Month: August 2006

On The Music Box, Anouska Shankar: Anourag

Wonderful Stuff. Pick it up as soon as you can, I promise you delights!

Cruising Through The Dreamtime… I have been working away on illustrations, trying to find that just so edge that drives my creativity along. Sometimes I chase it, sometimes it chases me. Tonight, we sit in an impasse.

I have discovered a new Arabic magazine on-line from London. Chock full of poetry. Now, that is a heady experience.

I finally started to read Daniel Pinchbeck’s “Breaking Open The Head” (I am well aware how I am lagging in this, after all it has only been published for some 4 years) So far, so good. For some reason, I did not have high hopes for this book. I am happy to be surprised by this one. I am thinking about purchasing his other if this one holds up.

Ah… Mati Klarwein… I discovered a magazine article from a French Surrealist source today, hence his appearance again on Turfing. I do love his work. One of the good ones, I wish I had met him.

Time again for some of Erik Davis’s fine writing. I really enjoy his work. His article was based on his talk at the MindStates II Conference in Berkeley in 2001. He also was the MC, and I was managing the event for Jon Hanna. Erik has the most amazing hands and gestures. Quite hypnotic.

I take great pleasure in introducing Kadhim Jihad Hassan, who is a poet from Iraq that I discovered recently. His style is quite interesting. I have found just these three poems, maybe more can be found along the way…

I hope you enjoy this edition…

G

The Links

A wee bit of ancient history

Psychedelic Culture: One Or Many? – Erik Davis

Three Poems – Kadhim Jihad Hassan

Art – Mati Klarwein

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The Links

Indian scientist challenges Einstein

Federal Appeals Court: Driving With Money is a Crime

Pugwis

White doe, Elvis sightings among Durham’s oddities

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A wee bit of ancient history:

(Gwyllm – San Francisco/Lands End, January 1975…)

I was ending my time at this point in the Bay Area. In about 3 months I would have moved to Los Angeles, and then to Hawaii. I would spend the next year or so living the beach life… ultimately returning to Venice until I moved to Europe in 1977. I was beginning to write again, and venturing back to music as well. (more on this later) A real period of turmoil, and change. Dark days at that time, yet a very fruitful period in that dream I called my earlier life.

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Psychedelic Culture One or Many?

Erik Davis

Originally Printed in Trip Magazine 2001

I’d like to paint a picture of contemporary psychedelic culture and how it relates to the larger world that we’re swimming around in. Of course, there have always been very different models of how psychedelics influence the culture at large – how they should influence it, and how they do influence it. If you go back to the Sixties, you can get the simplistic idea that the counterculture was one great wave of psychedelic experience that was united in its ethos, in its ways of thinking about what way the world should go.

That’s not really the case. There were a lot of very different subsets of people. You had people using a psychotherapeutic approach – how is this going to help us deal with individual psychology, and the psychology of groups. You had the elitist perennialism of Aldous Huxley and his school. On the other side of it, you had the Prankster approach, which was far more anarchic: “Let’s throw it all out there and see what happens, let’s spread it wide, let’s bring it all down.” In the Seventies, you had the great tensions between Timothy Leary and Ram Dass. Earlier in the Sixties, Leary often played himself as a semi-guru, but later he very strongly turned away from that model, from the “custard mush” of Hindu spirituality as he called it, and embraced a kind of proto-extropian, highly technological view of the future of humanity. Whereas his former colleague, Richard Alpert, really kept the connections between psychedelic experience and a variety of mystical and spiritual traditions very closely together in his influential books and talks.

So if we look at the backstory of where we are now, we see a lot of divergence. And today we also have a great deal of divergence. You have people who are very scientifically oriented, and remain quite skeptical about the kinds of claims people traditionally make about the worlds of experience that psychedelics open up. On the other hand, you have a very strong pull towards more explicitly spiritual and even religious forms; there’s the idea that there are spirits behind these experiences, that they have a kind of collective message about the planet or the future, and that by engaging in these practices we’re learning certain kinds of truth – truths which also become packaged by certain institutions or groups. This divergence is extremely productive; iIt’s very dynamic and open-ended. In terms of what psychedelic culture presents to the larger culture, its best aspect lies in this courageous open-endedness, this dynamic lack of resolution, this constant interplay between matter and spirit, science and experience, subjectivity and chemistry.

But what does “psychedelic culture” mean today? What are its boundaries? In many ways you can look at the mainstream world and say that psychedelics won. If you look at advertising, if you look at MTV, if you look at computer graphics, if you look at a lot of things inside of the emerging cybersphere, you will find traces and sometimes overt quotations of psychedelic experience and psychedelic culture. I’m sure if you took some of the advertisements you see today for soda pop and international financial institutions back to 1967, they’d say, “Wow, that’s a blast!” If we ever know – and I do hope someday we know –the exact extent of psychedelic influence on the computer industry, I suspect we’d be amazed, not to mention vindicated. For obvious reasons, though, the story remains untold. I was talking to Lawrence Hagerty [author of “The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness”] who noted that Sun Microsystems is beating the pants off some of the other digital monsters out there, and Sun is one major corporation out there that doesn’t do drug testing. Very interesting.

Clearly the ideas and experiences of this culture are trickling out, producing all sorts of influences that are hard to trace. But how do we characterize that relationship? How are psychedelic experiences and psychedelic thinking engaging with our strange new century?

SHAMANISM

When we reach for a good solid model for the function of psychedelics within a larger culture, we immediately face the shaman. The shaman is a very romanticized image, very “overwritten” as the academics like to say, meaning that the term now means many different things, including scores of things totally outside of its original ethnographic context. I’m not going to go into any specifics about particular shamanic cultures, but I would like to draw sort of a general picture that relates to the question about contemporary psychedelic culture.

One thing you can say about the shaman or witch is that she lives on the edge of cultural maps. The shaman acts as a kind of interface between the specific culture of a particular tribal group and the world outside, a world that we can think of not only as nature, of course, but as the cosmic, the abstract, the alien. The witch lives at the edge of the village; in her zone, we start to move into the wild. And that’s a very potent image for being a transfer point between the outside and the inside of human culture. One of the interesting paradoxes of shamanism is that, on the one hand, it is very technological, very savvy, full of knowledges in almost a modern sense of the term, like scientific knowledge. And yet the worlds that are being produced, sustained, and performed by the shaman are extremely cultural, spiritual, mythological. Look at a healing ceremony, and think about what exactly is happening there. Let’s say that healing is occuring through the use of quartz crystals being pulled out of the body. What’s happening there? What’s really going on?

One way of looking at it is to say that the shaman is playing a two-fold game. On the one hand, he knows perfectly well what he’s actually doing, that he’s pirated a little quartz crystal in his palm, that he’s using very specific plants which have very specific properties which can produce effects, both specifically related to health and to more general psychoactive goals as well. There’s a tremendous amount of knowledge there. And yet, what does the shaman do in the actual situation of the healing? She performs. And what she performs is a whole cultural web, the glue that embeds those knowledges in lived human life. Our doctors do that too, but the package is pretty one dimensional – “take this pill, it’ll work out for you.” Their knowledge is kept on the inside. What the sick person perceives is a cultural story,a cosmic metaphor, an image of the illness being removed from the body. So it’s not that the shaman is a manipulative trickster just playing games with quartz crystals. It’s that the shaman understands the technology of packaging knowledge within the cultural matrix of transformation, and performs this packaged knowledge as if it were one thing, one process of body and mind. Even a skeptic must recognize that the placebo effect plays a tremendous role in healing of all sorts, and that the art of producing the placebo effect is incredibly valuable.

Within this performance, the shaman plays a liminal role, mediating between knowledge and performance the way he mediates between outside and inside. Liminality is an anthropological concept that describes, again, a place on the edge of cultural maps, a zone between the wild and the culture, between hot and cold, between different villages. In the ancient world, crossroads were places of tremendous liminal power. People from different villages, different cultures would encounter each other there. So there’s a whole mythology of trickster figures – Hermes, Coyote, Legba, often associated with communication – who model this relationship between inside and out. The concept of liminality is crucial to understand what function and what role psychedelics play in the larger culture.

Today, many people attempting to create models for modern psychedelic use have looked to the image of shaman healer. Of course we should be wary of abusing this poor old character for our own purposes. There’s also one very important distinction, I believe, between the world view of the traditional shaman healer and what we are faced with, which is that we do not have a coherent, contained world view. We no longer have a specific cultural story that can be performed in that mythological sense. We’re at this very strange juncture in history when cultures are smashing together and flattening out. We have globalization, we have fragmentation, it’s a very open-ended situation. If there is a central error in the shamanic interpretation of modern psychedelic culture, it lies in a romantic nostalgia that wants to reconstruct or re-embody some fully coherent mythological world view.

I don’t want to say that in a way that undercuts the power of traditional myths, not to mention traditional practices and knowledges. Moreover, modern psychedelic culture has largely been defined by a relationship to non-European knowledges and cultures, and the reception of those stories and practices from the world over inform the evolving picture or cultural story about what psychedelic people are trying to do in the world. But I think that we often find a misplaced desire or tendency to want that story to be fully complete and realized, so that we then know that what we’re doing is engaging the mind of the planet, or that nature herself is telling us something. Those are valuable perceptions, but their attempt to escape the Western model can sometimes be Western transcendence – not to mention Western consumerism — in new disguise. I think it’s very important to recognize that, at the moment, we are still intimately embedded in this tremendous, bizarre, horrible and fascinating process of technological modernity. We can see its horrible claws, its profound lacks, and there’s a desire to overcome these things quickly and fully, to chuck that framework and enter into a different kind of re-enchanted world. The desire to re-enchant our experience of the world is a profound thing that we’re all feeling. It’s incredibly legitimate. And yet, I think that the way in which we move forward with that is not by reconostructing a kind of mythological world view in the name of ancient wisdom. The psychedelic eye sees that things are already enchanted, just the way they are, fragmented and integral at once. In this sense, it is important to see psychedelic culture not as a resistence to modernity, but its own fractal edge.

SCIENCE

One of those edges, of course, is science. Terence McKenna told me once that the most psychedelic magazine that crossed his desk was Scientific American. And if you approach psychedelics from a scientific point of view, you’re obviously dealing with material substances, with chemistry, with tiny little dynamic machines that we can describe in the institutionalized, image-free language of science. And yet, the paradox is that these compounds open up worlds which seem to pull the rug out from under the circumscribed territory of science. But yet again, we cannot fully inhabit the magical, open-ended world, because we cannot really ignore the fact that they are material compounds that enage our nervous systems, that require technical preparation if not actual synthesis. Drugs are a kind of Möbius strip: they are triggers that pull the rug out from under the world of triggers, the whole world of mechanism. And as long as we’re acknowledging the tremendous complexity and wonder belonging to the objects of natural science – and I see no reason not to – then we can never got off that strip, never resolve whether we are inside or out.

From the perspective of more materialist and scientific ways of looking at the world, psychedelics also pose a fundamental question about consciousness: do first-person perspectives have any value in our attempts to understand what consciousness is. Within contemporary neuroscience, there is a tremendous tendency to deny and even denigrate first-person experience as a valid way of understanding what’s happening in consciousness; we can only really talk about it from a third-person perspective. For someone like Daniel Dennett, any sort of internal information you get from meditation, from drugs, or from just paying attention is not really worth very much because the brain is fooling us all the time. Also, our subjective flow does not lend itself very well the kinds of frameworks that a hardhead like Dennett prefers. But to study the neurology of psychedelics without taking them would be absurd: first person is essential. Psychedelics open up a gate inside of the scientific worldview: the gate is chemical, but what comes in that gate cannot be captured by current models, at least in my view. In other words, in the attempt to create a complete scientific model of consciousness, neuroscientists must investigate the fringes of consciousness: dreams, mysticism, psychedelics, precisely those modes of consciousness that, potentially, most undermine and resist science as it is narrowly conceived. So today there’s a growing discussion of the neurology of mysticism, like the recent cover story of Newsweek on “God and the brain.” Though they did not raise the issue of psychedelics at all, it seems that we’re beginning to get workable third-person descriptions of a lot of what’s going on behind some of the most exalted and powerful states that human beings can achieve. One might say that all this simply confirms the view that it’s all in the brain. But what it’s also confirming is the experiential reality of these altered states, which only puts them on a more solid footing inside our technoscientific culture. The third person in the lab becomes the first person on the streets.

The resistence ot the first person also feeds into one of the more frightening aspects of our culture, which is the tendency towards controlling people from the outside. You find it in government, you find it in science, you find it in psychotherapy, you find it in motivational speaking, you find it in all sorts of places. This tendency says, “Well, all you have to do is trigger human beings a certain way and they will be happy or they will be productive.” And so the tendency to think about consciousness from a strictly third-person point of view also plays into the hands of the people who believe they can use third-person perspectives in order to perfect control.

What happens when you step across that line and say, “This is absurd, of course I’m going to plunge into my own individual stream of consciousness and make inferences, make discoveries, explore myself, explore social interaction from the perspective of these evolving states – especially the novel ones.” Even if you believe these states are primarily material, you have already affirmed the primary importance of subjective experience as the floating ground you stand on in order to embrace, instruct, understand, and relate to the world. So there’s the paradox. Hard core third-person scientists are inevitably fascinated by and drawn to these compounds, if for no other reason than the fact that they have to account for their action. And yet, the closer you get to these substances, the more they pull you into a very different kind of world, and the more difficult it becomes, perhaps, to account for the phenomenon from a purely “thinking machine” perspective. Psychedelics may be eating away and eroding some of the more reductive tendencies inside of brain science.

SET & SETTING

How do these compounds pull the rug out from under a mechanistic cosmology? We all know about set and setting, which play a tremendously powerful role in producing experience. But set and setting are not strictly mechanistic elements. They’re cultural activities, dynamic and open-ended — narratives, dramas. They have to do with meaning. Even from a skeptical point of view, anyone who’s really investigating psychedelic phenomenon will recognize that your own mind frame, and your own environmental setting, will help produce a qualitatively different set of events. So there’s no way to fully account for that from the perspective of brain science alone. You have to go to culture. If you think its all just neural programming, then the story “It’s all just neural programming” becomes your set. You can’t escape the shaman’s performance, the fact that it looks like I’m pulling a quartz crystal out of your body. Set and setting open up this whole problem or issue of self-programming, of programming your environment, and the role of intentionality. And all of those elements — especially intentionality — are extremely vital for us to keep in the center of our vision as we face what I often fear will be a fairly concerted attack on individual liberties and the liberties of consciousness itself.

Again, though, there’s kind of an interesting problem, which is the same problem that I talked about earlier regarding the shamanic worldview. If we were in a traditional society, the framework, the intention, the set and setting would basically be a given. We are brought up in it, we already know to some extent what’s going on, what’s going to happen with these experiences. They can be organized and explained and integrated, because we already have that map. It’s in the background. You can think of the shaman as a technician of culture, who knows how to maintain that cultural reality using techniques that are not necessarily included in that cultural reality, even using tricks to maintain that perception for the tribe. But we don’t have that option any more. We have science as the background, which means we can address the neuropharmacology of psychedelics. But the meaning of the experience, a meaning we have no choice but to confront? But how? What is our intention? What is the frame? What is the set and setting?

THE CORPORATE STATE

How does the liminal role of psychedelics play into the issue of policy and the law? It’s interesting to look at the role of psychedelic culture within the larger story of drugs as constructed by the state, especially those insitutions fighting the war on drugs. What interests me is that in some ways, the prohibition against psychedelics is not a bad thing. And I don’t mean that to say that it’s not bad that people are being incarcerated and having their lives ruined. Obviously major suffering goes down.Nonetheless, prohibition puts psychedelic culture in a very curious place inside the larger cultural framework, and that place has some very productive aspects to it.

For one thing, prohibition avoids some of the problems that occur with any sort of mainstream or corporate or state-oriented manipulation of psychoactive substances. I’m not entirely sure I believe myself on this one, but I do think it’s an interesting issue to raise. When Rick Doblin [founder and president of MAPS] was talking about his plan to make MDMA legal [at the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation’s “The State of Ecstasy” conference], he presented a very sophisticated and interesting plan. But at the end of his talk he described his vision of “Ecstasy clinics,” where people would go for legitimate reasons to be determined by some official body. There you’d have nice paintings and kind, trained people who’d help you through your potentially life-changing experiences. When I heard this, I had a weird feeling inside, a strange little shiver, like, “Okay, but I don’t think that that’s all of it.”

The ecstasy debate is taking place alongside the transformation of the corporate culture of psychoactivity and psychoactive drugs. If you look at Prozac, if you look at Ritalin, you see that there is a willingness inside of civilization — or whatever you want to call our particular monster — to willingly use powerful psychoactive drugs in order to produce — ie “restore” — certain normative models of behavior, happiness, and satisfaction. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with happiness or satisfaction. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing profoundly dysfunctional behaviors and finding ways, even very technological ways, of overcoming those behaviors. Nonetheless, there is something queasy that happens when those activities and those subjective possibilities become incorporated into the machinery of the state. And by the state, I don’t just mean the government. I am not speaking as a free market libertarian here. I also mean the large corporate state that we live in, the universe of Big Pharma.

So there’s a profound difference between decriminalization and legalization, and I think the anti-prohibition movement needs to start addressing some of these questions more critically. Legalization implies the incorporation od drugs inside the regulatory regime of big medicine and mainstream corporate culture, which needs to create “disorders” in order to proscribe commodity fixes. At the moment, of course, people are suffering needlessly from the venal War on Drugs, and we have to fight the anti-prohibition battle. I’m not talking about keeping things the way they are. But I don’t think it’s an accident, politically or spiritually, that the legal status of psychedelics is liminal – rarely targeted by other drugs, increasingly investigated by science, yet still illegal and, to some degree, marked by social stigma.

In this sense, MDMA exists in a very different category than psychedelics, one that the lies between the crazy world of bewildered toad-licking freaks and suburban moms popping Prozac. That’s why we now see mainstream media going, “This stuff’s not so bad!” The New York Times, Time magazine: “Hmm, you know, it’s not that different from the serotonin-based SSRIs and such.” But another reason for this mild but delightful mainstream move toward balance is that Ecstasy by itself, though incredibly productive and marvelous, does not puncture consensus reality the way psychedelics puncture consensus reality. And so I don’t think it’s an accident that its not so hard to imagine Ecstasy being officially integrated into our current psychoactive environment. But as soon as you start to integrate it, then it becomes manipulated by the institutionalized cultural machine, which has agendas that have nothing to do necessarily with you feeling better, with you discovering more love and intimacy or pleasure in your life. Whatever good it does, it also becomes a regulatory mechanism, a way of managing human subjectivity in an increasingly dense and chaotic social environment.

Psychedelics retain their unique power because they’re difficult to fully integrate into that regulatory framework. One of the things that is the most productive about them is that they’re going to puncture your consensus reality. Even if you are primed with E, they’re going to knock you out of whatever your given structure is, even those wise psychedelic models of healing or spirituality. You think you’re going to get the great earth momma embracing you in some kind of jaguar-rich forest, and you get sucked into some sort of interdimensional wormhole built by malevolent-looking insectoid goofballs, and you go, “But I was going for the nature vibe!” That’s great. It’s that pulling the rug out from under you. Its not in the visions; its not in the stories. It’s in the cracks and gaps that open up onto something exceptionally difficult to experience or explain.

RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY

The final zone I want to talk about in terms of psychedelic liminality is religion or spirituality, which I’d like to talk about in terms of the mystery religions of late antiquity. Many people have drawn very valid connections between the last few centuries of the Roman Empire and the world today. You have a globalized environment full of different kinds of people, along with a sort of mechanized state that is very efficient but rotten at the core. You have a very urban environment, in which many different kinds of people are coming together, and that pulls people out of their tribal connections to the rural places they come from. There’s a lot more movement in the empire. And it’s in this environment that you see the rise of the mystery religions, like Mithraism or Isis worship or gnosticism. Of course, there is also the famous mystery religion of Eleusis, which plays a very important role in the contemporary psychedelic story, but was actually much older than most of the mystery religions I am discussing. But in the waning centuries of the Roman empire, people fed their evident religious hunger and sense of spiritual dislocation by turning toward these exotic sects that promised, at the heart of the whole operation, an otherworldly experience. There was a desire for an experience of the self that went beyond the body, beyond the visible world, that seems very similar to today’s embrace of meditation, yoga and psychedelics.

So were they tripping? For me, that’s not the point. There is a tendency within psychedelic research, particularly the historical stuff, to assert that behind these vast religious mysteries across the globe lurk some kind of substance that’s “actually” producing spiritual experiences. Of course, we know there’s something botanical going on with soma, we know there’s something going on with Eleusis; there’s little fragments of it here and there, and of course we want to reconstruct what was actually going on. But this can also be very reductive, and in this way, we’re very modern. We’re still looking for the mechanism.

It’s my belief that once you take into account the way that cultural reality can program or set up a certain set of expectations, then you actually don’t need many chemicals thrown into the mix in order to produce a tremendously powerful experience. I find it unfortunate when psychedelic thinkers claims that real spirituality is just the psychedelic experience, and that everything else we see in religion is a pale reflection of the experience, either an attempt to reproduce it using cruder, slower, and to replace it entirely with crusty, dogmatic ideology. I mean, in some ways I think that’s probably an accurate description in a lot of cases, but I think it also misses a lot. And one of the things it misses are those stories and cultural frameworks that form the matrix for these experiences. By over emphasizing the “secret mushroom” behind iconography or in the eucharist, we tend to undercut the productive role of meaning, of those ongoing cultural frameworks that always shape our experiences. Though psychedelics are clearly universal in their action, the experiences that result are never completely purified of cultural and historical forces.

Another issue that’s raised by the mystery religions is the larger question about the importance of spiritual experience in the first place? It’s a pretty standard idea that we have spirituality over here, and we have religion over there. Spirituality is about your experiences: your mystical insights, the immediacy of spirit, gnosis. The real deal. Whereas religion we associate with institutional frameworks, with collective stories, with power relations, with established social relationships. And there’s this curious sort of balance between the two. At the heart of it the mystery religions is something like gnosis, a radical experience. Maybe it’s produced through a substance, maybe not. But there is an experience, a direct taste of the divine, of the otherworldly. And yet, again, it is embedded in this whole set of stories, practices and social frameworks. This context helps produce the shape of those experiences, and, far more importantly, helps integrate the residue of those experiences into ordinary life.

There’s a tendency inside of psychedelic spirituality, very strong and understandable, to say, “Now we are getting the goods, now we can skip all that ‘religion’ stuff and get right to the heart of it. We can go spiritual, we don’t need religion.” But I’m not entirely sure that the problem ends there, because without certain frameworks for understanding and integrating experience, then even the most profound state of gnosis can become nothing more than a kind of wacky hedonism. Nothing wrong with hedonism, mind you, and we don’t hear nearly enough about the profound pleasures of spirituality. But taking any substance in a de-mythologized environment, where you’re buying a piece of blotter or taking a pill, can easily become a mechanistic repetition. It can lose any edge of genuine openness and integration, and become a kind of video game.

I don’t have an answer for any of this, because I don’t know what the right frameworks are. I don’t know what the big maps are, and I tend, like most of us perhaps, to be rather distrustful of people who think they know. If you look at some Brazilian ayahuasca sects, you find some very interesting things happening there from a religious anthropology perspective. And yet, it doesn’t take much interaction with them to see things that at least from a Western perspective are difficult: institutional hierarchies, authorities judging good experiences from bad, and organizing the narrative of the trip according to set ideas. These sects actually aid people in a lot of ways, even Euro-Americans. And yet some people in psychedelic culture are uncomfortable with formalized psychedelia, and with the ecological religiosity of the ayahuasca scene. So once again we are “in betwixt, in between”: we know that we need frames, we know that by accepting and creating a spiritual environment, a spiritual story, the experiences themselves will have a much greater richness. (I mean, sometimes they’ll just come in and do whatever they’re going to do anyway.) And yet, what is our frame? What story should we be telling ourselves? Maybe the technical knowledge of set and setting itself already undermines the potential authenticity of experience dependent on set and setting.

I’m not sure whether the kinds of frameworks that we have so far are sufficient. One of them is the therapeutic model. Again, incredibly productive, and yet I’m not always so sure whether that is getting at the real heart of the spiritual potential of these molecules, to say nothing of their pleasures. There is still this emphasis on self-actualization, when I suspect that what psychedelics actualize may not be the self, at least in any conventional sense of the term.

Another example is rave culture, which is probably the best example of a kind of mass movement of people having serious psychoactive experiences. And raves in many ways are machines. They are designed in certain ways to produce trance effects, to derange everyday perceptual patterns, to key off archetypal experience with certain kinds of images. The drugs plug into the music and the music plugs into the drugs, and as the drugs and media evolve, they co-create these new environments and experiences. I don’t think you have to be too much of a worrywart to look at some aspects of rave culture, and wonder, what are they really doing? What is this for? What’s going on here? Trance is a two-edge sword.

So the question that tugs me is: Are there psychedelic values, and how can you communicate them? There does seem to be certain kinds of values and ethics that many people develop after a long, careful apprenticeship with these things. Meeting individuals from older generations, there’s certain things you pick up, a certain kind of openness and tolerance, a sweetness and a mirth. To me these point to some core values, even if they are too unspoken to even be considered values. But I suspect its pretty hard to transmit these values, and I don’t think the counterculture generation has done a very good job here. But is there a way to transmit these things? Or is it all just out of control? As soon as you start to try to control and define these values, then you make it more like religion. And yet, we have to acknowledge the chaotic effects of introducing psychedelics into youth culture without those contexts of meaning and ritual.

One of the good things about the old mystery religions is that they’re esoteric. There are levels of secrecy, even when the movement is popular. In order to work yourself up to the encounter, the experience, you have to go through a lot of social interaction, a lot of preparation, a lot of priming yourself for an encounter with what will always remain beyond your ken. And that structure also allows the production of wisdom people, whether you call them shamans, masters, of just people who know their stuff, and who pass on their knowledge and experience through organic, small-scale networks. There are mentors and apprentices, and those apprentices are able to reproduce those environments, changing them always slightly as the culture itself transforms. That kind of hermeticism still goes on, and it’s vital that it does go on –secret pockets and hidden social networks are vital to the continual richening of psychedelic culture and its influence on an increasingly psychoactive culture at large. At the same time, the genie is definitely out of the bottle. We live amidst a massive transformation of information networks, cultural, biological, and technological. It’s much easier to pluck potent and esoteric information out of the ether that in a more traditional society, where it would be guarded by the wacky alchemists, the witch at the edge of the village. They would be protecting their own game, but also insuring that information transfer occurs within a larger context, a more organic framework. Today everything hidden is becoming known. It’s all open, which means we are all liminal. The margins are mainstream, and every point is the center of things, which is another way of saying that we are all in between.

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Kadhim Jihad Hassan was born in southern Iraq in 1955. He has lived in Paris since 1976. He is a poet and translator, publishing his poetry in literary magazines for twenty-five years, with two collections. He has translated Arthur Rimbaud’s collected works, and works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean Genet, Juan Goytisolo and Philippe Jaccottet into Arabic. He also made, with introductory study, the first free-verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy into Arabic (UNESCO, Paris, & Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, Beirut, 2003). In 2006, his Le Roman Arabe – 1834 to 2004, was published by Actes Sud, France.

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Three Poems – Kadhim Jihad Hassan

Kadhim Jihad Hassan was born in southern Iraq in 1955. He has lived in Paris since 1976. He is a poet and translator, publishing his poetry in literary magazines for twenty-five years, with two collections. He has translated Arthur Rimbaud’s collected works, and works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean Genet, Juan Goytisolo and Philippe Jaccottet into Arabic. He also made, with introductory study, the first free-verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy into Arabic (UNESCO, Paris, & Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, Beirut, 2003). In 2006, his Le Roman Arabe – 1834 to 2004, was published by Actes Sud, France.

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The Poplar

The populus tree rose up there in all its fullness.

With my liking of assonance, I saw in it an infinity of peoples,

Populations of the lost come to slake their thirst at the brink of my fatigue.

I came and laid me down beneath its shade.

It made me happy to think that the mere sight of me

Brought it respite from wandering so long among branches and roots.

For me, it had dropped anchor, the tree-voyager.

For me, it had surrendered its arms, the tree-warrior.

And there I lay

A man unimpaled by any martyrdom,

Saved by the beauty of suicide’s attraction

Transformed into a vast appetite for all that dwells within reach,

But that forever refuses to be possessed

—-

My father’s house

Vast and without bolts was the house of my father. Relatives from the country would come and rest there as they passed through the town. Each one had his rifle slung from the shoulder. I asked one of them if he had already killed with it. “Yes”, he told me, “a whole lot of partridges, which I usually bring down with the first shot.”

Another told me that each of us bears his own death within him. He repeats it to himself, like a refrain. A song from the good old days. Then that was all.

Hearing him talk like that, my aunt, who was superstitious, retorted: “Why do you speak of death? We do not die, we emigrate.”

They were people of the vastnesses, with a simplicity of soul. Each had his rifle slung from the shoulder. And in their minds there jostled memories of partridges brought down with the first shot, of wild boars dropped dead in their tracks, of fogs you could cut with a knife deep in the depths of the forests, of a common felicity in having good thoughts about death.

—

Strike

This woman friend called a talking strike. She forced herself to say only the strictly necessary each time she felt her brain giving way and reverting to those obscure forces from an inadequately tranquillised and perhaps permanently sick past. Her whole effort became second nature and her contented habit consisted in stopping up inside her head that endless unscrolling of images, those avalanches of peevish, vengeful reminiscences.

I always admire the light-heartedness with which, once all that has passed over, she pursues her postponed reading, her dance classes, and what she calls her spaced-out loves. And, the interminable romance in which she narrates the exploits of a father she formerly detested, rehabilitated now as a leading figure of the Resistance.

___________

Sunday… Quiet day here at Caer Llwydd. Rowan on the X-box, Mary in and out. I am working on a website. Life is slow in that late August way. A bit overly warm. I long for a mountain lake! I should take myself up on these desires once in awhile.

Ironing out the last details on the radio. Hopefully in the next couple of days. It seems we may take it off shore. This of course will mean a general move anyway, as I think our time here at Bluehost.com is a bit done. Once bitten and all that.

On the Menu:

The Links

Pain sufferer turns to ‘shrooms

Poetry: Robert Graves…

I hope you enjoy this entry. I am remembering/and putting together another tale for your enjoyment, about another time.

Take Care,

Gwyllm

__________

The Links:

Armor Of God…

The Hoax..

Radiation… what Radiation?

In search of a lost world

The Erotic Universe

__________

Pain sufferer turns to ‘shrooms’

Every New Year’s Eve and July 4th, Bob Wold brews a tea containing a psychedelic drug from “magic mushrooms.”

Wold takes a small dose of the drug psilocybin — just enough to make sounds more distinct and colors a bit brighter. “I get a couple giggles out of it,” he said. “It’s like having two or three beers.”

