This is a really fantastic book. I've never been a religious person but I always had a feeling that psychedelics were involved in early religion and if any of this is true then it's really interesting how early Christian churches tried to suppress the use of psychedelics because they wanted to control the religious experience.
Kinda made me dislike modern churches even more.
I love me some Jesus but I detest organized religion. Churchy, sanctimonious peeps can bite me!
There's a lot of evidence in this book that points towards Jesus actually being a Dionysian figure. Jesus basically took over the role of Dionysus and Baccuas.
I take that evidence with a grain of salt. Again, I'm not religious. I've never really studied the Bible. And this guy does a lot of speculation based off of some really thin evidence. But it's still pretty fascinating As someone who's used plenty of psychedelics.
Dionysus WAS, among other cool things, the god of ecstasy. That is not only the purview of devout religion; it is also that of an enriched life.
It was absolutely fascinating. Having experience with psychedelics, I can absolutely relate. But what was fascinating is the author has never used them, specially so he wouldn’t be biased towards them.
I tried to take my personal experience out of the equation and focus on his evidence (an impossible task). Bit he has facts after facts that support the use of early psychedelics. It’s certainly speculation to connect the dots, but it’s not unrealistic.
I think one of the most fascinating things was people who had been blind their entire lives “seeing” VIVID images during their journey. That’s wild!
