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Classical Deities Derived from Personified Prehistoric Mushrooms
ARTEMIS OF EPHESUS
Over tens of millennia, the features of personified entheogenic mushrooms,
which artists had begun creating in the Upper Paleolithic period, were
morphed by the artists of various cultures as each culture's poets, priests
and rulers imbued those deities with different traits, associations and
escapades. For instance, the figure on the left depicts a reproduction of the
statue of the Roman goddess Artemis standing in her sanctuary in the once
Ionian Greek, but now Turkish, city of Ephesus clothed in a dress with
numerous swellings.
Prior to my having identified many prehistoric anthropoid figurines as
personified mushrooms, I would have assumed, as many scholars and laymen
have, that the plain swellings on the dress' bodice were intended to
represent, for some reason, a multitude of breasts, but that the swellings on
the dress' skirt were intended to be different, strictly decorative,
structures. However, after comparing the statue's dress to the pocked
surfaces of the many prehistoric figurines, like the one on the left in Fig.
14, which I had by then identified as personified A. muscariae, it was
readily apparent that all the swellings on Artemis' dress were intended to
personify studs on the surface of a developing A. muscaria.
More specifically, comparing the dress' raised, striated neckline to the
continuous rings left on the upper stems of many A. muscariae by their
ruptured partial veils ( adjacent figure, left), I could infer that the
dress' neckline was designed to personify such a ring. And, by comparing the
statue's bent arms to the discontinuous rings that are left on the upper
stems of other mature A. muscariae by their ruptured partial veils, such as
the one on the right in the same figure, I could infer that the statue's bent
arms had been sculpted to personify a discontinuous ring.
It was then no longer surprising that Artemis' name had been derived from the
Greek word tmesis for a cutting, or plant part that grows into a new plant,
as the Neoplatonist philosopher Porhyry had inferred.1 An ancient Greek
wordsmith had evidently personified the A.muscaria as a cutting using tmesis,
because the A. muscaria was considered a part which sprang from its arboreal
host with the ability to grow into a new plant, just as Vedic priests
regarded Soma as a shoot or amsu.
Contrary to Porphyry's belief that Ar- was derived from the Greek stem aer-
for air, and that Artemis thus meant "cutting the air", it is more likely
that Ar- was derived from the Greek root arg- for the luminous moon. This
parallels the finding that the name of the Hindu deity Soma, which Wasson
recognized as a personified A. muscaria, had been derived from the identical
Sanskrit word for moon. The reasons for this naming convention is that A.
muscariae emerge from spherical, white bioluminescent primordia, like the one
in Figure, and prehistoric wordsmiths, artists and mytho-poets metaphorized
that primordium as a little moon.
Artemis was therefore also intimately associated with the night, with trees
and with the forest, in general. Moreover, she was intimately associated with
bears and bees. But to understand why the following dialogue between
Entheogenas and Aneist, the brother of Aeneas, is of interest:
ENTHEOGENAS AND ANEIST: ON THE ORIGINS AND SIGNIFICANCE OF ARTEMIS
Entheogenas: And what is it, dear Entheogenas that bees and bears have in
common?
Aneist: Why it is honey, of course, dear Entheogenas.
Entheogenas: Correct, Entheogenas. They both have a fondness for honey. And
honey is what?
Aneist: Why that it is easy, too, Entheogenas. It is a sweet, golden liquid.
Entheogenas: Right, dear Entheogenas. And honey is often used for what?
Aneist: Well, Entheogenas. It is used to sweeten things.
Entheogenas: And where is honey found, dear Entheogenas.?
Aneist: Ha! Now, you are mocking me, Entheogenas. Any schoolboy knows honey
is found in hives.
Entheogenas: Right again, Entheogenas. And where are hives usually found.
Aneist: Well, they can be found anywhere. But they often hang from tree limbs
Entheogenas: Yes. That is correct again. And what do these hives look like?
Aneist: Well, Entheogenas, they can have different shapes. But generally they
are white, bulbous, somewhat conically shaped, structures with many ridges
and depressions.
Entheogenas: You are correct again, Entheogenas. So, now let us see what we
have so far,: we have bears and bees seeking hives filled with honey.
Aneist: That is correct, dear Entheogenas.
Entheogenas: Now, dear Entheogenas, you know that we tell children storks
bring babies, and the children believe us until they begin to see that the
story was designed to prevent them from learning about something we don't
think they should know about.
Aneist: Yes, I know that, Entheogenas.
Entheogenas: And you also know that here in Greece and elsewhere adults who
do things they don't want other adults or children to know about. So they
formed secret organizations that use symbols and words in quite different
ways than most people .
