Cannabis Roots: The Hidden History of Marijuana - Dr. David Hillman

Watch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVjT3Wwbb0k]

Sources Referenced

• Dioscorides
• Nicander
• Galen
• Old Testament
  • Henry Barclay Swete's The Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint, also on Biblehub.  GitHub, text file
    • Garden of Eden mentioned
• New Testament
  • Nestle’s Greek New Testament (1904) on BibleHub.  GitHub, text file
    • Mark 14:51/52 mentioned

Books

• The Chemical Muse - 2008, 2014 Thomas Dunne Books
• Original Sin - 2012 Ronin Publishing
• Hermaphrodites, Gynomorphs and Jesus - 2013 Ronin Publishing

Extra Information

Appear below inline with the text, as bullets, to give more context.  Typically defining related terms or definitions.
These are from the notetaker.

Transcript

okay welcome back everybody to cannabis roots the hidden history of marijuana, and next up we have dr. David Hillman he's got a new book coming out called “Original Sin” which discusses the rampant pedophilia taking place in the Catholic Church.  I contacted dr. Hillman because of his other book “The Chemical Muse Drug Use and Roots in Western Civilization”, which really explored the use of cannabis and other substances in Ancient Greece and around the ancient world.  today dr. Hillman is giving us a presentation satisfying the flame of desire and with marijuana, priestesses, drugs, and the cycle of life.  and I'm told it's not for the faint-hearted. there's going to be some erotic references and stuff like that, so this is probably… you’ll want to shut the computer off from the kiddies out there, or something like that. so with no further ado here is Dr. David Hillman. 

Alright so am i clear to talk about all the dirty stuff?  (voice:  it’s ok)   Alright, ok, fine, it's all clinical though, trust me, it's all clinical.  so honestly I'll say a few remarks and I want to spend a good bit of time on questions, but I'll say just a few remarks.  and I want to bring this down to where it's interesting.  so I don't want to leave anything out.  but you have to understand I came from this from a background of having both the sciences and the humanities.  so I have a degree and a PhD in classics, I do the Greek and Latin - that's my thing, that's my thing.  Not even history, so much as just the language.  i read the text, i know how to work the grammar, that's my strong point.  so what i did was i said hey there's all this scientific stuff out there that we don't have, we haven't translated. so i started working on it and it just sucked me in.  it's a huge… and let me explain to you what's going on, and then we'll talk about marijuana.  so an idea that I came up with, I was having problem with the vocabulary, with the Greek vocabulary. and there are some big holes in the ancient Greek world, that we try to plug over with kind of a Christian ideology, and I started calling this the “Christian lens”. when you try to take away the Christian lens, because the Christians are after the pagan cults all established, right? so you don't want to look at it through that lens, you want to see it as the pagans do.  let me give you one example, and I hate that word pagan because it's like using the n-word.  you know women who were called pagans were killed, I mean. so have a little respect, right? don't call it, don't use the term, pagan, but the thing that I say, the thing that I really think helped me to understand the text, is when I put aside that Christian lens.  and when you put aside that Christian lens.  let me give you one example:  homosexual.  there's no word for homosexual in the ancient Greek vocabulary.  there's no word for homosexual.  There are entire books written about homosexuals.  and there's no word for it in their own language.  so were they looking at it different? one question academics love to ask was “was Achilles having sex with Patrokolus” they love, and it's not just us, the Greeks did the same thing!! they were talking about it too! but when you look at the way they were talking about it, it was not about orientation, there was no question of orientation involved.  it's really weird!!  there's no concept of homosexual, there's no concept of heterosexual, and if you think about that, that makes an impact on society, just the language. so I started looking at the drugs, and I said we've got to be able to figure out the drugs, as we're figuring out the language. and I found a lot of … let me put it like this:  if you take the, if the drug lore, we call it drug lore, makes it sound funny.  but the drug lore of the Greeks, there are thousands of pages, thousands of pages untranslated.  nobody translates this. the head of my dissertation committee told me that, she said “you have to take the section out on recreational drugs from your dissertation on Roman pharmacy” and I said “why?” and she said “well the Romans just wouldn't do such a thing”, right?  these are the Romans we're talking about! these are the Romans. so I kind of had a drive. so the drugs, the plants become your genetic evidence. the myth is the amber.  so we discovered a bee that was 20 million years old, or something, in amber.  they took it out, they took the gut bugs out, they did a DNA analysis of the gut bugs and they found out they were not what they expected, that these bugs and their guts had been almost unaltered for 20 million years so it was kind of confusing, because we thought we'll this’ll show us archaeobacteria at its best.  no it really didn't. so what I'm trying to do is apply that same principle.  let's look at the amber. the amber is the myth. it's what holds in the cultural ideas. let's look into the ideas, and see what their DNA is. and that's what the drugs tell you. because the drugs are constant. it's like one thing, it's triangulation basically. it's one way of figuring out what was going on in the culture, by using a frame of reference. that's all. so when you look at the drugs in the ancient world, we're finding beautiful stuff. I'm gonna give you an example. there are two authors from the ancient world, that I want to tell you about. one is a guy named Dioscorides, and he is an author of all things herbal. he's a Roman. he's a Roman physician, for lack of a better term.  and then there's a priest who lived a couple centuries earlier, named Nicander.  both of them write about drugs. but both of them write about drugs in a very different way.  one is prose, it's a Greek prose, it's just “describe this, X Y & Z”.  the other one is poetry.  and it's a beautiful epic poem on drugs that priestesses used, to get… not to get high, but to do their routines.  and so if you trace the history of these drugs, that these priestly colleges are using, I'm just gonna hit some major points about what the history is shaping up to look like.  I said “break the Christian lens”. the first thing that you all believe, that it's completely wrong, is that women had no power in the ancient world. that they were slaves, they were chattel. you've heard this, you've heard this. classicists repeat this over and over and over again, and that's completely wrong. and the way that you can see this is the earliest medicine, we say, is Hippocratic right?  it's not.  the earliest medicine is actually gynecological.  you can look at the Hippocratic corpus and see that the Hippocratics were borrowing from a female tradition.  and we have one text of diseases of women that scholars have said “this is written by one of the Hippocratics, Hippocrates or one of his students”.  and they smile and look at each other (it's not in English right?)  they smile and look at each other and in the text itself it says “don't trust those stupid men physicians, you have to go to a woman because only we know the body”.   this is a document that is written by a man? excuse me? there's problems. something's going on here, right?  either they're not reading these things, or they're not… I don't know.  they're not understanding what the language is actually telling them, and that's what we get through the drugs. it's an anchor point that we can fix on.  so let me tell you about these priestly colleges, and I'll hurry up here because I'm droning on.  I want to skip ahead and just tell you:  so when you look at these drugs, pick a sex drug, let me give you a good one, that is something that you can kind of anchor yourself in. there's a drug that Mary Magdalene gives to Jesus. I hate using the Bible because then all the Gnostics will start yelling. but there's a drug that Mary Magdalene gives to Jesus right? and if you look check it out in the Greek, there's not one name for one plant.  you guys all know that right?  because you live that.  but modern classicists don't, and in these texts you have all sorts of different names.  you have street names for drugs. 

