#dan attrell

[polyphanes]

Reading the Kybalion: Prologue, History, Overview, and Perceptions

They say “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”. They also say a lot of other dumb things, but here we are anyway. So, on the Hermetic House of Life Discord server, while we were going through the weekly discussions that gave rise to my own Reading the Hermetica blogpost series (which we just finished up here last week!), wherein we covered all the classical Hermetic texts…

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Since the initiates of mystery cults were forbidden to discuss the contents of their rites, our most important clues concerning the rites of Attis and Cybele must come from the pagan poets on one end of the spectrum, and the invectives of their chief opponents, the Christian apologists and church fathers on the other end. Arnobius of Sicca makes it very clear that wine was forbidden to initiates of Attis’ mysteries, for “it is forbidden for those polluted with wine to enter a sanctuary because it betrayed his silence [concerning Attis’ act of adultery against the Goddess],” nevertheless, a type of frenzied intoxication is an undisputed fact among the rituals of the Divine Bridegroom, and I am highly averse to the idea that this was all spontaneously achieved. If wine was forbidden for use within the sanctuaries of Attis, then what intoxicants may have been available as sacrament for whipping Cybele’s devotees into frenzy? Laying bare the “rites the Phrygians perform in honour of Attis and Cybele and the Corybantes,” Clement makes clear to his readers the use of a “drink of gall” (πόμα χολής). It could be postulated that the sacrament could be any entheogenic, hallucinogenic, intoxicating, or narcotic substance, nevertheless, I propose the rites of the Goddess’ ‘drink of gall’ was, at least in the formative phases of its consumption as ritual, a concoction of pressed Amanita mushrooms which is both deliriant and hallucinogenic.                 Initiates used the mysteries as a process of self-dissolution and re-identification with the mythical lover of the Phrygian Mother whom she drove into madness, self-mutilation, and death. Clement is often quoted for his report on how initiates of the Phrygian mysteries were required to repeat the lines: “I have eaten from the drum (τυμπάνου), I have drunk from the cymbal (κυμβάλου), I have carried the sacred vessels, I have plunged beneath the curtain.” The drum and the cymbal symbolized the importance of trance music, the sacred vessels implied the sacrament, and the bridal chamber (παστός) implied the marriage bed of the Goddess. There is a confirmed Indo-European ‘culture-word relationship’ in the Hittite vessel name ‘kukupalla’ and the Greek ‘κύπελλον’ (goblet) and ‘κύμβαλον’ (cymbal), and the Sanskrit ‘kimpalá’ (a musical instrument) indicating an ancient association between such types of cult vessels and percussive instruments. The marriage bed, however, might be interpreted as the ecstatic state itself; what rendered this marriage ‘sacred’ was the very risk of dying these initiates exposed themselves to in the deliberate over-consumption of a toxic hallucinogen, the god’s own flesh and blood.

Dan Attrell - Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy

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Among the scholars of Indo-European religion, much ink has been spilled over the negation of death through the consumption of sacred foods. The gods were believed to be immortal only inasmuch as they were steadily supplied with their fix of ἀμβροσία (ambrosia), nectar, amṛta, or Soma. The poet of the Rigveda writes: “We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered. Now what may foeman’s malice do to harm us?” The Greek ἀμβροσία is etymologically bound to the Sanskrit amṛta (अमृत), which is synonymous with the god-substance Soma. Both of these mythical substances were preserved in Indo-European lore as the food and drink from which the gods maintained their immortality. Suetonius wrote of the mushrooms in which are generated a poison (or drug, uenenum) as deorum cibum following the Greek convention which called mushrooms βρῶμα θεῶν, the “food of the gods.” The Mycenaeans of ‘Mykenai’ derived their own name from the μύκης (mukes), suggesting the importance of the mushroom to that branch of Indo-European culture. The Greek word for mushroom itself, ‘μύκης,’ can be traced back to the syllabary Mycenaean period.

Dan Attrell - Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy

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Long before writing, agriculture and civilization, the shaman played the pragmatic role of priest, prophet, mythmaker, healer, herbalist, bard, teacher, and elder. Over hundreds of thousands of years in co-existence with nature, successive generations of humans managed to accumulate vast repertoires of plant lore. The earliest attempts at unlocking the healing, nutritional and mind-altering properties of plants must have been exceptionally hazardous, and people doubtless came to learn these properties through both trial-and-error, and by observing the effects of suspect substances on animals. For example, the psychoactive effects of Amanita Muscaria were first observed among the reindeer of the Siberian forest-belt who avariciously seek them out regardless of the season, even beneath thick blankets of snow and soil. Humans noticed the reindeer ate the mushrooms, but not only that - they also noticed the reindeer drinking their own urine to recycle the mushrooms effects. This consumption of the alkaloid-enriched reindeer urine probably occurred long before human experimentation with their own urine consumption, a technique R. Gordon Wasson put at the center of his Soma/ Mushroom hypothesis.

