Haunted Cosmos - Psychedelics, Serpent Gods, & Machine Elves

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Brian and Ben conclude (sad) Season Two by telling stories about and talking through the issue of psychedelic drug use. We actually believe this is a very important topic with deep roots of deception ingrained within. But why is this the right platform for it? Well, you might be shocked to find out the answer.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!This episode is also sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee. Visit their website here to purchase your first bag!  Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully. This episode is also sponsored by Private Family Banking Partners. Email them at:  banking(at)privatefamilybanking.com . For a free copy of a new book "Protect Your Money Now!  How to Build Multi-Generational Wealth Outside of Wall Street and Avoid the Coming Banking Meltdown" by Private Family Banking Partner, Chuck DeLadurantey,   go to www.protectyourmoneynow.net . Or, if you want to make an appointment to talk to a wealth advisor, click on the calendar link here: https://calendly.com/familybankingnow/30min.Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Right Response Ministries, private family banking, and Squirrely Joe's Coffee. Did you know that patrons of Haunted Cosmos get access to a weekly patron-only bonus show called The Dusty Tome? And the top two tiers of patrons get early access to add free shows. Join today on patreon.com for these benefits and more. And now on with the show. In time forgotten, the Greek god Apollo trod upon the clouds of Asia Minor,

keeping watch over the world below him. In his inspection, he gazed upon the beautiful princess, Coronus, of Thessaly. The god went down to the princess and took her to be his wife. Soon Caronus was with child, Apollo greatly pleased at the promise of new offspring. But Coronus was not at peace playing wife to one of the gods, and she wasn't afraid to express her discontentment either. It wasn't long before Apollo discovered her in the act of adultery with a mortal man named Iscus.

The god of light, poetry, and prophecy was wroth with Kouronis for her infidelity and bid his friend, the goddess Artemis, to kill her in an attempt to ease his rage. Artemis was more loyal to Apollo than Kouronis had been and so vowed to carry out the judgment swiftly. She took the mortal princess and strapped her, still very much pregnant, to a great funeral pyre. Without hesitation, Artemis lit the pyre with divine fire and the princess quickly began to be consumed by the flame.

But just before her whole body was swallowed by the blaze, the god Hermes took pity on the child in her womb and flew down with his winged boots to cut the baby away from her that he might live. The scribe of the gods then flew the baby to the feet of Apollos, who rejected the child and did not wish to claim him. So Hermes moved on, taking the boy away to the chief centaur, Chiron, who was wise in man. many things. It is said that the boy began learning under the centaur's tutelage immediately upon his weaning. Specifically, the chimera taught the lad named Asclepius in the ways of medicine, or if we can use the proper term, pharmacia. The practice of medicine, administration of drugs, and sorcery. As he excelled in his studies, he grew more familiar with the herbs that surrounded

Chiron's realm, and so found himself in their midst often. Being among so many plants, some very exotic, meant, of course, that he also spent much time around the animals of the forest. One day, as Asclepius searched for some herb to use in a ceremony of magic and healing, he stumbled upon a serpent in distress. What this distress was caused by is lost to legend, but we do know that Asclepius took pity on the creature and rescued it from its plight. As a reward for his aid, the serpent began licking the boy's ears and at the same time whispering deep secrets to him, secrets about healing, wisdom, and even resurrection. In addition to the secret knowledge now entrusted to him,

the serpents adopted him as one among their own ranks and so gifted him with a powerful rod that he might carry with him everywhere. The serpent promised him that he or another one of his kind would always be on the rod, accompanying Asclepius for all of his life, acting as a catalyst of power and counsel in his magical and medicinal pursuits. It's said that as Asclepius grew, His powers of healing and resurrection grew alongside of him,

and before long, he was frequently called upon by kings and noblemen from all around Asia Minor to bring a loved one back from the dead. Sclepius obliged. As the gods aged in their direct interactions in the affairs of men diminished, the people of Greece began to build temples to their god Asclepius, their god of Pharmakia and resurrection to new life. Within these sanctuaries of divine healing, supplicants would spend a night in the holiest section

of the temple, where they would be endowed with the aid of Pharmakia with strange visions of other worlds. Upon daybreak the next morning, the priest would interpret these visions for the supplicant and send them on their way. Under the influence of magical herbs administered in a holy place, ancient people in Greece would commune with their serpent God to receive healing and resurrection power. This practice was not limited to Greece, and in many cases, the methods of worship were even more disturbed. In the Mexican state of the Yucatan, one can go to see a particularly awe-inspiring UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's a pyramid, very similar to a Middle Eastern Ziggurat, by the way, which stands with white and blue limestone 100 feet out of the flatland around it. At its peak,

there is a temple to the Mayan god Kukulkan, the serpent god of visions and the unseen realm. If you explore the perimeter of the base of this incredible piece of craftsmanship, you'll find massive limestone carvings of Kekulkin's serpent head sitting at the base of the staircases, staring away from the temple and into the surrounding wilderness, while his tail leads up to the temple's summit. Here, long ago, the Mayan people would engage in ritual acts of bloodletting while ingesting hallucinogenic drugs like magic mushrooms as they sought an audience with their serpent vision God. If the stories are to be believed,

and let's be honest, they're not difficult to believe. The people frequently got the audience they so desperately saw it. As the drums pounded around him, as his pulse slowed while blood trickled from cuts all over his body, as the psychedelic effects began to take hold of him,

a whole other world unfolded around the ancient Mayan worshipper. Suddenly, a serpent rose from the smoke of the fire also soaked in his blood and gazed deeply into his mind before his mouth opened and a message was given to the man from the gods whenever this happened and it happened often the message would vary in scale but never in importance the worshipper was receiving a word from the gods an infallible authoritative and binding word they had no choice but to do what was commanded of them and just what was commanded of them In any season of drought or pestilence or blight, the people would engage in this worshipful act to Farmachaia in the hopes of seeking the counsel of the serpent God, and the hopes that Kekulkin

would tell them what needed to be done in order to bring respite to their troubles. What did need to be done? What did the serpent whisper in the ears of the expectant worshippers? Just look to the historical records of these peoples, which overflows with the macabre answer. Read the stories of the men who would engage in ritual human sacrifice to their pantheon in the form of ceremonial decapitation and heart removal, drowning of children, tossing of people off cliffs into the sea, binding people into unnaturally tight balls of decaying flesh that might be hung from strong tree limbs as ornaments,

ritualistic consumption of human flesh, wearing the skin of a flayed victim in order to perform a rain dance, and drowning others in sinkholes to satiate the hunger of the underworld. All of this was done in response to the so-called sage advice given by whatever God spoke through the mouth of the feathered serpent. As the Aztecs sought out the favor of their high god, Coetsuadl, they ingested large quantities of mushrooms and mescaline in order to commune with a feathered serpent god of civilization in order.

From him they learned great medicinal and astronomical insights, and from him they received commands to slaughter tens of thousands of people and ceremonial worship so that his greed for life would be sated. But the serpent god did not reserve all of the sacrificial spoils for himself. With the skulls of the deceased, the Aztecs built enormous battlement towers on either side of their temples, as documented by the Spanish conquistador Andres de Tapia. He went on to state that all around the temple grounds were poles with dozens of skulls impaled upon them. All of these skulls were the leftovers of their human sacrifice that was prompted

by the serpent god they met while tripping on mescaline. The Incas worshipped a goddess named Pachamama, a goddess of fertility and harvesting, who often took the form of a great serpent rising up out of the earth. As you might now predict, they would commune with this being while under the influence of the hallucinogenic ayahuasca. She taught them about the constellations, how to win wars and conquer more lands, the intricacies of constructing ornate temples whose detail and durability and precision still shock architects today. All the while they practiced infanticide and ceremonially sacrificed thousands of children's to Pachamama and other gods. In North America, indigenous peoples built the great monks mound in modern-day Illinois. At this mound, the Mississippian tribesfolk would

engage in long hallucinogenic trips using mescal and mushrooms and other substances while ritually murdering dozens of young virgins at a time. All of this took place right under the nose of the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, just miles away, a place well known for its religious connections to demonic worship and human sacrifice at the behest of serpentine deities. In India, we have the historic worship of the five Nagas, great serpent gods that came from the Middle East into the mystic regions of the Hamalia in order to share their lath spell of despair. The fruits of their catechism includes the practice of Sati, the ritual burning of a widow upon the funeral pire of her husband, and the conviction documented in ancient Vita texts that human sacrifice is the highest

and most pure form of sacrifice to use in appeasing the gods and beseeching their blessing. But what about the geographical stage in which the Bible was written? Of course our listeners are well acquainted with the mysterious and very dark history surrounding the wheel of giants in the goul and heights of the Levant region and the serpent effigy that sits just to the north of it. But what about the explicit human sacrifice and use of hallucinogens? These variables, at least on the surface, seem harder to connect to one another in this region. But if we dig deeper, we find the same unfortunate sins abound. In the lower regions of Egypt, far from the Alexandrian lighthouse,

and all the enlightenment that ancient wonder brought to the world. Ritual human sacrifice became a norm of religious practice around 2,500 BC. Coincidentally, or perhaps not at all coincidentally, the people of the same region began worshipping a new goddess at the time, Wajet. Her name means the green one, which refers to her symbol of, you guessed it, fertility and protection of women in childbirth. But the name could also be a reference to her appearance,

that of a green cobra equipped with wings. Not only was Wajet a regular and regional fertility goddess, this winged serpent goddess was also seen as the eye of Ra embodied, the protector of all Egypt and the strong arm of every pharaoh. At the peak time period of her worship, which was, again, at the peak time of Egypt's practice of widespread human sacrifice, researchers are also quite confident that hallucinogenic drugs were consistently used, in the daily ceremonial lives of Egyptian priests.