• The juice - opium

opium, you don't call it opium in the ancient world. you call it “the juice”, right?  so there's a drug vocabulary, and this drug vocabulary hides some very very very important ideas.  so pick a drug, the one that Mary Magdalene gave to Jesus, what does it do?  it's a combination, so what do you do when you break down the 18 different plants that they have, you look for active principles, that's so… it's a shotgun approach and then you start asking yourself “how are these things interacting”.  I'm going to tell you something that is absolutely 100% academically true in the universities today.  there is no university on this planet that can take one of these drugs, that these female priestesses were using, and explain to you what it did in the body.  it's impossible, it's impossible. they were using these complex mixtures to treat the “feminine being”.  now why would they do this?  why would they do this to these “chattel” that were sitting at home, right?  not doing anything, right, that's our model of them?  why would they be doing this? so if the oldest medicine is from gynecology, what would we say then about this book that just came out of Princeton that said (it's a beautiful book written about Oracles, and temples where Oracles prophesied, and the author of this book is a great great great archeologist) but she said one thing that I thought was very, it just reveals what our society is all about, she said “I don't understand why one third of the Oracles have to do with gynecology?”  because those priestesses were giving medical oracular healing to people.  so, of course!  they're the ones who knew about the drugs to start with.  so do you see how our understanding, because we have put women into a monotheistic box, we lose sight of the history, and that's what Julian, the apostate, said of the Christians teaching the early classics, he said “you cannot let Christians teach myth, because they change the meaning, they alter it to fit a monotheistic conception of the universe”.  so it was kind of a rat-, and of course he got murdered by a Christian soldier that threw a spear in his back when he was in battle, but Julian was trying to revive something that was very old.

