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Edited October 3rd, 2021 for typos, thanks to Michael Hoffman
This post discusses Carl Ruck’s 1976 article “On the Sacred Names of Iamos and Ion: Ethnobotanical Referents in the Hero’s Parentage” (published in The Classical Journal, Vol. 71, No. 3, pp. 235-252; available here).
Carl Ruck has been the most prolific author trained in professional scholarship to write on psychedelic in religious history, particularly ancient Greek religion and myth.
This article is a useful case study for thinking through the influence of anthropological theories of myth on Carl Ruck’s entheogen scholarship. This article is of interest because its early date and small size allows us to see relatively clearly how such outdated, ordinary-state-based theories work in Ruck’s writings, at a time when they have been less digested and less subtly incorporated than they will come to be. The article predates publication of The Road to Eleusis in 1978 by two years, and includes some material later republished or reworked in The Road to Eleusis.
To interpret the myths of the similarly named heroes Iamos and Ion, Ruck constructs a system of etymological punning, more or less consciously understood by poets and their audience. This is combined with the idea derived from Myth-Ritual Theory that myths involving botanical names and birth stories are derived from rituals of plant-gathering. These are further combined with a Structuralist interpretation of the myths, in which common categories are found from the individual details of the myth and then the narrative of the myth is argued to explore the relationships between those categories and (the most particularly Structuralist aspect of the interpretation) mediate the oppositions between those categories.
Mixed into this linguistic, myth-ritual, and structuralist interpretation is relatively straightforward evidence from archaeology, text, and art for drug plants in ancient Greek culture. My goal in this article is to show you, the reader, how to separate the solid evidence and argument from the argument based on outdated theories based in the ordinary state of consciousness.
The challenge in reading Ruck’s scholarship is that he mixes solid evidence from archaeology, art, and text with concepts drawn from outdated theories based in the ordinary state of consciousness, ultimately drawn from 19th and 20th century anthropology. Ruck usually does not indicate to the reader when he draws from anthropological theory. Unless you are versed in those theories, you will have a hard time recognizing when he is using those theories.
This undifferentiated mixing of solid with insubstantial is a problem because Ruck has been the main author working on psychedelics in the important area of ancient Greece and Rome for more than 50 years. He is the principal author many have looked to for the question of drugs in Mediterranean antiquity, yet his writings on psychedelics are overloaded with outdated theories. They are compromised, and in order to move the field forward, we need to sort Ruck’s achievements from his missteps.
In reading Ruck’s article critically, I’m not so much criticizing “his” missteps, as the missteps inherent in a scholarly approach that dominated the field of Classics for some time. Structuralist myth interpretation and Myth-Ritual Theory were very popular with Classicists. Ruck was not alone in using them. As always, see my summaries of theories of mythology here.
Some of Ruck’s evidence and arguments for psychedelics in ancient Greece and Rome are sound, regardless of whether or not Structuralist mythology or the Myth-Ritual theory are correct; some of Ruck’s evidence and arguments are insubstantial because they are rooted in non-psychedelic approaches to religion, myth, and ritual. I’m continuing my work of unraveling the strand of outdated anthropological theorizing about religion, myth, and ritual from the field of psychedelics in world history (see here for links to particular authors; My writings on Graves, Wasson, Allegro especially focus on anthropological theorizing).
Ruck’s solid work identifying and arguing for psychedelics in Greek, Roman, and later European religion needs to be separated from his interpretations rooted in ordinary-state-based theories of religion, myth, and ritual. The prime problem with Structuralism, myth-ritual, and other theories when applied to psychedelics is that such theories are not based in the altered state induced by psychedelics. They are theories on the outside (exoteric) and the product of their theorizing is ersatz and results in excess verbiage. Noise, obscuring the signal.
The article I will discuss is a good case study of the confusing mix that Ruck’s work presents. It was published for a scholarly audience in a journal for professional Classicists in 1976, before The Road to Eleusis forever defined Ruck’s career and trajectory of publishing.
I will proceed by inserting parts of the text, following up each section with my commentary. My main goal is to help you recognize key words that signal various theories and approaches. Ruck does not note when he is making use of a theory or approach, and may himself be using theories and approaches quasi-unconsciously.
On to the article:
The third sentence shows the combination of approaches. The first half of the sentence deals with etymological punning, a linguistic, literary, metaphorical, poetic approach; the second veers off into typically vague nonsense derived from early anthropological theorizing. The two approaches should be evaluated on their own terms, yet Ruck puts them both in the same sentence, implying an apparently seamless transition between the two.
The spatial vocabulary of such terms and phrases as “aligns” and “vertical plane which transects the sacred place are typical of Structuralist approach to myth. The anthropological theorizing continues in the next sentence, in which again an aspect of the mythic narrative is described in terms of spatial relations: “…orientation toward antithetically placed…”
Structuralist myth analysis typically takes what is expressed in a narrative and describes that content in spatial terms, in order to illustrate the ‘structure’ of the narrative.
Ruck sticks to etymological punning for most of this section. I mostly leave to one side an evaluation of Ruck’s arguments about punning and etymology in the names of the Iamos, Ion, Iason, Iole, etc. The goal of such an argument is to construct (or reconstruct) a system of referents.
Such etymologies and punning can form a useful part of recognizing psychedelics in culture, but the high version of etymologies and punning is certainly not to reveal psychedelics, but instead to reveal the relationship between thought injector and thought receiver, the contrasting models of time and control, and various other altered state phenomena.
Right at the end of the paragraph, Ruck again veers off into anthropological theorizing. “initiatory repetition of the birth trauma” looks like the myth-ritual theory mixed with psychoanalytic theorizing, while “resultant mediation of the Apolline and Dionysian elements” is classic Structuralism, signaled by the tech term “mediation.”
Moreover, the approach of filling in details of one myth with details from another myth based on certain similarities between the two is typical of Structuralist methods. Once you are convinced you have found the structure that underlies a pattern of mythic thinking, you can use that structure to link myths together and explain details from other myths.
Structuralism structures (ha) how Ruck describes myths. You can see when he’s doing so by noting some key words and sentence structures, like a focus on opposites, repetitions, inversions, similarities, mediations, and structures. The use of “association” looms large.
“associated” and “opposition” of chthonic (i.e. earthly and watery) Poseidon and celestial Apollo.
“seems to repeat”
Such loose connections allow seemingly any part of any mythical narrative to be related to any other part of any other mythical narrative.
“Like her own mother, however, she, too” “as if for a second gestation”
The phrasing of the sentence shows that Ruck wants to highlight that the poison here is actually beneficial. Such creation of an inversion (i.e. beneficial/harmful) is typical of Structuralist myth analysis. Same goes with describing honey as the venom of bees, to bring out a paradox between beneficial (honey) and harmful (venom).
I include the following section at length in order to illustrate how Structuralism allows Ruck to string together myths based on similarities. First, though, note the reference to Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in footnote 3.
