by John Lash

Andalucia February 16, 2008

from MetaHistory Website

One of twelve panels in the Psalter,
illustrating Biblical scenes with psychoactive mushrooms

In November 2006, shortly after the publication of my book Not in His Image, where I describe entheogenic rites in the pagan Mysteries at Eleusis and elsewhere, I made a long-awaited visit to the National Library in Paris.

Upon acquiring a membership card I was able to consult the archives for Greek and Latin manuscripts, of which the BNF (Bibliotheque National de France) has an impressive collection.

I was in quest of a very particular item, Latin MS 8846, the Paris Eadwine Psalter. This is the single and unique illuminated MS of the 12^th century, the only one of its kind in the world.

I was not able to handle the actual MS, but I examined the color microfilm made from it. My session of three hours in the microfilm booth left me with wide eyes, a slack jaw, and unsteady feet. I literally staggered out into the Rue de Richelieu.

For rest of the evening I remained in state of astonishment, totally stunned by the images I had seen rolling across the microfilm screen.

Psychedelic Bible

The Paris Eadwine Psalter is an oversize bound book of about 184 sheets, about 367 pages counting both sides.

The cover page is stamped Volume No. 174, 10 October 1873, presumably the day it was acquired or catalogued. It opens with five full-page panels divided into twelve sections, lavishly colored and detailed.

The panels show incidents from the Old Testament, running from the creation of Adam and Eve to the life of the Patriarch Jacob. There immediately follow many half-page and full-page illustrations of the Psalms interspersed with Latin commentary. After about 100 pages come four more twelve-section panels resuming the story of Jacob, then the illustrations jump to the Ark of the Covenant, David and Goliath, and John the Baptist.

About 45 pages further on there is a unique page composed of eighteen panels celebrating Jesus Christ, followed by two more twelve-panel pages illustrating events in the life of the Savior.

All this is totally Biblical narrative, larded with pious commentary and directions for song and prayer. The Eadwine MS is after all a psalter, intended for use by a choir or congregation in reciting prayers.

What is far from routine, however, is the way the book is illustrated.

Blue-staining mushrooms and mushroom-like omphali occur in lavish form in the first 100 pages. Dozens of pages display versions of a stylized tree with a blue trunk, depicting how psychoactive mushrooms grow from the trunk of a single "fruiting body" that sprouts from the mycelium.

Often the mushroom trees are integrated into dramatic scenes showing humans interacting with angels and demons.

Some elaborate scenes depict Apocalyptic events with the figure of Christ often placed next to a huge mushroom cluster.

The intertwining stems of the fungi, realistically shown as slender and curvaceous, just as they appear in the wild, are artistically woven in the Celtic style of the Book of Kells and other Irish illuminated manuscripts from the same era.

In many scenes (see below), a naturalistic mushroom nestles among ornate omphalos-buds that recall the segmentation of raspberries and blackberries, yet these latter forms are clearly not naturalistic.

They are carefully painted ovals or egg-shapes, distinct from the slender pin-headed mushrooms without segmented heads. Clearly, the artist knew the difference between stylistic and naturalistic representation and quite intentionally chose to juxtapose the two.

I suggest that the omphalos-bud was an artistic convention of the Mysteries intended to indicate how molecular structure looks in the visionary trance induced by psychoactive plants.

There is considerable confusion about the naming of Latin MS 8846, called the Anglo-Catalan Psalter.

Because it was made in Canterbury, England, around 1180 CE, it is sometimes called the Canterbury Psalter. It was left unfinished and taken to Spain for completion, hence the odd name Anglo-Catalan.

At the time of its construction, another, nearly identical psalter was produced in Canterbury:

MS R 17.1 (987), kept at Trinity College, Cambridge, England. Both psalters are attributed to the master scribe named Eadwine ("generous friend"), and both contain the same sequence of narrative events, but the Canterbury psalter MS R 17.1 displays none of the entheogenic imagery of BNF Latin MS 8846, the Paris Eadwine Psalter.

In 1935 M.R. James published a reduced facsimile of the Cambridge MS.

More recently, in 1992, it has been published as The Eadwine Psalter by the Modern Humanities Research Association of Pennsylvania State University in the USA. This book can be ordered on Amazon.com for a heady price. Disappointingly, it shows that the Cambridge MS is totally devoid of psychoactive mushroom imagery.

In a chapter of the 1992 facsimile book, religious scholar Patricia Stirneman discusses the relationship of Latin MS 8846 to its Canterbury counterpart.

Amazingly, she does not allude in any way to the lavish mycological imagery of the Paris MS; nor does she explain how two manuscripts produced from the same source at the same time could be so utterly different in visual presentation.

To scholars, the presence of psychoactive mushrooms in religious art is a closed subject, a revelation too outrageous to admit; but for this self-taught scholar it was the discovery of a lifetime.

Intentional Blindness

In 2002 the Spanish publishing house Moleiro published an exact copy of the Paris Eadwine Psalter, including the natural blemishes of the original pages. (The only earlier facsimile edition was published in Copenhagen in 1958.)

The meticulous catalogue description makes not the slightest allusion to mushroom imagery, or anything at all unusual in the illustrations of the MS.

The sample pictures offered by Moleiro are carefully cropped to avoid showing any evidence of offensive fungi. Another on-line resource, Facsimiles of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, reproduces some tell-tale scenes but without comment on what is being shown.

An article on the Moleiro edition in the UK online magazine Church Times (July, 2005) says:

THE PSALTER, also known as the Anglo-Catalan Psalter, was made in Canterbury in about 1180.

 

It was left unfinished, and, after 1200, was taken to Catalonia - perhaps as a gift. In the middle of the 14th century, the decoration of the manuscript was completed by Catalan artists, probably working in Barcelona.

 

The book was meant to be a copy of a famous Carolingian ninth-century Psalter, the Utrecht Psalter, and was acquired by the Christ Church Cathedral Priory, Canterbury, in about 1000. The original was named after the city to whose university library it now belongs, and was made at the Benedictine abbey of Hautvillers, near Rheims, between 820 and 835.

 

Each psalm is illustrated by drawings with an attempt to depict certain passages in the text, and by amalgamating a number of scenes into a single rectangular picture.

The article loosely associates the BNF Latin MS 8846, the Anglo-Catalan Psalter oaded with mycological imagery, with the mushroomless Canterbury Psalter.

Both originated in the area of Cambridge around 1120 CE, but only the latter remains in that town,

"to whose university library it now belongs."

It explains correctly that the psalter kept in Cambridge, the one without mushrooms, was made first, and then came

the Great Canterbury Psalter, or the Anglo-Catalan Psalter, which followed all the innovations of the Eadwine Psalter. It has three parallel texts - Latin, Hebrew and Catalan - and also has the prefatory illustrations of the Old and New Testament scenes.

 

To an extent, it is a copy of the Eadwine Psalter, particularly in its text, but the artists of the illustrations seem, on occasion, to have referred back to the original Utrecht Psalter of the ninth century.

This commentary is both both confused and confusing.

The Anglo-Catalan Psalter is MS 8846 in Paris: this is certain because it is the one that was begun in England and completed in Spain, in Catalonia. It is a copy of the British Eadwine psalter, yes, if that came first, but quite different in respect to its illustrations.

Up to about page 100, the Paris Eadwine MS is loaded with mycological imagery, but after that there is none.

This suggests that the mushroom illustrations were done in England when work on the MS started, but not continued when it was finished in Spain.

The expert commentary notes that the Canterbury illustrations (of both MSs, presumably) were based on the Utrecht Psalter, which displays the vivid image of a mushroom tree in the Garden of Eden, but makes no mention of that detail. Failure of attention or intentional blindness? Disregarding the blatant differences in illustration in the two Canterbury Psalters, scholars tend to confuse the two MSs.

