carl ruck

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Reorienting the shamanic axis: Apollo from wolf to light

Delphi was the universal axis mundi or central connection with the theological cosmos for the anc... more Delphi was the universal axis mundi or central connection with the theological cosmos for the ancient Greco-Roman world, the seat of the most renowned shaman of antiquity, the Pythoness prophetess. The long sequence of priestesses who held the office delivered oracular responses from mythical times as early as the mid second millennium BCE until the last recorded pronouncement around the year 395 CE. During this expanse of time, Greece transitioned from Pelasgian/Minoan worship of a goddess to the Indo-European evolution of the patriarchal family of Olympians, over which the male deity Zeus presided as father or sibling. The pathway of shamanic prognostication was reoriented from its former connection downward through the Corycian wolf cave on Mount Parnassos to the chthonic realm of Gaia and it was reassigned upon the building of the Delphic Temple sanctuary in the eighth century upward to Zeus, with the deity Apollo functioning as mediator, replacing his former pre-Indo-European persona with his new identity as son of the divine father, whose pronouncements the priestess thereafter delivered. The numerous mythical figures in the catalogue of those particularly beloved of the Apollonian deity and his twin sister betray their former role as recipients of human victims, once enacted in the bull dance at the Minoan labyrinth on Crete and by the lover's leap from the twin cliffs that loom above the Delphic sanctuary. They were prepared for their ordeal by the ingestion of a variety of psychoactive sacraments, prime among them was one associated with the wolf and its canine analogues. This entheogen was a mushroom, and the animals' fondness for the ecstasy it induced set the pattern for the bonding of humans into packs of warriors and the institutions of society. It can be traced back to the haoma sacrament of the Zoroastrian Persian elite, and indications of it occur as early as the Homeric tradition and persist throughout Europe until the late medieval period, and perhaps even later. In the reorienting of Delphi's shamanic axis, Apollo's lycanthropic persona was displaced and reinterpreted as related not to the 'wolf' (lykos), but to the 'light' (lux) of his solar manifestation. The deadly twanging of his toxic bow was transmuted into the harmonious, but equally entrancing, spell cast by the music from the plucked strings of his lyre. Apollo is paired with Dionysus as inspiring antithetical modes of human mentality, with Apollo presiding over the separation from Gaia and rational control over nature, and his half-brother finding the source of inspiration in the mediated encounter with the irrationality of the natural wilderness. At Delphi, Dionysus replaced his brother's former role at the Corycian Cave.

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The spiritual lover in the cult of Dionysus

An ancient Indo-European goddess of war validated the warlord's authority by a mystical marriage ... more An ancient Indo-European goddess of war validated the warlord's authority by a mystical marriage accessed via a fungal sacrament, empowering him with the ecstatic madness of lycanthropy. She entered the Classical world through Thrace as Kotys and became assimilated with a coterie of analogous deities that includes Athena (Medea, Medusa, Metis, and Kreousa), Bendis, Artemis, and Hecate, and hence inevitably Persephone and Demeter. With the evolution of viticulture and the fermentation of fungal yeasts to produce ethanol, her entourage included the bacchants and Dionysus as their spiritual spouse, and yielded to patriarchy. The association with Demeter and the evolution of cultivated cereals, made ergot, the psychoactive fungus parasitic on grasses, an analogue of the wild mushroom, contrasting the two fundamental foodstuffs as bread and wine. This was a motif that continued into the Christian mystical tradition. The ancient experience was termed a Mystery and interpreted as a ceremonial recapitulation of mankind's evolution from primitivism. Perpetuations of the primordial empowering mystical marriage occur in the Athenian Basilinna and the Roman Bona Dea. Although the revels of mainland Greece had apparently involved only women and the sexuality was metaphoric for a unio mystica, with satyrs and other imaginary creatures that manifested across the interdimensional barrier as the deity or his proxys, the rite was often perverted as a physical experience enacting metaphors as reality. Bacchanalian revels were introduced from the Greek colonies in the south of the Italian peninsula and Roman law attempted unsuccessfully to restrict them because of their excessive drunkenness and sexual abandon, including prostitution, enforced sodomy, and human sacrifice.

