity or bodily strength, both of which are possible effects from certain drugs. These improvements, however, as acquired characteristics, would not be inheritable, whereas a spiritual awakening leading to religious indoctrination would become perpetuated in the formation of a cultural identity. It is such a shamanic event that seems to lie at the origin of the later tales of gods and heroes and their interaction in the affairs of humankind.
Plato mythologized this visionary event with the parable of the cave. The eye is unique as an organ of perception in that it sees only through the instrumentality of illumination. Imagine that people are chained in a cave, forced to view only the fleeting shadows projected upon the blank wall, cast by objects that move behind them illumined by a fire. The shaman teacher, which the Greeks termed a philosopher, drags these prisoners, content with what they see, unwillingly up the steep incline to the mouth of the cave and the daylight of the outside world. At first they are blinded by the painful brilliance, rejecting what they see as less real than the familiar shadows on the wall of the cave. The message, applied to those of us who live in what we consider the light, is that beyond this shadow world of appearances is another realm where true reality exists. This realm is the empyrean.
The Greeks termed the shaman teacher a philosopher.
Another Greek version of the cave myth is the Homeric account of Odysseus in the Cave of the Cyclops, a primordial man with a single eye. Odysseus drugs the giant with a powerful intoxicant and then puts out the sight of the cave dweller’s eye with a burning timber. He cleverly has told the monster that his name is Nobody. The Cyclops, in contrast, bears the name of Famous, Polyphemus. Nobody and Somebody are obviously related as an antithetical dichotomy. When the blinded Cyclops calls for help, he shouts that Nobody is hurting him, and therefore his fellow tribesmen pay no regard. Upon escaping from the cave, Odysseus calls out his true name, which earns him the ‘hatred’ of his victim and the unfailing enmity of his father, Poseidon, the god of the seas. It is this enmity that makes Odysseus Somebody, the famous hero of the Odyssey.
The naming motif is characteristic of an initiatory rite, where one loses the former persona by becoming no one, before emerging from the nadir of existence with the new identity, Odysseus as the hero of the Trojan War. The truer etymology of the hero’s name, however, is not the ‘hated foe,’ but an epithet of the bear, ‘floppy-ear,’ whose hibernation in a cave sets the pattern for apparent death and resurrection. ‘Nobody’ in the Greek in this context has two forms, both metis and outis. The former also means ‘intelligence,’ and the latter in its Homeric dialectal form of otis is ‘floppyear.’ Indeed, an Etruscan version of the Odysseus story claimed that the reason for the hero’s long disappearance from this conscious world was simply that he got so tired that he fell asleep. A similar theme is basic to the whole tradition of the epic homecomings, which are called a nostos as the return to the nous or perceiving, awakened mind. In the Odyssey, Odysseus finally falls asleep on a magical boat and wakes up back home.
Primordial man might well have modeled the religious rites of the cave on the pattern observed in the sleeping bear, with which they sometimes shared the shelter. To prepare for hibernation, the bear eats voraciously, including psychoactive mushrooms. In Greek mythology, the bear is metaphorically a bee-eater, associated with the honey-drink, the ferment of bull carcasses, and an attribute of Artemis, whose other animal familiar, as we have seen, is the deer. The bear, worldwide, has a special significance, since it walks upright like a human. It is fantasized that within its hulking frame lies a human, captured or possessed, so that the killing of the bear is a sacred liberation. The bear, moreover, seems to reinforce its easy confusion with the human since the male beast is aroused by a woman’s pheromone.
Primordial man may have modeled the religious rites of the cave on the pattern observed in the sleeping bear, with which they sometimes shared the shelter.
