What is interesting, is that we find number a number of plants whose known uses create the suggestion that we are looking at a group of plants categorically selected because they are potentially painkillers. Amongst them are such notorious agents as willow (aspirin) and mandrake. Also amongst them are several members of the Asteraceae which may never have enjoyed such a use or reputation to our present knowledge, but nonetheless seem to readily fit into a group of plants whose analgesic potentials are easily suspect, those members of the Asteraceae with triterpenes, in accordance with the analgesic effects of various derivatives from the genus Lactuca.
Incidentally, the ones best known to us have been widely used, and yet have had undesirable side effects, while those less known to us may be far more sensible choices, all things considered.
One thing that this can do is push back the commonly regarded origins of aspirin, often traced though European witches back to Greece, to Egypt in the time of Tutankhamen, and perhaps with the aid of this, even further back and closer to where such a discovery should truly be placed and dated.
While the most careful and conservative logic might mandate that the Egyptians, who allegedly put artistic representations of food in tombs so that the deceased would have food in the afterlife therefore expected to have pains of hunger in the next world, therefore they expected to have other aches and pains, and so painkillers were also provided in the tombs.
But this kind of reasoning doesn’t always seem to fit comfortably at all next to the lavish religious praise for the splendid bounties of the rich feilds of the next world. It would be just as well to assume that the ancients included funerary food simply for the underlying purpose that seems to motivate much of their phemonal efforts to create “time capsules” much like our own modern ones, of enduring records for the benefit of future generations. If there’s one thing that is obvious about the shape of the pyramids, it is that they were meant to last. For whom?
There may be also be more. There is a great deal of what would seem spurious knowledge unless one can succeed in tying a minor Gordian knot through it, taking the seemingly unrelated peices of information and connecting them... or seeing that they are in fact connected.
These plants may have been included in funerary proceedings and in burials as a commentary and commemorative on the properties of plants to affect the processes of mortality, and the possible mechanisms of intervention.
To those involved with magick and the occult, magical herbals that list plants that have the traditional reputation of restoring the dead to life are not unfamiliar. They are not unfamiliar in ethnobotanical studies, either. While their powers or applications are perhaps overstated, there certainly seems to be a great deal of accuracy involved nonetheless. If such agents cannot succeed in resurrection of the deceased, they may certainly be capable of actions such as those already familiar to us from such agents as smelling salts.
Salts themselves in general also have a great degree of relevance to funerary matters in a more esoteric sense, be they “graveyard dust” or the salts possibly precipitated by corpses that may contribute to phemonema recognized by Karl Von Reichenbach, which may be rudimentary naturally occuring phenomena of palingenics, to palingenics itself and other occult phenomena.
So, too, may the expression, “pushing up daisies”, refer to a relevant aspect of certain members of the family Asteraceae, and any affinity they have for graveyards as well as alkaline soils or the accumulation of magickally-usable alkali.
Likewise, “memory glass” already known to modern scientists, which demonstrates the pertainent properties of physical reversal, is comprised of aluminum phosphate... in other words, a salt of aluminum.
But of course, it is simple reasoning to those who honor the traditional logics of the old ways, of paganism and witchcraft- logics which are credited with the latest rediscoveries of aspirin and digitalis- that certain poisons or painkillers, because they can kill, because they can take life, can experience a magickally crafted inversion of their physical properties, and can therefore restore or return it. The witches’ rede, or motto if you will, “what can kill, can cure”, is notorious amongst witches, and one can scarcely look at a few books on magick without encountering it. This logic, too, is what drives the applications of the respected and legitimized science of homeopathy, just as it must be its documented successes which sustain it.
Still, the finer points of the matter also merit attention. Groups of plants which promote out of body experiences are also well-known to many witches. To the reckoning of some, it may be that what causes one, in sufficient quantity, to “take leave of one’s senses”, is literally causing some degree of departure of conciousness from the body.
While this is not the place for a lengthy discussion of the validity of out of body experiences, perhaps it will therefore suffice to refer to both scientific experiments conducted by NASA regarding out of body experiences triggered by exposure to high gravitational forces in various flight simulator types, and the scientific experiments with the human sense of positioning that occured as Scientific American magazine reported on phantom pains. Such missing limbs as are associated with phantom pains are of course still visible in the subtle bodies of man, to various ways of seeing them, and these may be the bodies with which astral projection is accomplished.
Obviously, whether one considers that anaesthesia is contributory to out of body phenomena, or whether one simply again applies the traditional logic and acknowledges the effect of the reversal of physical properties that can be induced by magick or other methods and realizes that what can drive one from one’s body can call one back into one’s body, or observes the sizable collection of herbal materials and rituals for binding and banishing spirits and extends this not only to binding or banishing spirits to or from places, but bodies as well, there is much to contend with that may serve as at least both a sizable portion of actual, practical schemes to accomplish resurrection or immortality, and a map of the logic that is used to rationally arrive at such a position.
