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| Left: Cretan "Snake Goddess" from Knossos, ca. 6000 B.C.E. Right: Pheidias's Athena from the Parthenon. (Click on the images for larger views). | |
Gods, Goddesses and Serpents
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| Left: Cretan "Snake Goddess" from Knossos, ca. 6000 B.C.E. Right: Pheidias's Athena from the Parthenon. (Click on the images for larger views). | |
The reason serpents were intimately associated with and symbolic of deities in antiquity can now also be inferred. As explained in The Prehistoric Practice of Personifying Mushrooms, the earliest deities were personified entheogenic mushrooms, because these mushrooms could induce the ego death and spiritual rebirth that led people to believe they had spiritually died and been reborn as demigods in a previously imperceptible, spiritual reality. In antiquity these phenomena were appropriately likened to the rebirth serpents seemingly underwent after shedding their skins, and just as the mushroom's ability to cause ego death and spiritual rebirth was attributed to its toxin, the serpent's ability to be reborn was attributed to its toxin.
In addition, serpents were intimately associated with and symbolic of entheogenic mushrooms in antiquity because "both emerged from holes in the ground, in a manner reminiscent of the sexually awakened penis" 13 , and people believed that the entheogens in mushrooms could be transferred to and from serpents. For example, Nicander wrote that serpents could contaminate plants by their presence and that mushrooms in particular sucked up the venom of serpents in the ground beneath them.11 Similarly, Pliny stated that "if the hole of a serpent has been near the mushroom, or should a serpent have breathed on it as it first opened, its kinship to poisons makes it capable of absorbing the venom... so it would not be well to eat mushrooms until the serpent has begun to hibernate."12 Indeed, Pliny's warning against eating mushrooms before serpents begin to hibernate should be considered a display of the ancient belief that underpinned the role serpents played as guardians of sacred mushrooms, which were otherwise known in antiquity as the Food of the Gods.
The ancient that serpents had with toxic, hence entheogenic, mushrooms survived in the world's literature, art, and folklore: for example, in the Russian novel Lesnaya Glush', the host of a banquet explains that mushrooms should be eaten before the first thunder of spring because snakes will afterward inject venom into the mushrooms.101
The reputed ability of serpents to transfer toxins to and from entheogenic mushrooms, and to consequently imbue people with the same sense of divinity and immortality these mushrooms, could was associated with the well-known principle of sympathetic magic which underpinned the ancient belief that eating an animal would endow people with the animal's spirit and behavioral characteristics. Among the Jivaroan tribe of Ecuador this principle survives as a folktale about a boy who turned into a serpent after eating serpent's flesh, 14 while many ancient European stories tell similarly of someone who was transformed, reborn, or typically rendered divine in one or more ways when he touched, ate or was bitten by a serpent.
According to two variants of one such story, the Greek seer Tiresias was said to have been reborn as a woman after he touched or killed one of two copulating serpents, while another story tells how the ancient, Greek seer Melampus obtained his ability to prognosticate, cure people, and understand the language of birds after serpents spoke in his ear. As Mircea Eliade pointed out :
All over the world learning the language of animals, especially of birds, is equivalent to knowing the secrets of nature and hence to being able to prophesy. Bird language is usually learned by eating snake or some other reputedly magical animal. . . . Learning their language, imitating their voice, is equivalent to ability to communicate with the beyond and the heavens. . . . Birds are psychopomps. Becoming a bird oneself or being accompanied by a bird indicates the capacity, while still alive, to undertake the ecstatic journey to the sky and the beyond.15
Because serpents were clearly associated with immortality and divinity in antiquity, and both these attributes were integral to kingship, ancient kings the world over were said to have had serpentine attributes. For instance, Erectheus, a legendary Atheneian king and divinity, was said to have been born as, or to have become, a serpent. It is therefore not coincidental that the Iliad speaks of Erectheus being raised by Athena, to whom the serpent was sacred, after which Athena established Erectheus as the overseer of her Athenian temple, which reputedly housed a huge serpent.
