It appears that humanity has always ridden the Mindway in search of wisdom, insight, and community

 

The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World – Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, Karen Polinger Foster, Editors (2022)

 

            While I treasure and adore all books, it is books such as this one that thrill me the most because of the amazing amount of information included within.  Having read books on shamanism, ancient humans, and myth creation recently, I was thrilled when this book appeared in my hands while browsing the stacks.  The editors of this work, Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, and Karen Polinger Foster have provided the world with a magnificent resource exploring a seldom-analyzed part of our collective human past, that being the use and exploitation of what the writers term “Altered States of Consciousness,” ASC for short.  For far too long archeologists and anthropologists saw ancient man through our own modern “enlightenment” principles, ignoring all “subjective” experience such as trance, spirit possession, hallucinations, etc., in favor of empirically verifiable data.  This created a vast chasm of ignorance regarding the spiritual and mental lives of our ancestors.  It is the aim of this work to rectify that and to help guide the exploration of our distant human past towards a better understanding of the role ecstatic experiences had in the shaping of our species.  It is an impressive achievement.

            Formatted much like a textbook, each section presents a case for the omnipresence and importance of ecstatic experience in understanding the cultures of our ancient past.  The first section of three chapters, titled “Setting the Stage,” explores the history of ASC dismissal by biased researchers and explorers of our past, providing a firm foundation upon which to expand the explorations each writer takes in turn, and showing how universal these ecstatic experiences were.  These chapters also expand on what used to be the definition of “ecstasy” to include all types of societal, spiritual, and shamanic altered states of consciousness.  The third chapter of the first section aims to provide empirical models to define ritual practices and ecstatic experiences, from ancient man to today’s modern world.  It helps place these studies, and ASC’s themselves, within the greater study of humanity and its development, something which mainstream archeology and anthropology has dismissed for centuries.

            The second section seeks to elucidate the evidence we have for the various types of psychoactive compounds, plants, and substances used by our ancestors to achieve ASC states.  Evidence from archeological digs, mass-spectrometry, and other modern tools is given to show the wide variety of ingestible, smokable, or otherwise applied natural materials used in ecstatic rituals.  The full gamut of intoxicants is analyzed, from botanical specimens and residue found within sealed jars, to the early use of fermentation to create drinkable alcohol, to the various mind-altering plants used by the Babylonians, Hittites and early Egyptians, all recorded in their language and art.  To emphasize the communal use of these substances, the final chapter of section 2 discusses a type of ceramic container found throughout ancient sites.  The Ring-Kernoi is a device consisting of a ceramic tube, shaped into a donut, with four to five adorned containers attached to the ring.  Looking at these artifacts through the lens of ASC experience, the author describes their use in ritual communion.  Each adorned section contained wither a different psychoactive compound, whether opium, cannabis, mandrake, etc., meant to be smoked in sequence and passed around, or they contained different liquid substances which, when mixed up in the Ring-Kernoi, created an intoxicating brew capable of easing the passage into ecstasy.  For our ancestors, the divine, experienced through ecstatic states, was a communal activity, a very important way to define their culture and self-identity as individual groups. 

            The third section of this awesome book goes into detail exploring the numinous world of ecstatic experiences, as described by ancient humans in their own words.  Starting with a dive into the most ancient archeological sites we have found, such as Çatalhöyük, and the discovery of a communal imbibing of alcohol, whether plain or adulterated with other psychotropic substances, which took place in massive megalithic spaces, many of them underground or only accessible through narrow openings.  These are the first evidence for the types of communal, spiritual experiences out of which the human need for religious communion arose.  Delving into ancient rituals for the goddess Ishtar, the writings concerning the dead from Egypt, and the ASC’s described by the ancient residents of Crete and the Minoan civilization that followed, helps us grasp the constant flow of ideas and wisdom that propelled our humanity forward.  From these ancient civilizations we then move onto ritual experience in ancient Greece, and the various cults and oracles which took advantage of ASC’s to promote their ideology.  Ecstatic experiences were a critical part of many cults, including those of the healer Asclepius, and the gods Apollo and Dionysius. As with all roads, the section ends with an analysis of the ecstatic funeral processions recorded from ancient Rome.  These chapters help bridge the gap between our assumed knowledge of the ancients towards a more factual and historical basis, drawing from the many written records we have of Greece, Rome and their neighbors at the time.

