Decoding the double taboo
...imposed on healing, visionary and sacred substances
Written by Dominique Guillet, translated from french.
The declared and transparent aim of xochipelli.fr is to shed light on the taboo that has prevailed for a very long time over the healing, visionary and sacred substances and preparations of the Gaian Biosphere,
from mushrooms, plants, animals and minerals...
In this declaration of intent, I am basing myself essentially on the emphasis placed on the inverted taboo, or double taboo, as described by the metahistorian John Lash - whose entire written work I have translated on my Liberterre website and in publications. This double taboo was imposed by demented psychopaths on part of humanity at the time, i.e. during the emergence of certain tribes or societies around a thousand years before our Era, which we would hesitate to describe as civilisations - at least in terms of their controlling bodies.
This declaration of intent is also enhanced by some etymological insights based on the research of certain linguists, or on the discoveries and theses of the archaeologist Maria Gimbutas, regarding the existence of a language described as Proto-Indo-European, an original mother tongue. Original, of course, in the sense of a space-time strictly circumscribed to one of the expressions of humanity on this planet. A space-time that is all the more circumscribed, in my view, because I don't give any 'credence' to it.
- from the Latin "credo", to believe -
... to arrive at the modern concept of mafia finance
creating money ex nihilo and lending it to the poor at a very high price
to the ravings of the neo-Darwinians in their conception of the 'evolution' of the human animal and the entire biosphere,
a concept born of very damaged brains
by the pathology of Western linear thinking
Lynn Margulis, one of the most brilliant biologists of the last century, almost unknown in our country, despite having proved the validity of the concept of endosymbiogenesis
and, of course, none of her work has ever been translated into French,
so as not to upset the fundamentalists,
the imposition of a taboo?
described the neo-Darwinians as a small religious sect on the verge of extinction. Neo-Darwinian delusions are certainly one of the most destructive pseudo-scientific mutations of the inverted taboo syndrome.
This inverted taboo can be summed up quite simply as follows: it is strictly forbidden to use healing, visionary or sacred substances and, what's more, it is strictly forbidden to even know they exist. According to metahistorian John Lash, who - following in the footsteps of mythologist Joseph Campbell - has studied the vast majority of the mythologies of the world's peoples
this reverse taboo is unique in the world.
Taboos seem to have existed at all times and in all human societies, but they were very clearly stipulated so that individuals could respect them.
or break them, given the dissident inclinations that seem to characterise the most innovative fringe of the human species!
For example, in some indigenous societies, women with flowers are not allowed to take part in social gatherings and ritual or initiation ceremonies. In this case, the taboo is simply dictated and can be respected - or broken. In some Amerindian societies, members of the Beaver Clan are forbidden to eat beaver because it is their totem, their animal-emblem.
For this clan, beavers are seen as forms assumed by tribal guides or non-human ancestors.
This clearly stated taboo can be respected or broken - and is, in fact, broken during ritual ceremonies of gratitude towards beavers. In this case, the sacred nature of the beaver is maintained.
even if its flesh is communicated during rituals of power.
"Traditionally, the purpose of a taboo is to preserve the boundary between the sacred and the profane, but this boundary is nonetheless porous. The sacred cow of the Hindu religion roams the streets of India in a routine and nonchalant manner. The cow cannot be sacrificed: it is taboo. But because of a clear awareness of the taboo - complete transparency - the presence of the cow in the ordinary - profane - world awakens the mind to another world, a realm in which things have a different value, connected to the sacred dimension of life.Sacred and profane values coexist and interact, and this modus operandi can be seen in the function of taboos and forbidden objects". (John Lash. Le Paradis Reconquis. Liberterre collection. Editions Voix des Semences).
What is the origin of this inverted taboo that places a curse on healing, visionary and sacred substances? Today, no scholar has mentioned its presence in the cuneiform writings on the clay tablets - dating back to 3200 BC - that record the history of the Sumerian civilisation. We can therefore affirm that its only presence is expressed in the books of the Bible,
- from the Greek "Byblos", book, quite simply -
the source of the three so-called monotheistic religions,
because isn't Elohim the plural of El?
but where did these gods come from, travelling around in "chariots of fire"?
from the same galaxy as the one who came to save humanity from cardinal sin?
the Redemption syndrome... the Cross/Crossing Belief syndrome
Credo, ergo sum
and some have even gone on a Crusade to Save the Climate!
and more particularly exalted in the book of Genesis.
