The Great Zero Gate

Plutarch is for us the chief mouthpiece of the theory that all religions are fundamentally one, under different names and with different practices. For him and Maximus of Tyre ‘the gods’ are symbolic representations of the attributes of a Deity who is in his inmost nature unknowable. Maximus and Dion Chrysostom are ‘modernist’ in their views about myth and ritual; Philostratus and Ælian are genuinely superstitious. The Hermetic writings are good examples of the Plutarchian theory. They show, however, that the combination of philosophic monotheism with popular polydaemonism was becoming difficult, though the writers are equally anxious to retain both, as indeed the Neoplatonists were. Syncretism was easier when the gods were regarded as cosmic energies, or when their cults were fused in the popular worship of the sun and stars.

Dionysus and Orpheus were two nearly connected forms of the Sun-god, and the worship of both was influenced by the rites of the Thracian Sabazius. The central act of both mysteries was the rending in pieces of the god or hero, the lament for him, his resurrection, and the communion of his flesh and blood as a ‘medicine of immortality.’ The Egyptian Osiris had also been torn in pieces by his enemies; his resemblance to Dionysus was close enough to tempt many to identify them. In the Egyptian worship the doctrine of human immortality had long been emphasised, and this was now the most welcome article of faith everywhere. It was easy to fuse these national mystery-cults with each other because at bottom they all symbolised the same thing—the hope of mystical death and renewal, the death unto sin and the new birth unto righteousness, based on the analogy of nature's processes of death and rebirth.

While Judaism was purging itself from its Hellenistic element and relapsing into an Oriental religion, the bond of union in a people who were determined to remain aliens in Europe, Christianity was developing rapidly into a syncretistic European religion, which deliberately challenged all the other religions of the empire on their own ground and drove them from the field by offering all the best that they offered, as well as much that they could not give. It was indeed more universal in its appeal than any of its rivals. For Neoplatonism, until it degenerated, was the true heir of the Hellenic tradition, and had no essential elements of Semitic origin. Christianity had its roots in Judaism; but its obligation to Greek thought began with St. Paul, and in the third century ‘philosophic’ Christianity and Platonism were not far apart.

The real quarrel between Neoplatonism and Christianity in the third century lay in their different attitudes towards the old culture. In spite of the Hellenising of Christianity which began with the first Christian missions to Europe, the roots of the religion were planted in Semitic soil, and the Church inherited the prejudices of the Jews against European methods of worship.

Hellenism was vitally connected with polytheism, and with the sacred art which image-worship fostered. These things were an abomination to the Jews, and therefore to the early Christians. We, however, when we remember later developments, must take our choice between condemning matured Catholicism root and branch, and admitting that the uncompromising attitude of the early Church towards Hellenic polydaemonism was narrow-minded.

Porphyry made a very dignified protest against the charge that the Pagans actually worship wood and stone. ‘Images and temples of the gods,’ he says, ‘have been made from all antiquity for the sake of forming reminders to men. Their object is to make those who draw near them think of God thereby, or to enable them, after ceasing from their work, to address their prayers and vows to him. When any person gets an image or picture of a friend, he certainly does not believe that the friend is to be found in the image, or that his members exist inside the different parts of the representation. His idea rather is that the honour which he pays to his friend finds expression in the image. And while the sacrifices offered to the gods do not bring them any honour, they are meant as a testimony to the good-will and gratitude of the worshippers.’ The early Christian horror of idolatry was a legacy from the Jews, who were, on the aesthetic side, too unimaginative to understand a mode of worship which for other nations is natural and innocent.

-- William Ralph Inge, The philosophy of Plotinus

The religious condition of a great city in the third century must have presented a strange spectacle. ‘Let us suppose,’ says Cumont, ‘that in modern Europe the faithful had deserted the Christian churches to worship Allah and Brahma, to follow the precepts of Confucius or Buddha, or to adopt the maxims of the Shinto; let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese bonzes, Tibetan lamas, and Hindu pundits would be preaching fatalism and predestination, ancestor-worship and devotion to a deified sovereign, pessimism and deliverance through annihilation—a confusion in which all these priests would erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate their diverse rites therein. Such a dream would offer a fairly accurate picture of the religious chaos of the ancient world before the reign of Constantino.’