The connection is so clear that it's not really a matter of if these three factors were intimately connected with one another. It's more a question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Was it the revealing of Wajet to the people that led to the use of drugs and practice of sacrifice? Or was it the use of visionary drugs that led to their first meeting with Wajette, whose courtship eventually led the people to slaughter one another in search of her blessing? We may never know. Further north, in the region of Canaan, the fertility goddess Ashara was worshipped alongside the

enigmatic Moloch, the two a constant snare about the heel of Israel for their entire Old Testament history. As the people consumed what many scholars believe were hallucinogenic drugs, ritual sex acts would be performed as children were given into the fiery bosom of the bronze Moloch statue and burned to death. look in the ancient world, you see the vile triumvirate of psychedelic drugs, human sacrifice, and serpentine worship. And you may be wondering, does the Bible say anything about all of this? Of course, we know it reveals the Lord's hatred of human sacrifice at length. We also know how clear

the theme of the evil serpent is from beginning to end in the scriptures, from the garden serpent of Genesis to the dragon of Revelation. But what about the drugs? Are they mentioned at all in the pages of scripture? Well, think back to what we've talked through so far. Remember the Greek god Asclepius? Remember his power of Pharmacia and its ancient connection to sorcery and witchcraft? Well, you might be interested to know that when the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, the Septuagint that the apostles constantly referenced in their writings and epistles, when that version comes across a passage such as those found in Leviticus,

which says things like, you shall not suffer a witch to live, It uses the Greek word pharmacaya to account for the word witch. At every turn in the Old Testament, those translators of the Septuagint used the Greek word for botany, drug production, herbology, and hallucinogenic medicine to represent sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy, and other horrible practices of Canaanite worship. It would seem that to the faithful Jews of that time, all of the pagan Canaanite worship, they were to so aggressively repudiate, included the use of psychedelic drugs, Pharmacia. But what about the modern day?

Is this something that ended long ago, back in what you might colloquially think of as Bible times? Or is it something we still have to make eye contact with today? A man sat inside of a drum circle sometime in the early 2010s in the Amazon jungle. That man, in American, was elated to be on what was now his second trip to this region. A trip with the same purpose as his first, actually, to engage in a psychedelic spiritual pilgrimage with the help of the hallucinogenic drug, ayahuasca. As he drank the mixture of bulbs and water, a wicked brew of hellish tea, the world's curtain rolled back to reveal vibrant colors of an extra-dimensional paradise.

Blues and greens exploded into his face. He could smell, even taste the fish colors that poured past him. Eyes open, eyes closed, it didn't matter. He saw it all. This was no illusion. No trick of the mind in response to some neurological sleight of hand. No, this was real. This was a vision.

As the technicolor beams illuminated a passing swirl of geometric complexities and Enochian glyphs, he finally saw it. He finally saw what he came for. A great snake slid just within his periphery, over blue and sharp blades of glass-like crows. crystal. He had hoped to meet this entity again, an entity both he and others agreed to be a benevolent spirit. As the drums continued their frenetic rhythm, the serpent crept closer and closer, sizing up its visitor, who seemed to bask in the energy and power of this higher ethereal plane.

The man could feel the energy field of the entity as it approached, a crackling power mixed with a tinge of fear shooting down his spine. It was as if something inside of him, some primordial instinct still resisted his desire to be given over to this creature. The two desires warred within him as he choked back a rising paranoia. But he shoved it down, silencing this latent apprehension, and allowed the serpent's energy into his own essence. Every ounce of timidity vanished. The serpent circled him faster and faster as if a whirlwind would form around him.

But a whirlwind of purple trees and birds that spoke in the tongues, of man and angel alike. It coiled around him gently as if cradling a child in its undulating body of thick muscle. The snake's own face descended from above him until his own eyes were staring still and peacefully into the bright golden fire eyes of the being.

A part of him still maintained that he ought to be petrified. He couldn't bring himself to resist or flee. In fact, he felt serene. He noticed shadowy figures of bugs and spiders flying off of his body or out of it in evaporating into the otherworldly aether that surrounded him. Suddenly, he heard a voice from our world, one of his guides.

How are your visions? I have a snake inside of me, the man replied. Good, the guide reassured him. It is the spirit of ayahuasca. The snake sensed the dirty creatures fleeing from the man at its presence and impulsively tightened its grip about his body, sending a great wave of shadow insects flying out of him in one final wave. Green vomit flew out of the man's mouth just before the snake's coil relaxed its grip once more.

A wave of euphoric relief overwhelmed the man now. He gazed still into those eyes of fire. Eyes that met his as if they had always known them. As if that serpentine gaze had met the eyes of all the men who had ever been. Eyes which alone in the universe remain unconquered. Eyes that never sleep and will never die. Eventually, the snake left the man. who reported feeling a state of complete rejuvenation,

along with an eagerness to meet the being once again as soon as he could. Now, this is no isolated experience for those who consume ayahuasca. Upon their return to the world, they insist that what they saw was somehow not fake, but also not real in the way that men usually think of the real. It was, they say, realer than real. Many an atheist walks away from a trip on mushrooms, mesclin, acid, ayahuasca, DMT, or other psychedelics, having forsaken their atheism altogether.

They claim to have gone to a plane higher than our own, better than our own. Again, more real than our own. Sounds familiar, right? This could be a story found carved in stone on an ancient tablet. What about the other elements? Sure, we have hallucinogenic drugs. We have serpent gods. But what about human sacrifice?

Have the serpent gods of this other plane of being been tamed? Have they ceased to hunger for the blood of the innocence? Unfortunately, the answer is a clear and resounding no. Human sacrifice remains a non-negotiable element of the unholy trinity of drugs, serpent gods, and death. One day a woman named Margaret Sanger visited a British fellow by the name of Havelock Ellis. They were both proponents of the fringe but growing, movement of eugenics, a movement whose stated goal was to chemically sterilize those of lesser genetic

value in order to improve the human race. They were, in another word, villains. Sanger walked away from that encounter with Havelock, profoundly affected. She knew exactly what she needed to do. But did she know that Havelock had been greatly influenced by his semi-regular trips into the other plane, by use of the hallucinogenic mescaline? At any rate, The messages he got from the entities he encountered on these trips powerfully shape his own views of the world. These views, in turn, influenced Sanger. She, for her part, and partly based on these meetings with Havlock, would go on to create the most widespread and systematic institution of human sacrifice

to the demon gods that the world has ever seen. See, Margaret Sanger, known white supremacist and eugenicist, was also the founder of Planned Parenthood. The serpent gods are still hungry for the world. the flesh of infants, it seems. Well, welcome everyone to another episode of some of your favorite podcast, maybe. Haunted Cosmos. Hit show. Hit show, smash like smash. No, I'm not going to do that. Okay, welcome to the show. Very glad that you're all here. That was a great cold open. Man, we are smooth. We are smooth. We're like butter on a muffin. They call me grace, actually. That's my middle name.

Do they really? Yeah, yeah. Believe it or not. We're like butter. I have. I actually feel like butter scraped over too much bread. Harry Paul. Brian, how are you doing today? Man, I am just so excited because not only do we get to record an entire episode about the unholy triumvirate of hallucinogenic drugs, serpentine gods, and human sacrifice. But I get to do it with you. Dude, I need to do that.

I know. What the heck? I know. It's been a long week. You, by the way, look very handsome. Dude, you're looking so good. Someone commented on our ghost video and they were like, uh, I know, I'm not. Got a little bit annoyed at you two fawning over each other.

What? Look, I mean, I get it, you know, but it's going to happen. You just got to accept that. Guys, get out of here. I'm actually feeling a little bittersweet today. Yeah, me too. Because this is the last episode of season two. Season two that we're recording right now.

I can't believe it's already here. I can't believe that either. Time flies when you're having fun. Man, am I right or am I right? You are. But you know what it means? It means that two things. It means that we're deep into

preparing for recording of season three. That's right. Which is going to have some of the best topics, guys. I'm so excited. You guys might not know this, but the other thing it means is that very soon you and I get to go to Chili's for lunch. And plan out the entire season. That's what we do. We go to Chili's.

We get some margaritas. We get hopped up on seed oils. That's right. We go on vision quests with their chips and salsa. It's just canola. And then we plan out the topics for the next season. So season four planning, believe it or not, I know we're like, Season 2 here is going to start.

So, hey, tell us in the comments. What do you think we should do? No, better yet. If you tell us in the comments, I'm not going to listen to you. Okay, but if you're a patron and you tell me on Patreon, I will listen to that. There's no doubt about that. So here's what you have to look forward to in the gap between seasons two and three, because we don't want to leave you guys hanging.

Season 3 is going to start March 6th. March 6, which is five weeks from today. If you're listening to this episode, the day that it drops. January 17th. Yep. then you're going to hear the premiere of season three in exactly five weeks. Yes. Until then, in the meantime, you guys are going to get a treat.

Yep. We're going to be releasing five episodes that I think are great from our Patreon exclusive show, The Dusty Tome. And these five episodes explore the topic of witchcraft, specifically the Salem Witch Trials. Yes. So get excited for that. That's going to be every single week from here until the beginning of season three.

you're going to get an episode of the Dusty Tome. If you like that episode, there are like 50 plus more where that came from. When you hear this, there's going to be something like 45 to 50 episodes of the Dusty Tome. I think it's 45. I said 50 plus. Sitting there. That was not true. Waiting for you. And not only that, though. So there was a book that we used in this episode extensively in researching for it. I actually read the majority of it just last night. Or as normal people would say, in researching for it.

researching it. I was looking at many of the details. And it's Lewis Ungitt's book. It's called The Return of the Dragon, The Shocking Way Drugs and Religion shape people and society. So two things. Number one, you guys should all read the book. It's a great book. It's super good. It's an approachable read too. Yeah. But here's the great news. To the first five people that sign up for our Patreon today. Today. January 17. 20, 23 year of our Lord. Five people, any tier of support. If you sign up for our Patreon, we will contact you via Messenger there, and we will send you a free copy of Unge's book. Yep.

Lewis is not giving us any copies of his book to do. We're just going to buy them for you because we want you to read it. We also want more people to support Lewis and his work. Because, I mean, it's really an incredible book with great insight, I think. Yeah. So it's about a 200-page book, 160-page book. But not only do you get everything in the book, but his research is very meticulous. the bibliography.

Amazing. I mean, we're going to go down some bibliographical rabbit trails, having read other material as well for the preparation for the show. But it's just a great book. A lot of the core ideas that we had for this show, some of them were things that we had been coming to as we researched many of these other areas and topics and kept running into this. We talked about it in sleep paralysis.

Kept running into this. Evangelistic aliens even had, you know, Grant Hancock and Michael Paul and all these guys where this growing burgeoning field of serious argumentation for the use of psychedelics to improve humanity on everything from politics to spirituality to depression, things like that. And then, so we were starting to come to some of these like hesitations and questions. And Lewis's book drew so many threads together and put just crystallized, that's what, that is exactly what we've been intuiting. Yep, yeah, exactly.