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CHAPTER 7. The Wild and the Cultivated: Wine in Euripides' Bacchae

Persephone's Quest, 2017

A Prehistoric Mural in Spain Depicting Neurotropic Psilocybe Mushrooms?

by Alan Piper and carl ruck

Economic Botany, Jan 1, 2011

The Selva Pascuala mural, a work of post-Paleolithic rock art in Spain, contains fungoid figures ... more The Selva Pascuala mural, a work of post-Paleolithic rock art in Spain, contains fungoid figures herein hypothesized to depict neurotropic fungi, especially Psilocybe hispanica, a species that occurs in a neighboring region. This hypothesis is based on features of these figures related to fungal morphology, along with ethnographic analogy, and shamanistic explanations of rock art. If correct, this interpretation would support inference of prehistoric utilization of this fungus in the region. The mural represents the first direct evidence for possible ritual use of Psilocybe in prehistoric Europe.

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CHAPTER 6. Mushrooms and Philosophers

We present VUV observations of transitions between doubly excited sextet states in O 3+ , F 4+ an... more We present VUV observations of transitions between doubly excited sextet states in O 3+ , F 4+ and Ne 5+. Spectra were produced by collisions of an oxygen, fluorine and neon beam with a nitrogen gas jet target. Prepared beam-gas experiment yields new and explicit information on doubly core-excited ions. Some observed lines were assigned to the 1s2s2p 3 6 S-1s2p 3 3s, 3d 6 P electric-dipole transitions in O 3+ , F 4+ and Ne 5+. Three lines have been reassigned. Present data are the first explicit measurements on transitions between sextet states in boronlike ions by beam-gas spectroscopy.

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The apotheosis of the Divine Claudius: on the Emperor's lethal meal of mushrooms

The Drug Cult that Civilized Europe

Persia Haoma and the Greek Mysteries

CİSEATED-ASEHERT, Sep 1, 2019

In the mythological tradition, the Greeks traced tribal affiliations with the Persians through Pe... more In the mythological tradition, the Greeks traced tribal affiliations with the Persians through Perses, the son of the hero Perseus, and with the Medes through the sorceress Medea's son Medos. They also traced family ties with the Egyptians through the Argive Greek cow-maiden Io and with Phoenicia through Europa, abducted by Zeus metamorphosed into a bull, and through Perseus' Phoenician bride Andromeda, and through Cadmus of Boeotian Thebes, and further ties with Egypt through Perseus' visit to his great female ancestor's African homeland. These traditions pertain to the Greek Mystery religions and to the psychoactive sacrament involved in the rites of initiation. One version of this sacrament was the Persian haoma, which in the Sanskrit Vedic rite was the not-personified plant deity Soma. The same sacrament seems to have originated in Africa, perhaps stimulating humankind's first awareness of a spiritual dimension beyond the perceived reality. This was the psychoactive Amanita muscaria mushroom. Its assimilation into Hellenic theology underlies the identity of the Greek deities Dionysus and Demeter, and the various groups of dwarfish highly sexualized African grotesqueries that apparently materialized in the Mystery initiations of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace and elsewhere, and in the great rite of the Eleusinian sanctuary.

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Soma and the Greek Mysteries

CHAPTER 8. The Offerings from the Hyperboreans

Persephone's Quest

Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Hermes Press, 1998

We, the Inquisitors against heretical perversity and apostasy, by virtue of apostolic authority d... more We, the Inquisitors against heretical perversity and apostasy, by virtue of apostolic authority declare, inasmuch as the use of the herb or root called Peyote has been introduced into these Provinces for the purpose of detecting thefts, or divining other happenings, and of foretelling future events, it is an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic Faith. This is certain because neither the said herb nor any other can possess the virtue or inherent quality of producing the effects claimed, nor can any cause the mental images, fantasies and hallucinations on which the above stated divinations are based. In these latter are plainly perceived the suggestion and intervention of the Devil, the real author of this vice, who first avails himself of the natural credulity of the Indians and their tendency to idolatry, and later strikes down many other persons too little disposed to fear God and of very little faith. (Leonard, 1942) The Inquisi...

from the pages of ELEUSIS: Journal of Psychoactive Plants and Compounds New Series 4, 2000

Hypotheses advanced in The Road to Eleusis1 concerning the possible composition and method of pre... more Hypotheses advanced in The Road to Eleusis1 concerning the possible composition and method of preparation of the kykeon are evaluated in light of published criticism. Objections to the Eleusis theory are countered, and based on a largely overlooked aspect of the chemical hydrolysis of ergot alkaloids, a new hypothesis is suggested that reinvigorates the Eleusis debate. In part 2 of this essay, organic chemist Daniel M. Perrine provides further considerations that build upon the new idea, and a technical discussion of the practicality and realisability of the “Ergine Hypothesis ” paves the way for new chemical and psychopharmacological research. In part 3, co-author of The Road to Eleusis Carl A. P. Ruck re-examines the Eleusis mythologies and ritual practises from which appear a much expanded understanding of the entheo-pharmacology of the ancient world.