As I noted elsewhere, the Wassons knew of the mushroom imagery of the Utrecht Psalter (Rheims, c. 800 CE)  - knowledge that might have, but did not, lead them to discover the Paris MS.

The article continues:

A decision was made to alter radically the appearance of the illustrations by changing the monochrome or colored drawings of the Utrecht and Eadwine Psalters to colored paintings with larger figures and burnished-gold grounds - the technique used for the most luxuriously illustrated books of the late 12th century.

 

This new style of illustration required the artists to make many innovations in the visual composition of their imagery. Of all the copies of the Utrecht Psalter, this one made the greatest demand on the creative ingenuity of its artists.

In spite of the such elaborate description of artistic techniques, involving close comparison of three distinct works of art, no expert has a single word to say about the mushrooms depicted vividly in the Paris MS.

It appears that religious scholars practice intentional blindness when it comes to this extraordinary work of sacred art.

Private Illuminations

I am no expert on medieval illuminated manuscripts, but from what I can gather the Paris Eadwine Psalter was the unique production of British-Celtic artists who supplied the mycological material when the MS was begun.

For some reason, their work was interrupted.

In Catalonia, the artist(s) who took over the job phased out the mushrooms, which do not appear at all after page 100. Odd, since mushrooms of the Genus psilocybe are known to grow prolifically in Catalonia, on the south-facing slopes of the Pyrenees.

But of course they also grow prolifically all over England, Wales, and Ireland.

We may infer a division of opinion among the two teams of scribes who produced Latin MS 8846. The second shift in Catalonia did not eliminate the mushroom imagery of the first team, but they did not continue it, either.

Whatever the case,

"the technique used for the most luxuriously illustrated books of the late 12^th century",

...was applied to this masterpiece, suggesting that someone was putting a lot of time and money into it, intending to produce a prized work of art.

I wonder if the individual or group who initially conceived this extraordinary book had in mind to illustrate it fully and completely with mushroom imagery.

• Did the "generous friend" who sponsored the Paris Eadwine Psalter, and may have had a hand in directing its initial execution, want to share entheobotanical illuminations with the world at large?

   

• Was the construction of the MS interrupted because someone else was against this disclosure?

This seems probable that something like this occurred, but given how little we know its origin and production, it is impossible to be certain about how and why the Paris Eadwine Psalter was created.

Illuminated Heresy

-   More Images from the Paris Eadwine Psalter   -

by John Lash

May 2007 Andalucia

from MetaHistory Website

The Sermon on the Mushroom Mountain
Latin MS 8846, fol 6v, Psalm 2 BnF

A recent trip to Paris afforded me the chance to visit the National Library of France and acquire some inkjet reproductions of the Paris Eadwine Psalter.

 

With a couple of exceptions, where the source is wrongly attributed to "the Canterbury Psalter," this material appears exclusively on the Internet on metahistory.

 

Gaze and wonder!

 

 

Here is the same folio page shown in another view with color values adjusted to how it looks on microfilm - rather faded.

 

I have not yet seen or handled the original MS so I do not know if its colors correspond to the gloriously preserved tones of the other version, or if this is a Photoshop effect.

 

Scholars take the Sermon on the Mount for an illustration of Psalms 2, with allusion perhaps to verse 6,

"Yet I have set my king upon the holy hill of Zion."

In the scant literature I have been able to find on the Paris Eadwine Psalter, we are told that the lavish imagery of the MS is linked textually to the Old Testament books describing early events in the ecclesiastical story of humankind, mainly Genesis, and to the Psalms.

 

Lately we are hearing a lot of chatter about entheogens in the Old Testament, suggesting that Moses was "high" on Mount Sinai in ways that have not previously been considered.