The association snakes had with toxins is also clearly evident in the Bible. For instance, in addition to the association a serpent had with a toxic mushroom in the story of the so-called fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (as discussed in Was R.G. Wasson The Messiah?) Psalms 58:4 states "Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear. Psalms 140:3 states, "They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips." Numbers tells of Yahweh ordering Aaron to cast his rod to the ground where it — not coincidentally —turns into a serpent Aaron then uses to poison Egypt’s water. And Numbers also tells of Moses fastening the graven image of a serpent to a pole to cure Hebrews who were bitten by the fiery serpents Yahweh had paradoxically sent earlier to torment and kill them:
"And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived. Numbers 21:8-9.
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| Left: Moses pointing to the poled serpent he constructed to cure Hebrews who had been bitten by God's fiery seraphim. Center: The caduceus comprising two snakes on a pole. Right: Aesculapius with a poled serpent and an Indian medicine man next to Tree of Knowledge, as the logo of The American College of Surgeons. | ||
From the above analysis and many ancient literary passages too numerous to mention, it can be inferred with certainty that Moses's poled serpent was equivalent to the serpent-bearing staff of the prototypal, Greek physician Aesculapius, and to the caduceus, which physicians later used to symbolize the curative powers of the drugs they once derived mainly from plants.
In addition, it can be inferred that these poled serpents represented the curative powers of the toxins serpents inherently possessed, as well as the curative powers of the entheogens serpents were known for ingesting. It is therefore not coincidental that the caduceus and Moses' poled serpent were mushroom-like, or that Aesculapius and some other physicians reputedly had the same power to confer immortality on people for which entheogenic mushrooms have traditionally been known.
Because serpents were anciently associated with entheogen-induced, spiritual rebirth, they also figure prominently in many ancient stories about plants of immortality. For instance, in the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh retrieves a plant of immortality from the "Waters of Death," as the celestial ocean was then called. The plant was appropriately named "Old Man Becomes A Child," in accord with the tendency entheogens have of inducing childlike behavior. However, a serpent steals the plant from Gilgamesh, eats it, and sheds his skin — not surprisingly, recalling the association that shedding had with spiritual rebirth and immortality in antiquity.
In Genesis 3, a serpent promises Adam and Eve they will become god-like if they eat the Forbidden Fruit, which R.G Wasson correctly concluded was an entheogenic mushroom. And a serpent figures prominently in an ancient Greek story of how Glaukos, the son of the Cretan king Minos, was herbally resurrected by the seer Polyeidus, who had seen a snake use the same herb to resurrect a companion.
In the corrupted Grimms' fairy tale version of the Glaukos myth, the herb has become The Three Serpent Leaves, which John Fiske summarizes as follows:
A prince is buried alive with his dead wife, and seeing a serpent approaching her body, he cuts it in three pieces. Presently another serpent, crawling from the corner, saw the other lying dead, and going, away soon returned with three green leaves in its mouth; then laying the parts of the body together so as to join, it put one leaf on each wound, and the dead serpent was alive again. The prince, applying the leaves to his wife’s body, restores her also to life."9
As Wasson pointed out, of interest here is that "In China, for instance, in documents that tell of very old events, there is occasional mention that cadavers are covered with leaves, [but] Western readers are not apt to remember that leaves have in Chinese the additional meaning of pilei of mushrooms." Accordingly, Wasson went on to suggest that the heart of the preceding stories is a very old, herbalistic belief that applying red A. muscaria caps to the bodies of the dying or dead could heal or resurrect them.
In fact it is probably this practice that led to that of applying the red pigments hematite, cinnabar and ochre, symbolizing the red A. muscariae, to the dead or dying,10 And it is probably this practice that led to the practice of placing round tokens, symbolizing A. muscaria caps, in tombs.