He comes at it from an interesting perspective. He's a Christian man, a former user of DMT. And so he has the actual practical hands-on knowledge of what it's like. And then he's just an encyclopedic resource for different people to read, different historical threads to draw together. And it helps you see the modern phenomenon in a really clear light, I think. So if this topic interests you, you've got to check out Lewis's book. Like I said, I read most of it in a couple hours in bed last night. And it, it's also maybe framing this a little bit

just so you're aware when we say DMT DMT is a modern synthesized version of ayahuasca it's a very potent version of Iowa Boston version which we want to differentiate between psychedelics

and some other like kind of visiony drugs in that psychedelics actually change your cognitive function it's not like an antidepressant right it doesn't just change your mood it actually changes and alters how you think

about a thing. It actually can control what you see and how you see it. Very potent drug. And that would include a list of other psychedelics that are in the same category, but DMT is the strongest. Yeah. And it's easiest to say. And it's the one that, so you might hear us say DMT, there's Masculent tea, there's Iwaska, there's LSD. How do you say the silo silocybin? Silicin, which is a synthetic version of magic mushrooms. Just like DMT to I Ayahuasca, acid, mescal. All of its... A lot of it's related.

And actually one thing that I thought would be interesting, because we shared so much history in the cold open, hopefully to show you why all of this matters before... And some of the big meta-connections, to give you kind of a framework to understand why are we talking about this? Where does all this fit into this project of haunted cosmos? And just to give you kind of a broad understanding of the history,

but you need to understand, guys, that there are rabbit trails. Oh, my goodness. It goes so deep on this topic. Endless. And really, the way that we want to frame the show, and this is why we dove into so much history in the cold open, is that we don't want you to listen to this and think like, oh, they're just going to tell weird stories about people tripping. You can go get that on Reddit any time that you like. Yeah. We want you to see that this isn't just people playfully doing drugs that, you know, maybe they're harmful to your brain function.

Maybe they're not. who knows. No, we want you to see that this is actually people engaging in a spiritual practice that we believe is potentially overtly demonic. And it's harmful to your soul. And it's catechized people to do unspeakably horrible things in the past. And they've eventually been convinced and have actually carried those things out in what we would call, quote, real life. Let me even read you a couple quotes from a guy like Michael Pollan who has done a lot of work He's cited in Ungit's book. He says things like this.

He says, you go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness, and you will bump into the sacred. It's not something we generate. It's something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to non-believers as well as believers. He says in another place, and I think it's a book, How to Change Your Mind. He says, mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life forms and the molecular matrix that we share. I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature.

I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time. But I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life. Wow. These are spiritual investigations that people are going on. And it's not new, as you've seen in the cold open. there's two, really three broad concepts that I want us to familiarize herself with going into the show, and we'll touch on it here and there. But I want you guys to see how you can pick up on these things. So they are pantheism, pan-intheism, and hermeticism.

Those are three really important topics in this discussion. And they all three have a fundamentally identical or similar end game. And that is that man's great journey is to realize that he is actually part of the divine. And his job is to ascend to his divine nature in order to become a pure essence, a pure spiritual essence within that divine nature. So pantheism says that creation is God. All of creation is God. Panintheism is really similar.

It just says that creation is a part of God. It's God's body, but he has a separate soul. And you can ascend to that soul. Hermeticism is the one that I think is really important because it seems to be the message that's most being conveyed when people are on these trips. And it's that man has the task of finding a Prishah Theologia, a single theological truth of God that helps them along the path of their divinity. And they would say that other religions are stepping stones along this path.

And so the similarities kind of help them prove this hermetic point. But what you have to do is find the next stepping stone, which could be the full embodiment of the full embodiment of the Prishia theology itself. And so one of the through threads that you'll hear in these stories is this secret knowledge, this esoteric knowledge that is supposed to help men evolve spiritually into the higher plane.

So I want you to keep those three topics in mind as we go forward, but that's also just proof-putting that there's endless rabbit trails to go down. This is a huge topic. Asclepius with the serpent whispering in his ear all the way through the serpent mythology And one connection, I want to underscore a little bit, because we left it there at the end of the cold open. And I want you to understand that this isn't just some kind of ad hoc sort of like, oh, that's a little bit forced.

But one of the core theses of Angus book that we've come to believe as well is this triumvirate of hallucinogenic drugs used for worship, pharmacaya. I mean, religious hallucinogenic. Which is what we would say, side note on that point, which is what we would say, side note on that point, which is what. what the Bible is warning against, partly, when it talks about witchcraft. Yes. Shamanism, witchcraft, these things were... Our argument is that the law of Canaan in the Old Testament included the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Yes.

That was what the authors of the Septuagint clearly had in mind. Yes. They were trying to say, don't go engage in the shamanism and demon worship of these pagan Asherah and Moloch worshippers. They're using substances to alter their mental state and spiritual. spiritual state to contact entities, to talk with them, receive hidden knowledge, instructions for worship. So there's that element of it, the psych, the hallucinogenic worship shamanism practices witchcraft combined with contact with specifically serpent entities. Yeah. It's obvious. From India to China to North America, to the Gauls, to the Incan. We didn't even include all of

them here in the list. We skipped over some. By the time you're done reading, let me just read you, I've jotted this down as I read. This combination of drugs for spiritual purposes, serpent gods, and then also human sacrifices, the third thing. You find it in the Vikings, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the ancient Celts, the Gauls, the Egyptians, especially with the Whitewood Jet, Mesopotamians, the Greeks, the Old Testament pagans, the Incans, the Native Americans, the Hindus, the Chinese, etc. Yeah.

I mean, which is another way of saying everywhere. Everywhere. And then you see, as Christianity expands, and conquers these worlds, it does what often is described as dragon slaying, the serpent slaying. Again, the serpent of Genesis through the dragon of Revelation.

Christian faith expands, converts Vikings, converts Gauls, converts Hindus, converts all. Everywhere it goes, it wages war with... So you have giant slaying stories, even like St. George and the dragon. Part of the reality of those is that everywhere Christianity went, it forbade these practices,

put them to death. No more pharmacia. No more shod. feminism, witchcraft sorcery, and what you're going to hear today, this is the lie that you're going to hear from guys like Graham Hancock, Michael Pollan. A lot of these guys modern now, even it's mainstream, it's on Joe Rogan, it's on Netflix, it's everywhere. Being peddled is basically the idea of reject, here's the specific message, reject Christ, reject Christ, the Christians have been suppressing all of this warm, fuzzy evolution and

this great spiritualism and the serpent holding you like a baby and giving you secret knowledge. And the wicked, closed-minded Christians have been withholding all of this shaman magic from you and the witch trials and everything. And they've been holding this secret knowledge from you. But guys, you know where the secret knowledge always ends? It ends with... Let's kill babies. Yes. Let's kill people.

Let's kill children. Yes. Let's ruin the... Let's destroy ourselves. And so Margaret sang her plan, her... Yep. Her homeboy, have Locke. Ellis, unfortunately, has a really baller. Really, really cool name. Really cool name.

Is engaging in these practices, influences her. But not only that, think about the way that in the 50s and 60s in the sexual revolution and the hippie movement, LSD, hallucinogenic, psychedelics, were deeply involved in throwing off sexual morise and leading to what? Yeah. Human sacrifice. The need. Abortion. Because when you throw, when you embrace sexual degeneracy. When you become a sexually degenerate modern, as E Michael Jones would say, you develop now a requirement to figure out how to handle the natural byproduct of sexual intercourse, which means you have to handle the children that come from it. And the easiest way is to simply kill them.

Yeah. Hi there, faithful listener. If you've been enjoying the Haunted Cosmos podcast and you'd like to see Ben and I live, then come and meet us in person at the Right Response Ministries Conference, happening March 1st, 2nd. second and third. The title of the conference is Blueprints for Christendom 2.0, seven doctrines for ruling the world. Some of our other speakers include Doug Wilson, Joe Boot, and the host of the conference our friend Joel Webbin. Yes, the whole conference is going to be really awesome. But the best part to me is that Brian and I will be on stage with Joel talking about the most unhinged

things imaginable. Plus, by coming to the conference, it'll give us a chance to meet each of you in person. You can register for the conference by going to writeresponseconference.com. Again, that's rightresponseconference.com. And don't forget to use the promo code haunted to get 20% off of registration exclusively for our listeners. Lastly, if you're looking for another fantastic podcast, you've got to check out Joel's podcast called Theology Applied. It's on Apple and Spotify, but you can also watch Theology Applied by searching Right Response Ministries on YouTube. Check the links in the description.

Brian, you know how sometimes you wake up in the morning? Yeah, hopefully everybody does that. Sure, maybe. But do you ever feel tired when you wake up? Well, yeah, Ben, I used to all the time. But then I started drinking this new drink. It's actually called coffee, and it helps you wake up. No way.

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They make it super easy to order exactly what you want if you go to www. That's www.squarelyjo's.com and click shop coffee. And first-time buyers can sign up to receive 20% off of their first order. Just go to www. www.squarelyjo's.com or use the link in the description below. Squirrely Joe's Coffee. Share coffee, serve humbly, live faithfully. So it's the destruction of the image bearer is what this inevitably leads to.