what are the Christians doing at the time?  step back and say, “this is what the pagans are doing”, they're using all of these complex chemicals. the women are coming up with ways of regulating their menstruation, right?  with drugs!  they're figuring out ways of causing women to lactate, with drugs!  so what's going on in the rest of society? what is this movement pushing?  to make a long story, it ultimately pushes “the theater”.  the Oracles have all the power and they're the ones who say “you have to have a place where you can speak freely”.   it's definitely political.  you can't look at the activities of women and say “they're not involved”, just pharmacologically if you just stick to that side, that they “aren't involved in shaping society” - that's our Christian lens that causes us to see that way.  so what are the Christians doing at the time? what are the Christians doing at the time, this will come back to marijuana, I promise.  I have my… tie everything together.  what are the Christians doing at this time?  there's a ritual rape, ritual rape of children. to make a long story short. they were ritually raping children. they had a whole ceremony. Exorcists performed it.  they have a theological justification for it, right? and they have it all outlined as to what they were doing.  now, I had to put a few things…  

• Cyril of Jerusalem - Cyril is renowned for his Catechetical Lectures, a series of teachings delivered to catechumens preparing for baptism. These lectures provide detailed insights into early Christian doctrines and the preparatory rites for initiation into the Church.   (notetaker:  we need a source here)

I had to put Cyril of Jerusalem, the Bishop of Jerusalem said we can only tell so much about this ritual, up until a point. why can't we talk about what they did?  Was because they would starve kids, they would take orphans off the street, they would starve them, they would indoctrinate them for several weeks, and then they would put them in underground chambers.  he writes about this, it's not me making it up, it's all there. they would put them in underground chambers with Exorcists, and they would strip them naked. blindfold the kids, boys, and then put them through…  sorry I forgot the oiling, they would oil them.  and Cyril is very very explicit, there's a group of men, underground, oiling young guys up, and they have to oil them up from the bottom of their feet to the top of their head.  and then he goes on this long tirade about it and “tell them they don't have to feel bad about what's happening” (Ruck - “you musn’t forget the genitals”) say again? (Ruck - “he makes it explicit that you shouldn’t forget the genitals”).  Yeah (Ruck - “na goyem” unintelligible). So right there, something’s going on, right?  but then he says you have to go through the fires of temptation.  and it's actually a mystery ritual. and what happens in the application of the fires, is that you're applying sodomy.  and there's an entire poetic Christian work written about the war between Sodomia (sodomy) and Virtue.  okay, so. very sexual.  at this time, what else are the Christians doing?  they're saying “women are poison”. women ARE poison. Right?  women are poison. I say that very specifically because that's exactly how they say it. the early church fathers are talking about how women are the real enemies of our society. they target women. and that's when they start killing, imprisoning and killing, women for carrying around vaginal creams, or for carrying around something that can give you an abortion, they start killing people.  so this is the environment.  this is the struggle between the prevailing, predominantly female, priestesses. these medical women.   anyway!!! let me just make one point about the… point that I thought was really, maybe good, that we could take home. you know that has to do with marijuana. now, what about marijuana specifically? Because that’s what you guys all wanna hear about. so you're gonna notice right away:  everybody says “well there aren't that many references to marijuana”, right? “there aren't that many references”.  there are actually a lot more than you think.  just not to “cannabis”, right? because of the names.  so what is the name.. what if you were a Greek gentleman, and your daughter was performing and one of these Oracles, and you're partaking of the incense offering before the ceremony, alright?  this is your daughter and it's a big deal for her, big night.   and so what do you do?  you sacrifice to Hecate maybe, and you inhale the incense off of the altar, right?  so, what else can you do to administer drugs? See, let's approach it from the scientific standpoint, how else can you get those drugs in you?  they didn't smoke.  you can inhale fumes, they have a squirter that you can squirt stuff up your nose.  I'm not quite sure what the draw of that was but.  and then, the other place?  how do you get drugs in?  you eat them.   but they knew that eating changed the composition of what was going on.  so then you can do the ol’ rectal route of administration.  so if you look for references now to drugs that do anything rectally, right?  so the drug that Mary Magdalene gives Jesus has saponins in it.  it's a combination of plants that have saponins that cause anal sphincter spasming.  it's an ancient designer sex drug. and Jesus apparently had it when he was… most people don't know, and this is the battle I've been fighting, nobody reads their Bible anymore, that people need to read the Bible, right?  because there's a naked kid with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, right?  raise your hand if you've heard of the naked kid with Jesus.   look it's only a couple people. (Dr Ruck: he’s not a kid, but he’s an adolescent).  sorry, young man, the naked young man with Jesus.  yes sir, aye sir, the naked..  to me he's a kid, right.  yeah. now this is a younger, this is not a… the age group that dr. ruck is referring to is how the kid is: he's a naniskos he's a gumnos (Γυμνός) naniskos (Νανίσκος).

• gumnos (Γυμνός): The Greek word "γυμνός" means "naked" or "bare." This refers to something or someone without clothing.
• naniskos (Νανίσκος): The word "νᾶνις" (nânis) in Ancient Greek refers to a "dwarf" or a small person, often used for a young man or a small boy. The diminutive form "νᾶνισκος" (naniskos) would imply "a little dwarf" or "a small boy."
• gumnos naniskos (Γυμνός Νανίσκος) - translates to “naked little boy”

(Voice)… somewhere around puberty, somewhere around puberty.  can be a little bit before, scholars will argue about how late it goes, whatever. you're exactly right, it's about puberty, right? and that's where his range is.  so they're using these drugs… and that's what's disturbing, this is where it kind of gets disturbing is:  what were the Christians battling that would make them want to do these strange rites?  if you look at the Greek rites, they were copying. they were attempting to copy the Greek rites, at the same time, to alter them, so that the Greek gods would not be able to defend their own rites.  that was the idea. and how do you do this? because they believe in demons, right?  they believe in demons. these Christians, right? they believe in them just like the Greeks and the Romans do. so you see this period, this intense period of demon fighting, demon possession, and demon fighting. and how do they get to some of these fights? through the drugs that they're putting, to make a long story short, they're putting on the phallus.  and then they're either having vaginal or anal intercourse, well whatever you call it, I don't know, what is that? I don't know. but that, with a statue.  you can use a statue of Priapus, you can use any of the herms, and with the box that the Dionysiac troop would carry around.

• Alabastrum - stone medical dildo used to apply drugs 

they had some kind of instrument that they used to apply drugs.  was it dildos? we have those, from the ancient world. right? well all sorts of little statues that are used as….  we say dildo but it sounds sexual doesn't it? it is, but not really.  it's the application of a drug, and that's what's strange about it. let me just cut to the chase, because I probably have like five minutes left.  it's the Cult of Aphrodite, to make a long story short, I wanted to talk about the cult of Aphrodite, here. what do we call - everybody knows this - what do we call the women associated with a cult of Aphrodite. (whores)   Whores? Anybody else… (courtesans) Courtesans?  that's a little more cleaned up, isn't it?  Courtesans?  Private sacred prostitutes? yeah, those words are all Christian words.  these were NOT, these were NOT, prostitutes.  these were priestesses!  these were priestesses!  and what did these priestesses do? they created the “chorus”.  and what is the chorus?  it's a life stage.  

• chorus (χορός) - The chorus was integral to Greek tragedy and comedy, often embodying a collective voice of society, nature, or divine will. In ritual settings, the "chorus" could be led by priestesses who chanted hymns, performed sacred dances, and guided participants through a transformative experience.   the kore (κόρη) priestesses often guided the chorus (χορός) in enacting the sacred drama.  The fumigation of spaces with aromatic or medicinal herbs (e.g., myrrh, frankincense, or laurel) was a common practice in ancient rituals and theater.
• kore (κόρη), the young girl who's coming to life (puberty)

it's the strangest thing in the world. it's a life stage.  the Greeks actually believed, and I can show you this, it's not my words, it's their words, that the immediately post pubertal female, if given all of the Earth's natural mechanisms: drugs and enough astronomy, geometry, (“uh, women didn't learn…”, yeah, yeah they did!) astronomy, geometry, dance, poetry, pre-Homeric stuff, right?  this is in the Homeric hymns, right?  now, that's “post”, but it harkens back to earlier stuff.  so these girls, you take these girls, and they dance, they dance and they Oracularly prophesai (προφησᾶι). 

