Moses on Drugs

[porphyry]

A few days ago the internet suffered a flurry of stories reporting that a researcher had discovered that Moses and the mass of Israelites had experienced the Mt. Sinai Theophany (as well as the earlier burning bush episode) under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. There is also a PDF of the original article posted on the web. Tedious really. I wouldn’t mention it except Mme. Malkhos suggested some of our readers might find my comments about it humorous.

 

 

Some wag on the Classics list suggested that, while the author claimed that his insight was informed by taking over 160 does of hallucinogenic drugs today used by indigenous peoples in the Amazon and elsewhere, this might have had a more profound and determinative influence than he realized.

 

A more serious problem is that while figures like David and Solomon are about as well attested as King Arthur, there is really no evidence worth mentioning that Moses was even a real person, any more than there is for Perseus or Odysseus, so this kind of argument is just pointless.

 

On the Ancient Near East list, response was more muted, except one lurker chimed in enthusiastically with this offering:

 

Exodus 30:22-25 "Moreover the Lord spoke to Moses, saying 'Take thou

alo unto thee the chief spices, of flowing myrhh five hundred

shekels, and of sweet cinnamon half so much, even two hundred and

fifty, and of sweet calamus two hundred and fifty, and of cassia five

hundred, after the shekel of the sanctuary, and of olive oil a kin.

And thou shall make it a holy annointing oil, an essence compounded

after the art of the perfumer; it shall be a holy annointing oil.' "

 

The essential oil of calamus contains the psychoactive substances

asarone and B-asarone. These are the non-amine precursurs to TMA-2, a

phenethylamine having 10 times the potency of mescaline. The

psychactive aspects of aserone in small quantities create the effect

of a stimulant. Cinnamon is an irritant, and would have opened the

pores of the skin, allowing the drugs contained in the plant matter

to be more readily absorbed into the bloodstream. Cassia is often

used in modern times as a cheap substitute for cinnamon, or to

adulterate cinnamon. It has the same irratant properties.

 

Modern medicine uses the transdermal method to administer several

drugs, including medications for heart patients, nictotine patches

for ppl trying to quit smoking, and some forms of birth control. So

why wouldn't speading an oil containing pstchacive components on the

skin have some effect on a person? Especially if some of the plant

material used made it easier for the chemicals to be absorbed?

 

 

 

For all that he professes a profound knowledge of neuro-physiology, I could see many problems with this idea and asked him a few questions about some of them:

 

 

1. Why not make up a batch of that formula and find out?

 

2. Assuming that the proposed thesis is correct, when and why did the practice of inducing an altered state of consciousness through the ingestion drugs cease to be part of Jewish practice.

 

3. Why is there little or no mention of drug use in Jewish religious and mystical writings (surely it would be rather unfounded to assume that every time some sort of religious experience is had it is evidence of drug use; wouldn't that be circular reasoning?), no exaltation of calamus in the way that Haoma/Soma is alluded in Indo-Iranian texts?

 

4. Why is it necessary to assume the use of drugs to induce ecstatic experience, when it is quite possible to have such experiences without the use of drugs, and any substantial evidence of such drug use is lacking?

 

5. How are we to reconcile this supposed use of drug-induced ecstasy in the oldest strata of Judaism with Allegro's thesis that Jesus attempted to introduce drug-induced ecstatic experience into Judaism for the first time?

 

 

 

I thought the last one was the best (in case anyone doesn’t know of Allegro, after he was throw out of the temple mount for starting to dig on the temple mount—looking for the treasure from the Copper Scroll—without asking anyone’s permission, he wrote a tedious book explaining that Jesus instituted the mass with hallucinogenic mushrooms and that is how it was done down to the Reformation—shades of Margaret Murray! And of course no one like Celsus or Porphyry or Pliny would have taken Christians to task for this!).

 

 

 

But my interlocutor’s response was unexpectedly funny:

 

 

Calamus is still used commercially as a fixative in potpourri, but as a

dried material. It's sold as chunks of the dried root, and its scent-

retaining qualities improve over time. The psycoactive oils become null

after a period of two years, so it's unlikely that you'd be able to get

that effect now, using materials that are available.

 

I'm sorry, but I can't offer even guesses to answer the rest of your

thought-provoking questions.

 

Evidently its meant to be a scientific hypothesis that can’t be tested. And all my irony wasted.

 

If anyone is still bothering to read, this kind of insane idea offends me, and for this reason. The author assumes that a myth is literally true in every detail, except that no god or gods had anything to do with it, and now we can use science to say what really happened. The myth is true, except for the part that has any meaning. The Star of Bethlehem? Yes, that was a real astronomical conjunction, that led the Babylonian astrologers straight to the infant Jesus, but it was a natural phenomenon, nothing to do with a miracle—yet it led them strait to the founder of a world religion. How strange. Nothing to do either, seemingly, with the members of Matthew’s congregation asking him over and over about Jesus’ birth and his having to write something for them although he knew nothing about it, and so composing an answer made out of reference to and inversion of the Hebrew Bible. Moses and the Israelites saw and heard god? Well, of course, modern science tells us it was because they where whacked out of their minds on drugs, so its true (even thought there was no Moses), but it doesn’t mean anything.

It is a strange impulse to deny something and simultaneously hold it to be true. I don't think it comes from Bultmann and Entmythologierserung and rather from a lack of knwoldge of what myth is, and a narrowing of persepctive that encmpases only true and false.