Chris Bennett | Liber 420: Cannabis, Magickal Herbs And The Occult

00:00 Embrace yourself, because you're about to dive into another free first hour episode of the Higher Side Chats. And we just want to let you know that whether your looking for a companion through your paranoid insomnia, entertaining yourself through one of life's mundane activities or trying to ward off the internal screams from all those sad smothered souls around the office THC is here and you should know that every episode of the higher side chats has an entire second hour for plus members Sign up at thehiresitechatsplus.com and you'll get years of Plus Show archives, lifetime forum access a special invite to Greg Carlwood's monthly joint sessions MP3s of THC music bonus episodes tour videos and 10% off t-shirts grinders and whatever else ends up in The HireSite Store It's $8 a month that you won't miss so become a plus member and treat yourself in these troubled times always action packed and commercial free

00:51 Which means you'll unfortunately never hear my voice again. The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm of man Until we've thoroughly tested every last closed chested view Find the more, ya think you know unless you really do Where would we be without THC? We know they're lying to us, just don't know to what degree. Where would we be without THC? The highest side chat show. Great Carl Wood and Company

01:56 Folks, with a name like the higher side chats it's pretty obvious that the glorious green goddess that is Sweet Lady Cannabis is always ever so subtly present in this show's DNA. Because in a backwards age of prohibition to actually form a personal relationship with the herb is in and of itself an act of rebellion and a declaration of sovereignty over one's own consciousness which is oftentimes a dangerous thing to do And it's endlessly frustrating that there is such a long and violent history of death and imprisonment affecting untold numbers of people over centuries in the Empire's persistent quest to control all aspects of the human experience.

02:33 Yet anyone with the eyes to see can clearly recognize this plant's ability to facilitate creative and independent modes of consciousness, and across the board its vast catalogue of uses is so universally positive that one has to wonder if it really is one of the greatest gifts of the gods and enemy number 1 of empires of all ages. Because it facilitated spiritual enlightenment at a time of centralized religious authority, provided a potency boost to the magical rituals of many sects and secret orders forced to hide in the shadows of history. It inspired countless artists to create their masterworks and in more recent times coincidentally threatens the pocketbook in three major areas of control and wealth building that the American elite have been built on fuel medicine and textiles

03:19 So we're left with an inefficient, polluted and hazardous world of oils, plastic, pharmaceutical chemicals, incarceration and forest destroying practices. All the result of systematically removing this one magical plant from the people Well, the tide is thankfully turning as we twist the empire's arm and today's guest Chris Bennett knows this all too well. As he has been researching the historic role of cannabis in the spiritual life of humanity for more than a quarter century He has written about this in several books with titles like Green Gold The Tree Of Life Marijuana And Magic In Religion Sex, Drugs and Violence in the Bible, Cannabis and the Soma Solution. And most recently a huge 700 plus page masterwork entitled Liber 420 Cannabis Magical Herbs & The Occult An impressive and prolific cannabis chronicler bonafide marijuana mage of the modern age and fellow dancer with the devil's weed Chris my man welcome to The Higher Side Hey it is a pleasure to be here I dig your show dig what you are doing man

04:19 Thank you thank you i'm really glad your here and this is gonna be a lot of fun and very educational cuz u get into really deep waters with this research. And as you wrote in your inscription to me, your book and my show seem destined for inevitable collision and I'm really glad it could be today Lieber 420 is super impressive, and this is just one of several books you've written on the subject with more to come. What is it about this nexus of cannabis spirituality religion and magic that has fascinated you so much as to dedicate a huge portion of your life to it? How'd you get on such a road less traveled?"

04:55 You know, although my books take on a distinctly anthropological folklorist type of flavor it all started with the very powerful religious experience I had in 1990. One night alone working in this fish plant and smoking some ganja and on a whim reading the book of Revelation when I got to the end of The Book of Revelation and read the verses about The Tree Of Life I had this very powerful experience where, I just felt like light poured into me and there was a message that cannabis in all its various uses for fiber, for fuel food plastics whatever you can think of batteries even you know it's just incredible the uses of this plant was that tree alike. And i called my wife up at the time she thought I was having some sort of breakdown and stuff

05:43 The next day I got up and was like, was there anything to that or was I just tripping out? And I decided that if there was something to it then somebody somewhere else will have been familiar with this. You know and I started trying to find out everything I could about cannabis's role in religion and magic and spent a lifetime doing that as well as promoting the wonders of the cannabis hemp plant you know Yes, and that's so funny because the idea that cannabis could be the tree of life in the book of Revelation was definitely on my list of things to ask you about. Because I've had more than a few guests express this feeling that we are living in the endgame, that were living in apocalyptic times and not that cannabis ever really went away but it's definitely slowly been reestablishing its dominance lately and maybe this resurgence, so to speak

06:35 is sort of intelligently guided. Sometimes I wonder about plant spirits and overarching god forms, and just how much of what's happening in the zeitgeist is directed from elsewhere... And maybe there is something in there in regards to cannabis, what's happening right now, and its importance at this particular place on the timeline You know, and it's not just the tree of life. The tree of life is for the whole nations but I wrote a book Cannabis in the Soma Solution and the soma was the sacred beverage of the Vedic religion which led to Hinduism and in Persia was known as haoma, the sacred beverage of the Mazdean religion that became the Zoroastrian religion

07:16 both which are still around and there's all sorts of great archaeological evidence that has been coming up in the last couple of decades indicating that this was a cannabis preparation as well. So it is widespread religious sacrament and there's lots of archaeological and textual evidence. It's not like I'm interpreting some agent relief, saying this could mean this or that, like you see with a lot of the mushroom stuff. There are a lot of archaeological and actual textual references to cannabis. Cannabis is the term itself. The name is The root word for it is one of the oldest forms of language. It comes from the Proto-Indo European language, so even before languages like French and English and Sanskrit split off from the Indo European language cannabis, the term canna its root was already old

08:06 So this is like the oldest type of word even. And this obviously might be getting into your earlier book, Cannabis and the Soma Solution but if we wanted to start at the beginning of The Big Story and talk about man and marijuana's earliest interactions I think it was Carl Sagan who suggested it was man's first crop even but as far as you can tell how far back does that relationship go? Well, Elizabeth Whelan Barber who's the foremost aged textile expert in the world has suggested that tools used for breaking fibers off of hemp stock can be found going back 25 thousand years.

08:43 There's evidence of hemp rope in like the 24,000 year range. Then we have simultaneous almost finds of hemp fiber cloth in Katalhayaq and Taiwan dating about 12,000 years and then the first evidence we have of people burning it or using for ingestion goes back about 5500 years to the Ukraine region where they found polypod bowls in a cave that were used to burn cannabis inside of a cave which held the fumes in there And interestingly, this is the same region where it is thought that horse riding developed. The development of horse riding is thought to have occurred after the manufacturing of hemp ropes which were used to corral and pull the horses in control.

09:27 And it's interesting because one of the main cultures credited with spreading the use of cannabis are known by the blanket term Scythians, although this term refers to a variety of different interrelated tribes. But they were all very nomadic, you know for their use as horses. And this is how the mythology and religion and use of cannabis is thought to have spread throughout the ancient world and why there are connections between various cannabis terms in different languages going back to this older Indo-European language just because of this common way it was spread around. Interesting!

10:05 On the esoteric side of things, do you think it would be too bold to suggest that psychedelic plants cannabis included in there could have been maybe even the first seeds of spiritual and religious thought for man? Absolutely. I think that what they call The Stone Dave Theory and this is a combination that Terrence McKenna came up with based on the work of Julian Jaynes, psychologist the origins of consciousness and the breakdown of the vicomaral mind. James's theory was that, ancient man thinking operates in an area of your brain and a different area than speaking. So there are animals that have the basic kind of elements of language almost like coyotes or killer whales and birds and things like that can signal to each other and communicate in some way but that doesn't necessarily mean the ability for deeper reflective thought I think therefore I am abstract thoughts type thing

11:02 And Jaynes' theory was that this was big evolutionary step for humanity, who prior to this was just so basically caught up in survival. Eating not being killed type of thing that they were not really deeply reflected you know what I mean? The first people that experienced that sort of thought they experienced it as a voice coming from outside much like the schizophrenic experiences thought And this would occur at times of fear or upheaval, of danger and they'd hear something. You know maybe offer some advice that maybe hear the voice of their father or an ancestor at first you know something like that. This could also be induced through things like starvation or maybe going in a dark cave for long periods of time and psychoactive plants. This is where McKenna came in and suggested that psychoactive plants in his place he was particularly focused on the psilocybin mushroom

12:00 he suggested that this played a particularly facilitatory role. And I follow along with this, not that I dissuade the use of mushroom and other psychoactives but my own research has focused primarily around cannabis and you know i could give the example of say these controversial references in Hebrew that number of scholars have suggested are references to cannabis under the name cannabosic And in these references to cannabosom, Moses who first hears the angel of the Lord and flames a fire within a burning bush is commanded to make this holy oil with about six-and-a-half pounds of cannabosom which is thought to be cannabis according to some researchers although many modern Bibles have translated it as calamus or fragrant cane. This goes back to the first Latin and Greek translations of the Hebrew text

12:50 And according to Sula Bennett, who first suggested that this was a reference to cannabis in 1936. This was a reference to cannabis that is mistranslated as calabash. So these references Moses has come out and made this holy oil, and every time he speaks to the Lord he goes inside this little tent which is referred to as the Tent of the Meeting. And he covers himself with his oil in THC's fatty soluble, your skin is a big organ. Then he also places some of this oil on the altar of incense then he speaks to the Lord at the Pillar of Smoke in the Altar of Incense He focuses on a question then an answer comes back So when you throw cannabis into this scenario

13:31 that really offers a powerful reinterpretation of events because is Moses becomes like a shaman who in other cultures, in South America today or Africa and just a variety of different psychoactive plants and interpret that as some sort of divine revelation. And that throws Moses into the same realm And there's other references in the Bible as well that indicate the further shamanic use of this cannabis. So it's interesting because when you think about it, everywhere after the Bible became incorporated into these different religions and whatnot, everywhere it's gone one of the biggest things that is opposed are plant-based shamanic indigenous religions of lands that it has traveled to which is a standard

14:16 Those type of things that we see in South America and Africa, that's the standard anthropological way people develop. They start interacting with their environment, they're trying different plants, they get psychoactive effects out of some plants and this is clearly interpreted as some sort of magical or spiritual type of effect when people first interact but they don't understand chemicals and receptors in the brain and that type of thing it's all supernatural. The whole world supernatural at this point And you make a great point about just the difficulty of translating the definitions of something like an herb or plant, particularly when DMT-like compounds are in so many different plants and grasses and roots. In the example you gave

15:02 there is that phonetic connection that makes you think it's probably cannabis. And you also mentioned Soma and stoned ape theory, and I think a lot of people who are into this kind of material the first thing they run into is the mushroom whether psilocybin or amanita muscaria talking about things like John Michael Allegro work and I know you go a different direction. I just wondered if you could maybe speak to that a little bit more? Yeah, absolutely! Why don't we go with Wasson's work and Soma being the mushroom is very popular theory still. Yes. I have a whole chapter showing the problems i have with Wassons work

15:41 It's important to remember in Vedic literature, Soma is a plant. It's the moon. It's a god. There are all these different types of symbolism and some of them are pretty specific and in the Vedas which is a variety of ancient texts written in the Vedic language that celebrate Soma, one Veda that describes the description of Soma, physical description of Soma, the 10th Mandala of the great Wasson disallowed this. He tried to say that this was too much of a later, it was one of the last books written and by this time the identity of Soma has been lost but there's no Vedic scholars that agree with that sort of interpretation of The Tenth Mandala It is part of the Vedic religion and it distinctly describes a green or purple planet being smashed with rocks in a process very similar to mortar and pestle used in the preparation of bong today

16:34 and the faces of the rocks being turned green by the pressing up the soma, you know. But I think the more important thing in regards to this is the archaeological evidence and the archaeological evidence from the Karakum Desert by Victor Serenady – this is a desert in the Afghanistan region – in this archaeological complex known as the Bactria Marjiana Archaeological Complex. Serenady, a Russian archaeologist claimed found these three temple sites, and these temples were the size of a football field. And half of the temple site was dedicated to the making of a sacred beverage which he claims was the haoma of the Persian region."

17:18 He says this was a combination of cannabis and ephedra, and then in some cases cannabis-ephedra and opium. They did analysis at the time and found evidence that these plants were still growing there. There's been some debate about the analysis of this but we have other archaeological finds that are related to this that corroborate it. This has to do with the wider complex around the Persian use of haoma. And one of the Persian branches of the Scythians, known as the Sakas were also known as the Haoma Varga that is the Haoma gatherers and they would bring the Haoma to the region and we know that the Scythians were burning cannabis because we have found braziers where rock stones were heated up and then put inside a tent cannabis was thrown on it and fumes were held into the tents

18:11 like a little hot box and then could be inhaled, right? But we also have evidence of gold goblets from the Scythians that contained preparation, that contained cannabis and opium. They just tested for cannabis and opium I don't think they tested for ephedra but they probably would have found that as well And Russian archaeologists involved with this find said these goblets were used for partaking of haoma This is also related to the finds of 27-2800 year old cannabis in central China But it's found with Indo-European culture, which is a European descent, you know, Caucasian people that were living in China from about 2000 to 400 BC when the Han Chinese, the indigenous Chinese chased them out of the area. And they found cannabis at a number of caves, tombs

19:03 shaman and other figures from this culture. In one case it was a bouquet of female cannabis flowers that were placed over the chest of the person in the tomb, and another case it was a jar with female cannabis, and another case a jar with female cannabis at another plant. And these were you know we're not talking about fiber strains of cannabis these are psychoactive strains of cannabis that had THC good quantity and female plants specifically chosen so this was clearly used from from the context of the people that it was buried with, who seem like shamans or something like that by important figures. Now there's an etymological linguistic theory, haoma which is what this beverage was known in the Persian region among the Nazians and Zoroastrians is actually derived from a Chinese name for cannabis, hu ma

19:52 And that would have been familiar to these people who were known to have been in trade with this same temple I was discussing earlier because they found artifacts from both cultures, of both sites. So the intermediary in this trade was this other branch of Scythians that were more nomadic and had gold goblets with cannabis beverage right? So, there's a lot to it. Also things like Wasson's theory of the drinking of urine—he disavows the Tenth Mandela of Rig Veda which is written in Sanskrit as part of Vedic canon but to make his case for that he goes to some way later text from Hindu period about some interaction where sadhus tricked into drinking the urine of a god

20:41 And you've got to remember the role of urine in Vedic medicine and Hindu, Zoroastrian religion as well. There's all sorts of medicinal qualities attributed to drinking urine, bulls' urine as well right? You know what I mean this may have nothing to do with fly agaric mushrooms transferring through to the urine and stuff like that it's not a very powerful case in my mind And in regards to Allegro, you know, Allegro was a great scholar. You know Wasson as I show on my lengthy chapter picking apart Wassons book and you can go up to Google Books and find my book Cannabis and the Soma Solution put it in Wasson and you can read the whole chapter right there on Google books with all of my various reasons that I go over a lot of material

21:23 He was not. He had a bias and an agenda, you know so do I. Be honest about that and present speculation is speculation in fact it's fact! You know? I don't think Wasson was that honest. I have a lot of respect for what he has done for entheogens the study of these things his work on South America the mushroom there stuff like that is a lot better I don't think that he was correct about Soma at all, or there's any role for Flyagara in the Vedic religion. In regards to Allegro—he's a scholar and knew all sorts of languages and stuff like that—I read Sacred Mushroom on the Cross. I just think he kind of lost it with that myself. I don't buy that Jesus was a mushroom. He actually disallowed the Cannabossum reference suggesting as I recall —it's been a long time since I've

22:15 based on his observation of what he referred to as the daughters on the college campuses that use cannabis. And he saw the term pana as related to the glands, being the glands head and penis therefore a mushroom because the mushroom and penis have this correlation something like that which I just don't buy it In regards to Sula Bennett's identification of the term cannabis, it is important to remember that there are a variety of cannabis. There is no clear consensus on what the term cannabinoid means even amongst biblical scholars and Hebrew scholars

22:53 and things like cinnamon have been suggested, the calamus is one of them, lemongrass. A variety of plants have been suggested and Sula Bennett based her arguments on following back to modern term cannabis and also later Hebrew terms for a cannabis cannaboss that through ensuring that it was related to this term cannabossing. Sula Bennett believed that this was actually a Semitic term originated from Semitic people My view is, and this is also the view of Professor Karl Rudd, that this is the Indo-European term, Kana. And it came to the Hebrews with its original name and then the adjunct of bosom which means fragrant in Hebrew was added later as a item of trade. We now know that cannabis was a huge item of trade in these Silk Road trade routes because of these archaeological discoveries

23:44 of these Indo-Europeans in China, which I was discussing earlier. And as this is the main Indo-European term for it, it traveled with these spice roots and a lot of times when something arrives in an area with a name that retains that name in the new foreign language right? It's adopted into the language. Other references to kana in the Bible, such as that of Ezekiel describe it coming in as an item of trade. Jeremiah is described as coming from a foreign land. What do I care for this kana from a foreign land? It fell out of disfavor right so there's a lot to that and you know what I don't know about evidence of fly agaric mushroom use in desert people is pretty hard pressed in my mind regards to Allegro

24:30 Although a variety of psychoactive substances were likely used and evidence of that, such as mandrake references in the Bible. Strong drink in the Bibles thought to be a concoction of a variety of potent psychoactive plants contained in some sort of alcoholic preparation So there's all sorts of psychoactive plants I'm not trying to suggest that it's purely cannabis Right You know opium and other things were used you know Man what you clearly make a great case and your very knowledgeable and i didn't expect to talk about drinking urine but you know i have had a lot of people suggest they want a full year in drinking show and i am not willing to be that committed to it but its interesting that you brought up i just wanna ask because you do have knowledge about isa terry societies as well i heard that

25:24 the urine drinking tradition is the secret at the end of the road, uh, the golden dawn. And that almost seems too goofy to believe but do you think there's any truth to that? I don't think so. It's definitely ingestion of bodily fluids in a curly and magic, you know, T O which is based on actual Gnostic material. I have written about the age-agnostic sex cult in my book, Sex Drugs Violence of the Bible and the ritual ingestion of semen and menses as a Eucharistic substance that took place in the first centuries of Christianity. And that's an actual fact you know Crowley adopted some of these practices and worked them into his form of magic

26:15 I'd say that a lot of this was also influenced by the Mysterio and Baphometus Revelatum. You've had Tracy Twyman on here, so you're probably familiar with that work and its claims about the Knights Templar picking up Gnostic heresies—these same Gnostic practices I was just referring to—and it's important to remember in discussing Gnosticism or these sexual rights which are very similar to some of the Tantric rites that take place in India are the oldest form of Gnosticism. It took place with the Ophites and Nasenes, these are the earliest of Gnostic sects that we know about some people suggest these sects were even pre-christian so it goes way back you know when there's even texts like The Question of Mary which we only know about because Church Fathers condemning it excerpt was described Jesus himself partaking a such sort ritual ingestion of seminal fluids

27:12 Hmm, fun stuff. Well you know cannabis infused wine does come up a lot in the various preparations you talk about in the book is anyone today recreating those preparations the same way just to try to experience exactly what they were writing about? I think Melissa Etheridge has marketed a cannabis-infused wine. Other people are preparing cannabis infused wine, a friend of mine Enrico Pochard is producing a cannabis infused wine. Heineken's releasing hemp beer Most of the Canadian here in Canada is releasing a hemp beer. Yet, it goes way back and the use of cannabis-infused wines is very widespread. The first anesthesia written about was in China and it was a cannabis infused wine and the guy was knocking people out doing complicated operations. And we find references to cannabis infused wines all throughout ancient world Persia

28:08 Some have even suggested that Jesus was given some sort of cannabis infused wine on the cross when he was given vinegar on the sponge there, you know? All over the place and into the Islamic period as well. You know in Leviticus 20 I talked about quintessences or canoes which are tinctures used in alchemy that have a role similar to that of the philosopher's stone. And we know that cannabis was a form used in the quintessences and our cannabis because people like Perikelsis, Cardano and other alchemists wrote about it listed cannabis distinctly so it was obvious people were aware of this sort of preparation

28:49 Yes and i wanted to kind of talk about the. Alchemy and the magic side of things cuz it's just how many feathers this little plant seems to ruffle cuz even among researchers in your field you write about the prejudice against cannabis and other herbs among occult and magical scholars and i would think that, Some of these herbs, marijuana in particular would be pretty tame compared to the range of what occult scholars are looking at. Why is this prejudice so consistent do you think? I think it's coming out of the whole Christian bias of our culture, you know what i mean? You find this particularly in, you know, ancient world scholars and people have discussed this like Karl Rock and Dr David Hillman

29:33 who are academics, you have run up to severe opposition. I know of one scholar that had tried to just get some scrapings from a site at the Oracle of Delphi and they were too worried about what he might find but there's been more recent starting to open up. at first really struggled with it at the university that he works at, but now he's been giving courses on anthelmintics there. So you know what I mean? Things are changing but yeah there is huge academic prejudice to it because the people doing the research have not got experience themselves with these substances they don't realize the effects of them enough to understand why they would play a role

30:13 Same with a lot of magic. You go to a lot of neo-witches, you won't find the use of mandrake or henbane or datura maybe some lavender and some damiana or something like that that's pretty mild and few of them are actually aware of the whole plant based shamanic origins of it Right, and so like I mentioned Libra 420 this book is 700 plus pages with so many sources and grimoires and historical documents that were explored. As the pitch says, many of the works discussed have never been translated to English or haven't been published in centuries. And I just find that really impressive when I have a guest who's made that type of contribution to the historical record of these documents or works that have never been translated into English. Are there are couple that you find most important? Or that your most proud off in this work

31:10 I'm lucky enough to be born in this wonderful age of information, for one thing. You know what i mean? And this is like not something that even writers 20 years ago had access to information like we do now and And in services like Google Books, they have scanned in old Latin texts going back to the 16th-15th century. The oldest books in the world into Google because cannabis is still spelled the same as it was then you can go right back into these Latin texts and find the references and some of them... The majority

31:47 are just passing references maybe to cannabis fibers or something like that, are kind of inconsequential for what you study. But every once in a while you find the little gem and some of those gems that I think got pretty interesting that other people have written about or translated our references from Zosimos One of the first alchemists in the 4th century, this is like a later 16th-17th century book writing about Zosimos but references to cannabis infused wines and beers there and other plant infusions. Perikalsis' Arcanum which was a cannabis infusion used for the treatment of epilepsy something that a lot of people are now using cannabis core treating kits for epilepsy

32:29 And condemnations from the church, there's a great lambasting of people comparing the sinner to cannabis and going over all the ways the sinner and cannabis are similar. They're twisted like they're twisted fibers up the hemp rope you know? I spent a lot of money getting this stuff properly translated. I tried to figure out with my basic ability of Latin and using Latin translations online to find out what was of interest. So I was limiting my spending to the most valuable documents I could find But I have no doubt that there's much, much more to be found yet. The important thing is to know the various spellings of cannabis, cannabi, cannabis, cannibism, different things like that were used and then you can go and find references. And then when you find the references figure out who the authors are, their important figures what the book is about and start figuring out context of it all

33:25 But yeah, it was wonderful. Initially when I started writing Lieber 420, I thought maybe I would get a chapter about the medieval and renaissance material all together and I would focus mostly on the 19th and early 20th century figures like Blavatsky and Crowley and stuff like that But just the opposite happened. As I began to really dig in, I just realized there was so much more in this medieval and Renaissance period in regards to alchemical and magical references than I had even begun to imagine. And I could only put the wealth of material I had on the 19th and 20th century into one brief chapter in Lieber 420

34:10 I had a whole chapter on Crowley's use of drugs that I had to pull out of Libra 420 due to space, as well about 50,000 other words on that period. Because the book was taken over by this fascinating role of cannabis in medieval and renaissance alchemy magic and secret societies Mm-hmm. And the chapter that really got me was the Sefer Razael, Cannabis Mirror Magic and Crystal Gazing I guess the sefer razael is a grimoire It's not it's one i wasn't familiar with i guess it's from the 16th century and it references The use of cannabis to see spirits and demons in a magic mirror can you elaborate on that?

34:53 Yeah, there's a few sephirazials. This is the Sephirazial Libra Salomonis from the 16th century and it has a recipe for seeing spirits and devils in a magic mirror these were usually black obsidian mirrors that didn't hold a lot of reflection and just stare into them to begin to see visions and it describes use by cannabis ointment mixed with other herbs for the same purpose. We also find a similar recipe but with a different secondary plant being used in the grimoire, The Book of Oberon which is also dedicated to a lot of fairy magic. Yeah! Cannabis' use with magic mirrors really goes back a long ways you know there are suggestions that this combination was new some centuries before this and it's important remember a lot of these grimoires are collections

35:46 Clearly the case with a text by Libra Salamatus, which had to be... you know they weren't printed. It would be dangerous to print such a thing if this all had to be hand copied and passed around, you know. And we can see the continued use of cannabis with magic mirrors into the 19th century with figures like Pascal Beverly Randolph and Louis Alphonse Gagnet and other Rosicrucians as well who were still using this combination centuries later so obviously it had been around for... It was a very popular way of using mirror scrying

36:22 I really got interested in what was taking place with Mirror Shrine. One night, I watched this campy horror movie that was made by some millionaire who is also a meth head and he spent all his money making this movie called Eat the Evil Within. It's about a guy that has this relationship with the mirror and there's a line in it where the demon in the mirror says to him, ''I'm the one who tells you your dreams at night.'' And this is kind of true, I think. In my conclusion to Libra 420 trying to understand its prevalent role in magic where it was used as a magical mirror but also in fumigation rituals where the vision was seen in the smoke right? and in alchemy you know where we see things like The Marriage of the Sun and Moon

37:06 And I think this has to do with cannabis' relationship with what is known variously as the unconscious and subconscious mind. Unconscious according to Carl Jung, and subconscious according to Sigmund Freud, Jung's mentor It's interesting because the whole concept of the unconscious and subconscious mind came about through the study of cannabis by earlier psychiatric type figures like Dr. J.J. Moreau, who was part of the famous Le Club de Hachichines And he was suggesting that in the intoxicated state from cannabis, what people were experiencing was something similar to madness and also similar to what takes place in dreams. You know like you take a look at your dream, you're in your dream, you're telling yourself the dream, there are other people in your dream and it's all pretty real so this means that there is an aspect of consciousness which is kind of split from your regular awareness

38:06 but it's still God consciousness, right? And this is what again I said Freud referred to as the subconscious and Jung referred to the unconscious. In Freud's case he suggested that you know was like all our repressed memories stuff we didn't want to think about junk like that then once in a while it would reach up out and come out of the basement well Jung expanded on this if he thought that that was true but beyond There was an aspect of a collective consciousness, what he referred to as the collective unconscious. He compared this to the role of instinct in animals. Instinct is genetic memory. Some animals are born like a seal and it can go fishing on the day it's born. Deers or horses can stand up and walk around

38:50 They're not born helpless like a human being and this is because although we have very similar system in our brain, right? Left hemispheres that type of stuff. We have this huge frontal lobe deep buried beneath that is the same sort of aspects of the brain that control instinct of those animals inside us And these are really deep recesses of the mind, you know what I mean? And this is where Jung believed that people recognize symbolism and myths and things like that inherently because they've been so repeatedly told through the human experience. That's ingrained into an aspect of human consciousness right

39:30 Now, when you take a look at the relationship between cannabis and dreaming that seems counterintuitive because most people that smoke a lot of cannabis report that they dream less. And in the 80s, they were kind of looking at some of these things and they were looking at how cannabis influenced melatonin levels. They found that immediately after ingestion there could be a spike as much as 4,000 times regular daytime levels of melatonin with cannabis right? So likely people are spiking their melatonin all day with cannabis and then go to bed at night when they have less melatonin going on

40:08 But one thing I noticed a number of times was that wake up at like four in the morning, you know? Maybe couldn't get back to sleep. Smoke a bowl of cannabis and go to sleep...I would have the most intense lucid dreams I ever had! And i attribute this to this same spike melatonin. I had a deep sleep, got up for just a moment and had some cannabis get back. Melatonin spikes and then melatonin effects streaming. And I have these super intense dreams. I believe there's correlation there. And I think that this is what people are doing with with the magic mirrors or seeing smokes and things, is they're accessing an aspect of the subconscious or the unconscious mind. And that's what they're interacting with when they use cannabis for this purpose. They are causing some sort of split in consciousness that we experience in the dream state. The one who speaks to you from a mirror is the one who tells your dreams at night

41:08 Hmm. I like it! I think that's a great theory and uh... You know, as a daily cannabis user I am really interested in the spiritual communication aspects. You write about the Picatrix, a grimoire that's largely considered the foundation of the Western magical tradition and much of it is about contacting the planetary spirits As you say opium was used in invocation of the Sun Cannabis was used to appease the moon Well that's interesting! Today, you know without a historical or magical context are we dialing up the moon spirit if we smoke a joint at night? Is that where those stoner thoughts come from

41:48 You know, I mentioned alchemy in the marriage of the sun and the moon. And I kind of see that as... The sun is like our daytime present awareness or present consciousness and the moon is our nighttime consciousness you know what I mean? And I think that what cannabis offers is a mingling of that. And I know myself that although I seek out confirmation about ideas and corroborating material to build my ideas up A lot of my work has purely come through intuitive channels, you know what I mean? I just kind of have a nose for it. And I really believe that cannabis—my constant use of cannabis—I'm definitely a regular user of the herb... Cheers! ...has a lot to do with my ability to dig up all this cannabis material, this forgotten lore. It's like part of my consciousness knows it or remembers it.

42:43 That is really interesting, man. I have a lot of friends who comment regularly on the luck that I just seem to stumble into and I definitely am the biggest cannabis smoker of the group so maybe there's a correlation? Who knows Yeah, no I know a lot of highly intelligent cannabis users. I think you know it's important to remember that with cannabis intent is everything and if we spend all day playing video games it's not really throwing more gas in the motor and revving it up you're not going to be having the same experience say as some sad deal in India who partakes of a chillum of ganja, teshiva before sitting down to his asanas. Even though you're doing the same substance just because of the intent and beliefs involved you're doing different things. Right!

43:26 And, you know I've interviewed some magic practitioners about just the history of magic how to get involved with it. Of course there's many many grimoires that have lists of spirits and there's pantheons of different spirits that you can contact and some people who are more of the chaos flavor advocate for creating your own personal pantheon and i guess i would ask you Do you recall the names of any spirits or entities that are partial to cannabis? Maybe I should start my ritual contact with these kindred spirits, so to speak. Well, it's funny...I did have- I mentioned my experience with cannabis being a tree of life at the beginning but i did have this whole situation with magic later while I was researching my first book, Pringle The Tree Of Life Marijuana And Magic Religion that has to do with Crowley

44:18 and the number sequence, 777. What had happened is I'd had this religious experience about cannabis being a tree of life, was collecting all this information but I was kind of on a Christian bent because I've had the initial experience reading The Book of Revelation for a little while And I was working on my first book, which is like all my other books about cannabis and magic and religion. And I was collecting as many quotes as I could to document the role of cannabis in various areas. One of the people that I had found out about while I was researching this area was this guy Francois Ravelet who was a 16th century monk and bachelor of medicine. He wrote this book Gargantuan Pantagruel. And he's an alchemist as well

45:03 master of the quintessence, and I suggest that he is preparing cannabis quintessences. And he had coded references to cannabis in three chapters of his book Pantagruel under the name Herb Pantagrulian. And we know this is cannabis, it's not my opinion but it's well known that these are references to cannabis and they were banned by the church for some period and even some modern translations of Rabelais' work disallowed them So I was like, I gotta read this you know? And Rabelai writes a style known as the language of the birds, kind of an esoteric style where you hint at stuff and build around stuff symbolically. And so you got to know a fair bit about history and things like that to really get the gist of what he's talking about. So I had to read it a few times to understand it. While I was reading his book, I found that he had this place called The Abbey of Thelema

45:57 And the law of the Abbey of Thelima is do as thou wilt. Years before any of this, one Crowley book I had read was Diary of a Gypsy and I remembered it and thought oh that Crowley guy he had The Abbey of Thelima in Do As Thou Wilt in his books. He must have known about this guy Rabelais. And I kind of considered Crowley kind of Satanist at that time because I didn't know a lot about him, just the basic societal view of him. He's kind of bad guy and i thought well maybe check out now see if i can find a good cannabis reference for my book and i got this book magic in theory practice

46:36 I started reading it, and I was really digging it. And then I was talking about the Templars and by this time I was already interested in the Templars and cannabis and their relationship with the Assassins. This is so cool! Then I got to this part of the book where he talks about sacrificing a male child. And then he said that I read this myself 150 times in the last year. Oh my God, this is horrible! What have I been reading? This is demonic! I can't have any part of this." And I went down to another town, Victoria and visited a friend of mine and he had a copy of Gnosis magazine. I opened it up and there was a letter to the editor. It was child sacrifice. They'd just done an article about Crowley

47:19 And the guy was talking about the same thing that I was just worried about. It's like, oh! And they explained it as a puckish reference to sexual magic and said those are actually references to orgasms. And I thought okay well that seemed kind of weird to me at the time but it wasn't child sacrifice and I thought well I've got to go find a book by Crowley that has a good cannabis reference in there must be something out there. So I went into this bookstore and there was a copy of this book Lieber Alley the book of wisdom or following and it was a new book. I looked in the back under marijuana nothing, I looked under age for hemp and i see hashish there's like six pages of it and i start reading it and it's written in this same sort of esoteric style of jargon that Ravele wrote it and i was like i can't make sense of this is no good and i stick it back i go to another bookstore

48:07 and get a couple of used books. I get a copy of Ram Dass' Be Here Now, and a copy of The Tenth Mandala Of the Rig Veda which is the one with some references. When I go up to pay, the lady points out the price of Ram Dass's book and it was $3.33 when it came out in the 70s you know? Then she rings up my books then my change comes up at $7.77. And I'm like oh that's kind of cool because she just said the 3-3-3 thing we kinda laughed. And I thought well maybe I'll go get that Libra Ali book and see if there's anything to it. I read it a few times, maybe like rabbley, I'll start to understand what he's talking about so I get it and then I open it up in my car and it says the book of wisdom outfalling from the great wild beast 666 to his magical son 777 and I'm like whoa man

48:56 That's so fucking weird. And then I start running into this huge string of sequences where I keep running into this number 777 to the point where I get this check that enabled me to, after a lot of struggling and some sort of magical prayers to get money for this book. I get this check through this crappy business deal that the number was 0777-33300008 And I fucking was like, fuck me. You know that? Check even you know to this day this is all in the 90's and for a while i was signing you know the first article ever wrote I signed Chris Bennett 777 and it says that book was written for certain guy but doesn't say who it is maybe more written for mankind now so I didn't know anything about

49:47 And at a certain point, I just decided and I was signing artwork with it. I decided it was like some weird ego trip and had nothing to do with the historical type of research that I was trying to do. That was not cool that I was caught up in focusing on it. And then years later, I found out that this book was written for a specific guy. This guy was Charles Stansfield Jones known as Frater Ackad and he lived in Vancouver where i had grown up and I was like oh that's kind of weird you know? Then I found out he lived in North Vancouver which is more specific into the area I grew up but I'm like whoa that's kinda weird because I'd already had this 7-7 experience!

50:25 He lived in Deep Cove, which is like the square two miles area that I grew up in. In Vancouver here for the first 13 years of my life and I got stuck there. I couldn't find out anymore alls I could find out was he lived at this place called Tall Timbers and Deep Cove And then one day I was coming back from an event in Oregon talking with a friend of mine she was really into ghosts And I said, oh you know when i was a kid. I saw or thought I saw the same ghost twice on my street and told her the story about it for some reason that made me think about this whole Charles Stansfield Jones thing again when I got home and I googled him in deep cove again you know? And I ended up in this Deep Cove historical site there was a letter from his foster son

51:09 And he said, yeah I lived in a house called Tall Timbers on Caledonia Avenue which was my street. Wow! Akkad who Crowley had specifically written this essay about Hashish called the most holy grass of the era, the Herbo Santissimo Arribico lived like two doors down the street from where I grew up. And right in between the spot where I'd seen this ghost, and I realized as a kid when I was about eight or nine, I got taken to meet his widow because I was telling my friend that a witch lived in the house and my friend's mother was so concerned about this that she decided to take me to meet nice old lady who lived at the house who in hindsight was a witch

51:59 Wow. Member of the AA and the OTO. Him and Crowley, I released Libra 420, planned on releasing it on April 20th ended up coming out 2018 while i was working on it at same time when I found out that he lived down my actual street uh they had found that they'd actually did a ritual April 20th 1918 so I opened up the book with that ritual but cannabis was a big part of their relationship And at the first OTO Lodge here in North Vancouver, on the student reading list one of the first things is The Psychology of Hashish, Curley's 90-page essay on Hashish. They also have records of experimenting with mescaline at the lodge so it was clearly a big part of it and Akkad

52:45 Charles Stansfell Jones was a great friend of the famous author Malcolm Lowry, who wrote one of the most well-known novels of all time Under The Volcano. And it's well known now that Lowry incorporated all sorts of occult information in Under The Volcano from his relationship with Akkad, whom he studied under for many years. One of the lines that they worked into Under The Volcano is a line where the old man says, Bhang is Soma And there's a whole book written about it in the Rig Veda. And the book that it was written about was The Tenth Mandela of the Rig Veda, that I picked up when I had that initial experience with 777 and I wrote a whole book about Bong or cannabis as we know being Soma. Wow! What a great story man So there is some sort of synchronicity there. I don't know what the thing of it but its too undeniable

53:43 Luckily I documented a lot of this stuff. I published articles where i was using this 777 thing in the 90s before I knew about who Akkad was or any of that. So, I documented a lot of it on the way and it's too weird to just be coincidence so I kind of think there's some connection with this 777 stuff you know Akkad in 1948 just down the road from my street before he died at 1950 He claimed to have had some experience on April 2nd in 1948 that superseded Crowley's age of Forrest and replaced it with the Aeon of Nott. Interestingly, I'm working on a book right now which is kind of a follow-up to some of the material from Libra 420 called Alastair Crowley and The Herb Dangerous, A History of Cannabis in Thelema So on eBay there was like a cache about 300 letters between Ockhaud and Kenneth Grant and Germer

54:43 Akka was trying to take over both the OTO and the AA just before he died, based on his revelation of the Ann of Maat. So it's pretty active through the whole period. I don't know how much you know about the OTO but Wagner's Parsippal is pretty influential on both the OTO and the rituals Crowley wrote for him Theodore Roos, the founder of the OTO was actually a singer-dancer in the first performances of Wagner's famous opera Parsifal. And Parsifal, the symbolism of it serves as the basis for the OTO Gnostic Mass. Well one of things I've been finding out recently is that the foremost Wagner autobiographer

55:26 A translator of his work in the 19th century claims that Wagner was inspired to write Parsifal after being turned on to a cannabis tincture by Arthur Schopenhauer, famous philosopher who was also deeply influential on Crowley's philosophy. Wow, what a tangled web man. And that story you told is just so great and what good magic to release the book 100 years after Crowley does a ritual on 420 I mean yeah everything i hear about magic suggests that that is the way to do it Yeah absolutely! You know I also made the book 777 pages because of that whole 777 connection you know?

56:11 I love it man. Well again, great work! Remind the people where they can keep abreast of what you're doing and follow your work and get the books? Sure yeah you can follow me on Facebook i'm probably pretty easy to find You can find Libra 420 cannabis magical herbs in the occult on Amazon and other sites if you search Libra 420 It'll show up. Cannabis and the Soma solution as well you can find there, and I have a blog with a lot of articles over at cannabisculture.com if you search my name there Chris Bennett You'll be able to find that. I've got numbers of documentaries on YouTube like Cannabossum The Hidden Story of Cannabis in the Old Testament Smoke Of The Oracles Cannabis In Aging Greece If you search my name and cannabis those should turn up on YouTube as well

56:55 Awesome. And you mentioned that next book, do you have any idea when that's coming out? The Crowley expansion? Probably a year or two at least, it takes me awhile to put these things together I had a fair bit written already that i pulled out from Lieber 420 but I really want to get into Hubbard and Parsons and the role of drugs in that whole scene so I've got some research to do yet Yeah, well I can think after 777 pages on cannabis magical herbs in the occult one might want to take a little break. There you go man! Understandable... Well awesome A match made in Cannabis fueled heaven real pleasure to have you here today keep doing what you do and take care out there Thanks so much for having me Oh sweet lady cannabis and holy Ozarks iris side chatters Chris Bennett 777 pages Can ya believe it?

57:47 For real, if this is a subject that you find interesting and you want a big fat reference guide for on your bookshelf I don't think you could do any better than Lieber 420. And i think Chris is another guest that has been requested through the THC Plus Guest Request forums. I know I've seen it and I also know I have a huge huge list but I think this interview actually happened pretty organically through Facebook or a comment section something like that but completely appropriate for it to have emerged in a strange kind of life of its own way. And, of course, it's a good topic because marijuana does have major benefits

58:28 Can you abuse it? Sure, I absolutely do. I actually practice immersion therapy in the sense that i smoke about as much as a person can hoping that i'm going to overindulge the point of wanting to take a break or something but several years into this program i am waiting for that to take effect but there will be ill effects from anything We shouldn't have to immediately go there with weed. I had a friend in college who was trying to pass the drug test for a job and drank so much water that he had to go to the hospital for water poisoning, didn't know that was a thing but it did happen and you don't hear people tacking that on like make sure you drink plenty of water it's the best thing for ya but of course don't drink enough to drown yourself

59:12 It's kind of a given. And I guess i'm a little defensive because I referred to cannabis as universally good in the intro, and obviously that's a bit hyperbolic but not that much and not when you recognize that even water can be overdone. And I know I've already talked a ton of times about marijuana and other psychedelics and their importance to me—the impact and influence of just a few super powerful experiences which I think we all owe to ourselves A breakthrough mystical experience will change your life. The number one thing that holds people back from walking the creative path or a risky dream-inspired path and instead staying in a safe job that they hate, that's fear right? The number one thing let's stay safe let's make the non-risky choice and just stay the course That fear is cultivated in a life that is devoid of these breakthrough experiences In my opinion

1:00:12 And in the same way I say that I know enough about certain conspiracies to be satisfied, rather than arguing with people about those little details that we might never know. I feel similarly about a lot of the things we talked about today. Is it cannabis specifically in every instance and every reference? Ehh...I don't know but even if I think of some of these references to cannabis as To-be determined psychoactive regionally prevalent entheogenic plant The whole thing is still super fascinating to me. I mean, even Chris said that when you're talking about some of these cannabis-infused teas it's cannabis infused with opium so maybe cannabis is just riding copilot in some of these situations Opium might be more the key word there No doubt though Chris is an impressive researcher who really knows his niche

1:01:06 I feel quite fortunate to have had him here. He's a guy i'd love to see on a show like Rogan sometime Also, I think we edited most of it out But you might have heard his parrot in the background there for the first little while The other benefit Of rogan is that they're in the same quiet room away from traffic and parrots and clanging dishes neighborhood dogs all that stuff That we get here And try our best to minimize But regardless, if you liked the first hour we get into a lot of fun stuff in the second. For Plus members we talk about cannabis and time, cannabis the crucifixion and death and rebirth rituals, The Holy Grail being a cup that held a sacred psychedelic brew, entheogens in the age of suppression, and Saturn's relationship to cannabis... just a full spectrum cannabis-fueled cornucopia of fun stuff

1:02:02 And I guess i should mention this too because I get this question every so often it's come up a few times recently where people ask, I never get why as a plus member I'm hearing you recap what I just listened to. Well one I think it's nice to vaguely know what topics were in the plus show because you do pay for it and I keep the show in one complete mp3 file so you don't really know but also just because if I record two separate endings one with that one without Something might come out differently or I might say something off the cuff that's not in both endings and really it's just better to not have too much difference between two different versions of a show. So, just for my own peace of mind that every listener who makes it this far, of course here is the exact same wrap-up even if one little part of it is recapping The Flush Show topics

1:02:54 I hope that makes sense, but speaking of getting this far into the show we had our first Open Lines THC joint session and i thought it went pretty well. But a decent amount of people contacted me concerned that they felt I didn't give enough notice or they didn't know what was happening And I posted it in social media and talked about it in several wrap-up portions. I know, it's not the best place on a show to talk about news at the very end but this has sort of been the tradition for a long time and other people were concerned when they heard about Zoom because they didn't want to have to download a new app well...I should let you know that you don't have to download anything It is browser based! It even offers a temporary phone number for calling in

1:03:41 So it's about as easy and robust as I could find. There is a short name and email registration, but that's going to guard us against trolls and that kind of thing. I don't have a call screener so i'm just going in without any protection at all except for a slight registration hurdle Anyway, that has been uploaded for Plus people. It is on the front page of the HiresideChatsPlus.com and joint sessions will get a spot in the bonus material section as soon as there's a second one If you want to get in on the next joint session hopefully you use Facebook or Twitter I barely use them but I will announce these things a week or two out and then of course here in the wrap-ups of the show

1:04:25 And I'd be happy to go over an hour if the calls keep coming in. But check that out if you want to hear from the THC audience mainly, definitely got some interesting calls and that's pretty much it for today! Thanks everybody for listening. I know there are a ton of shows out there so it is much appreciated that I get your attention and time plus people thanks for supporting The Ride and paying for that full experience. I know there are a lot of full experiences and Patreons out there too So I appreciate all you guys. Consider this meeting of the Midnight Society closed Your move, cannabis concealers, entheogen extinguishers and alters and omitters of our very psychedelic history You're fuckin' I can't stay I ain't gonna take your proven wrongs

1:07:27 And I can't stand putting me down. I see your mind, the high sights, value to the time. Yeah! Oh yeah!