Aneist: Yes, I am aware that they commonly do this at Eleusis and elsewhere,
Entheogenas.
Entheogenas: Now, dear Entheogenas, let us see what people who are members of
organizations loyal to Artemis could be using the bee and beehive to
represent, if they so desired.
Aneist: Yes, by all means Entheogenas, please do.
Entheogenas: Well, since beehives are round structures that typically hangs
from trees, as you yourself pointed out, would it not be easy for these
people to use the beehive to represent the tree's fruit.
Aneist: Yes, of course, that could be so, considering especially that fruits
have sweet pulp like the honey in a beehive.
Entheogenas: Correct, again, Entheogenas. But also, dear Entheogenas, do you
not know that our word for wine methu is related to words for honey and the
intoxicating drink called mead in languages related to ours.
Aneist: Why, of course, Entheogenas. I should have thought of that myself.
Wine and mead were both originally made from honey.
Entheogenas: Yes, dear Entheogenas. So our story about bees and bears chasing
after honey in a beehive now has another, hidden meaning: it is a story about
creatures chasing after the intoxicating fruit of a tree.
Aneist: Yes, that is certainly possible, Entheogenas.
Entheogenas: In fact, you know, too, that our ancestors developed games or
plays during which they would dress up like bees or bears seeking hives, and
even work themselves into the same frenzy these creatures do when they are
after honey.
Aneist: Yes, that I know, too, dear Entheogenas.
Entheogenas: So do you believe these people were working themselves up into a
frenzy over honey to sweeten their tea, or could it have been something else?
Aneist: Well, it could have been something else entirely, Entheogenas. But we
can't really know for sure what they were doing, can we?
Entheogenas: In fact, dear Entheogenas. I have a book here from India in
which the Vedic priests speak of a substance called Soma sometimes as if it
was a deity; sometimes as if it was the milk of that deity; and sometimes as
if it were honey: They say, for instance: "Indra is farther than this seat
when the milked stem, the Soma, fills him."(III 366cd); and "The one with
good hands [the priest] has milked the mountain-grown sap of the sweet HONEY
[Soma]; the breast has yielded the dazzling [sap]."(V 434);
Aneist: That is very interesting, dear Entheogenas. So, if our artists were
going to represent Soma, they could do it as a person with breasts, or a
beehive, or a combination of both.
Entheogenas: Very good, dear Entheogenas. Now you are beginning to think
figuratively like our artists and poets once did. And now, you can see, too,
why our deity Artemis is sometimes surrounded by bears; sometimes by bees;
and why she is often personified as the Queen bee or mother bear. She
attracts and takes care of her offspring by giving them her fruits, so to
speak.
Aneist: Yes, that is correct.
Entheogenas: So bees and bears are symbolically equivalent, and Artemis could
be a personification of the hive, its honey, an intoxicant -- or, even -- the
fruit of a tree. Could she not?
Aneist: Hmm, I never thought of it that way, Entheogenas.
Entheogenas: Yes. In fact, at Ephesus there is a statue of our goddess
Aphrodite that bears numerous swellings. In one of the many mythological
motifs that revolved around Artemis and other Mother goddesses, those
swellings would be interpreted as breasts that issued milk; in still another
motif they would be interpreted as the testicles of a bull issuing semen; and
in still another motif they would be interpreted as the swellings of a
beehive filled with honey.
Aneist: I did not know that, Entheogenas.
APHRODITE/VENUS
Just as I could identify Artemis as a personified A. muscaria primordium, I
could explain why Aphrodite then identify the pictures of the Greek goddess
Aphrodite emerging from a scalloped shell on an Attic vase (adjacent figure,
left) and from a sheet on a 460 B.C.E frieze from the Ludovisi Villa in Rome
(adjacent figure, right) as classical Hellenic interpretations of a
personified A. muscaria emerging from its primordium. Aphrodite can thus also
be considered a Greek analogue of the L'Hermaphrodite, the Venus of Lespugue,
and the Chuckchee deity Mama, rising nude from the waste up. It is thus not
surprising that ancient sculptors typically depicted Aphrodite and other
deities next to � but, more importantly, attached to � tree stumps. After
all, these deities had been derived to personify entheogenic mushrooms that
grew on the roots of trees. (See Aphrodite and Eros with Satyr below.)
In light of the tendency mushroom caps have of cupping, as the cap of the
yellow A. muscaria in the figure below does, it is also not surprising that
Aphrodite is depicted in the adjoining figure sitting comfortably on a shell
resting on a thick mushroom stem. When the ancient Greeks associated the
mushroom cap with Aphrodite, they referred to it euphemistically as the
Flower of Aphrodite, and they represented it with a hexagon typically
inscribed with a six-pointed design. The Church fathers later deemed the
number six representative of sin. So the rose, with its characteristically
red or yellow head, was adopted to replace the Flower of Aphrodite.
