Figure 9. Left: Red and white, pocked, Cretan figurine personifying an A.muscaria as a woman squeezing her breast.

As explained above, anthropomorphic goddess or Venus figurines were designed to personify entheogenic mushrooms, especially A. muscariae, and it is now also clear why many sculptors had personified A. muscariae particularly as women squeezing their breasts: they did so to imply that the A. muscaria's juice was a milk. For instance, the artist who sculpted the Cretan figurine on the left in Figure 9, seemingly of a women squeezing her breasts, did so out of red clay, pocked it with red and white paste, and apparently put a head on it to identify it as a personified A. muscaria, like the one on the right in the same figure. (Click here to view several variants of this breast imagery.)

However, it soon also became clear that prehistoric sculptors had personified A. muscariae as women squeezing their breasts for still another reason: ingesting A. muscariae or their entheogenic chemicals typically induces the phenomenon called ego-death and spiritual rebirth. During these phenomena people typically come to believe that their personalities have died, that their spirits have united with God's, and that they have been reborn as quasi-divine, immortal, children of God in an unconditionally loving world which they often refer to as Heaven or Paradise. Consequently, Carl Ruck, R.G. Wasson, et. al. derived the now popular word entheogen for the A. muscaria and all similarly acting plants and chemicals by affixing the Greek root (gen-) for making to the combining form (entheo-) of the Greek word for "filled with God" (entheos). Entheogen is thus cognate with the Greek word enthousiasmos, which was originally intimately associated with religious communion.

Although it may be difficult for many readers to accept the notion that a mushroom could have been so ubiquitously used in antiquity to induce religious communion,  Clark Heinrich, in his book Strange Fruit, reported having had the following experience after ingesting a quantity of A. muscaria and his own resultantly, intoxicating urine:

Before another thought could arise in my mind, in the midst of a great darkness and a great silence, the heavens opened above my head. In an instant I was flooded with light from above, light of the utmost whiteness and splendour, that quickly dissolved everything in its glory. The bliss I had experienced prior to this new revelation now paled to insignificance in an immensity of light that was also the purest love. As the truth of the situation dawned on me the word "Father" resounded in this heaven of light and I was taken up and absorbed by the unspeakable Godhead. No longer separate, there was neither an enjoyer nor a thing enjoyed; there was union" ⁴

Heinrich's experience is not unique, however. On the contrary, many people have had very similar experiences after ingesting A. muscariae or other entheogenic mushrooms, as the following message in a newsgroup devoted to such mushrooms shows:

I have never seen a vision of God, I felt like I experienced him just for a short period of time while taking [mu]shrooms. I just felt this complete acceptance from this being, just peace . . .  I felt led in a way to evolve, almost metamorphasize into a new human being, that was much, much better than my old self. While I was thinking, and crying, just in anguish over my present state, something special was coming together inside me. . . . It was almost as if all my pain, hatred, and suffering was falling away, like an old discarded shell [This is a fundamental feature of ego death]. . . . I feel like God has purposely left a few keys on earth just to help people evolve into better beings. [Mu]shrooms are a valuable key to me, just helping to see a vision of myself, and the way I fit into this universe. The whole experience only lasts while under the influence, and when I come I come off the trip, I forget certain things, even though I remember the basics. So there's a lot lost in the translation. But I know this is true, God is here and now, it's powerful dynamic energy that finds happiness in living . . . So even though this sounds far out, I know [mu]shrooms have helped me to experience God in a totally unexpected way, and even begin to realize some of his intentions. ⁶

Today, most people, especially those who never experienced the above phenomena, tend to denigrate and  attribute them to neurochemical changes. But the ancients knew nothing about neurochemistry or the physiological basis of mental and emotional states. So, by a well-known, deeply rooted, and apparently very old principle of sympathetic magic still observed in many tribal societies, people simply held that ingesting an organism endowed the eater with the organism's spirit and behavioral tendencies — just as people in many tribal societies today hold that eating lion meat will make a man brave like the lion, while eating rabbit meat will make a man fast or timid like the rabbit.

Accordingly, prehistoric artists who ingested A. muscariae attributed their spiritual rebirth, feeling of unconditional love, and new found sense of divinity to the ingestion of a spirit that seemingly dwelled in A. muscariae. And they considered that spirit their spiritual mother, godmother or goddess, in that it induced a spiritual rebirth that put them in what they then considered the heaven or earthly paradise of the goddess's spiritual womb. 

A person who recently had such an experience after ingesting a quantity of entheogenic P. cubensi wrote the following:

"She is with me now... I can't explain who she is. She is me, in a way, and she is you, and she is everyone and everything else. She is love. She is beauty. She is truth. She is soft and warm. I can't see her, but that only adds to her beauty. There are no words to describe her. When I am afraid, she comforts me. When I am ignorant, she teaches me. She carries me when I can't walk, and she holds my hand in silent companionship when I can. There are no words between us, words are so pointless with her. She is wife, mother, daughter and sister. She is my true companion. She is Spirit. My love for her is beyond words. I feel like she is with me always. I feel like she is with all of us, always, and her love is beyond any description. I feel now that I know her, nothing will ever be the same. The love that she is is a love that I should spread, and it will color every aspect of my life from now on. Whatever happens, she will never leave my side. I feel total peace. Pure love. I want to spread the love she feels for me. I don't know what else to say. She is love." http://leda.lycaeum.org/Trips/Contact.6101.shtml

Figure 10: Terracotta figurine, often identified as Asherah, . ca 11th - 6th cent B.C.E.