In a modern city thus divided, every pulpit would thunder with denunciations of the soul-destroying errors taught in the next street, and the old state church, if there was one, would be most bitter of all. But at Rome the new gods fused easily with the old; no difficulty was felt in identifying a virgin goddess with the Mother of the gods. Isis could be adored as Venus, Minerva, Ceres, Diana, according to the pleasure of the worshipper. Wendland prints at the end of his book an extraordinary statuette of Fortuna Panthea, who is loaded with the characteristic emblems of Fortuna, Isis, Nike, Artemis, Asclepius, and the Dioscuri! The Oriental cults were not quite so complaisant to each other; but even in them there was borrowing, as when the lore of the Chaldæans mingled itself with the Persian religion. Paganism had no horror of heresy.

The deity, said Themistius, takes pleasure in the diversity of homage. Paganism had no dogma and no church. It showed a kind of wisdom in tolerating Lucian, who made few disciples, and persecuting the Christians, who made many. There never was one pagan religion. The common folk maintained their simple sacred holidays through all changes till the victory of Christianity—and long after; the philosophers turned the myths into allegories and so speculated without restraint. The official religion was really dead, as dead as the republican magistracies, the titles of which were kept up for the sake of old associations. The Romans had no objection to make-believe of this kind, and distinguished men were quite ready to accept dignified priesthoods without believing anything.

-- William Ralph Inge, The philosophy of Plotinus

In earlier times the shrines of Isis had an equivocal reputation. The goddess was popular with the demimonde, and her worship can have had little connection with moral purity. But such scandals are not recorded in the third century, when indeed they would have hardly have been tolerated. In our period the worship of Isis was organised in a manner very like that of the Catholic Church. There was a kind of pope, with priests, monks, singers, and acolytes. The images of the Madonna were covered with true or false jewels, and her toilette was dutifully attended to every day. Daily matins and evensong were said in the chief temples. The priests were tonsured and wore white linen vestments. There were two great annual festivals, in the spring and autumn. The autumn festival was the occasion of public grief and joy over the death and resurrection of Osiris-Sarapis. The processions and ceremonies described by Apuleius and others were ingeniously contrived to excite curiosity, stimulate devotional feeling, and gratify the æsthetic sense.

For the mystic, Isis represented the deepest mysteries of life. Proclus makes her say, ‘I am that which has been, is, and will be. My garment none has lifted.’ The worship of Isis was closely connected with that of the dog-headed Anubis, long popular in Egypt; of Harpocrates the son of Isis and Osiris, and above all of Sarapis, who more and more took the place of the old Egyptian god, Osiris. Sarapis was a deity of many attributes; he had a great reputation for miraculous cures, and invalids often slept in his temples. He ended as a solar deity of omnipotent majesty, and as the great god of Alexandria threw Isis somewhat into the shade. Caracalla paid him the compliment of dedicating to him the sword with which he had killed his brother Geta, as South-Italian assassins have been known to offer to the Virgin the knife which they have used successfully on a private enemy.

Isis was a suffering and merciful mother-goddess, who longed to ease human troubles. Her worship had a miraculous element for the vulgar, a spiritual theology for the cultured, and an attractive ritual for the average worshipper.

No other religion practised faith-healing, by passing the night in temples (ἐγκοίμησις), on so large a scale. This Egyptian religion never inculcated a very robust or elevated morality. Its power lay in its charm, and in the hope of immortality which was always strong in the Egyptian religion. ‘There is a famous passage in an ancient Egyptian text relating to the worship of Osiris, which speaks of the loyal votary of the god after death. “As truly as Osiris lives, shall he live; as truly as Osiris is not dead, shall he not die; as truly as Osiris is not annihilated, shall he not be annihilated.” The initiate is to share eternally in the divine life; nay, he does already share it. He becomes Osiris.

[...]

The worship of the Magna Mater had been known and recognised in Attica as early as the fourth century B.C., and at Rome as early as the second Punic war, and was patronised by the aristocracy, though no Roman was allowed to enrol himself among the eunuch priests of the Asiatic goddess. King Attalus at this time presented the senate with the black aerolite, formerly kept at Pessinus and then at Pergamum, which was supposed to be the abode of the Idæan Mother. The grateful Romans, at last rid of Hannibal, erected a temple to her on the Palatine, and ordained an annual holy week in her honour.

The Phrygian religion was wild and violent, as befitted a climate which produces extremes of heat and cold. It included such primitive elements as the worship of stones and trees, and at once horrified and fascinated the West by its wild orgies at the spring festival, which culminated in the self-mutilation of devotees. But it had also an ascetic order of mendicant friars, and ‘mysteries,’ of which little is known.

Till the beginning of the empire, the Phrygian worship was kept under strict control, and attracted little notice except on the festival days when the foreign priests marched in procession through the streets. But Claudius, according to a second-century authority, removed the restrictions on the worship of Cybele and Attis, and Roman citizens began to be chosen as archigalli. Henceforth the Phrygian worship received a measure of official support not extended to other Oriental religions. The festal processions were very imposing, and the death and resurrection of Attis was regarded as a sacrament and pledge of human immortality. The worshippers sang, ‘Take courage, ye initiated, because the god is saved: to you also will come salvation from your troubles.’

-- William Ralph Inge, The philosophy of Plotinus

Strictly, it was not the emperor, but his genius or guardian-angel, who must be propitiated and by no means blasphemed. Every man had a ‘genius,’ every woman a ‘Juno.’ This piece of old Roman folk-lore was now so much mixed up with speculation about disembodied souls and spirits that the fuller consideration of it must be postponed to a later chapter. Apuleius is a valuable source of information on the spiritualistic beliefs which were now becoming almost universal.

Christianity was not unaffected by them, but it did a great service by discountenancing magic and theurgy. The school of Plotinus was less successful in resisting the popular craving: it was at last deeply infected by this kind of superstition, which Plotinus himself disliked but could not wholly repudiate, since nature, for him, was a web of mysterious sympathies and affinities. The ‘genius’ was properly a man's higher self, his spiritual ego. It is therefore significant, as showing how fluid was the conception of personality at this time, that families, cities, trades, had their ‘genius,’ much as the individual soul might be held to be subsumed under a higher unit, and ultimately under the universal Soul.

This vagueness about personality made the notion of a celestial hierarchy easy and acceptable. Maximus of Tyre is fond of regarding the spirits as messengers and interpreters between earth and heaven, and Celsus, the Roman official, compares them to proconsuls or satraps, deputy regents of the supreme ruler. Plotinus himself believed in these intermediate beings, and so did the Christians, for whom the ‘dæmons’ of paganism became demons in our sense.

-- William Ralph Inge, The philosophy of Plotinus

A vigorous nation can survive a long period of revolutions and bad government, conditions to which the ancient world was only too well accustomed. But the two great races of antiquity were no longer vigorous.

The system of city-states is a forcing-house of genius, but terribly wasteful of the best elements in the population. From the fifth century B.C. onwards, war, massacre, and banishment steadily eliminated the most virile members of the Greek cities. Originally a very prolific race, as is proved by the extent of its colonisation, the Hellenic stock dwindled rapidly. The Spartiates became almost extinct. Polybius speaks of Greece generally as an empty country, and by the time of Plutarch large tracts of land were absolutely deserted. The decline was in quality as well as quantity; by the time of Cicero the Greeks had already ceased to be a handsome people. Complete racial exhaustion had practically destroyed the Hellenes before the period which we are considering.

The same blight began to attack Italy in the second century before Christ. The ravages of the Social War and the proscriptions only aggravated a disease which would have run its course without them, and which even peace and good government could not cure. Marcus Aurelius settled large bands of Marcomanni in Italy, a proceeding which would be inconceivable if tracts of good land had not been lying fallow. In the fourth century not only the country but the towns were almost deserted. Bologna, Modena, Piacenza, and many other cities in Northern Italy were largely in ruins. Samnium remained the desert which Sulla had left it; Apulia contained only sheep-walks and a few farm-slaves. Rome itself seems to have shrunk by more than one-half between Augustus and Septimius Severus. This decline, which was not caused by want, but mainly by a deficiency of births, received a sudden acceleration from the great plagues of the second and third centuries. In a healthy society the losses due to pestilence, like those due to war, are quickly made good by a spontaneous rise in the birthrate; but in the Roman empire the loss was probably permanent.