And here's the thing. I'm probably getting ahead of myself, but I'm just going to plant the seed. There is so, there's this really insane law. that they throw in there along with this. And it's that Christianity actually used to be on board with it. Oh, yeah. I'm going to plant that seed. We'll probably touch on that a little bit more later,

but it's this lie that the church became so power hungry that it didn't like how every single saint was ascending to the next level of divinity. The normal Christian could get direct access to God via hallucinogenics. And it was the love feast with community. You know, they called it the Romans called it the love feast, and they thought that this sip of communion wine was laced with some hallucinogenic. And so what you get down to is the religion with no name. It's been this religion that permeated all of culture, and it doesn't really have a name,

but it's the serpent worship with psychedelics and everything else like that. And it's all nonsense. And then the other thing that I kept thinking of in writing this show and researching for it was when Paul says that we now worship God with unveiled faces. Because something that you'll often read in these visions is that they think that the place that they're seeing is, quote, realer than real. I actually read that multiple times from Graham Hancock and other people. They called it realer than real. Now, I'm not saying that they were seeing something not real. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying, though, is that it's this really subtle and it's easy to miss lie where a pagan religion will try to get you to

think that the body that you live in and the world that you live in is actually not the place where you're meant to be. It's actually not the real thing. There's something else that you should be aiming for. You've got to keep that in mind. And so I actually, that verse kind of carries a new weight because part of what it makes me think is that Paul is saying like, no, this is the real thing. This worship that you're engaged in of the living God, this is the real thing. Where you're living, that's the real place. So anyway, that's just another thing to be thinking of as we, we, walk through these stories. One of Ungitz, he has an essay in the appendices of the book on the nature of consciousness. And he actually talks quite a bit about that, about the concept

of the soul and of the sundering of this, the immaterial and the material in death of the human being, where the lie is, that's a good thing. You need to be sundered from the body, but where in the Christian worldview, we have a deeply embodied worldview. Right. Where even the hope of Christianity is not etherealism. It's not floating in clouds. It's actually glorified body, immortal body, soul and body reunited even after death in immortality forever. So that's a very interesting essay as well that he talks about there. That's actually a nice segue into really the first story of the show. Yeah, the theme. Which is this idea that you can participate in in psychedelic use, and you'll come out of it with a huge lack of being afraid to die.

Yeah. So, Brian, can you start us off with the story of Gordon Wasson? Absolutely. During the conquest of Latin and South America by Ernan Cortez, the conquistador and explorer quickly noticed an ever-present feature in the religious rites of the Aztecs. Anytime a right was performed under the cover of night or a particularly dark, cloudy, and stormy day, the shaman would introduce a substance to people called Teonanakital into the equation. This apparently led to greater and greater communion with the gods they sought the favor of.

This substance, Teonanakotel, translates into English as God's flesh. In the modern day, we know it by another irreverent name, Magic Mushrooms. In 1995, a man named R. Gordon-Wasson traveled to the remote regions of Mexico, a village called Oaxaca, in search of this mysteriously effective mushroom. From the time of Cortez up to his own day, no word of God's flesh had made it to the U.S. Lawson wondered if it was even real, and if it was, he wondered if it was still around somewhere. As he walked through the empty streets of this village that seemed as though it was stuck in a different time, he saw the town's meeting hall at the end of the street and made his way to it.

There was a single official inside, a young man. Lawson walked up to the man and boldly asked him in the next. native tongue. If this man could help Wassen discover the secrets of the divine mushroom. The young man obliged and led Wassen to his house, where he then summoned other locals and shamans. Portions of the fungi were handed out to all in attendance before they all bit into them at the same time. Though it wasn't meant to be a religious ritual, the ceremonial aspect of these drugs never seems to be let go by users. After some time passed, Wasson was hit by a stream of other worldly visions, geometric monstrosities that defied our three spatial dimensions, palaces of all

pearl, hanging gardens like one might find in ancient Babylon, chariot races where horses were subbed out for centaurs and minotars and griffins. Watson commented later that it was like seeing the real reality for the first time. They were visions that transcended clarity and tangibility. To him, these experiences were more real than the hike up to the village had been. It's said that one does not have to consume any psychedelic drug to potentially experience the same harrowing or to some very pleasant effects. The Buddhist methods of meditation are often touted as another method of altering one's own consciousness. In fact, Western teachers of Eastern mystic meditation claimed to have come to their meditative convictions from prior experiences with psychedelics. In these experiences, allegedly, they received messages from general feelings,

or direct communication with entities that instructed them to take up Eastern meditation. At any rate, there have been more than a few accounts of people professing to experience regular psychedelic type trips while otherwise sober-minded, but in the midst of a meditation session. In 1946, a man named Roland Griffiths was born to a homemaking mother and psychologist's father. As he aged, his aptitude for medicine and neuroscience led to a degree from Occidental college and a PhD in psychopharmacology from the University of Minnesota. As he started his actual professional practice, he quickly gained a reputation for being by the book, straightforward in his medical orthodoxy, and unwavering in his respect of the modern medical practitioners who had come

before him. However, he eventually started to waver from these more conservative treatment methodologies. The man who was once very stern and serious in his consideration of new ideas suddenly started to muse about some new ways of treating neurological problems in his patients. This shift in Griffith's paradigm coincided exactly with his taking up a daily practice of meditation as prescribed by mystic Buddhism. What's more, both of these things coincided with his growing confidence in psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to relieve a very specific neurological problem faced by his most desperate patients. In 2008, Dr. Griffiths, now well into his firm belief in psilocybin as a lasting fix for this problem,

took on a new patient. Her name was Carol Vincent. She was a 53-year-old writer and entrepreneur from British Columbia who had been diagnosed with terminal lymphoma. To be clear, by the time she was sitting down with Griffiths, the terminal diagnosis had been looming over her for some time already. She'd gone through the stages of grief, one day wanting to live life to the fullest and reckless abandon, the next wanting to take great care to find some remedy as she clung to her last strings of hope that she might be cured. Through it all, she had finally arrived at a sort of acceptance. Of course, this isn't to say that she had any sort of peace about her condition. She didn't want to die,

but she had finally resigned herself to the fact that death was the most pressing thing in her near future. This induced great anxiety in the middle-aged woman, and it's this crippling anxiety that led her to Dr. Griffith's office. You see, that specific neurological problem that Dr. Griffith had found psilocybin to be a great answer for wasn't cancer, schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, nothing like that. It was an overwhelming fear of death. Griffith had found in Vincent, a prime participant in his latest clinical research study. He was in the process of testing 51 different terminal cancer patients to see how their anxiety levels over their fast approaching death responded to different levels of magic mushrooms.

His findings had shown that since psychedelics, unlike psychotropics, which just affect mood, actually alter how one perceives or thinks through reality. Terminal patients could benefit from the piece mushrooms brought them as it sort of tricked their brains into not viewing the threat of certain death properly, or at least that's as far as the materialist explanation went in explaining it. This method of not going quietly into life's good night

was actually not new with Griffith. The new thing Griffith was doing was seeking to lend the method more credibility by introducing it into proper medicinal practice, but he was not the one to actually come up with the idea. In the early 1950s, Aldous Huxley, the author of the prophetic book Brave New World, took his first trip on LSD. He became a frequent user of the drug, even up to his deathbed in 1963, when he asked his wife to inject him with more of the drug so that he could, quote,

leave this world in a swirl of stars. This desire of his was widely publicized, and it made others want to do all they could, like Huxley, to turn death into a spiritual rebirth, as opposed to some purely physiological occurrence that leads to, Nothing. The end of this train was many self-professed atheists taking psychedelics upon their deathbed in the hopes of avoiding the eternal death of their conscious they adamantly thought was waiting for them. Maybe some thought, being high as you die, could be a form of immortality, an endless trip.

Carol Vincent submitted her application to Dr. Griffith's study, was surprised to soon receive a message from Johns Hopkins informing her of her acceptance. In April of 2014, she entered a small treatment room on the university hospital grounds, one that has all the bells and whistles of an emergency room that has been designed to make it feel more like a normal living room in someone's house. Vincent was directed to sit down in the midst of two guides that would not leave her alone, and yes, they did refer to themselves as guides. She was handed an ancient-looking goblet that held the psilocybin pill and was told to take it when she was ready. She took the pill without hesitation, put on headphones that were playing classical music mixed with ancient chanting and relaxed.

She described the music becoming a tangible thing. Instead of sound, it turned into smoke and color and then beams of some alien substance that appeared to her to be solid. She could still hear it, but now she could also see it, touch it, even smell it. The music lifted her up on crystalline thrones to a sky of colors before. were dropping her back down to a dark pit. She said this scared her at first, but the darkness soon proved to be nothing more than a vacuum that was soon filled with the most vibrant displays of colors and geometry.

Vincent was walking through the deepest reaches of space as if she owned their vast regions and nebulous. As if everyone who ever said that space was mostly empty had lied to her just to ensure this moment was as euphoric and shocking as it could possibly be. She flew up to face a gigantic monolith that was black and smooth like a fantasy tower. She saw a golden shield and an immense dark vault full of mystery passed before her eyes. She began to weep, not out of fear, but just for the sheer beauty that presented itself around her.

She began to ask her environment questions. Where is God? Where is the human? What is the connection? At first, no answers seemed to come. but she soon realized that it was foolish of her to expect words and reply anyways. Her environment was giving her images that answered her, please. Beautiful fish, tranquil rabbits, great legendary pirate ships, an immense and immovable castle.

All of these images sprang at her with intense sharpness into her vitality. Whatever she was in the midst of was intelligent, sentient. She sensed and then saw a dark force flying. towards her, growing in strength. She took up courage and reached out to touch the void, only to see it immediately wither away as if it had been fog and she was the bright morning sun. While all of this was taking place, she noticed a cartoon version of a crab, with goofy-looking eyes and everything, walking by from time to time, clicking its claws as if it was some

petulant child begging for attention from a stranger. The crab, she somehow knew, was her cancer. The message she received and that she later repeated multiple times was that she was meant to lighten up about the cancer. After all, the crab was a cartoon. It was a silly thing. When she came down from her trip

and all the effects were done, she claimed to have been given a mandate from the trip itself. Though she was an atheist, she confessed that what had just happened was real and that it was a communal energy larger than herself that she gained a glimpse of.

Laugh about it, she said, that's what I have to do. You die and then you say, I'm here, I'm home, I'm back. Vincent believed she had seen the place where she would soon be forever, was no longer afraid to die. So, there we go. A woman, here's the thing, you're supposed to be afraid of death until you actually know the antidote.

Yeah. Everyone is supposed to view death as this thing that ought not to be. Yeah. We know that it's unnatural. We know that the world isn't meant to grow old and ugly and then eventually just wither away. It's supposed to be beautiful all the time. We have this baked into our hearts because God's put eternity into the hearts. Yeah, exeasties.

God said eternity in the hearts of men. Yes. We know that death isn't right. It doesn't fit. And so when there's a thing apart from the gospel of Jesus Christ that gives one immense peace and hope for death, almost a longing for death, your red flag should go up immediately. If you're not in Christ, you should not be looking forward to death.

And in fact, death should deeply bother you. Yeah. The idea of it. Yeah. And the fact that people, and this is just one case in the midst of literally hundreds. So many. Yeah.

