Ancient Egyptian followers of a deity called Bes may have used hallucinogens | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Egyptian followers of a deity called Bes may have used hallucinogens

arstechnica.com

44 pointsdiodorus6 comments

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Ancient Mancunian followers of a man called Bez definitely used entactogens.

“He is chiefly remembered for his bizarre style of dancing and use of maracas.”

All the ancient religions used hallucinogens (when they didn't use meditation or weird sex or whatever).

That's how you see God.

It sure beats reading old books.

No old books back then.

The consequences of illiteracy is finding God through Earth.

No need to find God through the Earth, if you think someone else did and wrote it down.

Just gotta pick the right book.

Old books are how they passed down knowledge about drugs, which absolutely included hallucinogens and psychedelics. We just made them illegal because modern chemistry, manufacturing and trade made powerful chemicals too accessible for worker-dependent industrializing societies to readily absorb. Culturally, we’re still feeling the reverberations from that knee-jerk reaction in the “war on drugs”, cartels, wildly varying legalization frameworks, religious exceptions, etc.

There were no books in ancient times. Knowledge was passed down from memory. There were papyri but obviously few of those survived.

We know building mind palaces/the loci method was part of the curriculum in Greece and Rome. And thus conceivably likely of most peoples of that time that had a complex culture lasting hundreds or thousands of years.

That's why knowledge about hallucinogen use in those times is scarce. You may find chemical evidence. We know of hallucinogen use everywhere in ancient times mainly because of this. See e.g. [1]. But inscriptions of details of rituals in e.g. stone are pretty non-existent. Most likely hallucinogen use was simply too 'everyday' to warrant such treatment.

"And after the pharaoh crushed his enemies he munged on a magic mushroom." was probably just as mundane as "And after the allies won WW2, all the commanders sat down together and had a beer."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140821182342/http://www.hallof...

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