Transcript: 20260414-Sex Magic - History Is Inquiry

What is [music] pharmakeia? The concept of pharmakeia. Pharmakeia is the use of natural elements to affect your surroundings. It is most essentially magic.

It is often translated straight up as sorcery. But it is specifically in all the references that I have seen it, it is most basically the use of the elements in your environment to manipulate nature in a way that you desire. It is magic. Um and those elements are the drugs, what you and I would call the drugs. Drugs that are found in plants, drugs that are found in soils, drugs that are found in living venoms.

Mhm. This natural world with its elements can be a tool for manipulating your existence within the cosmos. So, let me give you an example. The best example of pharmakeia, and you'll see it associated with this all the time, is the erotic magic. So, you want somebody to be attracted to you. Say you're Jason and you're off to seduce Medea. You can use the elements of nature in order to hedge your bets. It you can drug her in order to abduct her and rape her and bear children with her. Okay?

This is the thought process that pharmakeia facilitates most of these things that you call sorcery and witchcraft. They're They're the use of the natural elements of the world in order to affect an erotic response.

So, all of the creams, all of the perfumes, all of the um salves and ointments that we're going to be using or that Circe is going to be using or that the Temple of Aphrodite is going to be using, this is the magic, the sorcery that brings us that real mystery. You truly cannot be inspired until you've been manipulated by that witch. And that witch uses pharmakeia.

So, people would say today pharmakeia is the use of drugs in antiquity, something like that. The use of drugs in antiquity. Um but because they have a red text that talk about pharmakeia and all the sorceresses that are involved and all the magic that's involved, they don't see the predominance of sex. They don't see the predominance of what they call philtron, the use of specific sex drugs, right? That are meant for one thing. Jason sails to Colchis, right? Um but before he does, he stops off at Lemnos and he rapes one

Of the locals. And he does so by drugging her. And why? Because Jason was trained by the greatest Thessalian big-cocked centaur that there was. And what what was his magic? It was all the drugs. He actually gives her, the Greek says he, he drugs her and rapes her. So, um that's what the language is showing us for pharmakeia. That's who's using it, you know? People think because of medieval images of the witch, they think they think witchcraft is, you know, some whatever, a pot and a stick and a