THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY An ongoing project Philip Conover Lazo
THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY An ongoing project by Philip Conover Lazo
PART I: THE CONCEPT OF PSYCHOHISTORY
The concept of psychohistory refers to a series of reflections on the nature of History that have been taking place since antiquity inspired first by philosophy and ethics and in more recent times by psychology and anthropology. The Republic of Plato, The Politics of Aristotle, The philosophy of Confucius, The Utopia of Thomas More and Machiavelli’s The Prince are examples of these ideas.
From the XX century onwards the development of psychology and psychoanalysis awoke a number of interdisciplinary reflections that when combined with certain philosophical and ethical considerations arising from a reflection on the special brutality and general degradation in the decline of politics that lead into genocide and war during the XX century, have inspired certain thinkers in the necessity of expanding historical analysis with an interdisciplinary approach. And here the development of psychoanalysis has been crucial as well as a knowledge of anthropology and prehistory.
It is in order to save ourselves from ourselves that such an interdisciplinary approach has been necessary. Self-knowledge was the original purpose of philosophy as well as the very origin of ethics. From Pleistocene times the use of entheogenic plants led to the refinement of language. Expanded awareness necessitated clear elocution. The discovery of formal relationships between the elements of nature led to new discoveries, to practical applications of these discoveries which in turn led to new language, to the elaboration of new words to describe new functions.
Such is psychohistory, it is a new tool.
THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY
The purpose of the method of psychohistory is to organize certain insights derived from the association of historical events, or even current political events, with their phenomenological relation in time-space and known psychological realities. And as we mention phenomenology we should define what phenomenological logic is.
'Phenomenological origin' as Edmund Husserl defined it in his Pure Phenomenology and Investigations in Logicrefers to Noema (noumena as in Kant), nous or noos, mind in Greek, which is a thing in itself, extant in time-space, independent of the human mind, different from perception or a psychological event, or from phenomena as an object described by man.
Then, to approximate Psychohistorical Noumena, we would have to use an interdisciplinary approach. As an example we shall take a Noumena from contemporary politics: gun control.
What would a gun be? In terms of psychohistorical duration in time-space (from Brentano’s Psychology of Intentionality and Bergson’s concept of historical duration) a gun is an extension of the arm, a continuation of the historical function of the sword and the poignard. But like them a gun is in psychological terms an unconscious extension of the male penis and with it men define territoriality and power. Here we should note that territoriality is an anthropological concept and that power is a political idea. So that in psychohistorical terms a gun becomes a phallocratic tool that expresses territoriality and power.
As in the sphere of individuals so in the domain of nations: guns are used to assert supremacy and power. Internationally, guns, in terms of world culture (following Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message) and the very existence of arms, signify war. And here is a case in point: Guns are a Noumena, a thing in themselves, independent of men, they ARE war. Or rather
they are the expression of “I will punish you if you do not do as I want” (“A child is being punished” in On Psychopathology from Sigmund Freud; Wilhelm Stekel: Sadism and Masochism). Also in the psychopathology of violent crime involving guns and murder there is a strong element of repressed homosexuality as in gang warfare (e.g. la Mara Salvatrucha, the brownshirts of Eric Rohm vs. Himmler’s Gestapo or the tragic murder in Kansas described by Truman Capote in his novel In Cold Blood, a clear case of repressed homosexuality between the two murderers).
So that gun control to the ultraconservatives in the United States signifies castration. This is why you see such hysterical reactions to the possibility that a law banning guns might literally do away with their penises (see, e.g., Piers Morgan’s interview with an anti-gun control fanatic in a recent CNN television program).1 The whole question of gun control is a psychohistorical problem that has tremendous implications for the future welfare of humanity.
This reaction to gun control in the United States is part of the ‘fort apache’ complex, another psychohistorical phenomenon that has to do with collective paranoia and supremacist phallocracy in which large sectors of the American public see themselves threatened by the outside world, particularly by the United Nations and ‘hostile’ countries that allegedly possess atomic bombs. Also part of this syndrome is the fear of certain conservative elements of the population of a threat by the ‘native’ populations of the world. This syndrome contains a certain element of historical guilt and sexual domination in which the threat of the possession of their women or even of themselves by the ‘native populations' they have harmed in the past is an unconscious psychological possibility; so that it is particularly offensive and threatening that a ‘black man’, President Obama, wants to take away their guns.
1
Interview available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtyKofFih8Y (last visit, February 23, 2013).
PART TWO: WAR AFTER WAR, April 22, 2013
The Boston Marathon… Two Chechen brothers, a little American boy, a Chinese girl, an American girl and many more victims… A psychohistorical tragedy with world reverberations.
Reverberations of the War in Chechnya?
The intentionality of murderers is aleatory, they might take out their anger on anyone, the contagiousness of violence is a shock wave that stays in space around us, no one is immune to it, it saddens almost everyone. The etiology of violence is multiple, but perhaps its most pernicious cause is in the alteration of personality as a perversion. Violence can be induced as the ideology of hatred. Who perverts the most, the politician full of hatred or the religious ideologue who transfers his own hatred to the minds of the young? Where does responsibility lie?
Violence generates more violence, and guns and bombs are its agents. Guns and bombs are not merely inanimate objects. The tremendous energy needed to manufacture a single gun is inherent in it. It is potential energy and we transfer our psychological projections to them. In moments of great stress the very availability of guns can tip the balance from ire to tragedy. Even a knife can become a deadly weapon any moment. Just as you don’t leave a sharp knife around children you should not exhibit machine guns in store racks. What is the purpose of this, are you commercializing paranoia? It is a dangerous, obscene and irresponsible commerce that should be outlawed.
It is the sickness in culture, a culture of violence, a cult of violence. A supremacist culture that imposes its power through the cult of violence; be it class warfare or hatred of pacifists, or as in the case of religious hatred of infidels (the Chechen brothers)… They all lead to the same thing: WAR. Nothing good has come out of hatred, notwithstanding the platitudes of the purveyors of hatred, the golden rule is still valid: ‘Do unto others as you would wish to be done unto you’. It still stands today: It is the discipline of compassion, self- control and moderation.
The culture of violence should not be encouraged. It starts at home with the toleration of ire and the adulation of violence and the cult of guns. A supremacist culture requires this. The nations of the world united in their international forums should not permit this. Peace should be the culture of the World, no matter how utopian it sounds today, it is the way to universal consciousness and enlightenment.
The Method of Psychohistory
The diversity of cultures and of historical experience, of varied and contrasting anthropological environments cannot be denied. Humanity speaks different languages which are learning processes, implanted on a biological foundation, in vocal cords that produce different sounds.
The Chinese civilization, the Egyptian civilization and Mayan culture are three very clear examples of differentiated psychohistorical experiences evolved from the Pleistocene and later Neolithic cultures. There is a continuity of human evolution in Northern China from Pekin man to the earliest cultures of the Yellow River rooted to the soft, rich loess of the land. The migration of the people of the Sahara at the end of the Mesolithic Period into the fertile valley of the Nile, the spread of Olmec civilization from its central core in the Gulf Coast of Mexico into the high valleys of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guatemala was a learning process in new climates and environments, also a linguistic achievement evidenced in hieroglyphs and architecture.
This is dynamic human psychic evolution molded by historical events: The Shang Dynasty, the unification of Egypt by Nemes, the arrival of the Teotihuacan ambassador, Fire-is-born at Tikal, (378 A.D.) , were all linguistic achievements of the first order. The Spanish Conquest of Mexico and the Norman Conquest of England were intense formative periods that produced entirely new cultures from what had been before, and this is a true psychohistorical event, in the anvil of the collective mind, suffering profound transformation.
The structural logic of language studied by philology and linguistics corresponds to the first mnemonic effort implicit in early formative poetry like the charming Canterbury Tales of Chaucer or the delicious poetry of Sor Juana InĂŠs de la Cruz. In a way these works of art reveal traces of a broad psychohistorical synthesis that is operating in time and still
continues. This process testifies the emergence of a cultural genotype which is in itself a psychohistorical noumena.
This is the process of Psychohistory, its Rosetta Stone, its transcultural complexities deciphered reveal our provenance as a people and help us recover our historical memory from the ashes of History, sometimes violent and full of grief, sometimes sweet and beautiful, constructive‌ into the components of our national psyches, ethnical and cultural differences, Islamic or Christian; Western or Oriental.
The Noosphere
The Noosphere is the last of telluric layers after the atmosphere and the biosphere, visualized by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It is a useful concept for Psychohistory because it describes the collective biological and psychic energy generated by mankind throughout its process of evolution and history and like the other layers it is subjected to its own dynamics in time-space and duration. It forms a corona with the other telluric layers of planetary existence.
This layer, The Noosphere, (from Greek: sphaira, sphere; noos, mind; thus, sphere of the mind), resonates and vibrates with creativity or destruction depending on the irrational moods of the species. It also reacts to certain events that alter its composition like great natural catastrophes or cosmic events.
Before we come to a description of contemporary psychohistorical reality and its multiple manifestations, it would be helpful to trace the psychohistorical events that have most contributed to the formation of the Noosphere. To recuperate the Historical Memory of what was; to see again the mysterious panorama of the great megalithic centers at the end of the Pleistocene‌ to contemplate again the stupendous cosmic tragedy of the fall of The Great Asteroid that fractured the Earth and drew forth magma from Iceland to Puerto Rico and changed the face of the Earth forever. This we will designate The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event or GPTE from its initials.
Paleoclimatology
Terminations: (Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Arqueology, p. 53) Rapid Ice Retreat. Each corresponds to a major rise in sea level causing a Marine Transgression in low laying coastal areas. The last mayor cold period - The Full Glacial or Pleniglacial, lasted from about 23 000 to 14 000 BP. The last 10 000 years from 8000 BP are known as The Post Glacial or Holocene.
The Megalithic Cultures of the Late Pleistocene
Before we come to The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event we would do well to describe The Megalithic Cultures of The Late Pleistocene. In media res, we come to Gobekli Tepe, a most extraordinary archeological site in south eastern Turkey that has completely revolutionized our understanding of Prehistory, for no hunter gatherers constructed this site at least they were no simple hunter gatherers as previously understood.
The people who built Gobekli Tepe inhabited a different frame of mind from the simple hunter gatherers. These people were motivated by cultural phenomena of a different order. To begin with they possessed a remarkable idea of architecture in stone with a striking sense of esthetics quite out of place in a conventional conception of late Pleistocene civilizations. Those extraordinary pillars in the shape of a mushroom are very abstract and atemporal in conception, they could have been designed by Inhotep for The Temple complex at Sakkara (4778 BP) or by Pier Luigi Nervi in his Palazzetto dello Sport (1957). They are a 13 000 year old mystery of a culture we cannot fully comprehend. Entheogenic rites took place there under those mushroom shaped columns.
Gobekli Tepe, images from National Geographic (Historia NG No. 104).
King Zoser's tomb, Sakkara. Images from K. Lange and M. Hirmer, Egypt: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, in Three Thousand Years (Phaidon Press, 1957)
Pier Luigi Nervi, Palazzetto dello Sport, Rome
So that these elegant megalithic structures are 2000 years older than Katal Huyuk, the oldest known Neolithic site. Gobekli Tepe, is nearly 13 000 years old. Up to now twenty similar round structures have been found and many more are believed to be awaiting excavation, which in the words of the head of the German archeological team working at the site, could take more than fifty years.
But we cannot wait fifty years, we must reach some conclusions now given the unsettled nature of geopolitical circumstances. So we must draw intelligent conclusions and carry on with our reconstruction of Prehistory over and beyond the passivity and political
procrastination of the scientific community on this subject, or is it the desire of the western establishment to suppress anything that threatens the validity of the Judeo-Christian tradition? There will always be exceptions, and we wish to remember here the great names in recent Middle Eastern archeology: James Mellaart and Kathleen Kenyon.
The problem of financing scientific research is paramount; it is important to establish priorities. For instance, some of the money spent in finding the Titanic, then filming the sinking of that emblematic boat overloaded with atavism and full of dire catastrophe, and now comes the making of a replica, a new vehicle of morbidity for the pampered and the idle in this latter age of decadence in the West, to tempt again the fates. Some of that money could be well spent in exploring and photographing the Pyramids of Guanahacabibes Peninsula that lie a mere 600 meters below the surface of the sea.
The point that we wish to make is one that we feel has been clearly established by submarine archeology in recent times: that there was a worldwide Megalithic Civilization in the late Pleistocene that came abruptly to an end on June 5, 10498 BP. We accept Otto Muck’s date, derived from a careful analysis of a large spectrum of scientific evidence for this terminal event, a veritable Noumena of Psychohistory, carefully remembered in the tradition of Maya astronomers. It is the oldest Maya date extant to be found at the Temple of the Sun in Palenque.
Other late Pleistocene sites include: several in the Bahamas Bank consisting of interminable megalithic walls with groups of pyramids; specially the pyramids on the submarine plain off the coast of the Guanahacabibes Peninsula in western Cuba. To these we should add the two submarine cities in the Gulf of Cambay near the modern city of Dwarka; the underwater archeological site in Mahabalipuran in southeast India and the now famous underwater pyramid of Yonaguni Island in the Sea of Japan. There are also many megalithic sites around the Mediterranean whose dating should be revised. These include the megaliths in Tartessos Spain; the Island of Malta, Baalbek in Lebanon and Nevali Cori and Cayonu in Turkey. There should be many more sites on the submarine plains bordering the present coast lines of the north Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Oceans; the result of Glacial Terminations and Marine Transgressions; of eustatic and isostatic processes in the level of the sea and of tectonic subsidence.
So that near 1 p.m. June 5, 10 498 BP, a great asteroid (“Asteroid A”), possibly ten kilometers in diameter, came in from the Northwest, travelling much faster than the Earth herself, penetrated the Earth’s atmosphere, caught fire, exploded, broke in half and its two larger segments penetrated the Atlantic Ocean a few miles north of the Island of Puerto
Rico. These two huge masses of iron ore, like two cosmic missiles, fractured the Earth’s crust all the way to Iceland and precipitated a cataclysmic eruption of lava all along the line of fracture accompanied by a 500 meter high tsunami that swept the coasts of the north Atlantic and all the former Islands that existed in that Ocean.
We should visualize that late Pleistocene world before its final day, very different from our own in terms of geography and climate. For instance, the peninsulas of Florida and of Yucatan were twice as large as they are today, the Bahamas Bank was one big island the size of Yucatan and around the Azores there was probably a big island that sank. Hesitant England was then connected to Europe by a large sea side plain through which flowed the Thames, a longer Rhine and Loire. Also on the other side of the Atlantic the Hudson and The Delaware continued to flow along broader sea side plains before they emptied into the Atlantic Ocean opposite the Island of Atlantis, lost in memory until Plato rescued her, had already given her name to that surrounding Ocean. It was altogether a striking and beautiful world holding a veritable kaleidoscope of cultures that we cannot even begin to imagine let alone describe‌ But we do have the image of Gobekli Tepe even though that place flourished some two thousand years before the cosmic event. A few objects have emerged from the two sunken cities near Dwarka in the Bay of Cambay that show a level of culture similar to that of Sumer. The sonar photographs of the architectural complex at Guanahanacabibes shows signs of having been built on platforms similar to those in Olmec architecture as in La Venta and San Lorenzo. But without proper submarine archeological surveys we cannot have a more developed understanding of this very important site like we might have at Gobekli Tepe if investigations continue.
There have been interesting observations made about the nature of this world wide civilization. Graham Hancock has noted in a recent interview that this Pleistocene Civilization mapped the then existing world. There is a map, the Piri Reis map, formerly in the possession of a Turkish admiral of that name who lived in the early XVI century. A map that shows the Antarctic continent clearly represented as two large bodies of land separated by a straight. This knowledge was not arrived at until the middle of the XX century. We surmise that the Piri Reis Map is a copy of older maps that found their way to Constantinople from Alexandria where such knowledge was miraculously preserved from a time in the IX millennium before the present when the Antarctic was free of ice and someone cartographed the whole continent.
Plato vindicated, we should consider the terrific psychohistorical shock delivered by Asteroid A on the collective conscience and memory of mankind. We cannot here analyze all the geological, oceanographic and paleoclimatological evidence there is on the impact
produced by Asteroid A. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) and its Russian equivalent have all the data collected by The Glomar Challenger and The Academician Petrovsky, the oceanographic vessels that conducted extensive research in the North Atlantic during the 1970’s. This data has not been fully reported and interpreted. Here we are concerned with the impact of Asteroid A on the Noosphere and its reverberation to this day.