Ruck starts in linguistic, etymological, pun mode before veering off to asserting (without supporting evidence/argument) that “the drug… is the divine spirit which has become incarnate in the plant.” The next sentence moves into a lengthy bout of the ‘connections’ and ‘associations’ which typifies Structuralist interpretation of myth.
Similar elements across myths are pressed together to make a network of connections. His eventual goal is to argue that Iamo’s ion flowers are the amanita muscaria mushroom, as we’ll see in the next selection. The linking of myths via connections is designed to build up a system of referents that make that argument more plausible, though curiously Ruck will not capitalize on it. One could imagine other ways of making that argument plausible. Ruck’s impulse to link myths in this way is a product of the scholarly environment in studies of Classical mythology created by the intellectual trend of Structuralism in the 1970s.
Note the reliance on hypotheticals: “seems”, “apparently”, “suggestive”, “associated”, “could be interpreted”, “probably meant”, “probably to be understood”.
Finally, in footnote 4 on the Etruscan bronze mirror with Ixion and Datura, Ruck ought to have cited Robert Graves’ essay “What Food the Centaur’s Ate” p. 324 (my scan here) The same mirror served as one of Graves’ first examples of a psychedelic plant in ancient Greek art and myth (though Graves identified it as a mushroom). That Ruck knew of Graves’ articles is clear from endnote 122 on page 56 of Ruck’s earlier, 1975 article “Euripides’ Mother: Vegetables and the Phallos in Aristophanes” (here).
After writing a long series of speculative connections and associations between myths, it is curious that Ruck does not capitalize explicitly on the network he has constructed in what follows.
This next stage of the essay could have come directly after the beginning of the last extract, where the colors of the flowers and the serpents are discussed. Here in this extract we again have mention of the colors and the serpents, but no mention of the alleged connections to other myths. One could delete from the last extract the passage starting on p.237 with “The drug, furthermore, is the divine spirit…” and ending with the end of the paragraph and not affect the overall argument.
The overall argument links plants and serpents and relies on the color of the plant to suggest an identification with amanita. This is an argument in the style of Wasson and Allegro (though lacking Allegro’s characteristic immediate link to fertility); the Structuralist excursus dropped in the middle of the argument is Ruck’s characteristic contribution.
I shudder to see Ruck use that cursed word ‘taboo’. The concept ‘taboo’ so weighed down Wasson and Graves and blinkered there eyes to psychedelics. In ‘taboo’ is the awful origin of the idea of ‘secret’ mushroom consumption and hidden meanings. Ruck cites no other source than Wasson for the supposed ‘taboo’, and even says (contra Graves, again unmentioned) that there is no evidence for such a ‘taboo’ in ancient Greece… before he confuses that assertion by writing ‘something of the kind might be involved’ in Iambe’s jest in the Eleusis story. What a mess.
“Entheogen” scholars: stop writing ‘taboo’, ‘secret’, ‘hidden’!
Footnote 6 (see last line of the previous extract) is a preview of Ruck’s portion of The Road To Eleusis, published two years later, concerning Eleusis. This is textbook Structuralism, full of the typical jargon:
“It is the nature of religious or mystical experience to reconcile various of the dichotomies of human existence” is a Structuralist definition of religion and mysticism. Ruck’s subsequent summary of Iambe’s role in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is a Structuralist summary. Be on the look out for the following examples of jargon and typically Structuralist ways of talking:
- “mediate the basic oppositions which form the structure of the myths”
- “pivotal point”
- “converts”
- any discussion of a category turning into another category, e.g. “the mother…changes into the crone” (emphasis mine)
- “associates”
- “equates”
- “nullifies”
- “redeems”
More subtly, note how the narrative of the myth is discussed as interactions between categories: “the rape of the daughter by a male destroys the maiden and separates her from the mother, while the eternal return from death reunites mother and daughter and involves the birth of a male child.” This is an attempt to draw the narrative away from the details of Greek gods, goddesses, locations, etc., towards categories understood to be general, universal constants of human life (male/female, sex/birth, life/death, child/parent, separation/reunion, etc.).
At the end of the first paragraph, Ruck switches gears into a Myth-Ritual style: the myth reflects “ritualized attitudes” by people “enacting the sacred marriage.”
Ruck’s description of myths is so imbued with this sort of language drawn from ordinary-state-based, ersatz theorizing about mythology. To work with Ruck, you have to learn to recognize this sort of language and sift out this theory-based dirt from the gold.
Here, however, the gold is rather tarnished: “it is, however, possible that these psychotropic qualities existed only symbolically” (emphasis mine) … forget it! What are you even arguing?
Back to the main text:
Solid evidence/argument for mushrooms in Greek myth, art, and literature: Mushrooms in the foundation myths of cities, including depiction on a Greek vase of Perseus with mushrooms. Can you spot where Ruck veers into Structuralism? “Reconcile the dichotomy” should be ringing alarm bells by now, o savvy reader.
Skip that sentence and the next, and we come to more solid evidence/argument from a Greek comedian.
The pay off for the Iamos myth:
A suggestion in the style of Wasson, based on color, names, and “mycorrhizal dependence upon” trees, but ultimately Ruck does not commit himself to his suggestion. Curious statements then appear: From where does Ruck derive his assertion that non-‘magical’ plants “tend” to displace ‘magical’ plants? He does not cite anything, but from that baleful word “associated”, a Structuralist source seems likely.
More importantly for the next section of the essay are the words “symbolism of the herbalist procedures.” That myth derives from ritual (here “procedures”) is the core tenet of the Myth-Ritual school of myth interpretation.
In some places I rate Ruck’s work in the Myth-Ritual framework higher than his work in the Structuralism framework. Structuralism tends to distort everything it touches, always pulling away from the evidence towards categories, dichotomies, and mediations. Myth-Ritual Theory instead pushed Ruck at this stage of the article to bring together relevant evidence regarding plants, gathering plants, and altering consciousness. In turn we can discard the theory-bound notion that “myth derives from ritual” and make use of that evidence gathered by Ruck for our own purposes more simply than we can with Structuralism’s endless ping-ponging between oppositions.
Ruck ought to have made the connection between woman, plant gathering, lover, death, rape, transport through the air, etc. more explicit. He is hampered by the idea that a ritual itself causes an altered state of consciousness.
Ruck of course did not have the Egodeath Theory and its practice of interpreting metaphor in 1976. Now it is simple to see: the thought-receiver (female) part of one’s mind (or self) reaches maturity and plucks the drug plant, like the mind ready for initiation can be likened to a flower ready to be plucked. The thought-receiver is lifted up in the air, perception stepped back a level, and the thought-injector (male) part of one’s mind is revealed. The thought-injector seizes the thought-receiver, likened to overpowering rape and sexual union, and the maiden is swept off to underworld, falls to her death from the (rock) mountain, or taken to a tomb (from which she emerges again and receives knowledge of how to prepare and administer drugs). If you did not follow the previous paragraph, study your mytheme decoding!
To further support his argument about plant gathering rituals informing myth, Ruck turns to maenads, Dionysus, and wine. I was familiar with much of this material from The Road to Eleusis, so I was curious to see it here, published two years before Eleusis. I reproduce the full section below because it is worth reading, and because it is a good example of Ruck mixing together archaeology, art, and literary evidence (with varying degrees of confidence) on the one hand and statements that depend primarily on Structuralism and Myth-Ritual on the other.
The section opens with the key point that psychotropic plants were added to wine in antiquity. The argument is technological and seeks to make sense of the incredible strength of wine reported by ancient sources, including the habit of watering down wine, given that the limits of the natural fermentation process available to the ancients prevented wines from becoming very strong on their own. Given that limitation, how do we explain the ancients practice of water down their wine and of attributing exceptional potency to wine? Answer: they mixed in other psychotropic substances into the fermented grape juice. Another key piece of evidence is that ancient wines are reported to have a variety of psychotropic effects, something not appropriate for fermented grape juice alone.
Next Ruck links the thyrsos and ivy of Dionysus and the maenads to plant-gathering. This section, however, starts to spin off into Structuralism (e.g. “transition of the plant-child to the role of plant as lover…”).
The next paragraph, beginning “the numerous depictions of maenads”, brings us to speculation in the style of the Myth-Ritual theory. Depictions of maenads in art are said to be (or, Ruck is more tentative: “are probably to be understood as”) derived from herbalist procedures. Myth-Ritual theory ties myth to ordinary state actions and does not allow myth to have its own domain. Myth should instead be understood as derived from altered state experiencing.
Ruck’s overall goal here is still Structuralist: to tie the maenads to abstracted “roles” of human existence “the women thus were apparently both quasi mothers and brides of the same male deity.” The section includes etymological speculation, some solid data from texts with citations, and mysterious “connotations”, “apparentlys”, and “likes”, all mixed together.
The next paragraph starts “the exact herbalist procedures…” and the beginning of the paragraph shows us the shakiness of relying on Myth-Ritual theory, despite my cautious approval of Ruck’s Myth-Ritual derived work earlier in this post. We don’t know the exact herbalist rituals, they no doubt varied from place to place, and were “secret”, but nevertheless herbalist patterns and metaphors would certainly be comprehended (by whom specifically and in what way, Ruck does not say). But from what has Ruck constructed his “herbalist patterns and metaphors”, if the herbalist rituals are unknown, etc.? My goal here is to point out the weakness of the overly elaborate Myth-Ritual theory, which requires that we know about a ritual in order for that ritual to have any power to “explain” a myth. Ruck is on the right path here, to focus on plants in the myths of Dionysus, but he hampers himself with the Myth-Ritual framework.
The paragraph moves to better ground when bringing up evidence for Dionysus’ associations with a variety of psychoactives. We have good art evidence, with the crown of poppy capsules on the head of Dionysus in a vase painting. Then we have solid comparisons between attributes of Dionysus and the ancients’ understanding of mushrooms.
So the beginning and ending of this section are based on solid evidence and arguments, while much of the middle is muddled by speculation driven by Myth-Ritual Theory.
From here Ruck rounds up his discussion of Pindar and Iamos and turns to Euripides’ play Ion. Much of these sections is descriptive reporting of the myth. This reporting of the myth makes for a good opportunity to see how Structuralist obsessions pervade Ruck’s myth analysis. I’ll only excerpt a few passages, so you can get the sense.
First, however, the main plant argument regarding Ion is here:
The goal here is to construct a background of verbal associations for Ion’s name.
“Toxins” likewise figure in the rest of Euripides’ Ion, but Ruck has so subordinated them to Structuralist topics that we need to start fresh from the play with a new reading, instead of relying on Ruck.
A few excerpts to show you what terrors Structuralism can produce:
In the above an associative method of interpretation typical of Structuralism is on display. Figures are assigned to categories and then relationships are created based off of the categories.
Ruck is in the right ball park mentioning “initiation”, but the rest…
Ruck sums up the story of Ion this way:
Ruck’s wording is so affected by Structuralist jargon and obsessions that the meaning is obscured: “ambivalent”, the contrasting earthly and celestial, the emphasis on generic identities, “redeems”, “converting”, “mediates the antitheses.” What precisely does Ruck think is happening in the myth of Ion?
Structuralism and Myth-Ritual Theory are failed explanatory systems. Ruck is not responsible for this failure, but to move forward the field of entheogen studies (or my preferred phrase: study of psychedelics in religious history), we have to learn to sort out what in Ruck’s scholarship is conditioned by such ordinary-state-based systems.
Myth is based in the altered state of consciousness and requires an explanatory system rooted in the characteristic logic and phenomena of the altered state.
uploaded for scholarly purposes.
My 2017 assessment of Graves’ writings on psychedelics is here: Assessing Robert Graves’ 1950s psychedelic scholarship on Greek myth/religion/art
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Robert Graves principal writings on psychedelics in ancient Greek myth and religion:
Graves, What Food the Centaur’s Ate, published in Steps (1958) (The essay was first published in 1956 in the magazine The Atlantic Monthly, and also republished in 1960 in the book Food for Centaurs, with the title “Centaur’s Food”)
Graves, Poet’s Paradise (1961) (republished later as “The Universal Paradise”)
I have copies of other essays and book reviews by Graves. From my survey of them, they restate the arguments of the above two essays. The above essays contain Graves’ principal arguments for psychedelic mushrooms in ancient Greek myth and religion.
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I also include below the Forward to Graves’ popular The Greek Myths, in which he discusses his theories.
Graves, Greek Myths, Forward (1960)
Graves also included his mushroom arguments in the last, 1960 edition of his book on poetry and anthropology, The White Goddess, originally published in 1948. Below are some excerpts.
Graves, White Goddess, excerpts (last edition, 1960)
Graves’ White Goddess could be included somewhere in my “Theories of Mythology” page.
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I also have a book of selections of Graves’ correspondence. There are many letters to Wasson, which shed light on Graves’ roll in the development of the “secret entheogen” school of scholarship.
I see this book praised regularly and cited as a key study for understanding allegorical readings of Homer, but to me this praise seems odd because the book is narrowly invested in outdated concerns. Its coverage of the topic of Neoplatonic allegorical reading is hampered by its intellectual history approach (the ‘growth of the epic tradition’ part of the title). To learn about Neoplatonic allegorical reading practices, it would be better to read the ancient authors directly, especially Numenius, Porphyry, and Proclus. Lamberton’s book is not anyway about allegorical reading practices in general, but about the specific example of written interpretations of Homer that explain Homer explicitly as allegory for Neoplatonic metaphysics. Reading Lamberton does not produce anything like a full picture of allegorical exegesis in antiquity, even of allegorical exegesis of Homer, even of “Neoplatonic allegorical reading” (per the title).