The exceptions to the universal depopulation are found, not in the Romanised provinces of Gaul and Spain, which seem to have dwindled, though less rapidly than Greece and Italy, but in the Semitic East. The Romans themselves spoke with wonder of the fertility of African and Egyptian women; but Egypt was very full under the Ptolemys, and the high birth-rate was probably balanced by a high death-rate. The regions where the numbers increased were, it seems, those inhabited by Jews and other Semites, and those colonised by Germans. The steady influx from these fertile races seemed at times to have stopped the decline, so that Tertullian and Aristides speak in exaggerated language of the great abundance of population. The multiplication of the Jews, in spite of frequent massacres, is one of the problems of history. Germans penetrated everywhere, and were not kept down by massacre; they probably formed a large proportion of the serfs who were beginning to take the place of rural slaves in many parts. The army was chiefly composed of them: the fact that the minimum height for the infantry was fixed, in 367, at 5 feet 7 inches, and 5 feet 10 inches for crack regiments, shows that recruits were no longer expected or desired from the Mediterranean races.

The general result of these changes was that in the third century the traditions and civilisation of Greece and Rome were guarded almost entirely by a population of alien origin. One curious difference was that while the old Romans were almost vegetarians, and temperate wine-drinkers, the new Romans lived by preference on beef, and swilled great quantities of beer.

-- William Ralph Inge, The philosophy of Plotinus

Plotinus is the one great genius in an age singularly barren of greatness.

The third century is a dull and dark period, which has been avoided by historians for its poverty of material and lack of interest. It was a depressing age even to those who lived in it. When the death of Marcus Aurelius on the banks of the Save or Danube closed a long series of good emperors, even those who had ridiculed the imperial saint were saddened; all men had a misgiving that a troublous time was coming. Aurelius himself had been oppressed by the gathering gloom; he exhorts himself to courage and resignation, not to hopefulness. In the generations which followed, pessimism was prevalent. Cyprian, in rebutting the charge that the Christians are the cause why plague, famine, and drought ravage the world, says,

"You must know that the world has grown old, and does not remain in its former vigour. It bears witness to its own decline. The rainfall and the sun's warmth are both diminishing; the metals are nearly exhausted; the husbandman is failing in the fields, the sailor on the seas, the soldier in camp, honesty in the market, justice in the courts, concord in friendships, skill in the arts, discipline in morals. This is the sentence passed upon the world, that everything which had a beginning should perish, that things which have reached maturity should grow old, the strong weak, the great small, and that after weakness and shrinkage should come dissolution."

-- William Ralph Inge, The philosophy of Plotinus

The relationship between the highest and the ordinary state of consciousness was compared by certain schools of alchemy to that between the diamond and an ordinary piece of coal. One cannot imagine a greater contrast, and yet both consist of the same chemical substance, namely, carbon. This teaches symbolically the fundamental unity of all substances and their inherent faculty of transformation.

[...]

He who has found the Philosopher's Stone, the radiant jewel (mani) of the enlightened mind (bodhi-citta) within his own heart, transforms his mortal consciousness into that of immortality, perceives the infinite in the finite and turns Samsara into Nirvana -- this is the teaching of the Diamond Vehicle.

-- Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism

Spiritual things can be 'fixed' as little as living things. Where growth ceases, there nothing but the dead form remains. We can preserve mummified forms as historical curiosities, but not life. If, therefore, in our quest for truth, we do not rely on the factual testimony of history, it is not that we doubt the formal truthfulness, or even the truthfulness of intention on the part of those who preserved and passed on those forms, but we do not believe that forms created milleniums ago, can be taken over indiscriminately without causing serious harm to our mental constitution.

Even the best food, if preserved too long, becomes poison. It is the same with spiritual food. Truths cannot be 'taken over', they have to be rediscovered continually. They have ever to be re-formed and transformed, if they are to preserve their meaning, their living value, or their spiritual nutriment. This is the law of spiritual growth, from which results the necessity to experience the same truths in ever new forms, and to cultivate and propagate not so much the results, but the methods through which we obtain knowledge and experience Reality.

If this process of spiritual growth is repeated and experienced in each individual, it does not only mean that the individual will become the connecting link between the past and the present, but likewise that the past becomes revitalized and rejuvenated in the present experience and transforms itself into the creative germ of the future. In this way history is again reshaped into present life, becomes part of our own being and not merely an object of learning or veneration which, separated from its origins and the organic conditions of its growth, would lose its essential value.

-- Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism

Each new experience, each new situation of life, widens our mental outlook and brings about a subtle transformation within ourselves. Thus our nature changes continually, not only on account of the conditions of life, but -- even if these would remain static -- because by the constant addition of new impressions, the structure of our mind becomes ever more diverse and complex. Whether we call it 'progress' or 'degeneration', we have to admit the fact that it is the law of all life, in which differentiation and coordination balance each other.