The resistance applied on this point by the collective memory of mankind which does not wish to remember anything about Asteroid A explains among other things, the 2300 year old controversy between Atlantologists and their detractors. But beyond literature lies the region of the unconscious as any poet worth his salt well knows. In what varied ways did Asteroid A affect the planet Earth and the History of Mankind? The Mesolithic Period, the 5000 years following the beginning of the Holocene, which by the way, coincides with the impact of Asteroid A, was an age literally of darkness and of recovery. Darkness because for an unknown period of time, which has been calculated at upwards of two thousand years, a dark mass of volcanic ash hung over the Northern Hemisphere, which the ancient Greeks knew as ‘the night of the hyperboreans ’. The gloomy light of this northern mist must have had some sort of effect on the mood of the people who inhabited that part of the world (perhaps this is the reason why they ‘bleached white’ becoming ‘the white race’?). The population must have greatly declined after the catastrophe which came to be known as ‘the deluge’ due to the sustained precipitation after the evaporated sea water from such momentous submarine volcanism had fallen back as rain water for a period much longer than the proverbial forty days, one would surmise. Be it as it may, it took humanity nearly 5000 years to recuperate, perhaps to get to the point where culture was left off in 10498 BP. Around 5100 BP we see the rise of urban civilization for better or for worse because certain innocence was lost when walled cities appeared; if we are to quote the poet:
‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…’ ‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out…’ (Mending Wall, by Robert Frost)
Perhaps the wall symbolizes the trauma… for we have been building walls ever since.
The Spiral
The Spiral of History is its converging movement, resolving itself in a synthesis after a long experience of trial and error, Political History looking for the perfect formula between personal freedom and public administration. It could be happening now, the flowering of the past 5000 years of political experimentation. Historical experience compressed by an implosion and resolved into its simplest manifestations: simple councils of self-government by free men without bureaucracy or political parties. As people become more conscious, or educated if you will, they will want to be in syntony with each other without conflict or violence. And this state of things everyone will want to recognize as the natural state of being. Harmony will seize to be an utopia when a majority of people begin to want it. Perhaps after so much violence people will begin to inquire about the mechanics of peace.
There is a danger of involution if humanity refuses to learn, a decadent regression to perversion and brutality, when the State, influenced by corporate religion, wishes to block research into the expansion of the mind. There is a need to draw a line and say : ‘a historical era has ended’, we must begin anew, try something different; new political institutions with a spiritual life that goes beyond corporate formulas into the real inner discovery, inner direction, lucidity and autonomy, with the social and political institutions that define maturity, self-government and social responsibility shared by all.
The era that began with the unification of Egypt ends today, because it is salutary that it should be so, because new beginnings are healthy. Because the theory and practice of The State has been played out and any more procrastination will further brutalize humanity beyond recovery. It is childhood’s end: if he does not leave on his maturity, the grown child could be destroyed by his parents, Corporate Religion and The Nation State.
For this is no doubt the greatest of all psychohistorical problems: renewal. Some people will say: ‘who wants renewal, renewal is risky…’ ‘We will lose control’…there are some things that cannot be explained… they have to be experienced, people come into them, sometimes after catastrophe has hit them. I have already said in my book La Huerta del Macehual that public administration should be returned to the people… That little by little in a peaceful and democratic way, public office should be accessible to individuals bearing a card that contains in a microchip the sum of their abilities and past working experience… put it in a computer in all centers of public administration and the machine will tell them in detail where is an opening for them in real time where they can find work and be paid by the hour in any branch of public administration. Of course the mechanics of the system will have to be worked out by people who understand public administration, demography,
economics and so forth‌ And it will work when people have arrived at the junction of consciousness, education and shared social responsibility. I believe that we are nearly there, all we have to do is make this project public knowledge in such a way that everyone will want to participate in it spontaneously as a shared endeavor that will free us all from history.
PART THREE The Spiral: El Sue単o Florido
Paleoethnobotany
The spiral is a recurrent symbol in megalithic temples from Malta to Ireland. It is the Entheogenic symbol of the psychic continuum, of the passage between spheres of existence and parallel worlds. The use of The Sacred Entheogens was a common occurrence in late Pleistocene times. It was the central event at the temples of Gobekli Tepe, the Hypogeum of Malta and Newgrange in Ireland. The spirals at the entrance door to the passage corridors of these temples symbolized the psychic continuum of the experience of death and of Entheogenic experience that took place in the central chamber; these were parallel experiences that the ancients knew to be equivalent: The Little Death and the Great Voyage through The Portal. This is the reason why these temples were both temples and tombs.
The figure of The Sleeping Lady was recovered from the main chamber at the Hypogeum of Malta and may represent an Out of Body Experience while in Entheogenic trance and could be related to oracular functions. It is also possible that these temples are far older than they are supposed to be and that we should place all Megalithic Architecture before 10 498 BP. Men were different after that date, culture changed, perhaps that is the reason why Gobekli Tepe was deliberately filled with ruble sometime after 10 000 BP; they were ‘burying the past’ so to speak, after The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event. Social organization had changed and the cosmological outlook had changed.
Chronology in prehistory is very important to determine the cultural sequence. That is why civil and ecclesiastical authorities should not interfere with the work of archeologists or historians in an attempt to censure or suppress knowledge. In Malta, at the beginning of the XX century, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities conspired to destroy evidence of the antiquity of the megalithic civilization there ( Philip Coppens ). Most interestingly they
effaced the figure of a bison, an animal that became extinct in Europe around 10 000 BP, from the walls in one of the chambers of The Hypogeum. They also disappeared the work of Immanuel Magri in 1907, the investigator who spent two years working at the Hypogeum. What were they seeking to protect, the validity of the Judeo-Christian tradition?
A hundred years later we are still struggling against self-censure, passivity, complacency and immobility within the academic community and with retrograde authorities who want to shore up the Judeo-Christian tradition from the advancement of knowledge.
At the end of the Pleistocene there was a land bridge between Africa and Europe that went right through Malta and connected that island with Sicily and Italy. The geography and the climate of the world were much different and the people most have been very different, living in a world of plenty with temperate climates. They were civilized, no doubt about it. If we cannot imagine how or reconstruct their world from the little evidence we have it does not mean that we are going to accept the indifference of the scientific community on this subject. We must use our vision to see and understand their culture from what we know of prehistory, early Neolithic civilizations and the lives of aboriginal people in more recent times. We can be certain that late Pleistocene men carried out Entheogenic rites in their temples, like the Celtic Druids did, that included travelling along the psychic continuum through an spiraling vortex of light into unimagined worlds of the spirit that revealed to them the unfathomable forces of nature that surrounded their fantastic world of mega fauna and gigantic ice walls. ( See Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archeology and Peter T. Furst: Entheogens and Culture )
The Maya, The Hindu, The Sumerians, The Egyptians, even The Greeks remembered a world before The Deluge. These late Pleistocene people were giants compared to post diluvia humanity. If there was a mega fauna there were probably large human beings to go with it, those megaliths seem large to us today but they did not seem large to our ancestors in the late Pleistocene, at least they could handle them and place them in extraordinary fashion to build remarkable constructions like the Hypogeum of Malta and the temples of Gobekli Tepe. They must have been over seven feet on the average, the men, and the women over six feet. They lived in large communal houses made of wood as Plato says, like the Vikings did and the natives of British Columbia.
They were big and powerful, these homo sapiens diluvialis, and they could move huge monoliths, (Baalbek). They were very intelligent and they might have had an urban civilization that is lying at the bottom of the sea; that the scientific community has the responsibility to explore. They could have come from the west into western Europe and not from Africa as was previously thought. Between 20 000 and 10 000 years ago the climate in Western Europe was similar to that of Siberia today whereas at that time, the large islands of the Atlantic ocean: Bahamas, Cuba and Atlantis and the peninsulas of Florida and Yucatan enjoyed a mild semi tropical climate and must have been very fertile and were larger than they are today. These were the centers of a civilization in the late Pleistocene that radiated East into western Europe, to the valley of the Dordogne, Malta and Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.…
As I described it in my book Teonanacatl, our late Pleistocene ancestors held Entheogenic Rites for thousands of years ( Soleki in Furst: The Mousterian tombs in Shanidar, Syria ). They were not afraid to explore the phenomenon of death because to them it was an everyday occurrence . Like The Olmecs who would sit in a circle and let a jaguar out of a stone cage to see whom it would chose to eat… and in this way the Olmecs practiced selfcontrol. Our ancestors would enter into trances and visit parallel worlds. That is what happened in the Hypogeum of Malta and at the round temples of Gobekli Tepe.
Yet with time, The Entheogenic Experience was refined until it produced the theology of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, The founding Father of The Western World.
El Sueño Florido
The Phenomenon of Illumination is the awakening of consciousness. It is the vision of Telesis, of the formal interrelationship between all the elements of nature viewed as a personal experience within a spiritual phenomenon. The person that experiences this vision changes with it, as his soul or her soul, it is the same thing in metaphysical terms, explores the confines of identity and moves beyond the boundaries of the body to identify with that unitary vision of Telesis that helps us find our place in this world, indeed in the Universe. This is a profoundly emotional experience that involves the totality of our beings until the ‘I’ disappears within the experience of Illumination.
This is indeed a lonely journey; Akhenaten was trying to go back to a time when there were no gods; not Amon, not Aton but the Spiral and the journey through The Portal, The Flower of Illumination. Perhaps this is why The Toltecs called the experience of Illumination, El Sueño Florido, in Nahuatl Temixoch. And Xochipilli was the protective divinity, the embodiment of the experience that flowered into consciousness. For Akhenaten, the Sun, Aton, was the sole divinity that shed light on the living world and on the joy of life, our life, to live with open eyes, with clarity and truth, in the spirit of Maat which was to him impeccability of action, love and ethical consciousness. Akhenaten was a contemporary of the poets who wrote The Rig-Veda. And their time was one of momentous spiritual radiation, even reaching to our own time, for Akhenaten inspired Moses just as the Rig-Vedas led to the Upanishads, The Isa Upanishad: ‘Behold the universe in the glory of God: and all that lives and moves on earth. Leaving the transient find joy in the Eternal: set not your heart on another’s possessions…’ ‘He moves, and he moves not. He is far and he is near. He is within all, and he is outside all. Who sees all beings in his own self, and his own self in all beings, loses all fear.’ ‘The Spirit filled all with his radiance. He is incorporeal and invulnerable, pure and untouched by evil. He is the supreme seer and thinker, immanent and transcendent. He placed all things in the path of Eternity.’ (from the Issa Upanishad circa 2800 years before the present, Penguin Classics edition, 1965).
AKHENATEN’S HYMN TO ATON Though appearest beautifully on the horizon of heaven, Thou living Aton, the beginning of life! When thou are risen on the eastern horizon, Thou hast filled every land with thy beauty. Thou are gracious, great, glistening, and high over every land; Thy rays encompass the lands too… all that thou hast made: As thou art Re, thou reachest to the end of them; Though thou art in their faces, no one knows thy going.
When thou settest in the western horizon,
The land is in darkness, in the manner of death. They sleep in a room with heads wrapped up, Nor see one eye the other. All their goods which are under their heads might be stolen, (But) they would not perceive (it). Every lion is come forth from his den; All creeping things, they sting. Darkness is a shroud, and the earth is in stillness, For he who has made them rests in the horizon.
At daybreak when thou arises on the horizon, When thou shinest as the Aten by day, Thou drivest away the darkness and givest thy rays. The two lands are in festivity every day, Awake and standing upon (their) feet, For thou hast raised them up. Washing their bodies, taking (their) clothing, Their arms are (raised) in praise at thy appearance. All the world, they do their work.
All beasts are content with their pasturage; Trees and plants are flourishing. The birds which fly from their nests, Their wings are (stretched out)) in praise of thy ka. All beasts spring upon (their) feet.
Whatever flies and alights, They live when thou hast risen (for) them. The ships are sailing north and south as well, For every way is opened at thy appearance. The fish in the river dart before thy face; The rays are in the midst of the great green sea.
Creator of seed in women, Thou who makest fluid into man, Who mantainest the son in the womb of his mother, Who soothest him with that which stills his weeping, Thou nurse (even) in the womb, Who givest breath to sustain all that he has made! When he descends from the womb to breath On the day when he is born, Thou openest his mouth completely, Thou suppliest his necessities. When the chick in the egg speaks within the shell, Thou givest him breath within it to maintain him. When thou has made him his fulfillment with in the egg, to Break it, He comes forth from the egg to speak at his completed (time); He walks upon his legs when he comes forth from it.
How manifold it is, what thou hast made!
They are hidden from the face of (man), O sole God like whom there is no other! Thou didst create the world according to thy desire, While thou wert alone: All men, cattle, and wild beasts, Whatever is on earth going upon (its) feet, And what is on high, flying with its wings.
The rays suckle every meadow. When thou risest, they live, they grow for thee. Thou makest the seasons in order to rear all that thou hast made, The winter to cool them, And the heat that they may taste thee. Thou hast made the distant sky in order to rise therein, In order to see all that thou dost make. Whilst thou wert alone, Rising in the form of the living Aten, Appearing, shining, withdrawing, or approaching, Thou madest millions of forms of thyself alone. Cities, towns, fields, road and riverEvery eye beholds thee over against them, For thou art the Atem of the day over the earth‌.
Thou art in my heart, And there is no other that knows thee
Save thy son Neferkheperure Waenre, For thou hast made him well versed in thy plans and in thy Strength. The world came into being by thy hand, According as thou hast made them. When thou hast risen they live. When thou settest they die. Thou art lifetime thy own self, For one lives (only) through thee. Eyes are (fixed) on beauty until thou settest. All work is laid aside when thou settest in the west. (But) when (thou)) risest (again), [Everything is] made to flourish for the king…. Since thou didst found the earth And raise them up for the son, Who came forth from thy body: the King of Upper and Lower Egypt…Akhenaten… And the Chief Wife of the King…Nefertiti, living and youthful for ever and ever.
From Leonard Cottrell’s , The Penguin Book of the Lost Worlds, 1966.
THE RIG VEDA WE HAVE DRUNK THE SOMA
1 I have tasted the sweet drink of life, knowing that it Inspires good thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the Extreme, that all the gods and mortals seek it together, Calling it honey. 2 When you penetrate inside, you will know no limits, And you will avert the wrath of the gods. Enjoying Indra’s friendship (note), O drop of Soma, brings riches as a docile cow brings the yoke. 3 We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; We have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and malice of a mortal do to us now, O immortal one? 4 When we have drunk you, O drop of Soma, Be good to our hearts, kind as a father to his son, thoughtful as A friend to a friend. Far-famed Soma, stretch out our lifetime So that we may live. 5 The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space. You have bound me together in my limbs as thongs bind a chariot. Let the drops protect me from the foot that stumbles and keep lameness away from me. 6 Inflame me like a fire kindled by friction; make us see far; Make us richer, better. For when I am intoxicated with you, Soma, I think myself rich. Draw near and make us thrive. 7 We would enjoy you, pressed with a fervent heart,
Like riches from a father. King Soma stretch out our lifespans As the sun stretches out the spring days. 8 King Soma, have mercy on us for our well-being. Know that we are devoted to your laws. Passion and fury are stirred up. O drop of Soma, do not hand us over to the pleasure of the enemy. 9 For you Soma are the guardian of our body; watching over men You have settled dawn in every limb (note). If we break your laws, O God, have mercy on us Like a good friend to make us better. 10 Let me join closely with my compassionate friend So that he will not injure me when I have drunk him. O lord of bay horses (note), for the Soma that is lodged in us I approach Indra to stretch out our life-span (note). 11 Weakness and diseases have gone (note); the forces of darkness have fled in terror Soma has climbed up in us, expanding. We have come to the place where they stretch out life-spans. 12 The drop that we have drunk has entered our hearts, An immortal inside mortals. O fathers, let us serve that Soma with the oblations And abide in His mercy and kindness. 13 Uniting in agreement with the fathers (note), O drop of Soma, You have extended yourself through sky and earth. Let us serve Him with an oblation; let us be masters of riches. 14 You protecting gods, speak out for us. Do not let sleep or harmful speech Seize us. Let us, always, dear to Soma, speak as men of power in the sacrificial gathering (note). 15 Soma, you give us the force of life on every side. Enter into us finding the sunlight,
Watching over men. O drop of Soma, summon your helpers and protect us before and after. ( From The Rig Veda, Penguin Classics, 1981, translated by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty )
Notes and correlations
The Indo-Europeans known as the Aryans, not to be confused with the ‘aryans’ of Nazi folklore, migrated from the region of the Caspian Sea and the Iranian Plateau into NorthWestern India some three thousand five hundred years ago, about the time of the Pharaoh Tuthmosis III and queen Hatshepsut. Like many tribal nomads of Central Asia before and after them they were cattle breeders and horse tamers who moved about in their wagons looking for good pasture lands. They crossed the passes of the Hindu Kush into NorthWestern India around 1500 BC. All members of the tribe were familiar with amanita muscaria and other Entheogeic plants, as Gordon Wasson has pointed out ( Soma ). They performed the horse sacrifice for their god Agni and drank the sacred Soma in honor of their god Indra from whose name the word India is derived, ( it could be said that the national emblem of Mexico, the Eagle and the Serpent is of Entheogenic origin, a symbol of spiritual liberation, as the Aztec knights of The Eagle held Entheogenic rites at their sanctuary in Malinalco, under the auspices of Quetzalcoatl, The Plumed Serpent, and Xochipilli, the god of flowers and sacred plants, who were the tutelary deities of the rites The Temixoch).
The Horse Sacrifice of the Aryans and the drinking of the Soma were the two principal rites celebrated in The Rig Veda. I have myself eaten The Sacred Mushrooms, psilosibe Mexicana, with the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, and can testify that the Vedic Hymn to the god Soma is a beautiful and faithful rendering in poetry of Entheogenic Experience as I experienced it and wrote in my book Teonanacatl. I could say the same thing about The Tibetan Book of The Dead which describes the passage through The Portal into the Bardo Plain, ( Teonanacatl p. 67, note 20).
1 ( Verse 2 ) The god Indra was the tutelary deity of Entheogenic Rites. He was the personification of human wholeness and spiritual unity; of the reconstructed and born again self, thus of liberation; like Quetzalcoatl, Osiris, Dionysus and Christ.
2 ( Verse 5 ) The chariot of Akhenaten and the chariot of the Aryan heroes, like that of Achilles most have looked alike: light, with spiked wheels, drawn by two horses, ( Romila Thapar, A history of India. Penguin, p. 42 ), This image of a chariot has helped me to place the date of the Vedic Hymn, We have drunk the Soma around the XIII or XII century B.C., The Age of Akhenaten and Moses.
Akhenaten in his war chariot, his image defaced by his enemies.
3 ( Verse 7 ) The phrase, ‘stretch our life-spans’, repeated throughout the Hymn refers to the general feeling and appreciation on the part of the participant on the rite of a recuperated self, possessor of recovered and expanded faculties, that if well nurtured will help prolong life This phrase clearly suggests the origin of Yoga… which was a science designed to PRESERVE not attain Illumination, AFTER HAVING PARTAKEN OF THE SACRED PLANT. Throughout the centuries the ancient Arhats, ascetics and teachers of Yoga developed this science to help men preserve a spiritual resonance acquired while in communion with the god during the taking of Soma. The art of preserving and extending the duration of all the virtues attained during the gathering and the interpretation of the many experiences that compose the inner structure of a renovated self ( See Teonanacatl pp. 60-70 ). 4 ( Verse 9 ) The phrase, ‘ you have settled dawn in every limb ‘ refers to the somatic changes experienced in the body while the special alkaloid of the plant is enhancing neurotransmission throughout the central nervous system and specially in the brain. Not
surprisingly the medical term Teonanacatl pp. 60-70 ).
soma was derived from the Entheogen Soma. ( See
5 ( Verse 10 ) ‘ bay horses’ were apparently much admired by the Aryan bards who composed The Rig Veda and this is another clue that places our hymn in the early nomadic pre-urban face of Aryan history in North-Western India more than three thousand years ago. ( Thapar, op.cit. ) 6 ( Verse 11 ) ‘ weakness and diseases have gone’ . Entheogenic experience may clarify many psychosomatic syndromes liberating the body and the mind of certain illnesses. This author experienced the improvement of his eyesight and other beneficent changes. 7 / Verse 13 ) ‘ Uniting in agreement with the fathers’ . This expression is very important because it establishes a continuity in time with all the generations past and present from Gobekli Tepe to the present passing through Akhenaten and the Rig Veda; constituting in effect a veritable psychohistorical noumena being this, Entheogenic Experience, the fountainhead of religious inspiration throughout the ages ( See Teonanacatl, Author’s Note p. IV, The Source ). 8 ( Verse 14 ) ‘in the sacrificial gathering’. It is my belief that Aryans, because they had been or still were nomads at the time on The Rig Veda, gathered together in places that suggested to them the power of Nature, of mother Earth; and forming a circle, seated on the ground, passed around the Soma in the sacred kukeon, which had been previously prepared in the traditional way with the sacred implements, the stones and mortars used for pressing the plant. In Greek times the sacred crucible, The Kukeon, contained mint, claviceps purpurea, honey and water. ( Gordon Wasson, The road to Eleusis ).
Was Akhenaten trying to liberate Egypt from the theocratic power of the priests of Amon? Was he unconsciously trying to recuperate the spiritual freedom that homo sapiens diluvialis enjoyed at the temples of Gobekli Tepe? We do not know the exact sequence of events after Akhenaten’s death. How many people remained loyal to the vision of Akhenaten after his death? Were some of his followers, the Habiru of Pi-Ramses, taken by Moses into the desert?
Strabo, the Greek historian, geographer and philosopher of the first century of our era is one of the ancient non-jewish writers who mentions Moses with reverence in his Geography (24 A.D. ). He writes that Moses was an Egyptian priest who had political control of an area east of The Delta of The Nile, ( Pi-Ramses? ) and was dissatisfied with the current political institutions. He left Egypt followed by a large body of people. Moses wrote Strabo referring to his religious ideas, believed that The Divinity should have no
human or animal representation, for God according to Moses: ‘May be this One Thing that encompass us all: land, sea, the heavens, the universe and the nature of things…’, very close to the theology of Akhenaten. The historicity of Moses is an extremely difficult subject because one has to contend with a multiplicity of literary sources but no archeological or contemporary textual or paleographic evidence. There are biblical, rabbinical, Christian and Islamic sources, ( Moses is mentioned more than 500 times in the Koran ), not to mention contemporary critical historiography. On the other hand there is no doubt about the historicity of Akhenaten of whom we have a large selection of paleographic evidence in sculpture, reliefs, hieroglyphic inscriptions and tomb paintings.
There were many Semitic and non-Semitic people living east of the Nile delta, for several centuries since the time of the Hyksos, 3800 years BP, Semitic refugees established themselves in the area of Pi-Ramses until there emerged a border culture half Semitic and half Egyptian to which Moses very easily could have belonged so that the people that he led out of Egypt were not completely Semitic and could have been partisans of Akhenaten, people who left Egypt after some civil strife of which there is an echo in The Bible story of Exodus.
The monotheism of the Jews did not necessarily have to come from Moses but rather from a nucleus of emigrants who already possessed a monotheistic world view that was later superimposed to the polytheistic Habiru Bedouin tribes who worshiped the mother goddess Acera and a volcanic-teluric deity named Yahwe. They did not have the intellectual resources to design a new theology nor did they have a political motive or the urge for union, nor the need to produce a politico-religious synthesis. But Moses did. Was he a follower of Akhenaten? Was Moses Akhenaten? We know that the period between Akhenaten’s death and the reign of Ramses II was one of insecurity and strife, possibly of civil war between the followers of Akhenaten Theology of love and the soldiers, merchants and priests who favoured the god Amon and imperialist policy of general Horemheb. We should consider that Aye and Horemheb, the successors of Akhenaten, reverted to the worship of Amon. And as Sigmund Freud suggests in his book, Moses and Monotheism (pp. 62-69), out of the pact of Quadesh in the desert, the Hebrew tribes emerged with the new monotheism designed by Moses and adapted from the theology of Akhenaten.
The idea that Moses and Akhenaten are one and the same person proposed by Ahmed Osman in his book Moses and Akhenaten seems to me fantastic. It would solve many problems indeed and revolutionize the history of religion but it does not seem probable. The date for Akhenaten’s death has been given as 1334 B.C.. Osman’s thesis is that he did not die in 1334 B.C. but was exiled to north-eastern Egypt were he had relatives through his mother, Queen Tiye , and there stroke an alliance with the Semitic elements of the population and persuaded them to leave Egypt; whereas the date for the Exodus is variously believed to have fallen anywhere between 1298 and 1232 B.C., during the reign of Ramses II. Much would be gained in this debate if the mummy of Akhenaten were to be found and his probable age at the moment of his death established. The fact that his body has not been found leaves ground for a lot of speculation. ( The body in tomb KV 55 has not been positively identified as being that of Akhenaten since it corresponds to a younger man, aged 25, who is believed to be his son Smenkhkare ).
The central idea behind the desire to link Akhenaten and Moses beyond the obvious one suggested by Freud that Moses must have been an Egyptian nearly contemporaneous to Akhenaten, is that the fountain head of monotheism is One and the same; that is, The Phenomena Of Illumination. An individual has contact with The Source and he renders his message in contemporary language within the context of a specific culture, be this culture Egyptian or proto-Judaic. Moses delivered his message, so did Akhenaten. That Moses was influenced by Akhenaten there is no doubt in my mind but that they were the same person is entirely a different matter; no doubt a very attractive proposition involving much historical research and hard evidence that unfortunately has not been forthcoming. Yet the possibility cannot be excluded, for this is the very purpose of historical investigation; for one thing is what we know and another thing is what was, things not yet perceived by menthe noumena of History.
These are psychohistorical moments, when the cross currents of political and religious history meet in one man who operates a great religious synthesis. During special periods of tension ideological forces come into conflict and must be resolved. Thus new visions of the world are created and new interpretations of The Divine are met with and transmitted with varying success.
Akhenaten did just that out of his own original reality in the special political context that he lived. He was the son of Amenophis III, a many sided, athletic and outstanding man, who had already tried to reconcile the rival theologies of Heliopolis and Thebes, of Aton and Amon with the need for an imperial ideology, a unifying superstructure for the Egyptian
Empire that spread from Nubia to Syria and was created by his ancestor, Tuthmosis III, and which he visualized under the benevolent protection of Aton. Akhenaten, his son, ( Amenophis IV ), was an inspired man who combined many complex physical, intellectual, ethical and spiritual natures that led him to produce a remarkable politico-religious synthesis unique in world history, a vision of The Divinity infused with the miracle of beauty and the joy of life and love in great contrast with the violence of the patriarchal world which is still acting upon us today. He operated such a vast synthesis that he must have experienced a moment of satori, a comprehensive vision. He was a talented man who was the leader of an artistic revolution in culture and art, and a spiritual visionary. His psychohistorical resonance is such that he is still a popular figure today; who has achieved an immortality of sorts, must be the envy of all the other Pharaohs, including Ramses II his close competitor…So much has been written and said about him and his lovely wife, Nefertiti, that out of an affectionate respect for them both I will say no more.
Akhenaten had six daughters, he was probably a biological hermaphrodite, and in antiquity hermaphrodites were sacred because it was thought that hermaphroditism was a symbol of the dual perfection of God as it combined both masculine and feminine in perfect proportions ( there is a wonderful image of this in Federico Fellini’s film, Satyricon, of an albino hermaphrodite child, or ‘semi-dio’, who is stolen from a sanctuary by two covetous rogues.)
Plato presents us with a different interpretation in the Symposium. Through the voice of the dramatist Aristophanes, one of the participants in the dialogue, Plato sees, rather, in the longing and coming together of the proverbial separated halves into which we, ungrateful arrogant mortals, were reduced by the gods, an idealization of homosexual love raised to a ‘virile, spiritual communion’, to quote the words of the dramatist.
It would seem that the love between Akhenaten and Nefertiti, that produced six daughters, was an ecstatic orgasmic love between male and female parts that led to a shared vision of The Divinity, and that it inspired the royal couple’s reformist ideas. And here we see the complexity of being expressed in the dissolution of identity were male and female disappear in a carnal union of joyful celebration of life in union with all beings: men, animals and plants in humble recognition of the Sublime, in a true sacralization of erotic love. Akhenaten and Nefertiti wanted to symbolize that to their people. Perhaps this is the reason why they were not afraid to show themselves naked in public, to show their affection in public almost to the point of coitus, and urged their artists to commemorate their love in painting and sculpture in realistic detail; to communicate to mankind the
radiance and the warmth of the Sun as the One god, and to celebrate their love of life. This became the Hymn of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, their legacy to us.
The Judeo-Christian western world has underestimated the theological importance of Akhenaten’s message. His understanding of the sacred dimension of eroticism has only a parallel in Hindu philosophy and Yoga. It was only until the arrival of psychoanalysis and the literary art of David Herbert Lawrence ( Lady Chatterley’s Lover ), that western culture, after two thousand years of Christianity, discovered the spiritual dimension of eroticism without guilt, the fundamental equality between the sexes facing the act of love, the spiritual awakening into the beauty of the world motivated by orgasmic release when love is an art practiced by sensitive beings who interact constructively, creatively as Erich From suggested in his Art of Love. In this sense is Akhenaten very modern and perhaps this is the basis of his appeal to the younger generations of today.
THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY
An ongoing project Philip Conover Lazo
THE CONCEPT OF PSYCHOHISTORY The concept of psychohistory refers to a series of reflections on the nature of History that have been taking place since antiquity inspired first by philosophy and ethics and in more recent times by psychology and anthropology. The Republic of Plato, The Politics of Aristotle, The philosophy of Confucius, The Utopia of Thomas More and Machiavelli’s The Prince are examples of these ideas. From the XX century onwards the development of psychology and psychoanalysis awoke a number of interdisciplinary reflections that when combined with certain philosophical and ethical considerations arising from a reflection on the special brutality and general degradation in the decline of politics that lead into genocide and war during the XX century, have inspired certain thinkers in the necessity of expanding historical analysis with an interdisciplinary approach. And here the development of psychoanalysis has been crucial as well as a knowledge of anthropology and prehistory. It is in order to save ourselves from ourselves that such an interdisciplinary approach has been necessary. Self-‐knowledge was the original purpose of Philosophy as well as the very origin of ethics. From Pleistocene times the use of entheogenic plants led to the refinement of language. Expanded awareness necessitated clear elocution. The discovery of formal relationships between the elements of nature led to new discoveries, to practical applications of these discoveries which in turn led to new language, to the elaboration of new words to describe new functions. Such is psychohistory, it is a new tool.
THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY The purpose of the method of psychohistory is to organize certain insights derived from the association of historical events, or even current political events, with their phenomenological relation in time-‐space and known psychological realities. And as we mention phenomenology we should define what phenomenological logic is. Phenomenological Origin as Edmund Husserl defined it in his Pure Phenomenology and Investigations in Logic refers to Noema (noumena as in Kant), nous or noos, mind in Greek, which is a thing in itself, extant in time-‐space, independent of the human mind, different from perception or a psychological event, or from phenomena as an object described by man. Then, to approximate Psychohistorical Noumena, we would have to use an interdisciplinary approach:
As an example we shall take a Noumena from contemporary politics: gun control. What would a gun be? In terms of psychohistorical duration in time-‐space (from Brentano’s “psychology of intentionality” and Bergson’s concept of historical duration) a gun is an extension of the arm, a continuation of the historical function of the sword and the poignard. But like them a gun is in psychological terms an unconscious extension of the male penis and with it men define territoriality and power. Here we should note that territoriality is an anthropological concept and that power is a political idea. So that in psychohistorical terms a gun becomes a phallocratic tool that expresses territoriality and power. As in the sphere of individuals so in the domain of nations: guns are used to assert supremacy and power. Internationally, guns, in terms of world culture (following Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message) and the very existence of arms, signify war. And here is a case in point: Guns are a Noumena, a thing in themselves, independent of men, they ARE war. Or rather they are the expression of “I will punish you if you do not do as I want” (“A child is being punished” in On Psychopathology from Sigmund Freud; Wilhelm Stekel: Sadism and Masochism). Also in the psychopathology of violent crime involving guns and murder there is a strong element of repressed homosexuality as in gang warfare (e.g. la Mara Salvatrucha, the brownshirts of Eric Rohm vs. Himmler’s Gestapo or the tragic murder in Kansas described by Truman Capote in his novel In Cold Blood, a clear case of repressed homosexuality between the two murderers). So that gun control to the ultraconservatives in the United States signifies castration. This is why you see such hysterical reactions to the possibility that a law banning guns might literally do away with their penises (see, e.g., Piers Morgan’s interview with an anti-‐gun control fanatic in a recent CNN television program).2 The whole question of gun control is a psychohistorical problem that has tremendous implications for the future welfare of humanity. This reaction to gun control in the United States is part of the ‘fort apache’ complex, another psychohistorical phenomenon that has to do with collective paranoia and supremacist phallocracy in which large sectors of the American public see themselves threatened by the outside world, particularly by the United Nations and ‘hostile’ countries that allegedly possess atomic bombs. Also part of this syndrome is the fear of certain conservative elements of the population of a threat by the ‘native’ populations of the world. This syndrome contains a certain element of it even of themselves by the ‘native populations´ they have harmed in the past is an unconscious psychological possibility; so that it is particularly offensive and threatening that a ‘black man’, President Obama, wants to take away their guns.
2
Interview available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtyKofFih8Y (last visit, February 23, 2013).
Part two War after War April 22, 2013 The Boston Marathon… Two Chechen brothers, a little American boy, a Chinese girl, an American girl and many more victims… A psychohistorical tragedy with world reverberations. Reverberations of the War in Chechnya? The intentionality of murderers is aleatory, they might take out their anger on anyone, the contagiousness of violence is a shock wave that stays in space around us, no one is immune to it, it saddens almost everyone. The etiology of violence is multiple, but perhaps its most pernicious cause is in the alteration of personality as a perversion. Violence can be induced as the ideology of hatred. Who perverts the most, the politician full of hatred or the religious ideologue who transfers his own hatred to the minds of the young? Where does responsibility lie? Violence generates more violence, and guns and bombs are its agents. Guns and bombs are not merely inanimate objects. The tremendous energy needed to manufacture a single gun is inherent in it. It is potential energy and we transfer our psychological projections to them. In moments of great stress the very availability of guns can tip the balance from ire to tragedy. Even a knife can become a deadly weapon any moment. Just as you don’t leave a sharp knife around children you should not exhibit machine guns in store racks. What is the purpose of this, are you commercializing paranoia? It is a dangerous, obscene and irresponsible commerce that should be outlawed. It is the sickness in culture, a culture of violence, a cult of violence. A supremacist culture that imposes its power through the cult of violence; be it class warfare or hatred of pacifists, or as in the case of religious hatred of infidels (the Chechen brothers)… They all lead to the same thing: WAR. Nothing good has come out of hatred, notwithstanding the platitudes of the purveyors of hatred, the golden rule is still valid: ‘Do unto others as you would wish to be done unto you’. It still stands today: It is the discipline of compassion, self-‐ control and moderation. The culture of violence should not be encouraged. It starts at home with the toleration of ire and the adulation of violence and the cult of guns. A supremacist culture requires this. The nations of the world united in their international forums should not permit this. Peace should be the culture of the World, no matter how utopian it sounds today, it is the way to universal consciousness and enlightenment.
The Method of Psychohistory The diversity of cultures and of historical experience, of varied and contrasting anthropological environments cannot be denied. Humanity speaks different languages which are learning processes, implanted on a biological foundation, in vocal cords that produce different sounds. The Chinese civilization, the Egyptian civilization and Mayan culture are three very clear examples of differentiated psychohistorical experiences evolved from the Pleistocene and later Neolithic cultures. There is a continuity of human evolution in Northern China from Pekin man to the earliest cultures of the Yellow River rooted to the soft, rich loess of the land. The migration of the people of the Sahara at the end of the Mesolithic Period into the fertile valley of the Nile, the spread of Olmec civilization from its central core in the Gulf Coast of Mexico into the high valleys of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guatemala was a learning process in new climates and environments, also a linguistic achievement evidenced in hieroglyphs and architecture. This is dynamic human psychic evolution molded by historical events: The Shang Dynasty, the unification of Egypt by Nemes, the arrival of the Teotihuacan ambassador, Fire-‐is-‐born at Tikal, (378 A.D.) , were all linguistic achievements of the first order. The Spanish Conquest of Mexico and the Norman Conquest of England were intense formative periods that produced entirely new cultures from what had been before, and this is a true psychohistorical event, in the anvil of the collective mind, suffering profound transformation. The structural logic of language studied by philology and linguistics corresponds to the first mnemonic effort implicit in early formative poetry like the charming Canterbury Tales of Chaucer or the delicious poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In a way these works of art reveal traces of a broad psychohistorical synthesis that is operating in time and still continues. This process testifies the emergence of a cultural genotype which is in itself a psychohistorical noumena. This is the process of Psychohistory, its Rosetta Stone, its transcultural complexities deciphered reveal our provenance as a people and help us recover our historical memory from the ashes of History, sometimes violent and full of grief, sometimes sweet and beautiful, constructive… into the components of our national psyches, ethnical and cultural differences, Islamic or Christian; Western or Oriental.
The Noosphere The Noosphere is the last of telluric layers after the atmosphere and the biosphere, visualized by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It is a useful concept for Psychohistory because it describes the collective biological and psychic energy generated by mankind throughout its process of evolution and history and like the other layers it is subjected to its own dynamics in time-‐space and duration. It forms a corona with the other telluric layers of planetary existence. This layer, The Noosphere, (from Greek: sphaira, sphere; noos, mind; thus, sphere of the mind), resonates and vibrates with creativity or destruction depending on the irrational moods of the species. It also reacts to certain events that alter its composition like great natural catastrophes or cosmic events. Before we come to a description of contemporary psychohistorical reality and its multiple manifestations, it would be helpful to trace the psychohistorical events that have most contributed to the formation of the Noosphere. To recuperate the Historical Memory of what was; to see again the mysterious panorama of the great megalithic centers at the end of the Pleistocene… to contemplate again the stupendous cosmic tragedy of the fall of The Great Asteroid that fractured the Earth and drew forth magma from Iceland to Puerto Rico and changed the face of the Earth forever. This we will designate The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event or GPTE from its initials. Paleoclimatology Terminations: (Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Arqueology, p. 53) Rapid Ice Retreat. Each corresponds to a major rise in sea level causing a Marine Transgression in low laying coastal areas. The last mayor cold period -‐ The Full Glacial or Pleniglacial, lasted from about 23 000 to 14 000 BP. The last 10 000 years from 8000 BP are known as The Post Glacial or Holocene. The Megalithic Cultures of the Late Pleistocene Before we come to The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event we would do well to describe The Megalithic Cultures of The Late Pleistocene. In media res, we come to Gobekli Tepe , a most extraordinary archeological site in south eastern Turkey that has completely revolutionized our understanding of Prehistory, for no hunter gatherers constructed this site at least they were no simple hunter gatherers as previously understood.
The people who built Gobekli Tepe inhabited a different frame of mind from the simple hunter gatherers. These people were motivated by cultural phenomena of a different order. To begin with they possessed a remarkable idea of architecture in stone with a striking sense of esthetics quite out of place in a conventional conception of late Pleistocene civilizations. Those extraordinary pillars in the shape of a mushroom are very abstract and atemporal in conception, they could have been designed by Inhotep for The Temple complex at Saqqara or by Pier Luigi Nervi in his Palazzetto dello Sport. They are a 13 000 year old mystery of a culture we cannot fully comprehend. Entheogenic rites took place there under those mushroom shaped columns. So that these elegant megalithic structures are 2000 years older than Katal Huyuk, the oldest known Neolithic site. Gobekli Tepe, is nearly 13 000 years old. Up to now twenty similar round structures have been found and many more are believed to be awaiting excavation, which in the words of the head of the German archeological team working at the site, could take more than fifty years. But we cannot wait fifty years, we must reach some conclusions now given the unsettled nature of geopolitical circumstances. So we must draw intelligent conclusions and carry on with our reconstruction of Prehistory over and beyond the passivity and political procrastination of the scientific community on this subject, or is it the desire of the western establishment to suppress anything that threatens the validity of the Judeo-‐Christian tradition? There will always be exceptions, and we wish to remember here the great names in recent Middle Eastern archeology: James Mellaart and Kathleen Kenyon. The problem of financing scientific research is paramount; it is important to establish priorities. For instance, some of the money spent in finding the Titanic, then filming the sinking of that emblematic boat overloaded with atavism and full of dire catastrophe, and now comes the making of a replica, a new vehicle of morbidity for the pampered and the idle in this latter age of decadence in the West, to tempt again the fates. Some of that money could be well spent in exploring and photographing the Pyramids of Guanahacabibes Peninsula that lie a mere 600 meters below the surface of the sea. The point that we wish to make is one that we feel has been clearly established by submarine archeology in recent times: that there was a worldwide Megalithic Civilization in the late Pleistocene that came abruptly to an end on June 5, 10498 BP. We accept Otto Muck’s date, derived from a careful analysis of a large spectrum of scientific evidence for this terminal event, a veritable Noumena of Psychohistory, carefully remembered in the tradition of Maya astronomers. It is the oldest Maya date extant to be found at the Temple of the Sun in Palenque. Other late Pleistocene sites include: several in the Bahamas Bank consisting of interminable megalithic walls with groups of pyramids; specially the pyramids on the submarine plain off the coast of the Guanahacabibes Peninsula in western Cuba. To these we should add the two submarine cities in the Gulf of Cambay near the modern city of Dwarka; the underwater archeological site in Mahabalipuran in southeast India and the now famous underwater pyramid of Yonaguni Island in the Sea of Japan. There are also many megalithic sites around the
Mediterranean whose dating should be revised. These include the megaliths in Tartessos Spain; the Island of Malta, Baalbek in Lebanon and Nevali Cori and Cayonu in Turkey. There should be many more sites on the submarine plains bordering the present coast lines of the north Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Oceans; the result of Glacial Terminations and Marine Transgressions; of eustatic and isostatic processes in the level of the sea and of tectonic subsidence. So that near 1 p.m. June 5, 10 498 BP, a great asteroid (“Asteroid A”), possibly ten kilometers in diameter, came in from the Northwest, travelling much faster than the Earth herself, penetrated the Earth’s atmosphere, caught fire, exploded, broke in half and its two larger segments penetrated the Atlantic Ocean a few miles north of the Island of Puerto Rico. These two huge masses of iron ore, like two cosmic missiles, fractured the Earth’s crust all the way to Iceland and precipitated a cataclysmic eruption of lava all along the line of fracture accompanied by a 500 meter high tsunami that swept the coasts of the north Atlantic and all the former Islands that existed in that Ocean. We should visualize that late Pleistocene world before its final day, very different from our own in terms of geography and climate. For instance, the peninsulas of Florida and of Yucatan were twice as large as they are today, the Bahamas Bank was one big island the size of Yucatan and around the Azores there was probably a big island that sank. Hesitant England was then connected to Europe by a large sea side plain through which flowed the Thames, a longer Rhine and Loire. Also on the other side of the Atlantic the Hudson and The Delaware continued to flow along broader sea side plains before they emptied into the Atlantic Ocean opposite the Island of Atlantis, lost in memory until Plato rescued her, had already given her name to that surrounding Ocean. It was altogether a striking and beautiful world holding a veritable kaleidoscope of cultures that we cannot even begin to imagine let alone describe… But we do have the image of Gobekli Tepe even though that place flourished some two thousand years before the cosmic event. A few objects have emerged from the two sunken cities near Dwarka in the Bay of Cambay that show a level of culture similar to that of Sumer. The sonar photographs of the architectural complex at Guanahanacabibes shows signs of having been built on platforms similar to those in Olmec architecture as in La Venta and San Lorenzo. But without proper submarine archeological surveys we cannot have a more developed understanding of this very important site like we might have at Gobekli Tepe if investigations continue. There have been interesting observations made about the nature of this world wide civilization. Graham Hancock has noted in a recent interview that this Pleistocene Civilization mapped the then existing world. There is a map, the Piri Reis map, formerly in the possession of a Turkish admiral of that name who lived in the early XVI century. A map that shows the Antarctic continent clearly represented as two large bodies of land separated by a straight. This knowledge was not arrived at until the middle of the XX century. We surmise that the Piri Reis Map is a copy of older maps that found their way to Constantinople from Alexandria where such knowledge was miraculously preserved from a time in the IX millennium before the present when the Antarctic was free of ice and someone cartographed the whole continent.
Plato vindicated, we should consider the terrific psychohistorical shock delivered by Asteroid A on the collective conscience and memory of mankind. We cannot here analyze all the geological, oceanographic and paleoclimatological evidence there is on the impact produced by Asteroid A. The National Ocanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) and its Russian equivalent have all the data collected by The Glomar Challenger and The Academician Petrovsky, the oceanographic vessels that conducted extensive research in the North Atlantic during the 1970’s. This data has not been fully reported and interpreted. Here we are concerned with the impact of Asteroid A on the Noosphere and its reverberation to this day. The resistance applied on this point by the collective memory of mankind which does not wish to remember anything about Asteroid A explains among other things, the 2300 year old controversy between Atlantologists and their detractors. But beyond literature lies the region of the unconscious as any poet worth his salt well knows. In what varied ways did Asteroid A affect the planet Earth and the History of Mankind? The Mesolithic Period, the 5000 years following the beginning of the Holocene, which by the way, coincides with the impact of Asteroid A, was an age literally of darkness and of recovery. Darkness because for an unknown period of time, which has been calculated at upwards of two thousand years, a dark mass of volcanic ash hung over the Northern Hemisphere, which the ancient Greeks knew as ‘the night of the hyperboreans ’. The gloomy light of this northern mist must have had some sort of effect on the mood of the people who inhabited that part of the world (perhaps this is the reason why they ‘bleached white’ becoming ‘the white race’?). The population must have greatly declined after the catastrophe which came to be known as ‘the deluge’ due to the sustained precipitation after the evaporated sea water from such momentous submarine volcanism had fallen back as rain water for a period much longer than the proverbial forty days, one would surmise. Be it as it may, it took humanity nearly 5000 years to recuperate, perhaps to get to the point where culture was left off in 10498 BP. Around 5100 BP we see the rise of urban civilization for better or for worse because certain innocence was lost when walled cities appeared; if we are to quote the poet: ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…’ ‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out…’ (Mending Wall, by Robert Frost) Perhaps the wall symbolizes the trauma… for we have been building walls ever since.
The Spiral The Spiral of History is its converging movement, resolving itself in a synthesis after a long experience of trial and error, Political History looking for the perfect formula between personal freedom and public administration. It could be happening now, the flowering of the past 5000 years of political experimentation. Historical experience compressed by an implosion and resolved into its simplest manifestations: simple councils of self-‐government by free men without bureaucracy or political parties. As people become more conscious, or educated if you will, they will want to be in syntony with each other without conflict or violence. And this state of things everyone will want to recognize as the natural state of being. Harmony will seize to be an utopia when a majority of people begin to want it. Perhaps after so much violence people will begin to inquire about the mechanics of peace. There is a danger of involution if humanity refuses to learn, a decadent regression to perversion and brutality, when the State, influenced by corporate religion, wishes to block research into the expansion of the mind. There is a need to draw a line and say : ‘a historical era has ended’, we must begin anew, try something different; new political institutions with a spiritual life that goes beyond corporate formulas into the real inner discovery, inner direction, lucidity and autonomy, with the social and political institutions that define maturity, self-‐government and social responsibility shared by all. The era that began with the unification of Egypt ends today, because it is salutary that it should be so, because new beginnings are healthy. Because the theory and practice of The State has been played out and any more procrastination will further brutalize humanity beyond recovery. It is childhood’s end: if he does not leave on his maturity, the grown child could be destroyed by his parents, The Corporate Religion and The Nation State. For this is no doubt the greatest of all psychohistorical problems: renewal. Some people will say: ‘who wants renewal, renewal is risky…’ ‘We will lose control’…there are some things that cannot be explained… they have to be experienced, people come into them, sometimes after catastrophe has hit them. I have already said in my book La Huerta del Macehual that public administration should be returned to the people… That little by little in a peaceful and democratic way, public office should be accessible to individuals bearing a card that contains in a microchip the sum of their abilities and past working experience… put it in a computer in all centers of public administration and the machine will tell them in detail where is an opening for them in real time where they can find work and be paid by the hour in any branch of public administration. Of course the mechanics of the system will have to be worked out by people who understand public administration, demography, economics and so forth… And it will work when people have arrived at the junction of consciousness, education and shared social responsibility. I believe that we are nearly there, all we have to do is make this project public knowledge in such a way that everyone will want to participate in it spontaneously as a shared endeavor that will free us all from history.
Part Three The Spiral: El Sueño Florido
Paleoethnobotany The spiral is a recurrent symbol in megalithic temples from Malta to Ireland. It is the Entheogenic symbol of the psychic continuum, of the passage between spheres of existence and parallel worlds. The use of The Sacred Entheogens was a common occurrence in late Pleistocene times. It was the central event at the temples of Gobekli Tepe, the Hypogeum of Malta and Newgrange in Ireland. The spirals at the entrance door to the passage corridors of these temples symbolized the psychic continuum of the experience of death and of Entheogenic experience that took place in the central chamber; these were parallel experiences that the ancients knew to be equivalent: The Little Death and the Great Voyage through The Portal. This is the reason why these temples were both temples and tombs.
The figure of The Sleeping Lady was recovered from the main chamber at the Hypogeum of Malta and may represent an Out of Body Experience while in Entheogenic trance and could be related to oracular functions. It is also possible that these temples are far older than they are supposed to be and that we should place all Megalithic Architecture before 10 498 BP. Men were different after that date, culture changed, perhaps that is the reason why Gobekli Tepe was deliberately filled with ruble sometime after 10 000 BP; they were ‘burying the past’ so to speak, after The Great Pleistocene Terminal Event. Social organization had changed and the cosmological outlook had changed. Chronology in prehistory is very important to determine the cultural sequence. That is why civil and ecclesiastical authorities should not interfere with the work of archeologists or historians in an attempt to censure or suppress knowledge. In Malta, at the beginning of the XX century, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities conspired to destroy evidence of the antiquity of the megalithic civilization there ( Philip Coppens ). Most interestingly they effaced the figure of a bison, an animal that became extinct in Europe around 10 000 BP, from the walls in one of the chambers of The Hypogeum. They also disappeared the work of Immanuel Magri in 1907, the investigator who
spent two years working at the Hypogeum. What were they seeking to protect, the validity of the Judeo-‐Christian tradition? A hundred years later we are still struggling against self-‐censure, passivity, complacency and immobility within the academic community and with retrograde authorities who want to shore up the Judeo-‐Christian tradition from the advancement of knowledge. At the end of the Pleistocene there was a land bridge between Africa and Europe that went right through Malta and connected that island with Sicily and Italy. The geography and the climate of the world were much different and the people most have been very different, living in a world of plenty with temperate climates. They were civilized, no doubt about it. If we cannot imagine how or reconstruct their world from the little evidence we have it does not mean that we are going to accept the indifference of the scientific community on this subject. We must use our vision to see and understand their culture from what we know of prehistory, early Neolithic civilizations and the lives of aboriginal people in more recent times. We can be certain that late Pleistocene men carried out Entheogenic rites in their temples, like the Celtic Druids did, that included travelling along the psychic continuum through an spiraling vortex of light into unimagined worlds of the spirit that revealed to them the unfathomable forces of nature that surrounded their fantastic world of mega fauna and gigantic ice walls.( See Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archeology and Peter T. Furst: Entheogens and Culture ) The Maya, The Hindu, The Sumerians, The Egyptians, even The Greeks remembered a world before The Deluge. These late Pleistocene people were giants compared to post diluvia humanity. If there was a mega fauna there were probably large human beings to go with it, those megaliths seem large to us today but they did not seem large to our ancestors in the late Pleistocene, at least they could handle them and place them in extraordinary fashion to build remarkable constructions like the Hypogeum of Malta and the temples of Gobekli Tepe. They must have been over seven feet on the average, the men, and the women over six feet. They lived in large communal houses made of wood as Plato says, like the Vikings did and the natives of British Columbia. They were big and powerful, these homo sapiens diluvialis, and they could move huge monoliths, (Baalbek). They were very intelligent and they might have had an urban civilization that is lying at the bottom of the sea; that the scientific community has the responsibility to explore. They could have come from the west into western Europe and not from Africa as was previously thought. Between 20 000 and 10 000 years ago the climate in Western Europe was similar to that of Siberia today whereas at that time, the large islands of the Atlantic ocean: Bahamas, Cuba and Atlantis and the peninsulas of Florida and Yucatan enjoyed a mild semi tropical climate and must have been very fertile and were larger than they are today. These were the centers of a civilization in the late Pleistocene that radiated East into western Europe, to the valley of the Dordogne, Malta and Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.… As I described it in my book Teonanacatl, our late Pleistocene ancestors held Entheogenic Rites for thousands of years ( Soleki in Furst: The Mousterian tombs in Shanidar, Syria ). They were not
afraid to explore the phenomenon of death because to them it was an everyday occurrence . Like The Olmecs who would sit in a circle and let a jaguar out of a stone cage to see whom it would chose to eat… and in this way the Olmecs practiced self-‐control. Our ancestors would enter into trances and visit parallel worlds. That is what happened in the Hypogeum of Malta and at the round temples of Gobekli Tepe. Yet with time, The Entheogenic Experience was refined until it produced the theology of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, The founding Father of The Western World. El Sueño Florido The Phenomenon of Illumination is the awakening of consciousness. It is the vision of Telesis, of the formal interrelationship between all the elements of nature viewed as a personal experience within a spiritual phenomenon. The person that experiences this vision changes with it, as his soul or her soul, it is the same thing in metaphysical terms, explores the confines of identity and moves beyond the boundaries of the body to identify with that unitary vision of Telesis that helps us find our place in this world, indeed in the Universe. This is a profoundly emotional experience that involves the totality of our beings until the ‘I’ disappears within the experience of Illumination. This is indeed a lonely journey; Akhenaten was trying to go back to a time when there were no gods; not Amon, not Aton but the Spiral and the journey through The Portal, The Flower of Illumination. Perhaps this is why The Toltecs called the experience of Illumination, El Sueño Florido, in Nahuatl Temixoch. And Xochipilli was the protective divinity, the embodiment of the experience that flowered into consciousness. For Akhenaten, the Sun, Aton, was the sole divinity that shed light on the living world and on the joy of life, our life, to live with open eyes, with clarity and truth, in the spirit of Maat which was to him impeccability of action, love and ethical consciousness. Akhenaten was a contemporary of the poets who wrote The Rig-‐Veda. And their time was one of momentous spiritual radiation, even reaching to our own time, for Akhenaten inspired Moses just as the Rig-‐Vedas led to the Upanishads, The Isa Upanishad: ‘Behold the universe in the glory of God: and all that lives and moves on earth. Leaving the transient find joy in the Eternal: set not your heart on another’s possessions…’ ‘He moves, and he moves not. He is far and he is near. He is within all, and he is outside all. Who sees all beings in his own self, and his own self in all beings, loses all fear.’ ‘The Spirit filled all with his radiance. He is incorporeal and invulnerable, pure and untouched by evil. He is the supreme seer and thinker, immanent and transcendent. He placed all things in the path of Eternity.’ (from the Issa Upanishad circa 2800 years before the present, Penguin Classics edition, 1965).
AKHENATEN’S HYMN TO ATON Though appearest beautifully on the horizon of heaven, Thou living Aton, the beginning of life! When thou are risen on the eastern horizon, Thou hast filled every land with thy beauty. Thou are gracious, great, glistening, and high over every land; Thy rays encompass the lands too… all that thou hast made: As thou art Re, thou reachest to the end of them; Though thou art in their faces, no one knows thy going. When thou settest in the western horizon, The land is in darkness, in the manner of death. They sleep in a room with heads wrapped up, Nor see one eye the other. All their goods which are under their heads might be stolen, (But) they would not perceive (it). Every lion is come forth from his den; All creeping things, they sting. Darkness is a shroud, and the earth is in stillness, For he who has made them rests in the horizon. At daybreak when thou arises on the horizon, When thou shinest as the Aten by day, Thou drivest away the darkness and givest thy rays. The two lands are in festivity every day, Awake and standing upon (their) feet,
For thou hast raised them up. Washing their bodies, taking (their) clothing, Their arms are (raised) in praise at thy appearance. All the world, they do their work. All beasts are content with their pasturage; Trees and plants are flourishing. The birds which fly from their nests, Their wings are (stretched out)) in praise of thy ka. All beasts spring upon (their) feet. Whatever flies and alights, They live when thou hast risen (for) them. The ships are sailing north and south as well, For every way is opened at thy appearance. The fish in the river dart before thy face; The rays are in the midst of the great green sea. Creator of seed in women, Thou who makest fluid into man, Who mantainest the son in the womb of his mother, Who soothest him with that which stills his weeping, Thou nurse (even) in the womb, Who givest breath to sustain all that he has made! When he descends from the womb to breath On the day when he is born, Thou openest his mouth completely,
Thou suppliest his necessities. When the chick in the egg speaks within the shell, Thou givest him breath within it to maintain him. When thou has made him his fulfillment with in the egg, to Break it, He comes forth from the egg to speak at his completed (time); He walks upon his legs when he comes forth from it. How manifold it is, what thou hast made! They are hidden from the face of (man), O sole God like whom there is no other! Thou didst create the world according to thy desire, While thou wert alone: All men, cattle, and wild beasts, Whatever is on earth going upon (its) feet, And what is on high, flying with its wings. The rays suckle every meadow. When thou risest, they live, they grow for thee. Thou makest the seasons in order to rear all that thou hast made, The winter to cool them, And the heat that they may taste thee. Thou hast made the distant sky in order to rise therein, In order to see all that thou dost make. Whilst thou wert alone, Rising in the form of the living Aten,
Appearing, shining, withdrawing, or approaching, Thou madest millions of forms of thyself alone. Cities, towns, fields, road and river-‐ Every eye beholds thee over against them, For thou art the Atem of the day over the earth…. Thou art in my heart, And there is no other that knows thee Save thy son Neferkheperure Waenre, For thou hast made him well versed in thy plans and in thy Strength. The world came into being by thy hand, According as thou hast made them. When thou hast risen they live. When thou settest they die. Thou art lifetime thy own self, For one lives (only) through thee. Eyes are (fixed) on beauty until thou settest. All work is laid aside when thou settest in the west. (But) when (thou)) risest (again), [Everything is] made to flourish for the king…. Since thou didst found the earth And raise them up for the son, Who came forth from thy body: the King of Upper and Lower Egypt…Akhenaten… And the Chief Wife of the King…Nefertiti, living and
youthful for ever and ever. From Leonard Cottrell’s , The Penguin Book of the Lost Worlds, 1966.
THE RIG VEDA WE HAVE DRUNK THE SOMA 1 I have tasted the sweet drink of life, knowing that it Inspires good thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the Extreme, that all the gods and mortals seek it together, Calling it honey. 2 When you penetrate inside, you will know no limits, And you will avert the wrath of the gods. Enjoying Indra’s friendship (note), O drop of Soma, brings riches as a docile cow brings the yoke. 3 We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; We have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and malice of a mortal do to us now, O immortal one? 4 When we have drunk you, O drop of Soma, Be good to our hearts, kind as a father to his son, thoughtful as A friend to a friend. Far-‐famed Soma, stretch out our lifetime So that we may live. 5 The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space. You have bound me together in my limbs as thongs bind a chariot.
Let the drops protect me from the foot that stumbles and keep lameness away from me. 6 Inflame me like a fire kindled by friction; make us see far; Make us richer, better. For when I am intoxicated with you, Soma, I think myself rich. Draw near and make us thrive. 7 We would enjoy you, pressed with a fervent heart, Like riches from a father. King Soma stretch out our lifespans As the sun stretches out the spring days. 8 King Soma, have mercy on us for our well-‐being. Know that we are devoted to your laws. Passion and fury are stirred up. O drop of Soma, do not hand us over to the pleasure of the enemy. 9 For you Soma are the guardian of our body; watching over men You have settled dawn in every limb (note). If we break your laws, O God, have mercy on us Like a good friend to make us better. 10 Let me join closely with my compassionate friend So that he will not injure me when I have drunk him. O lord of bay horses (note), for the Soma that is lodged in us I approach Indra to stretch out our life-‐span (note). 11 Weakness and diseases have gone (note); the forces of darkness have fled in terror Soma has climbed up in us, expanding. We have come to the place where they stretch out life-‐spans. 12 The drop that we have drunk has entered our hearts, An immortal inside mortals. O fathers, let us serve that Soma with the oblations And abide in His mercy and kindness. 13 Uniting in agreement with the fathers (note), O drop of Soma, You have extended yourself through sky and earth. Let us serve Him with an oblation; let us be masters of riches.
14 You protecting gods, speak out for us. Do not let sleep or harmful speech Seize us. Let us, always, dear to Soma, speak as men of power in the sacrificial gathering (note). 15 Soma, you give us the force of life on every side. Enter into us finding the sunlight, Watching over men. O drop of Soma, summon your helpers and protect us before and after. ( From The Rig Veda, Penguin Classics, 1981, translated by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty ) Notes and correlations The Indo-‐Europeans known as the Aryans, not to be confused with the ‘aryans’ of Nazi folklore, migrated from the region of the Caspian Sea and the Iranian Plateau into North-‐Western India some three thousand five hundred years ago, about the time of the Pharaoh Tuthmosis III and queen Hatshepsut. Like many tribal nomads of Central Asia before and after them they were cattle breeders and horse tamers who moved about in their wagons looking for good pasture lands. They crossed the passes of the Hindu Kush into North-‐Western India around 1500 BC. All members of the tribe were familiar with amanita muscaria and other Entheogeic plants, as Gordon Wasson has pointed out ( Soma ). They performed the horse sacrifice for their god Agni and drank the sacred Soma in honor of their god Indra from whose name the word India is derived, ( it could be said that the national emblem of Mexico, the Eagle and the Serpent is of Entheogenic origin, a symbol of spiritual liberation, as the Aztec knights of The Eagle held Entheogenic rites at their sanctuary in Malinalco, under the auspices of Quetzalcoatl, The Plumed Serpent, and Xochipilli, the god of flowers and sacred plants, who were the tutelary deities of the rites The Temixoch). The Horse Sacrifice of the Aryans and the drinking of the Soma were the two principal rites celebrated in The Rig Veda. I have myself eaten The Sacred Mushrooms, psilosibe Mexicana, with the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, and can testify that the Vedic Hymn to the god Soma is a beautiful and faithful rendering in poetry of Entheogenic Experience as I experienced it and wrote in my book Teonanacatl. I could say the same thing about The Tibetan Book of The Dead which describes the passage through The Portal into the Bardo Plain, ( Teonanacatl p. 67, note 20). 1 ( Verse 2 ) The god Indra was the tutelary deity of Entheogenic Rites. He was the personification of human wholeness and spiritual unity; of the reconstructed and born again self, thus of liberation; like Quetzalcoatl, Osiris, Dionysus and Christ
2 ( Verse 5 ) The chariot of Akhenaten and the chariot of the Aryan heroes, like that of Achilles most have looked alike: light, with spiked wheels, drawn by two horses, ( Romila Thapar, A history of India. Penguin, p. 42 ), This image of a chariot has helped me to place the date of the Vedic Hymn, We have drunk the Soma around the XIII or XII century B.C., The Age of Akhenaten and Moses.
Akhenaten in his war chariot, his image defaced by his enemies.
3 ( Verse 7 ) The phrase, ‘stretch our life-‐spans’, repeated throughout the Hymn refers to the general feeling and appreciation on the part of the participant on the rite of a recuperated self, possessor of recovered and expanded faculties, that if well nurtured will help prolong life This phrase clearly suggests the origin of Yoga… which was a science designed to PRESERVE not attain Illumination, AFTER HAVING PARTAKEN OF THE SACRED PLANT. Throughout the centuries the ancient Arhats, ascetics and teachers of Yoga developed this science to help men preserve a spiritual resonance acquired while in communion with the god during the taking of Soma. The art of preserving and extending the duration of all the virtues attained during the gathering and the interpretation of the many experiences that compose the inner structure of a renovated self ( See Teonanacatl pp. 60-‐70 ). 4 ( Verse 9 ) The phrase, ‘ you have settled dawn in every limb ‘ refers to the somatic changes experienced in the body while the special alkaloid of the plant is enhancing neuro-‐transmission throughout the central nervous system and specially in the brain. Not surprisingly the medical term soma was derived from the Entheogen Soma. ( See Teonanacatl pp. 60-‐70 ).
5 ( Verse 10 ) ‘ bay horses’ were apparently much admired by the Aryan bards who composed The Rig Veda and this is another clue that places our hymn in the early nomadic pre-‐urban face of Aryan history in North-‐Western India more than three thousand years ago. ( Thapar, op.cit. ) 6 ( Verse 11 ) ‘ weakness and diseases have gone’ . Entheogenic experience may clarify many psychosomatic syndromes liberating the body and the mind of certain illnesses. This author experienced the improvement of his eyesight and other beneficent changes. 7 / Verse 13 ) ‘ Uniting in agreement with the fathers’ . This expression is very important because it establishes a continuity in time with all the generations past and present from Gobekli Tepe to the present passing through Akhenaten and the Rig Veda; constituting in effect a veritable psychohistorical noumena being this, Entheogenic Experience, the fountainhead of religious inspiration throughout the ages ( See Teonanacatl, Author’s Note p. IV, The Source ). 8 ( Verse 14 ) ‘in the sacrificial gathering’. It is my belief that Aryans, because they had been or still were nomads at the time on The Rig Veda, gathered together in places that suggested to them the power of Nature, of mother Earth; and forming a circle, seated on the ground, passed around the Soma in the sacred kukeon, which had been previously prepared in the traditional way with the sacred implements, the stones and mortars used for pressing the plant. In Greek times the sacred crucible, The Kukeon, contained mint, claviceps purpurea, honey and water. ( Gordon Wasson, The road to Eleusis ). Was Akhenaten trying to liberate Egypt from the theocratic power of the priests of Amon? Was he unconsciously trying to recuperate the spiritual freedom that homo sapiens diluvialis enjoyed at the temples of Gobekli Tepe? We do not know the exact sequence of events after Akhenaten’s death. How many people remained loyal to the vision of Akhenaten after his death? Were some of his followers, the Habiru of Pi-‐Ramses, taken by Moses into the desert? Strabo, the Greek historian, geographer and philosopher of the first century of our era is one of the ancient non-‐jewish writers who mentions Moses with reverence in his Geography (24 A.D. ). He writes that Moses was an Egyptian priest who had political control of an area east of The Delta of The Nile, ( Pi-‐Ramses? ) and was dissatisfied with the current political institutions. He left Egypt followed by a large body of people. Moses wrote Strabo referring to his religious ideas, believed that The Divinity should have no human or animal representation, for God according to Moses: ‘May be this One Thing that encompass us all: land, sea, the heavens, the universe and the nature of things…’, very close to the theology of Akhenaten. The historicity of Moses is an extremely difficult subject because one has to contend with a multiplicity of literary sources but no archeological or contemporary textual or paleographic evidence. There are biblical, rabbinical, Christian and Islamic sources, ( Moses is mentioned more than 500 times in the Koran ), not to mention contemporary critical historiography. On the other
hand there is no doubt about the historicity of Akhenaten of whom we have a large selection of paleographic evidence in sculpture, reliefs, hieroglyphic inscriptions and tomb paintings. There were many Semitic and non-‐Semitic people living east of the Nile delta, for several centuries since the time of the Hyksos, 3800 years BP, Semitic refugees established themselves in the area of Pi-‐Ramses until there emerged a border culture half Semitic and half Egyptian to which Moses very easily could have belonged so that the people that he led out of Egypt were not completely Semitic and could have been partisans of Akhenaten, people who left Egypt after some civil strife of which there is an echo in The Bible story of Exodus. The monotheism of the Jews did not necessarily have to come from Moses but rather from a nucleus of emigrants who already possessed a monotheistic world view that was later superimposed to the polytheistic Habiru Bedouin tribes who worshiped the mother goddess Acera and a volcanic-‐teluric deity named Yahwe. They did not have the intellectual resources to design a new theology nor did they have a political motive or the urge for union, nor the need to produce a politico-‐religious synthesis. But Moses did. Was he a follower of Akhenaten? Was Moses Akhenaten? We know that the period between Akhenaten’s death and the reign of Ramses II was one of insecurity and strife, possibly of civil war between the followers of Akhenaten Theology of love and the soldiers, merchants and priests who favoured the god Amon and imperialist policy of general Horemheb. We should consider that Aye and Horemheb, the successors of Akhenaten, reverted to the worship of Amon. And as Sigmund Freud suggests in his book, Moses and Monotheism (pp. 62-‐69), out of the pact of Quadesh in the desert, the Hebrew tribes emerged with the new monotheism designed by Moses and adapted from the theology of Akhenaten. The idea that Moses and Akhenaten are one and the same person proposed by Ahmed Osman in his book Moses and Akhenaten seems to me fantastic. It would solve many problems indeed and revolutionize the history of religion but it does not seem probable. The date for Akhenaten’s death has been given as 1334 B.C.. Osman’s thesis is that he did not die in 1334 B.C. but was exiled to north-‐eastern Egypt were he had relatives through his mother, Queen Tiye , and there stroke an alliance with the Semitic elements of the population and persuaded them to leave Egypt; whereas the date for the Exodus is variously believed to have fallen anywhere between 1298 and 1232 B.C., during the reign of Ramses II. Much would be gained in this debate if the mummy of Akhenaten were to be found and his probable age at the moment of his death established. The fact that his body has not been found leaves ground for a lot of speculation. ( The body in tomb KV 55 has not been positively identified as being that of Akhenaten since it corresponds to a younger man, aged 25, who is believed to be his son Smenkhkare ). The central idea behind the desire to link Akhenaten and Moses beyond the obvious one suggested by Freud that Moses must have been an Egyptian nearly contemporaneous to Akhenaten, is that the fountain head of monotheism is One and the same; that is, The Phenomena Of Illumination. An individual has contact with The Source and he renders his message in contemporary language within the context of a specific culture, be this culture Egyptian or proto-‐
Judaic. Moses delivered his message, so did Akhenaten. That Moses was influenced by Akhenaten there is no doubt in my mind but that they were the same person is entirely a different matter; no doubt a very attractive proposition involving much historical research and hard evidence that unfortunately has not been forthcoming. Yet the possibility cannot be excluded, for this is the very purpose of historical investigation; for one thing is what we know and another thing is what was, things not yet perceived by men-‐ the noumena of History. These are psychohistorical moments, when the cross currents of political and religious history meet in one man who operates a great religious synthesis. During special periods of tension ideological forces come into conflict and must be resolved. Thus new visions of the world are created and new interpretations of The Divine are met with and transmitted with varying success. Akhenaten did just that out of his own original reality in the special political context that he lived. He was the son of Amenophis III, a many sided, athletic and outstanding man, who had already tried to reconcile the rival theologies of Heliopolis and Thebes, of Aton and Amon with the need for an imperial ideology, a unifying superstructure for the Egyptian Empire that spread from Nubia to Syria and was created by his ancestor, Tuthmosis III, and which he visualized under the benevolent protection of Aton. Akhenaten, his son, ( Amenophis IV ), was an inspired man who combined many complex physical, intellectual, ethical and spiritual natures that led him to produce a remarkable politico-‐religious synthesis unique in world history, a vision of The Divinity infused with the miracle of beauty and the joy of life and love in great contrast with the violence of the patriarchal world which is still acting upon us today. He operated such a vast synthesis that he must have experienced a moment of satori, a comprehensive vision. He was a talented man who was the leader of an artistic revolution in culture and art, and a spiritual visionary. His psychohistorical resonance is such that he is still a popular figure today; who has achieved an immortality of sorts, must be the envy of all the other Pharaohs, including Ramses II his close competitor…So much has been written and said about him and his lovely wife, Nefertiti, that out of an affectionate respect for them both I will say no more. Akhenaten had six daughters, he was probably a biological hermaphrodite, and in antiquity hermaphrodites were sacred because it was thought that hermaphroditism was a symbol of the dual perfection of God as it combined both masculine and feminine in perfect proportions ( there is a wonderful image of this in Federico Fellini’s film, Satyricon, of an albino hermaphrodite child, or ‘semi-‐dio’, who is stolen from a sanctuary by two covetous rogues.) Plato presents us with a different interpretation in the Symposium. Through the voice of the dramatist Aristophanes, one of the participants in the dialogue, Plato sees, rather, in the longing and coming together of the proverbial separated halves into which we, ungrateful arrogant mortals, were reduced by the gods, an idealization of homosexual love raised to a ‘virile, spiritual communion’, to quote the words of the dramatist. It would seem that the love between Akhenaten and Nefertiti, that produced six daughters, was an ecstatic orgasmic love between male and female parts that led to a shared vision of The Divinity, and that it inspired the royal couple’s reformist ideas. And here we see the complexity of
being expressed in the dissolution of identity were male and female disappear in a carnal union of joyful celebration of life in union with all beings: men, animals and plants in humble recognition of the Sublime, in a true sacralization of erotic love. Akhenaten and Nefertiti wanted to symbolize that to their people. Perhaps this is the reason why they were not afraid to show themselves naked in public, to show their affection in public almost to the point of coitus, and urged their artists to commemorate their love in painting and sculpture in realistic detail; to communicate to mankind the radiance and the warmth of the Sun as the One god, and to celebrate their love of life. This became the Hymn of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, their legacy to us.
The Judeo-‐Christian western world has underestimated the theological importance of Akhenaten’s message. His understanding of the sacred dimension of eroticism has only a parallel in Hindu philosophy and Yoga. It was only until the arrival of psychoanalysis and the literary art of David Herbert Lawrence, ( Lady Chatterley’s Lover ), that western culture, after two thousand years of Christianity, discovered the spiritual dimension of eroticism without guilt, the fundamental equality between the sexes facing the act of love, the spiritual awakening into the beauty of the world motivated by orgasmic release when love is an art practiced by sensitive beings who interact constructively, creatively as Erich From suggested in his Art of Love. In this sense is Akhenaten very modern and perhaps this is the basis of his appeal to the younger generations of today.
Fourth Delivery, The Method of Psychohistory A General Theory of Psychohistory Authority, Violence and Sexuality The National Geographic Society recently published an article on the languages of the world, it found that the language spoken by more people was Chinese Mandarin followed by Spanish, which by one million people was ahead of English in third place. The present author is bicultural and writes both in English and Spanish sometimes without being aware that he has shifted from one language into the other; into a different language. Certain themes suggest the Spanish language and others English yet the author regrets to admit that he does not know Chinese…I would like to take this opportunity to thank my readers for their gracious interest in reading my ideas for which I alone take responsibility. Also I would like to thank their patience if now and then I were to shift from English into Spanish or from Spanish into English. I apologize for not always supplying a translation for it is not always possible to do so because the flow of ideas emerges without warning from the unconscious were they seem to occur in a language that is outside time, all of its own, that claims immediate exposition before it is forgotten. In our essay on The State, La Tarjeta Inteligente found in La Huerta del Macehual, we have covered some of this ground we now wish to make a further investigation on the basic Noumena that have consistently dislocated History. We believe that throughout History there has been operating a collective urge towards liberation, coherence and consciousness. This is the natural consequence of the ongoing process of Knowledge. Athenian Democracy, Roman Law, The Magna Carta, the democratic constitutions of the last three centuries are examples of this fundamental desire for coherence and certainty in social organization. The spirit of consciousness which unites the best qualities of analysis, memory and emotion have been pointing towards perfectibility since late Pleistocene times when the Tabu against anthropophagy began to take hold on the mind of humanity. Today we continue to re-‐dramatize generation after generation certain grotesque habits that darken the experience of life in this Planet. War, Violence and Torture, or the sadistic pleasure in violence, re-‐dramatizes pain in an endless chain of redress and vengeance. Also the desire to immobilize other human beings for our service which is called power or slavery; the corporate slavery procured by the State or the individual slavery inflicted by emotional dependency can also constitute a form of torture. We could quickly make a historical survey of the origin of these psychohistorical Noumena. At the end of the Matriarchal Age when the first public granaries were established and the distribution of wealth became an occasion for violence. The Patriarchy was born along with armed guards and
bronze weapons. The State was founded and organized violence appeared along with the foundational myths of the patriarchal Judeo-‐Christian tradition. Today the Gordian knot of power, authority, violence and sexuality is an unquestioned fact of life accepted by most people. Specially by its’ more accomplished practitioners who believe in it implicitly as pure ideology: the darker, higher circles of the political class and of organized crime, the oligarchies and plutocracies of our authoritarian democracies. The associated syndromes of violence and power have continued to change and expand in the XXI century from the reality described by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man. The political reaction of the 1970’s introduced the cult of violence as a response to the pacifism of The 60’s generation. The conservative ideologue William F. Buckley, the Supreme Court Justice Powell and billionaire F.I. Stone promoted the candidacy of Ronald Reagan to subvert Culture and establish a conservative regime based on the cult of violence and political reaction. John Lennon was murdered the U.S. flag appeared in all U.S. films to pass censure, the cult of violence came to the fore personified by actors Clint, ´dirty Harry´, Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Sylvester, ‘rocky’, Stallone, Bruce Willis, et all… With the passing away of the generation of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Richard Burton, directors like John Huston and Elia Kazan the American film industry, the number one promoter of popular culture, lent itself whole heartily to political reaction. The spirit of self-‐criticism, the idea that dramatic art is there to help generate a moment of self-‐knowledge through catharsis as the ancient Greek dramatists understood it has nearly passed away from western culture thanks to a generalized political reaction and the fear of excellence in art. We now have the rule of a mediocre bureaucracy of culture, the one that organizes the film festivals and the literary prizes is in league with the plutocracy who desires alienated market consumers and no free individuals with a clear level of political and cultural understanding such as true democratic societies produce, where not only are men and women equal but are also spiritually advanced and possess a certain degree of political conscience and social responsibility. The cult of martial arts, arms trafficking and political reaction perverted a whole generation the world over originating countless civil wars along with grave social dislocation that includes the drug culture of organized crime and gang violence like the Mara Salvatrucha of Central America, one of the byproducts of the civil wars promoted by U.S. led political reaction. This world culture of violence which now saturates the planet is having a special psychohistorical effect in the more vulnerable societies the world over: genocides in Africa by phallic-‐narcissistic goons in Uganda, violent convulsions within Islamic culture, (a theme that will require an extended analysis in a special section of our project to come ), teenage hit men employed by the drug cartels all over the world. The cumulative effect, the expansion and reverberation of all this violence overwhelms the minds of the seriously disturbed creating a reverberating chain reaction to the point of psychotic breakdown as in the case of the student in the Denver, Colorado cinema,
the Chechen brothers in Boston, the Connecticut school slayer and the Washington D.C. naval post attacker, the shooting of a woman in a car with a baby by police in front of The White House… In The Second Delivery of this Project we have already mentioned the cumulative effect and the reverberation of violence as an expanding wave within The Noosphare of the Planet. This is perhaps the single most important Noumena of Psychohistory. The negative Quanta of bio-‐energy induced by the cumulative effect of mass atrocities and brutalities is still emanating from such places as Auschwitz. None the less, there is a psychogenic transference operating as ‘culture’ and we can observe this in Israel-‐Palestine where this mass psychohistorical quanta of negative energy is being reproduced and perpetuated throughout as a culture of violence that does not accept the existence of the Other, The Enemy. If the populations involved do not come into an understanding of this fact and analyze it and deal with it collectively through special programs of education they will be condemned to re-‐dramatize periodically the same episodes of vengeance sadism and cruelty to the point that after the end of the world the phantoms of a German, a Jew and an Arab will still be chasing each other with a club much like in the paintings of Francisco Goya. Hablar de la violencia necesaria del estado es una aberración bolchevique. A los socialistas que creen en el estatismo les podríamos recordar que sin libertad y democracia el camino conduce al Archipiélago Gulag . O puede ser que como politólogos quieran congraciarse con el régimen para ingresar a la burocracia. Nosotros comprendemos el proceso histórico que vive México es por eso que reconocemos los esfuerzos del gobierno,( octubre, 2013), ante los desastres naturales y la terrible situación de inseguridad creada por más de 100, 000 secuestros en un año. También entendemos el esfuerzo del gobierno por encontrar un equilibrio político dentro del marco del régimen del sistema de partidos pues este es el momento histórico que vive México y le hace bien al país aprender la práctica parlamentaria y la necesidad de la responsabilidad en política. Sin embargo esperamos que el Congreso estudie la necesidad de abrirle el acceso a la administración pública a todos los ciudadanos que no militen en un partido político mediante la creación de una Ley del Servicio Social Voluntario y de La Tarjeta Inteligente que les diera acceso a plazas libres en la administración pública por un corto periodo de tiempo dentro de un sistema rotativo para evitar la creación de sinecuras. También queremos reconocer la moderación que demostró el gobierno de Distrito Federal en su manejo de la crisis magisterial. En ese mismo espíritu podríamos sugerir que a los jóvenes ‘anarquistas´ que se manifiestan violentamente ´cual rito de paso tribal’, empañando aniversarios tan significativos como la Marcha por El 2 de Octubre, se les proporcione acceso a algunos talleres artesanales como los que alguna vez existieron en las unidades habitacionales del IMSS para que aprendan algún oficio, tomen clases de guitarra o de yoga y se socialicen de una manera pacífica. Muchos son rechazados de las Universidades o los que son militantes políticos serios podrían formalizar su perspectiva política mediante un desplegado en algún periódico o en internet para comunicar algún programa político o social y no ser confundidos con otros que tanta droga les impidió concentrarse y terminar sus estudios universitarios. (Se podría negociar con el grupo que t hace algunos años tomó el Auditorio ‘Che’ Guevara para que lo entreguen, que mucha falta le hace a la Facultad de Filosofía y letras de la UMAM. El autor de estas líneas en alguna ocasión
disfruto ahí de sendas conferencias dadas por personalidades internacionales como el compositor Karlheinz Stockhaussen y la escritora Susan Sontag, sin mencionar los muchos clásicos del cine que disfrutó presentados por el Cine Club de La Facultad. El autor de estas líneas no comprende porque capricho están ahí esos jóvenes y porque los tolera La Universidad, pero en realidad debo decir que no conozco a estos grupos, que soy seguidor de Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi y de León Tolstoi y que estoy en contra de la violencia de cualquier género…) Otros politólogos, más generosos, más independientes y menos interesados en formar parte de la burocracia, han dicho, con Winston Churchill, que el sistema político que tenemos, o que padecemos, hoy en día, es el mejor; considerando las alternativas. En un sentido estricto esto es cierto si consideramos los regímenes dictatoriales personales, los caudillos y el fascismo corporativo de izquierda o de derecha que ha padecido Latino América. La democracia electoral de partidos pone a competir a diferentes sectores y grupos de interés de la sociedad que se arrebatan el poder periódicamente en el descontento y en la amargura de la derrota de los perdedores; evitando así las continuas guerras civiles tan prevalentes en el siglo XIX, pero sin erradicar nunca la pobreza y la discordia, tan necesarias para mantener una mano dura y autoritaria y una mano de obra barata en el mercado del trabajo. Este es nuestro presente y ha sido nuestro pasado. Sin embargo se supone que debemos de aprender de la experiencia de la Historia, que nos propone que el hombre es perfectible y que para sobrevivir y vivir en sociedad meditemos sobre la esfera de la ética y así proyectemos y visualicemos sociedades cada vez mejores. Nos movemos hacia ellas buscando el bien común. Es en este sentido que pensamos en una fase superior de la democracia hacia la cual pudiésemos todos transitar pacíficamente poniéndonos de acuerdo como sociedad compleja y plural que somos, gestionando paso a paso lo que valla surgiendo , cada vez con mayor aplomo, perfeccionando nuestras instituciones históricas e invirtiendo toda nuestra atención en la educación de nuestros hijos y nietos . Donde haya hombres y mujeres que sepan convencer con lucidez y con el ejemplo de sus actos por ahí estará la democracia. Por eso el gobierno del futuro podría surgir de las asambleas de barrio, de las juntas de vecinos, de las manzanas o de las cuadras que ante la emergencia del colapso de la política se presentarían como lo más sencillo, lo que está a la mano, como escribiera E.F. Schumacher en Small is Beautiful. Lo curioso del caso es que las asambleas de barrio y las juntas de vecinos no constituyen una utopía, o una forma inocente de idealismo; no, implican la recuperación de un ejercicio perdido, que es la comunicación humana, cancelada por el intenso narcisismo e ensimismamiento de la política en que se ha convertido nuestra cultura mundial contemporánea. Una cultura de marginación y consumo donde la más mínima comunicación espontanea, efusiva y afectuosa se ha olvidado en el primitivo narcisismo de una psique fracturada por el consumo y la manipulación del Estado, que ha alineado al individuo en la envidia permanente, en los celos y en la frustración ante las metas deliberadamente inalcanzables inducidas por la himnopaedia de la publicidad comercial reforzada por la propaganda política que propone una sociedad de clases, meritocrática y jerarquizada. .
