Welcome to Mind Escape. Are you ready?
Are you ready to escape your mind?
Hello Mind Escapees, if you have not already, please go check out
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Thank you. Tonight I have an amazing
episode for everybody. I am joined by author,
researcher, and friend PD Newman.
We're going to be discussing his latest book, Tripping the Trail
of Ghosts. Also, if you have not already,
check out his previous books. I have the links down below,
Alchemically Stoned Angels in Vermilion and Theergy Theory and
Practice. I've had PD on more than
probably most other guests, maybe even 8 or 9 times.
And each time it's a fascinating conversation.
He does his homework, he does his research, he's very well
versed. He reads probably more than most
other people in the world. He's he's very well versed.
And if you're looking for some sort of esoteric book on a
topic, check out his social media 'cause he might even be
selling one of his books that he's already read through.
So sit back, relax, and get ready to trip the trail of
ghosts with me and PD. All right, welcome back on Mind
Escape. Danny, how are you?
Doing good. Good.
Yeah, it's been a bit. Yeah, I know we've been trying
to do this for a while since your book Tripping the Trail of
Ghosts came out. And it's obviously something
we've talked about in the past. I know I've had you and Greg
Little on at the same time, and we've talked about some of the
stuff and you've mentioned your Missawaska hypothesis a few
times, but I thought we'd kind of go through it a little bit
deeper. And yeah, I really appreciate
you doing this. My pleasure.
So just to jump right in, what was the catalyst for you to
start writing this book other than obviously the Missawaska
hypothesis? Well, the the hypothesis came
much later when I started looking into the material.
It was a result of my previous book on on Theergy.
And you know, Theergy is a late antique ritualistic application
of Platonic metaphysics, and it's essentially a model of soul
ascent. And there are envisaged two
portals in the heavens, one where disincarnate entities exit
the realm of material, and one where 3 Incarnate beings entered
to Incarnate. And I was at a conference in
Yorkshire, fantastic conference called the Tie Ring of
Initiative. And Brian Morarescu who wrote
the immortality key, I know you know him, but he was there and
he was asking, you know, what was I up to?
And I just published Theergy and, and I knew he had a
background in, in classics. And so I'm describing to him the
the model of, of theergic ascent.
And nearby to us were Dennis McKenna and Graham Hancock.
And they were talking amongst themselves, just like Brian and
I were, but they had overheard our conversation.
And Graham turns around and says, oh, you're talking about
the path of souls. And I said, I've, I've never
heard that. I don't know what that is.
I'm talking about theory. And I, I said, is that what some
people call this ascent model on theology?
He said, oh, no, it's, it's a Native American model of sole
ascent. But it's exactly what you're
describing with two portals in the sky and, you know, accessing
the one for discarded entities in order to step foot on the
Milky Way, which is the path of souls proper.
And this is what piqued my interest beyond, you know, I had
participated in, in some smoke and, and sweat ceremonies with
some Lakota natives in Memphis in the past, but that was about
the extent of, of my knowledge of anything regarding Native
American spirituality. And so I, you know, I jumped on
my phone and, and started researching Path of Souls in the
first thing that came up was Greg Little's book, The Path of
Souls. And so I ordered it.
By the time I got back to Mississippi, the book was
waiting for me. And I, I was, the first thing
that struck me was the fact that Greg lived in Memphis, you know,
which is about an hour drive. That's where I was born.
Like I said, I was thinking, what are the odds that this
guy's this close to me? So I contacted him, You know,
we, we met up, he showed me around some mounds in Memphis
that I wasn't aware of. And from there, I used the
sources mentioned in his book, particularly the ones that
centered around F Kent Riley's annual or biannual conference he
would have at Texas University, where he would invite academics,
both archaeologists, anthropologists, as well as
natives, Native Americans, to come and try and make sense of
the iconography and, and what was previously known as the
Southern death cult. But now that term is out of
vogue, it's seen as offensive. So those texts were which turned
out to be the source texts for this approach to studying the
iconography. I just began devouring them and
there aren't many. I think in all there are four or
five source books before we get into secondary literature within
this domain. But the more I read, not only
was I I completely taken aback by the parallels between that
model and the orgy because there were no known communication
among these groups, I was struck by the repeated reference to
plants that were discovered within the vicinity of these
mound complexes. When they would do analysis of,
of botanical assemblages, they'd rake up soil and look for pollen
and, and plant remains and seeds.
And pretty much in every case, if, if it wasn't the remains of
a food stuff, it was psychoactive or outright
hallucinogenic. And so that's what really, you
know, made me feel like there's enough here, There's enough to
contribute and warrant a new book, a new study in this
domain, but focusing instead, not just on the path of souls,
not just on psychedelics, but how those two were bridged
through the use of, of ritual that took place on these
mountain complexes. And, and once that approach
became my, my kind of North star, I started looking at the
complexes themselves in a whole different way because there were
so many parallels between them and the path of souls itself.
So I began to develop this understanding that the mound
complexes served as a sort of virtual training ground for
living persons being taught this information.
Because just like with, you know, in, in ancient Egypt,
originally only the Pharaohs were the ones that were because
the the same model exists in Egypt, only the Pharaohs were
the ones that were doing this. But by the time the Pyramid of
Unas was discovered in the hieroglyphs on the walls were
copied. That's where we get the Pyramid
texts. After that came this tradition
of what are known as the Coffin Texts, where this same
information or variation of it would be painted on the inside
of a coffin for the deceased. And then eventually with the the
widespread distribution of papyrus, we get into a time when
virtually anybody who could afford it could have their own
personal book of the dead, like the papyrus of an E that we
currently called the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
But there aren't one there. There are many of these.
So just like in that case, in the in the Native American
model, this was secret wisdom that was only available to the
chiefs, the elite, the shamans. But eventually these sodalities,
these secret societies were formed that we might call it a
Society of shamans, where this wisdom was imparted
incrementally in the form of a formal degree structure so that
they could teach persons while they're alive the necessary
steps to take once they die, how to get on the path of souls.
So yeah, that's, that's how it came about and how the Misopaska
hypothesis it, it, it just emerged organically from this
this territory, especially once I saw the prevalence of honey
locust in the ethnographies and eventually started getting
familiar with it where I could recognize it in the archaeology.
But honey locust is, is a, a native source of NNDMT that
grows all around the South. And it was intentionally
propagated by the Cherokee, so much so that the the animals
that used to feed on honey locust and distribute the seeds
through feeding on them are extinct.
There's nothing left that still feeds on the honey locust.
Now you you'll still see things like foxes that will eat the
seeds, but not in the amounts that would warrant the wide
dispersal we see particularly around sites the Cherokee
inhabited. So this is LED botanist to
conclude that it was being intentionally propagated, but
they were unable to come to an agreement as to why they were
being propagated, and this seemed to me to be the most most
logical reason for that. Yeah, interesting.
Thank you for the the summary there to set this up.
I, yeah, I remember you reaching out cuz Greg Little, somebody
that we've had on the show a ton, he's actually in our as
with and so without documentary as are you both sharing
knowledge and stories. But you reached out to me and
said, hey, can you put me in contact with Greg Little?
I said, yeah, no problem. Of course, I kind of had an idea
of what was going on, and I had talked with Greg in the past,
but she was kind of, you know, a little bit hesitant to talk
about his knowledge of psychoactive compounds and his
history with all that. But I think since you've
connected with him, he's definitely been more open about
it. And as you can see on X, he's
definitely posting a lot about the effigy pipes and things like
that now. And he's a great follow on X if
you don't already. And he's the author of the
Encyclopedia of Native American Mounds, which I highly recommend
if you're interested in that topic.
But what what I found interesting too, is you had
Christine Vanpool write the foreword to your book.
How did you connect with her and what did you feel like she
brought to this hypothesis? Well, in addition to F Kent
Riley, another major figure in this research was a guy named
George E Lankford, and he recently passed away.
I believe he was living in Alabama, but he did so much for
the preservation of the folklore of the Mississippians.
And in one of his papers that was published in a journal that
is owned by archaeologists in Arkansas, there's a series of
them. I think there are three in all.
But he discusses the significance, the relevance of
these noted pods. And they're they're pottery, but
they're covered in little nodes that stick out all over them.
And he discusses the probability that these are in reference to
Datura seed pods. And the thing with the
Mississippians is they didn't have a universal system of
writing. The Ojibwa did.
They had writing, but it wasn't universal.
So let's say that you they would write on these Birch bark
scrolls. Let's say that you got your
hands on one of these scrolls. Even if you were a native
Ojibwa, you wouldn't be able to read it without asking the
person who wrote it. What does this mean?
So they had a system of of symbols, but they weren't
universal. In many cases, unique symbols
were used that without access to the author, you'd never know
what it said. So by and large, for the most
part, there was no writing within the Mississippian
tradition. So how do you how do you
preserve certain sensitive concoctions, potions, substances
alongside foodstuffs, especially with children running around?
How? How do you preserve it and label
it at the same time to let everyone know this is something
that will cause you to hallucinate or potentially die
if you take too much of it? And their solution was pretty
brilliant in my opinion. They would construct them either
to resemble the things they contained or to resemble the
supernatural entity that they believed the substance would
either put you in touch with or protect you from.
So that with these noted pots and they were tested by Eric
Singleton and several other folks tested a number of pots
they found at at Spiro in Oklahoma and they tested
positive for Datira residues. So that was a good confirmation
of of Langford's theory that these noted pots were indeed
intended to resemble Datira seed pods.
Now, in that study, he cites Christine Vanpool saying that
she's really the pioneer in this territory.
She was the first one to propose something like this.
So I looked into her work and sure enough, years prior to
Langford's work, she and her colleagues had been identifying
noted pots not in the Southeast, what I'm studying, but in the
Southwest, and with the proposal that these resemble Datura seed
pods. And so I got in touch with her
and, you know, kind of ran, ran my hypothesis, including the
Missiwaska hypothesis by her. And she was incredibly receptive
and also incredibly supportive and gave me notes and gave,
pointed me and, and very helpful directions.
And so it was, it was fairly natural, you know, once the book
was done, she was who ideally I wanted to write the foreword.
And I was happily elated when she said she would.
And, and she did a great job. She's a, she's a phenomenal,
absolutely brilliant scholar in this, in this domain.
Awesome. Yeah, No, I, I, you know,
sometimes forwards it's like somebody's just giving their
endorsement or whatever. But I think she definitely added
and helped set up kind of what you were going into there.
So yeah, I appreciated that in your introduction you start
talking about the MIIS ipians. Can you elaborate on that and
and what does that even mean? Yeah, yeah.
So like I said, the the Southern death cult name applied to this
iconography really fell out of favor, especially following the
the conferences that were being held at Texas University.
And the participants struggled to find a new way to identify
these and an acceptable name. And the first one that they
settled on was the Southeastern Ceremonial complex, something
like that. And that that seemed fitting for
a while, but eventually there the need arose for something
more specific. And there was another term that
escapes me. I believe the the initials are
Macc. Mississippian arc artifact or
something in that in that area. But finally, the last name, the
last designation that that was settled upon was the Miis, which
is the Mississippian ideological interaction sphere.
And this became important because, you know, it's, it's
fallacious to think of the Mississippians as one big
culture. It's, it's a, it's a
conglomeration of different tribes that each have in a very
different life ways, very different mythologies, you know,
and of course, just like we see with neighboring groups all over
the world, there's some crossover.
But even where that crossover occurs, from the academic
standpoint, it's important to maintain a distinction between
them and recognize this is just crossover and not I not, not not
an indication that this is the same group or came from a
previous similar group. So interaction sphere allowed an
approach to the problem of a group of of different cultures
interacting through shared iconography, even when over
distance. And throughout time, the
meanings attributed to that iconography might change.
