It’s become on-trend because of Westworld, but I’ve had a soft-spot for the bicameral mind. It’s just so fucking crazy, so it’s a lot of fun.
Drugs do have a strong cultural component. The hashish/vodka line gets used a lot by Russian historians because of how different cultures are on different parts of the line.
Part of their use is ritualizing their usage. Sure, Islam forbids alcohol, but Alawites have rituals where intoxication is mandatory (similar to the Jewish Purim ritua only they do it like every month. That might actually explain Assad’s foreign policy, but I digress). It’s also a good way to create separate groups. Christianity is the oddball here because it rejected that ritualization. I think it was Chesterton who said that the only reason why you open your mind is to close it again. Iconoclastic ideologies usually exist just long enough to mix things up before they become ritualized again. It’s easy to create a teleological narrative with the benefit of hindsight. Plenty of other “shake 'em up” religions. But the region for Christianity is all wrong for psychedelics.
[timg]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Pschoactive_Psilocybe_distribution.png[/timg]
Humans emerging as thinking humans in Ethiopia would appeal to a lot of Hoteps I know. I should share that with them, I’d never really looked at a map. But not really relevant to monotheism.
Probably a better vector for understanding are henotheistic/Kathenotheistic movements. In polytheistic cultures, you see various gods glomming onto other gods, becoming the same god, adopting a foreign god, separating into separate gods, etc. It’s an easy rhetorical move to escalate that and say only one god counts and it’s my god. Going back to the arbitrary rules thing, there is a sociological term for it but it’s escaping my mind right now and my google-fu is weak today. But separating out your cult has strong advantages. That way you’ve basically got one line of authority as opposed to multiple lines. While not strictly monotheistic, that’s basically what happened with Zoroastrianism. And, if you read between the lines a little and allow yourself some leeway since it’s in the distant past, it also does a fair job explaining the El/Yahweh fusion god you get in Judaism.
I like that reading, but it has it’s own retroactive teleology to it. When people start talking about it, things like the Norse religion(s) come up and, yeah, the they match is pretty perfectly. But the only versions we have are post-contact with Christianity and (importantly) after Christians had basically kicked their butts. So of course they Christianized their religion. And that’s when it wasn’t being written down by Christian monks for the purpose of proselytizing when it was 100% about Christianizing the religion.
Greek thought played a big role in all this when Christianity comes onto the scene but the neoplatonics are way late to the monotheism game. Alphabet at least makes more sense because it’s roughly contemporaneous. And alphabet is, as we all agreed, tempting but super shaky.
Same thing with drugs. Why would drugs make you think of one god and not many? I’ve encountered all sorts of crazy beings on trips. If I were a total melt-head shaman who had to trip balls as an occupation, I don’t see why I’d just think of one as opposed to a lot. Granted, that’s an atheist’s view. If there is just one god and psychedelics provide a channel to that god, then eventually you are gonna get it right. But that doesn’t seem real to me for obvious reasons.
It’s tricky man.