The Witch Hunters

                                          

«If the government were to prescribe our medicines and our diet, our bodies would be in such a dire state as our souls after so many centuries  of censorship.» Thomas Jefferson  

From the early days when the dominator societies were imposed, six or seven millennia ago, those in power decided to attack all those who by their thoughts, attitudes or activities could threaten the cultural and political foundations of their dominance.

The main objectives of these persecutory campaigns were those individuals or communities that kept alive the practice of ceremonial ingestion of plants and substances that promoted modified states of consciousness.

With this authoritarian point of view, any plant or medicine could be considered undesirable. At different times, various customs or practices were persecuted under various excuses or accusations.

In Greece there were several periods and places where the ecstasy practices were outlawed. This situation is well spelled out in the Bacchae of the Euripides tragedy. It tells the story of a king of Thebes, Pentheus, who decided to pursue the Dionysian wine cults. According to Euripides, this harassment policy achieved the opposite result to that intended. Most of the Theban women put aside their family and civic duties and took to live a dissipated life in the forest, with coiled snakes that licked their cheeks, and suckle mountain goats and wild cubs.

The elders of Thebes, Cadmus and Tiresias, proposed to recognize the God-plant as an essential element of human nature. However, Pentheus ignored them, and in the name of health and public decorum, decided to ban ceremonies, promising to «hunt» the offending people in the mountains and enclose them in iron nets for them to leave these criminal ‘orgies’. He threatened to behead the young foreigner who incited young women to vice, 

 «They say that a foreigner has arrived, which in  his lovely dark eyes has the charms of ause of Aphrodite and spends his days and nights providing bacchanalian feasts to the young girls.  If I have him in this house I will separate the neck of the trunk. Isn’t he worth of this horrible hanging with fury and rage, no matter who is the foreigner?»  

Euripides ironic comments about this «stranger» capable of such powers of conviction, a strange «sissy»  that has an incredible sexual magnetism that attracts women, and wonders how it is possible to ‘imprison’ a plant that grows in open fields, « a renovated fruit of Mother Earth. «

Dionysian celebrations in Rome were very important in the third and second centuries b.c.e..  Finally, in year 186 b.c.e. the Roman Senate banned in all Italy i the participants in this rituals, many of them women, were persecuted and imprisoned.

It was supposed at the time that the consuls who proposed the measure   came to «learn» about this «moral plague» that had invaded the peninsula, the night orgiastic mysteries. The defendants were convicted ipso facto. Armed pickets were installed at various points and at the gates of the city.For the first time, Roma closed the doors but not to control the entry, but to keep people out. They piled up prisoners in the dungeons.

In the city there was panic, people trying to escape, many committed suicide. At the end about seven thousand people were executed by knife or crucifixion (5% of the population of the city).

Various Greco-Latin and ancient oriental mysteric religious systems were a form of rebellion against the imperial authoritarianism imposing by force their religion on the conquered territories. In addition to the aforementioned Dionysian or Bacchic rituals, other beliefs that had great influence in the early Christian communities were the Orphic ceremonial, the cults of Isis (of Egyptian origin), the Mithras (from Persia) and and Attis Mysteries (cults of the Great Mother originated in Phrygia).  (to be continued). (to be continued).

From "Peoples, Drugs and Serpents", Danilo Antón, Piriguazu Ediciones.