I recently received an e-mail from a friend of mine about an aspect of his
experiences with psilocybe cubensis which I thought you elves may find of
interest. Here it is:
(snip)
Dear ZZ
How are the two of you? I'm
well and happy and thought I would share some thoughts with you concerning
mushrooms.
One thing that I consistently experience while on relatively high
doses of cubensis (5-10gms of dried) is encounters with what I can only call
Tribal Spirits. To me, this is really what these mushrooms are all about, and
yet I am hard-pressed to find much mention of this experience in the literature
generated around the subject.
Let me enlarge on this. My first tribal spirit
encounter experience was interestingly in relation to the Jews and what a
beautiful experience it was. It started in a somewhat novel way. I was about two
hours into the trip and was staring at a large wooden carving that I have of a
woman's torso. Now while I was looking at it, it suddenly called to mind a
wonderful bronze statue of David (as in David and Goliath) produced during the
Renaissance by, I think, Donatello. With this association in mind, the carving
suddenly seemed to become a doorway into what I can only call the Kingdom of
Judah.
Suddenly I was immersed in an ancient Judaic world characterised by a feeling of
being part of a noble, tribe living in the desert, with a strong sense of
kinship with all those around me. It was as if the land and figures of the Old
Testament had suddenly burst into life and I was a living part of it all. Now
what is interesting is that despite my explorations of a great deal of
religions, Judaism has probably appealed to me the least - far too law-bound for
my anarchic tastes. And yet here I was being bathed in the most wonderfully
noble spirit imaginable. What was especially interesting was my feeling that as
a member of this tribe of Judah I was very dark-skinned, in fact pretty well
black. Now I've read in a few places that the original Jews were probably very
dark-skinned and this was an amazing confirmation of this.
The thought
occurred to me that maybe inside my WASP body I had a few old Jewish genes
hanging around, and that the archetypes hardwired into these genes had kicked in
during the trip. However, I dispelled this notion on a later trip when I
suddenly found myself immersed in the spirit of Japan while practising some Tai
Chi while on the trip. Again - utterly wonderful. It's impossible to convey the
feeling, but I became one with the essential folk spirit that I'm sure lives
within every Japanese person. Suddenly I realised just how important a sense of
identity with a racial/tribal group really is. Without this identification one
is nothing - and yet all the politically correct thinking of today is that one
should move away from tribalism towards a universal community. Bullshit I say.
Tapping in to one's tribal spirit is I reckon what salvation (weird word that)
is all about. The hallmarks of the experience were tied up with the importance
of the family, the father, and the importance of the relationship betwen the
father and the son. There was also a strong sort of warrior feeling to it all as
well as a sense of sacredness of the Japanese soil.
OK, so I don't have any
Japanese genes in me, so the explanation for why I had these experiences
obviously lay elsewhere. And then WHAM I realised some months what the trigger
had been. In the case of the Tribe of Judah experience, I suddenly realised that
I had take the mushrooms over the celebratory period of Rosh Hashanah (the
Jewish New year). Whether I realised this subliminally at the time I really
can't say. And in the case of the Japanese experience, I discovered that I took
the trip on the night of one of their major religious festivals. So I'm
developing this theory that maybe when a people with a strong tribal spirit
celebrate their religion, it sends out vibrations into the ether which get
picked up on my bemushroomed people! Weird huh!
Well, I subsequently had two
further tribal spirit experiences which were as revelatory as the first two. In
the one, I found myself transported into an ancient north European,
pine-forested realm, and experienced myself as a sort of wolf-man. Don't laugh.
Yes it was sort of werewolfish but in the nicest way possible. At the same time
as I developed this wolf identification, I started becoming aware of a group of
similar wolf-men around me. We were sitting around a fire and there was this
voice, this Ursprach, speaking through my head in some ancient Germanic
tongue. Fucked if I could work out what it was saying, but it seemed that the
language spoken was what bound us all together into a single organism. Again
there was a strong warrior flavour. I subsequently stumbled on a book by Mircea
Eliade called `Zalmoxis - the vanishing god' in which he described the ancient
German `mannerbunde' (secret societies of warriors) whose central totem was the
wolf. They apparently took some hallucinogen - conjectured to be amanita - and
underwent a psychological transformation into wolves. This enabled them to fight
with what was called `furor mystica' in which they became utterly fearless and
fought like wild animals. Wowee!
Then, as if wrapping up things into a nice
quarternity of Tribal Spirits, I had one in which I became one with the Zulu
people. It started off with the feeling that my body had been transformed into
what I can only call the Black Goddess, and She was synonomous with the entire
continent of Africa. I had - this sounds bizarre but seemed thoroughly
acceptable at the time - become one with the African continent and it was very
female and amazingly sexy as well. Then I started hearing this chanting of
African language going through my head, and again I was struck by by how central
language was to the tribal spirit. Again, there was an emphasis on community,
family and the warrior/hunter spirit.
I'm not a particular fan of the German
writer/philosopher Rudolf Steiner, but I did come across something that he
believed that really resonated with all the above. I'll reproduce it here:
'In earlier times....the social life of human communities was
almost entirely the expression of Folk Spirits (Archangels). Their own soul,
character or super-personality became (as it still does today in some
communities) the culture or national character of the human community under its
guidance....in some indigenous communities or tribes, the ego presence is so
faint that the tribal Folk Spirits are even brough into partial incarnation.
This can be seen in some initiatory dances, where after long and exhausting
preparations inducing a state of trance, the dancers begin to MOVE AS ONE BEING
(my capitals). For those privileged to witness such events, they describe that
at the moment of incarnation - ie that moment when the individual dancers become
`one being' - a presence of immense power is felt. What is witnessed is more
than the sum total of the dancers, it is the tribal spirit itself with each
dancer becoming a limb of that being.'
The writer then goes on to
say - and this I found especially interesting in the light of my Judaic
experience: `The history of the Jews and their trials spanning nearly four
thousand years against al most continual opposition can serve as a picture of
the strength of a folk spirit in inspiring and nurturing its people.'
Well
ZZ, I hope you didn't find all the above too tedious to wade through. All I can
say is that for me, trying to tap permanently into the tribal spirit - or maybe
bringing a new one to birth - is about the only game in life worth playing.
Love