 

Benny Shannon seems to have kicked off the discussion, which involves a variation of the ecclesiastical mushroom cult proposed by Carl Ruck, a spinoff of the Allegro thesis (The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross), itself a spinoff of the Wasson thesis.

 

Biblical Entheogens by Shannon, just out in March 2007, looks set to stir up a lot of controversy, not to mention loud protests from the Catholic Church and other defenders of ye ol'time relijun, salvationist-style.

 

Paul Krassner has now jumped into the fray, as doubtless many others will do in short time.

 

I can only wonder how the revelations of the Paris Eadwine Psalter will affect this debate.

 

One possibility: since the Paris MS does not show amanitas, it may influence the prevalent tendency of Allergo, Ruck, and others to identify the fly-agaric as the entheogenic sacrament of choice among the Christian fold. In other words, it will support speculation that Christianity arose from a mushroom cult in Palestine. I strongly oppose this thesis.

 

Another possibility: close analysis of MS 8846 may suggest the survival of non-Christian cultic practices in Europe, late remnants of the Mysteries.

 

If so, we will have to consider how Mystery cult revelations of the magic mushroom differed from the visionary states experienced by the ecclesiastical elite who, according to Ruck and others, kept the secret to themselves. I have some thoughts on this issue, to be presented in a look at the "Good Friday Experiment" coming up in The Psychonautic Adventure, G2.

 

Typically, the MS presents botanically pictured fungi of different species or genii along with a stylized version, the omphalos-bud, as I am calling it. Beneath the Savior are two botanical images, white (left) and brown (right), The brown mushroom sprouts from the same trunk as a blue omphalos-bud.

 

In the upper right, under the angelic finger, two botanical specimens with their caps shredding sprout from the same trunk as a blue omphalos-bud. Just to the left, an ochre-colored omphalos-bud shares the trunk with a brown mushroom.

 

Did the visionary artists who conceived and oversaw the making of the psalter want to signify that both kinds of mushroom, literally represented and stylized, have the same source?

 

They both come from the fruiting body of the mycelium. The blue-staining properties of the Psilocybe genus, indicative of tryptamines, are continually emphasized by the distinct bluish color of the trunks of the fruiting bodies.

 

Elsewhere in the MS the botanically represented specimens display the same coloring.

 

 

 

 

Close up, the mushroom mountain has some intriguing details.

 

The omphalos buds appear in three different types, (left to right):

• a composite of mouth-like nodules (recalling a venus fly-trap)

• white mini-mushrooms in a lattice

• oblique, tree-shaped triangles

The mini-mushroom head is strikingly juxtaposed to the world globe at the tip of the long inverted cross held by the Savior.

 

In Christian symbology, the fusion of cross and globe signifies the reign of dominator religion across the entire planet. Here, with the staff pointed down, it may carry another message.

 

The ecclesiastical staff touches or almost merges with the mini-mushroom cluster - as if to say,

"The true power of the world comes from here?"

The two lower mushrooms are clearly represented as botanical specimens, although the one on the right may incorporate other plant imagery.

 

Otherwise, the mushroom mount is composed of clustered dark ringlets with some kind of white-flowered plant sprouting from them. These delicate plants have ochre buds or flame-like blossoms at the top.

 

Botanical identification? I can't say.

 

However, speaking as a psychonaut, I can attest that the ringlets resemble a sight I have frequently seen in visionary trance: supple conduits that wind endlessly into hyperspace.

 

I take these conduits to be micro-tubular channels in the atmospheric body of Gaia. Paracelsus called them iliastri, threads of star-matter. They are closely associated with DNA which is structurally arranged by microtubules.

 

The unidentified plants have three stems, recalling the triplets of DNA.

 

Could the leaves on the plants be a way of picturing letters in the genetic code?

 

 

Christ tempted

by an antlered shaman-devil in a mushroom grove.

 

 

Stay tuned for most on the Paris Eadwine Psalter in Savior, Hanged Man, Dancer. You ain't seen nuthin yet!