El Método de La Psicohistoria: la cuestión religiosa La esfera de lo secular debe de estar claramente diferenciada de la vida espiritual del individuo. Esto ha significado un arduo aprendizaje a todo lo largo de la Historia desde que se dejó de compartir la experiencia enteogénica a finales del pleistoceno. Hoy en día la religión en sus formas exteriores es un fenómeno étnico cultural que ha perdido su origen enteogénico y ya no es compartida universalmente como experiencia interna como se hacía al final del pleistoceno y como se hace hoy en día en las pocas sociedades sobrevivientes que viven la experiencia religiosa de una manera directa con Las Plantas Sagradas Es por eso que hoy en día tenemos que hablar de una sociedad secular necesariamente para defendernos del embate ideológico de las religiones externas corporativas que tienen un origen histórico étnico-‐geográfico con un fuerte componente racial de supremacía política cultural o explícitamente agresiva e imperialista. Es por eso que en una sociedad laica, en una sociedad libre, en una sociedad democrática que a la vez es plural tenemos que hablar de la libertad de conciencia y del secularismo fundamental en una sociedad democrática. Es el sentido tutelar que asumen las religiones corporativas asociadas al Estado que amenaza la libertad espiritual del hombre contemporáneo con la sombra de la Teocracia, permeando la vida social con un paternalismo autoritario y patrimonialista sobre las almas y las ideas religiosas como en los tiempos de Juan de Palafox y Pedro Moya de Contreras, quienes por cierto no lograron doblegar el espíritu de Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, aunque lo intentaron…. La pluralidad religiosa existente en las democracias avanzadas del mundo garantizada por sus Constituciones, es garantía de diversidad. Dios los hizo Ateos, Budistas, Católicos o Marxistas y tanta competencia los mantiene inspirados para bien de la sociedad que no permite que predomine alguna confesión; que como la política exterior de Inglaterra en los siglos XVIII y XIX, se aseguraba que siempre existiera un balance en el poder, que nadie predominara, que nadie impusiera un orden espiritual totalitario sobre las conciencias -‐ ninguna teocracia para el mundo, entonces, ningún ayatola u obispo virrey. La Espiritualización de la Política está en el fuero interno de cada individuo, si se es religioso u espiritual; en la esfera de lo enteogénico, de la divinidad que mora dentro de nosotros; si se es agnóstico alejandrino o rosacruz etc…, entonces morara en la conciencia de lo político y de lo ético. Pero una sociedad laica y sus necesarios límites a las libertades religiosas es algo que ya se ha acordado en la mayor parte del mundo civilizado. Ha quedado entendido después de innumerables guerras religiosas cuales son los límites de la libertad religiosa. No creo que nadie quiera regresar a las guerras religiosas; por eso el laicismo en política es necesario. Pero también es cierto que hoy más que nunca deseamos que renazca el espíritu de comunidad espiritual universal que es silencioso y telepático porque mora dentro del corazón de cada individuo. En el
terreno de la vida social no necesitamos exteriorizar nuestra ideología religiosa si la sabemos expresar con nuestros actos. Luego entonces La Espiritualización de la Política no tiene sentido si se limita a un ejercicio de buenas intenciones y propósitos humanitarios, eso no funciona en política real. Para asegurarnos que el poder no se eternice en la venalidad tenemos que cambiar de sistema político y así estar seguros que nunca más sea transferida a persona alguna responsabilidad social en un plano de autoridad discrecional sino que la responsabilidad de la gestión de los asuntos públicos de la sociedad sea compartida por todos en términos de igualdad, de autogestión y autogobierno, en juntas vecinales de manzanas, de cuadra o de edificio, en asambleas de barrios o de colonia, en parlamentos delegacionales, distritales, federales, de ciudad y en los consejos de las comunidades étnicas rurales.
The Method of Psychohistory: Imago Imago, in Spanish, mitote, are the many copies of reality, the representations from the Collective Unconscious that help form the many version of history for political purposes and propaganda; the projection, the image-‐idea favored by nationalists and the elaborators of religious ideology designed to perpetuate domination. The image of the Argentinian Jesuit pope standing before a kneeling ‘Mexican’ in the Vatican plaza, surrounded by some of his countrymen wearing the t-‐shirts of the national soccer team, performing an ‘exorcism’, ( or was it an unconscious act of submission reminiscent of conquest ? ), upon a representative of a ‘pagan Indian race possessed by the devil’, ( Mexico, the archrival of Argentina in culture and sports vying for primacy in Latin America)? We have to deconstruct this into the Vatican strategy to preserve its power over the Latin American masses believed to be the last stronghold of a faltering church which has lost its authority and credibility in Europe. The idea, or Imago, of electing an Argentine Jesuit to succeed the resigning Ratzinger was masterminded fairly quickly, probably suggested by Ratzinger himself who pointed out the dire straight in which the church found herself. Apparently the cardinals calculated that the way to hold their sway over the expertly intimidated and suppressed Latin America masses was to have recourse of the wide historical experience of the Jesuit order in this matter, who from the missions of Paraguay to those of New Mexico had had much experience in the past. Why was not a Mexican prelate chosen for this task? Because they have too much Indian blood in them and the Argentines are more reliable because they are solidly Latin and Eurocentric, from the Vatican´s point of view, the most competent representatives of Latin Europe in the American continent. In such a fashion is public opinion created and manipulated, the conservative media quickly responds. But are we here back in the eighteenth century or in the twenty first? Is Latin America going to be seduced by the Jesuit siren call and through it provide the survival of an obsolete religion restrictive of human spiritual expansion, the maintainer of the authoritarian social order and singular prop of the decadent National State? What exactly is the ‘Theology of Liberation’? Instead of defending the rich like the Legionaries of Christ why not defend the poor like father Alejandro Solalinde? We would need whole companies, legions of Solalindes to defeat Organized Crime... Some forty years ago in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico inspired by Erich Fromm who was then living in Cuernavaca, Bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo, Gregorio Lemercier and Ivan Illich proposed the use of psycho-‐analysis in monasteries and seminars of the Catholic Church as they had observed
the manifestation of severe psychopathological syndromes like alcoholism, repressed homosexuality, pederasty and other related neurosis and psychoneurosis in young aspirants to the priesthood. The Vatican and the reactionary Mexican clergy furiously fought such notions as they continued to steer the ship of Catholicism towards the rock of sexuality. Today they are paying the prize as the Church founders in the sea of its veritable nemesis, the incomprehension and repression of sexuality, which places the Church in obsolescence, outside the currents of contemporary society. The Vatican can count on the conservative masses of Latin America who can mobilize thousands of people for a papal visit, and so the Vatican is gambling for a show of power in its outing to Brazil. They have elected a Jesuit pope and they can rely on the discipline of the order to bring into their order the fragile and defenseless new generation of Latin American youth gambling on the atavistic permanence of their catechism and apologetics in the unconscious minds of the masses that the Jesuit order worked so well to introject in the minds of youth at their schools and universities since their early days in Germany with Le Jay, Láinez and Canisius. One thing they have not calculated is their continuous evasion of the problem of sexuality, the very rock towards which the vessel of the church is heading. I ignore if the subject was mentioned in the Manual of Exercises designed by Ignatius of Loyola or in the theology that his delegates expounded at the council of Trent, ( Leopold Von Ranke, Historia de los Papas, FCE pp. 68-‐112), but how can the order and the church think of surviving in the world of international sex traffic, slavery and pederasty in The Net? Are they aware of their own responsibility, how their own ignorance and teaching contributes to sexual ignorance and brutality in the world? An exclusively male society ignores the mechanism of the Oedipus Complex, even the U.S. army is beginning to recognize and accept homosexuality as an established fact of human nature without pseudo moral or ideological posturing. How is it that a society that ‘sublimates’ its generalized homosexuality in vows of chastity and ‘asceticism’ confronts the nature of the human libido which is in operation 24 hours a day every day of our lives by ignoring its existence?
There are signs that Europeans have grown tired of the Catholic Church. Christianity was originally a Mediterranean historical event, it was precisely the Jesuit order who between 1550 and 1773 insisted on making it universal, until the order was suppressed because of its overbearing pretensions and conflicts with constitutional monarchy and the emerging volterian bourgeoisie . The autochthonous, indigenous, populations of the American continent have never been great fans of Christianity and their sense of identity is growing stronger every day. The criollos and the mestizos of Latin America are constructing a new identity, looking for their roots in the Earth that gave them birth. Why should the Eurocentric Jesuit order come to teach us what to think and exploit the generous innocence of the majority of the people of this continent? The Method of Psychohistory: recurrent syndromes, Sugar and Slavery Drugs and Organized Crime Hernando Cortez’ conquest of Mexico awoke incommensurable greed in Europe. The genocide perpetuated on the Tainos of the Caribbean, and the Portuguese slave traffic introduced a new era of depredation and forced extinction of autochthonous cultures that became a new paradigm for the Americas that survives in many forms and many disguises to this day. It is the ethic of the matador, the machito and the cabrón eulogized in popular social folklore since the XIX century, a Karma that continues to reverberate today as organized crime. The Caribbean Islands were the scene of an experiment in terror, a generalized collective sadomasochism for economic gain was the accepted culture of the day; sheer erotic perversion reaching its apotheosis with the death of hundreds of thousands of transported slaves not to mention the eventual desertification of Haiti as the result of extreme exploitation. This was the legacy of the French, the thirty thousand French slavers who perished at the hands of the rebels in Haiti massacred after the rebellion of Toussaint Louverture in Española, the former home of the original Tainos of pre-‐Colombian days. ( We are reminded of another thirty thousand royalist Frenchmen, men, women and children, killed in La Vendée, in December 1793, by the artillery of general citizen Westermann at Savenay while attempting to cross La Loire on their way to Normandy, hopping for the support of the Royal, ( British ), Navy which never got there. ).
The economic impact of slavery has been the subject of many academic investigations yet many forms of slavery persists in our day. We could recommend the excellent History of Cuba by Hugh Thomas. Similar processes were experienced in Jamaica and Haiti and elsewhere in The Caribbean until the abolition of slavery in the latter part of the XIX century. The creation of the market for sugar through the agency of slavery has a similar parallel in the rise of the contemporary market in human traffic for sexual and economic exploitation in conjunction with the traffic in marijuana and cocaine generated by the inflated prices of these commodities because of their illegal condition. This double ‘opportunity’ of ‘drugs’ and slavery is one of the fundamental combinations that sustain organized crime, this symbiosis is its source of energy as well as its source of liquid cash. In the same manner the questionable or illegal practice of slavery created huge margins of profit in the sugar market in the XVIII and XIX centuries. It is the same opportunistic technique designed by parliaments and governments to maintain the unholy cohabitation between politics and crime. The same situation generated by members of the English parliament who owned sugar plantations in Jamaica during the XVIII century is repeated today by many politicians and bankers who are partners in crime with the drug cartels and who greatly benefit with the ‘illegal’ condition or status of ‘drugs’. Isn’t there a similarity in time-‐space between a clipper slave ship of 1860 and a jungle laboratory producing Cocaine in 2013, the huge profits? The hypocritical insistence on the illegality of Marijuana has made millionaires in all corners of ‘The Americas’. An innocent plant that grows from Alaska to Patagonia has turned millions of people into accomplices in crime and sanctimonious vulgarity; the result of political schizophrenia and cultural double standards… Not until drugs are legalized will we see a return to sanity and real prices. The vested interest by the present political world order in prohibiting ‘drugs’ is to keep prices high, in the streets of New York. Up to twenty seven thousand dollars can be made on a kilogram of marijuana because of prohibition and because of prohibition the apparatus of the state in association with organized crime cam make fabulous fortunes that can hardly fit in the cellars of organized crime and assorted corrupt political operators who stash the dollars in huge bundles inside cardboard boxes, (Chinese goons in Mexico city and politicians in Tabasco). With legalization, markets will be regulated, prices will be more realistic, they will go back to the original 1960’s price of 27 pesos the kilogram of marijuana, just like epazóte and hierbabuena, ( peppermint ), which is what marijuana is in a market sense – another herb. And a true new culture of health in a more lucid civilization will disclose the proper dimension of the so called ‘drugs’ within the frame of a saner society that will be liberated to do more creative things. Laboratories could be licensed, revenues collected, markets stabilized, new legal codes amply debated, instead of being habitually infringed with impunity, with the result that society loses all respect for the law. The lack of an international conference on Drugs is gravely contributing to a deterioration of social relations within the countries that suffer the syndromes of drug trafficking. The more that such a conference is delayed the stronger will organized crime become. The artificially high prizes created by penalization vastly increase the power of organized crime and greater is the universal corruption operated on society as a whole as the new generations sink in a
culture of habitual crime. What is even more perverse is the glorification of crime and violence as a way of life that constantly teaches the young and vulnerable that crime pays and that they will do well in life if they join the ranks of organized crime. This is what is happening in the Mexican state of Morelos where after the death of capo Beltrán Leyva who more or less imposed an old style order on the different bands, several new bands have emerged, some of them composed of teen agers who have scaled to new heights of brutality as they compete with each other for the control of territory, killing innocent bystanders during their gang shootouts and committing more atrocious crimes, ( evidence of several Morelenses in conversation with this author ). The cycle of violence continues because no one has a clear idea of when it started, why it started or what it all mean in a broad social and historical sense. Beyond political posturing is pure economic gain which betrays the complicity of a corrupt political order, morally bankrupt, which has nothing more to give but a lot to take. This is why an international conference on Drugs convening all the nations involved is urgent: to acknowledge the trade, understand its history, its cultural and economic ramifications, its regulation and its place within a new international legal order. The Method of Psychohistory: Self Government versus Party Politics Self-‐Government is an advanced form of electoral democracy. Party politics belongs to another era; to the era of the written press and political journalism, the heyday of ideology. It was the era that began with Daniel de Foe and L’Abbé Prévost and ended with the Internet. Today public opinion is formed via tweeter. The written press is too cumbrous with the extractive paper industry that devours the forests of the planet and the labyrinthine articles and editorials that try to define a political reality that is too exclusive and corrupt for the good of humanity. Town councils are better and get more things done than the ideology of the conservative parties or the liberal parties, the communist and socialist parties all put together because all these parties are self-‐perpetuating organisms that through their bureaucracies exclude everyone else. The electoral system based on party politics is not going to survive through the agency of independent candidates either….The system of party politics has been superseded by the desire to communicate directly through the new media that can quickly mobilize a territorial unit that has nothing to do with ‘ideology’ or ‘class interests’ but with direct, immediate community problems that deal with the living conditions of your city block, neighborhood, township or district.
The change to direct democracy would be the affirmation of the idea of community, of the existence of a community…A great renewal. There would be no dislocation in the transition, no chaos. People would gather in some neighbor’s house to represent their block and elect two delegates: one female and one male, to represent them, for a limited time, in the district assembly. Thus public administration would be managed directly at the block level and at the district level through block meetings, ( juntas ), and district assemblies, ( asambleas de barrio o de distrito ). Each district assembly would then choose eight representatives, four women and four men, to represent them at the state congress. Which will be renamed the community congress or the community parliament to leave behind the political concept of The State and all that it implies and get on with the task of a new redefinition of civilization to be defined by the participants themselves in their new assemblies. It would be 1776 and 1789 and 1821 all over again but more festive because we would have lifted a huge weight from our backs. We will have expanded our consciousness and live in the instant world of direct communication through the new media. We will have created a new political environment at a higher level of consciousness and empathy, closer to direct telepathy, which is an instantaneous mutual agreement of shared enlightenment in social order. A friend has said, quoting Winston Churchill, that the electoral, party democracies that we have today are the best we could hope for, considering the alternatives. And yes, those were the alternatives in the past but they are not what we can do in the future to better our present condition. In Churchill’s time National Socialism, Fascism, dictatorship and imperialism were the alternatives to electoral party democracy; pretty grim indeed; but that has changed, it is not the alternative today. The alternative today is between a mechanized plutocratic state in the manner of George Orwell´’s 1984 and Herbert Marcus’ alienated societies ‘with a lot of security and no liberty’; no matter how light and homogenized it might be made to look by the plutocracies, political scientists and mass psychologists, the possibility that we might enjoy life, freedom and democracy through some form of self-‐ government and direct democracy will be taken away from us by the people who love The System of Power.