Odysseus escaping from the Cave of the Cyclops
In the Homeric account of Odysseus’s emergence from the cave of the Cyclops, the hero actually must disguise himself as an animal to escape. He ties himself beneath a ram in the monster’s herd. The rock blocking the entrance to the cave is too heavy for the hero to dislodge by himself, but the monstrous Cyclops moves it aside to allow his animals out to graze, running his fingers over the rams’ fleece to check that none of the captive men is escaping, but unaware that the bottom half of the fleece is the hero and his surviving companions
Several caves in Thrace are identified by folk tradition as the original cave of Polyphemus. They appear from the distance to resemble a face, but on closer observation, the dual openings that at first are taken as the eyes actually suggest that the intervening nose is really a stipe, while the hemispherical forehead above makes a good likeness of the mushroom’s cap.
The fleece of the ram in the trick that Odysseus plays on his opponent is a frequent metaphor for the scabby cap of the Amanita muscaria. The best-known example is the golden fleece of the ram that the hero Jason plucks from a magical tree. This means that in this episode Odysseus has essentially become a mushroom to escape from his initiatory cave. The tribe of Cyclopes, moreover, as we have seen, is the workmen in the volcanic crucible of Hephaestus, forging the thunderbolts of Zeus. Their one-eyed attribute suggests the disembodied eye of transcendent vision. Traditionally, there are three of them, each named with an epithet of the thunderbolt.
The fleece of the ram in the trick that Odysseus plays on his opponent is a frequent metaphor for the scabby cap of the Amanita muscaria.
Both the cave of the philosopher Plato, with its great antiquity traceable back to the permeable painted walls of the Paleolithic womb of the cave and the pillar symbolism, and that of Odysseus’s Cyclops are based on the ecstatic entheogen-induced transcendence that lies at the origins of religion. As part of the epic oral tradition, the story of Odysseus encodes ritual themes from the earliest times. Plato’s version derives from this archaic ritual, reinforced by the use of caves in his own time for shamanic incubation and transcendent vision.
Shamanism became a more familiar type of religious experience through the revolution of the psychedelic 60s. The word originally designated only a type of priest among certain Siberian Mongolian peoples and was restricted to the anthropological study of their culture. People we now identify as shamans were previously pejoratively called witchdoctors, or in their own indigenous cultures known as wise men or women and healers. The Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade wrote what was the exhaustive, definitive study of shamanism as Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. He amply documented the role played by drugs in accessing this archaic ecstasy. He, moreover, had personally experimented with a variety of drugs, including mescaline, passionflower, opium, and methamphetamine, as stimulants for both mystical and creative inspiration.
Nevertheless, he surprisingly came to condemn drugs as indicative only of the late decadent stages of religion. He authoritatively pronounced that entheogens were not at the origin of religion, even though this would be the simplest and most natural way for primordial man to achieve the ecstatic experience. In doing this, he was responding with distaste to the irresponsible recreational drug use he encountered among his students. Eliade thus retarded the study of shamanism and added his voice to the growing concern about contemporary drug abuse. In his view, a shaman like the Mazatec María Sabina was not a perpetuation of an archaic technique, surviving in a culture marginalized by the main stream of history, but its recent extension to what he called ‘lower peoples or social groups’. The term is obviously prejudicial. When confronted with his condemnation in an interview shortly before his death, he appeared disturbed, too old to begin something new.
In contrast, entheogens, as the cave paintings indicate, were at the very origin of the religious awareness of Homo spiritualis. The denigration of the entheogen seems, in contrast, to be characteristic of the decadent stages, when the sacrament is deemed too dangerous for the lower class of peoples or social groups, and is reserved only for the elite with proper preparation. The deity becomes the property of the priesthood, and the congregation is taught that a placebo will afford the transcendent communion for anyone hardy enough to undertake the rigors of a spiritual life. The church lays claim to the empyrean and colonizes it as the province of its clergy. Only certain of the highest hierarchy are admitted to the secret of the most archaic technique, which lay at the very origins of religion.
Only certain of the highest hierarchy are admitted to the secret of the most archaic technique, which lay at the very origins of religion.
In fact, Eliade confided to Peter Furst that he had come to accept that there was no essential difference between ecstasy achieved by plant hallucinogens and that obtained by other archaic techniques.