Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras. Carl Ruck
ecstasy. The men induced something similar in the drinking parties or symposia, where the wine was fortified with consciousness-altering additives.
Dionysus’s most enduring gift was his patronage of the theater. Drama began as a shamanic experience, with an entranced narrator evoking the spirit of a deceased ancestor from his tomb to impersonate his story. As it developed in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE in Athens, it became a communal experience of shamanic possession spreading from the actors outward to the surrounding audience. To place them in the properly receptive mind, a special vinous potion was offered throughout the several days of performances. The great playwrights themselves appear to have composed their dramas in a state of shamanic trance and possession.
The Indian and Persian Soma rites, moreover, persisted among the early Indo-European immigrants to Mesopotamia and were assimilated by Semitic and other peoples, elements being incorporated into ancient Judaism and the Egyptian Mysteries.
By the Hellenistic period, similar and derivative entheogenic rituals were well established among spiritual communities like the Therapeutai, a mystical Jewish group with such pronounced similarities to Christianity that they were once thought to be the earliest documented monastic community of the sect. From the shores of the Dead Sea, the Essene brotherhood is another group that influenced early Christian practice, being exposed to the trade routes with the Orient that facilitated the mingling of ideas between the great civilizations of Eurasia. The Persian Magi were visitors to many ancient cities, performing their shamanic rites from the Athenian marketplace to ancient Judea and beyond. Moreover, port cities like the Peiraieus of Athens and Roman Ostia had multiethnic populaces with sanctuaries of their foreign rites.
Journeying in the opposite direction, the shaman Apollonius of Tyana, a contemporary of Jesus and also declared a god, was actually initiated into a Soma rite by Brahmans in India. The Christian version of the rite was suppressed by the dominant Church or reserved for its elite, but it persisted at least as late as the seventeenth century in various Gnostic sects, notably among the followers of Mani in the East, condemned as heretical although even in Europe Manichaeism and occult Mysteries like alchemy persisted or were repeatedly reintroduced by travelers from the Holy Lands of the Middle East.
Thus, as we can see even from this cursory treatment, many of the most significant developments of Western culture were inspired by a central spiritual, ecstatic impetus that most often, if not always, included access to altered states through the use of entheogens. As Plato eloquently documented, “Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided madness is given us by way of divine gift.”
It is in this vein that we now consider the lasting significance of the entheogenic Mithraic tradition as it existed—and persisted—throughout Eurasia, how the Roman Army adapted and brought the older Vedic and Persian traditions with them into Europe, as well as the “civilizing” influence it has had even into the modern epoch.
Preface
Also Sprach Zarathustra
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed—and, rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it:
Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest! For ten years hast thou climbed hither unto my cave: thou wouldst have wearied of thy light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine eagle and my serpent.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it. I would fain bestow and distribute, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.
Therefore must I descend into the deep: as thou doest in the evenings, when thou goest behind the sea, and givest light also to the netherworld, thou exuberant star!
Bless the cup that is about to overflow, that the water may flow golden out of it, and carry everywhere the reflection of thy bliss! Lo! This cup is again going to empty itself, and Zarathustra is again going to be a man.
Thus began Zarathustra’s down-going.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra’s
Prologue, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem, Opus 30, 1896, was inspired by Nietzsche’s lyric parable of the quasi-mythical Persian prophet known to the Greeks as Zoroaster, a possible contemporary of Moses and the heretical pharaoh Akenaten. The music’s ecstatic “Dawn Fanfare” was used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That is all that most people know about a religion that arose in what is now Iran some 3,000 to 3,500 years ago. Zarathustra’s belief in a single solar god, Ahura Mazda, became the religion of Persia until the Arabic Muslims invaded in 650 CE, and the Zoroastrians, for the most part, fled. Today they are reduced to some 200,000 adherents, mostly located in India, although a few have established themselves in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere. Reluctant to proselytize in general and specifically forbidden in their former homeland and most Muslim countries, they maintain a low profile in the modern world. Zoroastrians worship the Sun and the purifying power of fire, with little awareness, at least in public, of their own ancient traditions. In India, mostly in Bombay, they are known as Parsis (or Farsis), which simply means Persians; in their former Iranian homeland, they are called Gabars, which means “infidels.” Zoroastrianism also survived in medieval alchemical symbolism, and its traditions even fused with Islam in the mystical Muslim theology of the Sufis.
Zarathustra may have invented monotheism, or he was, at least, probably its earliest proponent. Although often dated to the seventh century BCE, estimates sometimes place him almost a millennium earlier, foreshadowing Judaism and the solar cult of the Egyptian pharaoh Akenaten, a tradition that continued into Christianity and Islam. Akenaten reduced the other deities to aspects of the One God, reforming a still older religion of opposed forces of light and darkness, goodness and evil.
In the reformed religion, Mithras, who was originally one of the four great deities, became an intermediary with the One God, much like Christ with the Father. The original religion was very much older; it was the religion of the Magi, shaman sorcerers, that the Persians brought home with them from the steppes of Central Asia. It was closely related to the religion of the Aryan invaders of India. Thus the earliest texts of Zoroastrianism and those of Hinduism show an extraordinary similarity of language and ideas.
Its sacred text is the Vendidad. The oldest part of it is a collection of hymns called the Gathas, some supposedly written by Zarathustra himself. Over the course of millennia, other texts were added. The entire scripture is called the Avesta, to which commentaries known as the Zand were added, so that the entire sacred text is called the Zand Avesta. The various texts were transmitted orally and were probably codified and finally preserved in the palace library of the Persian Darius and the Achaemenid dynasty (648–330 BCE). The Persian Avesta is comparable to the Sanskrit Rig Veda, a sacred text of Hinduism that originated roughly at the same time and was preserved orally until it was finally recorded in writing in Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages.
The reformed theology was not so much a battle between good and evil as an evocation of the higher potential within man (what Nietzsche termed the Übermensche or Superior Man) by a battle fought by conflicting interests within each individual’s soul, although Nietzsche’s interpretation was directed toward the liberation of man from all forms of theological hypocrisy.
The earlier belief in a cosmic struggle, however, never died out. The basic dualism of the universe surfaced in the medieval Albigensian Cathar Christian heresy in Provence and the Pyrénées, as well as the Bogamils of Bulgaria and Bosnia, the latter probably influenced directly by Persian sources. Even earlier dualism was involved in the numerous Gnostic sects of Christianity, among them Manichaeism, which derived from one of Zoroastrianism’s last prophets, Mani, who saw himself as a follower of Christ and, typical of the syncretism of the