Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: Iron

The demand for metal, and slaves to work the mines, played a major role in the founding of overseas trading colonies. Archaic Greek states, 800-500 BC, founded hundreds of colonies throughout Europe and North Africa. The enslavement of the locals was standard colonization procedure. Slaves were at a premium since most children never saw fifteen; rare was the woman who lived past thirty or the man who lived past forty.

The canonical Boeotian Hesiod dated the ages of man by the precious metals mined by the slaves: the original golden race of the orchard garden, whose spirits "roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds, givers of wealth"; the matriarchal silver race destroyed by Zeus for refusing to recognize him; the flesh-eating bronze race "sprung from ash trees...terrible and strong," who destroyed themselves in warfare; the founding fathers of Mycenae and Troy who dwell "untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed"; and their descendants of iron, who "never rest from labor and sorrow."

Delphi for north and central Greece, Olympia for the Peloponnese, and Delos for the Cyclades and Attica became political centers of an amphictiony, a theocratic military alliance. Amphiktyonis, the Mycenaean goddess who binds together, an aspect of Demeter or Danae, gave way to Amphiktyon as the founder of the Dorian and Ionian leagues of neighbors; he was the son of Deucalion, 'sweet wine,' the Greek Noah. Official magical sanction from the alliance's oracle was an obligatory preliminary to colonization. The colonists were sent forth with a spit from the home city and a pot with fire in it. The new colony was then joined to the mother city by communal sacrifice using the maternal spit and fire.

Nothing political happened among the Greeks that wasn't preceded by a communal sacrifice, usually followed by a sacramental meal. The warriors solicited Apollo at Delphi, Olympia or Delos with votive tripods, that is, free-standing three-legged cooking pots. The sacrificial animals were often cooked with magical herbs. They are shown arising reborn from the cauldron, often with vines growing from their bodies, or drinking from an entheogenic cup. Like the chalice, the tripod's contents were originally considerably more important than its shape or its 'votive' function. The Attic vase below, c.490 BC, typically pictures the tripod as a magical vehicle.

The Pythia herself is most often pictured seated in a tripod, that is, speaking entheogenically, straight from the Cretan ladle. But the distinction between the raw and the cooked, between the wild, with which the 'bestial' (pre-industrial) souls of women were equated, and the civilized (military-industrial), with which men were equated, was profoundly important to the Greek polity. In Classical times Greek women, with the schizophrenic exception of the Pythia, the 'Snake-Woman' herself, were forbidden to approach the tripod at Delphi. Barbarians couldn't sacrifice before Greek altars or participate in Greek assemblies or contests, nor could Greek women, who were kept away from sacrifices and blood. Civic participation of the wives of citizens was reserved for their bloodless sacrifices or the occassional Dionysian celebration, which recognized their originary female powers. This participation was politically, though not psychologically, peripheral in the culture.

Although compassionate, and politically astute, both Plato and Aristotle thought slavery a perfectly moral foundation on which to build an ideal aristocratic state, and neither entertained the idea that even the free laboring classes were worthy of full citizenship. The last thing Greek slaves needed was genuine inspiration, so, for them, the contents of the tripod became taboo. We have all become Greek slaves. The Mycenaeans, conquerors and transmitters of Cretan culture, were themselves absorbed by the southerly march of the Dorians and Ionians. Their Classical Greek imagery was then transformed by the Romans into the Orthodox Christianity which became the mandatory religion of the late Roman slave states, of all the medieval European slave states, and the theological underpinning of the Euro-American industrial theocracy.

The loss of connection to the ecstatic processes, the loss of an easy bridge between the conscious and the unconscious, is the beginning of neurosis, the loss of connection to the Holy Mother, the irrational voice of our emotions, the fountainhead of our genius. The ancient shamanic bridges need to be rebuilt; the familial tribal cultures need to be listened to very carefully.   Humanizing the evolved industrial polity will be every bit as difficult as healing the damaged ecosphere and rendering human industry ecological. "The Teleut shaman calls back the soul of a sick child in these words: 'Come back to your country!...to the yurt, by the bright fire!...Come back to your father...to your mother!...'....It is only if the soul refuses or is unable to return to its place in the body that the shaman goes to look for it and finally descends to the realm of the dead to bring it back." Hence historiography.