• prophesai (προφησᾶι) - a subjunctive or imperative form of προφητεύω (propheteuo): To act as a prophet, to speak oracles, to foretell.

they recite poetry, right?  and you can't touch them.  why can't you touch them?  because, anytime you get a “bud” it is at its strongest chemical point before it is fertilized, right?  because as soon as the seeds come, you're gonna have, that  everything is gonna be funneled into creating seeds.  so they knew this.  the Greeks knew this, and they talk about it. this is the budding of life.  this is the Kore (κόρη), the young girl who's coming to life.  and if we can capture that two or three year period, put it on an intense drug regimen, in an intense exercise regimen, and an intense education, and we put her up on the altar, and she dances over the fumes, and she's covered, she's covered in creams, her vagina is greased with (God knows what this stuff did) in the body, and if you have her up there (and you can't touch her by the way, you cannot touch her) if you have her up there, she can speak “from the gods”.  it wasn't one drug, it wasn't just marijuana, it wasn't just a LSD, it was… the drug was not the focus.  the focus was getting that girl to “approach the gods”.  and that is what the cult of Dionysus is all about.  

• thyone (Θυώνη) - In some traditions, after her death and apotheosis, Semele is renamed Thyone (Θυώνη), which directly relates to θύω ("to offer sacrifice" or "to burn as an offering").  Thyone becomes a divine figure associated with Bacchic rites, emphasizing her connection to Dionysian cults.  
• semele (Σεμέλη) - The mother of Dionysus in Greek mythology is typically identified as Semele (Σεμέλη)

Thyone (Θυώνη), his mother, her name means “the burnt sacrifice”.  The burnt fumes from the altar.  and that's not an altar with an animal, that's an altar with pounds and pounds and pounds of incense that's full of everything.  and one of the things that it has in it is “STR”.  Asterion (αστήριον) in Greek.

• asterion (αστήριον) - cannabis - it is derived from the word ἀστήρ (astēr), meaning "star."

It is the common name for weed, asterion (αστήριον).  it's one of the many ingredients, one of the many.  it's “the star”.  all these goddesses are all named after “the star”.  and Dioscorides talks about the shape of it, and what not.  you don't see that in the traditional (classicist interpretations) everybody said “where did those texts go?”,  because you're looking on the wrong names!  find their common names for them, and you can find the drugs!  there's a lot about marijuana that we don't know,  there's so much, I said when I was coming here, “there's so much untranslated” I'm gonna give the best picture I can.  but there's so much sitting out there, waiting to be harvested, mostly in Galen.  it's just amazing.  you guys are just on the tip of an iceberg.  I mean you could take ten grad students, in ten years, and you wouldn't find out everything that's in these formulae.  that's in these complex formulae created just to make a “chorus”!  just to make a chorus.  there's no faith, there's no Commandments.  the idea is, it's the natural voice of god.  so they would take these (is the last thing I'll say) they would take these 14/15-year-old girls, and they would decide public policy.  they would okay wars.  we have these Oracles (writings) survived by the way.  I'm not making this up.  if you wanted to go to war you had to ask one of these Oracles, right?  Isn’t that amazing?  that's incredible power!  that's incredible power.  so when we said that women didn't have power, look at the cult of Aphrodite Urania.   and you know what, I just keep droning on, so I probably should…  do I still have time?    

okay okay, why don't we take a five-minute question break to generate some ideas and then I'll go from there.  let's do that. does anybody have any questions?  

(off screen:  is there any way to find the recipes of all of these drugs?)  yes we have them. we have them. they’re in Greek, we have them. (voice).  Oh, is there any way to find a recipe, for these drugs?  yes we have them.  they're all written down.  you just have to go back, and find them.  yeah, there's thousands.  there's more written about ancient drugs than any other subject, period.  it's the most numerous type of writing.  there's thousands of pages of just Galen alone, on pharmaceuticals.  Yeah.  (Voice).  Yeah, it was eventually, it was eventually.  and you have like the Arab formularies.  you have the Arab formularies… okay so this (question) was: “did this kind of this knowledge of the pharmaceuticals get into the Arab culture?” yeah! yeah it did, ultimately.  and through formularies.  so when the Christians decided to burn… because this is what's funny (well it's not funny, but..). when the Christians decided to burn all the women for using drugs, and they really squashed the use of drugs in Roman society, you have a time period where people turn away from that.  and the knowledge is preserved throughout, there's groups that preserve it.  and so it's really interesting to follow that.  one of the groups that preserved it was the Arabs, but does anybody know what the Arabs studied before… who do they worship before Allah? (voice) yeah, but who are their primary deities, the Arabs?  Herodotus tells us that it was Dionysus and Aphrodite.  Dionysus and Aphrodite.  that black stone that's associated with the Kaaba and all that. 

