‎/HowDidWeGetHere

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How Did We Get Here

What did we lose when the monists took over. What did they erase?

Anything that explains the monist regime change of ~500 CE causing the collapse of the Roman Empire into oppressive dark ages gets us motivated, right? This is what kicked off the "western" culture much of the planet has today, which rediscovered their Hellenic roots around ~1600s CE, which still has that erroneous darkness nipping at our heels. We need to avoid falling again, to remain inoculated against tyrants and the misguided. During that change, formerly acceptable concepts and words were branded heresy by the theocrats who initiated the thousand-year dark age.

We like reality just the way it is. So, naturally, we parse the texts of the pre-monist world through that lens — not as The Fairy Tale, but as The Real. What exactly were the Christians taking over and erasing, and why?

It turns out, it's more compelling than any "tall tale" of Zeus and Mt. Olympus they'll try to use to discredit paganism as "just fairy tales believed by the villagers". What they dont tell you about is there was an entire school / system / industry of female priesthood — offering medicine, political advice, moral guidance, and connection to the divine — was erased and declared heretical. Ever wonder why the Church has always feared “witches”? That’s what we’re understanding here.

These priestesses created real systems:

Medicine (midwifery, women’s health, antivenoms),
Political Counsel (offering advice like whether to go to war),
Oracular Service (accessing insights from a higher consciousness, ecstatic state, the Aionic realm, a mental state seemingly outside time).
Colleges to train new preistesses

They held societal power and were respected for it. So of course they were a target to crush politically. The patriarchy took power and ensured their return was impossible. A new male-dominated priesthood ushered in a “new world order.” Even Jesus's education was funded by the Persian Magi — foreign mystics, not Christian leaders. The Greek speaking Rabbis who wrote the septuagint (greek old testament) were against "the female tyrants". The Qumran writing the dead sea scrolls ~100yrs later were engaged in a propaganda takeover project to reframe that Greek document as having a Hebrew ancestry. It looks strongly like the original Old Testament had Greek language origins, but for certain we know that the Christians were founded on the Greek language for both Old and New testaments.

The Language of Heresy

Key words and concepts were reframed to control thought — like Ingsoc Newspeak in Orwell’s 1984. Ancient Greek includes terms for magic and sorcery (pharmakia, magia), but these were not the fairy tale kind we see from Disney (or Christians) full of wand-waving and "faith.". These pre-monist concepts had concrete mechanics, physics with predictable cause-effect relationships.

Faith, after all, is only necessary when reason doesn’t check out. Their doctrines demand blind-faith because they don't stand on logic, often inconsistent or non-sensical. The meaning of Faith has drifted and changed over time to "blind faith", but originally meant trust with evidence (as Pistis).

In the ancient world, religion wasn’t based on belief — it was experience. In our human physiology, there are many ways to open that mental doorway, and one that the ancient priesthood employed was Pharmakia Magia (drug magic). The Kore (chorus) priestesses invented theatre. Singing and playing the lyre (the ancient guitar) to induce elevated states. These evolved from ancient Threshing Floor practice.

It was like a Phish concert. Anyone can understand that experienced reality. But the monists reduced it all to “blind faith,” turned women into evil, and recast these ecstatic rites as sin. This was an overthrow of political opponents, a power grab for control, and to do that they manufactured historical legacy of key documents, by placing the Bible (testaments) outside of Greek and Roman culture (forging their ancestry as Hebrew) to demonize Hellenic thought.

But Western civilization is built on Hellenism — not Monism. The Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution all came from rediscovering Hellenic philosophy. Philosophy (Philo Sophia from Greek) literally means “love of wisdom.” Monism stifles with dogma. Hellenism awakens with innovative curiosity. Science is the study of Nature, Knowledge is a key aspect of Nature, and to reject knowledge is to reject Nature. Today we see Science and protections of nature being attacked, rejected as hoaxes, so beware deceptive misinformation poisoning our virtuous alignment with nature.

For a deeper dive into Heretical propaganda, see Pejorative Terms Used by Monists

Cosmology and Consciousness

Those elevated consciousness states they used to gain insight, it's ancient nootropics, drug assisted enlightenment or adjustment of your mind "into a better alignment". The buddhists have it with their meditation. The shamans with their entheogens and rituals. It's not new, nor uncommon, just dismissed and minimized by the monists. Even the monists have their prayer (meditation) and their Christ-mind (for certain open minded sects).