The lady who served the potion: botanical symbolism behind the mysteries of Eleusis

Ancient Greek : intensive review & reference

The Lady who served the potion: the Eleusinian sacrament personified

The Dwarfish Grotesquerie In the etiological myth for the mixed drink of the kykeon that was ther... more The Dwarfish Grotesquerie In the etiological myth for the mixed drink of the kykeon that was thereafter drunk by the initiates for the Mystery celebrated annually for two millennia at the sanctuary of the 'Two Deities' (tó theó) at the village of ancient Eleusis about eleven miles west of Athens, the Lady who first served the potion did something obscene that made the goddess Demeter laugh (Homeric Hymns, 2.203). She had been grieving for the separation from her daughter Persephone, who had been abducted by the lord of the netherworld Hades, while she was gathering magical plants with a group of maidens attending her. The Two Deities were these two, the mother and the daughter, Demeter and Persephone, but since the role of one would devolve into that of the other, they were referred to as the Holy Duo. The jest that made Demeter laugh was an obscenity, but a sacred one, which was the clue to the meaning of the initiation and an essential element in the indoctrination of the new inductees into the secret of the religious Mystery. The Lady who served the potion was herself the personification of the obscenity, a dwarfish grotesquerie who went by the name of Iambe, named for the 'iambic' rhythm of scurrilous verse and dancing. The name was also a calque upon the whole series of names punning upon the ia/o-root that designated the homonymous word in Greek (iós) for the 'arrow' and the 'drug' or entheogen that anointed it with its 'toxicity,' so named for the poisoned 'bow' or (tóxon). Shamans in Classical antiquity commonly traveled in the spirit upon the vehicle of the arrow with its toxicity. The verbal root occurs in the word for the 'druggist' doctor as iatrós, and in the numerous mythical figures associated with entheogenic empowerment: like Ion of Athens, the eponymous ancestor of the Ionian tribal group of Greek peoples, conceived from a magical crocus plucked in a cave beneath the city's Acropolis; and Iamos of Olympia, the etiological founder of its hereditary brotherhood of divinatory shamans; and the cow maiden Io, who was constantly in estrus from the bite of the cow-fly (Tabanus bovinus); and the flower maiden Iole ('Violet'), who was deflowered by Heracles; and Iason (Jason), who was named for his anointment with a special toxin of Prometheus; and even Iacchos, who was Bacchos (the chthonic Bacchus, Dionysus) personified as the joyous shout who led the procession of Eleusinian initiates. Death and the Maiden The abduction of Persephone by Hades is a frequent mythical motif of shamanic rapture accessed in rituals of herbalism, probably referring to the sexual fantasies of females involved in the gathering of psychoactive plants. In the case of Persephone's experience, it was occasioned by the plucking of the nárkissos (Homeric Hymns, 2.8) (Pancratium maritimum or the 'seadaffodil'), depicted in pre-Classical Minoan frescoes, and specifically as a rite of visionary herbalism on a golden ring from Cretan Isopata. The flower's name belongs to the pre-Greek language, but it was assimilated into Greek as the verbal root for 'narcosis' and 'narcotic.' Since the essence of the Mystery initiation at the Eleusinian sanctuary was something seen, a vision of 'the holy,' although the hall of initiation was in no way suitable for a theatrical performance, we should expect that the kykeon served by Iambe was psychoactive. Thus her name belongs to the series of punning personifications upon the motif of the toxic arrow.

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Mushrooms, Myth & Mithras: The Drug Cult That Civilized Europe

This illustrated book traces the history of an unlikely force in the shaping of Western civilizat... more This illustrated book traces the history of an unlikely force in the shaping of Western civilization: the use of psychedelic mushrooms, namely by a secret society called the cult of Mithras. Nero was the first emperor to be initiated by the group's "magical dinners," and most of his successors embraced the ritual as a source of spiritual transcendence. The cult was officially banned after the Conversion, but aspects of their rituals were assimilated or co-opted by Christianity, and the brotherhoods persist today as secret societies such as the Freemasons. This is a fascinating exploration of a powerful force kept behind the scenes for thousands of years.

Mushrooms and the wine of Maron

Mushrooms, Myth & Mithras The Drug Cult that Civilized Europe

City Lights, 2011

The Beast Initiate: The Lycanthropy of Heracles

ATHENS JOURNAL OF HISTORY

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