But Wold doesn’t take “shrooms” for the four-hour high. Rather, he has found that psilocybin is the only drug that prevents one of the most painful conditions known to man, cluster headaches.

Hundreds of cluster headache sufferers have begun to self-medicate with psilocybin and LSD. And now Harvard Medical School researchers plan to do a carefully controlled study of the drugs.

Vivid hallucinations

Wold, a 53-year-old construction contractor, began suffering cluster headaches about 25 years ago. He would get four to six headaches a day, each lasting 45 to 60 minutes. Each cluster period would last three or four months. “The pain is similar to if you hit your thumb with a hammer,” he said.

Five or six years ago, Wold read an Internet posting from a man who said his cluster headaches went away after he took LSD for recreational purposes. Word spread, and other patients began taking LSD or psilocybin.

LSD can cause vivid hallucinations and distortions of color, sound, touch, etc. It also can impair judgment, leading to injury. Afterwards, users can suffer acute anxiety or depression. Psilocybin can cause vivid distortions of sights and sounds and emotional disturbances, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Wold had tried about 75 legal drugs, but none worked very long. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he tried psilocybin, and found that two doses a year worked wonders. He orders spores over the Internet and grows mushrooms at his Lombard home.

“For the past five years, I’ve been pretty much pain-free and headache-free,” he said.

Wold has formed a support group, ClusterBusters, to promote research on psychedelics. The group has heard from about 400 patients who have used psilocybin or LSD.

In a preliminary study, researchers from Harvard’s McLean Hospital surveyed patients who had used psilocybin or LSD. Twenty-five of 48 psilocybin users and seven of eight LSD users reported the drugs prevented the entire cluster period when headaches normally occurred.

Studying psychedelics

“No other medication, to our knowledge, has been reported to terminate a cluster period,” researchers wrote in the June 27 issue of the journal Neurology.

No one knows why psychedelics might work. But Harvard researcher Dr. John Halpern noted that the drugs share a similar structure to medications that have been approved for cluster headaches.

However, researchers acknowledged several limitations to their study, including the possibility that people with good outcomes were more likely to participate than those with poor outcomes.

Halpern and colleagues are planning a follow-up study in which a psychedelic drug would be compared to an inactive placebo.

Psilocybin and LSD are Schedule 1 drugs, meaning they are illegal unless used in research approved by the DEA and Food and Drug Administration.

Halpern warns that psilocybin and LSD “are drugs of abuse and are potentially quite dangerous. . . . My advice then is to not self-medicate but to respect our laws and to help us properly and safely conduct the research needed to find out if these substances work for real.”

____________

Poetry: Robert Graves

The Persian Version

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon

The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

As for the Greek theatrical tradition

Which represents that summer’s expedition

Not as a mere reconnaisance in force

By three brigades of foot and one of horse

(Their left flank covered by some obsolete

Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)

But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt

To conquer Greece – they treat it with contempt;

And only incidentally refute

Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute

The Persian monarch and the Persian nation

Won by this salutary demonstration:

Despite a strong defence and adverse weather

All arms combined magnificently together.

—-

Sorley’s Weather

When outside the icy rain

Comes leaping helter-skelter,

Shall I tie my restive brain

Snugly under shelter?

Shall I make a gentle song

Here in my firelit study,

When outside the winds blow strong

And the lanes are muddy?

With old wine and drowsy meats

Am I to fill my belly?

Shall I glutton here with Keats?

Shall I drink with Shelley?

Tobacco’s pleasant, firelight’s good:

Poetry makes both better.

Clay is wet and so is mud,

Winter rains are wetter.

Yet rest there, Shelley, on the sill,

For though the winds come frorely,

I’m away to the rain-blown hill

And the ghost of Sorley.

—

I’d Love To Be A Fairy’s Child

Children born of fairy stock

Never need for shirt or frock,

Never want for food or fire,

Always get their hearts desire:

Jingle pockets full of gold,

Marry when they’re seven years old.

Every fairy child may keep

Two ponies and ten sheep;

All have houses, each his own,

Built of brick or granite stone;

They live on cherries, they run wild–

I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.

__________

Links

Police warn of hallucinogenic chocolate bars at Amsterdam airport

__________

Late to bed and early to rise… visited friends last night, one leaving town, and another just recovering from a medical situation. Pizza, a glass of wine, laughter and a few tears. I got to practice my massage techniques, and to learn a few new pressure points.

Up early and leaving soon, so this is a short sweet one.

On The Menu:

Leonard at the Isle of Wight

The Links

Poetry: William Blake

Have a good one,

Gwyllm

____________

The Links

A subtle assimilation?

Scribbles in the stonework of Rosslyn

The Key to Atlantis: The Magic Mushroom

Neolithic stone carving of Big Dipper discovered in northwest China

____________

Poetry: William Blake

THE VOICE OF THE ANCIENT BARD

Youth of delight! come hither

And see the opening morn,

Image of Truth new-born.

Doubt is fled, and clouds of reason,

Dark disputes and artful teazing.

Folly is an endless maze;

Tangled roots perplex her ways;

How many have fallen there!

They stumble all night over bones of the dead;

And feel–they know not what but care;

And wish to lead others, when they should be led.

——

THE DIVINE IMAGE

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,

All pray in their distress,

And to these virtues of delight

Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,

Is God our Father dear;

And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,

Is man, His child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart;

Pity, a human face;

And Love, the human form divine:

And Peace the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,

That prays in his distress,

Prays to the human form divine:

Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,

In heathen, Turk, or Jew.

Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,

There God is dwelling too.

—–

THE GARDEN OF LOVE

I laid me down upon a bank,

Where Love lay sleeping;

I heard among the rushes dank

Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,

To the thistles and thorns of the waste;

And they told me how they were beguiled,

Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

—–

Thursday… I found an article on one of my favourite subjects by Kat Harrison. I have read it before, but it is worth a second glance, and if you haven’t read it, you’re in for a treat.

The links section is a bit hot and heavy today, lots of stuff occurring, and some wonderful weirdness going on in the world.

Have a great day, talk soon.

Gwyllm

—-

On The Menu:

The Links

The Leaves of the Shepherdess – Kat Harrison

Poetry: William Butler Yeats

Art: Maxfield Parrish / Gwyllm Llwydd

_________

The Links:

‘Hybrid mutant’ found dead in Maine

Here is the picture of the mysterious beast…

Spiralling…..

Raiders of the Lost Ark…

The Doctor Explains…

Road sign leaves Welsh-speakers bewildered

Snake in Grass claim writer’s critics

_______

The Leaves of the Shepherdess

by Kat Harrison

(Oracle – Gwyllm Llwydd)

Salvia divinorum, a relatively obscure sacred plant native to Oaxaca, was rediscovered by Gordon Wasson in 1962, when he and Albert Hofmann’s wife Anita first noted its psychoactive effects. Used for “divining” and other purposes at least as far back as the Aztecs, the plant began to be cultivated and used in the U.S. beginning in the mid-1990s.

I had grown the plant — Salvia divinorum — for twenty years, and I knew the scant botanical and anthropological literature on this rare, sacred plant, but I´d never successfully had a visionary experience from ingesting the leaves. Once I´d tried putting thirty leaves in a blender with water and drinking the green slurry, but other than a headache and distinct empathy with a trapped butterfly, not much had happened.

In the summer of 1995 I was ready for another in my series of solo ethnobotanical fieldwork adventures, and so I headed off for a month in the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Mexico. My son and daughter were staying with family, and I had work to do: not only investigating the folk uses and beliefs regarding healing plants, but also a health challenge of my own. For a couple of years following the dissolution of my marriage and the sad, slow death of my father, my heart had not been beating regularly. I´d always had a heart murmur and the strain of recurrent anemia, but this was more disturbing, grabbing my breath away. After one episode with a doctor, I decided I wanted to ask a Mazatec healer to do a ceremony for me with the Leaves of the Shepherdess.

The Mazatecs are renowned for their ritual shamanism, made world-famous by the twentieth-century “discovery” of their ancient practices using psilocybin mushrooms. The curandera Maria Sabina became the emblematic shaman who was revealed and unfortunately sacrificed to Western popular attention. The mushroom rituals intrigued me of course, but I was most drawn to the more elusive medicina of these leaves. I wanted to meet La Pastora, the Shepherdess.

An anthropologist friend gave me directions to an old curandero´s hut, perched above a tiny village in a remote valley of those tropical mountains. I came bringing greetings from our mutual friend and gifts of multi-vitamins and vegetable seeds. I was met with caution, which I felt was appropriate, and interviewed over two days as to my life experience and my intentions. The curandero and his son, who acted as our interpreter from Spanish to Mazatec, agreed to gather the leaves for a session with me.

Ska Pastora, the Leaves of the Shepherdess, grows in small, hidden glades in the upland moist forest of the Sierra Mazateca. The plant seems to propagate itself from nodes of the fallen stems, perhaps with the help of humans who tend their private patches. It is speculated that the species diminished its ability to set seed through centuries of human tending. And perhaps this highly sensitive species — growing in light-speckled seclusion in such a small region of the world — would have long ago disappeared, had it not been for its lovely medicina and gift to human consciousness. Each healer´s patch is a family secret, and the spirit of the plant is known to have a personal relationship with one who cares for her. Not just anyone can pick her leaves and derive benefit from her medicine. One´s purpose must be clean and clear.

Among many indigenous, nature-based peoples, significant plant species are each personified as a being with a name and particular attributes of character that relate to the plant´s effects. The plant spirit is a persona, to be honored, solicited and thanked for its gifts. Over the past five hundred years, a veneer of Catholicism has been laid over the rich indigenous animistic world-view, and stories of the helper-saints have meshed with the perceived primordial qualities of certain plant allies. The Virgin is often identified with plants that aid us; the Mazatecs recognize two species of morning glory (Ipomoea violacea and Rivea corymbosa) that produce Seeds of the Virgin, used for vision and difficult childbirth. Another name for La Pastora is Santa Maria, again a variation of the compassionate Mother Goddess.

We gathered for the session, a late night ceremony before a rough altar that held flowers, candles, pictures of the saints and powdered tobacco. We sat, the family and I, facing the stone wall that emerged from the earth there, against which they had built their tiny abode of tin, tar-paper and wood. La Pastora is very shy, they told me, timid like a deer. She will come only when we have eaten many pairs of the leaves and sit very quietly, perfectly still, in utter darkness, as in a glen in the forest in the moonlight. If someone moves or speaks suddenly, she will disappear in a moment. If we invite her, and are very clear and open to her, she will come, she will speak. She will whisper to us what we need to know and show us what she sees. She may help heal us, or bless us with good fortune. But we must pray and we must listen, and we must pay her our full attention. Do you know how to pray, really pray with all your heart? If not, tonight you will learn.

The curandero unrolled banana-leaf bundles of hand-sized Salvia divinorum leaves, slightly wilted, and sorted them into pairs. Both mushrooms and leaves are measured in pairs, he told me, representing masculine and feminine. He doled out forty pairs to me, rolled them into a long wad, rather like a salad rolled into a cigar. He explained that after he said the invoking prayers and we stated aloud our intentions, I was to eat the leaves. I was told not to hesitate at their bitterness, not to stop until I had eaten them all, and above all, not to laugh throughout the entire session. Laughter, he counseled, would steal away the power of the medicine.

The curandero held our leaves up to the altar, to the stone emerging from the mountain, and murmured a long prayer that included La Pastora, the Virgin of Guadalupe, San Pedro, San Pablo and names of native deities I could not recognize. He signaled me to state my intentions, make my request.

I greeted the spirit of La Pastora, identified myself, asked her to come be present with me that night. I asked, “Please help my heart to become strong and clear and without fear, so that it can pump smoothly.” I asked, as I always do when I enter into relationship with sacred medicine, “What is my work now? May I please see the next stretch of the path?”

I took my first bite, stanched my reaction to the bitterness, and proceeded steadily through many bites to the end. By the time I had consumed almost the entire bundle, I was saturated with a taste that was sharp and fresh and ancient all at once. I had a momentary sense of how very long these people had been doing this ritual, the generations that had sought the wisdom of this plant spirit. Suddenly there was a shimmering, the curandero blew the candles out for total darkness, and within seconds I was completely in another realm, astonished. Some part of me ate the final bite, and I relaxed into another place: I was in the presence of a great female being, a twenty-foot high woman, semi-transparent. I was standing in her garden. There she was, some distance away, at the edge of her garden, near the forest, standing amidst her lovely plants against a small, white picket fence. There were butterflies and hummingbirds flying around and through her. Her great translucent face, the density of rainbows, leaned toward me and away. She moved through the garden, tending her leaves and flowers, leaning over them and standing again, beams of sunlight pouring through her. I felt a great longing for her to move toward me, to touch me, and I realized I could not move my feet from the earth where I stood. I felt the other human spirits around me — the old curandero, his wife, his son and the little granddaughter — and they were all giving her their full attention. I realized then that we were plants at the edge of her garden. She drifted slowly toward us, reached out and ran her hands through us, like a breeze, like a ripple, and I knew in those moments that my body was clear, that when she touched me I was in perfect order. I knew in my bones that if we ever asked for her to touch us, and we gave in exchange our most profound attention when she did, all would be well. I inhaled and exhaled her presence. She circled the garden again and returned to us. When she passed her hand through my chest a second time, I saw a tiny, ornate wooden door in my heart. It was carved with flowers and vines, and had an intricate golden filigreed handle and hinges. As her grand spirit fingers brushed it, I felt a strong breeze open the tiny door and a pocket of hurt blew away into the sweet air of the garden.

There is this enduring memory of my own face gazing out of a plant, and the dark but not unfriendly presence of the woods nearby. As she faded from view and I returned to a sense of the present, I heard the words repeatedly, in both Spanish and English: “Show them the edge of the garden. Les muestra el borde del jardín.” That is my work.

_______

____________

one of those days for an old reliable source of poetic inspiration: Mr. Yeats. I find that there is always something moving and relevant in his works.

Poetry: William Butler Yeats

The Rose Tree

“O words are lightly spoken”,

said Pearse to Connolly;

“Maybe a breath of polite words

Has withered our Rose Tree;

Ore maybe but a wind that blows

Across the bitter sea.”

“It needs to be but watered”,

James Connolly replied,

“To make the green come out again

And spread on every side,

And shake the blossom from the bud

To be the garden’s pride.”

But where can we draw water”,

Said Pearse to Connolly,

“When all the wells are parched away?

O plain as plain can be

There’s nothing but our own red blood

Can make a right Rose Tree.”

—-

Her Praise

She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.

I have gone about the house, gone up and down

As a man does who has published a new book,

Or a young girl dressed out in her new gown,

And though I have turned the talk by hook or crook

Until her praise should be the uppermost theme,

A woman spoke of some new tale she had read,

A man confusedly in a half dream

As though some other name ran in his head.

She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.

I will talk no more of books or the long war

But walk by the dry thorn until I have found

Some beggar sheltering from the wind, and there

Manage the talk until her name come round.

If there be rags enough he will know her name

And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,

Though she had young men’s praise and old men’s blame,

Among the poor both old and young gave her praise.

—-

Sailing to Byzantium

THAT is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

– Those dying generations – at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

—-

The Fish

Although you hide in the ebb and flow

Of the pale tide when the moon has set,

The people of coming days will know

About the casting out of my net,

And how you have leaped times out of mind

Over the little silver cords,

And think that you were hard and unkind,

And blame you with many bitter words.

‘Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in’.—Aldous Huxley, Island

__________

I swear I will write something soon. Very busy, life is hectic.

I hope you like todays’ Assemblage.

G

—–

On the Menu:

Philip K. Dick Interview

The Links

Painting In Dali’s Garden

The Eleusinian Mysteries: Healing and Transformation

Poetry: Boris Pasternak

Art: Maxfield Parrish

—-

____________

The Links

From Roberto: Former British Ambassador Says Terror Alert Is “Propaganda”

Sleep with Neanderthals? Apparently we (homo Sapiens) did

Hang the Tsar!

____________

From Roberto Venosa/ 2 reservations have opened up for this great event:

PAINTING IN DALI’S GARDEN

Dear Friends,

We are happy to announce that, under the guidance of Visionary masters, Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffmann, the ‘Painting in Dali’s Garden’ workshop will take place during September 17 – 30, of this year. September in Spain, especially in Cadaques, is a most desirable time to be there. The weather is perfect, the sea is warm and delicious, the tourist tide has receded, and the ambiance is one of tranquility, romance and inspired creativity. Perfect for painting. Cadaqués, home of Salvador Dali, and playground to many of the artistic luminaries of the past century, is one of the most romantic and historically creative locations on the Mediterranean. Set on a charmed island, a stone’s throw away from the shore, the beautiful Villa Arenella becomes home and studio to 18 participants who will learn a painting technique that has been handed down from master to master from the 15th century to the present. The updated, simplified version, as taught by Venosa and Hoffmann, makes entry into painting highly accessible for the beginner, and adds significantly to the repertoire of the experienced artist.

This is the fifth anniversary of this workshop, and we plan to expand on the pleasures (if that’s at all possible), by providing more extra-curricular activities, such as yoga and massage, as well as a few added surprises. Also, we will keep our registration fees as they have been in the past: Depending on

accommodations, the rates will vary from $2150 to $2750, and will include the painting workshop, all breakfasts and luncheons, several dinners, a boat-ride/picnic, a trip to the Dali house, a paella fiesta, and an excursion to the Dali Museum in Figueras (new).

Motor scooters and bikes, autos (although unnecessary), are readily available for rent in the town, and the plethora of restaurants and coffee houses are some of the finest on the Med. Gourmet Mediterranean food, boating, swimming, scuba diving, windsurfing, and the myriad of other pleasures that surround the magical village of Cadaqués, are all available to make your creative and social experience unforgettable.

For imagery and complete information:

http://www.martinahoffmann.com/workshops/cadaques_2006.html

For additional information, or to reserve a space, contact us at:

roberto@venosa.com

art@martinahoffmann.com

rjl@venosa.com

Visit

http://www.venosa.com

http://www.martinahoffmann.com

____________

The Eleusinian Mysteries: Healing and Transformation

For almost a thousand years, the most exclusive society in the ancient world consisted of people initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Only the wise could be so honored; and wisdom, then as now, transcended gender, class, and country.

“Happy is he of the mortals who has seen this,” wrote Homer. “In the dark kingdom of the shadows, the fate of the initiate and the uninitiated is not the same. Those mysteries of which no tongue can speak-only blessed is he whose eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not the lot of other men!”

Like most great cults, it began with a legend long since obscured in the mists of prehistory. It’s site was Eleusis, north-west of Athens. Here Demeter, was reunited with her lost daughter Persephone. The site derives its potency from Demeter, a powerful figure in the Greek pantheon, symbolic of the Earth Mother, goddess of grain, fruitfulness, agriculture and civil laws.

The tale, recounted in one of the earliest Homeric Hymns, told how Persephone had attracted the attention of Hades, the dark Lord of the Underworld, who had carried her off to his realm beneath the earth. A distraught Demeter wandered the land, spreading famine by withholding her gifts of fruitfulness and causing crops to die. While she lingered at Eleusis with a family that had befriended her. Zeus persuaded Hades to return his captured bride.

But Persephone had eaten some pomegranate seeds in the Underworld, an act which obliged her to return to the shadowy domain for a third of every year. Nevertheless, Demeter and Persephone, in joyful reunion, became resigned to the annual parting and taught their Mysteries-an allegory of spring and rebirth- to the townspeople of Eleusis. Thereafter they annually re-enacted the celebration.

Very little is known about the Mysteries. The sacred rites took place in early autumn and the preliminary ceremonies lasted for nine days. They began with a gathering in Athens, when the names of that year’s initiates would be read out.

They met the next day and each initiate would be in charge of a young pig. The procession would head to the sea, and the initiates would wash both themselves and the animals. Then they would sacrifice the pigs and set off along the Sacred Way-the 14 mile route to Eleusis-with much light-heartedness and many stops at temples and shrines.

By the time the processing arrived in Eleusis, it would be dark. The night would be spent near the well where Demeter was befriended, the celebrants dancing by the light of flickering torches to the music of a crude oboe the aulos, and crashing cymbals. Emulating Demeter’s search, the participants would break their dancing to randomly search along the shore, ending their symbolic fast with a breakfast (according to the historian Clement of Alexandria) of barley water, wheat and sesame cakes, pomegranates, lumps of salt and young shoots of the fig tree.

Then, with growing tension, the crowd would assemble outside the telesterion, an immense hall with a roof supported by 42 massive columns. People gathered into two groups: the mystai, whose initiation was deferred for another year, and the epoptai, who were given a password and allowed to enter. On at least one occasion, men trying to bluff their way in without the password were put to death.

Certainly great efforts prevailed to see that no hint of what happened inside was conveyed to the uninitiated. The playwrite Aeschy-lus, born at Eleusis in 525 B.C., was accused of giving away the secrets in one of his plays. He escaped lynching only by proving that he had not been initiated.

Other ancients wrote about Eleusis. Cicero commented, “Nothing is higher that these Mysteries. They have sweetened our characters and softened our customs; they have made us pass from the condition of the savages to true humanity. They have not only shown us the way to live joyfully but they have taught us to die with better hope.”

Aristotle said that one did not go to Eleusis to learn, but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a receptive frame of mind. And Aristophanes added, “To us alone initiated men, who act aright by stranger and by friend, the sun shines out to light us after death.”

And in our era Jung explained. “the ordinary man was somehow liberated from his personal impotence and temporarily endowed with an almost superhuman quality. The conviction could be sustained for a long time and it gave a certain style to life and set a tone for a whole society.”

The ancient Greeks believed in the necessity of understanding the soul and coming to terms with death by abolishing one’s fear of it. This is a worthy state to achieve, and such persons who did so comprised an intellectual elite; self-confident, unencumbered by trivial concerns, truly free. The rites of Eleusis induced this happy condition.

At first the Mysteries attracted people of the locality. But with the rise to power of Athens, the cult expanded to include that city, altough the positions of authority-hierophant (high priest), daduchas (torch-bearer) and keryx (herald)-were always held by citizens of Eleusis.

For most of the centuries that Eleusis held sway, the city remained immune to outside strife. When Persian invaders burned down one temple, it was replaced with an even grander one. The new structure, of white marble, rose under the auspices of Pericles, whose favorite sculptor Ictinus had already achieved fame the Parthenon. The new Eleusinian temple’s “beauty and prodigious magnitude”-230 feet long by 180 feet wide-excited a degree of astonishment equaled only by the awe that its sanctity evoked.

But this too, eventually fell. In the 4th century A.D. Alaric the Goth laid waste to the whole surrounding province of Attica. Shortly thereafter, the Roman emperor Theodosius struck down most pagan temples, and the ruins of Eleusis lay untended and forgotten for centuries. In 1675, George Wheler an English traveler, noted, “One of the first things we came to was the stately temple of Ceres (Demeter’s Latin name), now laid prostrate on the ground, not having one stone upon another, for it lyeth all in a confused heap together.”

Half a century later, another Englishman observed “the bust of a colossal statue of excellent workmanship maimed and the face disfigured. A tradition prevails that if the broken statue be removed, the fertility of the land will cease.” This belief which first surfaced in Cicero’s writings, still had currency at the end 18th century when country folk could be observed dancing around the statue on the Full Moon at harvest time.

In 1801, over local objections, two British academics who had bribed the Turkish governor removed the statue to Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, where it remains today. Compounding their theft, they boasted about it in a pamphlet published in England shortly afterwards, explaining that their coup “required equal promptness and secrecy amidst the opposition to be expected from a herd of idle and mercenary Greeks.”

Whether there is anything to the old belief that the fertility of the land would cease with the statue’s removal can be judged by today’s visitors. They view only a region made arid and dusty by the heat, smoke, and debris from the surrounding oil refineries and industry. Doubtless the area prospers judging by the numerous shipyards and by the processing of oil, soap and aluminum. But the ecological cost has been high. For miles around, the trees, turning wistfully toward the sun, appear to be choking from pollution unknown in previous centuries.

Because of its industrial nature, Eleusis is not popular with tourists. This is unfortunate, because the sacred site is only a half-hour bus ride from Athens and here and there you can discover much of its original mystical charm-all the more so, ironically, because of its relative lack of attention.

Immense broken pillars lie everywhere, many with ancient lettering still visible, and patches of blue and white tile in intricate patterns define the areas of ancient floors. Great stone stairways lead up the gentle tree-clad hill behind the remains of the vast telesterion, it’s back to the rock and frontal facade toward the early-morning sun. Underground chambers and what remains of the ceremonial well lie almost overgrown with waist-high grass.

In the adjoining museum are a plaster reconstruction of the ancient site, marble pigs, and statues of Demeter with chipped faces. A tab-leau depicts what may be rites from the Eleusinian Mysteries-but who can really know about this most famous of human secrets? Over it all seem to hover the lovely spirits of the eternal mother and daughter, Demeter and Persephone. And from below, perhaps a hint of a rumble from the everpresent god of the netherworld.

“Then you will find a breath about your ears

Of music, and a light about your eyes

Most beautiful-like this-

and myrtle groves,

And joyous throngs

of women and of men,

The initiated.”

-Aristophanes

From Mystical & Magical Sites, by Elizabeth Pepper & John Wilcock, Phanes Press, 1992.

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Poetry: Boris Pasternak

Hops

Beneath the willow wound round with ivy

we take cover from the worst

of the storm, with a greatcoat round

our shoulders and my hands around your waist.

I’ve got it wrong. That isn’t ivy

entwined in the bushes round

the wood, but hops. You intoxicate me!

Let’s spread the greatcoat on the ground.

—-

“But He Was Belov’d…”

But he was belov’d. Not a thing

Could vanish or lose its life’s mission,

The lesser – his talent and kin,

And sketches of his compositions.

You’d just rise up your music stand

And just touch the cold keyboard –

The effort will dazzle you and

You’ll smooth all her wings, strong and broad.

And come the white snows and moon,

And windows’ glass double-braided,

And twigs in the silver galloons…

And time will be suddenly ended.

And you will be shocked in a flesh,

When sunk into concert’s embraces:

Much humbler than we ourselves

Is our everyday deathless.

—-

Dream

1913, 1928

I dreamed of autumn through the glass half-lightened,

Of friends and you in their joyful band,

And, like a falcon, which took blood in fighting,

Heart was descending on your gentle hand.

But time did go, grew older, failed to hear,

And only slightly silvering the frames,

Sunrise was catapulting bloody tears

Of late September on the glasses’ panes.

But time did go, grew older. And the crumbled,

Like ice, was thawing and breaking sofa’s silk.

And suddenly you stopped and stayed the silent,

And dream, like echo of a bell, did sink.

I waked. The dawn was, like the autumn, blackened,

The passed by wind was carrying far away,

Like a straw rain running behind a hay-cart,

The crag of birches running the sky’s gray.

—-

Echo

1915

A little nightingale, for a night,

Means what a pail means for wells, fulled.

I’m not sure, that starry skies glide

From songs to the other ones, truly.

But when her night song fuller rings,

The night o’er the song comes else broader.

A root of a tree better brings

When sop strikes into rooter’s borders.

And if there is wordless delight

Of beauty of leafage of birches,

It seems, that a song strikes a hut,

With chain, that is mighty and tortures.

And then sadness drops from the steel,

And then night dissolves into mire,

And all, till the far ploughed fields

Through it from the garden, is spied.

—-

March

The sun is hotter than the top ledge in a steam bath;

The ravine, crazed, is rampaging below.

Spring — that corn-fed, husky milkmaid –

Is busy at her chores with never a letup.

The snow is wasting (pernicious anemia –

See those branching veinlets of impotent blue?)

Yet in the cowbarn life is burbling, steaming,

And the tines of pitchforks simply glow with health.

These days — these days, and these nights also!

With eavesdrop thrumming its tattoos at noon,

With icicles (cachectic!) hanging on to gables,

And with the chattering of rills that never sleep!

All doors are flung open — in stable and in cowbarn;

Pigeons peck at oats fallen in the snow;

And the culprit of all this and its life-begetter–

The pile of manure — is pungent with ozone.

On the Sound Box: Nick Drakes’, “Time Of No Reply”

“If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”

[Marx, On the Choice of a Profession]

– All of our Love to Jules. (Girl, we are with ya!)–

Good friends are moving… Our Deda and Randy along with daughter Bailey are moving south to Medford. Randy has been teaching Pathology at OSHU for the last 7 years, and Deda has been working as a therapist giving physical therapy for kids with CP and other special needs. Bailey is looking forward to the journey south, and being in a new school. She is a promising young artist, heading into 7th grade.

Randy and I made a dump run with old furniture today… We were driving through Portland in the Land Cruiser that he sold me a few years back. We talked about a thousand things, almost in a rush, but yet in that relaxed way that Randy has… It was a great little journey, kinda bittersweet.. Mary and I are heading up to their house early on Tuesday to help a bit as they get their stuff packed and moved.

We love them and will miss them, good hearts and good friends that they are.

PK stopped by, he has just 2 weeks or so before he graduates from the local school of Oriental Medicine. He is pretty excited, but looking forward to a breather before he sits The Board in October. We loves him, we do. Instead of Burning Man, we will be at his graduation ceremonies this September 1st. I am starting to think of ideas for his web page, something not toooo over the top.

I hope this entry finds you well with yourself and the world. Here is to the change that we have all been a part of. Lets bring about the world that we have dreamed about throughout the ages of our sleeping.

One Love,

G

On the Menu

The Links

The Spirit Of A Buried Man

The Poetry of Karl Marx

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The Links:

Mammoths may roam again after 27,000 years

Greenland melt ‘speeding up’

Give a man six inches and he’ll want a …

French cops hunt mysterious ‘panther’

Return of the Bible Code Bozos

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Tales From Poland…

THE SPIRIT OF A BURIED MAN….

A POOR scholar was going by the highway into a town, and found under the walls of the gate the body of a dead man, unburied, trodden by the feet of the passers-by. He had not much in his purse, but willingly gave enough to bury him, that he might not be spat upon and have sticks thrown at him. He performed his devotions over the fresh heaped-up grave, and went on into the world to wander. In an oak wood sleep overpowered him, and when he awoke, he espied with wonderment a bag full of gold. He thanked the unseen beneficent hand, and came to the bank of a large river, where it was necessary to be ferried over. The two ferrymen, observing the bag full of gold, took him into the boat, and just at an eddy took from him the gold and threw him into the water. As the waves carried him away insensible, he by accident clutched a plank, and by its aid floated successfully to the shore. It was not a plank, but the spirit of the buried man, who addressed him in these words: ‘You honoured my remains by burial; I thank you for it. In token of gratitude I will teach you how you can transform yourself into a crow, into a hare, and into a deer.’ Then he taught him the spell. The scholar, when acquainted with the spell, could with ease transform himself into a crow, into a hare, and into a deer. He wandered far, he wandered wide, till he wandered to the court of a mighty king, where he remained as an archer in attendance at the court. This king had a beautiful daughter, but she dwelt on an inaccessible island, surrounded on all sides by the sea. She dwelt in a castle of copper, and possessed a sword such that he who brandished it could conquer the largest army. Enemies had invaded the territory of the king; he needed and desired the victorious sword. But how to obtain it, when nobody had up to that time succeeded in getting on to the lonely island? He therefore made proclamation that whoever should bring the victorious sword from the princess should obtain her hand, and, moreover, should sit upon the throne after him. No one was venturesome enough to attempt it, till the wandering scholar, then an archer attached to the court, stood before the king announcing his readiness to go, and requesting a letter, that on receipt of that token the princess might give up the weapon to him. All men were astonished, and the king entrusted him with a letter to his daughter. He went into the forest, without knowing in the least that another archer attached to the court was dogging his steps. He first transformed himself into a hare, then into a deer, and darted off with haste and speed; he traversed no small distance, till he stood on the shore of the sea. He then transformed himself into a crow, flew across the water of the sea, and didn’t rest till he was on the island. He went into the castle of copper, delivered to the beautiful princess the letter from her father, and requested her to give him the victorious sword. The beautiful princess looked at the archer. He captured her heart at once. She asked inquisitively how he had been able to get to her castle, which was on all sides surrounded by water and knew no human footsteps. Thereupon the archer replied that he knew secret spells by which he could transform himself into a deer, a hare, and a crow. The beautiful princess, therefore, requested the archer to transform himself into a deer before her eyes. When he made himself into a graceful deer, and began to fawn and bound, the princess secretly pulled a tuft of fur from his back. When he transformed himself again into a hare, and bounded with pricked up ears, the princess secretly, pulled a little fur off his back. When he changed himself into a crow and began to fly about in the room, the princess secretly pulled a few feathers from the bird’s wings. She immediately wrote a letter to her father and delivered up the victorious sword. The young scholar flew across the sea in the form of a crow, then ran a great distance in that of a deer, till in the neighbourhood of the wood he bounded as a hare. The treacherous archer was already there in ambush, saw when he changed himself into a hare, and recognised him at once. He drew his bow, let fly the arrow, and killed the hare. He took from him the letter and carried off the sword, went to the castle, delivered to the king the letter and the sword of victory, and demanded at once the fulfilment of the promise that had been made. The king, transported with joy, promised him immediately his daughter’s hand, mounted his horse, and rode boldly against his enemies with the sword. Scarcely had he espied their standards, when he brandished the sword mightily several times, and that towards the four quarters of the world. At every wave of the sword large masses of enemies fell dead on the spot, and others, seized with panic, fled like hares. The king returned joyful with victory, and sent for his beautiful daughter, to give her to wife to the archer who brought the sword. A banquet was prepared. The musicians were already striking up, the whole castle was brilliantly lighted; but the princess sat sorrowful beside the assassin-archer. She knew at once that he was in nowise the man whom she saw in the castle on the island, but she dared not ask her father where the other handsome archer was; she only wept much and secretly: her heart beat for the other.

The poor scholar, in the hare’s skin, lay slain under the oak, lay there a whole year, till one night he felt himself awakened from a mighty sleep, and before him stood the well-known spirit, whose body he had buried. He told him what had happened to him, brought him back to life, and said: ‘To-morrow is the princess’s wedding; hasten, therefore, to the castle without a moment’s delay; she will recognise you; the archer, too, who killed you treacherously, will recognise you.’ The young man sprang up promptly, went to the castle with throbbing heart, and entered the grand saloon, where numerous guests were eating and drinking. The beautiful princess recognised him at once, shrieked with joy, and fainted; and the assassin-archer, the moment he set eyes on him, turned pale and green from fear. Then the young man related the treason and murderous act of the archer, and in order to prove his words, turned himself in presence of all the assembled company into a graceful deer, and began to fawn upon the princess. She placed the tuft of fur pulled off him in the castle on the back of the deer, and the fur immediately grew into its place. Again he transformed himself into a hare, and similarly the piece of fur pulled off, which the princess had kept, grew into its place immediately on contact. All looked on in astonishment till the young man changed himself into a crow. The princess brought out the feathers which she had pulled from its wings in the castle, and the feathers immediately grew into their places. Then the old king commanded the assassin-archer to be put to death. Four horses were led out, all wild and unbroken. He was bound to them by his hands and feet, the horses were started off by the whip, and at one bound they tore the assassin-archer to pieces. The young man obtained the hand of the young and charming princess. The whole castle was in a brilliant blaze of light, they drank, they ate with mirth; and the princess did not weep, for she possessed the husband that she wished for.

__________

Jenny Von Westphalen

I have always maintained that every poet is a revolutionary, but not every revolutionary is a poet… Here you will find, that one man was both. His works resound through time, and though some may discount him, he changed the world out of his sense of love and concern for others. He lived a passionate life, and yet his greatest passion was his life companion and wife. This is dedicated to his wild love, Jenny Von Westphalen, who loved him, and cherished him, following him across Europe as he changed the world…

G

The Poetry of Karl Marx…

The Pale Maiden

A Ballad

The maiden stands so pale,

So silent, withdrawn,

Her sweet angelic soul

Is misery-torn.

Therein can shine no ray,

The waves tumble over;

There, love and pain both play,

Each cheating the other.

Gentle was she, demure,

Devoted to Heaven,

An image ever pure

The Graces had woven.

Then came a noble knight,

A grand charger he rode;

And in his eyes so bright

A sea of love flowed.

Love smote deep in her breast,

But he galloped away,

For battle-triumph athirst;

Naught made him stay.

All peace of mind is flown,

The Heavens have sunk.

The heart, now sorrow’s throne,

Is yearning-drunk.

And when the day is past,

She kneels on the floor,

Before the holy Christ

A-praying once more.

But then upon that form

Another encroaches,

To take her heart by storm,

‘Gainst her self reproaches.

“To me your love is given

For Time unending.

To show your soul to Heaven

Is merely pretending.”

She trembles in her terror

Icy and stark,

She rushes out in horror,

Into the dark.

She wrings her lily-white hands,

The tear-drops start.

“Thus fire the bosom brands

And longing, the heart.

“Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited,

I know it full well.

My soul, once true to God,

Is chosen for Hell.

He was so tall, alas,

Of stature divine.

His eyes so fathomless,

So noble, so fine.

“He never bestowed on me

His glances at all;

Lets me pine hopelessly

Till the end of the Soul.

“Another his arm may press,

May share his pleasure;

Unwitting, he gives me distress

Beyond all measure.

“With my soul willingly,

With my hopes I’d part,

Would he but look towards me

And open his heart.

“How cold must the Heavens be

Where he doesn’t shine,

A land full of misery

And burning with pain.

“But here the surging flood

May deliver me, cooling

The hot fire of heart’s blood,

The bosom’s feeling.”

She leaps with all her might

Into the spray.

Into the cold dark night

She’s carried away.

Her heart, that burning brand,

Is quenched forever;

Her look, that luminous land,

Is clouded over.

Her lips, so sweet and tender,

Are pale and colourless;

Her form, aethereal, slender,

Drifts into nothingness.

And not a withered leaf

Falls from the bough;

Heaven and Earth are deaf,

Won’t wake her now.

By mountain, valley, on

The quiet waves race,

To dash her skeleton

On a rocky place.

The Knight so tall and proud

Embraces his new love,

The cithern sings about

The joys of True Love!

—–

Sonnets to Jenny

I

Take all, take all these songs from me

That Love at your feet humbly lays,

Where, in the Lyre’s full melody,

Soul freely nears in shining rays.

Oh! if Song’s echo potent be

To stir to longing with sweet lays,

To make the pulse throb passionately

That your proud heart sublimely sways,

Then shall I witness from afar

How Victory bears you light along,

Then shall I fight, more bold by far,

Then shall my music soar the higher;

Transformed, more free shall ring my song,

And in sweet woe shall weep my Lyre.

II

To me, no Fame terrestrial

That travels far through land and nation

To hold them thrillingly in thrall

With its far-flung reverberation

Is worth your eyes, when shining full,

Your heart, when warm with exultation,

Or two deep-welling tears that fall,

Wrung from your eyes by song’s emotion.

Gladly I’d breathe my Soul away

In the Lyre’s deep melodious sighs,

And would a very Master die,

Could I the exalted goal attain,

Could I but win the fairest prize —

To soothe in you both joy and pain.

III

Ah! Now these pages forth may fly,

Approach you, trembling, once again,

My spirits lowered utterly

By foolish fears and parting’s pain.

My self-deluding fancies stray

Along the boldest paths in vain;

I cannot win what is most High,

And soon no more hope shall remain.

When I return from distant places

To that dear home, filled with desire,

A spouse holds you in his embraces,

And clasps you proudly, Fairest One.

Then o’er me rolls the lightning’s fire

Of misery and oblivion.

IV

Forgive that, boldly risking scorn

The Soul’s deep yearning to confess,

The singer’s lips must hotly burn

To waft the flames of his distress.

Can I against myself then turn

And lose myself, dumb, comfortless,

The very name of singer spurn,

Not love you, having seen your face?

So high the Soul’s illusions aspire,

O’er me you stand magnificent;

’tis but your tears that I desire,

And that my songs you only enjoyed

To lend them grace and ornament;

Then may they flee into the Void!

—-

The Awakening

I

When your beaming eye breaks

Enraptured and trembling,

Like straying string music

That brooded, that slumbered,

Bound to the lyre,

Up through the veil

Of holiest night,

Then from above glitter

Eternal stars

Lovingly inwards.

II

Trembling, you sink

With heaving breast,

You see unending

Eternal worlds

Above you, below you,

Unattainable, endless,

Floating in dance-trains

Of restless eternity;

An atom, you fall

Through the Universe.

III

Your awakening

Is an endless rising,

Your rising

An endless falling.

IV

When the rippling flame

Of your soul strikes

In its own depths,

Back into the breast,

There emerges unbounded,

Uplifted by spirits,

Borne by sweet-swelling

Magical tones,

The secret of soul

Rising out of the soul’s

Daemonic abyss.

V

Your sinking down

Is an endless rising,

Your endless rising

Is with trembling lips-

The Aether-reddened,

Flaming, eternal

Lovekiss of the Godhead.

____

The Wikipedia.org Entry for Karl…

On The Music Box: Chet Baker/Deep In A Dream…

On The Menu

V for Vox

The Links: Art Links From CJ Barnaby & Political Links

Proemium – Why Can’t We Cope with Ecstasy and Euphoria? – Jonathan Ott

Poetry: On August, The month of Lugh’s Games…

Enjoy,

Gwyllm

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V for Vox….

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.” — V’s introduction to Evey

(In simpler words) Behold! Before you is a humble stage performer, cast, against his will, by the whims of fate, to the roles of both victim and villain. The face you see now is not just some meaningless costume. It is a remnant of the People’s Voice, which has since gone and disappeared. However, this past annoyance stands courageously reborn and has sworn to conquer the evil and corrupt, who promote greed and the violent suppression of free will. The only choice is vengeance; a personal war held as a promise, but not in vain, for the importance and self-evidence of this quest shall one day exonerate the watchful and the righteous. But in truth, this thick soup of words has become too excessive. So, let me simply finish by saying that it’s my very good honor to meet you, and you may call me V.

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The Art Links:

Breaking Space 2 – CJ Barnaby’s Visuals…

Breaking Space 6 – CJ Barnaby’s Work In Motion..

More of CJ Barnabys’ Work, In A Collective Effort: “Hyperpeople…”

The Political Links:

Improvised Explosive Opportunities

Check Out The Comment Section…:The Anatomy of the Foiled Plot in London

As Viewed From The Palestinian World: CNN Presents” slanted propaganda

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Proemium – Why Can’t We Cope with Ecstasy and Euphoria?

– Jonathan Ott

For the sake of freedom and dignity, for the sake of democracy, in the interests of shoring up the battered U.S. economy, it is time to call a truce in the “War on Drugs,” an unconditional cease-fire. We can start by decriminalizing the entheogenic drugs, reclassifying them as prescription medicines as the Swiss government recently did, so that physicians and clinical re-searchers may resume the fruitful exploration of the therapeutic potential of these unique pharmaceuticals, which was so wrongly suspended in the 1960s. These wondrous medicaments, molecular entities which constitute a sort of “crack” in the edifice of materialistic rationality (Hofmann 1980), may be just what the doctor ordered for hypermaterialistic humankind on the threshold of a new millennium… a new millennium which could be the start of a new Golden Age, or the continuation and dreadful culmination of a cataclysmic cultural and biological Holocaust.

The essence of the experience conferred by entheogenic drugs is ecstasy, in the original sense of that overused word- ek-stasis, the “withdrawal of the soul from the body” (Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Edition, p.831), what R. Gordon Wasson called the “disembodied” state:

There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen. (Wasson 1957)

More specifically, it is an ineffable, spiritual state of grace, in which the universe is experienced more as energy than as matter (Ott 1977a); a spiritual, non-materialistic state of being (Hofmann 1988(. It is the heart and essence of shamanism; the archetypal religious experience. In the archaic world, and in the preliterate cultures which have survived in isolation into our time, shamanism and ecstasy represent the epitome of culture, the pinnacle of human achievement (Calvin 1991). The shaman is the cynosure of her or his preliterate tribe, (s)he is the thau-maturge, the psychopompos, the archetypal psychonaut journeying to the Otherworld to intercede with the ancestors or gods on behalf of her or his fellows. In the Age of Entheogens (Wasson 1980), in the archaic world, which still lives on in Amazonia and elsewhere, “every thing that lives is Holy,” as William Blake expressed it, especially the living, breathing, planetary biosphere, of which we are an integral part, and holiest of all are the wondrous entheogens, imbued with spirit power. Modern western culture has no official place for the entheogens precisely because it has no place for ecstasy. Dedicated, as we are, to treating the universe as matter, not as energy or spirit (Blake wrote that “Energy is Eternal Delight”), it embarrasses us to be reminded that our planet is alive and that every place is a sacred place.

Even our western religions with their vestiges of entheogenic plant lore (the ever-present “Tree of Life” with its entheogenic fruit; Ott 1979b; Wasson et al.1986) have forgotten their roots and worship symbols, knowing not the experience to which the symbols refer. As Joseph Campbell paraphrased Jung: “religion is a defense against the experience of God” (Campbell 1988). It is as though people were worshipping the decorations and hardware on a door- the portal to the Otherworld (Schele & Freidel 1990)- having lost the key to open it; having forgotten even that it is a door, and its threshold is meant to be crossed; knowing not what awaits on the Other Side. In the Judeo-Christian heritage, a horrendous duality has been imposed; the Divine is the Other, apart from humankind, which is born in sin. Despite overwhelming scientific and experiential evidence to the contrary, human beings are conceived of as a special creation apart from other animals, and we are enjoined to subdue the world, which is matter. This horrible superstition has led to the despoiling and ruin of our biosphere, and to the crippling neurosis and guilt of modern people (Hofmann 1980). I call this a superstition because when people have direct, personal access to entheogenic, religious experiences, they never conceive of humankind as a separate creation, apart from the rest of the universe. “Every thing that lives is Holy,” us included, and the divine infuses all the creation of which we are an integral part. As the dualistic superstition took root in our ancestors’ minds, their first task was to destroy all aspects of ecstatic, experiential religion from the archaic (“pagan”) world. The destruction of the sanctuary of Eleusis at the end of the fourth century of our era (Mylonas 1961) marked the final downfall of the ancient world in Europe, and for the next millennium the theocratic Catholic Church vigorously persecuted every vestige of ecstatic religion which survived, including revival movements. By the time of the “discovery” of the New World, Europe had been beaten into submission, the “witches” and “heretics” mostly burned, and ecstasy was virtually expunged from the memory of the survivors. For the Catholics, and for the Protestants after them, to experience ecstasy, to have religious experiences, was the most heinous heresy, justifying torture and being burned alive. Is it any wonder that today we have no place for ecstasy?

In the New World, however, the Age of Entheogens and ecstasy lived on, and although in 1620 the Inquisition in Mexico formally declared the use of entheogenic plants like peyotl to be heresy and the Church vigorously extirpated this use and tortured and executed Indian shamans, ecstasy survives there even now. It bears witness to the integrity of the New World Indians that they braved torture and death to continue with their ecstatic religion- they must have been bitterly disappointed in the “placebo sacrament” of the Christian Eucharist, which is a placebo entheogen (Ott 1979b)- and it is largely as a result of the modern rediscovery of the shamanic cult of teonanacatl by R. Gordon Wasson in Mexico in 1955 that the modern use of entheogens, in many respects a revival of ecstatic religion, began. Even though myriad justifications for the modern laws against the entheogens have been offered up, the problem modern societies have with these drugs is fundamentally the same problem the Inquisition had with them, the same problem the early Christians had with the Eleusinian Mysteries- religious rivalry. Since these drugs tend to open people’s eyes and hearts to an experience of the holiness of the universe… yes, enable people to have personal religious experiences without the intercession of a priesthood of the preconditioning of a liturgy, some psychonauts or epoptes will perceive the emptiness and shallowness of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition; even begin to see through the secular governments which use religious symbols to manipulate people; begin to see that by so ruthlessly subduing the earth we are killing the planet and destroying ourselves. A “counterculture” having ecstatic experiences in California is quite as subversive (Einhorn 1970) and threatens the power structures in Sacramento or Washington just as much as the rebellious Albigensians or Cathars, Bogomiles, Fraticelli “de opinione,” Knights Templar and Waldenisians threatened the power structure in Rome and Mediaeval times (Cohn 1975).

Since ecstasy was heretical, euphory, or euphoria (etymologically “bearing well”) was suspect, and the same Protestant ethic which warned that sex should not be enjoyed nor indulged in except for breeding held any ludible use of drugs to be sinful. This approach has been aptly described as “pharmacological Calvinism” (Klerman 1972). There was even a time when any use of drugs was considered to be sinful, when herbalists and midwives were burned at the stake beside the heretics, prayer being accepted as the only legitimate therapy (Ott 1985; Ott 1993b), when even laughter and smiles were the Devil’s handicraft. While some might consider these ideas to be quaint, even antiquated, we must recall that the American government has recently denied syringes to drug users and contraceptives to students- saying:”teenagers should be encouraged to say ‘no’ to sex and illegal drugs” (Anon. 1990)- “just say no” being considered to be the best contraceptive and the way to stem the drug-related spread of AIDS! Although we have at least 106 million alcohol users in the United States (54% of the population over 12 years of age), alcohol as inebriant is still illegal in parts of the U.S., and Puritan ideas regarding the sinful nature of inebriation are still dominant and underlie contemporary prohibition of just about every inebriant but alcohol.

Indeed, euphoria has generally been considered a negative side-effect of drugs, and structure-activity-relationship studies have been conducted with an eye to eliminating this “undesirable” trait! In reference to well-funded studies on alkaloids of opium and their derivatives, W.C. White, Chairman of a Committee on Drug Addiction of the U.S. National Research Council noted:

One of the chemical difficulties in this research has been to provide drugs which would prolong the pain control factor so as to reduce the need for repeated dosage and at the same time to eliminate the fraction responsible for euphoria… If this could be done, the same result might follow as occurred with cocaine… rapid decline in the use of cocaine as an addiction drug after the discovery of novacaine… (Small et al.1938)

Perhaps it was a little early to declare victory in the “War on Cocaine,” but White was correct in noting that, in the case of that drug, it was possible to separate the local-anesthetic “factor” of the cocaine molecule from the stimulating aspect, yielding more potent local anesthetics with limited stimulating or euphoric effects, although it has been claimed that “experienced cocaine users” could not distinguish equivalent intranasal quantities of lidocaine, one of the synthetic local anesthetics, from cocaine (Van Dyke & Byck 1982) and that cocaine’s euphoric allure and addictive power have been greatly exaggerated (Alexander 1990). In this case, however, the medicinal effect to be separated from the psychotropic “side-effect” is a local, peripheral effect. In the case of the opiate narcotic/analgesics, the medicinal effect of analgesia is as rooted in the brain as is the euphoric “side-effect,” and it has been claimed that the drugs are addictive because they so effectively change peripheral sensations from painful to pleasurable; that is, that a non-addicting opiate is impossible, a contradiction in terms Szasz 1974). Indeed, the non-addicting narcotic appears to be the philosophers’ stone of pharmacology, and the world has seen a parade of “non-addicting” (at least in pharmaceutical company propaganda) opiate analgesics, starting with heroin in the nineteenth century, some of which have even been marketed as “cures” for addiction (Escohotado 1989a). Some laypersons conceive of Methadone as being the “cure” for heroin addiction, when in reality it is another potent, addicting narcotic substituted for heroin in “narcotic maintenance” schemes.

Apart from the Puritan anti-pleasure ethic, inebriants like morphine, heroin, and cocaine acquired a bad reputation as a consequence of widespread use in so-called “proprietary” or “patent medicines” (Young 1961). The terms derive from the fact that the U.S. government, in the days before the “Pure Food and Drug Act” of 1906, issued patents to manufacturers of medicines, who were required to disclose the ingredients only to the Patent Office, not to the general public; the patents were on the names, they were actually trademarks (Musto 1973). Many of these products bore names like “consumption [tuberculosis] cure”; infant “colic syrup,” “teething syrup,” “anodyne” etc.; “one-night cough cure” and so forth. Typical products were “Adamson’s Botanic Cough Balsam and “Dr. Brutus Shiloh’s Cure for Consumption,” both of which contained heroin, as did “Dr. James’ Soothing Syrup Cordial” (Drake 1970). While opiates are certainly effective antitussives, and good palliatives to alleviate suffering from any disease, they are useless as therapy for tuberculosis (other than soothing cough) and today we don’t regard the use of drugs to tranquilize infants as appropriate. It has been stated that the proprietary medicinal manufacturers were immorally selling palliatives as tuberculosis cures, and indeed the morality of this is questionable. On the ether hand, in those days antibiotics did not exist, and there was no effective alternative therapy for tuberculosis which people might have taken in lieu of the anodynes, which at least made them feel better and cough less (thus theoretically reducing contagion) while they wasted away and died. Indeed, until the advent of the twentieth century, opium and its derivatives were among the few effective medicines available to physicians, and they indisputably deaden pain and alleviate suffering. No reasonable person advocates the use of palliatives in lieu of effective therapy, now that we have chemotherapies for a great number of the ailments which afflict us. On the other hand, what is wrong with more widespread use of palliatives as an adjunct to curative chemotherapy, pursuant to the truism that the better the patient feels, the sooner (s)he will be afoot again? As William Blake wrote in a letter dated 7 October 1803:

Some say that Happiness is not Good for Mortals, & they ought to be answer’d that Sorrow is not fit for Immortals & is utterly useless to any one; a blight never does good to a tree, & if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.

I say, why not conduct structure-activity relationship studies on euphoriant drugs to determine which drugs are the most euphoric and pleasurable, with the fewest side-effects? This research should be conducted with the same diligence we apply to searching for the best chemotherapy for tuberculosis or any other disease. Why shouldn’t patients have access to the most euphoric and pleasurable drugs to alleviate their suffering and make their therapy as pleasant as possible? As Aldous Huxley mentioned more than 60 years ago (Huxley 1931a):

The way to prevent people from drinking too much alcohol, or becoming addicts to morphine or cocaine, is to give them an efficient but wholesome substitute for these delicious and (in the present imperfect world) necessary poisons. The man who invents such a substance will be counted among the greatest benefactors of suffering humanity.

Instead of pursuing the impossible goal of engineering the euphoria out of pain-killing drugs, we need instead to find the ideal stimulant, the perfect euphoriant (what Huxley called Soma in Brave New World), the optimal entheogen (Huxley’s moksha-medicine of Island). Gottfried Benn proposed just this sort of research, which he characterized as “provoked life,” commenting: “potent brains are not strengthened by milk but alkaloids” (Benn 1963).

In a perverse way, the first steps toward this sort of “psychopharmacological engineering” have already been taken, in military research on performance-enhancing stimulants, in Nazi and CIA interrogation studies, in American research on “non-conventional chemical warfare” and in recent work on steroids to enhance athletic training and performance. Although the first tests of the effects of stimulants on soldiers, utilizing cocaine, were reported in 1883 (Aschenbrandt 1883), it wasn’t until the second World War that stimulants, in this case amphetamines, came to be widely used by soldiers, and much of the comparative research on military applications of stimulants dates from the postwar period (Weiss & Laties 1962). Similarly, while the Nazi physicians at the infamous Dachau concentration camp pioneered the use of entheogens, in that case mescaline, as interrogation aids, it was American researchers participating in the MKULTRA project in the postwar era who really pursued this questionable sort of work. The use of steroids to enhance athletic performance is a recent development, and the former communist government of East Germany especially furthered this work with a secret cash program during the 1980s (Dickman 1991). As many as 1500 scientists, physicians and trainers were involved in the research, which had as one goal the development of highly potent steroid derivatives active in sufficiently low doses as to be undetectable in “antidoping” tests. One success of the project was a psychotropic nasal spray containing a testosterone precursor which would not register on the tests. R Hannemann, a champion swimmer, described the effects as “like a volcanic eruption,” and said its use was mandatory for athletes who wished to compete on the East German team in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. In a recent refinement, Chinese athletes competing in the 1992 Olympics at Barcelona (along with their former East German trainers), were reported to have used a training potion based on birds’ nest and toad skin, which probably contained many active compounds, some of which are controlled drugs (Anon. 1992). It is regrettable that such perverse (but effective applications characterize the infancy of psychopharmacological engineering- we must recall the disproportionate success of East German and Chinese athletes in recent Olympic competition. I will suggest some more positive approaches.

Nobody disputes the widespread utility and need for opiates as pain killers in many branches of medicine. It is high time we abandoned any notion of the non-addicting narcotic, and instead concentrated on finding the drugs which patients like best. We are not interested in the results of crude pharmacological indices of analgesia in rodents, such as the “hotplate method” or “tail flick method,” but in the results of clinical research with human patients- in this case, I think it would be not the least bit difficult to find volunteers for this type of investigation. Since there is a considerable body of empirical testing which has been conducted outside of the laboratory among narcotic habitues, surveys can indicate promising candidates. Heroin has long been regarded to be the favorite drug of narcotics users, and would be a good place to start looking for the optimum narcotic. The contemporary use of Brompton’s Cocktail (an analgesic and stimulating mixture of heroin, cocaine and alcohol) in British hospices for terminal patients is an example of comfort-oriented therapy which ought to be followed in the United States. I think we will find that if non-terminal patients suffer less and feel better, their convalescence times will be reduced.

There is also a demonstrated extra-medical need for stimulants in our society. Examples are pilots and air traffic controllers who must work all night and require constant wakefulness and vigilance, truck and bus drivers, emergency medical workers, police, customs agents and other officials, and of course, military personnel. By accident of history, caffeine in coffee, soft drinks and tea (and in stimulant tablets, such as NoDoz), and nicotine in tobacco products have come to be the accepted stimulants for use in the above-mentioned professions. I must stress, however, that caffeine and nicotine have been anointed as society’s acceptable stimulants by default, since some of the alternatives are controlled substances. and in spite of research showing them to be inferior and unhealthful. Quite a bit of research has been conducted comparing caffeine with amphetamines, and almost invariably, amphetamines turn out to be superior to caffeine. Studies on reaction time under the influence of stimulants have found that in general caffeine has no effect on reaction times whereas amphetamines decrease reaction times (Adler et al. 1950; Lehmann & Csank 1957; Seashore & Ivy 1953; Weiss & Laties 1962). Amphetamines were also able to restore reaction times lengthened by fatigue in sleep-deprived subjects (Seashore & Ivy 1953). Marijuana (see Appendix A) on the other hand lengthens reaction time and impairs performance (Paton & Pertwee 1973b). With regard to steadiness of the hands, caffeine was found to impair steadiness (Adler et al.1950; Hollingworth 1912; Hull 1935; Lehmann & Csank 1957), while amphetamines improved hand steadiness (Adler et al. 1950; Seashore & Ivy 1953; Thornton et al.1939). In various coordination tests, amphetamines were in general more effective than caffeine in improving performance (Weiss & Laties 1962). Summarizing these and other studies, B. Weiss and V.G. Laties of Johns Hopkins University concluded (Weiss & Laties 1962):

A very wide range of behavior (with the notable exception of intellectual tasks) can be enhanced by caffeine and the amphetamines- all the way from putting the shot to monitoring a clock face. Moreover, the superiority of amphetamines over caffeine is unquestionable… Both from the standpoint of physiological and psychological cost, amphetamines and caffeine are rather benign agents. Except for reports of insomnia, the subjective effects of the amphetamines in normal doses are usually favorable. Moreover, no one has ever presented convincing evidence that they impair judgment. Caffeine seems somewhat less benign. Hollingworth’s subjects, after doses of about 240mg and above, reported such symptoms as nervousness, feverishness, irritability, headache, and disturbed sleep. Caffeine also produces significant increase in tremor. At dose levels that clearly enhance performance, the amphetamines seem not only more effective than caffeine, but less costly in terms of side-effects.

Little of this sort of research has been conducted on nicotine, but tobacco smoking, and the resulting increase in carbon monoxide in the blood, is known to degrade night vision (Federal Aviation Regulations 1991; Levin et al.1992; McFarland 1953; McFarland et al.1944). Although caffeine and amphetamine stimulants have not been shown to improve intellectual performance, and caffeine has in fact been shown to degrade academic performance in college students (Gilliland & Andress 1981), there is evidence that some drugs, like arecoline, the stimulating principle of betel nut (Sitaram et al.1978) and Hydergine, an ergot alkaloid preparation (Hindmarch et al.1979) can improve human learning and intellectual performance. Research into so-called “smart drugs” represents a burgeoning new field of psychopharmacological engineering, which merits scientific support (Erlich 1992; Jude 1991; Morgenthaler 1990; Morgenthaler & Dean 1991).

I don’t know about my readers, but I’d feel much safer if my pilot on an all-night intercontinental flight had taken 10mg of methamphetamine before departing, or perhaps an appropriate dose of arecoline hydrobromide, instead of chain-smoking Marlboros and gulping execrable airline coffee all the way. It is significant that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which has conducted research on optimizing performance of astronauts, settled on a NASA-developed “prescription” containing amphetamines for the pilots of the space shuttle orbiter Columbia:

On the maiden flight of the shuttle in April, rookie astronaut Robert Crippen avoided the queasies by dipping into the medical kit for a NASA-developed prescription of Dexedrine, a stimulant, and scopolamine, a tranquilizer. (Rogers 1981)

Never mind that scopolamine has been found to impair human serial learning (Sitaram et al. 1978)… Meanwhile, Soviet cosmonauts were deprived of vision-impairing cigarettes, as Valery Ryumin lamented in his log during a 175-day sojourn in orbit (Bluth 1981):

I am dying for a cigarette. I haven’t had one in three months. And if I hadn’t been kept so busy, I don’t know how I would take it. Would give all those strawberries and sugar of our entire stay in space for just one…

And some people still persist in denying that nicotine is an addicting drug (Levin et al.1992)! In cases where public safety is at stake, we need a drug policy based on research, not on prejudice; based on science, not on default and accidents of history (it is worth noting that caffeine was originally considered for legal control along with cocaine, heroin and morphine by early reformers). The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is guilty of defaulting on its obligations to protect the safety of air travelers, by allowing the use by pilots of inferior stimulants which impair steadiness of pilots’ hands and degrade their night vision.