Compare:

Unified model of cosmology in polytheism (the real):
- Humans are flawed, and that’s okay — we are divine in potential.
- There is the cosmos within us.
- Gods are archetypes of our minds — representations of various conscious states.
- We come from and return to the cosmic whole - we are all the big bang.
- Beauty/Harmony is Divinity. (celebrate the constructive)
Monotheism (the fairy tale, inconsistent, unbelievable):
- Humans are flawed, need to be saved, and are being actively judged.
- Divinity is external to our universe, not part of us, not accessable to humans until death, is only accessed through priests and the bible authors - who are human (inconsistency).
- Priests and bible authors somehow claim to know 'his' mind and intentions. (impossibility)
- The divine is unknowable until death, and we cannot experience it while alive. Our life here is flawed. (causes dismissal of nature)
- Judgement is Divinity. (celebrate the fear)

Polytheism followed nature. Just look around you to understand morality. Following nature leads to justice, knowledge, liberty. Monism created artificial rules (many based around demonizing previous competitor religion) so you couldn't understand nature, resulting in injustice and institutionalized error without ability to improve. Specific, Rigid, Biased, Judgemental and Intolerant.

What's natural is the worldview that Humans understandably make mistakes but that's ok as long as we constantly work to fix error. We all have this "divine" potential of self discovery to either grow to be "like gods" (aware, constructive), or shrink to be like the shadows or demiurge (rigid and fearful). Gods represent our conscious and are like archetypes of our selves in various levels of consciousness from low to buddha-mind. We're like a drop of water from the ocean, coming from and returning to the collective pile of matter before birth and after our death. We have one life to life so live it well, and connect with others because they're in our same situation. We are all part of the cosmos, that field of consciousness of all things, and the cosmos is (metaphorically or literally) 'god' just not anthropomorphically as some religions depict their god. Beauty and that Harmony is what defines the concept of Divinity. Later the Christians will flatten Daimones into Demons, to "demonize" them, break people's relationship with their own nature, cause them to demonize their self.

From this simple notion of Nature, Beauty and Harmony, you get morality, you get guidance for how to live. You get a feedback loop for improvement, not rigid oppressive unchangable control structure. Rules are simply all around us easy to know, instead of corrupted, invented, and crystalized into dogma.

The mystics of the Ancient world were like Buddha—but instead of fasting and meditating under a tree to ‘see the divine within’, they were opening the door to their consciousness by using myrrh, viper venom, and psychoactive plants to access "the divine within" or new areas of consciousness for insights and experience. The average Greek or Roman had ready access to these medicines — both for health and for mysticism, as well as recreation. It’s all there in the medical texts (Galen, Nicander, Dioscoredes), and it’s in literature (e.g. Homer, Philosophers, Euripides). And seen across biblical texts as well.

The ancient pharma industry was big business, promising to solve human needs, from root cutters to compounders to merchants to doctors / healers / saviors. The monists later demonized medicines, instead promoting faith in God, another control scheme to erase the past and put power into the new government run by priests. Theocracy is error of the worst kind.

The real religions, those in the know, recognize that the divine order is within us, not outside of us. Emphasis on us, it's spread across all conscious beings, as a distributed mind. Not the fairy tale new age version, no. We know for a fact these minds are connected - communicating using photons and sounds, paper, radio and electrical signals, etc. Think of the universe as a highly distributed consciousness, just not as you'd expect anthropomorphically - it's not an old man in the sky, but a vast and slowly evolving hivemind, with parts more connected than others. Extending to all matter various levels of conscious capability in dynamic physical processes (imagine various levels of complexity: human, dog, ant, germ, tree, mycelium, river, orbiting bodies, weather). We aren't saying a tree has human consciousness, but it has a different consciousness that governs it, similarly for the river carving a fractal path into the landscape, we're talking systems and components here, the brain is one efficient one exhibiting higher consciousness, but there are lower examples too.

The Temple of Apollo at Delphi said, “Know thyself.” That’s real. Not some alien sky-god judging you from outside the cosmos. That’s psychology. That’s consciousness. That’s something you can know as fact without invoking belief. Carl Jung’s Red Book explores this too, one of many examples however, and not perfect, but shows the western world awakening to the ideas.

Witches - Homer and Pharmakia

Take Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus’s shipmates are “turned into pigs” by the witch Circe. Also, a biblical apocryphal text has apostles similarly “turned into pigs” by cannibals — drugged, put on ropes, treated as livestock. Dumb and captive, not literal pigs as the mistranslations go, not FairyTale sorcery, but medical technology.

Circe wasn’t a Disney-style witch. She was a using drug technology to manipulate men. She used pharmakia to create a mental state. That’s drug magic.

And no — this isn’t an endorsement of drugs. But it is a rejection of Christian prudery. Understanding the origin of their manufactured heresies removes their power to weaponize ignorance.

The Crucifixion and Christing

Now, Jesus. He was one of the last to bear the title “Christ.” Definitely not the first. That goes to Medea. Jesus Christ means healer who spreads the salve onto the surface of the skin.

They arrested him in a park at 4am in the middle of a rite, with a n4k3d neaniskos boy. He was arrested for trafficking as a Lestes. He was then crucified (for heinous crimes) between two other Lestes while high on the dipsas thirst-viper venom from the rite. Roman soldiers would break the legs of the crucified so they’d fall and suffer ribcage collapse and suffocate — but they skipped Jesus because he appeared dead already. Pontius Pilot remarked his surprise, it wasn't typical to be dead this quickly. His people were treating him mid-crucifixion, with a sponge soaked with vinegar, which is a mild antivenom. He had entered a venom-induced coma, not death. Later, he “rose”—or rather, recovered, and left the chamber where his dead body was placed. This chamber was for Catharsis and was a common part of Asclepian healing rites as well as many PGM (greek magical papyri) rituals.

Medical texts from Galen and Nicander describe a cocktail called Theriac — used by Nero and Marcus Aurelius for good health — containing six venoms, plus built-in antivenoms (polythronic == polypharmacy, multiple drugs in one). This was a known pharma technology of the ancient world, and was even used by mideaval kings like Mithradates. The viper venom tech goes back to pre 1300BCE Scythian / Medean technology, arrow poisons, and medicine, and central technology to the rites of the oracular priesthood. Jesus was using the venom alone, while the antivenom was to be delivered by a youth in the garden wearing a medical grade bandage (sindon). Ancient medicine. Real pharmacology. That youth escaped while Jesus was being arrested, and Jesus was unable to receive his antidote before being carried away to hang for being a human trafficker (lestes), hanging between 2 other lestes traffickers.

The Origins: Medea, Circe, and the Amazonian Legacy

This venom goes back to bronze age cults. The Minoan goddess holding up the snakes (1600BCE). Circe. Hecate. Medea (>1300BCE). And the Scythians, horseback bowhunter people (>1100-300BCE) with their venom arrow-poisons. Scythian arrow poisons were infamous in antiquity. Legendary Amazon Women or not, we do have archeological evidence of female Scythian warriors from their graves, and from Greek historian writings.

These were the first Christs. Those who apply the drugs, for physical ailments, but also to provide salvation for body and mind through manipulation of consciousness, ecstatic revelation. Think buddha enlightenment or 60s psychedelics, this is the technology of getting your inner consciousness to do interesting things. To experience the divine order, beauty of inner mind. The universe is mental, and it can be perceived and manipulated. Insights, Mental shifts or Metaprogramming of the mental process.

There's no eternal life

Eternal life? This was a mistranslation in John 3:16. The original Greek text for John 3:16 speaks of aionic life, not adiodic (eternal) — aionic life is existence outside of time. Kronos governs that realm. Gods aren’t literal — “god” is a concept describing an aspect of consciousness, they’re archetypes of our mind that we name. Naming them helps to manifest them mentally, so we can engage with those aspects of our consciousness. It’s not fairy tale worship. It’s physics-of-mind. That’s why gods exist. So erasure of polytheism further divorces us from our own nature, moves us to the fairy tale, makes us less human, disconnected from our selves, lesser people who are lower.

Aionic Life (Ἀϊονικὴ ζωή)
- Aion outside of time, eternal or divine dimension of existence, beyond the constraints of human, mortal time. And life - Zoe denotes a more profound form of life. - Aionic Life, in the context of pre-Christian mystery cults, can be understood as life in union with the divine, for the initiates who underwent rites of initiation. These rites, often involving symbolic death and rebirth (as seen in the Eleusinian Mysteries), were designed to liberate the soul from the confines of mortal existence (dissolve our fear, give us gnosis or knowing), offering the initiates an experience of life that was beyond human time where times stands still - to live in the present moment.
- experiences or rituals involving symbolic death (such as initiations where one "dies" and is reborn) creates a profound spiritual rebirth during the initiate’s lifetime, where the initiate's consciousness shifts to a divine realm (thinking as a god might) or cosmic order (structure of thinking) that transcends mortality and earthly suffering (human fears which causes error and suffering). The initiate afterwards is now able to live without fear. This discovery of yourself is the cosmos. Learning to live in the present without anxiety of that future or depression of the past, without suffering.
Aion (αἰών) - an experiential or transcendent state in which an individual steps outside the normal flow of time, often through altered states of consciousness (induced by pharmakon or other means). It is a timeless, mystical realm or condition where the individual gains access to knowledge or wisdom beyond the limitations of ordinary perception. Aion in this sense is not just a period of time (like an age or era) but a realm of existence that transcends chronological time. It represents a divine or otherworldly experience, where one can receive visions, insights, or revelations from outside the constraints of normal time. In the context of a pharmakomantis (drug seer), to be “in the Aion” is to enter a state of heightened perception or spiritual ecstasy, where one may perceive visions of the past, present, or future, often with the guidance or influence of substances that alter the mind. This state is seen as being outside of normal, linear time and offers a broader, cosmic perspective on existence. Aion is a key concept in mystical and prophetic traditions, where time becomes fluid, and the individual attains access to divine or cosmic wisdom, often experienced as a direct, non-linear insight into the nature of existence.
Zoe - (Ζωή) - pronounced like Zoë. Eve—life. Everything in the mystery revolves around dzoh-way. The Septuagint calls Eve life. Her name was a Bacchic shout—life! The devil gave her the fruit and said, "God’s a liar."

There is no “afterlife.” There's only the one life we have, and the goal is to live it enlightened, above the line, fearless, knowing yourself and others. Eternal life was a mistranlation from the expressive Greek language (1.6M words) into a simplistic Hebrew language (8000 words), and was an attempt to hijack the mystery traditions for an extremist sect called the Qumran.

Early Monist cult itself was a corrupted offshoot of the Saturnian/Bacchic mystery religions. They kept the same aionic goals, kept the general recipe — drugs, antidotes, hymns, music, imagery — but turned the female-only rites into male-only rites. The Roman state later hijacked (and further consolidated or mainly erased) the Christian mysteries, removing the mystery rites of experiential gnosis from public life, and declared that only a priest could mediate the divine. This was an evil mutation into error, considering what came before was based in nature knowledge and liberty.

To this day, the Pope still receives the original visionary sacrament. Why not everyone else? Gatekeeping and Control.

Christ and Antichrist

“Christ” as chrism or christening, or as the man, was a drug title for the venom. To christ someone is to apply the sacred medicine. Therefore:

Antichrist = Antivenom (venom antidote)

There is no apocalyptic villain. “Antichrist” is a medical term. A vaccine. A counteragent that produces immunity to venom, or clears up the poisonous after effects of venom. Ancient medicine. Ancient wisdom.

Women in Medicine

And it all started with women — because they had specific (and critical) health problems to solve, as well as defense.

Women developed ancient pharmacology to solve their problems

Postpartum Bleeding - Coagulants, vasoconstrictors
Pain in Childbirth - Local anesthetics, opiate-like neurotoxins
Irregular Menstruation - Hormone-interactive neurotoxins
Menstrual Cramps - Muscle relaxants, analgesics
Fertility Control - Abortifacients, uterotonics, libido modulators
Mental Health (Postpartum) - Psychedelics, disassociatives
Visionary Insight - Trance-inducing compounds (venoms + myrrh/opium)
Mystical Experience - Ecstatic states via combined musical and venomous ceremony
Defense - arrow poisons gave security, allowed them to immobilize enemies, take a mate before discarding them, made them feared horse people.