            The final section of this great work focuses on the evidence we have from our collective past pointing to, or describing, the experiences of the “Ecstatic” mind.  This section builds on all the previous ones and shares great insights into such topics as spirit possession and prophetic ecstasy as described in Mesopotamian texts, the psychedelic art from the Aegean, and the progression from personal or communal ecstatic experience to that of rigorous, sacerdotally-dictated ASC’s utilized by the very powerful in all societies to control the masses (think of a modern Catholic service, with its rituals, chants, music, incense, and repetition, intended to draw the congregation together into a shared experience).  The insights found in these final chapters help us understand the evolution and propagation of personal ecstatic experiences into the collective religions we see all around us in our “modern” world.

            This book is a masterpiece of research and science.  I hope to see it used as a foundational text, allowing younger researchers to continue down the same path of exploration, and guiding the elders in these fields towards new ideas and possibilities for scholarship.  When we as a culture disdain “unsavory” aspects of our past, dismissing wholesale anything to do with mysticism, or our long-standing use of chemicals, fauna, trance, song, or rhythms to achieve altered states of consciousness, we negate aspects of ourselves that help us understand each other.  It creates divisiveness where these old rituals and experiences sought to create inclusivity.  It is such a shame that our modern world sees everything we do as the pinnacle of human achievement, all the while forgetting that for most of our human existence we have all had the capability of communing with the divine, of understanding ourselves and our place in the world around us, and of accepting that reality is far greater than the basic facts we all choose to agree upon.  This book is a great step in the right direction, and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in humanity’s psychological and spiritual development.

(This great resource can be purchased here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Ecstatic-Experience-in-the-Ancient-World/Stein-KieltCostello-PolingerFoster/p/book/9781032108483 )

Donald E. Brown shows us the universal truths of humanity, and the countless errors of anthropology

Human Universals – Donald E. Brown (1991)

In the course of reading a book, titled The Routledge Companion  to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World, I saw a footnote referencing a different book titled Human Universals.  I made the request through the Inter-Library Loan Program (ILL) and the book made its way to me.  In less than 160 pages, the author Donald E. Brown presents the many mis-steps, fallacies, and outright obfuscation entered into by anthropologists over the decades since the scientific field of anthropology began.  Specifically, Mr. Brown explains the many ways anthropologists sought to either prove or disprove the idea that certain traits, desires, and thoughts are universally found in all human societies and cultures.

To the everyday layperson, it would appear that there are many aspects of our lives that are universal to all humans, but much of the anthropological research in our collective past began with the assumption that the human mind is a blank slate at birth, and that all culture and society is created or instilled in a human after their birth by those around them.  This drew from psychological ideas which, wholly accepted one hundred years ago, are no longer seen as valid due to the countless years of neurological, genetic, and psychological research that we humans have endeavored upon.  Donald E. Brown spends several chapters discussing exactly how these old assumptions were put to the test, and how they were deemed erroneous.

It is one of the many aspects of anthropology that I found irritating while studying at university, and which I currently find frustrating in many of the “soft sciences.”  The Scientific Method relies on experimentation, rigorous data gathering, and the willingness for the researcher to admit their initial ideas are wrong when faced with evidence to the contrary.  The so-called “soft” sciences, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc., tend to begin with purely abstract assumptions, and then to seek evidence of these assumptions in the world around us.  Anyone who has studied the ease with which a human being can be deluded or misled by their own strongly-held ideas, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, can understand why Donald E. Brown spends so much time explaining the many fallacies and errors involved in the study of human universals.

There are basic elements of human life and culture that are obviously universal.  We are all born, and we all die.  We must all eat other living things for nourishment (plants are ALIVE, people!), and we must all imbibe water to survive. These, and many others, are universals of the physical, of the traits we all share as humans.  It is easy for anyone to accept these are universal to all human societies.  Apart from these basic things, there are universals that are more abstract.  For example, all humans dream, therefore all human cultures assign some sort of meaning to dreams.  For the most part, every single culture of the world has a taboo on incest.  Even in places like pharaonic Egypt, or in Medieval Europe, where the very top of the society would often marry their siblings, this was not done for sexual or reproductive reasons.  Marrying your sister meant that she would not marry someone from another family, which meant your family’s personal power and wealth would not be diluted.  This was the main reason rulers of Egypt and Europe married siblings.  It helped consolidate power, something the “elites” are always deeply concerned about.  And, yes, the populace found it as gross as we do today.

There are so many other human universals to be studied that it enrages me how ignorant and stuck to their assumptions anthropologists and other such scientists have been, stating with certainty that very few human universals exist.  Sticking to a flawed idea, in the face of overwhelming evidence, is the quickest way to ensure worthless science.  One of the interesting universals that has been found regards poetry.  Every single culture on Earth has had poetry of some sort, but the universality goes deeper than that.  Nearly every culture’s poetry consists of lines lasting three seconds in time.  This may seem arbitrary and weird, but for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, humanity carried its history and stories in our minds and transmitted them orally.  The three second line structure facilitates memorization, for the repetition creates a temporal framework in the mind, allowing for epic poems to be recited and recalled.  Recall how Aristotle railed against teaching people to write because he felt it would dilute their minds and weaken their memorization skills.  (He may have been right. Ha!)

Another human universal is the need for a spiritual connection with the world around us.  This does not mean organized religion, a specific trait of advanced cultures that seek to dominate the collective spiritual thought of the people through dogma and coercion, but instead refers to the inner individual need to attain closeness with Mother Nature, a divinity, or just the soul of the universe.  Even the simplest tribal societies had deep spiritual thoughts, and means by which to enhance and appreciate these experiences.

            Anthropology in the Western world spent way too many decades navel gazing and attempting to study every part of the Earth strictly through the lens of white, European, monotheistic cultures.  They did a great disservice to humanity in doing so, bringing about such stupidity that whole nations used their flawed “science” to justify genocide, imperialism, and the extermination of “undesirable” cultures.  The cost of this stupidity is still being paid.  Genetically, the difference between any two humans, no matter how remote or different they may seem, is miniscule.  It is literally 0.1%.  99.9% of your DNA is exactly the same as Napoleon, Bette Davis, or the ancient poet Rumi.  We are more alike as Homo Sapiens Sapiens than we all care to admit, and until we all choose to see ourselves this way, we will continue to breed hate, animosity, and jingoism in our people.  Donald E. Brown wrote this work in the early 1990’s, and I hope that it leads to a better understanding of the issues and limits inherent in the field of anthropology, especially when it comes to the biases and mental limitations of those doing the research.  While this was a difficult book to read, both due to the subject matter and my rage at anthropologist’s stupidity, I found it inspiring and educational.  I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the technical aspects of studying humanity, and the many properties and traits we all share universally.

(This book can be read here - https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1991-brown-humanuniversals.pdf )

The Ancient Sumerians May Have Left Us Our True Legacy

The 12th Planet: Book I of the Earth Chronicles – Zecharia Sitchin (1976)

            I have always enjoyed my forays into what mainstream writers refer to as “the Fringe,” or, if they are being blunt, “the Lunatic Fringe.”  Ideas and subjects once considered ridiculous or plain deluded, have been shown throughout history to be valid, sometimes because it takes time for society to catch up to the ideas being described, and sometimes because what may come intuitively to a human being as a Truth cannot be verified until years or centuries later. 

An example of the former is Copernicus, whose writings were deemed heretical, solely because the mass consciousness at the time was living under a reality tunnel that did not allow for anything other than the will of a god to determine what happens to our world.  In a world rife with illiteracy, those who were literate and powerful (the church) controlled what the illiterates thought and believed.  An example of the latter would be Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist who, in the early 20^th century, wrote up his ideas that the continental plates were in constant motion, and that the landmasses were all connected at one time in the distant past.  His ideas, while consistent with the observational data, were dismissed out of hand by geologists and earth scientists, who still believed the Earth was an unchanging rock, only altered by erosion and wind.  Once we humans began to create tools to explore the possibilities and history of plate tectonics, it was discovered that all the landmasses had indeed been connected in the past, and not just once, but at least 5 different times that can be verified through rock strata.  There are countless such examples.

I am not stating that what Mr. Sitchin describes in his book is factual, or even possible, but who am I to know?  I am just a well-read, educated reader, but in no way am I an expert on ancient cultures, especially the Sumerian kingdom, and what came before it.  What I do have experience with is reading about religion and myth and exploring how truth can be coded into legend, and how legends can betray truth when misread.  I say that as a caveat.  Mr. Sitchin studied the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew, and has studied the Greek early translations.  I am not sure if he has taught himself to read cuneiform and earlier writings, or if he is using other’s work, but I have to take all of his translations with a grain of salt.

That being said, what is described in this book is, to my mind, plausible, and a bit frightening if even slightly true.  There are some very serious and unanswered questions regarding the evolution of Homo sapiens, from the previous hominid species (Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalis, etc.) that immediately preceded our species.  The anthropological record seems to show that hominids evolved in Africa, and around 100,000 years or so ago (maybe longer), the ancestors of our species migrated out of Africa, settling in the Tigris-Euphrates valley and spreading through the world.  The earliest civilization that we can find any record of, whether archaeologically, or in ancient myths and writings, seemingly began out of nowhere around 8-10 thousand years ago, complete with agriculture, livestock, and societal structures we would recognize already in place.  This also coincided with the end of the last Ice Age on record.

Sitchin claims that the legends of Sumer and their tales of their gods are actually factual accounts retold as legendary history.  The 12^th planet of the title, is supposed to be a planet on an inclined elliptical orbit of the Sun, taking it out way past Pluto, and then back into the Solar System, between Mars and Jupiter, every 6,400 or so years.  This planet was the home of beings that sought out the mineral riches of Earth for their benefit, and who settled down on our planet, building several cities in the Euphrates to serve as their “space port” in a way, for every one of their years afforded them a chance to return to Earth or return from Earth back home.

In this tale, the beings asked their lesser brethren to work on Earth, gathering the minerals (gold, lithium, plutonium) that they needed from the southern areas of Africa.  According to Sumerian myth, these workers got fed up and asked their leaders to create a race of beings to serve as their work slaves.  This was to be us, the humans.  Much is discussed about how the biblical story of creation seems to describe exactly such events, especially when the god of genesis describes how he is one of many gods, and how they created humans in the gods’ image.  Sitchin goes into a lot of detail regarding this, and it makes for very interesting reading.  Humans served the gods.  The gods watched over the humans.

In recent times, WWII air forces would set up temporary bases in secluded Pacific Ocean islands, bringing with them everything modern, and, once the usefulness of the island was gone, the Air Forces would leave.  The people who lived there, the native islanders who had very little, if any, knowledge of the world outside their islands, started very quickly to believe they were gods, who, if placated or inspired, would return, providing the islanders with the modern goods and luxuries they saw as nearly magical.  They would build effigies of WWII propeller fighter planes, and create landing strips, hoping to inspire the visitors to return again and grace them with their godly presence.  They stopped their native religious practices in the attempt to feed this new belief.  That is our human nature.  It is very plausible to me that if beings from another world ever came to our planet and interacted with us that we would see them as gods and build our entire culture around them.

There are a lot more examples and cool stories in this book.  While it may all be a writer-created hope, there is always the possibility that what Sitchin is describing is the truth of our existence.  Ancient man had deities that were eternal, always with us, always a part of the world around us.  In fact, the world itself was full of life spirit.  Modern man, however, created civilization, rigid religion, and the idea that the god/gods came once in our past, and will return again in the future.  This makes no sense if it was just a truth gathered by our experience in the world round us.  This makes more sense if we are collectively remembering a past in which humans were the subservient slaves of what seemed to us to be god-like beings.

 

This book is from 1976, and helped foster the Ancient Aliens hypothesis that I so deeply loathe.  (This states that the great works of humanity’s past were too hard for lowly ancient man, and must have been created by aliens, or with the help of aliens, etc.  This insults the brain of ancient man which was exactly like ours today.  If we can do something, they could have done it too.  The only difference is in our storehouse of aggregated knowledge that we can all build upon.)  What Sitchin proposes is not that aliens came down and helped humans, but that an alien race came down to Earth, genetically altered Homo erectus, and created what we call Homo sapiens.  This is why our upward mobility and societal structures have exponentially grown in the past 6,000 years, where before our ancestors were pleased enough to just chill in family groups, and enjoy their lives.  It is a crazy idea, but there have been far crazier ideas that have turned out to be correct.  Many of the criticisms I read about this book and Sitchin's work pertain to very specific instances of sections that critics state are mistranslated from the Sumerian language.  They outright dismiss any of the other claims in this book, without properly addressing them.  That is lazy criticism.  The jury is still out!

(This book can be downloaded and read as a PDF here: The 12th Planet - Sitchin )