Just like with with anything else, you know, And it's a
cliche, but it's, it's still hold in some ways, it's kind of
like the telephone game, you know, over time, the intention
can be to perpetuate something that that the speaker believes
was also ascribed to by his distant ancestors.
But naturally, these things change with the time new
technologies come along. And just like with them.
I'm sure you're familiar with Joshua Kitchens work and Jacques
Valley where they're looking at the language used throughout the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance to describe beings.
Which because we're a technological society, in many
cases we might be describing the same things, but naturally we're
going to opt for a technological language to explain it, like
extraterrestrials or some are interdimensional beings.
Whereas being a prior to the emergence of quantum physics,
another dimension wasn't really language they would have had
access to. So just by us, that being our
fall back, we naturally explain it in a different way.
And this is true also for for the Mississippians.
By the time, especially by the time the colonists got here, you
know, and they're introducing things like gunpowder and, and
distilled whiskeys, things like that, it it naturally once those
things become incorporated, become commonplace, it becomes
the best way that the next generation can explain certain
phenomena. So we see that within the
interaction sphere, and by calling it the interaction
sphere, it allows for those, those small variations and, and
allows for them to receive the, the, the reverence, the, the and
the respect that they deserve without, you know, some outsider
coming along and saying, oh, you're, you're just like them
when they would never say that, you know?
Interesting, yeah, you mentioned entities.
So like how did your thinking of all from ghost as an apparition
or classical understanding of it to more of like ghost as a
ritual technology? What do you mean in terms of the
path of Souls itself? Yeah, in terms of like this
realm of understanding with the the psychedelics and the Native
Americans and things like that. Well, you know, to be 100% fair,
I'm probably just as guilty of the same problem, you know,
because I do come from a background in the use of
entheogens and encounters with with beings.
That one person to contact you or an abductee might say, oh,
that's an alien or somebody that's into paranormal research
might say that's a ghost. You know, for me, especially in
the early stages of my research before I really surrendered to a
magical worldview, which was a gradual process for me, it was
psychological. You know, I can't.
I came from a background studying Young and Spiel, Ryan
and Rank and Freud. So for me, my experience with
those substances was very much limited to what I believed was
coming from my own psyche, unconscious or, you know,
projection. So in that way, I'm probably
guilty of the same. But at the same time, even
though I'm not an academic and have no desire to work in
academia, for scholarship to be acceptable, there is a certain
way phenomena have to be treated, but without it being
outright dismissed. Now that's gradually changing
with people like cripple. Cripple.
I can't. I think it's cripple.
Yeah, Jeffrey Cripple. Yeah, you know, he's doing a
lot, as are many others, but he he's key, I think, in this
transition. Transition to where we can
approach this stuff phenomenologically and not
reductively, you know, and, and my future work, I'm really going
to make more of an effort to see things or at least communicate
things that way because I do see them that way.
But like I said, from a scholarship perspective, there
is an apprehension and, and to be honest, a phobia inherent in
communicating this stuff in that way.
You know, anthropologist, they, they really have the benefit in
that regard because if they're going to describe the material
faithfully, even if they don't believe it phenomenologically,
they still discuss it that way, you know, and, and I'm, I'm
trying to take some pages from their book, you know, and, and
incorporate that into the way I express these ideas.
So we'll see how that goes. But in the in my future work,
that's that's definitely a big concern for me.
Yeah, I mean, we all want to get stuff right as human beings,
right? Or as long as you're, you know,
an honest person, right? There's a lot of people out
there grifting and, you know, doing not so great stuff.
But the people that are doing the work, putting in the time,
doing the real research, you want to get it right.
And you want it to be taken seriously.
You know, we're all we're all humans in that sense that we're
flawed and we've got cognitive bias and apophenia, pareidolia,
all these kinds of things. So it is kind of like a
tightrope walk in that regard. When you look at these topics
like the fringe topics and things like that and just
metaphysics and stuff like psychedelics and psychoactive
compounds, just stuff we don't know a ton about yet
scientifically because it's kind of still like on the the
forefront of cutting edge research.
So yeah, no, I appreciate that approach.
And I think that's what makes you a great author too, is
you're not like, oh, this is how it is and you know, this is, you
know, a definitive take on things.
I don't, I don't like that. And I don't think that people
respond to that well either. And it doesn't age well usually
as as well. So what psychoactive compound
candidates surprised you most in terms of its like ritual
sophistication while you were writing this book?
Absolutely. The missal Bosca hypothesis and,
and granted it is a hypothesis, you know, we, we don't have any
conclusive findings of like we've, we have Datura residues,
we don't have DMT residues. And of course we wouldn't that,
that that particular molecule wouldn't survive in the way that
the Datura scopolamine, that stuff can survive longer.
Not to mention the fact that virtually everything has some
amount of DMT in it. It's almost in everything.
So even if we did find it, depending on where it was found,
what the conditions were, it still might not be conclusive
evidence, you know, but the, the best evidence for me was in the
domain of archaeology and the ethnographies.
And, and it was surprising because we've always been told
that ayahuasca was a phenomenon unique to South America, that,
that no one else was doing this. And you're, you're familiar with
my previous research with, with DNP and Acacia and the roles
that, that played in alchemy and Freemasonry.
So I was already open to the idea that that DMT did have a
prehistory that most people weren't aware of, simply because
nobody is really looking at it at the problem in that way.
But that doesn't finding DMT is not finding ayahuasca.
And the, the, the math was done and I'm sure it would be
different now because new species have been discovered.
But at the time, taking into account all of the plants that
were native and and growing in the Amazon, in the in the Amazon
basin, the odds of finding the two that would produce the
effect that ayahuasca does we're astronomical.
It, it simply, it was considered an impossible feet and yet it
happened, you know, and, and since those estimates were
arrived at, we now know that there, there were more than two,
you know, while there, there is only the one good source of, of
monomine oxidase inhibitor, the Banisteriopsis copy vine.
There are numerous DMT containing plants.
The most common is the Sukkotri Veritas, but there's dip plop
terrace Cabra Rana and there's a species of Virola that Dennis
McKenna studied among others. So, so that that raises the odds
that it would be discovered. But even by raising them, it's
still pretty phenomenal that it happened that they found it.
So the idea that ayahuasca it would be being used in North
America and the Southeast, you know, it, it was pretty mind
blowing for me. It was paradigm shifting because
we're not talking about importing true ayahuasca from
the Amazon basin. We're talking about a discovery
of two plants that are completely different from the
plants that they have access to down there, that there is
evidence that they're being combined to produce a chemically
phenomenologically similar concoction.
So huge paradigm shift and the the plants that they're using in
the, the way I arrived at this conclusion, it started with the
botanical assemblages because in dozens of them I'm seeing
Passiflora incarnata show up, which is our native passion
flower. Here there are several species
of passion flower, but only two of them are known to contain
monomine oxidase inhibitors that contain harmine.
Ours is one of them. And you know, for the past 20
years, that's that's my source that I use for potentiating
tryptamines. I'll take about 10 to 25 grams
depending on what part of the plant I'm using to potentiate
mushrooms or or or NNDMT. And it works with mushrooms
because silicon and psilocybin are both forms of NNDMT.
Psilocybin is for hydroxy NNDMT and silicon is for phosphoroloxy
NNDMT and so arming and other Mao is interact with it and very
much the same way increases and prolongs the effects also alters
them in some ways. But I'm seeing this and that
that really got me interested. And what, what made me first
begin to suspect there might be something going on with the with
the Mao is were the sketches of the, the Mississippians drinking
out of these giant whilkshell cups, Because in the depictions
they're drinking it and vomiting.
And traditionally what is in the literature is that what they're
drinking from these cups is something we call black drink.
I think in, in the, in Florida, among the Florida natives, it
was known as Cassina, but it's, it's made from Ilex vomitoria.
And it was given that name vomitoria by the botanist
because they would observe these natives drink it and vomit and
drink it again and vomit. So it was assumed it was in a
medic. Well, what what Ilex vomitoria
is, is, is yaupon holly and it only grows in, you know, North
Mississippi, some parts of southern Tennessee, northern
Georgia and on over into northern Florida.
But what they would do is boil up a concoction of this stuff
and reduce it, make it so concentrated that it essentially
became like a black syrup. And Fast forward to colonial
times, before coffee was being imported to the states, to the
colonies, the way people were getting their morning jolt after
they realized drinking rum in the morning wasn't the most
productive way to start your day, they started making tea
from these leaves. You roast them to decarboxylate
them, which activates the caffeine in them.
They're the only native source of caffeine in North America.
And so I'm wondering, you know, how are these colonists drinking
it to start their day? If it's in a medic, if it's a
purgative and makes you vomit? And so just like with anything
else in my research, I'm, you know, I'm a big take it to the
bench, like, like JBS Haldane, you know, tested on yourself and
see what it does. And we had it growing all around
our pond and the yard here. So I collected up all of these
leaves, dried, washed them, dried them and then roasted
them, ground them into a powder and started making tea from it.
And I started slow, and nothing happened outside of caffeine
buzz. So I'd increase the dose, I'd
increase the concentration. And at one point I even made a
gallon of this stuff and reduced it down to about 10 ounces of
liquid. It tasted, you know, unbearable,
but I didn't vomit and I never even got so much as nauseous.
So that's when I said, well, there's there's something else
going on. What are they drinking that's
making them vomit? If it's not, if it's this, that
that's not a solution. And it was around the same time
that I read Sean Rafferty's book on on Native American and Native
American intoxicants. And he notes that depending on
the occasion for drinking this black drink, the additives would
change. And these additives were
oftentimes secret, that they were only known to the groups
drinking them for the purpose that we're drinking it.
And, you know, you know as well as I do the the association with
purging in ayahuasca. It's even called La Purga in
some regions because it makes you vomit or come out the other
end, but it makes you purge. And so it at that time, it was
just a kind of a novel suspicion, like, you know, like
a what if? What if they were consuming a
form of ayahuasca? And so I keep digging and I find
out that the Alex vomitoria is a close cousin of yerba mate in
South America, which contains monomine oxidase inhibitors,
contains beta carbolines. And I thought, well, that's
interesting. You know, now we know that what
they're drinking would potentiate it if it were
concentrated enough. And then I find out that the
tobacco they're using, Nicotiono rustica, contains monomine
oxidase inhibitors. So there are three potential
plants, all of which many of these tribes are using for
different reasons that were they combined with the source of DMT,
it would cause an ayahuasca like experience.
And so I started going back through the literature looking
for a tree or another type of plant.
But first I was looking for a tree, largely because of my
previous research into Acacia for a tree here that would meet
that criteria, and I found it in none of the academic sources.
The only place I found it was in a book called Some Simple
Tryptamines by Keeper of the Trout, which is a classic and
psychedelic literature, but he had tested the the roots of a
honey locust tree. And found that they contained
NNDMT in them, which isn't surprising.
Honey locust. Now it's classified as Gliditzia
triocanthos, but prior to that reclassification it was known as
Acacia Americana. And we know that there are
hundreds of species of Acacia that contain DMT either in the
roots and the leaves and the flowers and the the external
bark. But just like with with the
Jerima preda, the the Mimosa hostilis, which was previously
Acacia Tinua flora in South America with, with Clifton Sea
of Trey campus, it's in the roots.
And that became my focus for the next, you know, several months
trying to find any evidence that this would have been used.
And the evidence came when I was reading the work of James
Mooney. And James Mooney was very
important figure also in southeastern ethnographies.
He was a big proponent, big supporter of the natives rights
to use peyote when the when their their peyote ceremonies
were trying to be shut down by the US government.
He was a major figure and making sure that didn't happen.
Well, he also did some work and the Southeastern territories for
the Smithsonian and in the Smithsonian's publication of the
Myths of the Cherokee, I found my smoking gun.