There is, of course, still more to consider... we know now that the body is full of receptor sites for opiates and opiate-like material, and we know the effects of overdose. Opiod receptor effects are already credited as a possible mechanism for the elements of near-death experiences through a mechanism of hallucinosis. What is thereby implied, whether this is wholly accurate or not, is that what we think of as death may, at least in cases, consitute an overdose on the body’s own natural painkillers.
One thing that making funerary offerings of painkillers can do, is to imply this for us.
Likewise, the word that W. Donner Denckla was doing with DECO, “decreased oxygen consumption” hormone, as he described in an interview in Omni magazine, seemed highly promising. There may yet be little telling if this agent and the agents involved in the near death experience are one and the same.
Something to consider is that our own sleep habits may consitute a need for dreased consumption of oxygen. Laying at times across our own limbs and cutting off circulation, sleeping at times with our faces buried in pillows, may mandate such provisions.
So too can we see the relationship between oxygen demands and brain opiates in sex in the breathing whose heaviness is in direct proportion with physical gratification. The need for variation in oxygen consumption here may be related again to obstruction of breathing from various sexual positions, and the diversion of energy to various muscle contractions and production and release of bodily fluids which contribute to fertility. The very issue of the generation and quantity of these fluids and the rate at which they are produced may never have departed from the occult, in fact. It is possible to easily support the idea that changes in the body’s consumption of oxygen are to be associated with the spontaneous generation or appearance of such occult excrete as ectoplasm, in of course anomalous quantities. This too is chronically associated with deeper states of conciouness such as sleep and trance.
In other words, we have some considerable cause to consider whether what we would normally think of as death is merely another specie of sleep or coma or deeper state of conciousness on these grounds alone, even before we take into consideration other aspects. One such aspect is that within the last ten years, the “six minute limit”, the six minutes of apparent death after which death is automatically presumed has been shattered by physicians who resuccitated a patient after practically a half-hour of apparent clinical death, although, horrifyingly, this achievement may have done nothing to alter standard hospital practice or official policies.
With such a gesture, the stereotyped television and movie fodder of a doctor who obsessively exceeds six minutes in trying to recussitate the patient and must be “slapped back to their senses” can immediately become a brave and pioneering hero with the gut instincts of a holy man, a model of sanity and compassion.
Hence, patterns of material that can affect these receptors may be relevant, through a number of possible physiological, and even physical chemistry mechanisms. Likewise, the appearance of plant material that is noted to help break opiate addictions, or ease symptoms of withdrawal, may be critical to watch for in the patterns of funerary offerings.
The particular “daisies” that Tutankhamen was “pushing up”, that is, the members of the Asteraceae incorportated into his funerary objects, are of a class of material not only known for opiate like effects, but for providing those effects without any known habituation or withdrawal . This alone may be much of the point of their inclusion.
Funerary offerings of various plant materials so far have been traced as far back as 60,000 years before the current era. The specific components of these offerings deserve all possible considerations in the given context, no matter how bizarre these considerations may at first seem.
The botanicals of the Shanidar site include "yarrow, cornflowers, St. Banaby's thistle, groundsel, grape hyacinths, woody horsetail, and a kind of mallow". Corroborative to the point of being eerie, cornflowers are also found amongst the few funerary flowers of Tutankhamen!
Besides the two specie of flowers from the Asteraceae found in the funerary wreaths of Tutankhamen, a third specie can be found in this pectoral from Tutankhamen's treasures. As would be applicable for the cornflower, and probably many specie from the cornflower's genus, Centaurea, the association with the Egyptian water lily here suggests that the two have similar pigments of parallel mystical science uses. Both of them contain anthocyanin pigments. This water lily has been found in endless works of ancient Egyptian art, and seems to have synonymity with light, and probably other natural forces.
The tapping of the electrical charge inherent in anthocyanin pigments may be part of both the ancient Egyptian wireless battery, the tet or djed, as well as a source of power for a mysterious object called the nebris, which may be an extremely high-technology predecessor of witches' brooms. Extensive information on the subject can be found on the "Tutankhamen's Broom" page of this site.
Only one of many possible approaches to this riddle is that this material was considered by ancients as suitable for a safe electrochemical analog of resuccitation with electrical current that doctors and paramedics use today, but there may be many other reasons or viable approaches; the ancients frequently make selections of symbols or materials that have a number of complex underlying reasons.
Sooner or later, our present level of the understanding of complexity in physical processes has to be factored into our complete view of the world. We strongly believe that the human brain is holographic in nature, and sooner or later our view of human conciouness must become holographic in nature. In other words, just as the most basic tenet of holography is that “the part contains the whole”, or that the part contains the information about the whole, from which the part can be recreated, we must eventually acknowledge that even partial human awareness must inherently contain all knowledge .