Some might object… even though caffeine is demonstrably inferior to amphetamines for pilots, everyone knows that amphetamines are “addictive” and hence unsuitable for such use. Such people will be well advised to consult the pharmacological literature on caffeine, which has been thoroughly documented as an addictive drug capable of eliciting tolerance and withdrawal symptoms (Colton et al.1968; Dreisbach & Pfieffer 1943; Goldstein & Kaizer 1969; Goldstein et al.1969; Ott 1985; Ott 1993b; White 1980). The fact that 90% of the U.S. population above 12 years of age are regular caffeine users (plus a sizable portion of the under-twelve set habituated to Coca-Cola and other caffeinated “soft” drinks) is ample testimony to the addictive nature of the drug (Goldstein & Kalant 1990). The 73 million 132-pound-bags of coffee consumed annually in the world correspond to 175 annual doses of caffeine (at 100mg/dose, assuming caffeine content of 2%) in the form of coffee for every man, woman and child in the world (Frankel et al.1992a), not to mention massive use of caffeine in the form of tea, mate, guayusa, yoco, guarana, cola, etc. But… can’t “abuse” of amphetamines lead to “amphetamine psychosis” (Cho 1990; Davis & Schlemmer 1979; Griffith et al.1970)? Yes, excessive amounts of amphetamines an lead to a characteristic psychosis, as can overuse of caffeine lead to “caffeine psychosis” (McManamy & Schube 1936). Although “caffeine psychosis” was first described in a patient who had consumed excessive amounts of caffeine citrate tablets (such as NoDoz) originally prescribed by a physician, the psychosis has also been observed following consumption of large amounts of cola soft drinks (20-25 cans in a day; Shen & D’Souza 1979), the moderate consumption of which is also associated with insomnia and anxiety (Silver 1971). Caffeinism can lead to symptoms virtually “indistinguishable from those of anxiety neurosis” (Greden 1974) and cases of “caffeine-induced delirium” have been reported (Stillner et al.1978). There have even been deaths attributed to coffee overdose in the form of naturopathic enema remedies (Eisele & Reay 1980. Obviously, one doesn’t want one’s pilot drinking a case of Coca-Cola or popping a bottle of NoDoz, any more than one would wish to be on a ‘plane flown by somebody who had injected a quarter of a gram of methamphetamine. The goal of psychopharmacological engineering of stimulants would be to find the optimal doses of the compounds which promote vigilance and wakefulness with a minimum of side effects like hand tremors. It is vital to public safety that such research be conducted, and if drug laws stand in the way, this is yet another example of their adverse impact on public health and on scientific research.

As for medicinal use of entheogens, their widespread use on the black market has given us some guidelines, as have better than two decades of experimental clinical use before their illegalization (see Grinspoon & Bakalar 1979 for a review of this early work.) However, new compounds have continued to be developed and tested (Repke & Ferguson 1982; Repke et al.1977b; Repke et al.1981; Repke et al.1985; Shulgin & Shulgin 1991), and some entheogenic plants or plant extracts such as ayahuasca (see Chapter 4) have begun to be used in modern psychotherapy (Krajick 1992), along with the “empathogen” MDMA (see Chapter 1; Adamson 1985; Adamson & Metzner 1988; Leverant 1986). Therefore new studies are necessary to determine which are the best entheogens for the following uses: 1) general, outpatient psychotherapy for various afflictions (Masters & Houston 1970); 2) “brief” psychotherapy in agonious treatment (Kast 1970); 3) long-lasting analgesia in agonious therapy; 4) marriage counseling; 5) group therapy (Blewett 1970); and 6) in experimental induction of dissociative experiences in psychotherapists as a part of their training. I think we will find that a variety of different entheogens will prove useful in various treatment modalities. For example, smoked, high-dose DMT would probably be the most effective drug for rapid induction of dissociative states in medical training (Bigwood & Ott 1977); LSD is probably the best drug in agonious therapy (Grof & Halifax 1977; and DET or CZ-74 or the plant drug Salvia divinorum (see Chapters 3 and 5 and Appendix A), owing to their short duration, might prove optimal for outpatient psychotherapy (Boszormenyi et al.1959; Leuner & Baer 1965). Preliminary experiments with psilocybine (see Chapter 5) suggested this drug could help cut the recidivism rate of paroled convicts (J. Clark 1970; Leary 1968). Instead of going broke building more prisons for drug offenders, ought we not investigate one illegal drug which might help keep people out of the prisons we already have?

Virtually all of the entheogens, or their natural prototypes, have already proven their worth in induction of ecstatic states in shamanism (Halifax 1979; Halifax 1982; La Barre 1970; La Barre 1972; La Barre 1979a; La Barre 1980a; Rosenbohm 1991; Wasson 1961) and in the catalysis of “religious experiences” (Clark 1969; W.H. Clark 1970; Felice 1936; Heard 1963; Leary 1964; Leary & Alpert 1963; Leary et al.1964; Masters & Houston 1966; Metzner 1968; Paz 1967; Ricks 1963; Watts 1962; Watts 1963; Zaehner 1957; Zaehner 1972; Zinberg 1977). Well-known examples of shamanic use of entheogens, which will be documented thoroughly in this book, are: primordial Siberian shamanic use of the fly-agaric, Amanita muscaria (see Chapter 6); the Mexican shamanic use of teonanacatl, the psilocybian mushrooms (see Chapter 5); pan-Amazonian shamanic use of ayahuasca in South America (see Chapter 4); use of tryptamine-containing snuffs in the Caribbean and Amazonia (see Chapter 3); divinatory use of ergoline alkaloid-containing morning glory seeds in Mexican shamanic healing (see Chapter 2) and North American shamanic use of the peyotl cactus (see Chapter 1). The value of the entheogens to organized religions has been amply demonstrated by the 2000-year survival of the famous Eleusinian Mystery religion of the ancient world (an annual, mass initiation employing an entheogenic potion containing ergoline alkaloids; Wasson et al.1978; see Chapter 2) and modern examples of the “Native American Church” and “The Peyote Way Church of God” employing peyotl as a sacrament (La Barre 1938; La Barre 1970; Mount 1987; Stewart 1987) and South American Christian churches incorporating Daime (ayahuasca) as a sacrament (Henman 1986; Liwszyc et al.1992; Lowy 1987; MacRae 1992; Prance 1970). Perhaps using these historical and modern examples as models will aid us in designing institutions to foster religious experiences in modern human users (Hofmann 1989). There is a place in the modern world both for organized entheogen-based religions and the shamanic model of small-scale cultic or individual use; for group communion and for solitary psychonaut “travels in the universe of the soul” (Gelpke 1981)- not to mention for medicinal use in various treatment modalities.

___________

Poetry: On August, The month of Lugh’s Games…

What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons, as I pass,

Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

– Andrew Marvell, Thoughts in a Garden

—–

And hate the bright stillness of the noon

without wind, without motion.

the only other living thing

a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended

in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone

raised in a landscape short of rain—

the skyline of a hill broken by no more

trees than one can count, the grass,

the empty sky, the wish for water.

– Dana Gioia, California Hills in August

—–

August rushes by like desert rainfall,

A flood of frenzied upheaval,

Expected,

But still catching me unprepared.

Like a matchflame

Bursting on the scene,

Heat and haze of crimson sunsets.

Like a dream

Of moon and dark barely recalled,

A moment,

Shadows caught in a blink.

Like a quick kiss;

One wishes for more

But it suddenly turns to leave,

Dragging summer away.

– Elizabeth Maua Taylor

—-

As in the bread and wine, so it is with me.

Within all forms is locked a record of the past

And a promise of the future.

I ask that you lay your blessings upon me, Ancient Ones,

That this season of waning light

And increasing darkness may not be heavy.

So Mote It Be!

– Faille, Lammas Ritual

—-

O Spirit of the Summertime!

Bring back the roses to the dells;

The swallow from her distant clime,

The honey-bee from drowsy cells.

Bring back the friendship of the sun;

The gilded evenings, calm and late,

When merry children homeward run,

And peeping stars bid lovers wait.

Bring back the singing; and the scent

Of meadowlands at dewy prime;—

Oh, bring again my heart’s content,

Thou Spirit of the Summertime!

– William Allingham

—-

Blessed be the Harvest,

Blessed be the Corn Mother,

Blessed be the Grain God,

For together they nourish both body and soul.

Many blessings I have been given,

I count them now by this bread.

Guardian of the East, I pray for your indulgence.

Hear me now as I request your aid in the cycle of life.

As your winds blow through fields of ripened grain,

Carry loosened seeds upon your back

That they may fall amidst the soil

That is our Mother Earth.

– Lammas Ritual

—-

Whilst August yet wears her golden crown,

Ripening fields lush- bright with promise;

Summer waxes long, then wanes, quietly passing

Her fading green glory on to riotous Autumn.

– Michelle L. Thieme, August’s Crown

_________

Marys’ Auntie Mary died yesterday in Scotland . She was 91 years old. We heard the news yesterday from Cousin Brian down in California. He and his sister Karin (over at her summer place in Turkey), are heading home for the ceremonies and taking care of the final arrangements..

Auntie Mary was an original… She was born July 17, 1915 in Glasgow. She lived most of her life in Glasgow, later moving to East Kilbride. We visited with her off and on when we lived in the UK. She was famous for a wickedly delicious sense of Gaelic humour, and in my case giving bad traffic directions. She once had us going up the M73 in the wrong direction, luckily that Scotch she had plied us with for the last 3 hours had not addled me to the point of not recognizing the fact that the oncoming vehicles were in the same lane…. 8o)

She was full of life, very active and lived on her own until last year. She will be sorely missed by those who knew and loved her.

Our sympathy goes out to Brian and Karin, and to Karin’s children.

The Gartan Lullaby…

Sleep, my son, the red bee hums

The silent twilights fall

The lady from the grey rock comes

To wrap the world in thrall

My darling boy, my pride, my joy

My love and hearts desire

The cricket sings his lullaby

Beside the dying fire

Dusk is drawn and the green mans thorn

Is wrapped in wreaths of fog

The fairies sail their boat till dawn

Across the starry bog

My darling son, the pearl-white moon

Has drained her cup of dew

And weeps to hear the sad, sweet song

I sing, my love, to you

Saturday… The Green and Tumbling World hurdles towards the Equinox, preceeded by the Perseids… Today we have a crowd of Rowan’s friends over for a celebration of the 16th year he has spent on this orb. So far it looks like the season of silly gifts; Tiara, matching Earrings… and more of the same.

Big Thanks to all who have helped out with EarthRites Radio. I think we have achieved our goal, now to see what the procedures are to bring the Beast back alive. So, stay tuned (sorreee) to what is looming on the Radio event horizon.

Well, have a pleasant one, and may this find you in a good place.

Pax,

Gwyllm

—–

On the Grill:

The Links

Invocation: Robin Williamson (Thanks Lois!)

The Delphic Bee – Jonathan Ott

Poetry Robin Williamson

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Links:

Evangelicals urge museum to hide man’s ancestors

George Galloway Eats Skyy Reporter Alive

Winged Beauty…!

Sky-watchers await celestial show

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From Lois in W.VA.. a reminder from Robin Williamson

you that create the diversity of the forms, open to my words

you that divide and multiply it, hear my sounds

I make yield league to you, ancient associates and fellow wanderers

you that move the heart in fur and scale, I join with you

you that sing bright and subtle making shapes that my throat cannot

tell you that harden the horn and make quick the eye

you that run the fast fox and the zigzag fly

you sizeless makers of the mole and whale

aid me and I will aid you

I make a blood pact with you,

you that lift the blossom and the green branch

you who make symmetries more true,

you who consider the angle of your limbs

who dance in slower time, who watch the patterns

you rough coated who eat water, who stretch deep and high

with your green blood my red blood let it be mingled

aid me and I will aid you

I call upon you, you who are unconfined

who have no shape, who are not seen but only in your action

I call upon you, you who have no depth but choose direction

who bring what is willed

that you blow love upon the summers of my loved ones

that you blow summers upon those loves of my love

aid me and I will aid you

I make pact with you, you who are the liquidness of the waters

and the spark of the flame, I call upon you

you who make fertile the soft earth

and guard the growth of the growing things

I make peace with you, you who are the blueness of the blue sky

and the wrath of the storm, I take the cup of deepness with you

earthshakers

and with you the sharp and the hollow hills,

I make reverence to you round wakefulness we call the earth

I make wide eyes to you, you who are awake

every created thing both solid and sleepy or airy light

I weave colours round you

you who will come with me

I will consider it beauty

I will consider it beauty

–”Invocation”

By Robin Williamson

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The Delphic Bee: Bees and toxic honeys as pointers to psychoactive and other medicinal plants. – Jonathan Ott

Economic Botany 52(3):260 -266,1998.

Herein a brief review, with 49 references, of the history and phytochemistry of toxic honeys, in which bees have sequestered secondary compounds naturally occurring in plant nectars (floral and extrafloral). It is hypothesised that such toxic honeys could have served as pointers to psychoactive and other medicinal plants for human beings exploring novel ecosystems, causing such plants to stand out, even against a background of extreme biodiversity. After reviewing various ethnomedicinal uses of toxic honeys, the author suggests that pre-Columbian Yucatecan Mayans intentionally produced a psychactive honey from the shamanic inebriant Turbin corymbosa as a visionary substrate for manufacture of their ritual metheglin, balché.

Tradition holds the famous Delphic Oracle was revealed by a swarm of bees, and the Pythia or divinatory priestesses in Delphi’s temple of Apollo were affectionately called ‘Delphic Bees’, while virgin priestesses of Greek Goddesses like Rhea and Demeter were called melissai, ‘bees’; the hierophants essenes,’king bees’. Great musicians and poets like Pindar were inspired by the Muses, who bestowed the sacred enthusiasm of the logos, sending bees to anoint the poets’ lips with honey (Ransome 1937). Some hold the vatic revelations of the Pythia were stimulated by inhaling visionary vapours of henbane, Hycscyamus niger L., issuing from a fumarole over which the Delphic Bees were suspended, and into which the plant had been cast (Ratsch 1987). The primordial Eurasian entheogenic plant soma/haoma, known in the Vedas as amrta, the potion of immortality, was called ambrosia by the Greeks, and with nektar, the other sustenance of the Immortals, was associated with bees and honey (Roscher 1883). This curious lore may represent a sort of mythological fossil, concealing a hitherto overlooked mechanism of drug discovery. I suggest that immemorial pursuit of wild honey, the only concentrated sweet which occurs naturally, could have led inexorably to the discovery of psychoactive and other toxic honeys, while subsequent observation of bees’ foraging habits could easily have led preliterate shamans/pharmacognosists to single out toxic plant species, even against a background of extreme biodiversity, as in Amazonia.

Xenophon’s 4th century BC Anabasis (IV,VII,20) described psychoactive honey poisoning during the ‘Retreat of the Ten Thousand’ in the ill-starred expedition of Cyprus. Countless soldiers in the greek army encamped near Trebizonde in Asia Minor, ate liberally of honey found there, “lost their senses and vomited” and “resembled drunken persons.” Pliny (XXI,XLV) described madness-inducing honey from this area as meli mœnomenon (‘mad honey’) and also mentioned (XXI,XLVI) a medicinal honey from Crete, miraculum mellis or ‘wondrous honey’ (Halliday 1922; Ransome 1937). The 6th-8th century BC Homeric Hymn to Hermes referred to melissae or bee oracles from Delphi’s Mount Parnassos, who could prophesy only after ingesting meli chloron or ‘green honey’, perhaps a reference to Pliny’s ‘mad honey’. It was conjectured that these bee-oracles were the Pythia, hence psychotropic honey could have been a catalyst for the mantic utterances of the Delphic Bees (Mayor 1995). It is thought the source of meli mœnomenon was Rhodeodendron ponticum L., which contains toxic glucosides called andromedotoxins or grayanotoxins (Krause 1926; Plugge 1891; Wood, et al. 1954) found in other species of Ericaceae, notably Kalmia latifolia L., another plant whose honey has provoked poisonings (Howes 1949; Jones 1947). Grayanotoxins occur in North American toxic honeys, presumably from K.latifolia (Scott, Coldwell, and Wiberg 1971). Frequent honey poisonings in Japan (Kohanawa 1957; Tokuda and Sumita 1925) were traced to ericaceous Tripetalieia paniculata Sieb. Et Zucc., and grayanotoxins were found in these honeys (Tsuchiya et al. 1977). Another toxic glucoside, ericolin, is known from ericaceous Ledum palustre L., and from honeys derived from this plant, which caused human poisonings (Koslova 1957; Palmer-Jones 1965). Both L.palustre and L.hypoleucum Kam. are used as shamanic inebriants by Tungusic tribes of Siberia (Brekhman and Sam 1967); while ‘Labrador Tea’, L. groenlandicum Oeder of the Kwakiutl Indians is said to have narcotic properties (Turner and Bell 1973), pointing to possible content of ericolin and grayanotoxins.

An ‘epidemic’ of honey poisoning in New Zealand was traced to honeydew or excrement of Scolypopa australis Walker, which had fed on leaves of tutu, Coriaria arborea Lindsay, Coriariaceae (Palmer-Jones 1947; Palmer-Jones 1965; Palmer-Jones and White 1949). ‘Mellitoxin’ isolated from the honey was identical to hyaenanchin from euphorbiaceous Hyœnanche globosa Lamb; and a second honey toxin, tutin, is found in C arborea (Clinch and Turner 1968; Palmer-Jones 1965). This leaf-hopper had transformed tutin from tutu leaves into hyænanchin during digestion; the bees making honey from its excrement. Symptoms of this honey poisoning included giddiness, delirium, excitement, suggesting a toxicological relationship to the Ecuadorian shamanic inebriant C.thymifolia Humb. Et Bonpl.ex Willd., shanshi, used to induce sensations of flight (Naranjo 1969). Preliminary investigations of shanshi suggested presence of a toxic glucoside (Naranjo and Naranjo 1961).

Solanaceæ are known both for shamanic inebriants and toxic honeys. Human honey poisonings in Hungary were traced to Atropa Belladonna L. or Datura metel L., and symptoms resembled those of tropane alkaloids scopolomine and hyoscyamine found in both (Hazslinszky 1956). Polish honey poisonings were traced to D. inoxia Miller (=D.meteloides DC.ex Dunal ), and scopolomine found in the honey (Lutomski, Debska and Gorecka 1972). Both scopolomine and atropine were detected in toxic honey from Colombia, of unknown provenience (Barragan de Dominguez 1973). Perhaps Brugmansia species were involved – these Andean shamanic inebriants (Ott 1993) yield toxic honeys (Lockwood 1979). Indole alkaloid gelsemine could account for honey poisoning from loganiaceous Gelsemium sempervirens (L.) Aiton in 19th century South Carolina – symptoms also included giddiness (Kebler 1896).

Brasilian inebriating honey from stingless bee Trigona recurva Smith is called feiticeira (‘sorceress’) or vamo-nos-embora (‘let’s go!’) in “allusion to the reeling, half drunken condition in which one falls after partaking of this honey” (Ihering 1903(4)). Mombuca, Argentine stingless bee (Melipona sp.) honey had “inebriating effects owing to the fact that the little bees harvest it from some flowers with narcotic properties” (Spegazzini 1909). Toxic honeys oreceroch and overecepes occur in Chiquitos, Bolivia; also a delicious honey, omocayoch, said to be as inebriating as liquor (D’Orbigny 1839); while a Paraguayan honey was characterized “as intoxicating as aqua vita” (Schwarz 1948).

So at least three categories of psychoactive phytotoxins-indole and tropane alkaloids and glucosides-occur in toxic honeys, and likewise in nectars from which such are made (Vide: reviews of non-sugar floral-nectar chemistry: Baker 1977; Baker and Baker 1983). Psychoactive cannabinoids occur in bee pollen of marijuana, cannibinaceous Cannabis Sativa L. ( Paris, Boucher and Cosson 1975). Pollen toxins could be sequestered by bees in honeys, as are nectar or honeydew toxins. Cannabis nectar likely also contains cannibinoids, explaining a common belief of marijuana growers, that marijuana honeys are psychotropic.

One of the more recondite Mesoamerican inebriants is the Mayan metheglin balché, a mead of stingless-bee honey, water and bark of leguminous balché, Lonchocarpus violaceus (Jaquin) DC. (Goncalves de Lima, et al. 1977). L. violaceus is psychoactive, owing to content of longistylines (Delle Monache, et al. 1977) or piscicidal rotenone, and Mayaist C. Ratsch proposed other shamanic inebriants, like psilocybin musrooms and ololiuhqui (Turbina corymbosa (L.) Rafinesque. Xtabentún in Mayan) were once added to balché (Ratsch 1992). Ratsch thought feasible my suggestion that xtabentun may have been a balché ingredient, as honey rich in psychotropics ergoline alkaloids of this Convolvulaceæ (Hofmann 1963) – noting that the Lacandon Indians, avid balché consumers know of inebriating honeys. Contemporary shamanic use of T. corymbosa has not been documented among the Mayans, but is all but universal among indigenous groups in Oaxaca, and occurs elsewhere in Mexico (Lipp 1991; Wasson 1963). Besides psychoactivity, ergolines have potent uterotonic effects, and seeds of ololiuhqui/ Xtabentún are also used as ecbolics/oxytocics (to precipitate childbirth) by indigenous groups in Oaxaca (Browner 1985; Ortiz de Montellano and Browner 1985). ‘Virgin honey’ of stingless bees (Trigona sp.) is used in ethnogynecology, noting of Tabentun (Xtabentún, identified as convolvulaceous):”the aromatic honey from its flower is said to be the source of a potent drink” (Roys 1931). Oaxacan Mixe use T.Corymbosa as a shamanic inebriant, and also employ “special honey” from Trigona sp. As an ethnogynacological remedy (Lipp 1991). Clavigero highly praised estabentun honey (Clavigero 1780); entomologist H.F Schwarz attributed xtabentún honey to Melipona beecheii Bennett, noting it was still produced in Yucutan in the 1940′s, being the most esteemed of many ethnomedicinal Mexican honeys (Schwarz 1948). An article on Mayan apiculture described situating hives near natural strands of xtabentún, noting “all their honey comes from this flower. No other is allowed to prosper in the immediate vicinity” (Mediz Bolio 1974). These clues suggest colecab (M.beecheii). T.corymbosa honeys were produced intentionally and much esteemed for constituent ergoline alkaloids conferring uterotonic and psychoactive properties. Such honeys may have been exploited by the Mayans in fabrication of their ritual metheglin balché, endowing the sacred inebriant with the plants legendary and chemically-verified entheogenic properties.

Field work in Yucutan and Quintana Roo revealed xtabentún honey was no longer of economic importance, and traditional Mayan hollow-log apiculture was found sadly degenerated. We failed to obtain samples of xtabentún honey for bioassay and chemical analysis, but attempts to produce it are underway. In Merida and Vallodolid, Yucutan, there survives production of a distilled liqueur from fermented honey, and known as xtabentún! A modern liqueur named for a pre-colombia entheogen, is yet another clue pointing to existence of inebriating T. corymbosa honey, and its probable use as traditional fermentation substrate for the sacred Mayan metheglin balché.

Xtabentún liqueur and conjectured use of psychoactive honey in balché have parallels in the classical and modern worlds. Pliny noted meli mænomenon of Asia Minor was made into a mead or metheglin, and toxic Ericaceæ honey was traditionally added to alcholic beverages in the Caucasus, to enhance their inebriating properties; while such toxic honey, deli bal, is taken in Turkey as a tonic in milk. Deli bal was an important export from this region in the 18th century, widely used to potentiate liquors in Europe – called miel fou, ‘crazy honey’ in France (Mayor 1995). “very intoxicating” honey, likely from spp. (mountain laurel) was used in 18th century New Jersey to ‘spike’ liquor sold under the appropriate trade name ‘Metheglin’ (Jomes 1947;Kebler 1896)

Toxic honeys are not unusual (I have intentionally ignored the literature on non-psychoactive plant (and industrial) toxins sequestered in honeys), nor are accidental inebriations by psychoactive honeys exceptional. In satisfying the universal human “sweet tooth” during human explorations of any given ecosystems, foragers would encounter psychoactive and other toxic honeys. Having consumed such honeys and experienced psychoactive or other medicinal properties of their contained alkaloids and allied phytochemicals, it would require no special technology nor great imagination to follow the bees to the nectar source, thereby easily finding valuable plants. It has been suggested that ethnomedicinal and culinary plants were discovered by a systematic process of ingesting all species, in the eternal search for food. Some have questioned whether such an extensive bioassay program were feasible in areas of extraordinarily high biodiversity, such as Amazonia, thought to be home to at least 80 000 species of higher plants (Schultes 1988)! Apart from observation of the effects of bioactive plants on domestic wild animals, serendipitous encounters with phytotoxins in honeys could have served as highly specific and efficient pointers to medicinal, especially psychoactive, plants, which would thus stand out in deep relief, even against a backdrop of extreme biodiversity.

There is evidence that in the case of T.corymbosa among the Yucatecan Mayans, a toxic honey may have attained exalted status as a preferred method of ingesting a psychoactive plant, even being produced intentionally. These Mayans came to worship bee-gods like Ah-Muzen-Cab,’Great Lord Bee’, who can be seen descending even today above the entrances to pyramid-top temples at Tulúm and Coba, his ancestral home. Much as we sweeten our bitter medicines with sugary syrups, bees collecting toxic nectars from flowers might naturally have prepared and concentrated a sweetened drug for the delectation of awed human votaries of Ah-Muzen-Cab and his industrious, heavenly host.

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Lyrics/Poetry: Robin Williamson

Strings in the earth and the air

make music sweet

strings by the river

where the willows meet

there’s music along the river

for love wanders there

pale flowers on his mantle

dark leaves on his hair

all softly straying

with head to the music bent

and fingers playing

upon an instrument

twilight turns from amethyst

to deep and deeper blue

lamps light with a pale green glow

the trees of the avenue

the old piano plays an air

sedate and slow and gay

she bends upon the yellow keys

her head inclines this way

shy thoughts and grave wide eyes

and hands that wander as they list

twilight turns a darker blue

with lights of amethyst.

—-

The Dancing of the Lord of Weir

In the third part of the year

when men begin to gather fuel against the

coming cold

hear hoover ring hard on frosty ground

begins our song

for centuries we lived alone high on the moors

herding the deer for milk and cheese for leather

and horn

humans came seldom nigh

for we with our spells held them at bay

and they with gifts of wine and grain did

honour us

returning at evening from the great mountains

out red hoods ring with bells lightly we run

until before our own green hill

there we did stand

she is stolen

she is snatched away

through watery meads straying our lovely

daughter

she of the wild eyes

she of the wild hair

snatched up to the saddle of the lord of Weir

who has his castle high upon a crag

a league away

upon the horse of air at once we rode

to where Weir’s castle lifts like a crippled claw

into the moon

and taking form of minstrels brightly clad

we paced upon white ponies to the gate

and rang thereon

“we come to sing unto my lord of Weir

a merry song.”

into his sorry hall we stepped

where was our daughter bound near his chair

“come play a measure!”

“sir at once we will!”

and we began to sing and play

to lightly dance in rings and faster turn

no man within that hall could keep his seat

but needs must dance and leap

against his will

this was the way we danced them to the door

and sent them on their way into the world

where they will leap amain

till they think one kind thought

for all I know they may be dancing still

while we returned with our own

into our hall

and entering in

made fast

the grassy door.

—-

The Water Song

Water, water

See the water flow

Glancing, dancing

See the water flow

Wizard of changes

Teach me the lesson of flowing

Dark and silvery

Mother of life

Water. water

Holy mystery

Heavens daughter

Wizard of changes

Teach me the lesson of flowing

God made a song

When the world was new

Waters laughter

Sings it through

Wizard of changes

Water. water, water

—-

Queen of Love

A strong power calls from the left hand

Across the waters deep

a strong power calls from the left hand

let all things sleep or weep

oh the queen of love, you have unwove my eyes

and my heart will not sleep

the eye would sleep but the mind would rise

I must needs walk down God’s eyebrows

and along the street of his eyes

look for me and you will see me in my red cloak

swimming determined

as God’s blood flows

creatures of grief you beg from the thief

I will not carry home your sacks of sorrow

but I will pay the fiddler good silver if he smiles

pray God he see tomorrow

and the fine fine girls that are into it

and my eyes with salt water swim

and we disputing with a brittle gaiety

upon the world’s rim

if I sought to love you with my body

it would be with a bent back

unto the day of doom

Oh the Queen of Love

I am in her heart

she is in my room

and together alone we clasp hands

and in each other’s eyes walk the endless shore

and below I have my duty to perform in the song

and that that I was

you will see it no more

the snow is on the hills of my heart

and to speak is to die

the men at arms do seek to mark me

and the monks raise hue and cry

seek me in vain on Golgotha

or in fear’s hollow

for the way I take today

only the true may follow

the ancestors in stone armour

calling for loyalty untrue

seek to make a zigzag of the arrow’s flight

it is so swaddled in the bands of form

but I am girdled with the storm

and cloaked with the night

I am not to be seen or found

save only in what I cause

standing outside on the inside outside

perfectingness and flaws

how will I say where I end

or where you begin

how will I say, what shall I play

shall it be you or the wild wind

as Pan with the unsane eyes

or with the wild horns

or when I am crowned with the paper crown

or with the crown of thorns

a strong power compels distortion from the right hand

fleece to the grey wolves

fangs to the grey sheep

but the Queen of Love she strokes

my body alive, that I do not sleep.

The doctor brews potions and pills

to open his own front door

and the locksmith makes strong bolts

to bar his gates to every new breeze that blows

shall I now put lion’s ears upon my ears

hear every sound as a roar

shall I now put mouse’s eyes upon my eyes

gauge the moon for size against my paw

while the Queen of Love

she sings to me

from above and beyond the world

and I observe my mind

it is playing ignorant boy

while at her feet I am curled

and I remember all female movements so well

of such a form to bring much joy and ease much care

to perfume and let fall the coloured gown

and to let down the curling hair.

But now I play seed thrower

and I will play three-legged man

I will play dream weaver and day bringer

and catch as catch can

While the Queen of Love

she swims like a silver dove in my mind’s room

and my body sleepwalks down the road

in a warm dark swoon…

—-

A Blessing on your day!