The books primary interest to us, then, is in how it demonstrates the limitations of the intellectual history approach with regards to allegorical interpretation (or analogical or metaphorical). What I mean by this is that Lamberton traces a ‘development’ of allegorical reading by positing that each piece of evidence of written allegorical exegesis depends on chronologically prior written allegorical exegeses. Lamberton can thereby ‘trace’ the ‘history’ and ‘development’ of allegorical reading practices and argue that these reading practices in turn produced explicitly allegorical literature.
Lamberton does not treat allegorical reading and interpretation as a mode of reading and interpretation, but instead as only a form of writing (i.e. exegesis). Allegorical reading is only possible in Lamberton’s study after encountering allegorical exegesis. He does not consider that allegorical reading is a mode of reading that is possible to the mind. Our response and position is that allegorical (or analogical or metaphorical) reading is characteristic of the loose-cognition, mystic, altered state of consciousness. The mind exposed to loose-cognition inevitably develops such a mode of interpretation, not only of words, but of images, sounds, and other representations (ultimately of mental constructs of sense perceptions). The history of allegorical reading is not limited to treatises that explicitly claim to offer an allegorical exegesis.
Lamberton writes as an outsider to allegorical reading, with constant asides about its absurdity ‘to us’. There is an ‘obvious’ and ‘natural’ meaning to Homer’s poetry that is non-allegorical. He writes as if the literalist, historicist reading and interpretation is the natural, to-be-assumed position. Yet he writes about non-literalist, non-historicist interpretors. This incongruence produces an odd book, at odds with its subject-matter. Throughout allegorical exegetes are assumed to be desperately looking for evidence of philosophical theories in texts that obviously do not contain that evidence, as if it were impossible that they simply saw evidence for those theories because they thought them to be the truth and thus inherent in the nature of reality and words.
Understanding that allegorical interpretation is in fact a normal aspect of altered state experiencing would produce a completely different book on Neoplatonic exegesis of Homer. It would focus more on Neoplatonic exegesis as a particular twist on allegorical interpretation, and not as if the exegeses we have determine what allegorical reading was and is. It would be able to describe more clearly why Neoplatonists wrote about the allegorical meaning of Homer in the way they did (because allegorical reading was not a rare, deviant, far-fetched thing to do). Its attempt to trace ‘influence’ and ‘development’ would have to be totally revamped because any evidence of allegorical exegesis should not be taken as evidence of influence by the Neoplatonists or as determined by Neoplatonic exegesis. Allegorical (or analogical or metaphorical) interpretation, after all, does not depend for its existence on the texts of Neoplatonist authors, but on the mind’s immersion in the loose-cognition state.
Our understanding of interpretation is so different that we are not left with much use for Lamberton’s book.
Ustinova’s 2018 book Divine Mania: Alteration of Consciousness in Ancient Greece is a large exercise in the ‘anything but drugs’ genre of academic books. Here is a densely researched book on ancient Greek practices of prophecy, initiation, battlefield mania, Nympholepsy, poetic furor, erotic mania, and philosophical mania. The book helpfully draws together all of these practices as all involving ‘alteration of consciousness.’
Yet the author only mentions drug plants in the context of the Eleusinian mysteries and only then as an unlikely hypothesis. Instead, the author favors ‘alteration of consciousness’ by non-drug means, especially sensory deprivation (as if that were reliable and powerful).
So, we have a tiny step forward: recognizing ‘alteration of consciousness’ throughout ancient Greek culture. Yet it persists in the ‘anything but drugs’ fallacy.
This fallacy is usually tied to broad and vague phrases like ‘alteration of consciousness.’ As if all sorts of altering consciousness are essentially the same and as if there were no content to altering consciousness besides the very fact of alteration itself. That the book is praised for ‘applying a cognitive approach’ shows how banal such approaches can be.
There’s of course little interest in loose cognitive representationalism, block universe determinism, and non-control. The book’s main take away is on the social role of these practices that involve alterations of consciousness, not on any sort of meaning. The author is also not immersed in the literary/metaphorical culture of ancient Greece.
The main use of the book is as a source-book, but it has to be read carefully, always keeping the author’s ‘anything but drugs’ and banal ‘cognitive’ approach at bay. I’m even skeptical of its use at that. Better to learn the egodeath theory and metaphorical way of interpreting and then read the ancient Greek sources for yourself.
A selection of recent articles, arguing that contemporary universities and academics are largely beholden to the status quo, that the university system and academic career turn professors into careerist conformists, not radicals. Universities want to avoid bad press, lest it harm donations and enrollment. Tenure and it attendant job security have become rarer, replaced by a growing number of adjunct teachers. In order to have a shot at tenure, graduate students and early-career academics are encouraged by the job market to be as safe as possible in their research and teaching. Academics become accustomed to serving the university.
[P]rofessors rarely exercise the freedoms tenure grants them. I taught for more than forty years, and I knew teachers who espoused radical principles when they were hired. They decided to keep these under the radar but promised to let loose once they earned that coveted job security. I can say from experience that not one of these erstwhile militants did so. Those of us who were troublemakers from the day we began working continued to “stir the pot,” as my Division Chairman accused some of us of doing, after we were granted tenure. For those who kept quiet, the hierarchy they accepted as the price they had to pay to someday be free became internalized. They got used to, habituated if you will, playing it safe. The years of willingly submitting to authority slowly but surely warped whatever radical instincts they once had, so that by the time they got tenure, they were already ruined.
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The professor who says, wait until I get tenure and then I will activate my radical heart and soul, is lying. The great day may come, but by then he or she has already seen that fighting the power is bad business. Better to work inside the system, be polite, write an occasional letter of protest, and avoid troublemakers like the plague you have come to see they are. Be a good worker and help train students to follow in your footsteps.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/04/the-dangerous-academic-is-an-extinct-species
[U]niversity faculty are less and less likely to threaten any aspect of the existing social or political system. Their jobs are constantly on the line, so there’s a professional risk in upsetting the status quo. But even if their jobs were safe, the corporatized university would still produce mostly banal ideas, thanks to the sycophancy-generating structure of the academic meritocracy. But even if truly novel and consequential ideas were being produced, they would be locked away behind extortionate paywalls.
The corporatized university also ends up producing the corporatized student. Students worry about doing anything that may threaten their job prospects. Consequently, acts of dissent have become steadily de-radicalized. On campuses these days, outrage and anger is reserved for questions like, “Is this sushi an act of cultural appropriation?” When student activists do propose ways to “radically” reform the university, it tends to involve adding new administrative offices and bureaucratic procedures, i.e. strengthening the existing structure of the university rather than democratizing it. Instead of demanding an increase in the power of students, campus workers, and the untenured, activists tend to push for symbolic measures that universities happily embrace, since they do not compromise the existing arrangement of administrative and faculty power.
