Green IslandA Happy Trippy Christmas
December 15th 2008 13:17
Jesus with magic mushrooms. Picture is from 12th century psalter in Canterbury, UK
John Marco Allegro who was on the original team of academics who studied the Dead Sea Scrolls believed without a shadow of doubt that the DSS proved that Christianity had grown from a magic mushroom cult. His thesis boils down to the assertion that Jesus is basically a big fly agaric mushroom.
Others have run with this obviously reasonable idea. On one blog some inspired bloke has pointed out that fly agaric when soaked in water feels like human skin and hence Jesus’ alleged exhortation at the last supper to “eat this bread, this is my body.” He was telling them all to get trippy. Further evidence of Jesus mushroom-ism is found in the story of the wedding at Cana. The guests had polished off all the cheap Bulgarian red and the fit birds were threatening to blow the party. So to stop the do turning into a sausage fest they got the bearded trippy dude to piss into a big pot of water. As we all know when a chronic shroom head pisses it comes out reddish orange and when mixed with water makes a powerful leg opening cocktail, and so ‘J’ from Nazareth saved the party. The night was a total success, Dave, whose party it was, got some action and Carl Cox played a blinding set. And from that very day onwards that smelly jobless dude who liked hanging out with fishermen was hailed in Cana as a party god.
After Jesus finally hung up his robe, few people in the Roman world seemed interested in worshipping some homeless drug addict. The big J just couldn’t compete with those fit Roman gods who were all 6 packs and impressive pectorals so the early Church leaders decided to hijack the biggest party night of the year, the Winter Solstice. A very gay bloke who went by the appellation of ‘Julian’ fiddled with the calendar and made the 25th fall on the day of the solstice. At the same time they started tinkering with spin doctoring: to make Jesus of Nazareth appeal beyond the shroom cliques of downtown Jerusalem they started bigging him up as the saviour of our sins and the son of god.
At first the Christmas thing was slow to get off the ground. They even got Justin Timberlake to do a Christmas gig but hardly anyone showed up. The people were stubbornly sticking to paganism; they still all preferred worshiping ‘Mithra’ the Roman god of light; which made perfect sense because during the three days prior to the solstice the sun seems to just hang there feebly in the sky. On the night of the solstice the sun starts it’s ascent in the northern sky and the days get longer. And so Mithra was bringing the light in and since December 25th was also the birthday of Bacchus (god of hangovers) everybody got bladdered and headed to Cream or Stonehenge and ignored all that stuff put out by Julian and his gay ilk.
It wasn’t until 300 C.E (AD) that the early church leaders really got their shit together. They found their perfect poster boy in Bishop Nicholas from Turkey. He was a jolly looking chap with a happy guffaw who had built up a solid rep as a thoroughly decent sort who kept giving stuff to the poor and needy. Instead of reprimanding him for not collecting church dues the early Church leaders decided to push the idea of Nicholas giving presents out on Christmas Day. Retailers all around the world realised the commercial possibilties of Christmas and so changed Turkish Nick into Santa Claus and have been making a killing ever since. Santa also made perfect sense to the Germans who had a god called Odin who also had a big beard and flew around the icy climes of Northern Europe. Over time the ministry of misinformation managed to meld all these ideas together and plugged away at the viral marketing until everyone seemed to forget about Mithra, Odin and Winter Solstice. Instead the people started thinking that Jesus of Nazareth was born in a barn on December 25th and that marked the beginning of our salvation from original sin.
Santa the big fly agaric
The greatest irony of all this is that Jesus never existed. He is just a symbol for a big magic mushroom; namely Amanita Muscaria or as it is commonly known, fly agaric. Since the dawn of man these bulbous little red and white fellas have been leading the way. Before kiddy fiddling priests tried to mediate between man and his maker, human kind intuited the spiritual realm through the investigation and worship of nature. Throughout the world they happed upon entheogenic substances that literally opened their minds. Terence Mckenna in his book Food of the Gods points out that early man doubled his brain size in a mere 200,000 years and this mental development represented “the most spectacular transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.” Bearing this in mind, it is possible to see how the story of the Garden of Eden and the tree of knowledge is from an older age when man was inspired by natural psychedelics. The snake is the shamanistic bringer of knowledge and the casting out of paradise and needing to wear clothes refers to a certain change in climate which put a nip in the air that killed the shrooms and caused the need to wrap up more. What with the weather turning shitty and no more magic mushrooms no wonder the earliest folk felt like God had abandoned them.
Amanita Muscaria or fly agaric
I could carry on pontificating about drugs and early religion for endless paragraphs but I really want to get on to the story part of my Christmas blog. However, before I do I would just like to mention that in one stage of its growth the amanita muscari’s head reverses and looks like a cup and not a hood. This is the Holy Grail that the big J passed around and also the lost Hiram Key of some pharaoh dude who was holding out because he was down to his last couple of hits. Indeed, the philosopher stone, the Masonic lapis, the Holy Grail, the Hiram Key, Hermes Staff, UFOs, DNA, Jesus and the missing continent of Atlanta are all linked to magic mushrooms. The magic mushroom is the Rosetta Stone by which we can translate the remaining traces of ancient cultures.