Dan Attrell - Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy

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Through their tried and tested methods, the shaman became an institutionalized other, possessing access to a region of the sacred that is hidden from society at large. The shaman or mystic often could perform the promethean task of descending into madness and return with an art or knowledge useful to the tribe, nevertheless, practical knowledge was seldom the ecstatic’s priority. Many techniques used as far back as the Paleolithic era are still used today by shaman around the globe representing an unbroken continuation of mankind’s oldest magico-religious practice – a practice concerned with direct experience. At present, shamanism is still commonly found among isolated pre-literate societies. The Ayahuasceros of the Amazon jungle continue their complex ancestral practices, relying on archaic systems of boiling the bark of the monoamine oxidase inhibiting (MAOI) Banisteriopsis caapi vine with the leaves of several shrubs containing dimethyltryptamine (DMT) to access worlds far beyond conventional human senses. Mycolatry, the religious veneration of mushrooms, was a widespread phenomenon amongst the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica. Among the Aztecs, psilocybe mushrooms were christened teonanacatl, ‘the flesh of the gods’ in the Nahuatl language. The mushroom ceremonies (Velada) have survived among the isolated Mazatec people despite the systematic suppression of this theophagy by 16th century Dominican and Franciscan missionaries.

Dan Attrell - Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy

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Though shamanism was recognized to be global phenomenon in the 20th century, no group was subject to more anthropological research than the shamans of Siberia and the Russian steppes so well-known from Eurasian folklore. For their own conveniences, many western scholars simply lumped the vast diversity of Siberian and Turko-Tartar religious practices into ‘shamanism’ and this had done violence to the idea behind the word. Shamanism is nothing more than a tool or a τέχνη to be applied within the context of any given religion – it is not a religion in and of itself since the ecstatic experience stands at odds with dogma or canon by its very nature. Although shamanism permeates and influences the religions of North and Central Asia, as it does in the Amazon basin, it was never the religion of a given region. Any given religion can lend its symbols and discourse as a framework or point of reference to communicate the contents of an individual’s subconscious. The mystical or ‘shamanic’ experience is entirely subjective to the individual undergoing it and therefore, ‘shamanism’ stands outside the realm of the ordinary communal ‘religious’ experience.

Dan Attrell - Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy

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To this day, one aspect of shamanism seeks to heal its patients by dissolving their individual neuroses. These neuroses, generally speaking, have emerged from the irreconcilable gap between a mind dominated by language and a reality as perceived by the senses. They are the curse of civilized man, of man fallen into language. Shaman dissolve these neuroses, then, by forcing either themselves or their initiates (or both) into a state of ecstasy wherein they might examine the world from an ostensibly ‘supernatural’ viewpoint – a viewpoint stripped of language, accrued data, preconceived notions, and illusory egoic constructs. Herein, the shaman lays bare the truth that Alfred Korzybski meant when he said “the map is not the territory.” They reveal what the great bard Terence McKenna said when he stated: “what we call reality is, in fact, nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.” Very often, this visionary perspective stripped of its linguistic maps is interpreted by the ecstatic person as a state of disembodiment, dismemberment, death, or prenatality. In these moments of disembodied hierophany, all things are exude the holy; it matters little where exactly the sacred is manifest: the rocks, mountains, and trees are each as spiritually profound as the loftiest of experiences in the presence of a Sky Father. Under the influence of what Rudolf Otto famously coined the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans,’ or what Eliade called the ‘wholly other,’ the specialists of visionary experience have aided their fellow humans to cease their fear of the inevitable winter, the death of their crops, and ultimately the loss of their own lives.

Dan Attrell - Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy

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The so-called ‘mystery cults’ were a handful of marginal Eastern Mediterranean cults which achieved popularity throughout the Roman empire and were distinguished as a unique religious phenomenon by the Belgian archaeologist and philologist Franz Cumont in his 1906 book Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. This modern label of ‘mystery cults’ has now long been used as a blanket designation to cover the cults held in honour of Mithra, Attis and Cybele, Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone, Orpheus and Bacchus/ Dionysus, and the Samothracian Kabeiroi, among countless other minor and local groups who will never be remembered. Each of these cults (with perhaps the exception of Mithraism) revolved around the dramatic and ecstatic veneration of “dying-and-rising-gods,” a title formulated by the founding father of comparative religion, James G. Frazer, and subsequently developed by British and Scandinavian members of the Myth-and-Ritual School. These so-called “Cambridge Ritualists,” held to the notion that myths do not stand on their own, but are born out of ritual. This theory, of course, is heavily disputed; but the alternative view is equally enlightening: that myth and ritual evolve along parallel lines, without one developing strictly out from the other.              The ‘Divine Bridegroom’ is similarly a name I use for these dying mystery gods. For the most part, the mystery religions were sanctuary based, taking place in a telestrion (initiation chambers), caves, or mountain groves, and their members were organized by a structure of hierarchical degrees of initiation. The “mysteries” themselves generally entailed dramatic experiences conveyed via esoteric initiation ceremonies that were reflections of annual agricultural and astrological cycles. Already the mainstream view of old-school ethnologists believed in the notion that the mysteries were survivals of ancient “rites of passage,” especially by Mircea Eliade and Angelo Brelich. Many believed that the origin of the mysteries should be sought in some stage of primitive agricultural development, and it is in illo tempore - into that mythic dream time - to which I wish to return throughout this book.

Dan Attrell -  Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy