“I do not suggest that St. John of Patmos ate mushrooms in
order to write the Book of Revelations. Yet the succession of images in his
Vision, so clearly seen but such phantasmagoria, means for me that he was in
the same state as on be-mushroomed. Nor do I suggest for a moment that William
Blake knew the mushroom when he wrote this of the clarity of vision…” page 40,
Carl A. P, Ruck, in Sacred Mushrooms:
Secrets of Eleusis
I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it.
It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach
turned sour. Revelations 10:10, St. John
A dragon red and hidden Harlot which John in Patmos saw
From Milton,
William Blake
In 1954, Aldous Huxley published
The Doors of Perception, a book about
his experience using mescaline, the active psychotropic in peyote.
He took the title from William Blake’s, “The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
In the
1960’s the psychedelic rock band The Doors, would take their name from the same
quote. The full quote reads,” If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite/For man has closed himself up
till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern,” (page93).
If Aldous Huxley and Jim Morrison used
psychoactive substances to open these doors of perception, it would seem likely
that William Blake did as well.
If one never looked at the art of William Blake or knew of his
background in Gnosticism, it is possible to come to the conclusion that he was
simple inspired. However, If one takes a closer look at his work, in
conjunction with such works as John M. Allegro’s,
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, or Jan Irving and Andrew R
Astrotheology and Shamanism, or my
Hacking into Heaven: Mushrooms and the Bible,
it should be obvious that William Blake knew the source of the Bible to be the
mushroom,
Amanita muscaria more commonly
referred to as fly agaric; and that he consumed them to become inspired. In
this work, I will analyze the engravings and poetry of William Blake to
demonstrate beyond a doubt that he used mushrooms, and incorporated them into
his art, in fact emulating the Bible.
Deconstructing a
myth is a difficult task, for it involves tearing apart something sacred and rebuilding
it into something more realistic; it is akin to ripping the wings off of an
angel to bring the image back down to earth.
For example, part of the William Blake myth involves Blake having a
vision of god at the age of four. How
can one confirm of deny this happened? How at four years old, do you have the
linguistic ability to express a vision of god? Unless of course, Blake relates
the story later in life to give credence to the narrative of his poetic
vision. This story comes to us from
Blake’s wife, Katharine, and is recounted in the Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, “You
know dear, the first time you saw god was when you were four years old, and he
put his head to the widow, and set you a screaming” (77). Furthermore, this comes from a conversation
Robinson had with Katherine in 1827, after Blake’s death. Also, while Blake had some recognition during
his own time, he was not published, and most of his work was in private
collections.
Alexander
Gilchrist wrote The Life of William Blake
in 1863, nearly 40 years after Blake’s death.
While it provides the narrative of Blake’s life, it does so by relying
on dated information given to Gilchrist by Blake’s surviving friends. To really understand Blake’s work, it is more
important to look at who inspired his style and philosophies: Jacob Boehm and
Emmanuel Swedenborg. Both Boehm and
Swedenborg attempted to reinterpret the Bible, and created their own
methodology for their exegeses. Both men
came to the conclusion that the Bible was a sort of code in which the truth was
hidden. Consider the following quote
from Boehm’s Clavis :
10. Reason will stumble, when it sees heathenish terms and
words used in the explanation of natural things, supposing we should use none
but scripture phrase (or words borrowed from the Bible); but such words will
not always ply and square themselves to the fundamental exposition of the
properties of nature, neither can a man express the ground with them: also the
wise heathen and Jews have hidden the deep ground of nature under such words,
as having well understood that the knowledge of nature is not for every one,
but it belongs to those only, whom God by nature has chosen for it.
And consider a similar quote from Swedenborg’s The White Horse:
7. The Word is not understood, except by those who are
enlightened. The human rational faculty cannot comprehend Divine, nor even
spiritual things, unless it be enlightened by the Lord (n. 2196, 2203, 2209,
2654). Thus they only who are enlightened comprehend the Word (n. 10323). The
Lord enables those who are enlightened to understand truths, and to discern
those things which appear to contradict each other.
Both excerpts
suggest that the actual words of the Bible are not to be taken literally, but
interpreted. Furthermore, Boehme
suggests that only those chosen by god will receive insight, while Swedenborg
suggests that only the enlightened will understand these spiritual truths.
Apparently, Boehme and Swedenborg feel they are in possession of this faculty
to discern the truth of the word, but where did they get this divine knowledge?
How where they selected?
Secret societies
abounded in medieval Europe, and it has been suggested by many that the secrets
of the Divine mystery of Jesus Christ have been passed down through secret
societies and the founders of these societies, especially through the
alchemical works of Paracelsus and secret society of Freemasonry. Rather than try to prove that William Blake
lived across the street from a Masonic temple, and was a freemason, as well as
those who inspired him, I would rather focus on the work of Blake to demonstrate
the themes he includes come from Freemasonry and alchemy. It was through these
secret societies that certain members were initiated in into the inner circle
and given the true doctrine of the world’s great religions; civilization
evolved out of mushroom use, more specifically the consumption of Amanita
muscaria.
In 1957, the
western world was introduced to magic mushrooms via Life magazine, in an
article about R. Gordon Wasson’s discovery of the magic mushroom in Mexico. The
ancient mushroom ritual was still being practiced by the Mazatec Indians. Wasson followed up the article with a
self-published book, Mushrooms Russia and History. And in 1969, he self-published another book, Soma: The Divine Mushroom of Immortality,
which consequently was sold out before it was even published. Only a year later, John M. Allegro would
publish his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, claiming that the god the
ancient Israelites was the Amanita muscaria mushroom. It wasn’t until 2001, that Dan Merkur
published, The Mystery of Manna,
which he suggested ergot rather than amanita.
And in 2002, Clark Heinrich published, Magic Mushrooms in Religion and
Alchemy, in which he suggests that the Amanita muscaria mushrooms was behind
both religion and alchemy. Then in 2006,
Jan Irving and Andrew Rutajit published, Astrotheology
and Shamanism: Unveiling the Law of Duality in Christianity and Other Religions,
which reasserted the Amanita muscaria
theory. Most recently, I published my
own, Hacking into Heaven: Mushrooms and
the Bible, which I too assert that the Bible is based on the psychoactive
mushroom Amanita muscaria. You can download a PDF copy by clicking on the photo of the cover on sidebar.
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