• Kaaba (كَعْبَة‎) - The Kaaba is the cube-shaped structure located in the heart of the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is the most sacred site in Islam, and Muslims around the world face towards it (the Qibla) during their daily prayers.   
  • Before the advent of Islam, the pre-Islamic Arabs practiced polytheism and worshiped a variety of deities. Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, does indeed mention that the Arabs revered Dionysus (the Greek god of wine, revelry, and ecstasy) and Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of love and beauty)
  • The Kaaba itself, before the rise of Islam, was a place of idolatry, and it housed many idols representing various gods and goddesses. 
• The Black Stone (Arabic: الحجر الأسود, al-Ḥajar al-Aswad) - is a revered object embedded in the eastern corner of the Kaaba. The stone itself is a significant religious symbol, and Muslims believe it was sent down from Heaven. It's traditionally said that the Black Stone was originally white but has turned black due to the sins of humanity. The stone is about the size of a fist and is encased in a silver frame. It is kissed by pilgrims during the Hajj pilgrimage, as part of a ritual that commemorates the actions of the Prophet Muhammad during his time in Mecca.

That's all, that's all (voice of Ruck…) Cybele sure, yeah, no definitely, yeah. the cult of Cybele is…  they actually have a formula for one of the drugs that the priestesses of Cybele used.  they would take this drug, and they would go stand in the common ways, the street intersections. and they would scream! this must been great to live back then (haha).  they would scream! crazy stuff! and they were sacrosanct, because they were priestesses, they could say anything they wanted, and if there were tyrants who had too much money in power, they were the ones who started saying things about them.   these priestesses!  isn't that something?  tremendous political power. (voice: when do you think the cult of Aphrodite began…) you can't really give it an origin, right?  because all it is Astarte and Ishtar, Ashteroth, it's all the same goddesses who are being given different names.

• Astarte (Ἀστάρτη), major goddess in ancient Semitic religions, particularly among the Phoenicians, Canaanites, and other peoples in the ancient Near East.  She was a goddess of fertility, love, beauty, sexual desire, and war. Astarte was associated with the moon and Venus, and her worship often had an aspect of sacred sexuality.  Her cult involved rituals of fertility and love, sometimes including sacred prostitution, as well as prayers for victory in battle. She was also considered a protector of women and children, and her influence was widespread across the Mediterranean.
• Ishtar (𒀯𒋾𒀀𒋗, Inanna in Sumerian) - Mesopotamian counterpart to Astarte, primarily worshiped in Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian cultures. She was also known as Inanna in Sumerian mythology. Ishtar is a complex goddess associated with love, sexuality, fertility, war, and political power. She was also connected with the planet Venus, just like Astarte.  The worship of Ishtar involved sacred rites linked to fertility and sexuality, often considered both divine and earthly. She had a prominent role in mythological tales, such as her descent to the Underworld in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
• Ashtoreth / Ashteroth (אַשְׁתֹּרֶת, Asherah) - is the Canaanite and Hebrew name for the goddess that corresponds to Astarte and Ishtar. She was an important deity in the ancient Levant and the broader Semitic world, including the Israelites before monotheism became dominant.  Like Astarte and Ishtar, Ashtoreth was a goddess of fertility, love, and sexuality. She was also associated with war and the protection of cities. Ashtoreth was sometimes paired with the god Baal in her worship, representing fertility and agricultural abundance.  Her worship often included rituals of fertility, including the offering of food, incense, and sacrifices. In some periods, her cult involved sacred prostitution or sexual rites that were believed to ensure agricultural prosperity.  In the Old Testament Bible, Ashtoreth is sometimes referred to in connection with the worship of false gods by the Israelites (anti women, anti Medean governance).

but what's important, what I think is important is, there's a group of guys called the Orphics, and they start writing poetry.  and when I say guys I don't mean males.  there's a group of people who start writing Orphic poetry. and there are all these Orphic hymns that we have, to the different gods. and if you look at the influence just of asterion 