Thousands probably. I mean, I saw hundreds. Of people that go on this trip, they're atheists or agnostic at best. And then they come out and they're like, well, whatever it is, I know that I don't have to be afraid of anything. Yeah, that should not be the case.

No, it's a classic element of deception, where deception is not always just darkness and evil and, you know, hatred and bitterness and pain and torture. Darkness is also, it appears often in the guise of light and of peace and of goodness and of hope. many of the messages that people return to, this was one of the point Unget made in his book, is that many people would say they had these profound experiences that were deeply shaping of their entire worldview, that it increased their creativity, that it increased their ability to think and consider

and think creatively about problems. And then you'd come back and you'd say, well, what were your insights from this experience? And it always just boiled down to these kind of hallmark, you just got to love, like chat GPT, wrote it. Yeah. Like, you just, you know, just oneness, man, like just the essence of love. Like a hippie in

Woodstock, kind of the stereotype. And the point is that it gives people a deception through a powerful experience of emotion that they have experienced something more real when what they've experienced is a fun show mirror of reality. Right.

Warped and twisted. And they show you a lot of things. It's this mile wide river of stuff. Yeah. But the river is only an inch deep. And so that's why you come back and they're like, if you could describe it and, you know, some philosophical statement, some profound thing,

you're just like, you just got to love. They can't tell you what that means. They can't tell you how it's done. All they can tell you is that you just got to love. And that's the only thing that they get from this life-altering experience that's so cheap. Yeah. And so shallow.

Yeah. It'll be like he, Angu gives some examples of people who do these trips and they're like, you know, I realized that I needed to just quit my job and then like pursue transcendental meditation and just give up. Like, it was like, what if the message they actually needed was like the Protestant work ethic? Right. Like, well, I mean, yeah, look at the whole hippie movement. Like, those people were not hard workers. They didn't create utopia. They didn't create anything good, actually. No. Not even close to utopia. In fact, there are examples of people who form communes

around drug experiences. And they're like, man, we're just going to show them. Like, I think Graham Hancock's says every politician should be required to take DMT or something like that because it would fix all of our problems. I'm like, here's what happens. They all get together. There's one example in the book, like, 20 people get together in this house, this communal living. They're just going to, like, do drugs. And then pretty soon, like, half of them stop working at all. And then the other ones get really bitter. And someone starts stealing, like, firewood from another person. And like, they just get into, within a year, all of them have hate each other and abandoned. Yeah. So, man, just love. Right. Apparently it doesn't actually produce virtue.

It just doesn't track. Also, I guarantee you most politicians are already doing to you. Just read that hideous strength. Like, they're communing with the macrobes. Your brain produces DMT naturally. Like, maybe you don't know that, but it does. It's just small amounts. But the lizard people, it's producing huge amounts. Right.

Because they are the serpents you're commuting with in the DMT vision. Like Hillary Clinton is the, I will just talk. He is the spirit of Iowa. You're talking to Michael Obama. I'm kidding. Please don't unaligned me. No, so this story, just now reminded me of a motif in Tolkien.

The Tolkien's, he's brilliant at doing this. And it's that I say it all the time, but it's when Frodo is walking with the hobbits and they've met Strider. And I think it's Pippin, or maybe it's probably Mary that's asking him, like, how do we know he's not a servant of the enemy? Yeah.

And Frodo, in his wisdom, says, I think a servant of the enemy would seem fairer, but feel fowler. Yeah. I actually think that this is a good example of that. You get this very fair view of what you have to look forward to once you die, where you just kind of become absorbed

into this hyper-spiritual plane and everything feels very, very good, and all your worries are taken away. It's this facade of the actual truth that God will wipe away every tear. But the thing is, the tears are wiped away after judgment comes. And that seems foul.

Yeah. Judgment is not supposed to be something that we're like, can't wait. Heck yes. This is going to be amazing. Yeah. The awareness of the weight of your sin is going to bear down on you. And it already has when you believe the gospel. Yeah. In a profound way where you're left being like, I deserve hell. Yeah. I deserve hellfire. That's what I've earned. And so that seems very foul. Yeah. But what God turns it into is the fairest thing in the world. It's actual life everlasting. It's resurrection glory. And this inverts that. Yeah. And instead it gives you the fairness of you actually have nothing to worry about. Yeah. But what you are the fairness of you actually have nothing to worry about. Yeah. But what? What it hides from you is the foul truth that if you buy into that, you will suffer the pains of hellfire. We feel the wrongness of death, human beings do, because God has set eternity in our hearts and we're image bears.

And we're supposed to find respite from the fear of death in the one who knows his way into and out of the grave, which is Christ, not from this, don't worry about death. Death is actually a release. Death is actually a freeing of you to this higher plane of. goodness and existence. It's like, it's why... Which is just what the serpent said to Eve. Yeah. He literally said, did God really say you'd surely die? What he actually means is you'll just become like him. You'll become great. Nothing is new. Yeah. Yeah. It's why C.S. Lewis in the silver chair makes the witch appear as a beautiful woman who turns

into a great green serpent, snake. He's saturated in this mythology and in these images and biblical imagery and also even other cultures and northern-like Viking and many of these mythological traditions that have the exact same motifs play out again and again. It's also why Lewis and Peralandra has ransom die. And not only does he die, but he goes into the proverbial grave, which is the inside of Venus, which there's a lot of symbology there that we're going to gloss over. I believe the word you're looking for symbolism. Yes, thank you. I just reference a movie no one should ever watch.

So please don't. I'm not even going to say it. It's terrible. I didn't catch it. I watched it as a teenager unsupervised. Ah, yeah. No teenagers.

Well, that's not. Anyway. Anywho. So he goes into Venus. So Ransom goes like into the belly of the earth. Yeah. You know, and as he's fighting against the devil. Yeah, the unman.

And he gets the wound on his heel. He literally goes into the grave. And then Venus, you know, as an intelligence, kind of like, spits him back out. in this beautiful mountain garden and you have the consummation of the world, basically. Beautiful. Yeah. But that's also the picture.

Like, you can't rely on a thing to save you if all they know is the way into the grave. Yeah. You can't rely on that. Or if one who says the way into the grave is really the way into paradise, period, staying there. Exactly. What you actually need is the one who can show the fruit of his labor.

Yeah. That he's come back out of it, glorified. And there's only one person that's ever done. that, and that is the Godman Christ. It reminds me on a related note back to this idea that you will receive some sort of transcendental knowledge. We're going to talk about Gnosticism and things like that, that will improve people politically and emotionally and spiritually. You look at the societies and the civilizations that were built by this unholy union of hallucinogenic drugs, serpent gods, and death, basically human sacrifice. And that's what they create.

Even the greatest marvels that they create, their temples and ziggurots and architectural wonders, are bathed in blood. They're horrors. If you look at, though, the civilization that conquered those, which is the Christian civilization, that did away with the pharmacaya and instead said right worship is the way to truly be a human, not to receive this secret knowledge from the serpa gods via hallucinogenic mushrooms, but which sounds crazy. but that's literally what they're saying. Yeah. The way to virtue is these men who were sober-minded with strong backs, who built the cathedrals of the world, who built the West,

who built the greatest civilization that humanity has ever seen. And what Graham Hancock is trying to do is remithologize the world. Materialism has failed. Yes. And so people are giving up atheism and materialism left and right, because it's literally Reddit-level tier atheist cope. It's dumb. It's the most unintelligible babble.

It is the standard deviation meme. We have the really dumb guy on one side, the really smart guy, and then just the midwit in the middle. That's Reddit to your atheism. The dumb guy is like, there's more to the world than just stuff. No God because death. And then the guy on the left is like, don't listen to the serpent. The Jedi.

And the guy in the right is like, don't listen to the serpent. He's like, listen to the serpent. So we're seeing materialism die. And one of the reasons behind the show is because we're saying there's a failure of materialism. The world is not just stuff. but there's two roads before man once he realizes that. There's the world of

broad, self-made religion, which is homemade spirituality, which ultimately is it's communion with demons, or it's the Christian faith. And what you guys like Graham Hancock and Paul, these guys are saying, is Christianity is keeping you

from all this utopia. And yet, when you look at it, historically speaking, the thing those societies gave us, it was not utopia. It was very ugly. It was death and more death and more death. And Christianity says,

yes, if you want your life, you have to die. If you want to have life, you have to die. But there's resurrection. It's death, burial, and resurrection. It's crossbearing daily. And that way is the way to virtue, not shortcuts through chemical brain alteration and communing with the demon serpents.

No, it's through the hard, death work of dying to yourself. And actually, that's where you find out what love really is. Right. Exactly. It's not, and it's not this weird, you know, hermetic tendency to say, well, Christ was an example for all men. All men have to suffer their own passion in order to be resurrected themselves into this new life to their own divine. That's just the same lie repackaged. You have to rely on the passion of someone else. That's what dying to yourself looks like. It just makes Christ into another one of Graham Hancock again. I know I'm talking a lot about him, but he's so popular right now.

He's very influential. I can pull up the quote here. Graham Hancock called these serpent entities, which he claims to have encountered himself many times, to be the ancient teachers of mankind. He said, Mother Ayahuasca has frequently appeared in me in the form of a serpent. Yeah. So that just makes Christ into another serpent entity, a false Christ.

It's like the abduction narratives from season one, episode 10, where they would promise, you know, will you just become one of us? Christ was one of us. If you follow this path that, by the way, Christ also followed, even though he never said it. You'll just become like him. You'll become this deified version of yourself. And that's a nice segue. Segway.