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Figure 11: Central American mushroom stones personifying sacred mushrooms. |
Athena, like many other Greek deities, can therefore also be considered an analogue of Asherah, Soma and many other deified entheogens too numerous to discuss in this paper. Hence Athena was often depicted next to or even attached to the foot of a tree, tree stump, or a post, implying that her botanical embodiment was the once sacred entheogenic mushroom that grew at the foot of a tree.
Finally, the belief system that underpinned the Eurasian practice of personifying A. muscariae as deities is apparently analogous to the Mexican Mazatec belief that ingesting an entheogenic mushroom is tantamount to ingesting the body of a deity. Accordingly, Eurasian anthropomorphic figurines should be considered analogues of the Central American figurines called mushroom stones (figure 11), which Wasson already identified as personified mushrooms.
Conclusions
In this article, I have identified a number of prehistoric, anthropomorphic figurines as personified primordial mushrooms, particularly the entheogenic Amanita muscaria and Psilocybe cubensis, and I have explained that such mushrooms are entheogens, in that ingesting them can lead people to believe they have died and been spritually reborn as quasi-divine, Children of God in an unconditionally loving world such people often call Paradise or Heaven. Based on (1) the deeply-rooted, human tendency to a personify plants and (2) a well-known principle of sympathetic magic which holds that the spirits of plants are manifested upon ingestion, many prehistoric sculptors who ingested entheogenic mushrooms personified the mushrooms' spirits as goddesses who could transport their souls to a heavenly paradise. Accordingly, these artists personified such mushrooms (1) squeezing their breasts, to imply that the mushrooms' juice was a milk, and/or (2) holding or covered by snakes, which anciently symbolized entheogenic toxins that could induce ego death and spiritual rebirth. Other artists, however, regarded the spirit of entheogenic mushrooms as a heavenly father and used the phallus to symbolize them.
References
2. Bisson, M., White, R.. Female Imagery From the Paleolithic: The Case of Grimaldi. http://www.insticeagestudies.com/library/library.html
3. Gimbutas, Marija. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500-3500 BC: Myths and Cult Images. Berkeley: University of California, 1982.
4. Heinrich, Clark. Strange Fruit. London. Bloomsbury Publishing. 1995. pp. 195-196.
5. Hoffman, Albert. LSD My Problem Child, Los Angeles, Jeremy Tarcher, Inc., 1979, p.98.
6.. Fuzion@starnetinc.com
Subject: Re: Is there a
mushroom God? Date: 27 Feb 1997 00:00:00 GMT
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alt.drugs.psychedelics,alt.nature.mushrooms
7. Graves, Robert and Patai, Raphael. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis.New York. Crown Publishers. 1963. p. 81.
8. Wasson, R.G.. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 43-45.
10. Soma. p. 219
11. Nicander, Alexipharmaca 521-525.
12. Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Loeb Classic Library. Vol VI. Libri XXII, 95.
13. Allegro, John. The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross. Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday. 1969, pp. 53, 59.
14. Dundes, Alan (ed.). The Flood Myth. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1988, p. 140.
15. Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 98.
17 . Lévi-Strauss, Claude.The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1966.
18. Janson. H.W.. History of Western Art. Englewood Cliffs, Hew Jersey, 1962, p. 29.
19. Pritchard, James B..Palestinian
Figurines in Relation to Certain Goddesses Known Through Literature.
New York : Kraus, 1967.
32. Graves, Robert. Greek Myths. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1981.
33. Graves, Robert. Food for centaurs: stories, talks, critical studies, poems. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1960.
34. Zohar Sitrei Torah (1:147b-148b). Cited by Alan Humm at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu:80/~humm/Topics/Lilith/
35. R. Ya'aqov and R. Yitzhaq. Cited by Alan Humm at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu:80/~humm/Topics/Lilith/
36. Weather Folktales. http://athena.wednet.edu/curric/weather/hsweathr/folktale.html.
37. Alan Humm, Personal Communication.
38. Depicted by Alan Humm at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu:80/~humm/Topics/Lilith/.
39. Allegro, p. 53.