(cannabis) on that?   *I mean, Zeus, what does Zeus call it “his astropaous”* he's the one who “sends the fire” it's an important part, it’s an important part, but these Orphics, they're really the key.  they're really the key.  the Orphics are really the key, to understanding how the cult was all fit together. and remember this is not just the worship of “god of thingies” right?  they didn't worship “Men in Tights”, right? on clouds.  they didn't worship that.   they would be the first to tell you.  well you say “what about myth”?  myth is all about stories, and this…  yes, because if you were an ardent - and this is where I should have started, maybe I'll finish here and I should have started here - if you weren't an ardent follower of the muses, you didn't get it.   the muses were an actual cult.   it's one of the oldest that we have, in Greece. Why?   all of the poetry - how do we know that? - all of the poetry harkens back to the worship of this group of this group of goddesses: “the muses”.  so it's not about a single plant.  it's not about the Christian perspective.  it's about seeing the “Choral beauty” that they saw.  and they would say “that's what transmits freedom and all of these grand science and whatnot, is that song”  if your society doesn't have that song, you don't have freedom. (ok, i got a question…)  (so so I want to remind everybody to use a mic because we are filming this and it makes it a little awkward with with with with the questions and stuff like that - but in regards to this cannabis use how do you think it came into greece and began to be used this way and what is there in regards to archeological evidence to back up this stuff) yeah, so you're gonna ask an archaeologist the second half of that question.  I'm not going to step into an arena that I don't feel I'm a hundred percent, I'm good with.  we have found, you know there was a female skeleton found by an Israeli team.  I actually did a dig at Megiddo. Has anybody been to Megiddo?  it's the site of Armageddon in Israel, right?  it's the site where that supposed to be.  so, it's funny, I was doing a dig at Armageddon.  I don't know, I thought it was funny.  we did find there's a female skeleton of a girl, she's like 14, and she's got (they found) cannabis. and they think it has to do with the treatment, right?  She was delivering a child, she died from not having a wide enough pelvic girth, right?  and they were giving her marijuana.  why would you give somebody marijuana, whose pelvis is too small?  to relax, in the broad ligament, right? to let that thing relax, soften up a little bit.  relax, right?  so it would open, it would have opened it up, that's what they were trying to do.  isn't it interesting, you can take the chemical and you can figure out what was actually going on from the chemical that they were using.  but they found this girl, she died, and she had marijuana in her system.  that's the archeological side. what is the real evidence? what is the real, how do we know how old it is? it must be at least as old as the earliest Greek archaic medicine, because we constantly see the use of the training of priestesses, to communicate a drug knowledge to the priestesses.  so you can see that in the earliest poetry, you can see that the reference to “the star” and the reference to the… we don't just look where the name is, you look for other…, somebody had the snake up, who put the snake up, on that…? Was that Vishnu, was it (shiva!) Shiva!  and I wanted to make sure that that didn't escape our notice.  because that's how they coded all this stuff, right?  Dionysus is always portrayed as going around with X Y & Z.  all right, what is a Sphinx?  there's an actual episode, in a guy named Nonas, nobody reads Nonas, right?  there's an actual episode where there's a real Sphinx, who uses a bow and arrow to strangle someone, so they're using some kind of toxin on the arrow, and since they're constantly talking about…  where does the toxin come from? from the snakes!  you know, it's probably from the snakes! and what's beautiful, is there's there's a remedy for this, there's a remedy for one of these snake toxins. and it's beautiful! nobody looks at this stuff. It's old because it comes from the gynecology, and those are the earliest drugs. Definitely.  yes? (voice:  why do you suppose Mary Magdalene gave Jesus a sex drug to seduce him to turn him on to enlighten him some combination of all of that and was was that like early in their relationship? or later. Or much later, at the time of his crucifixion….) this is right before the garden, so he's about to get off’ed.  this is his ending.  (voice:  guess) that is, you could make drama out of that.  you know, a really good drama.  but what does the evidence say? let's just look at what the evidence says about that.  what do we know? she gives it to him before the garden. Before he ends up in the garden.  that's where he's betrayed.  when he's in the garden, he's with that kid in the garden.  is there an association?  is there was there a reason that he had the linen cloth, the kid had a linen cloth?  what do we know about linen?  what kind of ceremonies is that used in?  why is it that Jesus's apostles are standing at a distance? why is it a public park at two o'clock in the morning?  Right?  why is Jesus dealing with a prostitute in the first place? and what IS that prostitute? that's what our understanding of the term is.  how did the Greeks and the Romans, and the Hellenists that lived in the mish-mosh of Judea, how did THEY interpret that?   people have asked me, because with my book that is just coming out, they asked me “what what is your problem with what Jesus was doing”.   