According to Greek mythology, Aphrodite was born from the castrated genitals
of Uranus that Chronus had taken and thrown into the sea, on which Aphrodite
floated safely to Cyprus. Consequently, Aphrodite reveals itself as a
personified form of the Greek word aphrodite, meaning foam-born.
However, since the Greek wordsmith who first coined Aphrodite evidently did
so to name a prehistoric mushroom deity, Aphrodite can also be resolved into
the Greek prefix aph-, 'away from' or 'out of' + the stem rod- of Greek
rodon, rose + the suffix -ite, stone, revealing that hidden in aphrodite was
the notion of something that came from a red stone.
In contrast to the above statue, which clearly associates Aphrodite with a
mushroom, the 4th century B.C.E. statue on the left has Aphrodite's shell
morphed into wings, implying to the knowledgeable viewer that the mushroom's
cap could confer the ability to fly on anyone who ingested it. And a snake is
coiled around the tree stump
I will discuss the many associations the snake had with the A. muscaria in
antiquity later. But suffice it to say now that the snake was used in
antiquity ubiquitously as a symbol of the ability of toxins � and, hence,
intoxicants � to induce spiritual rebirth because the snake's ability to shed
its skin was compared to the shedding of the ego during ego death, and that
ability was attributed to the snake's venom by a well known principle of
sympathetic magic. As Allegro pointed out, snakes were even thought to have
given entheogenic mushrooms their ability to induce ego death and spiritual
rebirth:
"It is not difficult to see the reasoning behind the ancient connection
between the serpent and the mushroom, which played such a large part in
mushroom folk-lore and mythology. Both emerged from holes in the ground in a
manner reminiscent of the erection of the sexually awkened penis, and both
bore in their heads a fiery poison which the ancients believed could be
transferred from one to the other. If the hole of a serpent writes Pliny,
'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'" Allegro- Sacred Mushroom and The Cross , p. 79, Citing Pliny
the Elder's Historia Natural XX, 95.
Consequently, the Romans derived their name Venus for Aphrodite from the same
Latin root ven- that yielded, among other words, venom 'poison' and venerate,
to worship; Moreover, because the mushroom's cap was often represented in or
by fans in antiquity, a variant of ven-, van-, yielded the Latin word vannus,
for fans and fanning. Some of these associations can be seen in the1st
century Pompeiian wall painting from the Casa de Venus (below), in which
Venus floats on a shell that was partially transformed into a red cape, to
imply the red cap of the A. muscaria The cloth was also intentionally morphed
into the snakes, wrapped around Venus' right arm.
Another important symbol of the A. muscaria in this painting is the cesta, or
basket, just above the serpentine red cloth on Venus' wrist, and on the
cherub's pole. As Allegro noted, the cesta, was:
meant to represent the lower 'cup' of the mushroom volva, ' the little
basket' from which the stalk of the fungus emerged, like a snake being
charmed from its box. . . . As objects attached to the wrists of the sacred
prostitutes at the mushroom-raising ceremony these replicas of the matted
volva, perhaps already divided to reveal the emergent mushroom stem, were
probably intended to offer a kind of imitative encouragement to the dormant
fungus to open and reveal itself.[Ibid., p 80].
Because of the vulva had been one of Aphrodite's symbols, the Myrtle plant,
which in ancient Greece was representative of the vulva, was sacred to her.
As already explained, the vulva was symbolic of the return to the womb of
the universal creatrix, and therefore people held that the myrtle could
facilitate contact with the dead in the underworld.
Aphrodite's original association with the unconditional sense of love that
entheogenic intoxicants can induce, caused Aphrodite to later become
associated with the opium poppy, and thus a myth relates how poppies had
sprung from the tears of Aphrodite when she mourned for her beloved Adonis.