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The “professor-as-revolutionary” caricature serves both the caricaturist and the professor. Conservatives can remain convinced that students abandon conservative ideas because they are being manipulated, rather than because reading books and learning things makes it more difficult to maintain right-wing prejudices. And liberal professors get to delude themselves into believing they are affecting something.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Shame-of-Our/239148?cid=wcontentgrid_41_7
[T]he conditions ravaging our profession are also ravaging our work. The privilege of tenure used to confer academic freedom through job security. By now, decades of adjunctification have made the professoriate fearful, insular, and conformist. According to the AAUP, adjunct faculty are about half as likely to undertake risky research projects, and the timidity moves up the ladder. “Professionalization” means retrofitting your research so that it accommodates the critical fads that will make you marginally more employable. It means cutting and adding chapters so that feathers remain unruffled. Junior faculty play it safe — conceptually, politically, and formally — because they write for job and tenure committees rather than for readers. Publications serve careers before they serve culture.
If my book deserves recognition, then we must also recognize that no young scholar with any sense would be foolish enough to write it. Graduate students must tailor their research projects to a fickle job market, and a book like mine simply doesn’t fit.
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The message is clear: Stick to the old dissertation formula — six chapters about six authors. The most foolish mistake is addressing an audience beyond the academy. Publishing with Penguin or Random House should be a wonderful opportunity for a young scholar. Yet for most hiring committees, a trade book is merely one that did not undergo peer review. It’s extracurricular. My book exists because I was willing to give up a tenure-track job to write it.
We cannot blame this professional anemia on scarce funding. The largest adjunct-faculty increases have taken place during periods of economic growth, and high university endowments do not diminish adjunctification. Harvard has steadily increased its adjunct faculty over the past four decades, and its endowment is $35.7 billion. This is larger than the GDP of a majority of the world’s countries.
The truth is that teaching is a diminishing priority in universities. Years of AAUP reports indicate that budgets for instruction are proportionally shrinking. Universities now devote less than one-third of their expenditures to instruction. Meanwhile, administrative positions have increased at more than 10 times the rate of tenured faculty positions. Sports and amenities are much more fun.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/OveruseAbuse-of-Adjuncts/143951?cid=rclink
The search for truth, critical thinking, intellectual creativity, academic standards, scientific invention, and the ideals of citizenship have been discounted in favor of maximizing profits, vocational training, career success, applied research, and bottom-line considerations.
…
The overuse and abuse of contingent faculty members is a threat to academic freedom and intellectual innovation. The contingent faculty finds its teaching constrained by fear of the administrators’ uncontested right not to renew their contracts.
In an address to the American Council of Learned Societies, Clifford Geertz, one of our most influential scholars, once recounted his own career, calling it “a charmed life, in a charmed time. An errant career, mercurial, various, free, instructive, and not all that badly paid.”
Geertz continued: “The question is: Is such a life and such a career available now? In the Age of Adjuncts? When graduate students refer to themselves as ‘the pre-unemployed’? … Has the bubble burst? … It is difficult to be certain. … But there does seem to be a fair amount of malaise about, a sense that things are tight and growing tighter … and it is probably not altogether wise just now to take unnecessary chances, strike new directions, or offend the powers. Tenure is harder to get (I understand it takes two books now, and God knows how many letters. … ), and the process has become so extended as to exhaust the energies and dampen the ambitions of those caught up in it. … All I know is that, up until just a few years ago, I used … to tell students and younger colleagues … that they should stay loose, take risks, resist the cleared path, avoid careerism, go their own way, and that if they did so, if they kept at it and remained alert, optimistic, and loyal to the truth, my experience was that they could … have a valuable life, and nonetheless prosper. I don’t do that anymore.”
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/campus-politics-and-the-administrative-mind
Though conservatives frequently attack higher education as a radical enclave, the institutional culture of the contemporary university is really far more aligned with institutional liberalism than radical leftism. The concept of the “deep state” has been debased lately, but in its original form – the idea that there is a bureaucratic class that persists within elected governments regardless of the outcomes of elections and which has its own interests that it asserts through subtle administrative power – is true of colleges, perhaps even more than of governments themselves. And the deep state of most universities is not radical but rather progressive. It’s not comprised of Sanders-style insurgents but of Clinton-style establishmentarians. It’s this class of people that college students have been petitioning, and so the presumptions held by that class of people represent the boundaries of what much contemporary college activism can achieve.
[W]e need to recognize that higher education has developed an entire set of administrators whose fundamental purpose is to prevent controversy from happening before it starts. I’ve come to call them the “Liability and Controversy Avoidance Class.” They are the diversity officers, the Title IX coordinators, the fixers of Greek life controversies, the public relations and marketing people who know just how much intersectionality language to pepper into their press releases.
I don’t think that none of these jobs are worthwhile; in fact some of them are essential. But anyone who cares about genuinely radical action on campus has to understand the way that universities have adapted to protests by treating them as a marketing issue to be managed.
[first pass]
The poet, fiction writer, and essayist Robert Graves wrote about mushrooms in Greek religion and myth in the 1950s. He corresponded with Wasson from an early stage of Wasson’s research into mushrooms and contributed evidence and ideas to Wasson on the role of mushrooms in religion. Wasson, however, did not credit him or acknowledge his published work on mushrooms, putting a strain on their friendship. Moreover, Graves’ work has been ignored by the majority of subsequent scholars on mushrooms in Greek myth and religion. Credit that has gone to Wasson and Carl Ruck as first popularizers of the role of mushrooms in Greek myth and religion should go to Graves. This post will clarify what Graves asserted and what the strengths and limitations of his approach were.
Graves primary contribution is the essay “Centaur’s Food,” first published in The Atlantic magazine, but reprinted and more commonly available in Food for Centaurs (1960), a collection of Graves’ poetry and essays. His other writings on psychedelics in religion and history primarily reiterate the findings presented in “Centaur’s Food.” Additionally, “The Poet’s Paradise,” the transcript of a lecture delivered at Oxford in the early 60s, published in Oxford Addresses on Poetry (1961), contains some material on Graves’ views on contemporary use of psychedelics and some new interpretations of religion and mythology. Below I list the claims of the two essays and summarize and comment on the methods Graves’ uses to advance these claims. Finally, I add a few notes about Graves’ relationship with Wasson and Graves’ self-presentation and its impact on the effectiveness of his arguments.
Graves makes some serious blunders, but some of the evidence he draws our attention to remains strikingly relevant and has not been given its due by subsequent entheogen scholars. Graves is the true origin of the middling moderate entheogen theory of religion, as defined here: psychedelics were used commonly in the origins of religion, but later became more and more restricted to select occasions or a select group, until finally they became so secretive that common knowledge of their role was lost; the role of the scholar is to unveil the presence of plants in religious myth and ritual.
