MOTHER MYCELIUM: Kybele, Attis, & the Fruit of the Gods, by Iona Miller, 2020
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/cybele.html
In the rites of Kybele, during fruiting seasons, mushrooms that grew beneath the sacred pines were dried on the tree itself apparently to increase their potency. An effigy of Attis was bound to the trunk of this tree in remembrance of his ritual castration. In celebrations of the Divine Mother Kybele and her Divine Bridegroom Attis, the red and white mushrooms were imagined as little phallic creatures that were bleeding.
The fungi colonize the root system of a host plant and share information. The mass of thread-like mycelium is the 'mother spawn' or 'mother culture' from which the fruiting bodies grow. Fungi also share an intimate relationship with humanity. They shape our consciousness, connection with nature, and perhaps our co-evolution.
Psychoactive substances are historically associated with offensive operations, transgressive and unrestrained sexuality. Mycelium wraps itself around the tangled mychorrizae like the mother-complex of Kybele wraps around the psyche of transgendered Attis.
Some mushrooms heal, while others kill, and some like the ambiguous pharmakon of old can do both. It functions as remedy, poison, and scapegoat. It brings death close as either cure or poison. Psychoactive mushrooms evoke memory -- very deep memory. They can also produce amnesia, convulsions, unconsciousness, and dissociation.
Stan Grof describes how we can tune into the psychic consciousness of animals, plants, or inorganic systems. He says, "transpersonal experience might involve "reentering" or "reexperiencing" of a prepersonal occasion," including oceanic pleromas, archaic images, phylogenetic heritage, or animal/plant identification."
Pure Power of Nature
The human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When Neolithic foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts. Psychedelics reaffirmed their primal alliance with the Virgin Forest.
Civilization is driven by ecological forces and the human mind. A "revolution of symbols" was a conceptual shift. It allowed humankind to imagine gods as supernatural beings resembling humans that existed in a universe beyond the physical world. Even today we follow in the footsteps of our ancestors.
Jung said, "Disalliance with the unconscious is synonymous with loss of instinct and rootlessness." (CW 7, Para 195) "But besides that [Intellect] there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche." (CW 8, Para 794)
We are entangled and embedded in Nature, but have lost touch with its life animating principle. Mycelium becomes a metaphor for our deepest living connections with primordial nature, its unconscious, underground, or chthonic aspects. We can regress to what appears to be the conscious nature of our environment, biosphere, the entire planet, or universe -- the sum of creation.
Such comprehensive vision reveals the plant-based shamanic origins of religion. This is explicit psychedelic mysticism. Psychedelics tend toward harmonization and reconnection of the brain through a 'reset' mode. To go back to our Origins, we must approach "death" as a profound transformation process that reconnects us with the archetype and myth of our origins. First come experiences of the amniotic universe and cosmic engulfment, then the death-rebirth struggle. (Grof)
Animism, a relational way of knowing what we know derived from relations with the environment, was the original basis of religion. Primary or irreducible images stand for themselves and depend on direct experience of feelings or qualities. The death-rebirth motif reflects anomalous body-self experiences and the fundamental process of transformation of the self. As part of the symbolic experience of death, the old self must die before being spiritually reborn.
Deities are central to sharing relationships with the environment, developing communal affairs, and maintaining identity. Both Attis and his plant-god analog are part of the religious motif of the dying-and-rising god, in which a god dies and is resurrected. Animals were guardians of the spirit world. Spirits arise from a sense of disembodied self and mind. Habitual patterns decompose leaving the sense of freshly reborn consciousness. Fear is released producing a sense of great energy. Resetting the brain is life changing.
The ancient body-based sense of awareness is mimetic. Shamanic metaphors are predicated on body, self, animals, and relational others. They include alter-identities and animal allies. Soul-flight is a body image metaphor of transcendence. Body and self image are universal patterns, levels of transformation of meaning, from primitive arousal to imaginal function. Combining memory and perception creates images that affect emotions and communicative interactions.
Emotions drive wide-spread bodily changes, mental states of excitement or perturbation, strong feelings, and impulses toward certain types of behavior. It is a radical change of perspective, self-reference, and reflexive self-awareness. Psychedelics are a phenomenological approach to emotions that first reduce them to a common root then resolve or reunify them.
It may be driven by the desire to worship as much as by the environment. The human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself. Such psychoactive experience is highly convincing and includes energies described as serpentine. Vision serpents reveal the serpentine nature to the world. The "serpent power" is associated with the oldest forms of the Great Goddess, who often had snakes as her familiars, the embodiment of wisdom and rebirth.
The ritual use of psychedelic plants remains the most effective tool for inducing non-ordinary healing and transformative states. The closer we come to the deep core of any archetypal experience the more the numinous effect increases. A confrontation with a divine power not of this world expands the presence of a more-than-human world.
