When Moses saw the burning bush and listened to God giving the Ten Commandments he was stoned according to Benny Shanon. The Israeli professor has been exploring this angle for decades but a radio program has put him into the news.
Shanon recently penned an article appearing in
Time and Mind journal of philosophy saying that much of the Moses story could be the retelling of a "trip".
As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics," Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.
Shanon, an Israeli psychology professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University believes that much of Exodus was written under the influence. Two Sinai desert plants, harmal and ayahuasca have a hallucinogenic reaction when consumed. Shanon says that he has partaken of the brew made from the plants about 160 times. Harmal, one of the plants Shanon wrote about has long been regarded by Jews in the region as a magical and curative plant. He says he himself experienced "
spiritual-religious connotations" under the powers of the powerful brew.
Shanon has been exploring the state of mind under the influence of harmal and ayahuasca for over a decade in context to the time period that the Biblical book of Exodus was written. His
Antidopes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experincepublished in 2002 by Oxford University Press has been widely acclaimed.
The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness," writes Shanon. "In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings."
Other Bible scholars aren't very impressed with Shanon's "discovery".
Orthodox rabbi Yuval Sherlow told Israel Radio: "The Bible is trying to convey a very profound event. We have to fear not for the fate of the biblical Moses, but for the fate of science."
Many religions use
"spirit" enhancing drugs during ceremonies so these claims are not completely unfounded. The native people of North America often used hallugenic mushrooms and marijuana during religious ceremonies to explore the spiritual realm. It's thought that Stropharia cubensis was "The Tree of Knowledge" in the Garden Of Eden.
Gordon Wasson, his wife Valentina and Allan Richardson experienced one ceremony with the Mazatec Indians that was published in Life Magazine.
"There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead lives, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me."
Is it possible that one of the most widely believed "rules" of human behaviour was written under the influence of a hallugenic brew?
