Quotulatiousness

October 24, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on the potentials of therapeutic use of psilocybin

Filed under: Europe, Greece, Health, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the last free edition of his Weekly Dish newsletter — and probably the last time I’ll be able to link to it — Andrew Sullivan discusses the medical trials and legalization initiatives for psilocybin along with some of the history of its use in the Elusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece:

At the archaeological site of the Sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis. The information board on the left stands on what was once the courtyard of the sanctuary. Over the staircase behind it stood the Greater Propylaea. Next to the cavern in the background stood the Sanctuary of Pluto (who abducted Persephone, Demeter’s daughter). The cavern represents the entrance to the Underworld. The path to the left of the cavern leads to the Telesterion where the faithful were initiated to the Eleusinian mysteries. The brown building up on the hill (left) is a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary (Church of Panagitsa Mesosporitissa) and stands over the area of the Telesterion.
Photo by George E. Koronaios via Wikimedia Commons.

There are many ways in which this election might portend the future, but there’s a seemingly small issue — only on the ballot in Oregon and the District of Columbia — that’s a sleeper, it seems to me, and worth keeping an eye on. It’s the decriminalization of naturally-occurring psychedelics, in particular, psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in some mushrooms which have long been dubbed “magic.”

This doesn’t come out of the blue. Huge strides have been taken in the last few years in the decriminalization of cannabis, with 33 states allowing medical use, of which 11 allow recreational as well. The FDA recently greenlit clinical trials for psilocybin as a “breakthrough therapy” for depression — with some wildly impressive results. Books like Michael Pollan’s magisterial How To Change Your Mind have helped shift the reputation of psychedelics from groovy, counter-cultural weirdness to mature, spiritual, and regulated mental health treatment. Ketamine — previously a party drug and an animal tranquilizer — has shown more promise as an anti-depressant than any therapy since the mid-1990s.

The familiar worry, of course, is that we might be ushering in an era of wild drug experimentation, with unforeseen and unknowable results. Some people fear that relaxing some of the legal restrictions on things that grow in nature could lead to social disruption or higher levels of addiction or worse. The great popularizer of psychedelics, Aldous Huxley, gave us a somewhat sobering description of what might be our future in Brave New World, and many in the West have been terrified of these substances for quite a while.

But new research suggests that this shift toward integrating psychedelics into a healthy, responsible life for Westerners may not be new at all. It would, in fact, be a return to a civilization that used these substances as a bulwark of social and personal peace. New literary investigations of ancient texts, new — and re-examined — archeological finds, and cutting edge bio-chemical technology that can detect and identify substances in long-buried artifacts, suggest that deploying psychedelics would, in fact, be a return to a Brave Old World we are only now rediscovering.

We’ve long known that human knowledge of psychedelic aspects of nature goes back into pre-history; and use of them just as far. But perhaps the most surprising find in this new area of research is that sacred tripping was not simply a function of prehistoric religious rituals and shamanism, but an integral, even central part, of the world of the ancient Greeks. The society that remains the basis for so much of Western civilization seems to have held psychedelics as critical to its vision of human flourishing. And that vision may have a role to play in bringing Western civilization back into balance.

A breakthrough in understanding this comes in the form of a rigorously scholarly new book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name, by Brian Muraresku. What he shows is the centrality of psychedelic use for the ancient Greeks, in an elaborate and mysterious once-in-a-lifetime ceremony at the Temple of Eleusis, a short distance from Athens. We’ve long known about this temple of the Mysteries, as they were known, and the rite of passage they offered — because it’s everywhere in the record. Many leading Greeks and Romans went there, including Plato and Marcus Aurelius. Here is Cicero, no less, in De Legibus:

    For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those Mysteries. For by means of them we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope.

May 17, 2020

Cicero’s Finest Hour (44 to 43 B.C.E.)