Over the course of many millennia, artists tended to emphasize in their own figurines the womanly aspects of the ancient prototypes from which they worked, while de-emphasizing the prototypes' mushroom-like features. Nevertheless, remnants of the mycological origins of many such deities managed to survive in the  later depictions of these deities. For instance, comparing the Cretan figurine (Figure 9, left) to the terra cotta, Palestinian figurine of a knotty-caped, monopodial female with arms akimbo holding her breasts (Figure 10), it can be inferred that the cape was designed to personify the studded veil covering the A. muscaria's cap, just as the globs of paste on the Cretan figurine were. The Palestinian figurine is thus fully analogous to the Cretan one, as well as to the Willendorf Venus, in that it, too, was, knowingly or unknowingly, designed to personify an A. muscaria, tens of millennia after the Willendorf Venus and other figurines were created with pocked heads and folded arms.

The noted archaeologist, James Pritchard and, later, others believed for a number of reasons that this Palestinian figurine and its many analogues were fashioned to depict the Canaanite goddess Asherah.(Pritchard, 1967) Hence, those reasons also provide a basis for believing that Asherah had originally been a personified A. muscaria.

It can then be inferred that Asherah was depicted elsewhere with arboreal features being eaten by animals, because of the well-documented fondness animals have for mushrooms, including entheogenic species. It can be inferred that the Cannanites and their Hebrew brethren established alters and planted phallic poles and other monuments, called Asherah, next to sacred trees on mountains, because such trees hosted the notoriously rhizophyllic A. muscaria, which prefers higher altitudes at lower latitudes. And it can be inferred that the name of this goddess is identical to the word for these poles, because Asherah personified the poles.

As Robert Graves and Raphael Patai suggested in Hebrew Myths, Hebrew and Canaanite women baked the pulverized mushrooms that were, in effect, Asherah's botanical embodiments into loaves shaped like this goddess, which were then ritualistically ingested. ⁷ Consequently, as Graves and Patai also noted, the Arabic root ftr for bread and mushrooms clearly revelas its cognation with the Hebrew words (a) petrya, for a mushroom; (b) pitta, for bread; and (c) the Greek word pita, for the discoid bread, shaped like a mushroom cap.

In the 6th millennium B.C.E., the Hebrew king Josiah attempted to stop Hebrews from worshipping Asherah and analogous, entheogenic mushroom goddesses during a more general call for a return to older doctrines. It can therefore also be inferred that Josiah was ostensibly trying to reinstitute the prohibition against A. muscaria ingestion that appears in the so-called Allegory of The Fall (Gen 3:1-22), as discussed in "Was R.G.Wasson The Messiah?"

This Canaanite and Hebrew practice was apparently fully analogous to the ancient Greek practice of crushing and ingesting the botanical embodiment of Dionysos that Grave's concluded — correctly I believe — was originally an entheogenic mushroom in wine during the Bacchanal, after which the spirit of Dionysos seemingly rose up and possessed the revelers. In addition, these practices were fully analogous to the Egyptian practice of ingesting cakes in rituals commemorating the resurrection of Osiris.

Asherah can then also be identified as the Ancient Near Eastern analogue of a Siberian Eskimo goddess who rises nude from the waste up from the roots or trunk of the birch, which avidly hosts A. muscariae, baring breasts swollen with milk for anyone who approaches her in prayer. Moreover, both Asherah and this Eskimo goddess can be identified as analogues of the Hindu deity Soma, whom Wasson ⁸ identified as a personified A. muscaria. The Rg Veda therefore repeatedly describes Soma using the following breast imagery:

"[approaching] the Soma as it were a breast?" (IV 23Iab);

"... milk the breast which is milked of sweetness. [Soma]"(VII IOIIab)";

"When the swollen stems were milked like cows with [full] udders . . "(VIII 919a);

"The sweet juices have hurried to the god like milch cows [to a calf]. Resting upon  

the barhis, noisy, with full breasts . . . they have made the red ones their flowing      garment."(IX 681);

"The priests milk this stem for you both [Varuna and Mitra, two gods], like the auroral milk cow, with the aid of stones they milk the Soma, with the aid of stones." (I 1373ab);

"The first milk of the stem is the best."(II 13Icd)";

"Indra is farther than this seat when the milked stem, the Soma, fills him."(III 366cd);

"The one with good hands [the priest] has milked the mountain-grown sap of the [Soma]; the breast has yielded the dazzling [sap]."(V 434);

"When the swollen stalks were milked like cows with full udders." (VIII 919ab);

"They milk the thundering stems..."(IX 726a ).

John Allegro claimed that it was the practice of personifying A. muscariae as a breast that caused the Sumerian word gannu, "used of the red dye cochineal ... to derive very probably from gan for the red top of the A. muscaria... since in Sumerian gan also meant cone or hemispherical shape, such as the lid of a bowl or a woman's breast. Thus, "gan had yielded the more precise Sumerian word agan for the breast,^" and women in the ancient Near East put red dye on their breasts, thereby causing them to resemble red A. muscaria caps.