Thus each generation has its own problems and must find its own solutions. The problems, as well as the means to solve them, grow out of the conditions of the past and are therefore related to them, but they can never be identical with them. They are neither completely identical nor completely different. They are the result of a continual process of adjustment.

In a similar way we have to look at the development of religious problems. Whether we regard them as 'progress' or 'deterioration' --they are necessities of spiritual life, which cannot be forced into rigid, unchangeable formulae. Great religious and deep-rooted philosophical attitudes are not individual creations, though they may have been given their first impetus by great individuals. They grow from the germs of creative ideas, great experiences and profound visions. They grow through many generations according to their own inherent law, just like a tree or any other living organism. They are what we might call 'natural events of the spirit'. But their growth, their unfoldment and maturity need time. Though the whole tree is potentially contained in the seed, it requires time to transform itself into visible shape.

-- Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism

In 1913 the New York socialite and devotee of New Thought, Mabel Dodge, wrote: ‘Nearly every thinking person these days is in revolt against something, because the craving of the individual is for further consciousness, and because consciousness is expanding and bursting through the molds that have held it up to now.’

-- Mike Jay, Psychonauts

In 1929, the same year that amphetamine was synthesised, Freud reflected in his Civilization and Its Discontents on whether such drugs were remedies for the disease of civilisation or symptoms of it.

‘What decides the purpose of life’, he wrote, ‘is simply the programme of the pleasure principle’; yet the pursuit of pleasure cannot avoid being forced into conflict with reality. In this age-old struggle, ‘the crudest, but also among the most effective among the methods of influence is the chemical one – intoxication’. Drugs give us an edge over our circumstances: ‘not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world’, by offering temporary escape from pain, fatigue or boredom.

Yet they can never actually resolve our conflicts with the external world, and they often end up weakening our ability to manage them. In themselves they are neither disease nor cure; their benefits and dangers are, as James Lee maintained, a function of how we deploy them. They have played an enduring and intimate role in civilisation’s control over the forces of nature: they are part of a formidable toolkit that extends from the mastery of fire to the modern technologies that extend our mental reach through everything from writing to photography to the telephone. In the modern age:

-- Mike Jay, Psychonauts

Stories even more alarming than Halsted’s bubbled up regularly from the medical literature. The German toxicologist Louis Lewin, who by the 1880s had established himself as an international authority on mind-altering plants and drugs, wrote that one of his patients, suffering from facial neuralgia, had been resorting to morphine for pain relief until he was introduced to cocaine. He was soon using over a gram a day, soaked into cotton-wool plugs and inserted between his teeth:

-- Mike Jay, Psychonauts

A far more extensive report, and the one that influenced Freud most powerfully, was that of the Italian neurologist Paolo Mantegazza, who practised as a doctor in Argentina and Paraguay in the 1850s and self-experimented with the local plant stimulants, guarana and coca. Unlike von Bibra, Mantegazza appreciated coca’s stimulant effects immediately and pursued them vigorously. ‘As soon as one chews one or two drachms’, he wrote in his 1859 monograph ‘On the Hygienic and Medical Values of Coca’,

Mantegazza found in coca not a productive stimulant for the sober self, but a radically altered state of consciousness. Unlike caffeine, higher doses brought not overstimulation but ever more pleasurable and remarkable effects. By chewing 8 drachms in a day and a further 10 the same evening, about the most he could physically manage, he attained what he called ‘the delirium of coca intoxication, and I must confess that I found this pleasure by far superior to all other physical sensations previously known to me’.

He recorded his pulse before the evening dose at 83 per minute; half an hour later it had risen to 120. He felt supremely happy, and on closing his eyes was presented with ‘the most splendid and unexpected phantasmagoria’, kaleidoscopic images succeeding each other too fast to record, or even to communicate by announcing them in rapid fire to the colleague beside him. He attempted to transcribe them, missing ten for every one he managed to capture:

Mantegazza embraced coca’s euphoric and visionary properties, which convinced him that ‘all this will be great science in the near future’. The desire and capacity for ecstasy was a constant throughout human history, but he believed that its limits were still unexplored. On his return to Italy he became a medical professor in Pavia, founded the Italian Anthropological Society and began work on a massive survey of inebriation and human nature, which ran to 1,200 pages when it was eventually published in 1871.