I mean they would use it. What he first notes about it is
that they would use it in their ball games.
The the Cherokee have a kind of lacrosse like ball game that
they would play and what the sticks would be made from a
honey locust that had been struck by lightning.
That was my first reference. And I thought, well, that's not
proof that they're consuming it, but we know it's sacred to them.
And then he goes on to say that when they play, they take the
ash from where it was struck by lightning and they draw crosses
on their shoulders. And then they take the roots and
chew on them while they play. And now chewing the roots
because there's no beta carbolenes, no monomineoxase
inhibitor in the plant, it's doubtful that that would cause
any kind of effect. But remember, they are also
smoking tobacco that has monomineoxase inhibitors in it.
They're also drinking black drink before these games that
has monomineoxidase inhibitors. And they would, they're, they
were in the habit of spitting the juices out and rubbing it on
their bodies. And I'm sure you're familiar
with Terence Mckenna's book True Hallucinations, where he goes to
LA Charera looking for Ukuhe, this orally active DMT that
doesn't have a monomenoxase inhibitor in it.
And in searching for that, he meets a shaman that explains to
them that it's also used in warfare.
That if one shaman is battling another, they'll sneak to his
house and rub Ukuhe on the rungs of the ladder that they used to
climb up on top of their house to do certain ceremonies.
So that once they get up there it the Kuhei, the DMT would soak
into their hands, cause them to become off balance, they'll fall
off the house and and die or be injured.
So it was a form of warfare and a good indication that it is
transdermally absorbable even without a monoamine oxidase
inhibitor. So that was exciting.
But we still hadn't arrived at anything specifically like an
ayahuasca resembling concoction. And in the same text, it gets
into the myths now in, in, in the, the native, the in the
tribes of the Southeast, there's a prevalent myth of these two
twins. They call them the hero twins.
One of them was raised by the father, the other one was thrown
away. And why he was thrown away
changes with the tribes. But the the most common
variation is that the father's gone hunting.
The mother is pregnant with twins.
This evil being, this underground being comes and
mauls her and kills her. The father comes home and finds
her dead, but he can see that there's movement in her womb and
so he cuts the womb open and takes the baby, not realizing
there are two babies in there and he throws the remains into a
nearby pool. So the second baby gets kind of
adopted by these same the the emissaries of the same below
world being that killed the mother and he gets raised in the
below world. And because of this, he knows
magic. He's learned magic from them.
So while lodge boy, the first boy he's raised in a political
kind of a setting where he's raised to be a leader, thrown
away is raised to be a magician and he's wild, whereas the other
is civilized. So in the story, the wild one
approaches his father's Hut. And this story, this likely
served as what's known as a charter to explain actual rites
of passage that young boys would have gone through.
So the, the myth becomes it, it, it begins to inform the, the
ritual itself, the the boys are, are playing the role of thrown
away in this rite of passage, becoming recognized as the child
of this father. So the boy approaches the
father's Hut and tells him, I'm your son.
And the father says, well, that remains to be seen and we'll
have to do some tests to, to find out.
He says, until we get ready, have a seat right over here.
And this is the first Test, and it's a, it's blankets on the
ground. Unbeknownst to him, beneath
those blankets are thorns from the honey locust tree.
And honey locust thorns, they can get 12 to 14 inches long.
They're huge, long thorns, extremely sharp.
And he sits down and it doesn't harm him.
And so that's taken as the there's 33 tests, very classic
Van Gannett rite of passage. And it doesn't harm him.
So once it doesn't harm him, the father says, OK, let me see.
How will you fare playing stickball against my other sons?
Because by this part, he's got more sons.
And the mother pulls him aside, the new wife, and she whispers
to him that they're going to cheat.
And another version, she tells him that you can't win, you're
one against many. And she's so she says you have
the power of lightning. If you strike lightning at or in
the direction of your father's honey locust tree, he'll
immediately stop the game because he doesn't want to lose
that tree. And so he goes out, they start
playing stickball, and he strikes lightning at the tree
just like she said. The father says, Nope, stop,
this ain't happening. You ain't killing my honey Lucas
tree. And he brings them in for the
third and final Test. And this is the one that really
opened the possibility of an ayahuasca analogue in the
Southeast. He has the boy climbed into a
giant cauldron, a giant pot, and in the pot with him are the
roots of the honey locust tree. Remember, the roots are where
the molecule is located and he's boiled in this pot and if it
doesn't kill him, that's the final proof that he's this
immortal God like being that is really the twin of lodge boy.
So there are artifacts that back this up and, and one example is
a, a, a gorget that they'd carve from shells, the same Welt
shells they would drink the substance out of.
And in the gorget, archaeologists were dumbfounded
as to what it represented because it shows a humanoid
figure in a, in a definite circle, A2 edge circle.
So a lip, a rim, and he's surrounded by all these squiggly
curly lines. And archaeologists never knew
what this was. So they gave them the name, the
spaghetti style gorgettes or gorgettes because they look like
they have spaghetti noodles in them.
But after reading that that that description for Mooney, I
thought, could that be the boy in the pot with these roots?
And so I started digging on any description of this gorget and
finally come across this paper by F Kent Riley where he draws
it not from an aerial perspective, but 3D and says
this is a depiction of a humanoid figure in a boiling
pot. We don't know what the curly
lines are, but it's somebody in a pot being boiled and you know
that that for me, I I said what there, let's let's keep pushing,
let's keep digging. And the, IT, it was out of that
that I really began to entertain the possibility and got the
nerve to put it in writing that I think this could be what's
going on. And, and Christine Van Poole
invited me to the Society of American Archaeologists
conference in New Orleans and asked me to present this
material. And I was very nervous because I
was the only person there that didn't have a PhD or wasn't
studying to get his PHDI felt like I didn't really, I had, you
know, imposter syndrome all over me going into this place.
So I presented the material with a lot of conditionals, you know,
a lot of if then or maybe perhaps.
But afterwards it was overwhelmingly well received.
And I even had one very prominent scholar in this field
come and tell me you, you can remove the conditionals.
He said you. This is the closest we've got to
a solution to what's going on with the gorgets, with these
particular ethnographies, with why these plants were so
revered, this particular tree and you know, so it was very
well received. And since then we've gotten even
more confirmation. And this came from Greg Little.
You know, he, he likes to post on his, his Twitter feed, his ex
feed pots and, and, and mounds and gorgettes.
But he posted a picture of of a play pot I had never seen and it
was a pot with a humanoid figure inside of it, just like the
gourget, but it comes from a different tribe, you know?
So this is a good example of how they can have the same icon, but
the description and the execution of it will change, but
very likely indicative of the same myth or a variation
thereof. So yeah, that that that was by
far the most shocking and I think paradigm shifting, not
just for me, but for the whole study of what was going on with
the Path of Souls with the the southeastern natives and, and
all of those tribes involved in it.
Yeah, that's super interesting. And I mean, you know, it makes
sense. Your, your research isn't
predicated on, you know, like you said, you, you actually try
these compounds, you try to recreate these scenarios.
So yeah, I mean, I think that that's what's missing from a lot
of other people's research too, is taking it from the
hypothetical or a hypothesis to actually a theory or trying to
test the hypothesis or something like that.
So I think that that's just another reason why I appreciate
your work is you're willing to put yourself out there and
you're honest with yourself, like, hey, I don't know if this
is true, but let me, you know, put it out there and see what
actual academics have to say about it.
So no, that's awesome. In chapter 2, Cavern of Sacred
Visions, what makes a cave more than just geology or a place?
Like what makes it a machine or something transformative?
That's a good question. When you look at the origin
myths of a number of different tribes and groups in the
Southeast, you see caves here in Mississippi that the Choctaw,
the band of Choctaw recently reacquired the land where on
their sacred cave exists. And their origin myth is that
their people formed within a mound, Nani way, a mound like a
like a big belly, but then emerge from a cave.
So you see this anthropomorphization of the
earth as womb and vulva. And from this, the people are
born like babies. And when you're looking at the
Mississippian iconography that's so prevalent in the Southeast,
the Mississippians proper only go back to about 1000 AD,
whereas the iconography itself shows up much earlier in a place
called Picture Cave. And Picture Cave is is located
at a secret location on private land in Missouri.
And within it there are something like 300 petroglyphs
that are that predate that thousand AD dating for the
origin of the Mississippians. And it's where we're first
introduced to a number of these supernatural figures like like
red horn and the underwater Panther and the the great
serpent, the horn serpent. And they show up in there and
recent dating of some of the petroglyphs in there.
I don't want to give away the material because the paper I
don't think has been published yet, but it shows a much earlier
date than what has been imagined for the Mississippians.
So that cave, just like with the Naniweya cave for the Choctaw,
it's sort of the birth place of the Mississippians.
It's the, it's where we see the earliest examples of the
iconography that defines them and, and caves.
They, they, they've always been sought out in regions where they
exist by those seeking visions, by shamans, by people undergoing
rites of passage. And it's, it's akin to what John
C Lilly was doing with his float tanks, because you can't hear
anything once you're deep in there.
You can't see anything once you're in the dark zone, so it
effectively becomes a sensory deprivation bank.
And through trans induction techniques, through fasting,
through physical torture, scarification, and through the
consumption of entheogenic or psychoactive plants, the the
effects of that, of that isolation can bring about
intense visionary experiences. And that's likely what was what
is what was taking place in picture cave.
And, and the, the natives that visited this were from all over.
Some of them would travel 1000 miles to get to this cave.
And the, the, the time span is also great.
So it's very possible that that it had a number of different
uses. I imagine, and this is just
speculation, but imagine that the early uses probably were
that sensory deprivation model and whatever visions were seen
emerging from the walls of this cave.
Just like is proposed with Neanderthal art and caves in
France, it's been proposed that what they saw they then
immortalized by painting or etching or, you know, depicting
on the spot where they saw it. Now over time, The Cave, once
pictures are there, I think it's a natural evolution that others
will come in and add to the art and the art.
We live in a in a time when all of these different domains have
been separated, demarcated. We don't think about religion as
being art or medicine as being magic.
You know, all these things are separated.
But for indigenous cultures, that's not the case.
Everything is sacred. Everything participates in the
sacred. Religion as such doesn't exist
because everything is a religious activity for them.
They're the secular does not exist.
So once art has been left on these walls of this cave, for
whatever reason, it's only a natural next step for other art
to be added. And I think the and again, I'm
speculating, but I think what probably took place is because
what's being depicted isn't everyday activities.
It's supernatural beings from their own mythology.
It opened up the door for kind of a, a prototypical television
in a way where the images can be shown one at a time to deliver a
narrative to an A candidate to an initiate that's coming there
to be initiated into the secret supernatural wisdom that that
was shared by a number of tribes.
Because it wasn't just one tribe using it.
It's all different tribes. You know, and that speaks also
to the, the, the unifying element of it because of, you
know, rating was a real, it was a reality for a number of
tribes. You rated other tribes and, and
how well you rated them was largely how much of a man you
were considered, how much honor you had was based on your
success at rating other villages.
So I think it's a testimony to The Cave and to the natives
themselves that this place transcended that, that once they
were there, the differences didn't matter a lot.
Like in a Masonic Lodge, you know, you might have Jews and
Muslims battling in war right now, but the minute they step
into a lodge that's gone. You saw that in the Civil War
where a, a man who's a Mason in the North, coming down to the
South, he'd encounter a, a Confederate Mason and their
stories, I've heard numerous stories where they say don't
touch him, don't touch his family, don't touch his house.
That's my brother, you know. So the difference is, just like
with with those scenarios within this cave, the differences fell
away and it became this magical theatre, really like a
television. Because once you get in the dark
zones where the art exists, you can't see.
And their only method of seeing would have been with a torch.
And with a torch, the light doesn't go very far.
