Читать книгу Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras - Carl Ruck - Страница 7

When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed—and, rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it:

Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest! For ten years hast thou climbed hither unto my cave: thou wouldst have wearied of thy light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine eagle and my serpent.

Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it. I would fain bestow and distribute, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.

Therefore must I descend into the deep: as thou doest in the evenings, when thou goest behind the sea, and givest light also to the netherworld, thou exuberant star!

Bless the cup that is about to overflow, that the water may flow golden out of it, and carry everywhere the reflection of thy bliss! Lo! This cup is again going to empty itself, and Zarathustra is again going to be a man.

Thus began Zarathustra’s down-going.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra’s

Prologue, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem, Opus 30, 1896, was inspired by Nietzsche’s lyric parable of the quasi-mythical Persian prophet known to the Greeks as Zoroaster, a possible contemporary of Moses and the heretical pharaoh Akenaten. The music’s ecstatic “Dawn Fanfare” was used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That is all that most people know about a religion that arose in what is now Iran some 3,000 to 3,500 years ago. Zarathustra’s belief in a single solar god, Ahura Mazda, became the religion of Persia until the Arabic Muslims invaded in 650 CE, and the Zoroastrians, for the most part, fled. Today they are reduced to some 200,000 adherents, mostly located in India, although a few have established themselves in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere. Reluctant to proselytize in general and specifically forbidden in their former homeland and most Muslim countries, they maintain a low profile in the modern world. Zoroastrians worship the Sun and the purifying power of fire, with little awareness, at least in public, of their own ancient traditions. In India, mostly in Bombay, they are known as Parsis (or Farsis), which simply means Persians; in their former Iranian homeland, they are called Gabars, which means “infidels.” Zoroastrianism also survived in medieval alchemical symbolism, and its traditions even fused with Islam in the mystical Muslim theology of the Sufis.

Zarathustra may have invented monotheism, or he was, at least, probably its earliest proponent. Although often dated to the seventh century BCE, estimates sometimes place him almost a millennium earlier, foreshadowing Judaism and the solar cult of the Egyptian pharaoh Akenaten, a tradition that continued into Christianity and Islam. Akenaten reduced the other deities to aspects of the One God, reforming a still older religion of opposed forces of light and darkness, goodness and evil.

In the reformed religion, Mithras, who was originally one of the four great deities, became an intermediary with the One God, much like Christ with the Father. The original religion was very much older; it was the religion of the Magi, shaman sorcerers, that the Persians brought home with them from the steppes of Central Asia. It was closely related to the religion of the Aryan invaders of India. Thus the earliest texts of Zoroastrianism and those of Hinduism show an extraordinary similarity of language and ideas.

Its sacred text is the Vendidad. The oldest part of it is a collection of hymns called the Gathas, some supposedly written by Zarathustra himself. Over the course of millennia, other texts were added. The entire scripture is called the Avesta, to which commentaries known as the Zand were added, so that the entire sacred text is called the Zand Avesta. The various texts were transmitted orally and were probably codified and finally preserved in the palace library of the Persian Darius and the Achaemenid dynasty (648–330 BCE). The Persian Avesta is comparable to the Sanskrit Rig Veda, a sacred text of Hinduism that originated roughly at the same time and was preserved orally until it was finally recorded in writing in Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages.

The reformed theology was not so much a battle between good and evil as an evocation of the higher potential within man (what Nietzsche termed the Übermensche or Superior Man) by a battle fought by conflicting interests within each individual’s soul, although Nietzsche’s interpretation was directed toward the liberation of man from all forms of theological hypocrisy.

The earlier belief in a cosmic struggle, however, never died out. The basic dualism of the universe surfaced in the medieval Albigensian Cathar Christian heresy in Provence and the Pyrénées, as well as the Bogamils of Bulgaria and Bosnia, the latter probably influenced directly by Persian sources. Even earlier dualism was involved in the numerous Gnostic sects of Christianity, among them Manichaeism, which derived from one of Zoroastrianism’s last prophets, Mani, who saw himself as a follower of Christ and, typical of the syncretism of the ancient world, combined ideas from Buddhism and other central Asian religions.

A version of the Persian religion became popular in the Roman Empire from the first century BCE, centered upon Mithras, who is almost indistinguishable from the Greek hero Perseus. (The former slaughtered a bull, while the latter is known for decapitating the Gorgon Medusa.) Mithraism became one of the dominant religions of the Roman Empire. Although derived from the Zoroastrianism of the Achaemenid monarchs, it had assimilated many additional elements as it passed through the Middle East, including certain astrological metaphors and incorporating the latest discoveries in astronomy. It also absorbed the symbolism of the agricultural fertility cults of Mesopotamia, although its most ancient cultural roots pertained to nomadic hunter peoples of the Asiatic steppes. Nevertheless, even before its advent to the West, many prominent guests of the Persian elite were apparently offered an opportunity to be initiated into something that seems very similar to the Greco-Roman version, and even in its Persian original, it was a brotherhood of warriors cemented by a visionary Eucharist.

Mithraism initiated its members through seven stages of transcendence, culminating with an ecstatic vision in which one journeyed into a sacred realm where one experienced the entire pattern of the Universe, an experience that was expressed in the prevalent Roman philosophical system known as Stoicism.

Mithraism was a fierce competitor with Christianity, as was the more ancient Mystery religion of Eleusis. With the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine and the subsequent persecutions by Theodosius, the sanctuaries where the secret Mithras rituals were practiced were demolished. The Church fathers were well aware of the similarities between the two religions, and they desperately argued that Satan must have had advanced knowledge of the coming of Christ and preemptively mocked the Christian rites. Indeed, as the earlier of these popular Roman religions, Mithraism had a wide and formative influence upon the fledging Christian cult. Despite the loss of Imperial patronage, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the best efforts of the Church Triumphant to relegate it to oblivion, Mithraic traditions survived and even thrived in the esoteric undercurrents of Western civilization, and they do so to this day.

It is essential for our understanding of the Classical heritage of ancient Greece and the spread of Greco-Roman culture to Europe to come to terms with the fact that Western civilization was profoundly influenced by a secret spiritual practice that revolved around the use of entheogenic plants and mushrooms to usher transcendent states of consciousness.