In “Centaur’s Food,” Graves claims:
- The taboo on mushrooms in some cultures is a sign of their earlier use in sacred ceremonies
- That Greek priests later banned the use of the mushroom and that Greek myth reflects this change by depicting the punishments of figures for serving ambrosia to mortals
- Mushrooms are found in Greek art: An Etruscan Bronze mirror dating to 500 BC depicts a mushroom at the feet of Ixion; A vase painting of the centaur Nessus dying after being shot with an arrow by Heracles depicts mushroom in between centaur’s feet; The relief scultpure from Phrsalus from 5th BC depicts Demeter and Persphone holding a mushroom
- That the first letters of the ingredients for the recipes given for Ambrosia, Nectar, and the Eleusinian Kykeon in Greek sources spell out the Greek word for mushroom in various forms; The mu- syllable of the Greek word for ‘mystery’ musterion refers to fly (muos) and mushroom (muka). Mystery celebration at Athens held during the fall, the mushroom season. The corresponding spring festival was named for flowering, springtime plants (anthesterion), so seems like that musterion somehow refers to a substance.
- Dionysus was the mushroom, both born from lightning; that Maenads raged like Berserk in amanita-state; that ripping off of heads in Dionysus rituals refers to removal of head of mushroom from stalk.
- That animals used as symbols of major cities in the Peloponnese refer to mushrooms (toad for Argos, fox for Messene, serpent for Laconia); nearby city name Mycenae refers to mushroom. Founder of Argos, Phoroneus, name may refer to toad, born from an ash-tree, which are known to attract lightning, which is sign of mushroom. The fox-skins worn by the avid followers of Dionsysus, the Thracians, resemeble mushrooms in vase paintings. The little foxes in Old Testament stories refers to amanita. The fox in the story of the Spartan boy who snuck a fox into school in his tunic and then said nothing in order to not be found out even as the fox began to gnaw on his innards refers to amanita. Swelling in Old Testament and Greek Myth refers to mushroom.
- The Athenian festival called Scirophoria is a procession of mushrooms or later mushroom-like parasols.
“The Poet’s Paradise” claims:
- Visions of paradise and of hell due to drugs; commonality of these visions not to due to Jungian collective unconscious, but due to shared culture and drug experiencing; ‘Wisdom’ due to drugs
- Amanita was used in Europe, but reserved for the priesthood and taboos were used to deter others from having it; the taboo hung on long after rites were over; Amanita was initially used, but later the more common panaeolus and psiloybe used; Mushroom use was secretive and reserved only for those of a certain integrity; No Christian or Jew consumed mushrooms; despite Christian peyote churches, predicts that Catholics and Protestants cannot accept visionary plants and will lead Prohibition, in cahoots with tobacco and liquor industries
- An Aztec fresco depicts a river in paradise as a mushroom
- Pastries offered during Eleusis rite shaped like phallus and piglets refer to mushrooms to due shape and name respectively
- Dionysus was sometimes called the lame god, so were toads (which refer to mushrooms)
- Perseus ability to fly refer to visionary state, who named Mycenae from a mushroom he found growing on the spot.
- Sea metaphors due to a physiological effect of psilocybe, that of lowering body temperature
Methods used by Graves:
- Anthropological theories (taboo is sign of earlier sacredness, taboos had ritual exceptions)
- Common names for mushrooms or nicknames reflect taboo and can be used to interpret myth/religion/art
- Compare with known mushroom use in Siberia and Mexico (Berserk and Lightning God)
- Identification of mushrooms in visual art
- Connects myths and figures to each other through shared imagery or other similarities, then applies characteristics of one myth to another
- Gets mushroom recipe for Ambrosia, Nectar, Kykeon with poetic feature of listing a secret word with the first letters of a series of words
- Notes a few comments by ancients about mushrooms – Nero says they are food of the gods, I.e. ambrosia; Porphyry calls them god-nourishing, normally an epithet for ambrosia; Plutarch says mushrooms grow from no roots or seed, but from lightning; Dionysus’ feasts called the Ambrosia
- Common sense – what else causes visions?
- Ritual action and mythology symbolically refers to mushroom, mushroom-induced activity, or mushroom preparation
- Mu- roots of words suggests links between concepts muketa, musterion, muos
- Analogy between names of festivals to point to mushrooms
- Draws on personal experience in “The Poet’s Paradise” to claim heaven and hell are visionary states.
- Physiological and phenomenological effects of mushroom explain metaphor (but in a weakened way)
Comments:
- Mushroom religion earlier, taboo’d and then supressed, so we have to sift through later evidence for the signs of this earlier religion. This is moderate entheogen view. Assumes secret hidden pagan tradition, not Jewish (yet he interprets some Old Testament stories as referring to mushrooms) or Christian. Bad Anthropological theory immediately hinders; Graves is deficient at theoretical level. This affects the type of evidence that he sees and the ways he interprets it. This is the important theoretical limitation, affects Wasson (or tied up in Wasson’s work) and subsequent entheogen scholarship (especially Ruck)
- Has some understanding of phenomenology and altered state, uses it in interpretation, but vague and incomplete; for Graves myths more prominently reflect ritual and practice, should be treated as history and asked historical questions of.
- Relies on ‘connections’ strategy typical of anthropological approaches to myth; explains myths by other myths instead of internally. This is a bad characteristic of Ruck’s writings, too.
- Not mono plant fallacy – amanita as original, later substituted with more common but still visionary mushrooms
- Cross cultural evidence; variety of evidence
- For contemporaries he wants to reserver drugs for those with good moral character. Says good moral character necessary for positive experience.
- Equates drug state with non-drug poetic trance, but elevates poetic trance as ‘active’, against ‘passive’ mushroom state
Graves was a literary figure and, like Wasson, an amateur scholar. His writings reflect these two features. The writings often have a literary flow and include bits of poetry. For example, “Centaur’s Food” is written as a travelogue, tracing the development of Graves’ hypothesis as he travels from his home in Majorca to England, and “The Poet’s Paradise” concludes with an ode to Dionysus composed by Graves. Furthermore, Graves is very aware of his outsider status to academic scholarship. He mocks scholars’ braindead interpretations of Greek Art and the authority given to them, and also comments self-deprecatingly on his own ideas as the musings of an amateur. This last feature, though, leads him not present his arguments as strongly as possible. Citations to texts he refers to and images of works he refers to are missing, and the reader is usually unable to read or see the Graves’ evidence.
Graves speaks frequently of his relationship with Wasson in his published work on psychedelics, and the letters published in Between Sun and Moon: Selected Correspondence (1984) reveal more of that relationship. Graves was contacted by the Wasson’s wife Valentina as the Wassons prepared their first book, Mushrooms and Russia. She contacted him to ask his opinion about the poisoning of the Roman Emperor Claudius in AD 54, who was said to have died after ingesting a poisonous mushroom. Graves had become famous for his works of historical fiction featuring Claudius. Graves is excited by their interest in mushrooms in culture and develops and shares with the Wassons the idea that the negative association displayed by some cultures towards mushrooms is the sign of an earlier religious usage of mushrooms and taboo. He discovers and informs Wasson about the ritual use of mushrooms in Oaxaca, Mexico, the publicizing of which would make Wasson famous and cement his reputation as foremost enthnomycologist. Wasson’s account of the mushroom ceremonies in Oaxaca in turn prompt Graves to think about mushrooms in Greek religion. The correspondence shows Graves sharing evidence and interpretations with Wasson that he would later publish in “Centaur’s Food”. Their relationship begins to sour, however, when Wasson fails to cite “Centaur’s Food” or mention Graves’ role in developing the ideas published in Soma. Graves complains of this in a published review of Soma, “The Two Births of Dionysus”, and Wasson apologizes in a private letter, claims that on the one hand he had merely forgotten to cite Graves’ role in idea development and on the other had omitted Greek culture from Soma in order to take on only one group of scholars at once.