The Method of Psychohistory: The Vision of Love is the highest form of Consciousness The Entheogenic Theology of Huautla and the Bardo Thödol: Temixoch, el Sueño Florido Los protagonistas enteogénicos son: La Tierra en su modalidad sacralizada por el enteógeno o sea La Diosa Madre Demeter, Guadalupe Tonantzin Cihuacoatl, el enteógeno u Hongo Sagrado, Teonanacatl, ( psilocybe Mexicana ), Peyote, ( losophora williamsii );El Hijo, el iniciante o Mistoi, y el Dios Padre, La Divinidad Inmanente proveedora de la luz, el calor, la llivia y la Telésis, (Gestalt de configuraciones y significados que le confieren unidad y sentido a todos los elementos de la Naturaleza). El Nombre de esta última divinidad es múltiple: El Padre Tláloc, en Sánscrito, Diaus-‐ Pithar, para los Griegos, Dionisio, el joven Iacco, que fueran como Xochipili y Quetzalcoatl deidades tutelares del Sueño Florido, Temisoch. En la Antigüedad el Santuario Enteogénico de mayor influencia durante 2000 años fue Eleusis, sobre el mar Egeo, a quince kilómetros de Atenas; desde la época Micénica 3500 AP hasta su destrucción por el Vándalo Alarico en 396 de nuestra era. El uso de los Enteógenos es tan antiguo como la humanidad misma. Pensamos que Los Enteógenos eran conocidos en Gobekli Tepe, Catal Huyuk, Eridu, en el Egipto predinástico, en la civilización Minoica de Creta y en la cultura pre-‐ Helénica de Grecia. Sin duda que Grecia estuvo bajo la influencia cultural Cretense y que la Gran Diosa Madre común a todas las culturas Mediterraneas y del Cercano Oriente también fue venerada en Grecia y que en algún punto se llamó Deméter y que fue reverenciada en Eleusis como La Gran Madre y que es posible que en el Bronze Tardio sus ritos tuviesen influencia Cretense. Lo que si sabemos con más certeza es que a comienzos de la Epoca Clásica en Grecia Pisistrato el tirano de Atenas amplio la pequeña estructura rectangular del antiguo Telesterión de Eleusis con una mayor que después fue destruida por los Persas. También sabemos que el arquitecto Ictinus, comisionado por el gran Pericles, diseño un templo con un pórtico de columnas de mármol y que la parte posterior del Telesterión estaba constituida por una gradería de piedra excavada en la roca viva que otrora habría sido la cantera original y que en tiempos remotos ( 4000 AP ) existió una cueva que bien pudo haber sido el santuario original. Siglo.s después este pequeño acantilado sirvió de pared natural para el templo en épocas clásicas. Esto nos da a entender el patrocinio que ejerció Atenas sobre el Santuario de Eleusis durante la época Clásica Griega y después bajo el imperio Romano hasta el año 396 de nuestra era cuando el Santuario fue destruido por el Vándalo Alarico.
Sabemos que Herodoto, Sófocles, Eurípides, Esquilo, Sócrates, Platón, el emperador Adriano, el escritor Apuleyo autor de Las Metamorfosis, y muchos otros hombres y mujeres de todas las edades y condiciones sociales incluyendo a los esclavos, Las únicas personas excluidas de participar en los ritos Eleusinios serían las que hubiesen cometido delitos de sangre. Los ritos se celebraban bajo la protección de la Gran Madre Deméter, de su Hija Core-‐Perséfone y del Estado Ateniense y fueron de gran influencia en el mundo antiguo para el Helenismo, y de hecho constituyeron el fenómeno central de la religión personal en el mundo antiguo en Asia, Africa y América. ( ver Richard Evans Schultes, Plantas de los Dioses, FCE ) La mejor descripción de lo sucedido al interior del telesterión durante la ceremonia de iniciación en Eleusis esta en Gordon Wasson: El Camino a Eleusis, una solución al enigma de los Misterios, FCE. Lo que puedo decir aquí para no repetir el excelente trabajo que hicieran Wasson y sus colaboradores es que La experiencia Enteogénica profunda de Iluminación y de visiones trascendentales la puede vivir cualquiera que lo desee, que lo halla meditado y que este consiente de su significado, preparado, como se hacía en la antigüedad, con gran respeto y estudio previo a la ceremonia de iniciación con Las Plantas Sagradas. Se puede destacar de todo lo dicho por tantos autores de la antigüedad y de tiempos modernos el valor espiritual transformador que se llevaban los antiguos de su experiencia en Eleusis: la
Visión de lo Inefable, La Paz concedida por La Divinidad y su infinita misericordia al concedernos la oportunidad de conocernos a nosotros mismos, al recuperar la línea de nuestra memoria rescatada y reconstruida y contemplar la sobrecogedora unidad y belleza del mundo que nos rodea; el sentimiento de la paradisiaca experiencia que podría ser la vida en esta tierra si tan solo ejerciésemos el autocontrol suficiente para vivir en armonía con la naturaleza y con nuestros semejantes, como lo pintara con gran claridad Hieronymus Bosch en su tríptico del Jardín de las Delicias. Esa era la certeza que se llevaban los antiguos, la convicción íntima de que el paso entre esta vida y la otra constituía Un Continuo Psíquico por el que transitaban. En el momento mismo en que salían de Eleusis los invadía el sentimiento de tener el destino espiritual de sus vidas en sus propias manos y que esta vida era equivalente a la otra y que no había la menor diferencia entre una y otra porque la vida, como dijera el poeta: sueño es y los sueños, sueños son y que la única realidad era La Visión de lo Inefable, inenarrable, que era el mayor tesoro que se llevaban…
The innocence that lies under the skin of the huautleños and the freshness of the mornings in Huautla announce a promise revealed by The Sun. It is a vision of love that recalls The garden of Paradise among the fruit trees of the orchards of Huautla. No words can describe it; or if words are a vehicle to the unconscious we should do well to stand outside time and like the crumbling pigment of ancient buildings retain the pressed images of past lives to live and to witness a simultaneity elongated like the shadow we project from our backs, facing the sun, facing the light. Imagine that at that moment of crossing The Portal , you are presented with a moment of grace, with the eternity of your life opened like the many petals of a lotus flower blending with the beauty of the world that surrounds you. We would then be experiencing The Clear Light of Pure Reality and the very cobble stones that we tread with the pilgrims of Huautla will shine with magnificence revealing the hands that set them, letting us see the presence of the masons of long ago performing the tequio, the hours of communal work. We would then pass from one world to another understanding a long series of events that placed us there at that moment, like the bonding of many lives that suddenly manifest themselves and are understood to be part of the same effort towards redemption through the clarity of The Vision of Love. The trees in the orchard of Huautla will seem friendly to us and the wise huautleños will smile with us assenting, for they are all mushroom eaters, the best of them. We come and go between the worlds parading dawn the street with our friends who accompany us, who are travelling with us along the Luminous Path of The Clear Light of Radiance. We enter the Portal and disappear.
The Meaning of Love is stated by little sign posts along the way, a friendly face, a chance conversation with friends standing at the crossroads, a phrase remembered that clears the meaning of a paradox, will open an unsuspected door, previously unseen, that will lead to joyous gatherings with friends, in this world or in another, it does not matter , it is the same. So we should not fear… Pilgrim on the road, the one who knows the Way, how to find the divinity that dwells inside us? Pilgrim on the road, where does he go, he goes towards the center of his heart to begin the life of consciousness. He will have his life in his own hands and will be responsible for his actions because he knows the Way… that each decision in his life emerges from the clarity of his consciousness for in such a way he increases his spiritual energy and this shows him the Way… The pilgrim chooses the paths that have a heart…that lead to the center of his heart. Thus we read in D.T. Zuzuki’s Zen Buddhism: “In the Sayings of Nan-‐ch’uan we read that, when T’ui governor of Ch’i District, asked the fifth patriarch of the Zen Order-‐that is, Hung-‐jen-‐ how it was that while he had five hundred followers, Hui-‐neng, in preference to all others, was signaled out to be given the orthodox robe of transmission as the sixth patriarch, the fifth patriarch replied: “four hundred and ninety nine out of my disciples understand well what Buddhism is, except one Hui-‐neng. He is a man not to be measured by ordinary standard. Hence the robe of faith was handed over to him.”
‘’Under the fifth patriarch, all of his five hundred disciples, except one Hui-‐neng, understood Buddhism well. The lay disciple, Neng was quite unique in this respect, for he did not at all understand Buddhism. He understood the Way only and no other thing.’’ From D.T. Zuzuki, Zen Buddhism, pp. 27 and 28. Doubleday Anchor Book, 1956. The highest form of knowledge is a direct vision of reality, when a series of associations are connecting several levels of existence in a broad phenomenological spectrum integrating new discoveries into a unified vision that expands continuously in a continuum of knowledge that is reaching us directly from the unconscious. This is a comprehensive vision akin to Illumination. This vision is not an elaboration of a previously known ideology but is completely spontaneous and original. It does not mean that this original vision does not resemble other previous visions outside the mnemonic content stored by a single individual because it could be said that original vision emerges from the same Universal Source. The Ultimate Vision of Reality is something that we have perhaps experienced before and that we are now remembering. Perhaps this is The Way that Hui-‐neng knew and yet yet he did not know Buddhism ideologically, just as Plotinus might have known The Way even before he studied the philosophy of Plato with his teacher Amonius Saccas. Any man can know the way if he so desires, for we are all pilgrims on the way, peregrinos en el camino. And we come from the same source even though it is not easy to remember. That this Vision of Ultimate Reality is a vision of love is unquestionable, it is in the nature of Telesis that a continuous association of ideas that clarifies some point is inspired by love. Love is the highest form of consciousness, it can become pure knowledge This is indeed the object of science when it wishes to go beyond the limit to expand knowledge around a phenomena; it goes beyond the limits of knowledge to touch a noumena, something previously unknown. Galileo did this, so did Descartes – and Hui-‐neng.
Psychohistory and the History of Religion Ever since Sir James George Frazer’s monumental, The Golden Bough, ( Macmilland, 1922 ), Joseph Cambell’s, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, ( Bollingen Foundation, 1949 ), Claude Lévi-‐Strauss´ La pensée sauvage,( Librairie Plon, 1962 ), Mircea Eliade´s Traité d’histoire des religions, ( Editions Payot, Paris, 1964 ), and E. O. James’ Prehistoric Religion, ( Thames and Hudson, New York ), we posses a well structured road for The History of Religion, albeit the road did not go much further than Sumerian Ur. Then came the description of James Mellart of Catal Huyuk in the April 1964 issue of Scientific American and sometime later the discovery of Gobekli Tepe in southern Turky at the end of last century, a site that has not been fully interpreted and perhaps will remain so for some years
to come while excavations continue. We hope to establish a continuity of religious thought from Gobekli Tepe to Catal Huyuk, Eridu and Eleusis…right dawn to Bishop Eusebius and emperors Constantine, Julian, Theodosius and Justinian. It is indeed the History of the Decline of Religion in the West, from the courageous psychonauts of Gobekli Tepe and The Hypogeum of Malta who travelled through The Portal to modern Psychonauts like Terence Mackenna and a few other mystics and poets. Or should we apologize because we are not considering the vast calendar of saints and the battalion of theologians from the Mediterranean world? The Method of Psychohistory: Repressed Homosexuality and Male Hysteria, Sigmund Freud: On Psychopathology, Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality. (The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 10, 1979 ). Leonardo, Sigmund Freud, chap. 3, A Pelican Book 1963. Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, Farrar, Strauss and Giraud, 1972. Wilhelm Stekel, Sadism and Masochism, The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty, Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York 1953. Exclusively masculine corporations like armies and corporate religious institutions unconsciously base themselves in paranoid mechanisms derived from the repression of homosexuality, the consequence of a neurotic fixation that can generate mass hysteria, sadism and violence clearly observed during a civil war. A classic example of this was The Spanish Civil War 1936-‐1939, well documented by Hugh Thomas in his monumental History of that war. Another more contemporary case in point is the Syrian Civil war where desperate acts of brutality seen in internet document
the terrible contradictions in contemporary Islamic Culture that have been building up since the late XVIII century. It takes a complete collapse of society to bring out the components of mass psychopathology in psychohistory. The problem of Authority and Power is amplified for us to see. A historical society struggles to find the best forms of social organization, helpless, without the instruments of self-‐ analysis and falls victim to old atavisms and formulas repeated from generation to generation because they seem to have worked in the past. One combatant professes to be fighting for freedom, his opponent, his enemy, is also fighting for freedom, so he is convinced. No matter who wins, in a few years’ time, they, the winners, will have recreated the same conditions of oppression that they fought to liberate themselves from. To understand this is the very purpose of the Method of Psychohistory. A situation is developing in US society created by cultural attitudes that were developed in the last centuries as the result of slavery, slave traffic and a slave powered economy that is now returning as a dramatization of past conflicts unresolved in our collective unconscious; drives that were thought to have been overcome after the struggle of the civil rights movement in the 1960’.The psychohistorical consequences of slavery in the United States are not over and the recent tensions between The Tea Party and President Obama are symptoms of this unresolved conflict that could well lead to civil war. There are unconscious forces not fully understood by the conservative masses that perceive in President Obama a threatening force that could be operating a symbolic mass castration on those elements of society that base their internal psychological security and sense of identity in the fact that they are white and belong to the Judeo-‐Christian tradition and who feel themselves threatened by what they perceive to be the plural, multiracial and multicultural world they do not understand and do not wish to accept. Obama Care is the point of rupture, and they do not want to ‘let go’ because they would then be accepting symbolic castration and loss of power. Millions of people have been conditioned by years of conservative rule and the supremacy of conservative culture that they have The power. They cannot bear to loose it and are showing all the symptoms of great stress that might only be released after great violence. Are the psychotic killers that have been re-‐dramatizing their fantasies by going out into the streets or cinemas and killing with bombs or guns all the people they can premonitory symptoms of this? Is the United States getting ready for a mass re-‐dramatization of the events of 1861-‐1865? The conditions seem to be there, they seem to be mounting… A culture of a phallic-‐narcissistic character produces phallic-‐narcissistic leaders. The repressed homosexuality, the jealousy and the paranoia remain at bottom the same cultural substratum. The people change but the culture remains, and this occurs all over the world in the same fashion. The Manic-‐depressive and sadistic Ivan The Terrible did not start a trend when he massacred his own people; before that, the Mongols had brutalized the Slavs of the ancient Rus. The ancient Swedes in their journeys dawn the Volga towards Constantinople captured Slavs to sell in the slave markets of Constantinople. Today the Russian mafia travels all over the world looking for captives
to sell in the sex markets of five continents… dramatizing again the contempt that phallic-‐ narcissistic characters feel for the opposite sex. This is the march of the conquerors and the conquered who do not know anything better other than ‘the lessons of Power’. ( Sigmund Freud op.cit. pp 205-‐208. Wilhelm Reich, op.cit. pp. 219-‐222). The only thing we can do is to indicate pathogenic tendencies and syndromes, we are not generalizing from a philosophical standpoint; we want to help establish The Method of Psychohistory. But we most warn that this method has elements that are experiential, to a certain extent one has to live these events in order to experience a sudden understanding. The author can narrate one of these moments: in November 1968, in Paris, at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in The Sorbonne, The author participated in several meetings organized by the Trotskyist journal, Rouge, directed by Alain Krivine. This ‘ groupuscule ‘ which controlled The Faculty at the time possessed a ‘service d’ordre’ composed of a group of goons in black leather jackets who were at the orders of a hysterical young man who looked exactly like Trotsky-‐ spectacles, goat-‐tee and all. The service d’ordre would block all the entrances to the conference hall, an imposing oval amphitheater from the XVII Century, while this deputy of Alain Krivine, would harangue the crowded hall with his little Trotskyite gestures and poses. I was then witnessing the genesis of the future political figure and even then I suspected the existence of the phallic-‐exhibitionistic attitude and the general infantilism of politics which made the political discourse hard to believe. In very few people and in very few circumstances have I been moved by political oratory. Very few political figures are free of the expostulation of the narcissistic-‐exhibitionist attitude. What is the origin and the meaning of this posturing? It originated with the earliest kinglets of the first city states in Neolithic times-‐ Those personages who controlled the first public granaries in places like Mohenjo-‐Daro, Eridú and Ur probably already possessed a ‘Service d’Ordre’. Are we going to continue to believe in the system of power and the expostulation of its neurotic-‐hysterical symptoms in politics for another five thousand years? I have already described some of the mechanisms that lead to the formation of the system of power in my book La Huerta del Macehual, La Tarjeta Inteligente, (included in this blog ). All these psychopathological symptoms inherent in politics form part of my criticism of Hans Kelsen’s General Theory of The State, which is a standard reference in many faculties of law and Political Science the world over. Perhaps the time has come to make a critical reading of Doctor Kelsen’s thesis in view of the questionable relevance of electoral democracies and the problem of political representation in our oligarchical societies? One of the fundamental psychohistorical questions is: Can a democratic society be built without the threat of violence and the recourse to authority? Are we sufficiently developed as political
societies to organize ourselves in corresponding and harmonious understanding? Is this a desirable end in political organization? If the answer of a majority is yes, how could we proceed to get there? Clearly, education is the only way: to raise the level of consciousness of our populations to the point where a higher empathy, nearer telepathy, is possible as a shared collective experience, when the stratification of class is no longer impressive, new more spiritualized generations will no longer feel the need to differentiate themselves within class structures with all the paraphernalia and nomenclature that give status and hierarchy. The author shared this experience of communion, the bond of tele-‐pathos, with his friends during The Taking of The Sacred Mushrooms in Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico in the summer of 1968 ( Teonanacatl p. 64, on this blog ) . I believe that this is possible, that it could be possible to teach telepathy to children without using the Sacred Plants: the disappearance of ego-‐centric tendencies gives way to a feeling of love and compassion, an awareness of the world imbued with generous impulses that could become a new culture. There are systems of Yoga: Raja Yoga and Bhakti Yoga that can be taught to children and which could become a way of life for an entire community…..( Tibetan Yoga and secret doctrines. Edited by W.Y. Evans-‐Wentz, Oxford University Press, p. 33 ; see also: Aldous Huxley, Island, Penguin Books, and E.F. Schumacher, Lo Pequeño es Hermozo, Herman Blume Ediciones, 1978 ).