HATHOR
Wasson's discovery of the Vedic tendency to personify A. muscariae as cows
with full udders was also instructive in its ability to explain why breasts,
milk and other drinks figured so prominently in many ancient myths and art
works. But it was particularly instructive in explaining why the Egyptian
nursemaid to the gods, Hathor, who was intimately associated with intoxicants
was traditionally personified as a cow amidst reeds nursing the young Horus
and as a woman in a tree dispensing a liquid . (Right: computer enhanced
interpretation by Dale R. Broadhurst of Hathor feeding Hatshepsut as the god
Horus from Hatshepsut's Deir el-Bahri shrine.)In fact, Hathor is identifiable
as having originally been a prehistoric mushroom deity, and therefore the
liquid she dispenses from the sacred sycamore fig tree that once hosted her
is actually the same mushroom juice the Rg Veda personifies as Soma's milk
The round, white objects prominantly situated next to her and at the foot of
her tree are thus clearly identifiable as A. muscaria primordia, exactly like
the one in Figure 6, as opposed to the fig in the immediately adjacent
figure. (Left: Hathor in her sacred sycamore fig tree from Roger Cook's The
Tree of Life as reproduced and cited by Chris King in Genesis of Eden)
Since birds have always been intuitively rooted artistic devices for showing
ascent and flying � literally and figuratively in the sense of
entheogenically intoxicated � it can also be inferred that the artist who
created this picture was crediting Hathor with having given the people at the
foot of her the tree wings they needed to ascend, or "get high." In still
other terms, Hathor and other Egyptian deities were credited with the ability
to turn mortals into personifications of the solar deity Horus by what is
still referred to as "lighting them up."
The prototypal and epitomal source of light is the sun. And, therefore, those
deities and, particularly, Hathor's bovine form (above) bears the solar disk,
which was originally designed to graphically depict being "lit up" -- only in
what was then assuredly the spiritually enlightened sense of the term I will
discuss later.
Having originally been the goddess of this spiritual form of intoxication,
Hathor, like many other mushroom deities, later became associated with the
spirit of the fig, barley and other grains that prehistoric people believed
entered the liquors that were fermented from them. In fact, it is very
possible that the development of beer and other alcoholic beverages from
grains was related to the extant practice of brewing the grain on which
psilocybes had been grown into teas with entheogenic properties resulting
from the presence of entheogens in the psilocybe mycellia.
Recalling that prehistoric sculptors personified A. muscariae goddesses with
prominent vulvae, the origins of an ancient Egyptian story telling how Hathor
had displayed her vulva to Ra, the sun deity, to convince him to pass his
kingship on to Horus, rather than on to Horus' demonic brother Set, is also
very clear. (Jeneen OBerski's abridgement of Alan Gardiner's translation of
the this story; but it would be better to go to it later) The fig was used
ubiquitously in antiquity as a symbol of goddesses because, as the adjacent
figure suggests, the fig's oval red interior strikingly resembles a vulva.
Consequently, figs were worshiped as symbols of the vulvae of goddesses3; a
Greek euphemism for 'vagina' sukon meant "fig"; and fig trees were known for
arousing lust. Hence, fig trees were favored by satyrs and the pagan gods of
Gaul, who the Romans referred to as ficarii, or "fig-eaters."4
In accord with this analysis is Robert Graves' belief that the Satyrs'
favorite food was not the fig, as is commonly believed, but the A. muscariae,
of which the fig was merely a symbol.6 Accordingly, even though the statue of
the Satyr on a tree stump holding Aphrodite while Eros binds them together in
love may be taken as just that, any viewer who was aware that Aphrodite was
a personified A. muscaria would have recognized what the satyr was actually
preparing to "eat" her.
Because the fig was a symbol of the A. muscaria, which was ingested in
antiquity to secure mystico-religious knowledge, satyrs, like Dionysus'
foster father Silenus, were held to be tree spirits who dispensed wisdom;
Buddah was said to have received enlightenment under a fig tree; and Hathor
dispenses the very same enlightenment personified as milk from the vulvae cum
volvae of her sacred fig in the above picture.
Moreover, because the fig was symbolic of the entheogenic Amanita muscaria,
the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus was said to have rested under a fig
tree, and the Romans dedicated the fig to their god of intoxication, Bacchus,
employing it in related religious ceremonies. Among those celebrations was
the first day of the year on which figs were offered as first fruits and
crowns made of figs were worn on the heads of people, for example, in the
ancient Greek city of Cyrene -- which, not coincidentally was noted as a
center of intellect, medicine and philosophy.
In view of the Amanita muscaria's tendency to appear in autumn, it is also
not at all coincidental that the Greek goddess Demeter was said to have
first revealed the fig to mortals as the so-called fruit of autumn; that
Demeter figured prominantly in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which revolved
around a strange secret potion called kykeion; or that the Greek word
sycophant, for an informer, literally meant "shower of the fig."
This Greek word has popularly been interpreted as having referred to a person
who revealed figs that were being illegally transported into or out of
Greece. But, as the Oxford English Dictionary points out, that interpretation
"cannot be substantiated" and "it is possible that the term referred
originally to making the gesture known as 'the fig' or Mano fico, shown in
the adjacent figure, or had some other obscene implication.