Wasson appropriated (stole?) Graves’ ideas and downplayed Greek (Western) myth/religion, just as he later did, when arguing against Allegro. Wasson later addressed Greek religion in The Road to Eleusis, but in the way to maximize publicity, but minimize uptake by scholars. Ruck’s solid research on Dionysus and wine is obscured and downplayed by Wasson’s grandstanding about Eleusis.
Bogus outdated anthropological theories explain the limitations of all the bad moderate entheogen scholarship (e.g. Wasson, Allegro, Ruck). The theory that psychedelics were used in the remote past at the origins of religion, but restricted to a few elites and/or priests and taboo for the general populace is rooted in outdated and bogus anthropological theories. Bad theory has caused some evidence to be overlooked, other evidence to be interpreted badly. Sweep those theories away and start again with better theories.
My outline of theories of mythology indicates the harmful role of bad and outdated anthropology on the study of myth. A similar sort analysis of bad anthropology in entheogen scholarship is needed, to show how it has distorted our use of available evidence. The bad theorizing in the field has limited the scope and power of its interpretation.
Researching for my post on Robert Graves has made this clear. It is amazing how limited this field has been. It is likewise amazing the role that a few influential researchers can have on the development and constraining of a field. There is a direct line from bad anthropological theories to Graves, to Wasson, to Ruck, the leading voice in the study of psychedelics in Greek religion and culture.
Graves proposed to Wasson in the 50s, before the publication of Soma, that the taboo on eating mushrooms found in some contemporary cultures could be explained by the anthropological principle of taboo. The revulsion felt towards mushrooms was the sign of an earlier prohibition on mushrooms due to their sacred nature. The prohibition kept mushrooms reserved either for a special elite or for certain special festival days. Later the mushrooms were either banned, fell out of use, substituted with a placebo, or knowledge of them became even more restricted and secret. The taboo then morphed into a feeling of revulsion towards mushrooms evidenced in some cultures and in many disgusting or unsavory names/nicknames for mushrooms found worldwide.
Graves claims this is based on “a sound anthropological principle” and takes it as proven and true before he sets off looking for evidence in ancient Greek myth/religion/art/literature. But this theory limits the sorts of evidence he notices and distorts his interpretation of that evidence. This theory lies behind Wasson’s Soma, though he does not credit Graves, leading to a breakdown in their friendship. This theory dominates Road to Eleusis so much that Ruck’s far more wide-ranging work on wine in that book is so frequently overlooked for the single, supposedly exceptional and secretive, case of Eleusis.
More details to come as I complete my post on Robert Graves.
http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/01/18/wasson-and-the-psychedelic-revolution/
My notes:
Road to Eleusis: ‘unveiling’ of ‘mystery’ as publicity event, despite Ruck’s claim that there was little publicity. It’s certainly announced by Wasson that way in his opening section of the book: the grand collaboration between mycologist, chemist, and classicist, finally revealing the truth about the ancient mystery cult.
Wasson needed confirmation of another ancient mushroom to corroborate his claim that soma of ancient India was mushroom. This helps explain why Ruck’s far more relevant Dionysus material was relegated to ‘additional’ evidence. If the book was meant to cause a stir, they failed because they over emphasized the main ritual at Eleusis at the expense of all the other rituals associated with Eleusis and the rest of Greek religious practice. At a glance, the book seems to deal with only the the one-time event at Eleusis, when in fact Ruck provides evidence for widespread entheogen use and knowledge in Greek culture.
Authors made it easy to dismiss and ignore due to brittleness of ergot identification (Hofmann admits this in his section) and to minimizing wine and Dionysus evidence at expense of grand gesture of ‘unveiling the mystery.’ Ruck provides something of a corrective here, alluding to a different identification, which he claims is sounder, and placing emphasis on wider entheogen knowledge and use in Greek, Roman, and Christian religion.
Wasson had already proposed in a lecture and Robert Graves had already published that mushroom was in Eleusis potion.
- Wasson proposed mushroom in Eleusinian kykeon in 1956 in a [unpublished?] lecture.
- Graves proposed and published it in 1960 Food for Centaurs and put stone relief carving from Northern Greece of Demeter and Persephone holding mushroom on cover of new edition of Greek Myths published in same year.
- Then in 1976 Ruck says that Wasson proposed that they ‘solve’ the Eleusinian mystery. What was there to solve? Wasson himself and Graves had already made the point. Again, this intention to ‘solve’ the mystery seems like a publicity event. Ruck provides plenty of evidence for Wasson’s interest in publicity for his earlier work. Elitist Wasson tried to set himself up as balance to the popularizing Leary, walking a fine line of publicity and defense of elite culture.
Typical Ruck problems:
- Stops after finding presence of plants, mistakes presence of plants with the ‘mystery’.
- Relatedly, this knowledge of the presence of plants was held by only an elite few.
Also, Makes Prohibition-compliant claim that ‘abuses and excesses’ caused Prohibition.
E. R. Dodds, author of Greeks and the Irrational: still very respected by mainstream Classicists. Graves regarded as poet and novelist, not scholar. Ruck blacklisted for decades.
Ruck seems to imply that Eliade knew differently, but published drug-diminishing view of shamanism due to Prohibition:
“Mircea Eliade, the renowned authority on religion, mysticism, and shamanism, […] disavow[ed] his own considerable evidence about shamanism in Siberia and elsewhere and declare[d] that drugs were characteristic only of the decadent last stages of a cult, affording only inauthentic hallucinatory communion with the divine. Inevitably, anyone who thought differently was assumed to have ruined his mind on drugs.”
Michael wrote that I bring the Classics department perspective in the invisible college of transcendent knowledge. What does that consist of?
My background in official academia:
My training is primarily in the field of Classics, the study of the ancient Greek and Latin languages and literature written in those languages. This primarily involves study of the technical grammar and syntax of the languages, of the figures of speech and rhetorical structures typically employed, of the plots of major works, and of the implied viewpoint and assumptions of an author. In its most basic form this consists of a close reading of the Greek or Latin in order to better explain what a text means. Classical authors typically wrote in a dense and layered way, even without taking into account encoding of altered state cybernetics
For the majority of contemporary Classicists, the literature to be studied primarily consists of ancient Greek literature from c. 800 BC to c. 300 BC and Latin literature from c. 200 BC to c. 200 AD. I take a wider view of this field than most and include anything written in those languages, including works of Late Antiquity, Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, however we should define or understand those periods. Even within official academia I am something of an outsider in this way. A better name for the field may be ‘Classical Languages and Literature’, to de-emphasize ‘pagan’ antiquity in favor of a more natural and balanced focus on the full history of the languages and literature. Contemporary classicists unduly limit themselves in general to non-Christian texts, creating an artificial divide in the ‘western tradition’ that negatively affects both the study of Classical texts, which are assumed to be wholly different from Christian texts, and the study of Christian texts, which are not subjected to close reading and linguistic and literary analysis as works of Greek and Latin literature as often as Classical texts. For many, studying the Classics has become either a refuge from bunk Christianity, similar to the turn to Eastern religions, or a way of avoiding the critical study of Christianity and preserving the just-so story of early Christian history and texts.