Yeah, that brings us to our some, let's talk a little bit more about Gnosticism, ancient knowledge, secret knowledge. Yeah, the secret, the idea that just a secret knowledge that you can find hidden under some rock will actually save you. that's the root of this. And it's found most potently, I think, in the Elysinian mysteries of ancient Greece. Tell it to us, Ben. Gnosticism is an ancient heresy that arose within the first century A.D. Even while the ink was still drawing on the books of the New Testament. While it's undoubtedly a confusing spaghetti junction of ideas, philosophies, and practices,

what pagan religion or heresy isn't, after all, it has also exhibited a great influence on the human psyche. At its root, and to really run the risk of oversimplifying it, Gnosticism says that the material is bad. Everything material, from your own body to the dust beneath your feet, to the forgettable water molecule floating aimlessly in the ocean is bad, evil, or at least inherently flawed. The only hope that humanity, and indeed all of creation in general, has,

is to become more spirit. Thus, in the Gnostic framework, the human soul is the only, pure thing within the human and is therefore the true ego of everyone. The body is just a temporary vessel, one we all must tolerate for a time, but the soul is the thing worthy of your attention, for it will be the thing that lasts forever. In Gnostic cosmogony, the creator god of the Bible, Jehovah, is the bad guy. He's the bad guy because he's the one who made all the stuff. How could a good God make a bunch of material stuff that's so horrible. To the Gnostic, the evidence against the God of the Bible is damning. However, the serpent who came to Eve in the garden, far from being a

deceptive tempter like we've been told, is actually the underdog hero of the whole narrative. He is the true supreme God, who is benevolent and generous in his outpouring of true knowledge, true nosus upon the world. After all, all he wanted was for Eve to become like unto God. right? Now, of course, the Christian can pick the flaws of this paradigm apart with ease. The material world is not inherently flawed and evil. It's fallen, sure, but that's because of what we did, not because of anything God did. To the contrary, he made it all very good. And yes, these moral bodies will die, and our souls will live on. These vessels are temporary, but only in this form. For we will be resurrected, with glorified bodies to live in for all eternity if we're in Christ. A man's life

has all bound up in his unification of his soul with his body. To sunder the body from the soul is to die by definition. So we cannot have true eternal life until we are embodied souls once more. Though these fallen and corrupted bodies are temporary, they're glorified versions, the things they should have always been, are immortal just like the soul. But what am I getting at? What does this have to do with some random dude tripping on acid burning man? Well, to answer that, we actually have to take a trip back to ancient Greece, specifically the city of Elusis. One of the rules of ancient Greece was that if anyone, be he human or immortal, eats or drink something in the halls of Hades, then he must stay there forever. There is a myth from that time in which this rule plays a key role, and it is very important to our study today.

Homer composed to him that tells the story of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone. in the lay, Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and fertility in ancient Greece, assign her beautiful daughter the task of painting all of the flowers of the earth, thus bringing them to be. As she worked away at completing this work, she caught the attention of the god of the underworld, Hades. In his lust, Hades took Persephone away from her work. Indeed, he took her away from the entire surface world and housed her in his realm

in the earth's belly to be his wife. One day, Demeter realized that her daughter, was taking too long to finish her assignment, and so the goddess went looking for her. She quickly discovered that Persephone was nowhere to be found. In her search, the goddess went into the city of Elusis and inquired on Persephone's whereabouts from its king, Triptolamus. The king, unfortunately, could not help, was very contrite to the goddess over this fact. Demeter took pity on the man for the sake of his sincerity and decided to give him a gift

before she went on her way. She taught the king the skills of agriculture and the harvest of crops. leaving the city in a state far better than how she had found it. After long years of looking, she gave up. She pounded upon Zeus's doors and begged the king of the gods to do something about her missing daughter. Demeter knew that nothing so important could escape his gaze, but Zeus would not disclose to Demeter where Persephone was

or who had taken her, driven to rage by this. Demeter brought about a terrible drought that covered the entire world. People suffered and starved and resorted to the world. to horrible things to find an ounce of satiation for their hunger. The gods suffered from this by way of having their sacrifices reduced. The people were failing to worship them under such horrible conditions. Thus, the outcry of the people reached up to Zeus and he relented from his secrecy. He promised to tell Demeter what happened to Persephone. When she discovered that Hades had taken her to be his wife, Demeter's angst only increased. She knew the rules of Hades and wasted no time in

further begging Zeus to let her daughter go. But alas, Persephone, by a trick of Hades, had consumed six pomegranate seeds during her stay in his realm, and was now bound to remain there forever. Demeter pressed the drought harder onto the land until all crop yield was stolen away from the people. Zeus, now suffering the wrath of man and the rest of the Pantheon, decided to make an exception to the rule of the fates just this once. He decreed that Persephone would be returned to her mother for six months every year. But for the other six months, she would dwell in Hades with her husband.

One month per seed that she consumed. When Persephone was finally reunited with her mother for this first annual cycle, the land gave way to immense fertility under the blessing of Demeter and the world enjoyed her first spring. Somehow, this particular myth caught a tight grip on the people of ancient Greece.

In it, they found great significance, particularly in the theme of rebirth after immense hardship and a new perspective on Hades in his immortal world of shades. Perhaps this is because of one minor detail that we've left out up to now. When Demeter left that seemingly insignificant city, Elusis, after giving Tript DeLimas the skill of agriculture, she had left one other gift to the king in her wake. She turned him into a god. You see, when she first came to the city, Tript DeLemus's father was still its king, and the prince was just a baby. Beyond that, he was a sick,

baby, who the family was sure would not survive infancy. Demeter took pity on the child and nursed him with her own milk. Instantly the boy was healed, and instantly he grew into the stature of a man with immortality, and so Triptolemus became a sort of patron demigod of agriculture for the Greeks. All of this meant that within this story, the people thought they dimly saw the key to immortality, to godhood. To them, it all had to do with the city of Eleusis and the history that had occurred within its border. Driven by a hunger to learn this secret and make themselves into gods, the intricate and controversial a Lucinian mystery rite was formed. Its entire point being to usurp the prison cell of mortal flesh and become like unto the divine, the spirit, the Numa.

The ceremony, which was commonly called the Mysteries, took place in the month of Bodromian, September, after a ritual cleansing had occurred for each initiate earlier in that year. To begin, initiates would embark upon a solemn march from Athens to Elusis, a distance of about 13 miles, to follow in the footsteps of Demeter in her sorrowful search for Persephone. Once there, they would bathe themselves in the sea before standing on the threshold of the Hall of Initiation, called the Telestrian. Sacrifices were offered to Demeter, Persephone, and Triptolamus. Incantations were recited. Two vessels were filled with water and were then poured out to the east and to the west while the initiates shouted, rain and conceive.

In symbolic fashion, the priests would bring about the climax of the rite by cutting an ear of grain in complete silence for all to see. And then, before finally entering the Telestrian, where our knowledge of the rite ceases, initiates were given a drink, a drink which many believe contained. the ergo fungus. In other words, before entering the hall and learning the true secrets that would allow one to ascend to pseudo-divinity, one had to consume LSD in the form of ergo fungus. We only know what occurred within the hall by rumor, and even that's hazy. Initiates were shown various secrets, the contents of a sacred chest and a lidded basket. These contents are lost to history since, as far as we know, no one ever wrote them down. They were told secrets as well.

And all of these things were held tightly under oath by every participant, and anyone who divulged the information to those who were not initiates could be punished by death. The full climax of what took place in that hall is heavily disputed, but everyone agrees that it included personal visions and revelations given to each initiate from the other side. No matter what was said or shown to the people, the result remains the same. They drank the drink, entered the dark temple for a night, and emerged in the morning with a newfound sense of profound knowledge, a secret gnosis that guaranteed them a true seat among the divine when their fickle flesh finally withered away. Graham Hancock, the prolific author and host of the very entertaining Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse,

is a professed regular user of ayahuasca. Now, when I say user, don't get the wrong idea. He's not sitting in his flat in London all day, shooting up, and then laying in the last, laying back to go for various rides. These psychedelics don't seem to elicit that sort of behavior from people. Instead, he tries to make at least one pilgrimage each year to a different part of the world, where he engages in ritual ayahuasca use with a group of other seekers. According to him, these ceremonies range in their specific mechanics and logistics,

but the reason he seeks them out is because they all end the same, with a dram of ayahuasca and a trip into what seems like a parallel world full of realer than real truths for him to take home. Dr. Hancock has reported many encounters with the spirit of ayahuasca, a serpent which he names mother ayahuasca. He says that, though he cannot say whether the visions are real in the same sense that you and I are real, they felt more real to him both during and after the experiences.

At their first encounter, the serpent mother ayahuasca coiled herself around the journalist's body in the form of a massive boa constrictor, then gazed into his eyes. To him was like looking into infinity itself. Also to him, it seemed to last an entire age. When it was over, he realized that through it all, she had been beaming a single message into his consciousness,

that he must be kinder and more nurturing to others. It's worth noting that Dr. Hancock, though raised by devoutly Catholic parents, is a staunch atheist, but not of the sort that believes brute materialism is the only reasonable worldview to hold. Rather, he's of the sort that is just not compelled by any reason to follow any particular God or strict dogmatic path of truth.

Either way, it's worth hearing his takeaways from his various ayahuasca experiences yourself. What follows is a quotation from Grand Hancock's introduction to The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian Murarescu. Quote, When I first embraced atheism, I embraced the interlinked ideas that there's no transcendental meaning or purpose to life. There's no heaven and no hell, and that when our bodies and brains die,

it's absurd to imagine that some spiritual part of us, the soul, survives. After my ayahuasca experiences, I'm no longer so sure that logic and reason can effortlessly reduce us to our bodies in this way. On the contrary, I've seen much to convince me that although consciousness manifests in the body during life, It is neither made by the body nor confined to the body, nor inevitably extinct on the death of the body. One outcome of this is that I no longer fear death as I once did.

Rather, I regard its approach with curiosity and a sense of adventure. I think I can say, therefore, that my experiences with ayahuasca have been persuasive, perhaps in very much the same way that the experiences of pilgrims to the ancient Greek sanctuary of Elusis were persuasive and for very much the same reason. Namely, as you will learn in the pages that follow, that a likely psychedelic brew, the Ku Kukion, was drunk by participants at Elusis, after which they experienced visions that vanished all fear of death.

The specific psychedelic compounds involved in ayahuasca are closely related to those in the Kukion, but by no means identical, end quote. Dr. Hancock, if by some miracle you are listening, then we would urge you not to put your trust in Hulisian, and psychedelics and LSD and in the feathered or the mother ayahuasca, but in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the way the truth in the life. No one comes to the father, but through him, he's the one who knows the way in and out of death. You are not just a brain on a stick. You're not just stuff. Consciousness

is not just a result of the body. You're correct about that. But it's because you have an immaterial soul and you're an image bear of God. And so we would encourage you to believe and be saved. Yes, indeed. It's funny also that he's like, look, be kind to everybody. Except Christians. That's the thing is, as far as I know, he's never explicitly expressed, you know, like open animosity. Right. Like death to the Christians. You know, his parents were Catholics.

