"All the World's a Stage We Pass Through" R. Ayana

Showing posts with label cocaine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cocaine. Show all posts

Monday, 8 December 2014

Tripping the Light Fantastic: Drugs and Entheogens - What's the Difference?


Tripping the Light Fantastic
Drugs and Entheogens: What's the Difference?

 




The word Entheogen means God contained within and in some other translations it means to awaken the divine within, which is closer to the word Entheogenesis, describing the process of doing away with all that which is transient and impermanent, while allowing the unchanging aspect of our being to awaken to itself. An Entheogen is a compound that induces a spiritual or mystical experience. There have been many kinds of Entheogens or plant based psychoactive substances used by humans. However, there isn't much known about these plant medicines commonly, as a result of which humanity has long been exploited by psychological manipulation at the hands of the powers that be. Constant repetition of lies and negative propaganda seem to be working well on the sleeping masses, however with more information and awareness on these subjects things are quickly changing globally.

It is good to see great change manifesting when people join hands and come together against this regressive oppression and tyranny that act out through the various world governments, big greedy corporations and the Military Industrial Complex. One of the ways to beat the system is through creating more awareness ... by disseminating useful information, sharing knowledge ... speaking your truth and more importantly, living it ! We came across this brilliant source of information on various drugs and their effects on human consciousness and thought it must be shared here ...

In 2010 I was fortunate to be a presenter on the subject of entheogens at a fascinating conference in San Rafael, California, titled “Beyond the I… the end of the Seeker’. The conference organizers had recruited a remarkable collection of physicists, neuroscientists, consciousness researchers, and spiritual teachers, all with a common interest in what turned out to be the rather hazy subject of ‘Science and Non-Duality’. (I say that I was fortunate to present because I was also able to attend workshops and lectures with some of my personal heroes including the physicist/authors Peter Russell, Amit Goswami, NASA’s zero-point scientist Bernard Haisch, anesthesiologist Stuart Hammerhof on his and Roger Penrose’s theory of Quantum Consciousness, and a remarkable presentation by Nassim Haramein exclusively on his paper about the Schwarzschild Proton). The entheogen section of the conference — titled ‘Entheogens as a Portal’— was a panel comprising of Rick Doblin (MAPS), Dr. Martin Ball, James Fadimann, myself and a couple of other speakers (whose names I must confess I don’t remember) all who received 20 minutes to speak about entheogens and (I presumed) ‘non-duality’.

Since my normal presentation (which is mostly about my theory for a quantum nature for the transpersonal entheogenic experience that I outline in my book ‘Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad’) takes at least an hour, and since I was considering ‘non-duality’ to be another way of describing the ‘classical’ mystical experience of ‘transpersonal Oneness’ that occurs with the complete dissolution of Ego and Identity (‘the loss of all opposites’), I decided to talk about a subject that I had been thinking about more recently, namely the correlation between the effect a ‘drug’ has on the Ego (one’s personal sense of ‘I’) and its relative toxicity.




So for this conference, rather than discussing my usual subject (the endogenous entheogens, DMT and 5-MeO-DMT), I decided to consider the broad spectrum of different ‘mood-enhancing’ compounds available, and rather than considering how each particular ‘drug’ affects our bodies or our ‘mental well-being’ as most scientific studies would, I would instead rank each drug on how it affected our sense of Ego, our sense of “I”. Since the total loss of Ego and the sense of “I” is the core of the transpersonal mystical experience (and I am an experiential-mystic at heart) I decided that I would assign each ’drug’ its own ‘Mystical Value’, with the ‘drugs’ that can induce the transpersonal state of total loss of Ego and Identity having the highest value (most value to an experiential mystic), while the ‘drugs’ that reinforced or inflated the sense of the Ego would have the lowest. After having ranked the various compounds (according to experiential reports in literature, EROWID, etc), it was interesting to note that the scale naturally descended by the chemical class of the compound—tryptamine, phenethylamine, opiates, amphetamines, alcohol— and that this corresponded to a noticeable increase in toxicity.

Here is how I ranked the various compounds, along with my personal commentary on the effects of the compound, its toxicity, and human history.

The Oroc Mystical Value Scale


The endogenous entheogens/ Simple tryptamines:

1. 5-Methoxy-DMT: Regularly capable of inducing a ‘classical’ mystical experience of transpersonal oneness with complete dissolution of Ego and Identity, even at dosages as low as 5 micrograms. Endogenous. Which means that it is naturally produced within our own bodies and thus 100% physically ‘non-toxic’. Also present in nature in the leaf, bark, and roots of trees, and in the venom of the Bufo Alvarius toad. 5-MeO-DMT has been used in South America in the forms of snuffs for an estimated 3000 years. 5-MeO-DMT’s modern use, first in the form of smoking toad venom, and then as synthesized 5-Meo-DMT, is approx 35 years old.


2. DMT (dimethyltryptamine): Capable of inducing a ‘classical’ mystical experience of transpersonal Oneness, with complete dissolution of Ego and Identity, mostly at high dosages, and in certain individuals. Endogenous. Found in the leaf, seeds, bark, and roots of plants, DMT has been used in South America as snuffs, and as the active alkaloid in ayahuasca, for more than 1500 years. These plant admixtures are regarded as sacred medicines amongst the Amazonian cultures from which they originate. After being discovered to be psychologically active by the Hungarian psychologist Stephan Szara in 1957, DMT was used by IM sporadically throughout the early 1960’s (most notably by William S Burroughs and Timothy Leary) before experiencing a brief burst of popularity in the late 1960’s (after the underground chemist Nick Sand discovered that the fumurate was smokable), before disappearing almost completely by the end of the 1970’s. The writings of Terence McKenna subsequently rekindled interest in the compound and its natural analogue ayahuasca, which combined with the unsubstantiated theories of Dr Rick Strassman presented in the more recent book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, has resulted in a significant modern mythology amongst the current psychedelic counter-culture.


The Complex Tryptamines:

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8204/8156705241_f4f98b26d6_k.jpg3. LSD-25. (lysergic acid) Also a tryptamine, LSD is capable of inducing a ‘classical’ mystical experience of transpersonal Oneness, with complete dissolution of Ego and Identity, in high dosages, and in certain individuals. Synthetic, with close analogues found in nature. The Eleusinian mysteries—which could only be attended once in a lifetime—were considered the high point of Greek Society and ran for more than 2000 years, tremendously influencing Greek Philosophy and thus Western Thought. Kykeon, the entheogen at the heart of these mysteries, was most likely an LSD analogue produced from an ergot (grain) fungus. (The Temple at Eleusis was dedicated to Demeter, the Goddess of Wheat). LSD-like compounds have also been isolated from the Aztec ololiuqui (morning glory) seeds. Lysergic Acid –LSD 25, which captured the public imagination like no other entheogen in modern history during the late 1960’s and early 70’s– when an estimated 75 million people tried the drug – is the synthetic counterpart of these natural plant analogues. While the very high dosages (800+ micrograms) recommended by Leary, Metzner, and Alpert in ‘The Varieties of the Psychedelic Experience’ (1963) to induce a transpersonal-mystical experience ultimately proved to be more than most people liked to handle psychologically, LSD is physiologically one of the safest compounds known to man, since it requires the smallest known amount (1/10,000th of a gram) to be psychologically active, and is thus has an incredibly low toxicity to dosage. (You can ingest the same amount of cyanide, or even plutonium, and it will pass through your body without affecting you). Wikipedia reports a suspected fatal overdose (Kentucky, 1975) medical literature on LSD, which involved the IV injection of a ridiculously large amount of LSD (1/3rd of a gram … more than 3000 of today’s hits!) but notes ’most sources report that there are no known human cases of such an overdose’.

4. Psilocybin (4-OH-DMT). Can induce transpersonal-mystical experience in high dosage. Naturally occurring in some 200 mushroom species. The presumed entheogen in Terence McKenna’s ‘Stoned Ape’ theory. The least powerful of the tryptamines, psilocybin is of low toxicity although overdoses are reputedly possible on synthetic psilocybin, such as in the death of John Griggs, the leader of the notorious LSD-and-hashish cartel, The Brotherhood of Love, although none are reported on EROWID.



Ketamine/PCP


5. Ketamine/PCP: Capable of inducing a ‘classical’ mystical experience of transpersonal Oneness, with complete dissolution of Ego and Identity, mostly at high dosages, and in certain individuals. The only legal PCP analogue (estimated 5-10% the strength of PCP), Ketamine, which acts as a stimulant on the central nervous system, requires inclusion due to its impressive record for inducing mystical experiences in individuals (mostly by IM injection) and it could be argued that it deserves a higher ranking than the complex tryptamines. Since it is used as a medical anesthetic, it is considered physically very safe and overdoses are rare. While PCP was first synthesized in 1926, with an illegal street use that peaked in the mid-70’s, Ketamine’s illegal use as an entheogen (and increasingly as a party drug in small doses) is a relatively recent human development.


The Psychedelic-Phenethylamines:


6. Mescaline: Can induce transpersonal-mystical experience in high-dosages. Naturally occurring in various cactus species, mescaline is one of the oldest psychedelics known to man. The San Pedro cactus cults of Northern Peru are the longest known continuous shamanic tradition having existed for at least 3000 years, while there is evidence of peyote use in Mexico and North America dating back 5700 years. In these cultures, the mescaline-containing cacti were considered sacred medicine. Although very rare today, synthetic mescaline was the main subject of Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Doors of Perception’, which helped spark the 60’s psychedelic revolution. (Mescaline, Psilocybin, LSD, and DMT would be the 4 compounds listed in the introduction to Leary, Messner, and Alpert’s ‘The Psychedelic Experience’ in 1965.). Like most psychedelics, mescaline is physically non-toxic and non-addictive.


7. 2-CB, 2-CI: Structurally related to mescaline, both 2-CB and 2-CI can induce transpersonal-mystical experience in high-dosages. Synthetic phenethylamines, these are notoriously dose-sensitive and little is known about their toxicity, but due to the extremely low toxicity of mescaline and virtually all psychedelics, they can be assumed to be physically non-toxic and non-addictive. Both are creations of Alexander Shulgin (most famous for popularizing MDMA), which rose to popularity in the LSD drought of the early 21st century caused by the infamous Kansas Silo bust, proving once again that prohibition simply results in diversity.


FATAL OVERDOSE LINE

The Empathagenic-Phenethylamines:


8. MDA: (Sassafras). Empathogen. The original 1960’s ‘Love Drug’. As with all the compounds in this class, empathogens can decrease the effect of Ego by inducing love and compassion to others, weakening the sense of ‘I’. Empathogens also differ from psychedelic/entheogens in their acute toxicity, with deaths caused by cardiac arrest/brain hemorrhaging at a fatality rate of approx 2 in 100,000 users, approximately the same as the more popular (though less toxic) MDMA.

9. MDMA (Ecstasy). See MDA. Rediscovered and popularized by chemist Alexander Shulgin in the 1980’s, MDMA held great promise for psychiatry before becoming illegal in a wave of Federal paranoia. Currently being used in hospital trials in Israel, the organization MAPS (Multi-disciplinary Association of Psychedelic Sciences) wants to start clinical trials on returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress syndrome here in the USA


Other Popular Illegal Compounds:


10. THC (Cannabis or ‘marijuana’). Decreases the effect of the Ego by shifting perspective, often towards the humorous side. Relatively low toxicity, no possibility of physical overdose. While cannabis related crimes are the number one reason for incarceration in the USA, with over a million people in jail for its sale, distribution, production, or possession, there has never been a single death related to THC consumption itself.

11. Opiates/Heroin: Nullifies the Ego by negating all desire although not the sense of “I”. Highly physically addictive with regular fatal overdoses, heroin was involved in 213,118 Emergency Room (ED) visits in 2009. Meanwhile Oxycodon fatalities (OxyContin is a semi-synthetic opiod pain reliever derived from opium) have increased 66.7% over the last five years due to this pain-medicines relatively high toxicity. (14,459 in 2007 … 82,724 people died from FDA approved drugs in 2010.) ED visits involving nonmedical use of pharmaceuticals (either alone or in combination with another drug) increased 98.4 percent between 2004 and 2009, from 627,291 visits to 1,244,679. OxyContin sales currently exceed $4 billion per year.

12. Cocaine: The ultimate ‘Me’ drug. Physically and psychologically addictive. Highly toxic. A nervous-system stimulant, cocaine dependence (addiction) can result in cardiovascular and brain damage. The Greed Culture of the 1980’s that came only 15 years after the ‘Psychedelic Revolution’ can almost be epitomized by its reverence to cocaine, the most expensive drug that does the least for the shortest amount of time. In 2009 Cocaine and crack cocaine overdoses were responsible for over 400 000 ED room visits in US hospitals. While the first ‘cocaine epidemic’ in the USA was in the 1880’s, cocaine has greatly grown in popularity since the 1970’s, with the estimated U.S. cocaine market exceeding $70 billion in street value in 2005 – a greater revenue than a corporation such as Starbucks. The multi-billion dollar ‘War against Cocaine’ has been waged at the military level in foreign countries since the 1980’s with no noticeable affect on supply, while drug violence long the border of Mexico – mostly over the cocaine and methamphetamine trade – is killing more than 5000 people a year.

13. Methamphetamines. Physically and psychologically addictive. Highly toxic. The highly lucrative illegal underground market of the USA’s most-popular legal drug (Ritalin and Adderall are legal methamphetamines – the USA consumes 85% of the world’s prescription speed.) Sometimes called ‘white-trash cocaine’, methamphetamine abuse is reaching epidemic proportions at many levels of American society with over 93,000 ED room visits in 2009. Crack cocaine and methamphetamine addiction have long been associated with both forced and voluntary prostitution in every country that they appear in, while the violence associated with Mexican drug cartels fighting for control of a cocaine and methamphetamine market valued in excess of 50 billion dollars is currently responsible for over 15,000 fatalities a year.

( And finally, our Society’s chosen legal ‘inebrient’)

14. Alcohol: Considered a psychoactive depressant. Highly toxic and physically addictive. The United States Center for Disease Control estimates that medium to high consumption of alcohol leads to the death of approx 75,000 people a year in the USA. While the last three compounds on this chart – Cocaine, Methamphetamine, and Alcohol – are the only three compounds most likely to reinforce the Ego to the point of physical violence, alcohol is the one your most likely to do yourself physical harm on due to self-loathing. Alcohol is the most common extenuating factor for homicides, rapes, beatings, and suicides, not to mention vehicular fatalities. Alcohol is arguably the least sophisticated drug in both its production and its crude inebriating effects. The first alcoholic beverages can be traced back 9000 years to Neolithic times, which is why I like to call it our ‘stone-age drug’. Paradoxically, (or perhaps because of its ancient origins) alcohol it is the only 100% legal drug on this list in the vast majority of countries around the world.

My conclusion from ranking these various compounds by their unique ‘Mystical Value’ and comparing their relative toxicity can thus be expressed quite simply (as):

Oroc’s Law: The more a compound disrupts the Ego (the sense of ‘I’), the physically safer (less toxic) that compound will be, while the more a ‘drug’ reinforces and inflates the sense of Ego, the more physically harmful (toxic) that compound will be.

After my presentation a number of the enthusiastic audience asked me if I had ever written anything about this ‘Mystical Value Scale’ and I had to confess that I had not, but that some time in the future I would try to. But in all truth, I would probably have stored it away in the back drawers of my very messy mind had not the former ‘Chief Advisor on Drugs’ to the British Government published a very interesting report in the respected Lancet medical journal that was released just a month later (Nov 2010) and made world-wide news. In this report by the ‘Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs’, every common drug in British society was scored by a panel of social health experts on the harm it created including mental and physical damage, addiction, crime and costs to the economy and the community, thus basically ranking the public health effect of the various drugs. The maximum harm score was 100 and the minimum zero. When the results were tabulated, the most harmful drug was alcohol (72), then heroin (55), crack-cocaine (54), methamphetamines (33), cocaine (27), cannabis (20), ketamine (15), and MDMA (9), with LSD (7) and magic mushrooms (5) being ranked as the least harmful substances to British society! (Neither DMT or 5-MeO-DMT were on the list). The esteemed authors also wrote that ‘our findings lend support to the previous work in the UK and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm.’

Based on this highly scientific report, my observation about the related toxicity of my Mystical Value scale would seem to have been validated, with those ‘drugs’ that most eradicate the effect of the Ego being deemed (by public health experts) the safest. Non-addictive and of low toxicity, psychedelic ‘drugs’ offer no threat to your physical health, and yet they are considered by our Society to be extremely ‘dangerous’ and are amongst the most illegal substances on the planet.

The word drug incidentally—which means (in this context, according to the Webster’s dictionary) ‘a chemical substance which enhances physical or mental well-being’— is a ridiculously misleading and almost meaningless word if you think about it, since nearly everything we eat and drink can be considered a drug. Nitrous oxide, a gas, is a drug. Coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate are all drugs. Even McDonalds french-fries under this broad definition could be considered a (highly addictive) drug. Now, as much as I love chocolate, coffee, and even — I hate to admit it — the occasional McDonalds French-fry, I see little purpose in comparing them in any way, shape, or form, to LSD, DMT, or 5-MeO-DMT, which are far more likely to completely change your consensual reality then they are ‘enhance your physical or mental well-being’. But the very use of a word/term as broad as ‘drugs’ (drug law, drug war, illegal drugs, dangerous drugs etc’) to describe and legally regulate (DEA) such a ridiculously broad range of compounds is in it’s self a verbal smokescreen designed to help limit the distinctly society-changing possibilities of psychedelic-entheogens.

If I may diverge for a moment, it is my personal opinion that the ‘first’ psychedelic revolution in the United States (1963 – Saturday 6th December 1969) ‘failed’ ultimately due to the mass influx of a variety of distinctly non-psychedelic ‘drugs’ into the chaotic and highly exploratory youth culture of that time. Psychedelics when used in high-dosages have proven to be safest when used in a thoughtful and controlled ‘set-and-setting’, but as the Youth revolution took hold many teenagers were exposed to super-powerful entheogens like LSD-25 and STP (DOM) in what can only be described as a cavalier and Dionysian manner. Considering the fact that an average hit of LSD in 1968 (400-500mg) was 5 times stronger than a hit of street acid (80 to 100mg) today, and that first-timers LSD users were frequently encouraged to take two hits if they wanted to see Tim Leary’s promised ‘white light’, with little thought to their ‘set-and setting’, then it is easy to see how a large number of young hippies feared acid as much as others revered it. (You still witness this same phenomena today … many of the 20 something’s that I talk to at festivals seem to love DMT but are terrified of LSD having already experienced a trip too long and arduous for them … and they probably ate a quarter of what their parents did for their first time in the 60’s!). This tendency to push all experiences to the limit (‘the Prankster ethic’) opened the backdoor for the more seductive and much easier rides of first heroin, and then cocaine. (Which when it was first introduced was not thought to be addictive.)

Disregarding the potential (and well-documented role) that the CIA played in the introduction and distribution of virtually all the illegal drugs that became available, by failing to recognize the essential difference of psychedelics/entheogens—that they are best used carefully in a sacred manner with trusted guides and not wildly in recreation amongst crowds of strangers—and then by lumping the wide-variety of compounds that followed into a singular ‘Drug Culture’ that fails to distinguish between the wide variety of experiences that this vast family of so-called ‘drugs’ can produce, the Alternative culture that had been inspired by psychedelics and the chance for change, ended up settling for uppers-and-downers and the Status Quo, as heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines became the most popular ‘illegal drugs’ of the last thirty years of the 20th century. (And the use and abuse of legal ‘
prescription drugs’ sky rocketed).

 https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8081/8303098571_b87f6d74f2_b.jpg

It is interesting now —with more than 40 years perspective— to realize the fact that our Society’s so-called ‘Drug Culture’ has increasingly turned away from the 60’s psychedelic ethos of the mystical destruction of the Ego (and consequently the social structures that the Ego creates) towards a range of compounds that actually reinforce the concept of the Ego (and thus maintain the existing social structures that Ego has built). It could be argued that the last thirty years of the twentieth century that came after the failed psychedelic revolution of the 1960’s were the most egocentric years in human history, as television and a global communication network have relentlessly promoted the cult of the Ego as the highest human ideal to the post Vietnam generations of techno-capitalists, with the constant accumulation of individual wealth and power seen as a Darwinian function inherited from our hunter-gatherer days. This obsession with the role of the Individual has resulted in 5% of the world’s population now controlling 50% of its wealth, as multi-national corporations controlled by a handful of families continue to strip the globe of its resources to line the pockets of shareholders and board members in those industrialized nations whose military are effectively the World Law, a treacherous and seemingly unstoppable situation that is threatening life on this planet as the military-industrial complex lurches increasingly erratically through the last of its days. The cult of the Individual Ego has now grown so predominant, we have a societal case of what I call ‘extinction denial’ where the fate of the individual has become paramount, best expressed in the concept ‘You better get yours while you can.’

A radical reassessment of the effect of capitalism and consumerism on both the human condition and our planet is clearly required, but what can bring about a change in a viewpoint that has been steadily being programmed into us by the very technology whose reckless use we need to reassess? According to the Dalai Lama ‘achieving genuine happiness may require bringing about a transformation in your outlook, in your way of thinking, and this is not a simple matter’ and I believe this applies to us as much as a Society as it does to each of us individually. But what can any of us really do other than reorganize deck chairs on the Titanic? What action can actually have a chance of bringing about a fundamental transformation in the way Humanity perceives and values Life on this planet?

In July of 2003 when first introduced to the super-entheogen 5-MeO-DMT, I underwent what I now believe to be a ‘classical’ mystical experience of transpersonal unity with the Source of Being. This event had a profound effect upon my world-view since I found myself changed from an agnostic scientific-rationalist to believing in the existence of a God far greater than I could have ever imagined, all in the space of a single 40 minute drug-induced ‘trip’. The result for my subsequent search for answers on how such a radical transformation could have occurred is contained in my book “Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad.” (Park Street Press, 2009), and within the pages of that book I make the claim that this discovery of a spiritual element to the Universe, and the realization that God not only CAN exist but exists —as the mystics have always insisted—as a part of you, is the most exciting realization that a human being can make. More than eight years have now past since I myself made that unexpected discovery, and while I still agree that is ultimately the most exciting discovery possible, I must concede it is not always the most practical, a dilemma that mystics have known and have suffered for since the beginning of time. The personal discovery of God—any kind of God or Buddha-State, for they are all streams of the same Cosmic river—can never be ‘scientifically’ proven and inevitably any entheogenic realizations or enlightenment can only offer the same proofs as any other ‘spiritual’ system … the sticky dual-problem of personal testimony and ‘faith’.

I have however come to realize that while entheogens can never ‘prove’ the existence of God (rather one can only ‘experience’ God-Consciousness through the use of them and thus form your own opinion), true-entheogens can be used as the most powerful tools of exploration available for investigating some of the most perplexing philosophical questions that humanity has managed to conceive, especially those concerning the role and reality of Consciousness, and its human-shadow, the Ego. As our Society and technology begins to progress beyond the Newtonian-Darwinian paradigm, we are coming to scientifically realize that nothing in the Universe exists as an individual point in space-and-time, since the emerging quantum view of the Universe states that all things are linked and connected thru a matrix of fields of energy that far surpass the energy of physical matter, matter is merely the froth on the wave of reality if you like, while our consciousness, the vehicle of this discovery, far from being an accidental by-product of chemical reactions produced within the matter of the brain as purported by the old paradigm, increasingly seems to be a part of an infinite field of consciousness that both permeates, and creates, the Universe itself. I can also personally testify that thru the use of entheogens one can actually experience a moment outside of time and space as pure Consciousness, with no idea or memory of who you are or where you came from, and in that instant the realization arises of the interconnectedness of all things, that all is truly One—the transpersonal experience as Stanislav Grof calls it—and that this is quite possibly the most profound human experience available, a speculation that the recorded history of all varieties of mysticism would seem to support.

Which brings about the about the very interesting possibility—as suggested by the psychologist Julian Jaynes in his increasingly influential book ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’—that the modern highly-individualized human Ego that has been so venerated in the 19th and 20th centuries may be a comparatively recent development in both human history (and perhaps the history of the Universe), and that ‘the voice in our head’ that we now all constantly hear, a few thousand years ago would only arise only in times of severe crisis and danger. (And was often thought to be the voice of the Gods). The non-denominational spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle in his modern classic ‘A New Earth’ argues that our highly refined sense of ‘I’ has come from the development of our technology-driven Society, since the narrowing of our mental focus away from the transpersonal has allowed us to develop our fantastic technology, but at the expense of disconnecting us with another deeper layer of consciousness that we share with all other things in the Universe. We can no longer see the woods for the trees so to speak, as we have become prisoners of our own inflated sense of self.

As our scientists start to discover the outer realms of Quantum Consciousness, and our psychologists and spiritual masters begin to return our attention to the idea of a Cosmic or Absolute Consciousness that both unites and transcends all religion, with the role that the Individual Ego plays in our Society coming under increasingly critical scrutiny, then it would seem clear the lesson that the careful use of entheogens can teach virtually any of us. It is a scientifically verifiable fact that entheogenic compounds can cause a human ego to be disrupted or even momentarily wiped away, and that when this happens, to paraphrase the poetic words of William Blake, the doors of perception are cleansed, and all things appear to man as they are, Infinite. Throughout the recorded history of Humanity there has been no experience considered more profound or more valuable then the singular realization that All is indeed One, and now as the scientists have begun to catch up with the mystics on realizing the simple undeniable fact that all systems are linked, and that the very idea of the ‘sacredness of the individual’ is somewhat absurd, we now need to reform our governments, our religions, our financial institutions, our schools, and most importantly ourselves, to this fundamental Universal Truth.

In a world where we have been programmed by the constant sounds and flashy moving images of our rapidly developing modern technology since we have been born, the ancient schools of meditation and contemplation have had little chance to reform the Ego or the society that our love of technology—the human child of the Ego—has built for us, since we have long since forgotten that the death of the Ego is a desirable goal. Deepak Chopra once wrote that synchronicity is the universe showing its intention, and therefore I do not find it strange that mescaline was first synthesized the year that Röntgen discovered radiation, or that Albert Hofmann had a strange dream to reinvestigate a compound that he had put on a shelf many years earlier, thereby instigating a chain of events that would cause him to discover LSD-25’s remarkable psychoactive qualities while the Manhattan Project was months away from igniting the world’s first atomic bomb, arguably humanity’s most egocentric invention. Lysergic Acid (LSD) is a remarkable 20th century invention in the fact that it is the only entheogen that a competent chemist can make a million hits of in an afternoon, and its mass-production qualities (for a mass-production society) should not be under-valued, since it has been responsible for reintroducing the mystical/shamanic concept of the death-and-rebirth of the Ego into our Society at a time when it is most desperately needed. An entheogenic moment outside of space of time can cause a lifetime of egocentric programming to come tumbling down like a house of cards, an illumination almost impossible to ignore, and it is for exactly this reason that our Governments so fear them. If we build the foundations of the Entheogenic Revolution —the 2nd Psychedelic Revolution— upon the basis of a constant awareness of the influence of the Ego, and seek out a deeper connection with the Mind of the Universe that we all share in a process of ‘liberation theology’, then we have a chance to rebuild our tribes into a true World Family that will find a way through the troubling times to come. For if there is one thing that is for sure, it is that none of us will make it alone.

— James Oroc


Reference : DMT Site


From Psychedelic Adventure @ http://www.psychedelicadventure.net/2014/07/drugs-entheogens-whats-difference.html

For more information about drugs see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/drugs   
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Wednesday, 2 March 2011

The Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies

The Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies

Evidence for Ancient Transatlantic Trade

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Transcript: 

In the 21st dynasty of the Pharaohs, 3,000 years ago, the funeral of Henut Taui - the Lady of the Two lands - took place one night at a temple.

Compared to those of the great rulers of Egypt, her burial was a modest affair. But just like the Pharaohs she too was mummified and her body placed in the depths of a desert tomb in the belief it would give her immortality. In an unexpected way, it has. Her mummified body waited throughout recorded history - the Greeks and Romans, the Dark and Middle ages, the Renaissance and Napoleon, until in the early 19th century her tomb was plundered.

The King of Bavaria bought the ornate sarcophagus with the mummy inside. He gave it to a museum in Munich where for another century Henut Taui lay undisturbed.

Then a German scientist, Dr Svetla Balabanova, made a discovery which was to baffle Egyptologists, and call into question whole areas of science and archeology from chemistry to botany.

She discovered that the body of Henut Taui contained large quantities of cocaine and nicotine. The surprise was not just that the ancient Egyptians had taken drugs, but that these drugs come from tobacco and coca, plants completly unknown outside the Americas, unheard of until Sir Walter Raleigh introduced smoking from the New World, or until cocaine was imported in the Victorian era.

It was seemingly impossible for the ancient Egyptians to get hold of these substances. And so began the mystery of the cocaine mummies.

It was in Munich in 1992 that researchers began a huge project to investigate the contents of mummies. When as part of their studies they wanted to test for drugs, it was no surprise that they turned to toxicologist Dr Svelta Balabanova for help.

As the inventor of groundbreaking new methods for the detection of drugs in hair and sweat, she was highly respected in her field. Dr Balabanova took samples from the mummies, which she pulverised and dissolved to make a solution. As she'd done countless times before, she ran the samples through a system which uses antibodies to detect the presence of drugs and other substances. Then as a backup the samples were put through the GCMS machine which can accurately identify substances by determining their molecular weight. As the graph emerged with peaks showing that drugs were present, and as the printer spewed out the analysis of just which drugs, something seemed to have gone very wrong.

DR SVETLA BALABANOVA - Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ulm:
"The first positive results, of course, were a shock for me. I had not expected to find nicotine and cocaine but that's what happened. I was absolutely sure it must be a mistake."
NARRATOR:
Balabanova ran the tests again. She sent fresh samples to three other labs. But the results kept being confirmed. The drugs were there. So she went ahead and published a paper. The reaction was a sharp reminder that science is a conservative world.

DR SVETLA BALABANOVA - Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ulm:
"I got a pile of letters that were almost threatening, insulting letters saying it was nonsense, that I was fantasising, that it was impossible, because it was proven that before Columbus these plants were not found anywhere in the world outside of the Americas."

NARRATOR:
From toxicologists to anthropologists - everyone thought the same.

DR JOHN HENRY - Consultant Toxicologist, Guys Hospital, London:
"The first thing you think of is that this is just mad. It's wrong. There's contamination present. Maybe there's a fraud present of some kind. You don't think that cocaine can be present in an Egyptian mummy."

NARRATOR:
Yet Balabanova herself had been worried about contamination. First she checked all the lab equipment. But being a forensic toxicologist, that wasn't all she did. Balabanova had learned her trade from working for the police, and had been trained in the methods they use for investigating a suspicious death. She'd been taught how vital it is when an autopsy is carried out to know whether the victim has consumed or been given any drugs or poisons. And she had also been taught that a special forensic technique exists which can show that the deceased has consumed a drug and rule out contamination at the same time.

So, anxious to ensure that her tests on the mummies were beyond reproach, she used this very technique - it's called the hair shaft test. Drugs and other substances consumed by humans get into the hair protein, where they stay for months, or after death - forever. Hair samples can be washed in alcohol and the washing solution itself then tested. If the testing solution is clear, but the hair tests positive, then the drug must be inside the hair shaft, which means the person consumed it during their lifetime. It's considered proof against contamination before or after death.
DR JOHN HENRY - Consultant Toxicologist, Guys Hospital, London:
"The hair shaft test is accepted. If you know that you've taken your hair sample from this individual and the hair shaft is known to contain a drug, then it is proof positive that the person has taken that drug. So it is accepted in law. It's put people into prison."

NARRATOR:
The hair shaft test on a couple in Jersey [Channel Is.], showed their two sons had drugged them before killing them. And aside from the Newall case, the technique has been used in countless others over the last 25 years. Since it's also used for drugs tests on addicts, company employees and in sport, to suggest it could produce false results was for Balabanova unthinkable.

DR SVETLA BALABANOVA - Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ulm:
"There's no way there can be a mistake in this test. This method is widely accepted and has been used thousands of times. If the results are not genuine, then the explanation must lie elsewhere, and not in my tests, because I'm 100 percent certain about the results."

NARRATOR:
If the fault was not in the tests, what else could lie behind the impossibility of mummies containing drugs from coca and tobacco, from a continent not discovered until over 1,000 years after the end of the Egyptian civilisation? In search of an explanation, we went to one of the UK's foremost authorities on mummies, a person who had spent years rummaging around in the bodies of ancient Egyptians, Rosalie David.

ROSALIE DAVID - Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum:
"When I was informed that cocaine had been found in Egyptian mummies, I was absolutely astounded. It seemed quite impossible that this should be the case."

NARRATOR:
Sceptical of Balabanova's results, Rosalie David decided to get some sampless from her own mummies and have them tested especially for 'Equinox'.

ROSALIE DAVID - Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum:
"What we shall do is to provide tissue samples and a hair sample from a number of mummies in the Manchester Museum collection. I shall be very surprised to find they had cocaine in them."

NARRATOR:
It would be a while before the results came back from the lab. Rosalie David's motive was not only to independently check Balabanova's methods. She also wanted to run the same tests but on different mummies. For she had more than one idea about how Balabanova could have got a misleading result.

ROSALIE DAVID - Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum:
"There were two ideas that sprang immediately to mind. One was that possibly something in the tests could give a false result. The second was that possibly the mummies that had been tested were not truly ancient Egyptian, that they could be some of these false, relatively modern mummies, and traces of cocaine could be in those individuals."

NARRATOR:
What Rosalie David was referring to happened in Egypt in Victorian Times. It was a gruesome operation to supply the antique dealers of Luxor.

When 19th century travellers went to Egypt in search of mummies and other valuables, the dealers might not have the genuine article available. And so the crudely mummified body of a recently dead Egyptian might be procured instead. For a shrivelled corpse would greatly increase the value of a genuine but empty sarcophagus.
Sometimes collectors would buy only limbs or other mummified spare parts. These are doubly suspect for the trade in fake mummies, especially separate heads and limbs, has an even older origin.
Eating the flesh of mummies was a common 16th century practice in Europe. People believed that mummies contained a black tar called bitumen, and so thought powder made from the ground up bodies would cure various illnesses.
This is the very origin of the word mummy, from the Persian for bitumen, mummia, and although it made people sick a roaring trade in powdered mummia grew, supplied from body parts and tissue shipped in bulk from Egypt.
The temptation to resort to fakes was high.
ROSALIE DAVID - Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum:
"Very soon, the demand outstripped the supply and certainly in the 16th century a French physician undertook a study of this trade. And he found that in fact they were burying bodies of convicted criminals in the sand. They were producing mummies, and these then became a source for the medicinal ingredient."

NARRATOR:
Could it be that the mummies Balabanova tested were fakes? Carbon dating on mummies often produces incorrect results, so archaeologists often rely on the provenance - knowing what tomb and excavation the mummy comes from and on examination of the mummification techniques.

So the only way for Rosalie David to check out here theory about fakes was to travel to Munich to see for herself the seven mummies that were the cause of all the fuss.
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The Munich mummies as they are known belong to the city's Egyptian Museum, which is housed in the old palace of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who started the collection.

Inside the museum, Rosalie David found the sarcophagus of Henut Taui - the Lady of the Two Lands. She discovered from the museum catalogue that the coffin was bought by King Ludwig from an English traveller called Dodwell in 1845. There was no record of an exact excavation, but Henut Taui was said to have come from a tomb reserved for the priests and priestesses of the god Amun in Thebes.

But while being shown the other coffins Rosalie David discovered that apart from Henut Taui, most of the Munich mummies are of unknown origin, and some of the tested mummies turned out to be only detached heads. According to the museum, research had revealed inscriptions, amulets and complex embalming methods, which the museum claimed proved the mummies were ancient.

DR ALFRED GRIMM - Curator, The Egyptian Museum, Munich:
"The investigation shows clearly that the Munich mummies are real Egyptian mummies, no fakes, no modern mummies. They come from ancient Egypt."

NARRATOR:
The obvious way to prove this was to show the mummies to Rosalie David, but all the museum would let her see were empty sarcophagi.

DR ALFRED GRIMM - Curator, The Egyptian Museum, Munich:
"On grounds of religious respect we don't show these mummies here in our galleries. That's one point. The other is we don't allow to film the mummies and to show them on TV."

NARRATOR:
It wasn't always so, for the mummies had already been shown on television. But this German film [showing mummified bodies without wrappings] announcing Balabanova's results has caused quite a fuss. And so now, even though giving access might defeat the accusation of harbouring bogus mummies, it seemed that the museum wanted nothing more to do with the research they politely pointed out was far from respectable.

DR ALFRED GRIMM - Curator, The Egyptian Museum, Munich:
"It's not absolutely proven and I think it's not absolutely scientifically correct."

NARRATOR:
Rosalie had to make do with research papers and books from the museum. Were the Munich mummies fakes? Despite her initial suspicions she decided that on balance, they probably were the real thing.

ROSALIE DAVID - Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum:
"From the documentation and the research which has been carried out on the Munich mummies it seems evident that they are probably genuine because they have packages of viscera inside, some with wax images of the gods on them and also the state of mummification itself is very good. I would say that the detached heads we can't comment on, but the complete bodies probably are genuine."

NARRATOR:
And if that wasn't enough, it turned out that the results from the Munich mummies were not the only evidence from the dead. The anthropologists who originally ordered the tests didn't continue the project. But Balabanova, alongside her normal research into the metabolism of drugs started requesting samples of other ancient human remains from universities. And it was then that she got more results from Egypt.

She tested tissue from 134 naturally preserved bodies from an excavated cemetery in the Sudan, once part of the Egyptian empire. Although from a later period, the bodies were still many centuries before Columbus discovered the Americas. About a third of them tested positive for nicotine and cocaine.
Balabanova was mystified by the presence of cocaine in Africa but thought she might have a way of explaining the nicotine. As well as Egypt and the Sudan, she tested bodies from China, Germany and Austria, spanning a period from 3700BC to 1100AD. A percentage of bodies from all these other regions also contained nicotine.

[Graph showing presence of nicotine: Percentage of bodies with positive result - Egypt:89% Sudan:90% China:62.5% Germany:34% Austria 100%]

DR SVETLA BALABANOVA - Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ulm:
"I continued to work on it because I wanted to be sure of my results, and after 3,000 samples I, was absolutely certain that the tobacco plant was known in Europe and Africa long before Columbus."

NARRATOR:
Far from being solved, the mystery that began in Egypt was spreading. Balabanova was suggesting that an unknown type of tobacco had grown in Europe, Africa and Asia thousands of years ago. But every schoolchild knows that tobacco was discovered in the New World. She was asking for a substantial slice of botany and history to be completely rewritten. Would anyone back her up?

Dr Balabonova had told us that we might find the secret of the mysterious presence of nicotine and cocaine in Egyptian mummies in the ancient plants of Africa. Perhaps there had been drug plants which the Egyptians had used but had vanished along with their civilisation. This led to a much more basic question. Were the Egyptians, the great Pharaohs and pyramid builders really users and abusers of drugs?
The clues can be found hidden in the walls of the grand temple of Karnak. The entire building is covered in depictions of the lotus flower from the tops of the vast columns to the pictograms on the walls. Until recently, Egyptologists took this most commonplace Egyptian symbol to have only a religious meaning. But according to some the true significance of the lotus has been overlooked.
ROSALIE DAVID - Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum:
"The lotus was a very powerful narcotic which was used in ancient Egypt and presumably, was widespread in this use, because we see many scenes of individuals holding a cup and dropping a lotus flower into the cup which contained wine, and this would be a way of releasing the narcotic.

"The ancient Egyptians certainly used drugs. As well as lotus they had mandrake and cannabis, and there is a strong suggestion the also used opium.
"So although it very surprising to find cocaine in mummies, the other elements were certainly in use."
NARRATOR:
So the Pharaohs clearly indulged in drugs. Hashish - which Balabanova also found in the mummies - is an Egyptian tradition which has survived for thousands of years, although nowadays, in public, pipes tend to be filled with nothing more than tobacco.


By contrast, the narcotic blue lotus flower, once so essential at parties, is now on the verge of extinction. And if it could disappear, why not other drug plants? We decided to pursue Balabanova's unusual theory that an ancient species of tobacco might once have grown in the Old World.

Small amounts of nicotine are present in a wide variety of plants and foods, but the high concentrations sought by smokers can only be found in tobacco.

[Graph showing quantities of nicotine: Concentrations in bone samples - Modern Smoker in nanograms/gram :c40ng China:c55ng Germany:c65ng Sudan:c45ng Egyptian Mummies:Off screen!]

The idea of a lost species of tobacco came to Balabanova because the concentrations in the bodies from Asia and Europe were similar to modern day smokers.

But one thing had puzzled her. At 35 times the dose for smokers, the amounts of nicotine she had found in Egyptian mummies were potentially lethal.

But first, Balabanova was baffled, but then she had a thought. The high doses of nicotine in Egyptian bodies could be explained if the tobacco - as well as being consumed - had also been used in mummification.

Over their 3000 year history the Egyptian priests kept the recipe of spices and herbs used to preserve the thousands of people and millions of animals they mummified a closely guarded secret.

The high levels of nicotine in tobacco can kill bacteria. Could it have been one of their secrets?

Balabanova looked through old literature about the bodies of the great Pharaohs and queens themselves. No longer under the care of the priests the fragile royal mummies are now kept in strict atmospheric conditions in the Cairo museum.

But Balabanova discovered a story from the days when scientists could still tamper with them - a story that had almost been forgotten.

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Ramses II died in 1213BC, a few hundred years before Henut Taui. When he was mummified, every possible skill and every rare ingredient was used by the embalmers to try to preserve his body for eternity. For where Henut Tuai was only a priestess, Ramses was arguably the mightiest of all the Pharaohs.

His imposing image adorns most of Egypt’s famous sites for he presided over the Golden Age of its civilisation, and as a skilled military commander won the conquests that made it into a powerful empire.

What interested Balabanova was what happened to Ramses 3000 years later, when he went on his final royal visit.

On september 26th, 1976, amid all the pomp and circumstance - due a visiting head of state - French TV cameras recorded the arrival of the mummy of Ramses II at an airport in Paris. An exhibition about him at the museum of mankind was planned. But the body was found to be badly deteriorated, so a battery of scientist set about trying to repair this damage.

The bandages wrapped around the mummy needed replacing, so botanists were given pieces of the fabric to analyse what it was made of. One found some plant fragments in her piece, and took a closer look. Emerging on the slide, according to her experience, were the unmistakable features - the tiny crystals and filaments - of a plant that couldn't possibly be there.

DR MICHELLE LESCOT - Natural History Museum, Paris:
"I prepared the slides, put them under the microscope and what did I see? Tobacco. I said to myself, that's just not possible - I must be dreaming. The Egyptians didn't have tobacco. It was brought from South America at the time of Christopher Columbus. I looked again, and I tried to get a better view and I thought, well, it's only a first analysis. I worked feverishly and I forgot to have lunch that day. But I kept getting the same result."

NARRATOR:
Amid a storm of publicity people alleged - just as they did with Balabanova's results - that this must be a case of contamination. It's a view shared today by Ramses' keeper at the Cairo museum, who suspects there is a straightforward explanation.

PROF NASRI ISKANDER - Chief Curator, Cairo Museum:
"According to my knowledge and experience, most of the archeologists and scientists who worked on these fields smoked pipes. And I myself have been smoking pipes for more than 25 years. Then maybe a piece of the tobacco dropped by haphazard or just anyway and to tell this is right or wrong we have to be more careful"

NARRATOR:
To combat the allegations of careless smoking Michelle Lescot extracted new samples from deep inside the body of Ramses' mummy and took care to document it with photographs. And as far as she was concerned, these samples again gave the same result - tobacco.

So was Lecot's discovery the proof Balabanova needed for an ancient species of tobacco? For a second opinion, we went to the herbarium at the Natural History Museum to find an expert on tobacco who had seen Lescot's published work. She argued that Lescot's evidence would only identify the family from which tobacco comes, and not the specific plant.
DR SANDY KNAPP - Natural History Museum, London:
"I think that they had a certain amount of evidence, and they took the evidence one step farther than the evidence really allowed them. Sometimes you can only go so far down the road towards telling what something is, and then you come against a wall an you can't go any farther, otherwise you start to make something up."

NARRATOR:
Sandy Knapp thought the plant from Ramses was more likely to be another member of the tobacco family, which is known to have existed in ancient Egypt, such as henbane, mandrake or belladonna.

DR SANDY KNAPP - Natural History Museum, London:
"I think it is very unlikely that tobacco has an alternative history, because, I think we would've heard about it. There'd be some use of it present in either literature, temple carvings, somewhere there would've been evidence to point and say 'Ah, that's tobacco', but there's nothing."

DR MICHELLE LESCOT - Natural History Museum, Paris:
"It’s true that the official theory is tobacco originates in South America. It's also true that there are species in Australasia and the Pacific Islands. There could have been other varieties, ancient varieties that once existed in Asia. Why not Africa? Varieties that have now disappeared so it's not sacrilege to challenge the official theory."

NARRATOR:
The jury was still out on the vanished species of tobacco though Michelle Lescot was convinced that her identification had been correct. But she couldn't help with the cocaine, for it seemed not even one botanist believed in a disappearing coca plant.

DR SANDY KNAPP - Natural History Museum, London:
"Finding cocaine in these Egyptian mummies - botanically speaking - is almost impossible. I mean, there is always a chance that there might be some sort of plant there, but I think there is some sort of mistake. There is something wrong there. I can't explain it from a plant point of view at all."

NARRATOR:
For thousands of years people in the Andes have been chewing coca leaves, to get out the cocaine with it's stimulant, anaesthetic and euphoric properties. There are actually species of the coca family which grow in Africa, but only the South American species has ever been shown to contain the drug. Since cocaine is not in any other plants, Balabanova was completely mystified, but she thought she might have just one possible idea.

DR SVETLA BALABANOVA - Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ulm:
"The cocaine of course remains an open question. It's a mystery - it's completely unclear how cocaine could get into Africa. On the other hand, we know there were trade relationships long before Columbus, and it's conceivable that the coca plant had been imported into Egypt even then."

NARRATOR:
An ancient Egyptian drug trade stretching all the way across the Atlantic Ocean? This was an idea so far-fetched it could only be considered once all the others had been eliminated, the idea that the Egyptians had been able to obtain imports from a place thousands of miles away from a continent supposedly not discovered until thousands of years later.


Was it possible that coca - a plant from South America - had been finding its way to Egypt 3,000 years ago?

If the cocaine found in mummies could not be explained by contamination, or fake mummies or by Egyptian plants containing it, there appeared to be only one remaining possibility... An international drug trade who's links extended all the way to the Americas.
To obtain incense, myrrh and other valuable plants used in religious ceremonies and herbal medicines, it's true, the Egyptians were prepared to go to great lengths.

Even if traders, like today, made all sorts of exotic claims for the source of their products, there is nevertheless clear evidence of ancient contacts as far east as Syria and Iraq. The extended north into Cyprus, south into Sudan and Somalia and west into Libya, but America? To the majority of archeologists, the idea is hardly worth talking about.

PROF JOHN BAINES - Egyptologist, Oxford University:
"The idea that the Egyptians were travelling to America is, overall, absurd. I don't know of anyone who is professionally employed as an Egyptologist, anthropologist or archaeologist who seriously believes in any of these possibilities, and I also don't know anyone who spends time doing research into these areas because they're perceived to be areas with any real meaning for the subjects."

NARRATOR:
But on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, where the moving current of the Gulf Stream arrives in Mexico directly from the west coast of Africa, there is a professionally employed anthropologist who does seriously believe in such possibilities.

PROF ALICE KEHOE - Anthropologist, Marquette University:
"I think there is good evidence that there was both transatlantic and transpacific travel before Columbus. When we try to talk about trans-oceanic contact, people that are standard archeologists get very, um, skittish, and they want to change the subject or move away. They suddenly see a friend across the room - they don't want to pursue the subject at all. They seem to feel that it's some kind of contagious disease they don't want to touch, or it will bring disaster to them."

NARRATOR:
Why was the mere contemplation of voyages before Columbus or the Viking crossings to America, thought to be some sort of curse?


It was in 1910 that some early anthropologists began to theorise that the stepped pyramids in Mexico might not have been the invention of the American Indians. Could the technology have come from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, from Egypt, where there were also stepped pyramids?

After spotting other transatlantic similarities, anthropologists began to argue that all civilisation was invented in Egypt and later handed down to what they regarded as primitive societies. The implication that Old World culture was superior was thought acceptable at that time.

But the arrival of modern dating techniques showed that the similarities were far more likely to be independent developments. For example, the Egyptians abandoned pyramids with steps in favour of smooth ones 2,000 years before the first stepped pyramids occur in the Americas. What's more, the suggestion that American Indians couldn't build their own civilisations became highly unpopular.

Despite a brief revival in the 1970's when anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Atlantic in a primitive reed boat, research into ancient contact with America was frowned on, even if connected with theories of cultural superiority.

But the idea that the ability of the ancients to cross the oceans might have been underestimated continues to be quietly whispered about. Over the years evidence has grown which suggests it might be time to look again at such voyages. To imagine that the Egyptians, who apparently only sailed up and down the Nile or into the Red Sea, might get as far as the Americas perhaps sounds fantastical. But in science, what is one day thought absurd can next day become accepted as fact.

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[Picture of a Norse settlement in Newfoundland]

One senior academic thinks it's important to remember that before the discovery of this Norse settlement in Newfoundland in 1965 theories about Viking voyages to America were dismissed as nonsense.

PROF MARTIN BERNAL - Historian, Cornell University:
"What we've seen is a shift from the idea of Viking landings in America being seen as completely fantastic or partisan, to being accepted by every scholar in the field."

NARRATOR: The fact that evidence of the Viking crossings was hidden has encouraged Martin Bernal to contemplate even earlier voyages that are likewise dismissed as impossible.
PROF MARTIN BERNAL - Historian, Cornell University:
"I have no reason to doubt that there were others - but what they were, and how much influence they had on American society is open to question. But that trans-oceanic voyages are possible - or were possible - seems to me to be overwhelmingly likely."

NARRATOR:
A likelihood Bernal believes is reinforced by some Roman jars found in 1975 in a place called the Bay of Jars in Brazil. It's been suggested that a Roman galley could be buried under the sea. But the interpretation of such finds is heavily disputed.

PROF JOHN BAINES - Egyptologist, Oxford University:
"They would fit the possibility that there was the odd ship that by mistake ended up on the other side of the Atlantic. What they're not going to fit is the idea of sustained two way contact, because there is a huge amount of historical evidence from the Roman world, but there is nothing to suggest such contact existed."

PROF MARTIN BERNAL - Historian, Cornell University:
"They can't have been planted because the bay was known as the Bay of Jars since the 18th century, so that Roman jars had been turning up, and this links up with indirect Roman documentary evidence of contact."

NARRATOR:
The Bay of Jars is only one of several oddities claimed as evidence of transatlantic contacts. Also in Brazil, there is an inscription said to be in an ancient Mediterranean language. Meanwhile, in Mexico, there are 3,000 year old figurines with beards, a feature unknown in native Americans plus colossal statues that are said to look African, and an apparent picture of a pineapple - an American fruit - has been found in Pompeii.


But if tobacco from Mexico or coca from the Andes was carried across an ocean, it apparently need not have been the Atlantic. According to Alice Kehoe, a number of other American plants mysteriously turn up outside the "sealed" continent. But they are found on the other side of the Pacific.
PROF ALICE KEHOE - Anthropologist, Marquette University:
"The one that absolutely proves trans-pacific voyaging is the sweet potato. There are also discoveries of peanuts more than 2,000 years ago in western China. There is a temple is southern India that has sculptures of goddesses holding what looks like ears of maize or corn."

NARRATOR:
And if American maize might have got as far as India, why couldn't tobacco or coca have reached Egypt? They could have come across the Pacific to China or Asia and then overland to Africa. The Egyptians need not have travelled to America at all, or known where the plants had originated, but could have got them indirectly, through a network of world trade. But any ancient trade route that includes America is unacceptable in archeology.

PROF JOHN BAINES - Egyptologist, Oxford University:
"I don't think it is at all likely that there was an ancient trade network that included America. The essential problem with any such idea is that there are no artefacts to back it up that have been found either in Europe or in America. And I know that people produce examples of possible things, but they're really very implausible."

NARRATOR:
Yet discovery of minute strands of silk found in the hair of a mummy from Luxor could suggest the trade stretching from Egypt to the Pacific. For silk at this time was only known to come from China. Martin Bernal argues that it would be a pity to replace earlier cultural arrogance with an arrogant belief in progress.

PROF MARTIN BERNAL - Historian, Cornell University:
"We're getting more and more evidence of world trade at an earlier stage. You have the Chinese silk definitely arriving in Egypt by 1,000 BC. I think modern scholars have a tendency to believe rigidly in progress and the idea that you could only have a worldwide trading network from the 18th century onwards, is our temporal arrogance - that it's only modern people that can do these things."

NARRATOR:
The evidence for ancient trade with America is limited, and most of it is disputed, but it can't be completely ruled out as explaining the apparent impossibility of Balabanova's results, results that at first seemed so absurd many thought they would be explained away by a simple story of a botch-up in a lab, results that still without firm explanation continue to crop up in unexpected places.

For in Manchester, the mummies under the care of Rosalie David, the Egyptologist once so sure that Balabanova had made a mistake, produced some odd results of their own.
ROSALIE DAVID - Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum:
"We've received results back from the tests on our mummy tissue samples and two of the samples and the one hair sample both have evidence of nicotine in them. I'm really very surprised at this."

DR SVETLA BALABANOVA - Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ulm:
"The results of the tests on the Manchester mummies have made me very happy after all these years of being accused of false results and contaminated results, so I was delighted to hear nicotine had been found in these mummies, and very, very happy to have this enormous confirmation of my work."

NARRATOR:
The tale of Henut Taui shows that in science facts can be rejected if they don't fit with our beliefs while what is believed proven may actually be uncertain.

Little wonder then, that a story that began with one scientist, a few mummies and some routine tests in no time at all could upset whole areas of knowledge we thought we could take for granted.



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