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historia Civilis
Published 16 May 2020

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Sources:
Cicero, “Letters to Atticus” | https://amzn.to/3b8EQby
Cicero, “The Philippics” | https://amzn.to/35EHcOe
Suetonius, “The Life of Julius Caesar” | https://amzn.to/2xJesHH
Plutarch, “The Life of Julius Caesar” | https://amzn.to/35DG6lZ
Plutarch, “The Life of Cicero” | https://amzn.to/2Laca7w
Plutarch, “The Life of Brutus” | https://amzn.to/2SLaWUC
Nicolaus of Damascus, “The Life of Augustus” | https://amzn.to/3dlQeCg
Appian, “The Civil Wars: Book 3” | https://amzn.to/2WbJXU4
Cassius Dio, “Roman History: Book 44” | https://amzn.to/35HC4ce
Cassius Dio, “Roman History: Book 45” | https://amzn.to/35HC4ce
Cassius Dio, “Roman History: Book 46” | https://amzn.to/2WDNIka

Barry Strauss, “The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination” | https://amzn.to/2WAUxTD
Tom Holland, “Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar” | https://amzn.to/2zjG4n4
Adrian Goldsworthy, “Antony and Cleopatra” | https://amzn.to/2L8MQ1F
Anthony Everitt, “Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician” | https://amzn.to/3bbrKKM
Tom Holland, “Rubicon” | https://amzn.to/3dombKn
Adrian Goldsworthy, “Augustus” | https://amzn.to/3fAInmD
Anthony Everitt, “Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor” | https://amzn.to/2Wf9CLH
Adrian Goldsworthy, “Caesar: Life of a Colossus” | https://amzn.to/3cfFQvU

Music:
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“Heliograph,” by Chris Zabriskie
“The House Glows (With Almost No Help),” by Chris Zabriskie
“Hallon,” by Christian Bjoerklund

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May 6, 2020

Quintus Tullius Cicero, Praetor 62 B.C.E.

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Thersites the Historian
Published 25 Jul 2018

Quintus Tullius Cicero is best known as the younger brother of Marcus Tullius Cicero who wrote a pamphlet on running for the Consulship, but he was also one of Caesar’s legates in Gaul and a braver than average Roman.

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February 1, 2020

Cursus honorum – Consuls

Filed under: Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historia Civilis
Published 18 May 2015

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Music is “The Life and Death of a Certain K. Zabriskie, Patriarch” by Chris Zabriskie. (http://chriszabriskie.com/)

January 19, 2020

Cursus honorum – Aediles

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historia Civilis
Published 6 Feb 2015

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Music is “Clap Your Hands” by Jahzzar (http://betterwithmusic.com)

January 14, 2020

Cursus honorum – Quaestors

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historia Civilis
Published 20 Dec 2014

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Music by audionautix.com

October 5, 2018

QotD: Thomas Jefferson, Epicurean

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epictetus indeed, has given us what was good of the stoics; all beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace. Their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention. These they fathered blasphemously on him who they claimed as their founder, but who would disclaim them with the indignation which their caricatures of his religion so justly excite. Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon; for Plato makes him one of his Collocutors merely to cover his own whimsies under the mantle of his name; a liberty of which we are told Socrates himself complained. Seneca is indeed a fine moralist, disguising his work at times with some Stoicisms, and affecting too much of antithesis and point, yet giving us on the whole a great deal of sound and practical morality. But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man; outlines which it is lamentable he did not live to fill up. Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others. The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the rescuing it form the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, **** invented by ultra-Christian sects, and unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by him, is a most desirable object, and one to which Priestley has successfully devoted his labors and learning. It would in time, it is to be hoped, effect a quiet euthanasia of the heresies of bigotry and fanaticism which have so long triumphed over human reason, and so generally and deeply afflicted mankind; but this work is to be begun by winnowing the grain form the chaff of the historians of his life. I have sometimes thought of translating Epictetus (for he has never been tolerably translated into English) by adding the genuine doctrines of Epicurus from the Syntagma of Gassendi, and an abstract from the Evangelists of whatever has the stamp of the eloquence and fine imagination of Jesus. The last I attempted too hastily some twelve or fifteen years ago. It was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington, after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day. But with one foot in the grave, these are now idle projects for me. My business is to beguile the wearisomeness of declining life, as I endeavor to do, by the delights of classical reading and of mathematical truths, and by the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope and fear.