It seemed like he liked his parents well enough. But, you know, he went to the Catholic school and he was just sort of rebellious the whole time. And it is ironic. Yeah. That, and I certainly don't think he's a unique case in this regard. No. Where he was raised Christian, was never really. one of faith himself, apostatized, took up this lifestyle of DMTUs, and is now very compassionate

to every worldview, except the one that he was raised with and apostatized from. It just shows you that, this is one of the greatest apologetics for the Christian faith, is that over and over again, you will find that it is the one thing you're not allowed to believe. Would you like to get control of your money and set up a system that will guarantee for the rest of your life, tax-protected compounding interest and growth? How about having 24-7 electronic access to your money for funding wisely chosen investments, home improvements, and other large expenditures without going to the mainstream banks? This is not a dream, but can be a reality when working with our sponsor Private Family Banking. You can find their contact information in the show notes below.

To make this season even brighter, Private Family Banking is giving away a pair of tickets for the upcoming Blueprints for Christendom 2.0 conference hosted by Wright Response Ministries. It's a $500 value taking place March 1st through the 3rd in 2024 in Taylor, Texas. To enter the ticket giveaway, join Private Family Banking's email list by sending an email to banking at privatefamilybanking.com with the subject line, tickets in all caps, and include your full name and mailing address in the body of the email. The ticket entry period will end at midnight central time on February 13th in 2024, and the winner will be notified via email on February 14th.

You must be 18 years of age or older to enter, and only one email per person can be entered into this giveaway. Thank you. It's like, yeah, Buddhism, Eastern mysticism, spiritualism, whatever it is, theosophy, you can have any of that. That's cool. In fact, man, that's so interesting. Yeah.

But Christianity? That's like really lame. And evil. And they're so evil. Like they battled against progress. Where the story of history, like you see this laid out in many different areas with like the, a lot of times Islam has talked about this way. It was like the Christian just went and they did all this, you know, they kind of like oppressed this religion of peace. And it's like if you actually look at the history, you'll find that Christians absolutely sinned and sinners.

We're not like, it's not part of an endorsement of the Crusades. Part of our belief as Christians is that. people are bad, like, apart from the grace of God. In Christians also still sinning. Yeah. That's actually a whole thing in the New Testament. Right. Is Paul's like, no, you guys still... Stop sinning. You still wrestle with the old man.

Like, stop sinning. Christians, stop doing that stuff. Even the pagans don't do that. Like, Christians still sin. So, but the point being that they often want to reduce it down, they're correct in a war between two spiritualities. Yeah. But they just misread all of, all of history.

I'm confident to say that when they misread, they present it as Christians are basically holding up progress and they're the source of all this animosity. And there's just, well, no, no, no. Again, think back to the type of civilizations that are created by the practices, the very practices that he is putting forward. These Islamic countries full of sex slaves

and people impaled on sticks on the side of the road is not really the thing that you want to live in, and you can thank Christendom for you not doing that right now. Also, if you time traveled back to, like, many of these societies, all of a sudden you find yourself in, like, the ancient Aztec world, you're still beating heart would likely be ripped from your chest within days of your appearance by people tripping on, you know, basically LSD. Yeah, exactly.

So we're still a seven, you know. Basically, the thing is simply don't want that. No. And don't fall into this lie that a lot of like the modern intelligence, yeah, academic have sold us that if it wasn't for Christianity, we would be miles beyond where we are now. That's the most laughable proposition that has potentially been told in the modern world full stop. Everything good in society is because of the law of God written in His Word that's been applied to society, to the church, and to the state, and to the individual. even when people who are not Christians

have the conscience within them and obey it, it's even like Romans 1. They are lots of themselves even. So now what's interesting to me as well, this may be a really hard, do you have anything else before we go on our clothes? Well, I was going to say,

one of the fascinating things that I saw on one of the Wikipedia pages that I was on that I didn't save because I didn't think it was that important at the time and then couldn't find later was some historian was talking about how people like Plato and Plotonus and Socrates and Euripides and like I think maybe I saw Homer, but maybe not

were initiates in the Elyssinian mysteries. Really? Yes. Wow. And that a lot. Harry Paul? A Vatican, Platonis. That's Owen Wilson as Voldemortembourg.

For people who are. haven't been on the show before. For people who haven't seen that one Instagram real that we saw months ago. And ripped off. And have never let go. Later in a show. Wow.

Okay. Anyway. So, and then they're saying that like Aristotle and Plato got a lot of their philosophies from whatever truth was revealed to them in the L.E. Cynian mystery, which is difficult for me, partly because you read Aristotle and you're like, that's pretty good. He's not like just trust the innocuous. Right. Like, he's a pagan. He was, you know, but you read it and you're like, wow, that's some, what a keen ability to read the book of nature. This man is displaying right here. You know what I mean? In fact, I'm not agreeing with this. I'm just saying how on the, how on the nose he was. John of Damascus, who's one of the first apologist in the church, thought that Aristotle was divinely inspired in his writings. Just, and he was no slouch. He was no stupid person. And it just goes to show.

how confusing it gets when you get into the subtlety of the lie. Now, I don't know if Aristotle actually did that. That's just one historian who's like, yeah, I read it somewhere that he took part in the mysteries. But it is something interesting to think about. And it does kind of lend credence to the idea that these people aren't just wasting time. I always go back to this. Like pagan worship, hermetic rights, Gnostic rights, people are not just wasting time. Yeah.

Because God's not capricious. He doesn't command capital punishment for a waste of time. Right. He commands capital punishment for horrible idolatry that leads to human sacrifice. Shamanism and witchcraft and what we're describing was a capital crime. Yes, capital crime. And so anyway, it's just something else to chew on. Yeah, just generally speaking, what we're saying is that these drugs don't just produce brain states.

No. That give the illusion of these things, but that actually people are experiencing communion with real things spiritual entities. Yeah. And that they're not wrong about that. Yeah, one of the, one of the big conclusions that I have from all this research is that, is that they're not seeing something that's not real. Right. You know, it's not realer than real. Staying by that. Yeah. But I think that they're experiencing things that are real in a, in a conscious and spiritual sense. Very much like how Christ's body is spiritually present in the supper, I think that these things are actually spiritually real

and they're actually experiencing them. I think it's important for people to understand because a lot of people have a default, again, one of the big points to show is to fight against the default materialism that our culture tends to have and re-mythologize the world, you know, bring the wonder back.

One of the things that people often just assume is that their mind is their brain or it's just a brute phenomenon of their brain. And I want you to think, think about that for a moment. If that's, first of all, there are many good reasons to think that's not true. But if that were true, it would be the end of science and knowledge itself. Yeah. Because it would be brute determinism. Because then your thoughts would just be the mere result of physical processes, which are brutally deterministic. Theoretically, could be predicted. Yeah. If you

actually knew all the variables. Right. You could actually accurately predict every single thing in the future if you knew all of the variables if that were true. And you couldn't, you couldn't actually conclude that your thoughts were reliable. No. Indicators of anything. They're just brain states. Right. And they certainly wouldn't be free thoughts. You wouldn't be driven by a libertine desire, which is what the scriptures teach, that we actually do things based on desires we actually have. We have a will. It's the establishment of second causes. Yeah. But you lose that completely. Yeah, it just goes away. If you boil everything down to synapses and quirks moving around in your brain. Ungit's discussion of consciousness is an important part of this is that,

be careful that you don't make, you have to understand that consciousness itself is not something science can directly observe. Even when we're through an MRI or some other technology observing brain states, we're not observing consciousness. Even the fact that certain activities like memory retrieval

or a certain playing the piano or something is associated with different brain states does not mean that what you're observing in those brain states is the consciousness itself. A metaphor that you frequently use is really helpful here. And what you're saying is why we don't consider people with Down syndrome, for example, as subhuman. They're still humans.

They're worthy of protection and love and care, all these things. And it's because the body, which includes the brain, is like an instrument. You think about it like an instrument. And the soul is the thing that's playing it. Or the consciousness, you know, however you want to delineate those things, is the thing that's playing it. And sometimes the instrument can be faulty, but the soul is still there trying to play it, doing the best, and it actually is required to do the best that it can to play with what it's been given. Yeah, with the instruments given.

But if you reduce it all down to materialism, which even functionally this is doing that in a way, then you lose that. You actually lose the value of human life because you lose human beings as image bearers that have been endowed with the breath of life from God. Yeah. The only thing in creation that was given the breath of life is man. Yeah. And when you reduce consciousness down to the brain activity, then that is completely wiped away.

Yeah. And you no longer have a reason to value human life more than the fly that you just swatted off the wall. Right. And while all analogies are going to be very incomplete or oversimplifications, it is important to understand that, that when we're talking about you have to be careful as well not to commit the post. talk, ergo proctor hawk fallacy. Like, after this, therefore, because of this, that just because you observe a brain state that's associated with certain activities of the consciousness, does not mean that you've observed the cause. Yeah. No. You actually can't infer that. So consciousness is not, it's, I think in the book, Lewis says it's opaque to science is one way that you could put

it. It's not observable to science. It's categorically outside of the things that science can actually see and investigate. That's why consciousness is such a mystery and such a difficult problem for materialists who have to come up with elaborate theories, epiphenomenalism, and different theories are trying to say, okay, where does consciousness come from? There's another theory that panpsychism is a theory that's discussed in one of the epilogues, not epilocks, appendices of the book, that basically, like, it's the idea that all matter has some kind of consciousness, but that it then requires something like

the brain for that to be expressed to know that it has consciousness. Which is just pan in theism with more steps. Yeah, also work cited, I made it up. You have to take it completely by faith. Right, yeah, exactly. That the rock has a kind of consciousness just like you do, and that because you have this evolved mechanism of the brain, you can interact. But this post hoc aeroproctor hawk fallacy is also, you can call it chronological snobbery

in some way because it essentially says like, well, we've reached the peak of human knowledge thus far, which is arguable, actually. And so now the smallest thing that we can observe must be the cause. That's essentially what it's saying is when you cut the atom and then the proton spill out and then you cut the proton and all the quarks spill out, that's the smallest thing that you know of. Yeah. So therefore, that's the cause of everything. Now you've explained it. When you take the MRI and you see the brain activity occurring, which is very amazing, by the way. It's amazing, yeah. And you can light up all the different regions of the brain.