And so it seems obvious to my festive mind that the whole weight of mankind’s collective wisdom points to the need to have a psychedelic Christmas. And indeed my experience of over 30 Christmases points to the very same conclusion. I’ve dressed up as a woman and sung Last Christmas to my Chinese students; I’ve slept on a beach in India with a bird who was so ropey I didn’t make a move and I’ve refused to answer the phone on Christmas day in Japan for fear that my Japanese boss would invite me to a tortuous meal. Last year I passed out at 9pm on Christmas day in a restaurant on a beach in Thailand. Last year was somewhat better but I’ve only had one really memorable Christmas. And that was over ten years ago when I went back to the tiny town of my childhood to spend the holiday with my mum and brother. That year I bought back a bag full of liberty caps.
Magic mushroom, Horoshima and UFO
That Christmas Eve turned out to be a blinder of a day. After breakfast my brother and I made our excuses to mum and disappeared up to my old room. There we had the obligatory Christmas chillum and scoffed 60 odd shrooms each. Then we headed back downstairs and told mum we were off on a wholesome walk in the country to blow away the cobwebs. To our dear mum it seemed a bit of a desertion but I promised to come back later and help her stuff the turkey and that seemed to cheer her up.
Off we plodded down remote muddy lanes. Thirty minutes into our nature stroll the psilocybin started conducting my synapses to a rousing melody. Just then Jesus rode past on a phat scrambler bike and gave us the good news that ‘work’ was the creation of Beelzebub or the anti mushroom and that the Big J had personally brought into being the lottery, unemployment benefit and higher education just to combat this powerful heresy. Before parting our saviour with the big bulbous red head gave us a couple of tokes on his Hermes Staff joint that he had just got last week in the ‘dam. That couple of tokes was mightier than a Moroccan micky finn and after Jesus Amanita Christ blew off in a right racket of revving and splattered mud we felt a bit light headed and decided to rest under a large umbrageous tree in the forest. As we lay on the wet leaves giggling we saw nature throbbing all around us. The shitty grey sky became a masterpiece of minimalism and my spirit expanded to commune with the ancient British woodland.
The Last Judgement by Jacob Van Campen. Clearly Jesus is coming out of a mushroom
We reclined in the tumultuous silence of the forest for what seemed an eternity before I remembered about my rash turkey promise. So reluctantly we plodded home doing that mysterious hippy trick of pulling ourselves together. We tripped over the door step and fell into the house. My brother wisely vanished upstairs and left me to face the stuffing ordeal. The white pimply skin of the bird seemed so ugly and my hands full of glop seemed hilarious. I made a few wry comments and started laughing. Mother for some unknown reason (perhaps she’d started on the bottle) also started laughing. It didn’t take long before neither of us could stifle our fits of hysterics. It was ten minutes before we dried our eyes and completed the job.
With the Christmas Eve preparations all done, mother and I did what nearly all British families do at Christmas time – we sat in the front room complaining about the shitty repeats and Romanian nativity cartoon on TV. The Jesus toke had lost its buzz and the shrooms had dulled in intensity. I managed a sandwich and near coherent chat. My brother had already gone out to meet up with some old school friends and mother offered to give me some money to buy a bottle at the offie and stop off for a pint on the way back from town. Being the bad son that I am I took the proffered cash and was soon out in the dark cold night drifting into ‘town’. Town consisted of a couple of streets with a few pubs. I got to the offie before it closed and was served by a young woman in her early 20s. She had mousey hair and a slim build and one of those cute elfin faces made a bit secretary saucy by a pair of glasses. I lingered over the purchase of a cheap bottle of blended whisky and attempted a bit of Christmas banter. To my surprise she wasn’t put off by my off kilter demeanour and agreed to pop over to the pub opposite for a pint with me when she finished locking up.
It’s amazing how the mojo is so strong that it can force it’s way to the fore even when the brain its sending back distracting messages about the wondrous nature of beer froth and the perfect symmetry of the bog tiles; but sure enough while sitting there with Peach (I remember she had a name to do with fruit), getting to know each other a little, I got the horn. My mushroom downstairs was ready for engorged action. Leaving the pub we snogged in the archway of a door and she invited me back to her parents’ place.
A ten minute walk and an attempted hushed entry into her home and we were rolling around on the mattress on the floor of her room. I got the full benefit and my addled state meant that she got more than two minutes in heaven. After, we quaffed whisky from the bottle and smoked some of her weed which although inferior to Jesus’ stash had the desired effect of making me pass out.
I woke on Bacchus’s birthday with a hazy recollection of doing something a bit wild the day before. I turned in bed to see a young naked bird in bed with me. What a result. I got dressed, said Merry Christmas to Peach and grabbed the half empty Whyte and Mackay from the floor. Then I happily stepped out into the freezing cold and headed home.
And although the story is about Christmas Eve, I got my oats after 12 so that makes it technically Christmas. And the point is that maybe there is some truth to all those religious conspiracies about Jesus, mushrooms and the high points of human evolution. I got high, I met Jesus, I had a laugh with my mum and I got laid all because of the genius of magic mushrooms. I can’t say that my brain doubled in size or that I managed to pen a masterpiece but for once the big day wasn’t soured by forced good cheer, overeating and lousy TV. So to all my readers I say have a trippy Solstice and let the light into your life.
Picture of Santa as a shrooms is taken from:
nmazca.com
Picture of UFO, mushroom cloud and mushroom is taken from:
Really Long Link
Picture of Jesus with the shrooms is taken from:
www.thebirdman.org
Thanks to:
Little Rich for showing me what a magic mushroom looked like
The sweet girl at the offie
My readers
| 52 |
| Vote |
subscribe to this blog