"The biblical prohibition "Thou shalt not know" is a clear and deliberate act of denial. It determines the particular dynamic of the inverted taboo, the way in which it conceals what it prohibits. Expressed in more explicit terms, the taboo stipulates that "thou shalt not know" what you are forbidden to possess. The taboo is imbued with a double curse: against sharing the tabooed thing and against the very knowledge of its existence that makes it possible to share it.Such is the extraordinary and disconcerting prohibition stipulated in Genesis, the first book of the Bible". (Op. cit.)
"Do not eat of the forbidden fruit". This is one of the oldest taboos in the world, and it applies to the Tree of Knowledge: "Thou shalt not know". So what is the forbidden fruit? Obviously not the apple!
But rather cannabis, mushrooms, the blue lotus... or the mythical Soma
I spent whole days looking through the digitised reproductions of medieval manuscripts in a large number of European digital libraries... and I found illuminations in which Eve is holding out the Mushroom to Adam! Adam's very famous apple...
and for 2700 years the theocrats have been throwing anaesthetic ointment on us
- from Latin, "pomus", apple -
For 2,700 years, theocrats have been anaesthetising humanity with their destructive and sterile myth of Adam and Eve in a 'Paradise' from which they were expelled because Eve ate the forbidden fruit offered by the Serpent and encouraged her husband Adam to do the same,
or at least the one who provided the bleeding rib from which it was forged...
Do you have to wrap it in paper/gift wrap or is it for immediate consumption?
Yahweh/Jehovah/Yaldabaoth expels Adam and Eve when they - having eaten of the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge - realise that they are naked, of course. Yahweh establishes war between the two genders - and between the woman and her seed; he condemns them to hard labour - in perpetuity; he curses the serpent - the serpent of the flesh.
the famous Lucifer, from the Latin "Lux Ferris", Bringer of Light
it condemns women to suffer and sometimes die in childbirth;
the "work" of the woman giving birth...
from the Latin "trepalium", a torture instrument with three stakes
He condemns them both, and their descendants, to "work" the soil by the sweat of their brow - covered in the dust to which they will return at their death.
It's quite a programme... and it borders on the bewitching!
not to say genocide
Yahweh is not happy at all and is afraid. "Behold, the man has become like one of us, for the knowledge of good and evil". "Let us prevent him now from putting forth his hand, and taking of the Tree of Life, and eating thereof, and living for ever". Genesis 3:22 thus introduces another motive for this devastating myth - namely, a second tree. This is why Yahweh expels these two dissenters from the Paradise of which they were guardians: to thwart another potential violation of his divine will.
It should be noted here that, according to Genesis, eating the fruit of the second tree, the Tree of Life, is not prohibited.
"Why is God so afraid that eating the first will lead to eating the second? Undoubtedly because the realisation obtained, through the consumption of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, generates the recognition of the nature of the Tree of Life. The forbidden fruit gave the original parents access to the very biological source of their existence, the "Tree of Life". As this tree could only be reached if the fruit of the other tree was eaten, access to it did not need to be denied. Without the forbidden fruit to open their vision, Adam and Eve could enjoy the Tree of Life for nutrition, for sustenance, but not to access its deepest secrets, not to reach the secret of life itself.The Tree of Knowledge confers the wisdom that opens the way to the secret of immortality, represented by the Tree of Life (in modern terms, DNA, the human genome, ontogenetic and phylogenetic evolution)" (Op. cit.).
I invite anyone interested in the full decoding of this pernicious myth to consult the first very long chapter, or the book, mentioned above.
That the forbidden fruit - healing, visionary and sacred substances - provides access to the secrets of life will come as no surprise to those who have had the courage to delve into the world of entheogens. The Ayahuasqueros of Latin America claim that, thanks to Ayahuasca, they can perceive the molecular level of Amazonian plants, some of which - among tens of thousands - they use to heal. When Westerners ask them how they know about the healing properties of certain Amazonian plants that have only just been discovered thanks to sophisticated, hyper-modern technology, they invariably reply that it's thanks to the Madre Yagé. (Jeremy Narby, Cosmic Serpent).
Some researchers and Nobel Prize winners in modern biology have recently had the courage to admit that it was thanks to the use of psychoactive substances (Psilocybe mushrooms, LSD, etc.) that they made the discoveries that have made them famous.
The confiscation of the visionary riches of the Gaian Biosphere - which will be one of the fundamental themes of this blog - was the work of a small, demented clique of theocrats who arrogated to themselves the right to act as intermediaries between Humanity and Otherness, and who invented religions to do so,
from the Latin "religare", to bind, from the Greek "lugo", to attach a branch,
in connotation with the Sanskrit "raggu", rope, that which binds
Those who take refuge behind the supposed etymology of the term religion with the Latin "legere" for reading, law, etc., are nothing but cowards who perpetuate the fundamental objectives of all institutional religions:
enslaving the human race
claiming that human beings could no longer make this connection on their own because they had fallen!