That's crazy. But that's not the smallest thing. You would even admit that's not the smallest thing. So therefore, how do you have the hubris to say, oh, well, because that's the most advanced setting we have on the machine, and that's the most basic observation that we can make, that therefore is somehow the cause. You haven't actually answered anything either. You're just saying somehow that's the cause.

You've just labeled a thing in arrogance. You have no actual way of knowing whether or not that claim that you've just made is true. So anyway, that's kind of, we just got kind of off topic. We did a little bit. And you know what, who cares? Let me give you a perfect segue. Some of the beings that people see in these states, there's many. I mean, they see the serpent as one of them. There are, they see aliens. Yep. They see, uh, something called machine elves. That's my favorite name for anything ever. It's like elves, elves. One of the funniest aspects of this, we're going to get into the, the closing story,

which we'll touch on some of these things. But is that apparently some of the machine elves are racist. Seriously? Yeah, there's stories. If you Google this racist machine elves, you'll find that there are stories of people who have had trips,

and they'll go and they'll talk to these beings, these machine elves, and they're like using racial slurs. Wow. And they're very racist. So apparently, apparently the psychedelic world is also not the problem to all human issues.

It's not the solution to all human problems, is what I meant to say. Is the devil a racist? If the devil was a racist, wouldn't you want to be the race that he's prejudiced against? Because would that mean that he just kind of like leaves you alone? So whatever the machine elves hate, I'm like, I want to be like, I want to be that. I want to be like, yeah, absolutely. Whatever it is. I think we've lost some of our audience.

No, I'm just kidding. You guys are too chill for that. So I think we're ready. Yeah, I think we are ready. To prime the pump as we go into the closing story, because we're going to leave you with a statement and we really want you to think about it, is that the deception of the DMT trip

doesn't leave itself in a secular place. It actually tries to intrude upon the biblical worldview and repackage it and twist it so that now it's something new. I'm going to say that. that's a little bit cryptic, but just listen to the story and then see if you can make the connection with the final few sentences of the episode. And thank you guys for listening to Season 2 of Honest Cosmos.

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But all right, so let's head to the last stories. Terence McKenna was born in November of 1954 in Colorado. As a boy, he loved to hunt for fossils in the local mountains. And this ensured that he was outside. a lot. Being outside is good for a growing boy, and it eventually led to McKenna developing a keen interest in natural sciences. At the age of 14, the lad sat down and cracked open Carl Jung's book Psychology and Alchemy. It was a sponge for any information related to geology, archaeology, psychology, history, biology, you name it. At this same very formative early teenage stage,

McKenna picked up a copy of Life magazine and turned to a story whose title immediately grabbed his attention. Seeking the magic mushroom. Reading this story proved to be a larger turning point in McKenna's life than even he gave it credit for at the time. Little did that 14-year-old know that he would go down in history as a mystic and psychedelic guru for an entire generation. As McKenna's interest in the use and experience of psychedelics increased, so did his interest in the mystical side of world religions. He traveled through the Far East to learn shamanism from Tibetan masters. He traveled to Jerusalem to study the mystic cabala and grow in his knowledge of ethnobotany. It was on this trip that he met the woman who would someday become his wife, Kathleen Harrison.

He went back to Tibet and worked as a hashish smuggler for the shamans there as he steadily became an encyclopedic resource of knowledge on visionary plants of the region. The man even spent time as a butterfly collector in Indonesia. Bottom line, say what you will about the guy, but he can't be accused of not having range. As time wore on, McKenna's public reputation as a leading voice of what exactly psychedelics mean at a metaphysical level began to take shape. He would be sought after by publications, universities, and conferences, some more credible than others, to comment on or speak to his own experiences and how it connects to broader issues of consciousness and man's telos in life. This is when he really started to talk a lot about how, sometimes on these trips, one can

expect to meet face to face with something that is most certainly an intelligent being. They're sometimes humanoid and sometimes not, but they're certainly real. He claimed that it's as though they exist as counselors or tormentors or helpers, depending on which one of them you run into, in an interdimensional world parallel to our own. He even had a name for these things. Now, to be fair, he casually referred to them as demons or angels and the like sometimes, but he didn't like constraining them to such dogmatic and traditional terms. He preferred the more progressive name, Machine Elves. The intrigue of the name itself reflects a myriad of different forms these beings may take. They may appear as sentient geometrical patterns that shift and fold in upon

themselves like some sort of living fractal kaleidoscope. They may rise up from the ground as chimeras of some kind, a minotaur or centaur or Pegasus from old folk tales. They might look like black humanoid elves that you might imagine in a North Pole-themed haunted house at Christmas time. They might be serpentine. They might look like an old sage wizard or a great tree or a dark tower. Who knows? Maybe they will appear to you as a wheel within a wheel cover with eyes. With whatever form they take, though, it will certainly have a message for you.

Terrence McKenna died of a brain tumor in 2000. In 1999, in response to a question about how he felt about his upcoming death, he said, When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity shining through every leaf. I mean a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears. Dr. Rick Strassman had worked hard for two years to finally be at this point. His volunteer, a man he calls Phil, sat in the chair in front of him with his girlfriend, Robin, sitting off to the side, observing.

For two years, Strassman fought for approval and funding just to do what he was about to do with his now friend. The tension in the room was a bit high, at least for the doctor, as he readied the syringe and leaned forward to face Phil's eyes. He rubbed his arm with a cotton swab of alcohol and a spot the size of a wallet. After this, he gently pinched the skin and pushed the needle into fill. He steadily squeezed the syringe dry and removed the needle. A high dose of DMT was just given to the subject,

and Strassman waited, eager and ready to record all that he could glean, from whatever it was this man was about to experience. Strasman was a keen researcher, and after hearing about the work done by Dr. Griffiths at John Hopkins University, was eager to see if he could take the studies further by using purer forms of DMT instead of the slightly weaker psilocybin. Additionally, he was very interested in these machine elves

that he'd read about from Terence McKenna. To Strassman, it sounded like Terence was closer to some grand religious and metaphysical theory of everything than he gave himself credit for. Thus, he diligently noted the experiences of his subjects in his research in order to further solidify his own conclusions before making them public. In his book, The Spirit Molecule, a doctor's revolutionary research into the biology of near-death and mystical experiences, Strassman details the following experience of one subject that, to us, is alarming. I'll be paraphrasing the account.

given by the doctor for you all. Sarah sat in the chair and took deep breaths as Dr. Strassman injected the DMT directly into her veins. It was the first of what would be five total doses, with each dose increasing in quantity. She placed the eye shade over her face and descended, or ascended, whatever, into a sound that started as a low hum and built up to become a rushing wind carrying her away. She left her body and got the sense that it was just her, the real her now. The colors that surrounded her were aggressive and horrifying. It was a new world. It wasn't a dream, which is a mocking veneer of our real world.

It was a new place altogether. It made it seem like colors on Earth were just a dream version of the real things. She felt completely abandoned and alone, the last being in the entire universe, lost in a void of kaleidoscopic color that was an eternal trap. As the hyperspeed flying slowed, she heard angelic voices singing above her, but they brought no comfort. They weren't there to help her,

but merely to observe her wallowing in misery and she knew it. They sang in her despair only ripened. A male entity came to her and tried to communicate telepathically. He told her that she'll see something, but she can't understand what she'll see. The confusion adds to the chaos raging within her. She comes back to the room and re-enters her body, unsettled. By the third dose, the aggressive washing machine of colors had become routine to Sarah,

and so she was able to relax more. Though the first experience terrified her, it left her with an intense sense of love, weirdly, and so she was eager to go back for more. Fear deferred will turn us all into masochists, I suppose. A fairy creature prompted Sarah to go deeper into the technicolor void, but she was reluctant to do so. The pause was long enough for the drug to wear off, and she came back to herself. On the next trip, she shot out of her body and into the floating void quickly and with great ease.

Suddenly, cloaked entity surrounded her, and she somehow knew they were very glad to see her there. She let her guard down to embrace the moment with these creatures, so obviously benevolent. They told her how glad they were that humans had discovered and were beginning to better understand this technology. They informed her that human beings exist on many levels with the physical being the lowest form. Nonetheless, they did seem very keen on learning more about her physical body. They were very concerned with her well-being and concluded this meeting with the exhortation to her to embrace peace. In the final trip, she was able to skip the wild hurricane of color. and just go straight into deep space.

The cloaked beings were there waiting for her. They spoke of great knowledge that they were ready to share with mankind once man was able to extend their contact times with the beings. They wanted Sarah out of the world altogether to be with them forever, and she was sure this was for her good, or so they told her. She could not escape the feeling that they wanted something from her, something more than just physical data. She told them that she could give them spirituality

and love from within herself, and so she did. She conjured love to her side. She grabbed it with her cosmic arm and reached her arm across the cosmos, like a bridge into the supernatural and unseen world. They accepted her gift, and she says they cherished it. She, though, ended up feeling disappointed. They had promised to give so much to her,

but somehow they had only taken. Accounts like this one, and countless more, led Dr. Strassman to eventually publish another book titled, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, a new science of spiritual revelation in the Hebrew Bible. In it, he makes the connection, which he believes to be ironclad, between these machine-elf-type entities

so many of his subjects encountered, and the angelic descriptions in the Bible. Specifically, he finds great parallels between the machine-elf entity and the ophonym, or eye-covered wheels within wheels that accompanied the living creatures in Ezekiel's vision by the Chabar Canal.

He uses this connection to bolster his new theory of prophecy, Theo-neurology. According to Strassman, this is a top-down theory of how the divine is revealed to man. When man ingests the spirit molecule of DMT and other psychedelics like it, they will certainly encounter the divine realm. His theory is that whatever information or revelation

is gleaned from the encounter. center in this realm is divine revelation. It's polytheism, it's worthy of scorn. It's also proof that the ranks of saints in Christ church militants still have great dragons to slay in the world. We don't kill the dragon by going to meet them on a psychedelic trip, no. We wrestle not as with flesh and blood. So then, modern man, put on the armor of Christ and his word, and go do your fighting against the powers and principalities. Want more hunted cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content as well as exclusive content in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. So go to patreon.com slash hauntedcosmos

and sign up now.