I take the liberty of observing that you are not a true disciple of our master Epicurus, in indulging the indolence to which you say you are yielding. One of his canons, you know, was that “that indulgence which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain, is to be avoided.” Your love of repose will lead, in its progress, to a suspension of healthy exercise, a relaxation of mind, an indifference to everything around you, and finally to a debility of body, and hebetude of mind, the farthest of all things from the happiness which the well-regulated indulgences of Epicurus ensure; fortitude, you know is one of his four cardinal virtues. That teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties; not to fly from them, like cowards; and to fly, too, in vain, for they will meet and arrest us at every turn of our road. Weigh this matter well; brace yourself up; take a seat with Correa, and come and see the finest portion of your country, which, if you have not forgotten, you still do not know, because it is no longer the same as when you knew it. It will add much to the happiness of my recovery to be able to receive Correa and yourself, and prove the estimation in which I hold you both. Come, too, sand see your incipient University, which has advanced with great activity this year. By the end of the next, we shall have elegant accommodations for seven professors, and the year following the professors themselves. No secondary character will be received among them. Either the ablest which America or Europe can furnish, or none at all. They will give us the selected society of a great city separated from the dissipations and levities of its ephemeral insects.

I am glad the bust of Condorcet has been saved and so well placed. His genius should be before us; while the lamentable, but singular act of ingratitude which tarnished his latter days, may be thrown behind us.

I will place under this a syllabus of the doctrines of Epicurus, somewhat in the lapidary style, which I wrote some twenty years ago; a like one of the philosophy of Jesus of nearly the same age, is too long to be copied. Vale, et tibi persuade carissimum te esse mihi.

**** e. g. The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, &c.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, 1819-10-31.

Syllabus of the doctrines of Epicurus

Physical

The Universe eternal.

    Its parts, great and small, interchangeable

Matter and Void alone.

    Motion inherent in matter, which is weighty & declining

    eternal circulation of the elements of bodies.

Gods, an order of beings next superior to man.

    enjoying in their sphere their own felicities,

    but not meddling with the concerns of the scale of beings below them

Moral

Happiness the aim of life

    Virtue the foundation of happiness

    Utility the test of virtue.

Pleasure active and in-dolent.

    In-dolence is the absence of pain, the true felicity

    Active, consists in agreeable motion

    it is not happiness, but the means to produce it.

    thus the absence of hunger is an article of felicity; eating the means to produce it.

The summum bonum is to be not pained in body, nor troubled in mind

    i.e. In-dolence of body, tranquility of mind.

    to procure tranquility of mind we must avoid desire & fear, the two

    principal diseases of the mind.

Man is a free agent.

Virtue consists in:     1. Prudence     2. Temperance     3. Fortitude     4. Justice
to which are opposed:     1. Folly     2. Desire     3. Fear     4. Deceit

December 2, 2017

Breaking news from 55 BC

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Despite the written records left by Julius Caesar, Cicero, and Tacitus, until now there had apparently been no physical evidence of Caesar’s invasion of Britain:

… a chance excavation carried out ahead of a road building project in Kent has uncovered what is thought to be the first solid proof for the invasion.

Archaeologists from the University of Leicester and Kent County Council have found a defensive ditch and javelin spear at Ebbsfleet, a hamlet on the Isle of Thanet.

The shape of the ditch at Ebbsfleet, is similar to Roman defences at Alésia in France, where a decisive battle in the Gallic War took place in 52 BC.

Experts also discovered that nearby Pegwell Bay is one of the only bays in the vicinity which could have provided harbour for such a huge fleet of ships. And its topography echoes Caesar’s own observations of the landing site.

Dr Andrew Fitzpatrick, Research Associate from the University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History said: “Caesar describes how the ships were left at anchor at an even and open shore and how they were damaged by a great storm. This description is consistent with Pegwell Bay, which today is the largest bay on the east Kent coast and is open and flat.

“The bay is big enough for the whole Roman army to have landed in the single day that Caesar describes. The 800 ships, even if they landed in waves, would still have needed a landing front 1-2 km wide.

“Caesar also describes how the Britons had assembled to oppose the landing but, taken aback by the size of the fleet, they concealed themselves on the higher ground. This is consistent with the higher ground of the Isle of Thanet around Ramsgate.”

Thanet has never been considered as a possible landing site before because it was separated from the mainland until the Middle Ages by the Wanstum Channel. Most historians had speculated that the landing happened at Deal, which lies to the south of Pegwell Bay.

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