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The American Ethnomycological and Entheomycological Association
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Entheogen was derived when the Hellenist scholar Carl Ruck and ethnomycologists R. G. Wasson, Johnathan Ott, and others affixed the Greek stem for making (gen-) to the combining form (entheo-) of the Greek word for "God within" (entheos) in an effort to coin a non-pejorative term for any substance that can cause a person to believe he is filled with God's spirit. Most people who have taken entheogens recognize, however, that the perceptions and emotions produced by these substances are unique. So it is virtually impossible to effectively describe these perceptions and emotions to someone who has never experienced them first hand, just as it is impossible for a sighted person to describe what red looks like to a congenitally blind person. Accordingly, members of ancient priesthoods, brotherhoods and other esoteric cults required initiates to ritualistically ingest entheogens to allow the intitiates to view the world through entheogenically altered eyes.
Unfortunately, many prohibitions were placed on entheogen ingestion over the ages. So members of these organizations cleverly designed symbols and stories they could interpret one way, while their entheogen-naive detractors were interpreting the same symbols and stories in other ways. In fact, since the overwhelming majority of scholars who have studied these themes and symbols over the ages have been entheogen-naive, they have done little more than frame etheogen-naive interpretations of them, or outrightly denied that they even exist, in some case even after having been apprised of their existence.
Regardless of whether or not you are entheogen-experienced, however, you should be able to appreciate the revelations the articles on this site makes about these themes and symbols. The only thing you will need to appreciate these articles is the ability to recognize that pictures are worth a thousand words, and both can be interpreted and assembled in many different ways depending on the light one shines on them. In that respect, the parts of the archaeological, mythological and linguistic records that entheogenists created over the ages are like holographic records that can only be viewed clearly by shining on them the same light in which they were created.
Among the subjects these articles discuss are:
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The enigmatic Venus of Willendorf and other prehistoric humanoid figurines were sculpted to personify the entheogenic Amanita muscaria and other entheogenic mushrooms to suggest that these mushrooms contained the edible spirits of deities based on a well-known principle of sympathetic magic which held in prehistory, as it still does in many tribal societies, that the spirit of a food is ingested along with it. Read The Origin and Significance of Anthropomorphic Goddess Figurines based on a paper in The Journal of Prehistoric Religion (Vol XIII, 1999, pp. 22-28).
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12th century French fresco depicting Adam and Eve next to a Pilzbaum, or mushroom tree, hosting Amanita muscariae. |
The "Forbidden Fruit" was the
entheogenic Amanita muscaria. Read Was R.G.
Wasson the Messiah discussing the entheogenicially inspired roots of The
Allegory of The Fall
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Egyptian Crowns were stylized depictions of
Psilocybes because the pharaohs were evidently descended from shamanic pastoralists and
herbalists who had been led to believe they were the divine and immortal so-called Sons of
the Sun because of psilocybe ingestion. Read The
Entheomycological Origin of Egyptian Crowns and The Esoteric Origin of Egyptian Religion (J.
of Ethnopharmacology 102: 275-288, 2005):
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An enigmatic goddess found in the ancient Philistine city of Ekron, known biblically as a divinatory site, was named Petryah, the Hebrew word for mushroom, deducibly because this goddess was originally a personified entheogenic mushroom. Read The Enigmatic Ekron Goddess Revisted, The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society (JANES 31):
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