They would have been able to illuminate 1 icon at a time, so
they would have been presented sequentially, which would
naturally lend itself to a narrative.
And I think this is probably where a lot of the the
narratives emerged from for a number of different tribes.
You know, even though, again, they change over space, they
change over time. But it does become this magic
time capsule where something resembling theater or television
is made possible. And you know, I'll get a little
bit out there with this because I do think it's pertinent, but
David Lewis Williams, an archaeologist that was studying
the the rock art of the sand people, he developed this model
of trance. He calls it the three stages of
trance model. And he postulates that the first
stage of trance is the perception of geometric figures,
geometric motifs, a set number of them that that chemist named
Heinrich Kluber discovered. He calls them form constants.
He discovered them taking mescaline in his in his
laboratory with his assistant, but these appear over and over
in the earliest cave art and Neanderthal are lattices,
spirals, funnels or tunnels, and cobwebs are the traditional
forms. So he he postulates that in
stage 1 of trance, you're seeing geometric figures.
In stage 2 of trance, these geometric figures begin to take
on the appearance, often 3 dimensionally, of real world
objects that those shapes and form.
So let's say it's a latticework of hexagons.
Once you enter stage 2, that might become a honeycomb for if
and, and it's often culturally relevant.
So especially if the individual was a beekeeper, he would
probably see something like honeycombs.
If they were from in Ireland, they might begin to see the
basalt columns that, you know, that form the long hexagonal
structures that piece together like a honeycomb.
But they're still observing it as an outsider.
They're, they're watching it like we watch TV.
When stage 3 happens, the 4th wall falls like in theater.
You know, in theater, the actors don't address the audience.
There's a invisible 4th wall that separates the two.
And never shall the twain meet but that the 4th wall falls away
and they become an active participant in what they're
observing, often times without remembering that they ever took
a drug, which is you've probably heard or experienced something
similar with high doses of psilocybin.
You get immersed into this almost alien narrative and you
forget who you are, that you've done the drug and you're totally
in what's happening. And so that's what happens with,
with stage, stage 3. So with these caves, just like
with television or, or a play, a theatre, a group of people
watching television are essentially participating in a
version of Stage 2 trance. You know, the first time we get
to something like stage 3 on a global level is when something
like Nintendo emerges, you know, because then you're, even though
you have an avatar on the screen, you are him, you know,
and you're participating in the drama that's going on,
controlling the direction it moves.
So with these caves, I think it's something a lot like that
in the in the stages where someone is being taught this
myth through this narrative, It's very much an artificial
induction of stage 2 trance. But the moment someone descends
into this cave with the intention of inducing trance
through one or more of these techniques, they participate in
it. You know, they're they're
participating in the the being, the entity that they're
observing on the walls, probably in some cases becoming them
just. But that wouldn't have been
confusing for them, especially with rites of passage and
rituals, initiations that are based on the myths already where
they're playing the character. And again, bring it to something
modern, like in Masonry where the candidate is made to be
higher in the biff and, and he's murdered and raised, You know,
in those moments, it's it's bewildering because you're no
longer observing a mystery play. You're at the center of it and,
and had no idea you were going to be at the center of it.
And I think that that that can tell us a lot about, you know,
you, you use the, the, the, the phrase machine.
Is that what you, how can, how can it be like a machine?
I think that's how I think that's the closest thing to to
how to view it as a technology and not just a a dwelling place
or a shelter, if that makes sense.
No, I appreciate that. Yeah, no, that was a good
explanation. And if you look throughout
history, you know, Da Vinci disappearing in a cave and a lot
of great artists and minds of similar things or, you know,
darkness induced visions and things of that nature.
So super interesting. Do you think the Cahokia mound
alignments were some sort of like astronomical launch window
for spiritual contact or anything these these psychedelic
rituals or what do you think was happening there?
Absolutely. I think most of them were, but
Cahokia is really easy to see because the structure of the
complex lines up perfectly with the constellation we recognize
as Orion. And that that's confusing for a
lot of people studying this because, you know, they're well
aware of the fact that Orion is a Greek convention and they
wouldn't have recognized that cluster of stars that way.
And that's true. The same cluster is still sacred
to them, but they see it as the chief's hand constellation, and
it it appears that the oldest mounds are the ones that align
with the chief's hand constellation.
The other ones that seem to resemble what we see as Orion
are are significantly later. And it appears to be that they
weren't so much trying to create Orion on the ground as much as
they were including the other stars around the constellation.
And the ones that stand out the most that seem to form a shape
are those that they include there.
And it it also is interesting that when you look at the
depiction of red horn in picture cave, it fits.
If you overlay that on Orion, you're looking at a perfect
match, you know, So there does seem to be a tradition of seeing
it as a humanoid figure, even though it would be incredibly
misleading to say it's Orion, it's the hunter that they're
creating. But they were, they were
certainly modeling it after that.
And the reason they would want to model it around that specific
constellation is because in the palm of the chief's hand, one of
the most prevalent pieces of iconography from the
Mississippian ideological interaction sphere is a hand
that looks like it has an eye in the palm.
It's not an eye. It's actually meant to look like
what they call the Mijas scale, which is a cowrie shell.
Actually, I have one right here. These little shells and these
are sacred among a number of tribes and medicine sodalities
as in the the media we win the shell society, which is a little
further West and N into Canada. But their mark of showing that
they're an initiate is they'll put that shell in their palm and
show it to the other members and that that act is confirmation
for them. Even if he's from another tribe
or from a the same tribe but a different settlement.
Yes, he's a member he's welcome he can come in and participate
in the ceremony. So it that's what it's meant to
represent. But in the constellation itself,
where that's placed in the palm is the exact location of Messier
42, which is the Orion Nebula. And I'm sure Greg is he, he's
the guy who opened me up to this whole thing.
So and I'm sure you've. Heard him that we've done an
episode where he kind of goes through all the actually might
even be on our Patreon now that I think about it, but it's he
goes through the metaphysics of the Native Americans kind of
what you're describing right now.
Yeah, he, he gets it for sure. And so this, this the Orion
Nebula, they see as a what's called an ogee.
That's not a Native American word.
That's a word from you'll you'll primarily see it, if you see it
at all, in descriptions of of ornaments on houses are on
furniture. But it's a shape that has a
curve with curves coming up on the side, almost kind of like an
F hole in a violin that, you know, if we took half of that,
we could call that an oogie. But the soul, initially only the
soul of the the chief, the shaman, the elites at death
would travel with no, to travel through this whole, they would
launch themselves, their soul in the form of an arrow through
that opening. And that's how they would gain
access to the Milky Way. To give you a picture, if we
imagine this as the Earth going this way, we have the ecliptic,
which is where the sun rises, the moon.
All the planets travel through this path.
Now going this way is the Milky Way wrapping around.
So naturally there are two intersection points where the
ecliptic meets the Milky Way at those two points are where there
are two portals in the sky. And we see the same exact thing
in the theergic model and late antiquity.
Even before that, there were hints of it in Plato and even in
Homer. But so the the southern
entrance, the point of intersection is located exactly
at that ogee at Messier 42 within the constellation of
Orion or the Chief's hand. So that's the goal.
That's what they're trying to do now at Cahokia.
And this research was done by another absolute brilliant
scholar named William F Romain. He's got at least three books on
the subject where he really dives deep into this.
But at the, the right time of the year, the there there's a
main mound, the the big mound at the center, but then there's a
Causeway, like a road that's built that leads to a smaller
mound that is in the shape of the ogee and the Orion
constellation. And that Causeway represents the
path that the soul would travel. And it's done on the night when
the Milky Way, which you know, in my model here, just because
this is easy, easier to juxtapose with a vertical, It's
actually at a tilt. The Milky Way is in a tilt and
on on the summer solstice, it aligns with that spot, which
becomes a veritable launchpad. Like you said, a launchpad for
the soul to immediately enter the Milky Way.
And you know, I should, I should clarify the, the southern portal
in the Orion, that is a portal and it, it became the primary
portal used especially with later, later complexes like
Moundville, which was a necropolis.
But by this point, it wasn't just the elite they had evolved
to, where the shamans in these sodalities would offer to take
people who hadn't been initiated into this wisdom for a nominal
fee. They would take you or a loved
one who had passed away along this path like a psychopomp God.
They would leave their body through ritual psychedelics and
guide the soul of the dead safely onto the Milky Way, and
then come back. Now, at the time of Cahokia,
they would actually use the northern portal, and at the
summer solstice instead of the winter solstice, it's at the
winter solstice when Orion is visible, and after winter,
Orion's no longer visible in the sky.
Well, the reason they're opting for the Orion portal is because
they're taking people who weren't initiated Now at the
opposite portal, the one that they were primarily using at
Cahokia, it's within the vicinity of what we we recognize
as Scorpio. For them, it wasn't Scorpio, it
was the great Serpent constellation.
And the serpent is also the below world entity.
The Scorpio constellation is only visible in the summer night
sky, just like Orion is only in the winter night sky.
And what this serpent did mythologically, was police the
skies for anyone attempting to enter that portal who hadn't
been initiated into the secret Wisdom, who wasn't a member of
the Sodality, wasn't an elite, wasn't a chief.
And if that happened, he would knock them out of the sky and
they would fall to the below world where he eventually goes
to following summer. Scorpio never rises above the
horizon and at this point, this feathered serpent constellation.
Once he descends, he sheds his feathers and becomes what's
known as the underwater Panther and hibernates in the underworld
like a bear or a Panther hibernating down there.
But he knocks people down to make sure they can't access this
sacred domain where the the happy dead go.
So like I said, just to clarify, at that time, Cahokia is an
early civilization within the Mississippian timeline.
And at that point, just like with Egypt, it's still limited
to people who had been initiated.
But once we get further towards the end of the timeline,
especially at Moundville, they're allowing people who
weren't initiated to go with the help of someone who was
initiated as a psychopomp. But for that reason, they had to
avoid Scorpio, the Great Serpent.
So they did it at a time when it was totally below the the
horizon in the Underworld, and that gave them safe passage to
the ogee located in Orion or the Chief's Hand.
Interesting the Spyro shells of Oklahoma.
Which artifact out of, you know, that realm of research do you
think shows most convincingly sort of metaphysical design?
And then to piggyback on that, why do you think so many
academics mischaracterize some of these artifacts as toys?
That's a great question. I think probably the most
interesting is the hollow mound that that's became like an earth
lodge as they're sometimes called.
And it was hollow. So it was effectively a cave.
And I think it was either Langford or Riley.
But they said what is a mound but a man made cave, you know,
And that that I think speaks also to the significance of
caves and these these practices. But this one was intentionally
made hollow. And the cavity was supported by,
I believe it was cedar, giant cedar posts.
And within it were placed statues and pipes that were
created as effigies of the particular supernatural beings
that one could expect to encounter in the path of souls
journey. They were the they represented
the trials that one had to pass like metaphysical landmarks, but
they were placed in their proper positions within this opening.
And it's terrible. The the this mound was first
accessed by people who had no business being in it.
And they created a a fictitious mining company to give the
appearance that what they were doing was official.
But when the university, the local university found out about
it, they immediately got a statement issued that they had
to vacate those premises because that was not only sacred area,
but needed to be studied by those who are qualified to study
it. Because these people were
looting it and then going and setting up stands on the highway
and selling these pieces, you know, for pennies.
And there were thousands and thousands, just shell cups
alone, thousands of them discovered in this thing in
addition to these pipes and statues.
But once they got the order, they decided to fill it up with
kegs of dynamite and blew it up, destroyed it and anything that
was left. And if it wasn't for one of the
individuals involved, a drawing he made of everything inside it
before they raided it, we'd have no idea what it looked like in
there. But he did.