But cocaine had yet another quality: as well as an anti-depressant and an energy booster, it was a powerful euphoriant. Freud quoted Mantegazza’s claim that it produced a ‘state of greatly increased happiness’: during the peak of his coca intoxication he had scribbled, ‘God is unjust because he made man incapable of sustaining the effects of coca all life long. I would rather have a lifespan of ten years with coca than one of 1000000000 centuries without!’

-- Mike Jay, Psychonauts

These high-dose effects [of Caffeine] were described by the author and prodigious coffee drinker Honoré de Balzac, who drank dozens of cups a day while writing his novels and, in his 1839 Treatise on Modern Stimulants, admitted that ‘I consume it in such quantities that I have been able to observe its effects on an epic scale’.

Balzac’s coffee consumption mounted to the point where ‘finally, I discovered a terrible and cruel method, which I would recommend only to men of excessive strength’: swallowing handfuls of ground coffee beans without water on an empty stomach until:

-- Mike Jay, Psychonauts

Across Europe and the United States, the 1880s was a decade of velocity and acceleration. The first electric tram appeared on the streets of Berlin in 1879, and in the United States in Cleveland, Ohio in 1884. Cities were criss-crossed by cyclists, the countryside by trains, the seas by ocean liners. The telegraph system was spreading its filaments across the globe, making the price of goods in every port known instantaneously. Pocket watches were sold by the millions as working people needed to synchronise their plans, coordinate with travel timetables and manage their schedules in precise increments.

This was a new way of living, and there were many who believed it was placing a stress on the brain and nervous system for which humanity was unprepared and ill-adapted. New diagnostic terms such as ‘railway spine’ and ‘bicycle face’ were coined for particular syndromes attributed to movement at speed, while the pervasive stresses of modern life were captured in the diagnosis of ‘neurasthenia’, a term popularised in 1869 by the American neurologist and physician George Miller Beard.

-- Mike Jay, Psychonauts

Before the nineteenth century, medical case histories had typically been recorded as concise notes of diagnosis and family background; now they were increasingly recast as discursive narratives of the inner life, adopting stream-of-consciousness styles or multiple viewpoints.

Many writers and other artists, in turn, avidly followed the scientific discoveries of the day and were among the first experimenters with novel drugs. Authors of what Émile Zola termed the ‘experimental novel’ turned a scientific gaze on the workings of society, and artists drew on drug experiences, along with the latest findings in perceptual psychology, to explode the conventional rules of painting, colour, shape and movement.

At the time, there was no specific term for those who used drugs to explore the mind. It was only in 1949 that one was coined, by the German writer Ernst Jünger in his novel Heliopolis, about an oppressive futuristic city where a rebellious scientist finds freedom through his drug-induced inner journeys. Jünger invented the term ‘psychonaut’ to describe a character who ‘captured dreams, just as others seem to pursue butterflies with nets’ and ‘went on voyages of discovery in the universe of his brain’.

Jünger was a spiritual mentor to Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, who helped to popularise the term, and it came into currency through the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s; but it serves as a useful collective term for a previous generation whose inner journeys had been largely forgotten by the time it was coined. These days it suggests a renegade working outside the boundaries of institutional science; the early psychonauts also included plenty of renegades, autodidacts, bohemians and mystics, but they experimented alongside leading scientists, university professors, doctors, surgeons, business leaders, philosophers and pillars of the literary establishment.

-- Mike Jay, Psychonauts

Hesse found himself very much at odds with the new German reality in the years following the first World War. Believing the decline of the West was ‘fated, irreversible, and complete’, Hesse saw an emerging age of catastrophes and nihilism. Soon, he felt, ‘all Western Europe would succumb to wars, revolutions, and moral insanity’ (p. 63).

Proclaiming himself an enemy of the modern world, he became one of the fiercest anti-modernists of the decade. Whatever belonged to modernity, whether it was the automobile, modern architecture, mass-production, or the prosperity of the 1920’s, received short shrift in his writings. Europe, he said, was on the threshold of a dehumanized “machine-culture” that could benefit only the masses who were too stupid to see how cheap and ugly modern life really was. Both present and future could, on this view, offer mankind nothing but a collectivized existence devoid of spirit. And the prospect filled Hesse with such rage that at times he wished to see modern Europe annihilated by machines run amuck or in a second world war.