.As Kathryn Yronwode explains at her website devoted to all sorts of amulets
and occult objects:
The mano fico, also called figa, is an Italian amulet of ancient origin.
Examples have been found from the Roman era, and it was also used by the
Etruscans. Mano means 'hand' and fico or figa means 'fig', with the idiomatic
slang connotation of a woman's genitals. (An English slang equivalent might
as well be 'pussy hand.') It represents a hand gesture in which the thumb is
thrust between the curled index and middle fingers in obvious imitation of
hetorsexual intercourse.
Consequently, there are again grounds for believing that the fig was a symbol
of the vulva cum volva of the Amanita muscaria and that sycophant originally
referred to a person who had been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries,
but had divulged the secret to outsiders. It is for that reason that
Entheogenas would have been called a sycophant, for having divulged what the
secret fig of the Eleusinian Mysteries really was, though his student, the
entheogenically inspired mystic Plato, was said to have been a "philosykos"
or "lover of figs" [read A. muscariae]. The belief that Demeter and the
Eleusinian Mysteries were associated with entheogenic mushrooms is also
supported by observing that in the adjacent Greek frieze Demeter is seen
passing a mushroom to Kore, or Persephone, to imply that the mushroom
contains the spirit of the grain from which it grows.
In contrast to these and other positive associations that existed in
antiquity betweem A. muscariae, figs and knowledge, Hebrew writings known as
the Haggadah identifies the fig as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge5;
Genesis 3 associates that knowledge with the advent of human death and evil;
and Genesis 3:7 specifically states that Adam and Eve clothed themselves with
fig leaves after their alleged fall. As we shall see, the paradoxical
relationship the Hebrews established between knowledge and evil was designed
to dissuade Hebrews from ingesting A. muscariae and other psychotropic
mushrooms by intentionally corrupting a much older orally transmitted story
that associated knowledge with eating figs. In that story, the fig was the
symbol of A. muscariae, and fig leaves were used in in the same sense we
figuratively speak of a person "clothing himself in knowledge."
When the fig tree was incorporated into Christianity, in the Christian
efffort to absorb and reinterpret Jewish and pagan symbolism, the fig ended
up being used both as symbols of good and evil. For example, Jesus curses it
in Mark 11: 12-14. But, because of the positive associations it had with
deities, it became associated in oral tradition with the Virgin Mary and
Christ. More precisely, in the Apocryphal Gospels the sycamore or Pharoah's
fig in the Egyptian town of Mathave opened to absorb and hide the Virgin Mary
and Christ from Herod's wrath, and it was similarly a fig tree into which
Zaccheus climbed to see Jesus in Luke 19:10
And He entered and was passing through Jericho. And behold, there was a man
called by the name of Zaccheus;
and he was a chief tax-gatherer, and he was rich. And he was trying to see
who Jesus was, and he was unable
because of the crowd, for he was small in stature. And he ran on ahead and
climbed up into a sycamore tree in
order to see Him, for He was about to pass through that way. And when Jesus
came to the place, He looked up
and said to Him, "Zaccheus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at
your house." And he hurried and
came down, and received Him gladly. And when they saw it, they all began to
grumble, saying, "He has gone to
be the guest of a man who is a sinner." And Zaccheus stopped and said to the
Lord, "Behold, Lord, half of my
possessions I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of
anything, I will give back four times as
much." And Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house,
because, he, too, is a son of Abraham.
For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.
Thus Zaccheus had essentially received enlightenment in the form of Christ
from having been in the sycamore fig tree, just as Hathor dispenses
entlightenment from that same tree in the figure above.
That the fig was indeed a symbol of the A. muscaria is also apparent from the
story of Amos who, having been a grower of sycamore figs, happens to aquire
the gift of prophesy:
Then Amaziah said to Amos, 'Go, you seer, flee away to the land of Judah, and
there eat bread and there do your prophesying!
But no longer prophesy at Bethel, for it is a sanctuary of the king and a
royal `residence.'
Then Amos answered and said to Amaziah, 'I am not a prophet, nor am I the son
of a prophet; for I am a herdsman and a grower of sycamore figs.
"But the Lord took me from following the flock and the Lord said to me, 'Go
prophesy to My people Israel.'
1. Porphyry, Eusebius's Preparation for the Gospel, translated by Edwin
Hamilton Gifford (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1903)
3. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.
4. Special thanks to Kim Burkhard for bringing the material on the fig to my
attention in one of the many instructive messages he's posted in sci.
mythology over the years
.5.Barnstone, Willis, ed. The Other Bible. San Francisco. Harper & Row, 1984.
6. Graves, Robert. What Food the Centaurs Ate. Steps: Cassell & Co., 1958,
pp.319-343
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