So as as despicable as he is, we should still give him credit for
the drawing because otherwise we we wouldn't know anything about
it. But that to me is the most
fascinating because not only does it give us a picture of a
real picture, it's not just we're not speculating anymore.
We're looking at what they imagine the path of souls look
like. But it because of all the shell
cups there, many of which tested positive for substances like
datura, it becomes like a North American, almost like Ellucidian
mysteries. Like we're looking at the the
telesterion where they would drink the Kiki on and experience
what they interpreted as the afterlife through the through
the psychedelic, you know, training for death.
We're seeing something like that with this place set up like the
afterlife as they imagined it. And with all of these cups that
were likely the cups belonging to individuals who went through
it, you know, the these cups weren't just, oh, let's drink
from the shell cup and throw it away.
The cups were often inscribed with images.
And those images were were super supernatural beings that one
could expect to encounter on the path of souls, which in effect
became the degrees, right? Remember I said it was a degreed
structure. So once you get to a certain
degree, you receive a new cup that has the image of the
supernatural associated with that point in the journey.
And this explains why so many people were buried with their
cup, because it was quite literally the a mark of their
identity. It showed other people where
they were not as a nobleman necessarily, but where they were
as as a member of a sodality, that they were possessed of a
certain wisdom that many people didn't have, you know, and it
set them apart. It marked them.
And we know this from a, a, a story that was preserved by
Lankford, where this chief needs to send a message to a chief of
the neighboring tribe. And he sends his son as the
emissary. And he gives his son his shell
cup. And he says, be sure to show
this to the chief so that he knows it came from me, you know,
very clearly indicating that it was a mark of identity, not
something he was going to trade with the chief, but something to
save. Here's proof that I'm from X,
you know, So, yeah, it, it, it opens up an aspect of Native
American ritual culture in the Southeast that provides just one
more really striking parallel to what we imagined to be a Greek
phenomenon. You know, you, you encounter so
much, especially in 19th century scholarship on ancient Greece,
they call it the Greek miracle. Like everybody was stupid in the
whole world until these Greeks came along and brought us
reason. And it's, it's just, it's
absurd. It's nonsense.
And we're seeing that writing or no writing, the, the what the
Native Americans in the Southeast were doing was just as
sophisticated, just as complex and, and just as magical as
anything that emerged out of Greek culture.
They would interpret them as toys.
You know that it's because they've completely lost touch
with the magic of, of, of nature, of being.
You know, in the ancient world, everything reflected nature.
It wasn't until the development of things like Chariots that we
even see something resembling cars and things on wheels.
But going all the way back to the Stone Age, there was a this
amazing piece of amber that was carved into a small bear.
You know, clearly a ritualistic object may be indicative of a
clan, of a vision, of a power being given to them by receiving
it. But some of the first
discussions of it were that it was probably a toy, you know,
this delicate, perfectly carved object.
And, and that's the best they could come up with was it's
probably a toy. So I think that's just the
tendency of, of academia, particularly at a time when that
that bias exists that says there is no magic, you know, it must
be something practical, therefore it must be a toy.
Because I can't do any, I can imagine doing anything with
this, but it just shows their their lack of imagination, lack
of innovation, and the the the bias that exists towards
discussing the sacred in any way other than to demarcate it from
the mundane with within a a a rite of passage model.
In Chapter 7, you know we're talking about Mississippian
shamans and shamanism. Do you think the Mississippian
shaman was closer to a pharmacologist, astronomer,
psychonaut, or do you think there were they were all three
simultaneously? Oh yeah, definitely the latter
and you know it before. Before I answer this in in more
complete terms, it it is important to to distinguish
between what a shaman actually was and what we use the word to
describe since the time of of the late 19th century when
anthropologists were trying to find it.
A term that could be universally used to cover all of these
different types of people because they are vastly
different depending on where we're talking about.
But the word itself comes from likely stems from the Ungus
people which were Siberian are Siberian.
They still they still exist, but that's where we get the word
Saman from and the the practices they exhibit became the criteria
for what modern academics used to describe these people in
vastly different settings. But they are very different.
And often times, you know, sometimes the word gets used
for, for types of practitioners that it really doesn't fit with.
And Sasha Chaitao has has recently pointed this out in
regard to ancient Greece. And while I, I think what she's
saying is, is relevant, I also see the usefulness in having a
universal term because it, a lot of it is contact with the dead,
communication with the dead, contact with in communication
with supernatural beings, nature spirits and and Native American
tradition. A big part of it consisted of
being bed, you know, the shaman able able to enter a state that
for himself and for the observers very much look like he
was dead, you know, and is being raised from the dead often by
another shaman who's there as kind of to watch him, to help
him keep his body safe, you know, things like that.
But, but that being said, I do think it's a useful term.
And there the principal concern within many of the Southeastern
traditions were healing. And, and that's fairly universal
and the healing we think about medicine largely in terms of, of
physical ailments, fixing something physical.
But medicine for, for many Native American cultures can be
something like, I'll give you an example.
The first time I sat with a group of Lakota doing a pipe
ceremony, a, a butterfly came and landed on my shoulder.
And I thought that was neat, interesting.
But for them, it was something else.
They, they started talking about butterfly medicine and I
thought, what do you mean? You know, butterfly medicine
and, and for them, medicine is something that can come along
and bless you, give you help, give you assistance, boost you,
but it's giving you something that you're missing.
So they would have perceived that as I arrived missing
something the butterfly had to offer.
And this, this is a fairly common way of thinking and, and
different shamanic traditions that let's say that that I want
to develop the power of flight or I want to develop the ability
to see farther than I should be able to see as a man.
This consists in a number of cases of being able to acquire
the power of an eagle, you know, or a hawk, something that has an
incredible sight that that has the ability to fly seemingly all
the way up to the sun. You know, we think about man,
especially in in post Christian Judeo-christian traditions as
being evolved beyond animals, as being something superior to
animals. And many shamanic settings
that's not the case. These beings are more evolved
than us and that's why they have magic we don't have.
And even in, in postmodern and meta modern settings where these
traditions are continued, but the, the cultures have evolved
with the times. They'll view it in conjunction
with the judeo-christian kind of model that yes, we're evolved
beyond them, but that also means we've evolved beyond magic.
And to acquire magic powers, we have to recover our eagle, you
know, we have to recover our Hulk that we have lost touch
with. But it's somewhere often times
in US and, or in the, in the more ancient picture, it's, it's
out there and we have to get it from them.
So medicine can be something like that.
And what, what I was getting from the butterfly, I didn't
press it at the time because the notion was really foreign to me
and I didn't really understand what they were saying.
And I didn't feel like I was in a position to quiz them,
interrogate them about that particular thing.
But over the years, I've gradually come to understand
that that medicine is acquiring something missing.
So healing can mean a number of different things, but healing is
a major factor. Recovery of the soul or souls is
a major factor. We again and post Christian,
judeo-christian setting, we think of we have a soul, but for
many indigenous traditions, we have many souls.
You can have in Africa, there's a Bush soul that's separate from
the dreaming soul, you know, and there's evidence that in in
certain times in ancient Egypt, there were as many as seven
souls. But the Native Americans in the
Southeast most commonly believed in two souls.
And these two souls were there's a a free soul that is the soul
that is able to leave the body in dreams and vision quests.
And then there's a a second soul that's bound to the earth that
stays after death. So after the physical body dies,
the free soul is able to ascend and follow the path of souls
while the other soul is bound here.
And we see an antelope to that in in ancient Egypt where
there's a BA and a castle. And the BA soul is often
depicted as a bird with the face of the deceased.
And that's the one that is able to go on the journey into the
duot like we see in the pyramid coffin and and book of the Dead
texts. Whereas the car remains behind
in the form of a statue that is sometimes in the burial.
Sometimes there are a number of cause put in one spot.
But I like to think about it because we are so meta modern
and post Judeo-christian and and our thinking.
I like to think about the the free soul or the BA as being
akin to our suke or psyche. The part of our it's clearly us,
it's our our emotional mental disposition.
It's the locus of ourselves that many believe continue after
death, whereas the CA remains behind #1 because it's, it comes
from the earth, it doesn't originate somewhere else like
the free soul is thought to do. And #2IN in in the Egyptian
tradition, the car is the source of luck.
It's the source of of beneficial things bestowed on you from your
ancestors. So it's easy.
It might not be correct, but it's easy to think of the car as
genetics. You can see how genetics are
just as much you as your psyche is you.
But one remains behind for the sake of your descendants.
They carry your genes, whereas the other one is envisaged as
going off somewhere else. That being said, these souls,
one or more of them can get lost.
This can happen through trauma, through illness, depression, you
know, and, and, and these states were seen as requiring someone,
the shaman, to go and retrieve them.
And so they often times they would have to go to the land of
the dead, find the soul and bring it back to them.
So soul retrieval is a big part of that.
And that that that qualifies them as a psychopomp, which is
this. It's similar to what we're
seeing in Mountainville with the shamans guiding the dead.
Instead of guiding them to the realm of the dead, they're
guiding them back because the body isn't ready to die and it
needs its soul to remain active participant in the, the, the
tribe to contribute what they contribute, which might be
hunting, it might be sewing, you know, it could be anything.
But they need them for the tribe to persist.
There's not just an infinite number of, of people who can
say, make bread, you know, or, or knows how to go out and
gather all these herbs. So it's incumbent upon them for
the sake of the whole tribe to go and retrieve this soul, bring
it back to them. But they do these things often
in conjunction with certain astrological timings.
So yes, they're also astrologers in a way now.
They didn't divide the year in the same way we do.
We're a, a, a solar people. We divide our calendar into the
360 plus degrees of the solar circuit, the the annual circuit,
we divide that into an equal segment of of of 12 sections,
each of which has 30° in them. You know, so everything we do
and and did from planting to harvesting, everything was based
on on that solar circuit. They were a lunar people and
many still are, but they used a lunar calendar and we usually
think of the lunar calendar as being 13 months of 28 days each,
which gives us the same end result of a year.
And but it's it doesn't line up with the sun.
It takes 19 years for the 2 to align.
That's called metonic time. Well, for them, they didn't look
at the the lunar year they were observing.
And this probably took centuries of one person observing, passing
that information on him observing.
But they're not just looking at the moon phases because the moon
changes. You think if you were, if you
had no idea about how long a year was and you were watching
the sun, the sun doesn't change physically, it stays circular.
But the moon changes, goes through phases and changes.
So naturally that would lend itself to keeping time more
easily and quickly than would the the sun.
But in addition to the the cyclical changes, they noticed
that just like with the sun through the seasons, it would it
would rise on a different place on the horizon and it would rise
to a different height in the sky.
And that's what what we're dealing with with when you look
at the poverty point cultures down in Louisiana where they
have the wood hinges, you know, these hinges and the, the mound
complexes function this they, they function this the same way
where you can stand in one spot and at the moment of moonrise or
sunrise, you determine which of these these poles or which of
these mounds aligns with the moonrise at a given time.
And that's how they discovered, well, I shouldn't say that's how
they discovered, that's why they built them.
But they discovered that the moon had a broader cycle of 18.6
years. And they call that the the minor
and major lunistices or or lunar standstills.
It's the lunar equivalent of a solstice.
It's called a lunistus. And when we got to the major and
the minor, those for them, we're literally understood as the
world being recreated at that moment, all of creation was
renewed. Naturally, they didn't feel a
pause. It was, there's a just like we
have continuity of consciousness through the seasons.
But they understood that at that point, everything was renewed.
And they started using it in a magical context eventually,
because a drought kept crept in. Now, Cahokia was the first big,
major, complex site with hundreds of thousands of people
potentially living there. You can imagine how much corn
would be required to sustain them.