I have also intentionally sought out advanced training in the related disciplines of ancient history and archaeology/art history. This is relatively unusual among academics of my generation, who are usually encouraged to hyper-specialize by the demands of graduate training and the academic job market, and by the tendency observable in the 20th-21st centuries of academic fields to wander away from each other into increasingly specialized subfields. I saw these pressures early on and resisted them, wanting to cultivate a fuller picture of the ancient world than the study of language and literature could afford. Although based in the study of language and literature, I embraced the study of history and archaeology/art history.
I remain, however, highly skeptical of these fields, as I am of my own. Besides not recognizing the role of psychedelics, they remain tied to the overly naive literalism of 19th century scholars who founded the modern fields. Contemporary scholars in those fields have not overthrown that literalism to the degree needed, especially to the general public. The fields, as presented to the general public, undergraduate students, and even many graduate students, rely on a degree of certainty about reconstructions of the past that is unfounded and misguided.
Ancient history: the majority of modern narrative histories of antiquity largely follow works of history written by ancient Greeks and Romans themselves. They tend to use those ancient works as the basis for their chronology and history-telling, with some additions or corrections based on non-literary sources. This however continues to ignore work done since the 1970s detailing how the works written by ancient historians were not founded on the principle typical of the modern discipline of history that the past be recorded and depicted as accurately as possible with as much objectivity as possible. Instead ancient history writing was a branch of literature, one that had some relationship with the concept of an accurate representation of the past, but certainly not in the same was as moderns would like. It has been shown again and again that history writers in antiquity were willing to distort events for a wide variety of reasons, from advancing specific political positions, to creating arresting emotional effects, to crafting an account that corresponded with poetic motifs. Moreover, as I have been showing in my ongoing translations from the first history writer, Herodotus, episodes presented as history regularly reflect altered state cybernetics, and so we have to wonder to what extent the representation of events has been modified to conform to altered state cybernetics or whether certain episodes are privileged because they conform to the typical trajectory of altered state experiencing. Modern narrative histories that rely on ancient histories should acknowledge and reflect those dynamics. As it is, they flatten out those dynamics, literalizing them, flattening the inspired air out of them, reducing them to a simple narrative.
Archaeology has a similar problem. Archaeologists of the 19th and early 20th centuries regularly relied upon ancient texts as straightforward descriptions of sites and topography. The authority given to the texts regularly shaped the identification and interpretation of sites and parts of sites. Even though working archaeologists have questioned the authority of texts, some abandoning them off completely, the identifications and interpretations made by their predecessors have often been taken over by guide books, informational signage aimed at tourists, and academics outside of the field, who are unaware of challenges to the initial work or unable to enter into the debate. The presentation of sites to the public is affected issues of local and national identity that are often obscured. A problem for the classical era, it is even more so for early Christian sites, where mythology is repeated as historical fact time and time again. My graduate training in archaeology has resulted in a deep skepticism regarding the way sites are presented. To a certain extent this is out of the hands of practicing archaeologists, and I know many who call for revisions to the identification and chronology of sites, based on more reliable dating techniques than suspect literary texts.
John Bartram is one such scholar, who calls for a revised chronology and identification of ‘early Christian’ sites and texts based not on the received chronology, but on more reliable dating techniques (more of relevance throughout his site).
Classics itself, as the study of classical literature, is not free of these problems of received assumptions in chronology and identification. The field is inconsistent in its assumptions of authorship and authenticity of texts. The 19th century was characterized by a great deal of skepticism regarding the unity, authorship, and authenticity of classical texts. A good deal of that skepticism was rejected primarily because literary scholars wanted whole texts by single authors to analyze. Moreover, the field relies upon unverifiable assumptions regarding the transmission of texts from antiquity to the earliest currently extant edition, which may date to centuries after the believed date of composition.
All my studies in official academia have shown me that we have far less certainty regarding our historical reconstructions of the ancient world than is normally presented. When researching I favor alternating between two approaches – a wild, throw anything against the wall approach to see what sticks and a careful questioning of assumptions and of importations of material from outside the immediate topic under consideration.
Altered state cybernetics are inherent to the human mind, even if expressed and in a certain way experienced differently by different cultures. To truly unlock ancient thinking and writing, learn to recognize those dynamics and metaphors for them.
There is an analogy between my reservations concerning received historical reconstructions of the ancient world and the uncertainty and detachment concerning the reality of the external world, the splitting of representation and represented referent, in the loose state of cognition. This skepticism and reservation is not an abandoning of all possibility of knowledge about the past, as recommended by some post-modernist thinkers, but rather a detachment and flexibility regarding our reconstructions and assumptions. Researchers must be more open than they have been to questioning wide swaths of assumptions at once, not simply manipulating individual pieces of evidence at a time.
Back cover blurb with table of contents and chapter abstracts here.
Selected excerpts from the chapter abstracts that point to the assumptions of the ‘cognitive’ theories employed (emphasis mine):
[T]he human mind is supplied with an array of mental tools which give rise to religious beliefs and practices as byproducts of normal human cognition.
A cognitive model of divination reveals how normal processes of thought give rise to this common human behavior. From a broader perspective, Sperber’s theory of symbolic thought shows how “irrational” religious claims arise through fully rational processes.
Cognitive approaches to ritual trace its characteristic features to intuitive processes, including those which have evolved to help us identify threats in the environment.
Importing of concepts and jargon from this bunk field, the Cognitive Science of Religion: ‘dual-process model’, ‘minimally counterintuitive concept’, ‘intuitive thought’. The field is bunk and feeble because it is ordinary state based. The emphasis throughout that religion can be explained by ‘normal’ ‘rational’ human processes. ‘Normal’ and ‘rational’ here are code for ordinary-state. It’s nothing but more academic sky-castles and spin, avoiding the obvious relevance of altered-state thinking to religion. The altered state is entirely ‘normal’ and ‘rational’, an in-born potential of the mind, and is a better candidate for explaining religion than exclusively ordinary-state based thinking. “Cognitive Science of Religion” is merely another theory of low, exoteric, ordinary-state based religion.
This book appears worth reading as a survey of Greek religion relatively free from the dominant trends of the 19th-20th century, anthropological and sociological approaches to religion. But overall, another misfiring.
cyberdisciple 
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