Like other classical cults, the religion of Dionysus was assimilative, incorporating pre-Hellenic elements into the traditions of the Indo-European migrants to the Greek lands. With newly corrected and updated philological material, this second edition of Maculate Muse will serve as an invaluable reference work for the study of Greek drama. Terms are explained as they occur in each individual context and in relation to typologically similar terminology. Although these terminological entries are arranged in numbered paragraphs resembling a glossary, they can also be read as independent essays on the various aspects of comic obscenity. The latter part of the book identifies all the obscene terminology found in the extant examples of Attic Comedy, both complete plays and fragments. He also looks in detail at the part obscenity plays in each of Aristophanes' eleven surviving plays. His analysis of obscene terminology sheds new light on Greek culture, and his discussion of Greek homosexuality offers a refreshing corrective to the idealized Platonic view. After contrasting the peculiar characteristics of the Greek notion of obscenity to modern-day ideas, Henderson discusses obscenity's role in the development of Attic Comedy, its historical origins, varieties, and dramatic function. This acclaimed book, now in a new edition, offers both a comprehensive discussion of the dynamics of Greek obscenity and a detailed commentary on the terminology itself. The pervasive and unrestrained use of obscenity has long been acknowledged as a major feature of fifth-century Attic Comedy no other Western art form relies so heavily on the sexual and scatological dimensions of language. It survived the Conversion to Christianity in the knighthoods of late antiquity and the medieval world, and was assimilated to the Eucharist of certain of the ecclesiastical elite. The Soma sacrament as the Persian haoma was proselytized to the West by the Zoroastrian priests of Mithras and became a major cohesive indoctrination for the Emperors, army, and bureaucrats who administered the Roman Empire.
Mushrooms, however, were fundamental to social norms and religious observances in the celebration of Dionysus, and figured in other Mystery cults and in the foundational traditions of many cities, including Mycenae and Rome. The possibility that the ancient Greeks indulged in chemically altered consciousness is antithetical to Europe's idealization of Classical antiquity and the proposal was largely ignored. In 1978, he proposed such a role for the visionary potion that was central to the mystical experience of the Greek Eleusinian Mystery, that was celebrated annually for two millennia at a sanctuary near Athens. The identification, if correct, implied that there should be evidence for a similar sacred role for the mushroom in other regions in antiquity where the migrating Indo-European people settled. In 1968 he traced this taboo back to the Vedic Soma, which he identified as a psychoactive mushroom. The article appeared in Life magazine and was intended as publicity for his forthcoming Russia, Mushrooms, and History, in which he and his Russian-born wife Valentina Pavlovna pursued their lifelong fascination with their dichotomous attitudes toward fungi, which had led them to suspect a cultural taboo upon a sacred object.
Secrets of the lost tomb lycanthropy professional#
Gordon Wasson, a professional banker and amateur mycologist, inadvertently launched a profound cultural change that has come to be called the Psychedelic Revolution, by publishing an account of his experience with a Mazatec shaman in Hautla de Jiménez in the mountains of central Mexico. The lycanthropy initiation is a bacchanalian rite of root-cutters and is a motif of warrior brotherhood widespread among the Indo-European peoples. Like the motif of the domestication of the cat, the lycanthropy of Heracles involves the whole family of canines, from the domesticated dog to its wilder antecedents in the wolf and its analogue as the fox. As the beast being initiated, Heracles became a wolf. The deifying milk-flower of the goddess was a ritual of adoption into the family of the celestial deities, that Hera performed also with two other bastard sons of Zeus, Hermes and Dionysus. The event of the lactation of Heracles is depicted on four Etruscan mirrors and a Faliscan-Hellenic red-figure krater. The lily was an analogue of a sacred mushroom, as the narkissos of Persephone’s abduction by Hades.
As the Lion of Nemea, Heracles was the greatest of the wild cats. This was the event that was the mythological origin of the Galaxy and of the lily flower that incarnated the same deifying essence as the celestial milk of the goddess and it was the etiology for the domestication of felines. The obscurantist Hellenistic poet Lycophron referenced the initiation of Heracles as a beast suckling the breast of the goddess Hera.
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