We're talking about millions of corn plants just to sustain them
for a year. So when drought came, they don't
know what to do. You know, they're, they're dying
off in huge numbers. Some are migrating, trying to go
somewhere where it's better. So how do they sustain this
population? Well, they started timing
rituals with these major and minor lunar sandstills to try to
affect time being restarted that they could, if they did the
ritual just right, acted out the, the things that happened at
the beginning of time in just the right way, they could
restart creation themselves. So yes, the, the, there was a
heavy astrological component to what the shamans were doing,
especially by that time. Now, prior to that, it most
evidence, it looks like they're aware of this lunar timing, but
instead of trying to use it to restart time, they're trying to
use it to increase or embrace meteorological activity to make
it rain. And that's what early sweat
lodges, the earliest sweat lodges looks like they were
doing. It wasn't just a way to relax in
a hot tub. It was a ritual for the filling
up with all that steam was a way to affect rainfall on a, on a
miniature, on a microcosmic scale to affect broader
rainfall, you know, in the world around them.
So very, very astrological. And what, what was the 3rd
qualifier you mentioned? You said astrological.
Psycho Nod. I mean, we kind of I mean, it
kind of touches on a little bit, yeah.
But yeah, I know it's it's a good breakdown.
And yeah, I think that as you mentioned, when we think about
these, you know, somebody pictures somebody, you know,
with a group and leading them in some sort of like psychedelic
circle or trance circle or something like that.
But obviously there's a lot more involved with that.
And as academia dives even deeper into these topics, I
think that we'll probably see more and more of kind of what
you're talking about, which brings me into my next question.
If the Missus Missawaska hypothesis is correct, it's
obviously enormous. But why do you think academia
hasn't wrestled with the possibility of this even harder?
I think it's a simple reason the like I said earlier, the none of
the academic sources in any of the different disciplines that
I've encountered are aware that in in DMT is in the honey
locust. It's not mentioned anywhere and
the only source that I did find it in is something that no self
respecting academic would open. You know, some simple
tryptamines, a book written by a guy who's trying to figure out
what can I trip on outside? Like what in nature can I use to
have a psychedelic experience. And I think that's the main
reason. It has to do with their
readiness to dismiss a source if it doesn't meet their criteria,
which for them means peer review.
And, and, and there's a lot to be said for peer review, but to
pretend that the author of Keeper of the Keeper of the
Trout book some simple tryptamines, the notion that
that wasn't peer review is ridiculous.
It wasn't reviewed by peers in a university, but he had a team of
people helping him with this mass mass spectrometer.
How do you pronounce it? Mask spectrometer.
That's how he tested it and found DMT present.
But the idea that that laymen are that are sophisticated
enough to do that aren't worthy of consideration because they
didn't graduate from a university is absurd.
And will only hurt them in the long run.
You could. Say the the opposite though,
too, right? Like you could say, you know,
while obviously that's just how you do science using the
scientific method and all these techniques, there's something to
be said about mind which we don't fully understand yet.
And then these compounds that interact with that mind that
maybe even a lot of these, you know, maybe some of these people
have used cannabis in college or something like that.
But I've only found really a few academics that are outwardly
spoken about their use other than the people that write about
or work within psychedelic science, if you know what I'm
saying. So it's like, I think, I think
it's they're missing this component which you're willing
to do, which is like put yourself in these mindsets or,
or actually test these things out.
Personally, I don't see much of that within academia.
And if you did, you probably see more ethnobotany, more, you
know, a lot of chemical samples being studied, looking for
psychoactive compounds and things like that.
So that's why I think what you're doing is important,
because it's bringing more attention to something not only
just within a field, but also this specific topic, which is
Native American psychoactive compounds and rituals.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. And the, the, the problem is
that unless what you're researching, if, if you happen
to be an academic researching psychoactive, narcotic,
hallucinogenic plants, no one wants to fund that.
You know, the only, only ones that want to fund that are the
the pharmaceutical companies that think they'll get the
benefit of being able to market whatever is found.
So you get people like, you know, Wade Davis, brilliant
researcher and writer, but he's sent to the Amazon by
pharmaceutical companies looking for drugs.
He's sent to Haiti looking for the zombie drug so that they can
get a new anesthetic. If it's not something like that,
Universities just I mean, and and I see a change happening and
hopefully it'll happen more. But prior to literally the last
1510, fifteen years, you, you wouldn't just not get funded.
You would be dismissed from your station.
You know, that's just not something that that they wanted
to be associated with. But you know more for people
like me. Yeah, totally.
And like I said, I appreciate, that's why I appreciate your
work is because you are willing to put yourself out there like
that. What evidence would you like to
see discovered next on while we're on this topic?
Like chemical residues, botanical finds, more cave
iconography, like what are you hopeful for, looking forward to?
I would love to see, I would love to see some research done
in an attempt to discover any evidence of, of tryptamines in
pots shells. You know, I said earlier that
it's doubtful that it would be there, but at the same time, the
team that was researching the shell cups at Spyro, that's not
something they were looking for. You know, they were looking for
things like datura and tobacco. So it's doubtful that that they
would have known even if they did found it, find it because it
wasn't something they were actively searching for.
But that that's what I would love to see some effort, some
time, some resources put into and I think the best, the best
chances would be within Cherokee artifacts because we know that
they were planting these things. We know that they were it was
wrapped up with their ball game. And, and just as an example of,
of again, how we're so divorced from the idea that everything is
sacred for us, a ball game is recreation.
You know, we go to have a good time, watch two teams play, but
it wasn't like that for them. What what they're acting out on
the field where they play these games was cosmological.
You know, they're they're participating in cosmological
powers. And there's even evidence that
the winners or losers of these games also served a divinatory
function that could tell them how well crops might do or how
bad they might do, which, knowing something like that
gives them time to prepare for the worst.
You know, no matter how you feel about divination and how how
legitimate the information gleaned from it is for them,
it's real and it changes the entire way they prepare for
what's coming. And in that preparing, chances
are you're going to discover new ways to prepare and if it works,
will likely become the norm for the next years, for the
following decades. You know, it's through that
reaching into the unknown and, and trying to find a solution
that that new lifeways emerge and, and those kinds of, of
settings. So, so yeah, I, I would love to
see some resources poured just into the, the Missahawska
hypothesis as a whole, because I do, I really do.
I don't want to say I believe that's, that's what was going
on, but I do think there's ample evidence to support the
hypothesis. And if, if more people within
the that domain of study like, you know, did like Christine Van
Poole has done and take that seriously, regardless of the
fact that it wasn't found by something, someone in their
department, you know, that's the problem you run into is that I
don't have credentials to be studying this stuff.
But I also don't think they're needed.
The literature's published. You don't have to take a class
and get a diploma to read the same text that the professor is
teaching from. Those texts are available.
So that that's what I would like to see more, more research
poured into that and more scholars, not necessarily
academic scholars, preferably from both fields stepping in to
look at these problems. Because like you said, most
academics aren't doing psychedelics.
So when they see psychedelics or or evidence of their use,
they're not always going to see it.
They're not looking at it with the eyes of someone that's been
outstripping root bark and boiling it with other plants,
you know, to, to consume it. So it just goes right, right
past them. See, I think we could all
benefit from people from all walks of life who who have an
interest in this stuff looking at it and telling the rest of us
what they see. Absolutely.
And why not go to the source to and use that lens of gnosis or
knowledge and kind of apply it to that kind of like what you're
doing? So yeah, totally.
One more question before we get to Mike's mind melters.
Do you think the ghosts or you know, what we're calling ghosts
are the dead? Or do you think they're like
some, you know, like information imprints that you know gets
amplified through ritual? Or do you think there's some
sort of like interdimensional beings or something along those
lines? That's a good question.
And I think by the second you mean like the kind of like the
Stone Tape theory, like it's recorded in the environment and.
Yes. Or even like a Rupert Sheldrick
morphic residence, like something.
Yeah. Is like, you know, I don't know
if you've ever seen that documentary, you know, Muscle
Shoals about the famous recording studio.
But they say like, anybody that records in the studio says
there's like something like there's like a living presence
in the room. And that's why all these great
albums came out of there. So something along those lines.
I certainly believe in that. You know, the Greek, the Greeks
called it a spiritus loci, a a genius of a location.
And we think about a genius as being someone radically
intelligent of their own constitution.
But this wasn't the case for the Greeks and and people in the
Middle East. Genius is something you acquire.
It's like a, a daemon that comes, like Socrates said, he
has a daemonian that informs him of things before they happen and
tells him how to act or respond in certain ways.
And I absolutely believe that certain locations harbor these
types of spirits entities. You know, I don't think it
matters what we call them to acknowledge that there is an
effect. You know, when you look at
something like Stax Records in Memphis or Muscle Shoals or or
Motown in Detroit, I mean, there's something going on in
that spot regardless of who is there playing the instrument,
who is singing the song, who wrote the song.
But the moment it is brought to that location and laid down on
on tape, something magical happens.
And the same is true at at certain locations.
I know, I know you've, we've talked a little bit in the past
about, you know, outdoors kinds of stuff and even festivals, you
know, when they have them at the same place year after year,
every other year, something. Happens there.
Now, whether it's brought with the activities of the people who
are there doing whatever they're doing or whether those people
chose that place to do it because it's conducive to or is
in alignment with what they plan to do, I don't think we can
necessarily know. And I also don't think it
matters. But I do believe that there are
are we could say electromagnetic, but but if it's
something we can't observe scientifically and put our
finger on, it doesn't matter what we call it, because
anything we call it, we're explaining it away.
We're not explaining it. We're just kind of putting it in
a neat box, but but being open to the mystery of why this
place, you know, why these people.
Yeah, there, I think there's something spooky going on.
Do I think there are ghosts? I mean, yes, I think in a way
we're ghosts. And and, and Paulo, this is
Bantu African tradition that was preserved by slaves that were
exported into Cuba. They preserved their religion in
the New World and it of course naturally changed to reflect the
area they're performing. It took on some of the
characteristics of the Protestants.
They were enslaved by the Nigerian Lukumi practitioners
that they were enslaved next to. But one of the things that I
was, I was told when I was first initiated in to Paulo, was that
we're only alive to the degree that the dead can pass through
us. That the moment the dead stop
passing through US is the moment we are also dead.
And you know, if you look at the world as we've got the material
realm and then something else and the domain of psychology,
they're going to call that mental or psychological where we
project things. If you go to a more traditional
society, they'll say that's the land of the dead and the
ancestors. You go to atheistic society,
they're going to say that's the realm of the gods, spirits,
angels, demons, things like that.
But it doesn't matter what we call it.
We're basically dividing the world into into two.
And if the dead are spirits, and if the other world is the
spiritual domain juxtaposed with our material domain, does it
matter what we call it? We're really just saying there's
something else that interpenetrates and affects us.
Your cultural conditioning is what's going to determine how
you identify that thing. But I think there's a, there's a
certain magic in allowing yourself to be vulnerable to not
knowing and still participating in it and living in the mystery.
You know, for, for me, that's, that's far more honest with
myself. If I try and say that's a ghost,
that's an alien, that's a fairy. You know, I think what what
we're doing is reducing our ability to perceive its action.
The minute we say that's a car is the same minute it's not
going to fly. And if it does, we probably
won't see it as a car anymore. You know, So being, being in
that state of vulnerability of, of not knowing, I think gives us
more opportunity to observe the phenomena, the phenomena of the
other, rather than trying to say it's this thing and this thing
does this, it's characterized by these behaviors, which is
naturally going to make us dismissive of or completely
blind to anything else it might do.
Interesting. Well, thank you for answering
that. Are you ready for Mike's mind
melters? I don't know man, that sounds
that sounds intimidating. I think it'll be good for you,
but here we go. All right, Danny, Are you ready?
I'm going to ask you 5 philosophical questions.
Just answer them the best and as concisely as you can.
And here we go. Hit me.
