Podcast #030 - Ancient European and Middle Eastern Drug Use - An Interview with Alan Piper - Part 1
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May 11, 2009 12:25 AM PDT
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What evidence is there of Amanita muscaria mushroom and other drug use in Afghanistan? Did the Sufi employ psychoactive substances? What are the Moroccan goat men? Is there a possible link between intoxicating sacramental use of milk and Mohammed's landmark visionary experience through the seven heavens? How does the new evidence of prehistoric mushroom use in Europe affect current academic arguments against such use? Is there a link to the word 'marihuana' and the Chinese language?

My guest is the British independent scholar Alan Piper - an expert on psychoactive substances in ancient religions. In this two part series we'll be discussing Zoroastrianism, Sufism, Amanita muscaria - the fly-agaric mushroom, intoxicating milk and meat, new evidence of prehistoric mushroom use in Europe, the origins of the word "marihuana," and much more.

[Photo of Alan Piper and Prof. Carl A.P. Ruck at Cuenca, Spain, 2008]

Alan Piper was born in 1953 and like many others of his generation encountered psychedelic culture in his teenage years. His father undertook psychloytic therapy in the 1950s and so Alan grew up with the likes of Aldous Huxley and Henri Michaux on the family bookshelves, which were a point of reference for him in his own encounters with the psychedelic experience. Again, like many others of his generation, he moved away from psychedelics and into an exploration of eastern religions and hermetic philosophies, looking for a context for his entheogenic experiences. Laid off from a macobiotic food company in the 1980s Alan took the opportunity to take a degree course in the History of Ideas, partly as an opportunity to put the new religious movements which emerged from the 1960s into a cultural context. As part of his study of religious, philosophical and scientific ideas his undergraduate studies involved the study of historical method, the discipline of 'doing history'. The second wave of psychedelia, rave culture and entheogenic neo-shamanism, hit around the time of his graduation. The writings of Terence McKenna renewed Alan's interest in the entheogens and their role in human cultures. A couple of his early papers on entheogenic topics brought Alan in touch with members the community of entheogenic scholarship and he has been lucky to have had the support and encouragement of other members of that community and to share his explorations with them. Alan has attempted to apply the methodological disciplines learned as an undergraduate to his study of the role of plant drugs in religious history of mankind. However, he recognises that there are many ways to make of sense of history some more objective and some more subjective. All attempts to 'do history' involve both reason and the imagination and our history is the product of an interplay between the dream and necessities of everyday reality.

Alan has authored and co-authored the following papers:
• Esoteric Cosmologies
• The Mysterious Origins of the Word "Marihuana"
• The Tree of Life and the Milk of the Goat Heidrun
• Burāq depicted as Amanita muscaria in a Fifteenth Century Timurid Illuminated Manuscript