I had an evangelical stopped me on the street and he said “hey brother, can I answer any of your questions about Jesus?”.  (laughter) and so I said “oh he's asking for it”.   (laughter) so I said, because I really do, see i’m serious, I'm not mocking, because I want to find out “what is the rationale”.  and I say “why, okay” so he said “you have any questions, brother?” and I said “yeah, why was Jesus with a naked kid in the Garden of Gethsemane”.  and he laughed and he said “you know I've read in my Bible many a time, but I've never seen that”.  nice, so I said Mark 14:51 52, so he looked shocked and he opened the Bible and looked at it.   and this, I kid you not, this is what he said, he stood there and read it, and I was watching him, and he said “you mean, for everything that Jesus did for you, just because he was with this naked kid, you wouldn't believe him?”.  and that's the exact answer that the early church gives.  it's the exact same answer that the early church gives.  it's amazing, nobody ever answers this question.  what, so if you look at. okay, last sentence. if you look at the actual pharmacy, and you look at the biology, and you look at all the history, you look at the linguistics, you can figure out what he was doing there.  you can figure it out.  Yeah. (voice: when you mentioned the snake I started thinking about the myth of the Garden of Eden, and how the snake, and the women are associated, and are evil.  does that mean that the Judaic church also tried to persecute).   I'll let a Greek answer that for you. I won't give you the answer.  I’ll let a Greek do it.  it's Typhon, it's the monster Typhious, right? why would the Jewish Orthodox, Orthodox Jews, why would they have an anti-woman approach?  why do Muslims, who were extreme, you know, on their end. I'm not talking Sufis, and all.  but extremist Muslims, why did they always want to put the Taliban?  why do they want to put woman in burkas?  what do they want to throw acid in faces?  why did the Christians burn women alive, and shut down colleges for women? why did they do that?  the Greeks already gave the answer.  It’s Typhious.  Zeus has to beat Typhious.  Typhious is monotheism.  the Jews that came out of Egypt followed Set. right?  as a monotheistic God.  the enemy of Aphrodite and Dionysus.  it's all… they knew the problems, they knew the problems.  Christianity's problem, for the Greeks, was that they were atheists!  you know what the Greeks called the early Christians?  Atheists!  how could they call them atheists?  that's what people call people who are not Christians, now.  Right?   do you see what happens, they adopt, the aggressor adopts the tactics of the people they filled the position for, right? the pagans disappeared, the Christians came, and they start using this tactic.  It’s amazing, it's beautiful, kind of beautiful history.  but anyway, did that answer the question?  (voice) yeah but say your question again because I think you're making a very important point.  (voice:  oh, it was just, “was the judaic church anti-women, was that the creation, or i’m sorry, the garden of eden myth, the attack of women and their power, over medicine”)  yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely, yeah.  it's a way of establishing power for a specific group.  yeah, yeah. (voice: just to repeat it, you know “was the Garden of Eden myth a direct attack on women, due to their power of medicine?”) right, and the christians use it that way, too (voice: so you're saying yes) definitely, and one other way of proving that is the Christians use the very same approach.  (voice: exactly it seem like you're similar it's like Oh it predates Christianity, then, yeah, ok) right, and why would they use Eve? because she had already been set as an example of what's evil.  and it worked.  and by the way, they even went so far as to say the name Eve - these Eve are the Greeks - the name Eve is related to the sacred name for guess who?  Dionysus. (voice)  yeah yeah, right, it's very weird!  it's like when you start realizing, the word for medicine in Greek, iatros (ἰατρός), the word for doctor, that's the word for physician, iao (ἰάω).  it comes to the verb iao ****(ἰάω).  is also a word that means “the cry”, this is so weird when I read this, “the cry that a woman delivering a child gives”.   isn’t that weird?  that's its own thing?  and that's what means medicine? that's where medicine comes from? right? and the arrow drugs to cause the uterus to contract and all that.  it's beautiful stuff.  (voice:  and so organized religion has been an attack on healers this whole time.  Just.  that's weird.  okay, thank you very much) yeah.   yes Dr Ruck. (ruck: … Iacchus can be made, kind of, into a person, Priapia can be made into Iacchus, and Iacchus is a name for Bacchus)  that's right.   it's a way of celebrating. (voice) and it's a way of celebrating, and why?  this connection between Bacchus and Aphrodite, why do some of the earliest statues of Aphrodite - that they say are some sort of Mithraic thing - that they all have penises. What?  right?   ancient statues with penises. It’s very…. why would you need a penis on a female statue?  ya, no I'm serious, I'm really asking.  can anybody, why would you need…?  Dr Ruck: (ruck: because she's superior!  she has both sexes!) and you can use that because she’s superior.  she's like Phanes, this early early Greek god that's both masculine and feminine.  and he wraps snakes around, he's got snakes wrapped around, he/she, it's like a yeah, he/she kind of thing.  and also… well i’ll let that answer it.   (voice: anymore questions?)   Ok, thank you!  It’s been great!   (Applause)