Number one, what is something that you believe in that you
know is probably wrong or logical, but you are just not
being honest with yourself? Probably that I that I exist and
I specifically mean existing as an individual, something I think
that's probably fallacious. We have this first party
perspective of the world. We have an internal life,
eternal dialogue, but we buy into this notion that we're
abstracted from the world, we're abstracted from nature.
And I think it's useful particularly for the discovery
of technology, creation of art and things like that.
But I think it's probably fallacious.
And that ties in with with with free will.
We all like to believe we have free will.
And I'm not necessarily sure that's the case.
We are, we are subject to so many external factors.
We're subject to so many genetic tendencies, we're subject to
traumatic responses that we don't know we have, that it
begins to look like we don't so much have free will as we have
freedom of surrendering or struggling, if that makes sense.
Surrendering to, I hate to use the word fate, but surrendering
to the world as it is or struggling against seeing as it
is, which which would also say struggling to see the world as
you wish it were. But I think either way we say
it, it really puts a lot of suspicion on on the reality of
free will and on the question of whether or not we exist at all
as beings that are somehow separate from everything else
here. That's that's probably my I like
it, my belief. Yeah.
You know, I always think about it like Simone Laplace's
billiards break in terms of like if you're God's billiards break,
I should say, where if you had all the physics and you had the
knowledge of the universe, and we're able to like, obviously we
quantify things, right? We can observe, we can measure.
If you did that on a macro scale, you could probably figure
out about us in that way. So like internally we have free
will, externally we have not, no free will, if that makes sense.
Like the universe, if there is a creator or somebody controlling
it probably would have the knowledge of what's going to
happen next. And internally we don't have
that ability. So it's free will.
Yeah, I, I, I envision envision a car on a highway with
guardrails on each side and free will really amounts to I can hit
the rail on the left or the rail on the right, but I'm likely
never going to get off this highway.
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it #2 do you think there
is an objective purpose for humanity, and if So, what do you
think it is? I do think that we do have an
objective purpose. I don't think we can know what
it is, and this is not anything logical, reasonable, reasonable.
It's strictly faith that there is some purpose to this.
Now that being said, I also ascribe to the deconstructionist
idea that we make meaning as we go.
Now that's not to say that meaning does not exist until we
make it. It's the, it's the part of me
that has faith, the part of me that has seen it on, you know,
1015 grams of mushrooms or 10 strip acid.
Meaning exists in the world and those states, whether or not
that my awareness of that meaning fades afterwards, the
memory of it remains. And it's in that memory that I
have faith that there was a time when I saw meaning in the world,
you know, but I also think that part of what we do and it's
which probably has something to do with not being able to know
what that meaning is. The big meaning that we
previously just discussed is making meaning as we go.
And I hate to use a phrase, you know, cliche, new age, kind of
like Co creators with God. I hate that kind of thinking,
you know, but it, but it, it does seem to have some kind of
grasp of the idea that that we do have the power to make
meaning. And I think that's part of what
art art is. I think that's part of what
discovery technology. All of that has to do with with
making meaning, but it's probably very different from
objective meaning in the world. Yeah, like God's air or a God's
art? Yeah, I like it #3 Do you think
humans are special or separate from nature?
If your answer is yes, please give me your best example of
why. No, no.
And that goes back to my the first question.
I don't think we're separate. I think we buy into the illusion
that we're separate, which is probably a major source for a
lot of the shit that we're putting the planet through, you
know, just the, the pollution that effects innumerable
ecosystems, you know, litter and, and plastics in the ocean.
You know, the the Earth is resilient.
It's not that I'm saying that we're killing the Earth, but we
are killing our ourselves by, you know, I'm sure there's a
what is it Sherwin-Williams that has the the picture, their
slogan is paint the Earth and it's a picture of the earth
being covered in paint. You know, I've always thought
that was the most disgusting icon who would say that to
represent their product and what they have to offer.
But that's what we're doing. We're we're covering the planet
and in doing so painting a wall between ourselves and the planet
to further abstract us to say we're separate, we're above
nature. But anybody who's taken
ayahuasca or good dose mushrooms knows that nature is far smarter
than we are. And I look at things like
there's a moth that looks like an owl.
You know, it's got owl eyes, it looks like it's got owl
feathers. But that that species didn't
have a meeting and say it would be cool if we had moth eyes on
us, you know, so that then the things we eat, you know, it
won't affect them. But the things that eat us, it's
their predator. So if we could look like the
predator of our predators, that would be fucking sweet if we
could do that, you know, they didn't do that.
The intelligence of nature itself, you know, think about
it's once removed. It's not that they look like
they're predators. They look like the predator of
their predators. That's smart, super smart.
There's other moths that look like snakes for the same reason.
You know, the tips of their wings are perfect snakeheads
with with eyes and and mouths. And it just shows that that
there is an intelligence, a logos present in nature that is
far smarter than the most intelligent human on the planet
and automatic. It doesn't take reasoning or or
an equation to come to the conclusion.
It just is. It just does.
So no, I don't think humans are are above or separate from
nature. It's just the lie we tell
ourselves so that we don't feel as bad as we should about a lot
of the shit we're doing. Totally, totally identify with a
lot of that. You know, there's very few
arguments, if any, that you could make that there's not
already a proto version of something else that's capable of
what we're doing in nature, just not on the level that we're
doing it at. Yeah.
So to say that it, you know, there's a, we're A1 off, well,
you'd be very hard pressed to find, you know, like I said,
some non proto version of that. I like it #4 What do you think
happens when we die? I don't know.
I, I, I, to be completely honest, I think anything we
could say about it would be speculation.
If we want to give credence to the people who have had near
death experiences and come back and tell us what happened.
I've had a near death experience.
So I'm sure you remember in 2015, I was struck by lightning
and and had a full on near death experience.
But whether or not that's what really is going to happen when
we die, what happened to me was so different than any other near
death experience I've ever read. So I don't think we can
necessarily glean glean any universal information about what
might happen to a specific individual when they die, You
know? So reincarnation, total
oblivion, the life of the soul in another place, my own near
death experience, my own psychedelic experiences, my own
experiences in the domains of magic and mysticism and inducing
out of body experiences. I, I tend to suspect that there
is continuity of consciousness beyond death, that in some ways
it resembles a physical world. I'll be it with laws that are
very different than what we're used to here.
But to say that I believe that, no, I have no idea.
And it would just be an, again, a question of, of faith.
And I do have faith that there's continuity of consciousness.
I don't like to support that with the, the, the positivist
materialist kind of logic that that material energy is never
destroyed, it's only converted. I don't think that proves
anything because we're not talking about energy in a
material sense, you know, we're talking about what seems to be
something else. So no, I, I don't have any proof
for it. It's simply a a faith thing, but
ultimately I don't think any of us can know that.
And I think that's part of the real beauty of the of it.
Participate, just participating in the mystery, surrendering to
that mystery. There is a sacred vulnerability
to that. That can either be the most
terrifying thing that you've ever considered or the most
liberating thing. It just depends on how you let
it hit you. Interesting.
Number 52 possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the
universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Arthur C Clarke, do you think there's life elsewhere in the
universe, or do you think we are alone?
That's a good question. And do you mean do I think
there's life elsewhere? OK.
So, yeah, let me rephrase that. I know.
Yeah. So do you think that there is
material or physical life elsewhere?
Not necessarily like, you know, we've talked about like
interdimensional beings and possibilities of that, but do
you think that there is physical life as we know it somewhere
else in the universe? I suspect that there there,
there would be the the universe is just too vast for conditions
similar to our Goldilocks zone conditions to have not emerged
somewhere. Now, are they carbon based?
Do they breathe oxygen? Are they bipedal?
All of those things probably not in in vastly different
conditions would produce vastly different beings.
I don't think we're alone, but I also don't think we're alone
here. Like we're surrounded by life.
We're surrounded by more, more more to the point, we're
surrounded by mind. I'm I'm of the opinion that
everything that exists participates in mind to the
degree that it's capable. There is a certain kind of
knowing to a mineral, There's a knowing to a piece of mica that
knows how to cube. You know, there's a knowing to a
crystal lattice that does what it does.
And I don't think it's an automatic mindless process.
I think mind drives it to the degree that it can participate
in mind. So life probably mind,
absolutely. I like it.
Thank you for answering Mike's Mind melters.
We've had you on a million times.
And obviously since I came back up after a little bit of a
hiatus, we've added this new segment.
So I appreciate you answering those.
And yeah, I, you know, I really enjoyed the the this last book,
Tripping the Trail of Ghosts. Obviously, it's kind of, would
you call it your magnum opus of Missawaska or do you think
you're going to expound on it at any point?
That's probably the extent of what I'm going to do in the
domain of of Native American research.
Not because I think I've exhausted the field, I've just
my interests are all over the place.
And if I spend too much time on that, then I'm going to do it at
the expense of something else that I would really like to, you
know, give my perspective on. So that's probably it.
And also I'm, I'm realizing that a number of really important
thinkers have read that book and are carrying that research
further and ways that I couldn't particularly there's some
indigenous authors, some academic authors, Chris, Chris
Vanpool is a good example that have have really picked that up
and are taking it in places that I'm just not qualified to do.
And I'm content that they'll get it where it needs to go.
And, and in the meantime, I've got to, yeah, I've got a handful
of other projects I'm working on right now.
By the time those are done, there will be another handful.
I just, I just bounce around. I follow my notes, you know.
No, I like it. I mean, that's kind of how I run
this podcast, for that matter. I just whatever I'm interested
in or books that I've been reading or something's really
been hitting me hard or I do a lot of reflecting and something
comes to me. I have the same approach.
I think that's a good approach to have because whatever you're
passionate about at that time or at that moment, it's going to
come out in whatever creative endeavour it is, whether it's a
book, a documentary, a podcast, whatever it is.
So I like that approach. And yeah, I think you have a
great take on that. Like, like you said, you realize
the limits of what you're capable of, so you're going to
let other people carry that torch.
And I think that that's a perfect way to approach that.
And I think more people should take that approach based on some
of the stuff I see people putting on or putting out there.
But yeah, man, as usual, it's always fun having you on.
If anybody has not checked out Alchemically Stone, you could
start there, work your way to angels and Vermilion.
And then we did a cool episode when you came out with the OR G
theory and practice. And I really enjoyed that one as
well. And yeah, this new one, tripping
the trail of ghosts. It's it's if you like history,
psychedelics, ritual, esoterics, I think, you know, it's the
perfect combination of all of that.
So, and you're not in academia, so you're able to kind of
theorize, hypothesize, speculate a little bit more, which is
always fun as well. And yeah, man, like I said, I
really appreciate you sharing all your knowledge and research.
And obviously we'll have you back on in the future.
And you and I text regularly and talk and, you know, about crazy,
weird stuff we're into and experiencing and stuff like
that. And yeah, why don't you, if you
want to just drop real quick a little bit of a nugget on your
next two projects here that we were talking about off air?
Yeah, well, we're kind of stepping out of the domain of
literature and working on a couple of documentaries.
We're nearing the completion of the first documentary, which is
following the timeline in my second book, Angels and
Vermilion. And for those who aren't
familiar with that book, it looks at the tradition of
alchemy that fed into Freemasonry and fundamentally
altered the ritual by introducing Acacia into the
ritual. And the question that drove me
that kind of blew the doors off of all of this research in that
book, in my previous book was why is the Acacia put there?
Because when when I went through the Master Mason degree and 1st
encountered that Acacia, I had just finished extracting my
first batch of N and DMT from from Acacia.
And so I thought, well, that's either a really interesting
synchronicity or there's something more at work with this
bird of Acacia. So I really dove in, read every
version of the ritual I could find, and then finally found the
evidence that proved that they were consuming the Acacia
specifically for its visionary qualities.