To put it yet another way, even if a certain ancient people had no concious or working knowledge of raising the dead, at some level, they, like all of us, do possess this very knowledge, as well as all knowledge. While their funerary rituals and customs may not have succeeded in restoring those they loved, the holism of human conciousness is inevitable, and there may be no way in which they could have avoided coming close to actual mechanisms of resurrection, no way in which they could have addressed the issue without grasping part of the truth.
While this is not the place for the discussion that is deserved about how this holographic nature of human conciouness accounts for both occult knowledge, and the familiar Christian expectation that “out of the mouths of babes may come great wisdom”, nor to give a list of the countless examples of this happening, it certainly is an appropriate place to emphasize that we have a scientific basis to contradict the notion of ignorance, and a scientific basis to contradict the notion that those who are "ignorant" in an area have nothing to contribute. Such a vaccuum as that “nothing” is abhorred and attacked by nature, it is inherently out to fill in that void.
Hence, it may well be the next logical extention of our own sophisticated reasoning to look, seek and even expect, with the appropriate caution, that those who preceeded us, even while they helplessly mourned the loss of their loved ones, were skillfully sowing the seeds of cures for the disease known as death, only awaiting those who could focus and harness their understanding.
This is the least generous assessment of them realistically possible.
The rationale, in fact, with which Egyptologists and geologists attacked the presentations of John Anthony West and Robert Schoch, who gave formidable and reasonable evidence that the sphinx was far older than previously thought, was literally tragic. When faced with the issue that if West and Schoch are right, there is an entire period of missing history, of which archeologists have yet to find a trace. “Show me a pot shard, show me anything”.
It’s a reasonable question, and yet the very reason it’s a tragic one is because of both its presumption that absence of proof is proof of absence, let alone proof of anything such as the contrary to West and Schoch’s assertions, but moreso it’s tragic because of its Neocentricism, the limited point of view that the way we do things at the present moment is somehow by far superior to other alternatives, that it is “the” way.
The fact is, we leave more evidence that any civilization before us. But we’re not proud of it, it’s trash, and it’s reached such horrendous proportions that it’s caused endless complications.
On the other hand, our very own funerary customs may be only a hair’s breadth from practices and their components that are capable of resurrection, whether we know it or not- we may only enjoy some vague sense that what we do is somehow appropriate or important- and we may be no different than the example that is implied, that some fragment of incredible wisdom shines out through the mechanics of even our most unconcious gestures.
(Perhaps more important to the survival of this planet’s inhabitants in general, it’s possible that when we truly learn to effectively factor life and death into our own psychology, the very fact that we somehow manage to continue the “immortalization” of ourselves though vast monuments of refuse may be one day understood to be akin to the negative ways that children will seek attention, a kind of blind lashing out, a rebellion at our own mortality. Some perception that our caring that extends outside of ourselves is intimately connected to our caring about ourselves is unavoidable; to extend this to apathy, giving both ourselves and our enviroments up as a lost cause, may be a wise if challenging gesture.)
There isn’t any real telling here whether for thousands of years, Egyptian culture at it’s very pinnacle, like possibly any culture at it’s very peak, prided itself on zero enviromental impact, and prided itself on going out of its way not not to leave it’s evidence, it’s refuse, behind. If this culture favored verbal knowledge rather than written knowledge, they’d hardly be the first or they only. If all that this culture chose to own, and to use, were so biodegradable that every bit of it is gone, it would not only make a great deal of sense, but it would serve as a shining example to our present culture which has achieved proficiency of leaving a trail so well as to be literally choking the animal kingdom to death on its plastic refuse.
In other words, it would be premature to rule out that what we have uncovered was deliberate, done with full knowledge and understanding, and what we find and will ever find will only be the occasional burial that was done purely and completely for the sake of future generations, by a people who had already mastered life and death and did concern themselves with the occasional contribution to posterity.
As much as can be said and done to demonstate vast technical prowess going back five to ten thousand years before the current era, there is no telling as yet just how far back our ancient and occult knowledge and traditions actually go. Maybe someday we’ll stand in agreement that something like omniscience is natural and inevitable in any people who extricate themselves from the pulls of social pressures, of complex human insanity, of the preposterous and incessant bombardment of our numb but aching senses with advertisment and entertainment, and the endless barrage of false pertainance, planned obsolescence, and self-aggrandization to be chronically associated with the “almighty dollar”. Those “Neandrethals” whose name we use to insult one another, may have done far better than us, all things considered, may have walked in the peace we so desperately crave, and in the wisdom that ensues.
There is likewise ultimately no escaping the inevitable need to examine what was left to us, with as much open-mindedness and focus as we can challenge ourselves to invest. Future generations may be counting on us, depending on us, to firmly and finally come to terms with our almost unimaginably rich and abundant legacy of ancient wisdom.
Recommended links: Burial, Ritual, Religion and Cannibalism
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