The spell of the Original Fall and Capital Sin...
2700 years later, the 'system' is still working, albeit to a hobbled and sometimes limping degree...
"According to the usual interpretation, the myth states that the original parents were expelled from Paradise for having eaten forbidden fruit - in other words, for an act of disobedience. What the myth does not make clear is that, in fact, the paradisiacal state was induced by the act of consumption and that the Fall resulted from the fact that the plant they ate was taken away from them. Eden is a space, the natural paradise on Earth, but the awareness of being there comes from the forbidden fruit that grows there. This is the first factor concealed in the disguised message of the myth.
The language of the Eden myth uses a deceptive and deliberately perverted syntax: it leads us to presume that the cause of the Fall was an act of disobedience, whereas in reality the Fall occurs not because Adam and Eve disobey but because they no longer have the right to possess what they have been punished for enjoying. Their punishment is a loss of access to the very thing that reveals to them that they are in fact living in Paradise. This is the second factor concealed in the disguised message". (Op. cit.)
The Fall was not the punishment for eating the forbidden fruit; it was the consequence of the ban on eating the fruit once it had been tasted.
The prohibition on eating the fruit is the prohibition on knowing about the existence - and sharing - of healing, visionary and sacred substances,
from mushrooms, plants, animals and minerals...
The word 'healer' really gets under my skin, especially when I find the definition in Wikipedia - one of the major sources of disinformation at the beck and call of the Authorities: "A healer is a person, usually without a medical degree, who heals, or claims to heal, outside the legal scientific practice of medicine, by empirical or magical means, by virtue of supposed special gifts or using personal recipes".
all the most sordid clichés have been concentrated in just four lines
who is the consummate imbecile who could have written such a defamatory rag?
presumably a scoundrel bribed by the French Medical Council,
or the Conseil de l'Ordre des Pharmaciens, or the Conseil ...
all Orders created by Marshal Pétain in 1941
the very person who initiated the widespread destruction of herbalism
The root - the etymology - of the terms healer, healing, cure is, for me, one of the most fascinating there is. Its Indo-European root is "wer" and its Sanskrit root is "vāraḥ", which is derived from the verb "vṛṇoti" (vṛ-) to cover, envelop, surround, hide. This Sanskrit root is attested in the following compounds: 'dur-vāraḥ for difficult to defend; 'aśva-vāraḥ' for rider/one who restrains the horse; 'vāṇa-vāraḥ' for breastplate/one who protects from arrows.
This Sanskrit root vāraḥ is the origin of the following terms:
war, healing, guardian, garden, guarantee, gatehouse...
and take it or leave it, it's not a question of guesswork
To heal was called "garir" or "warir", to restore health, in 12th/14th century France. Related to "warjan", to defend, to protect, in Old Frankish. Correlated with "werian" in Old High German and "wehren" in German, to defend. Correlated with Gothic warjan, to forbid.
Remember that in our languages, the letters G and W often interchange. So we have gardien/warden; guerre/war; guérite/garret; garantir/warrant, etc. In the case of jardin/garden, it is the letters J and G that interchange.
Why do garden/garden come from the same Indo-European root? Because, quite simply, a garden is - always - defined by an enclosure to protect it from wild animals, or domestic animals... or marauders, gypsies, swarthy people whose very existence requires the emergence of police forces, courts, magistrates, laws, prisons...
which leads some people, myself included, to say,
that agriculture was the beginning of social chaos
These etymological correlations also highlight the naked and inescapable truth - very often obscured by the neo or pseudo-shamanic movements tinged with stupid New Age: the shaman, the healer who knows how to heal also knows how to kill. They are the same forces, and often the same substances: it all depends on the intention - and the dose!
The Greeks understood this very well
because "Pharmakon" means both remedy and poison
but "Pharmakós" also refers to ritual sacrifice...
In Theocritus's Idylls, Simaitha and her maid are described as "pharmakeutriai", or pharmacists - magicians who perform magic and ritual practices using plant substances (laurel, flour).
Author Maurizzio Bettini refers to "practices of homeopathic and homeophonic magic" in his analysis of the ritual in honour of the goddess Tacita in Ovid. It's a very appealing concept, and these correlations, both semantic and physical, between sacrificial rituals and substances/poisons lead us to address the third term of our favourite expression in this essay: healing, visionary and sacred substances.
The expression "sacred" and all correlated terms: "sacrament", "sacrifice", "sacer", "sacra", "sacrum", "sacre", "sakros"... as well as "holy", "sanctified", etc.
derive from the same Indo-European root "sak", for power and divine force
Basically, what is sacred, the sacrifice, the sacrament..., is what gives power - to the human race, not to false divinities - and a whole book could be written on all these correlations.
