Dying Before You Die
Every time I come across Christ’s demand that his followers eat his body and drink his blood, I’m like damn, that is some real edgelord shit. But to many first century observers, cannibalistic rites would not have been so strange; the figure of Christ, with his wine and his true vine, his body and blood, would have been immediately recognized by most as none other than Dionysius, the son of Zeus, who, dying and resurrecting every year, demanded that his own initiates—way before Christ—eat his flesh and drink his blood. This ritual was itself derived from the older realm of myth in which the wicked Titans, after capturing the baby Dionysius (distracted by a mirror), roasted and devoured him and then were promptly annihilated by a lightning bolt from father Zeus; the smoke from which became humanity, made of the Titan’s more wicked impulses but tempered by a spark of the divine—the remnants of the infant son of god.
The authors of the Christ figure, hoping to fast-track their new religion, appropriated the already viral god Dionysius, furnishing their new messiah with the popular memes of antiquity. The death and resurrection is yet another familiar meme that would have been understood as the mystical experience par excellence: the katabasis—or journey down, a trip to the underworld and back, and not only made by Dionysius. Aeneas, for example, flaky hero of Virgil’s roman nationalist epic poem The Aeneid (BCE 19), desiring to visit his recently deceased dad in the underworld, asks the witch Sybil how to get there. “It’s easy to go to hell,” she tells him (truer words were never spoken). “The door is open night and day: / but to retrace your steps, and go out to the air above, / that is work, that is the task.” In order to go to hell and back again, Aeneas must find the golden bough (Yes, that golden bough), a kind of mistletoe vine, “golden in leaves and pliant stem,” a bough sacred to Persephone, infernal queen of the underworld; in other words, a psychoactive bough.
Persephone, goddess of spring, had been worshipped, along with her mother, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, for at least two thousand years (if not more) in the wildly popular mystery cults, those yearly raves of dancing and singing by which initiates performed a collective journey to the underworld in a highly ritualized spectacle, a simulated near death experience brought about by the kukeon, a psychoactive cocktail, mixed up by priestesses (a role given exclusively to women), and, in the more popular rural version of the mysteries, was presided over by the god of the vine, the pharmakon, scapegoat, and original edgelord, Dionysius. To eat the god was to take the drug.
The resulting altered state was known as telestic madness, or divine ecstasy—one of four in Plato’s taxonomy of madness. So the mystery cults were not so much a religion as an experience, an event after which one’s mental life would have been radically re-organized. One of the mysteries of the mystery cult was its fantastic success rate, generating a near universal enthusiasm that would spread throughout Rome and the levant; as far as we can tell, everyone in ancient Greece—and I mean everyone—did the mystery cult. Not until Plato and the dawn of Greek rationalism do the mystery cults begin to be criticized: Socrates says that dancing women don’t have philosophy—go figure. But it was ecstasy, not rationalism, (nor mere drunken stupor), that was the occult source of the “Greek cheerfulness” that so astonished Nietzsche; the radical affirmation of life and death.
The language of conversion that animates the gospels and the letters of St. Paul is yet another appropriation of the popular “dying before you die,” that was once the very potent death-of-the-self common to the mysteries—an ecstatic death that we would recognize today as a certain kind of psychedelic experience. This technique for traversing the limits of psyche (going to hell and back), so popular among the “irrational Greeks,” infers that they were rather more in touch with the Real than is our own benighted culture—despite all our science (or because of it).
Shortly these techniques would be lost to time, transformed under a repressive Christianity into the purely symbolic placebo eucharist still practiced to this day. Mysticism and the limits of psyche would now be policed by holy church, its transgression punished by death. The violent persecution—in the name of christ—of women, pagans, infidels, heretics and the use of pharmakeia would characterize the new era, the “thousand years of stasis” (as McKenna calls it) otherwise known as Christendom.
Dionysus riding on a tiger