And the the documentary follows that tradition from from Egypt
on into Prague with John D and Edward Kelly into London with
the Royal Society, which is the the first group that was looking
at this problem. After Elias Asheville had
inherited these papers. I was trying to make his
Enochian magic system work but couldn't and decided that it was
because he didn't have this red powder Edward Kelly had.
So they go on this wild goose chase looking for a drug that
would fit that bill, what they decide on as Acacia.
And that is what leads the research assistant to Sir Isaac
Newton, a man named John Theophilus de Sacuglieri, after
he was installed as the third grandmaster, the premier grand
legend London to put the Acacia in Masonic ritual.
So, yeah, we, we in that documentary, we, we've gone to
all the places where this happened, taken experts in those
particular areas of research with us, conducted interviews
with them telling the story where it happened.
And the, the director of the films is my dear friend Alec
Hawkins, who is an award-winning filmmaker from Columbus, Ms. But
he doesn't just make films. It's not just your typical
documentary. He is a cinematographer.
You know, he, it's, it's an art film that documents.
So we're excited about that. It should be done by the end of
this year, end of December, and then we'll be figuring out who's
going to carry it for us. Yeah, we've had Alec on the show
too before. That's right, you have.
We were talking about like Charles Manson, MK Ultra, all
that kind of jazz when he was on.
Yeah, he he knows his Manson more for sure.
And he's also working with me on the next documentary that right
now we're in the the writing phases.
Not not not writing a script, but writing kind of an outline,
getting all the information in one place.
And oddly enough, it sounds like it's completely out of left
field. I've met given my, my previous
research, but we're looking at the the various examples of, of
alien UFO sightings, abductions, contact incidents that happened
in Mississippi and most people don't think about, unless you're
thinking about the Pascagoula incident.
Most people don't think about this stuff in Mississippi, but
it is very prevalent. And you know, there's a lot of
consensus today about how whatever these things are like
to hover about nuclear facilities and and places where
nuclear bombs have been detonated.
And a little known fact is that in Mississippi in 1964, two
nuclear bombs were detonated in Lamar County.
And it's after that that these sightings really amped up.
But even prior to that, we see them in the most significant.
And, and really what made us say we need to document this somehow
was an event known as the Kilgore Hills Moon Man.
And this was in in a newspaper in 1893.
This man, Kilgore Hills is now there's nothing there.
It used to be a little town with a saloon.
But this man, Gus Goody I think was his name.
He owned the saloon and he sees down in a a ravine, a light
coming out of this ravine and he goes down to investigate it and
sees a cylindrical ship down there.
And surrounding it are a number of beings that are like 3 feet
tall, 3 to 5 feet tall, have large heads, Gray skin and
enormous cat like eyes. And as the story goes, and this
is treated as folklore in Mississippi, but I'll tell you
why I don't think that's the case, is that somebody behind
Goody also saw them and at his shotgun and shot one of them.
The rest of them scramble into the cylinder ship, take off, and
the other one lays there dead. And if you're familiar at all
with the the UFO flaps from the late 19th century, most of them
were these cylinder ships. Not UFOs, not discs.
The airship phenomenon, Yeah. Yeah, so it fits.
It fits with that, even though it's never like even in Jacques
Valet's passport to Magonia where he gives the the
chronology of all of the known abductions or sightings, he
skips right over 1893, never mentions this incident
Mississippi, which I find strange and I'll tell you why.
And it's also this the reason why I have my doubts about this
just being folklore. But the the being they took and
placed it on a cot on the porch of Goodies Saloon and people
would come by and look at it. Now this, this photographer, I
think he worked for a newspaper in Houston, Mississippi, gets
wind of this, travels down with his camera and takes pictures
and sells the pictures for a dollar.
Or he'll take your picture standing next to it for $5.00.
But this only went on for a day because by Day 2, the smell was
so overwhelming that Goody's wife was throwing a fish.
He said, you got to get this thing out of here.
This is embarrassing. Nobody's coming in the saloon,
you know. So he and the guy who pulled the
trigger on the thing, they decide they're going to go bury
it in the Kilgore Hills Cemetery.
But once they get in there, they realize, well, this, this isn't
a white man. We're in a white man's cemetery.
This clearly isn't a man, nor is he white.
And so they do, they agree, OK, we'll carry it over to the
African American cemetery and we'll bury it there.
And the African American folks say you're not burying that
here. He's not white.
He's not a man. Well, he's not African American
either. You can't put him in our
cemetery. So they carry him back to the
white cemetery and decide to build it outside the fence line
on a on a hill. Like there's a trench on each
side. And they put him on this Crest
of this hill and covered it with sandstone and put an oak marker
there that said here lies the moon man because they believe
they'd come from the moon. And so we drove out there to
check this place out. You know, when we got the first
footage of it to see if there even was a Crest, a Ridge
outside the fence. And I walked the entire
perimeter and there was 1 Crest directly behind it.
Now what's interesting is it's got this barbed wire fence.
The whole barbed wire fence is intact until you get to where
that Crest is and it's permanently pulled back and
folded up so people can go through there.
And in in some of the accounts, people talk about how they still
visit the grave site of this moon man and take their
grandkids to see it. And that may be what, why it's
pulled apart there, that people are still going in this place,
which is fascinating to me. But the reason I, I have my
suspicions about it not being folklore is because the common
consensus, consensus among ufologists is that the, the
idea, the picture of the, the traditional grey alien that we
know today came about with the success of Whitley Strivers
Communion, the, the painting he had put on the cover.
But that's not really true because even if we go back to
the Barney Hill, Barney and Betty Hill incident, they drew
some pictures and made sculptures of what they saw.
And it was a these three to five feet tall beings with Gray skin
that had large cat like eyes. And when you look at the
description in the newspaper from what happened in 1893 in
Mississippi, they're described as skinny, 3 to 5 feet tall,
large heads with big cat like eyes.
So if it is folklore, that means that Mississippi folklore is the
ultimate source for the image of the Gray alien as we know it.
But the problem is Betty and Barney Hill, they're in New
Hampshire. It's highly doubtful that they
would have seen a newspaper clipping from a town in
Mississippi that basically consisted of a saloon, you know,
and it's I also find it doubtful that Whitley Schreiber would
have encountered it. So it, it either means that a
piece of unknown folklore dictated the way we perceived
aliens for the next 100 years, you know, or there's something
to it worth discussing. And that that was really what
made us say, you know what, we should just really look at the
trajectory of these accounts and Mississippi that started with
this in 1893 and persist all the way up to this year where an
event happened in Columbus where Alec lives.
So that's what's that's what's next on the docket once we get
the the the DMT Acacia documentary finally out of our
hands. Nice.
Yeah, I know. I'm, I'm excited to see what
comes of it. And I know you've been working
on this first documentary for a while, so I'm looking forward to
that one as well. And yeah, you've been, you were
in our documentary too, as within.
So without from UFOs to DMT, you describe your own personal
encounter that you had with your wife in Mississippi.
And I appreciate you sharing your story on that as well.
And yeah, man, I mean, I think my ass is asleep right now.
So we're going to have to probably do like a Part 2, but
we should definitely do 1, unlike the UFO stuff.
And I think you've got a lot of interesting stuff you've
uncovered. And obviously I had ingrained
myself into that world for a bit.
And you know, you, I think you can only keep keep the one foot
in that world for a bit, you know, before it gets a little
chaotic and you got to. If you're if you're interacting
with the people that occupy that domain, it gets a little
nauseating real quick. You I find it best to just keep
to myself with this research. Y'all do what you're going to
do, but I think 90% of them are completely nuts, egomaniacal,
and are just ruining the entire area of research to be.
Well, I think with, with the social media and cliques and
saying salacious shit to get more attention, I think has
definitely brought a lot of kind of what you're talking about.
I have obviously the, you know, I think when I started doing
mind escape is really when I started ingraining myself into
all these fringe communities. And yeah, the UFO thing, I've
met a lot of cool people, you know, but there is also kind of
what you mentioned too. So, you know, you just kind of
have to take it for what it is and just remind yourself to like
when you're online, like. The same thing applies to
everything. So if somebody's trying to get
clicks on a political topic, of course they're going to say
crazy shit. If they're trying to get clicks
on metaphysical fringe topics, of course they're going to say
crazy shit. So you just kind of have to keep
that in mind when engaging with these communities because there
is a lot of that. And usually, you know, there are
your cool people, you know, like I met you through doing this.
I met, you know, so some of the people that were in their
documentary through doing that, you know, like, so it's just
like there is that, but there's also good cool, knowledgeable
people too. I guess you just kind of have to
use your judgement on what's going on there, but.
Yeah, yeah, I I agree. They're few and far between.
I have. You're right.
I have met some really valuable people since I started really
looking into this territory, but Even so, I'm careful to let them
do their research and I do mine, you know?
Well, of course, yeah. I mean, I think everybody should
always do their own research and just not take word of mouth from
somebody, you know, especially. With this topic.
Yeah. And and look, if you watch our
documentary as within so without that's, I had a couple of
hypotheses going in. One that it takes a human mind
to interact with this phenomenon, whatever it is, at
very least a mind virus, at most something otherworldly that
we're connected to that we don't know about.
And then the other hypothesis is it could just be genetics or
part of our evolutionary or, you know, evolving our consciousness
in the sense that maybe if you look at like the pantheon of
gods from ancient times or now, this might, you know, as a, a
young modern myth style thing. Like maybe this is what pushes
humanity forward in terms of like achieving the next goal or
technology or whatever. In the sense that like we're
subconsciously dangling this carrot in front of ourselves,
but it's not, there's nothing really there.
And we're truly these aliens, if you will, by we're creating this
myth that we're chasing that. And and then we'll invent a new
myth when that, you know, kind of unfolds or whatever, you
know, now we can kind of see, you know, there's nobody that I
mean, I'm sure there are, but nobody's practicing in a large
scale ancient Greek religion based on the pantheon of gods.
And nobody's, you know, you could call it paganism or
whatever, but in, in terms of like, actually is like a
movement, those things kind of go wayside when we, you know,
Thales comes along. Oh no, these, there's a natural
explanation for this phenomenon. And I'm going to buy up all
these olive presses and I'm going to make a ton of money
because everybody thinks the gods are what's making it rain.
And there's going to be more hubs.
But I know that it's just a rainy season, you know, like
that kind of a thing. So I, I, you know, those were my
2 hypothesises going into making our documentary, but there is
something weird there and I've never gotten to what that
actually is. And I kind of go back and forth
a lot about it. But I'm interested to see your
take because, you know, I think you have a great perspective on
these things. And you know, as you mentioned,
you're not just, you're actually interested in it.
You're not just doing it to do it, which some people do.
So yeah man, super looking forward to that.
Let's do a full work up an episode on it.
We'll try and schedule that. Like I said, if I I got to get
in butt shape again after my hiatus, I've come back.
I realized like 2 1/2 hours is like the most I can sit without
my ass falling asleep. But I.
Get it? Yeah man, I really appreciate
it. Click the link down below.
I'll have the link for all of P DS books next to the mushroom
icon at the bottom. Yeah, check out Alchemically
stone, check out Angels and Vermilion, check out Theergy and
check out his newest one, Tripping the Trail of ghosts.
And of course, look out for these two new documentaries that
are going to come out sometime in the next couple years.
One, the first one's probably going to be out sooner than
later, but yeah, man, I really appreciate you coming on.
And I love our interactions and even sometimes just texting us,
texting each other randomly, interesting stuff.
I love that. So yeah, man, I appreciate it.
And thank you for sharing all of your knowledge and your efforts.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
It's it's good to see you. Good to see you back on.
Good to see you too, man, and you're welcome back on anytime,
but we are going to end this the same way we end all of our
episodes, which is we love everybody.
Stay safe out there and we'll catch you next time.
Peace. If you would like to support
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