This lineage begins with Medea (of Jason and the Argonauts fame), ruler of the Medes. The Medes were descended from the Scythians — nomadic horse peoples who became the Celts. The Greeks wrote of these fabled "Amazonian women" who used poison-tipped arrows, delivering both paralysis and medicine. This was Female - led pharmacological culture. Her people saw it as magic, which is where the original definitions for witch, sorcerer, magic comes from.

Medea. Mediterranean. Medicine. Medusae. It’s all the same 'med' root. The priestesses of this order were the Medwa or the Medusae. The Medusae put snake venoms in their hair and draw their arrows through before shooting. It's where we get the later creative story about the Medusa, who had snakes in her hair.

They built temples to Medea, who was celebrated for being a Soteira/Savior, healing venomous bites, and her contribution to medicine, which hipocrates/asclepius later built on. They had a college system to educate young girls into these leadership positions at those temples.

And from that ancient, empowered knowledge we built our modern world of medicine and schools.

Magic wasn’t fairy tale. It was techne (technology). It was real. And it was taken from us, suppressed, reframed as evil. But nature knowledge and liberty is the most virtuous, it is what is divine.

Reality?

Whether what was in the texts actually happened, is up for debate. But from the texts, that’s what seems to have been going on at least culturally in ancient written literature, we're talking Ancient Greek mainly. And of course the clearest knowledge was confined to the priesthood... and to those in the know about that discipline.

Drakōn (δράκων) - temple guardian, the one who sees clearly, protecting divine secrets or treasures
Daimōn (δαίμων) - educator, carry divine messages and oversee the education of souls, initiatory guides—connected to planetary intelligence, soul correction, and enlightenment
Medwa / Medusae / Echidnaic Priesthood / Pythian / Sybil / Oracle, etc, etc, etc - various names for priestesses following this technology

The educated writers, popular philosophers and writers, had bits and pieces, but there was a code not to reveal (or profane) the mysteries exactly. Mystery is language for achieving that state of consciousness, in Hellenic culture we're talking about those oracular rites with the music and drugs. In buddhism, it's meditation enlightenment.

For Ancient Greek or Bronze Age cults, Dr Hillman shows his work, cites his sources, and we've looked at many of his 1000's of ancient source texts, and it’s all there in the texts what he's telling us about. There's plenty of knowledge from the other schools as well (e.g. buddhism, shamanism, druidism) which have very similar consciousness mechanics at their core even if different culturally in the specific customs, rites, deities, rules. These eastern and shamanic religions weren't suppressed as much as the Greek, so we have modern writing examples for those.

Why though? Let's project ourselves backwards in time...

There's been so much damage from monist religious fanaticism to this day. We have a psychological trauma and we need therapy. We need to unpack the past to move on to a future without that baggage. But it wont be solved once. These problems are cyclical, they come back. Human beings make mistakes, and we're (all) here to correct them.
It’s nice to have more to the word “pagan”, and not to write it off the way the winners wanted, but know what the winners were covering up and why. Those religions have names, those religions are not accurately summerizable with a single opaque pejorative word "pagan". Pagan was the term used to reframe negatively in order to obfuscate and demean. Those "pagan" disciplines were actually filled with virtue, knowledge, justice, inspiration, all good that was painted evil by the culture war winners.
It's nice to have more to the word “witch” than just writing them off as cruel child eaters who love raw evil. Nope. They were important figureheads serving a prominent and important role to society. You’ll never look at a disney movie the same… it’s a christian pile of garbage propaganda. But at least the cauldron makes sense now. They were drug compounders. They sourced their materials from ‘root cutters’. Like our pharma system, they had roles for gathering, compounding, manufacturing, selling of these remedies. Of course it was big business. A plant that connects you to the divine, can heal you, or kill your enemy? This is technology. This is ancient Pharmakon. Then the dark ages said ‘nope, you just need god’ and made that heresy. why? yeah. power. evil monists... humans being flawed humans and committing their errors...

Theologians have a ton to lose, so they defend it. Lot of power and influence to give up. Mugs and T-shirts, tickets to the colosseum and Isreal. Seminary school. Free $$ from collection plate. Political power. Their positions at universities or seminary schools...