-- Peter Roberts, From West to East and Back Again: An Educational Reading of Hermann Hesse’s Later Work

What happens if we really stop imagining Roman Egypt as a primitive “heart of darkness” full of murky magic, superstition, and irrational delusions? We then see one of the greatest cultures of the ancient world struggling to survive under foreign domination. Its religious institutions had been the fabric of society for thousands of years, but now the temples are in decay and have lost most of their traditional power and prestige. They have been reduced essentially to private enterprises, and its priests are forced to compete on a pluralistic religious market imposed by external forces that are hostile or simply indifferent to their sacred traditions.

In the terms of a famous analytical model, the result during the Roman period was a growing tension between “locative” and “non-locative” (“utopian”) modes of religious practice. The former were inherently conservative, as they represented ancient cultic traditions tied to specific places: the temples and sanctuaries where the gods were at home. But in the cosmopolitan culture of the Hellenistic world, characterized by unprecedented degrees of mobility and inter-cultural exchange, this locative character of traditional religion began to give way to a type of religion that could be practiced “here, there, and anywhere”:

If I have called some special attention to the role of psychoactive substances in this context, it is because the relative neglect of that dimension needs to be corrected while the underlying mechanisms of discursive marginalization must be properly understood. The implication is not that psychoactives are in any way central to the spiritual culture under discussion or to the Hermetica more specifically. Rather, they should be seen as part of a much broader, far more diverse and complex repertoire of techniques and procedures that were available to spiritual practitioners in late antiquity.

-- Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity

To properly understand the theurgic process from such a perspective, it remains important to emphasize the crucial importance of mental expectations and ritual context, for these are largely responsible for what is actually seen and heard in any drug-fueled experience.

Since our female practitioner in the “Mithras Liturgy” has been told that she is about to see the gods, she is prepared for awe-inspiring experiences of fire and light. She must have expected to be overwhelmed and deeply impressed, and we know that the exact content of her experience will have been determined by how the subjective contents of her own mind (including her belief in the gods, the stories she knows about them, fears about their awesome power, and so on) interact with the objective impact of a specific psychoactive compound.

Furthermore, she is being guided through the experience by a ritual leader who gives her precise instructions about what to do and say at any moment. If we reread the text with this information in mind, we discover that in fact he does not begin by asking his daughter to inhale the pneuma. Rather, what happens is that he recites the long opening invocation while simultaneously “anointing her face with the mystery” – that is to say, with the hallucinogenic ointment. While it is beginning to take effect, she is instructed to do the inhalations, three times in succession, “drawing in as much as you can.” The drugs must be responsible for the ensuing sensation of ascending upwards and floating weightlessly in midair.

Having been enveloped by deep silence (another possible drug effect), initially the practitioner feels threatened by the awesome presence of the divine powers, which are glowering at her and seem ready to attack her. To keep them at bay, she must put her right finger on her mouth and say “Silence! Silence! Silence! Symbol of the living imperishable god. Guard me, Silence! Nechtheir thanmelou!” Then she has to hiss at them and make a popping sound, followed by a longer formula of incomprehensible words, all of which will have the effect of restoring them to peace.

Likewise, when disturbed by a sound of crashing thunder, she has to repeat these same words, reassuring the gods that she is no alien intruder but an immortal being like themselves: “I am a star, wandering about with you.”

[...]

Interestingly, a reverse logic seems to govern the virtual taboo on discussing psychoactive agents in such texts as the “Mithras Liturgy.” While most classicists keep speaking of “magic” in spite of its pejorative connotations, they avoid mentioning “drugs” probably because it carries such connotations! This fact can be explained from the history of the field.

From the 1980s, a new generation of excellent scholars began challenging the old patterns of prejudice against theurgy and finally succeeded in restoring it to academic agendas. But while it is one thing to convince your colleagues that theurgy is governed by “a rationality of its own,” having to tell them that it involved drugs is something else entirely – the latter suggestion might easily lead them to conclude that those old prejudices were perhaps not so wrong after all, and those alternative rationalities might not be so rational. The effect that such information can have on nonspecialists is even harder to control, and very few scholars have been willing to take the risk – especially in the field of ancient religions, where several established academics have seen their reputations ruined by mediatized sensationalism about “religion and drugs.”

No won-der then that most scholars would like to avoid those “herbs” and their troublesome effects. Nevertheless, the references are there in our sources, and much more abundantly than is often thought. The information is obviously important for understanding how these rituals may have worked and why practitioners could be so impressed by their efficacy. If our own hinterland of cultural biases makes it hard for us to consider this dimension seriously, then the burden is on us to do something about it.

-- Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity