@Nyarlathotep I’m trying to have one with you, and maybe that’s not coming across. Let’s leave it at that.
You might be paying lip-service to that; but as far as I can tell, you are (perhaps unconsciously) grasping straws on an almost industrial level, in an attempt to make your model immune to criticism. I see this all the time, even in myself; but its always easier to see it when you don’t care about the subject (it’s easier to see it in others).
@Nyarlathotep I’ll consider what you’ve said.
@JoelInbody Is it possible that these description were closed to outsiders? That only the holy people were inside, did their thing (whatever that is) then told a tale to the people waiting outside?
Is it possible they did partake of crazy drugs, did see crazy shit, then told exaggerated versions on what they experienced?
@David_Killens: To your first question: yes, that is what the evidence suggests. Peasants, slaves, etc. were not permitted into temple shrines to watch the ceremonies. They were told what (supposedly) happened inside by hearing priests sing about it before the ceremonies.
To your second question: yes, it is possible that priests did drugs, saw wild shit, and repeated it to people outside. I admit that is possible. I have not found that described in any texts I read, however.
So take Egypt: the preparation for temple service is well-documented (Eaton 2013), and included bathing, dressing in clean linen, and rubbing your body in perfume if I recall or maybe incense. It did not include drinking a strange beer, smoking a joint, or snorting a powder. Could a priest have done that on their own? Yeah, they could have. I admit that is possible.
2 Likes
@David_Killens The ancient Hindu did what is known as “Soma”, which is a hallucinogenic drug of sorts, by which they communed with the Gods that they did the Vedic sacrifices towards.
@JoelInbody Well that’s a major bummer right there! Had they done that, I would loved to join in. LOL!
1 Like
@BigNeerav eh 
Egyptian priests were bureaucrats. They were appointed by the pharaoh for a few months each year and they didn’t drink any Soma, as far as I can tell, they just feasted on the statue’s offerings. Then they went back to their day jobs, where they served as scribes, lawyers, military captains, etc.
1 Like
@JoelInbody So they basically went to their jobs fat and happy from religious food. Gotcha! 
1 Like
@David_Killens Holy moley! Is Dudeism a joke? That is freaking hilarious!
The Dude abides. 
And get a good rug, then it will really tie the room together.
1 Like
@David_Killens Maybe that is the hallucination that @JoelInbody was talking about, because the dude looks absolutely stoned out of his mind. LMAO! 
Oh - for fuck’s sakes! They were politicians!!! Out and out politics - 
hiding truth from people. Telling the crowds fantastic unconfirmed stories. Benefiting personally. They could be liars and drug users…
@Whitefire13 I’m just using the technical term here, haha. By bureaucrats I mean they were appointed formally into a social structure, and were subordinate to higher priests who served as administrators. I agree, as you know, that they were liars, and certainly could have been drug users. The texts are silent on that last point, however. The closest I’ve found to anything resembling hallucinations is very rich, descriptive dreams, but those could also be lies.
That’s not THE research. It’s one of several trying to replicate Libet at al. (1983) or do similar work. The Libet paper has been met with criticism; here’s just a random one I found (actually while trying to find the Libet paper itself, not criticism against it):
Libet’s 1983 experiment reported that brain activity (the RP) reflecting a decision to flex a finger or wrist occurred several hundred milliseconds before the subject became aware of her decision (or urge or will) to move. This has been interpreted, controversially, to suggest that our subjective impression that our conscious wills initiate the movement is illusory. Libet accepted this interpretation, but maintained that conscious will can still play a genuine role in the vetoing of initiated acts.
Many neuroscientists and most philosophers contest the claims about the supposed inefficacy of conscious will, and this paper summarises their arguments. At the neurophysiological level, it has not been shown convincingly that a neural ‘decision’ sufficient to cause the movement occurs before the time of awareness of the decision to move. Even if this could be shown, it would not undermine the conceptions of free will that are defended by most philosophers.
(There are other papers out there with criticism of the Libet et al. paper, but all the other ones that popped up were behind paywalls, so I couldn’t read them)
The Soon et al paper and other papers are also met with some criticism:
The average values reported by most studies occur in advance of awareness, but these findings do not establish the relation between this activity and awareness of action. Additionally, much of this work does not address a common criticism (Banks and Pockett 2007; Klemm 2010; Roskies 2010) that simple finger flexions and complex, deliberative action are very different. Clearly, much morework needs to be made to establish this connection for Libet-like experiments to be used to support any philosophical position about free will.
The Libet Paradigm and Its Societal Implications
The variation present in our review poses problems for (a) comparing results between studies, (b) evaluating the relevance of this type of methodology to answering questions about voluntary action, and (c) extrapolating its significance to society as a whole. Furthermore, even if we assume that each experiment was an exact replication ofthe original paper, some of the claims made in individual papers would not be supported by the methods employed.
So no, the mind taking decisions unconciously is by no means proven, and certainly not in a pretentious religious setting.
The rest of your post made absolutely no sense to me.
Edit: cleaned up quoted material.
Ad hominem attack.
Muppet.
257 posts, and still no objective evidence, despite lying you could demonstrate it, then lying that you had not said yes when asked if you could demonstrate objective evidence for a deity.
So far no evidence and no explanation. Just endless unevidenced assertions, and the blatant lies I’ve quoted.
Though this was pretty hilarious though…
It’s hard to digest his endless verbiage, but it is axiomatic he has failed to offer anything beyond endless unevidenced assertions, peppered with sophistry using rhetoric like logic, reason, knowledge, truth etc etc. His definition of a deity was truly hilarious, utter nonsense unsupported by evidence or rational argument.
If he is genuinely studying philosophy then he’s wasting his time, and ought to go back to learning basic word definitions, words like truth, fact, science, logic, reason, epistemology, theism, atheism, agnosticism, as the way he uses these words as soundbites shows he doesn’t understand them at all.
He also needs to show some integrity and either acknowledge his attempts to reverse the burden of proof are based on a known logical fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam.
1 Like
Nymphaea caerulea (blue lotus) and N. ampla, which has a white flower but a similar alkaloid content, grow along lakes and rivers, thrive in wet soil, and bloom in the spring.2 They belong to the water-lily family. Another variety is N. lotos, sometimes called the ‘white lotus’ though not a true lotus. The isolation of the psychoactive apomorphine from Nymphaea species3 has offered chemical support to speculation that Nymphaea species may have been employed as hallucinogens in both the Old and the New World.4,5 The use of N. caerulea and of N. lotos in rites and rituals is depicted in the frescoes within the tombs, and in very early papyrus scrolls. The most important of these was the scroll of Ani (Book of the Dead). Nymphaea is mentioned and represented in several chapters of the book, always tied to magical-religious rites. Depictions of Papaver somniferum and mandragora, also known as mandrake, a hallucinogenic plant with anticholinergic properties, often appear alongside those of Nymphaea.6 Tutankhamon’s tomb contained a gold-plated shrine decorated with a bas-relief of a pharoah holding a huge Nymphaea and two mandragoras in his left hand.
Nymphaea flowers were also depicted in frescoes from the tomb of Nebaum (XVIII Dynasty, 1370-1318 bc) found in Luxor, and now located in the British Museum. The frescoes illustrate a ritualistic funeral dance with two male dancers accompanied by three women, garlanded with petals of N. caerulea. The women are offering vases, from which golden emanations flow as if they contained a magical fluid. Nymphaea species also feature in erotic cartoons (Figure 1).
Similar motifs are seen in Mayan art, and Dobkin de Rios,7 Diaz,8 and Emboden9,10 hypothesize that the plants were used as hallucinogens during religious rites or as ‘entheogenes’, symbolic of a union between man and the divine. In a vase found in the Classic period Mayan site of Bonampak, the headpiece of the central figure depicts a character adorned with a Nymphaea, performing a ritual dance. In the Mayan ruins of Palenque, also in Chiapas, Mexico, a bas-relief in the tomb of Pacal, in the Temple of Inscriptions, contains a representation of two Mayan priests standing on either side of ‘jaguar god’. One of the priests has a Nymphaea bud emerging from his head, and the other has the same bud emerging from his headpiece. Such striking similarities in such distant cultures lead to the conclusion that the plants had a common use. Studies from several different laboratories have identified apomorphine and aporphine in the bulbs and roots of N. ampla.11 The emetic effect of apomorphine (and aporphine, which is hydroxylated in the body to form apomorphine) is well known. Mescal beans, ritually used by shamans to induce an ecstatic states are likewise emetic; it has been hypothesized that Nymphaea was used by both Egyptian and Mayan cultures as a purifying ritual emetic.11 However, it has only recently become clear that apomorphine can be utilized, with excellent results, to treat erectile dysfunction. It is a centrally acting, selective D1/D2 dopamine agonist, and activation of dopaminergic receptors in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus initiates a cascade of events, ultimately resulting in smooth muscle relaxation and vasodilatation within the corpora cavernosa, leading to penile erection.12,13
This discovery provides a likely explanation for the appearance of Nymphaea in the Luxor frescoe and in erotic cartoons such as that reproduced in Figure 1. The fact that temple drawings only depict use by the higher castes, such as priests and royalty, suggests that the masses did not benefit from this discovery. The Nymphaea story serves as a further illustration of how the effects of substances of plant origin were known even though the discoverers lacked the technology to explain them.14,15
GET WASTED AND HAVE AN ORGY FOR THE GODS… FUN TIME…
Fast forward to the 1990s
In 1992, German scientist Svetla Balabanova and her team were involved in a programme that aimed to uncover how ancient societies used hallucinogenic drugs. Mummified ancient priestess Henut Taui - along with eight other mummified bodies - produced results that astounded the team.
Every single one of the nine mummies tested positive for cocaine and hashish, while eight also revealed traces of nicotine. And again, the world reacted with incredulity. There were too many “what ifs”, too many obstacles to believe that the results were true… weren’t there?
Balabanova repeated the tests in the wake of the controversy, using radioimmunoassay and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) - testing methods which are regularly used in modern day drug testing - and got the same results. The bones, soft tissue and hair of the mummies all contained traces of the drug, ruling out the possibility of external contamination.
Further research by Parsche and Nerlich in 1995 - which included samples from the intestines and liver - revealed that the nicotine and cocaine were most likely ingested, while the hashish was probably inhaled. And later, new research from Balabanova showed that 79% of the 71 additional mummies that were tested (using bone and hair samples) were positive for cocaine. Interestingly, the highest concentrations of the drug were found in the mummies that were youngest when they died.
The proof is in the hair testing
It wasn’t just Balabanova’s hair tests that revealed unexpected traces of these substances: multiple tests by other scientists over the subsequent years confirmed the result. But just how accurate were these test results likely to be?
While, at the time, it was still early days for hair drug testing, that’s not to say that the methods were unreliable. The scientists used both radioimmunoassay and GC/MS testing of the hair samples, carefully washing the samples beforehand, to avoid the risk of false positives through contamination.
But the test results alone are not enough. In order to be truly useful, hair test results must be expertly interpreted.
Interpretation involves working to rule out any extenuating circumstances that may affect test results. In the case of the cocaine mummies, there were plenty of circumstances that were suggested to have affected the results. Were the traces a result of contamination by modern day people smoking around the mummies? Did the mummies genuinely date from Ancient Egypt? Could these substances have been a byproduct of decomposition? Were the results themselves fabricated?
Every Cansford Labs test report will include the toxicologist’s interpretation of the test results, along with a detailed breakdown of the chain of custody, from sample collection right through to analysis. This ensures that the validity of the sample and the testing process are confirmed from start to finish, removing any doubt about the results.
It may be hard to believe that the Ancient Egyptians were using THC, cocaine and nicotine some 3,000 years ago, but of the three theories, it has the most validating evidence. The combination of a highly accurate testing method and careful, expert interpretation of the results suggests that, while their use may have been medical or even accidental as a result of the use of indigenous plants for other purposes, these addictive substances have been used for centuries longer than we once thought.
With no way of knowing for sure, the case of the cocaine mummies highlights just how vital interpretation can be in drawing the most valid conclusion from a hair drug test.
1 Like
I have a good friend who studied Archeology and is really into this. I will drop him a line and ask for referenced. Religious history is replete with examples of hallucenogenic practices. All kinds.
1 Like