The etymology of our third term, 'visionary', is just as fascinating and evocative.
It is derived from the Indo-European word "weid" and the Sanskrit terms
"Vidya" for spiritual knowledge and "Veda" for sacred teachings.
Correlated terms in Latin, French and English are, for example:
video, videre, video, vision, wisdom, wit
but also wizard and witch
those who "see
translated as sorcerers, witches, dowsers
And to come back to the expulsion, accompanied by genocidal threats, of the mythical characters Adam and Eve from the Garden/Paradise/Eden of Genesis,
Garden, caretaker and enclosure....
Paradise, 'paradisus' in Latin, 'paradeisos' in Greek,
"pairidaeza" in Avestan/Iranian means "enclosure/park" because
composed of "pairi" for "around" and "diz" for "to make an enclosure, a shape"...
"Eden" from the Assyrian "edinu", meaning field, space...
It's quite possible that there's yet another concealing factor in this sterile myth: the Garden/Paradise/Eden is no doubt merely the vehicle for simulating/dissimulating one of the fiercest curses laid on mankind: the invention of agriculture. During my investigations of European libraries in 2011, I came across an illumination in the Psalter of Saint Louis (1253/1270) in which a mocking ape, surrounded by small (magic??) mushrooms, stands before Adam, who is cultivating the earth.
In partial conclusion, the double taboo imposed by the theocrats and other desert patriarchs on the peoples of the Middle East has spread like a plague, a curse, in every direction of the planet.
over the course of conquests, religious wars, the intellectual, artistic, spiritual and sexual sequestration of the Pagan peoples of Europe, the destruction of all the centres of the Initiates of yesteryear (and their libraries) dating back thousands of years, the genocide of the First and Indigenous Peoples, the exactions of the Inquisitors who burnt at the stake tens of thousands of healers, healers, midwives described as witches and sorcerers, etc.
to arrive at today's pharmacocracy.
The planetary ecocide that is unfolding inexorably before our eyes is the inescapable consequence of this taboo. The epitaph of this withered humanity could be: "it perishes from no longer being able to pay tribute to Beauty".
And this humanity can no longer, literally, pay homage to Beauty, because the theocrats have forbidden human beings from using and knowing about the existence of healing, visionary and sacred substances.
which conferred on them Healing, Vision, Power
and the living, authentic connection
with Otherness, the First Source, the Mother
Our Mother on Earth
give us our daily visionary sacraments!
or simply exterminated all the peoples of Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe and the Americas who didn't believe in their spiritual scams.
However, the predatory psychopaths, biocidal terrorists and other pharmacocrats are on the home straight - and they know it - and they are rushing to do just that.
like a TGV hurtling towards the Abyss of their vanities
High Speed Terrorists
as the Metahistorian explains,
Tertön in his prime
A shaman in his playing days
"Hidden prohibition is a powerful tool for social manipulation. This particular power is precisely one of the attributes of the inverted taboo. But, in this context, there is also a disadvantage for those exercising control. In contrast to the open taboo, which is known, adopted and accepted by the whole community, the taboo that divides the community depends on a cover, a programme of concealment that keeps its members in ignorance of what is forbidden. Maintaining such concealment is not easy. It requires enormous and constant effort over time. It requires covert strategies of coercion and intimidation. And, most importantly, it requires controllers to involve the entire community in the cover-up so that those who are subject to the taboo are fundamentally involved in the deception of which they are the victims. Taboo-makers cannot do without the complicity of the people they are luring, thanks to occulting prohibition, to guarantee their success.
If the object subject to the occulting prohibition were revealed and the tribe became aware of what it was being deprived of, the whole system of control and concealment would implode. Such an operation of deception is precarious and perhaps even hard to imagine, but it can work and, surprisingly, it works very well indeed.But, inevitably, the day comes when a member of the community discovers what is prohibited and hidden in the inverted taboo and denounces it" (Op. Cit.).
And today, it is not only members of communities who are denouncing, naming and activating the human ferment
modern reincarnations of the Telestai of ancient Greece,
Syrian, Egyptian... the so-called Pagan Gnostics
those who stand up and are intentional
those who own a Telos
and who also sometimes take communion with prohibited substances
just as the initiates of yesteryear communicated at the Kikeon
but whole communities, who are rising up against predatory, demented, criminal psychopaths.
For the Liberation of the Serotonergic neurognostics of the Gaian Biosphere
Xochi, 17 October 2015
or 26 Vendémiaire in the Republican Calendar, Aubergine Day
translated from french, courtesy of Dominique Guillet (copyright free)