God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshiped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar.
In 1967, Raphael Patai was the first historian to mention that the ancient Israelites worshiped both Yahweh and Asherah. The theory has gained new prominence due to the research of Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who began her work at Oxford and is now a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter.
Information presented in Stavrakopoulou's books, lectures and journal papers has become the basis of a three-part documentary series, now airing in Europe, where she discusses the Yahweh-Asherah connection.
"You might know him as Yahweh, Allah or God. But on this fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: There is only one of Him," writes Stavrakopoulou in a statement released to the British media. "He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many ... or so we like to believe."
"After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, uncomfortable conclusion that God had a wife," she added.
Stavrakopoulou bases her theory on ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in the ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit, now modern-day Syria. All of these artifacts reveal that Asherah was a powerful fertility goddess.
Asherah's connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.
"The inscription is a petition for a blessing," she shares. "Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from 'Yahweh and his Asherah.' Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife."
Also significant, Stavrakopoulou believes, "is the Bible's admission that the goddess Asherah was worshiped in Yahweh's Temple in Jerusalem. In the Book of Kings, we're told that a statue of Asherah was housed in the temple and that female temple personnel wove ritual textiles for her."
J. Edward Wright, president of both The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, told Discovery News that he agrees several Hebrew inscriptions mention "Yahweh and his Asherah."
"Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors," he added. "Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant."
Asherah -- known across the ancient Near East by various other names, such as Astarte and Istar -- was "an important deity, one who was both mighty and nurturing," Wright continued.
"Many English translations prefer to translate 'Asherah' as 'Sacred Tree,'" Wright said. "This seems to be in part driven by a modern desire, clearly inspired by the Biblical narratives, to hide Asherah behind a veil once again."
"Mentions of the goddess Asherah in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are rare and have been heavily edited by the ancient authors who gathered the texts together," Aaron Brody, director of the Bade Museum and an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion, said.
Asherah as a tree symbol was even said to have been "chopped down and burned outside the Temple in acts of certain rulers who were trying to 'purify' the cult, and focus on the worship of a single male god, Yahweh," he added.
The ancient Israelites were polytheists, Brody told Discovery News, "with only a small minority worshiping Yahweh alone before the historic events of 586 B.C." In that year, an elite community within Judea was exiled to Babylon and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This, Brody said, led to "a more universal vision of strict monotheism: one god not only for Judah, but for all of the nations."
The first and only documentary to go where no film has ever gone before: into the hidden faith of America's founding fathers. Many founders were involved in secret societies, and yet it is often claimed these men were Christians who were trying to build a Christian nation. But was their faith the true faith of the Bible? And is it possible, as some claim, that the exact opposite is true?
What did the founders believe about the Person of Jesus Christ? Were they fighting for Christianity, or against it? Moreover, is it possible that the events of the American Revolution have a much darker significance in the pages of Bible prophecy than most church leaders are aware?
Charles Thomson was the Secretary of the Continental Congress, and the man responsible for the final design of the Great Seal of the United States. He was said to be more familiar with the events and people surrounding the American Revolution than any other man of his era. He spent years documenting the history of the War for Independence, knowing many details which had escaped others. Though encouraged to publish his remarkable history, he chose to destroy it. He said: "I shall not undeceive future generations." Since we are the 'future generation' of which Thompson referred how have we been deceived about our Founding Fathers? What was Thomson hiding? How has it affected the Church and society in America today?
The Secret Faith & Religious Beliefs of:
Thomas Paine - inspired the American Revolution.
Thomas Jefferson – Declaration of Independence ~Author.
John Adams - the second President of the United States.
Benjamin Franklin – Signed all of the founding documents.
George Washington - "America’s Father" 1st President.
Confronting David Barton's "fabled" view of American history, showing from his own writings the error of his teachings.
Secret Societies worked to change the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Patriotic Christianity; Dominionism and building the NOW.
Prophetic implications used to build the kingdom of Antichrist.
Elder Floyd Red Crow Westerman on Native American Prophecy & Philosophy.
The spirit world is more real than most of us believe, the spirit world is everything. It is the Hopi belief, that if your not spiritually connected to the earth, its likely you will not remain. Its not the end of the world, its the end of us. Earth has all the time of in the world.
Every day that you don't do what's right, is a day that you've lost an option and your loosing your options every day…
YouTube video featuring a 1998 audio recording of Terence McKenna discussing 2012.
High Society: The Central Role of Mind-Altering Drugs in History, Science & Culture
By: Mike Jay
An illustrated cultural history of drug use from its roots in animal intoxication to its future in designer neurochemicals
• Featuring artwork from the upcoming High Society exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, one of the world’s greatest medical history collections • Explores the roles drugs play in different cultures as medicines, religious sacraments, status symbols, and coveted trade goods • Reveals how drugs drove the global trade and cultural exchange that made the modern world • Examines the causes of drug prohibitions a century ago and the current “war on drugs”
Every society is a high society. Every day people drink coffee on European terraces and kava in Pacific villages; chew betel nut in Indonesian markets and coca leaf on Andean mountainsides; swallow ecstasy tablets in the clubs of Amsterdam and opium pills in the deserts of Rajastan; smoke hashish in Himalayan temples and tobacco and marijuana in every nation on earth.
Exploring the spectrum of drug use throughout history--from its roots in animal intoxication to its future in designer neurochemicals--High Society paints vivid portraits of the roles drugs play in different cultures as medicines, religious sacraments, status symbols, and coveted trade goods. From the botanicals of the classical world through the mind-bending self-experiments of 18th- and 19th-century scientists to the synthetic molecules that have transformed our understanding of the brain, Mike Jay reveals how drugs such as tobacco, tea, and opium drove the global trade and cultural exchange that created the modern world and examines the forces that led to the prohibition of opium and cocaine a century ago and the “war on drugs” that rages today.
Table of Contents
A Universal Impulse High Societies - The Evolution of Drugs - Animal Intoxication - Drugs and Shamanism - Drugs and Culture - The Culture of Kava - The Culture of Betel - Drug Prohibitions - Drug Subcultures - The Cultures of Ecstasy From Apothecary to Laboratory What Is a Drug? - Drugs in Antiquity - Renaissance Herbals - Witches and Flying Ointments - The Invention of Laudanum - Linnaeus and the Enlightenment - The First Synthetic Drugs - Opium and the Romantics - The Club des Haschischins - Freud and Cocaine - Addiction and Drug Control - Mescaline, LSD, and Beyond - Drugs of the Future
The Drugs Trade Drugs of the New World - The Psychoactive Revolution - Tobacco in China, Tea in Europe - The Opium Wars - The Anti-Opium campaign - Temperance and Prohibition - The 'War on Drugs' - Epilogue: The Decline of Tobacco
About the Author: Mike Jay is a leading specialist in the study of drugs across history and cultures. The author of Artificial Paradises, Emperors of Dreams, and The Atmosphere of Heaven, his critical writing on drugs has appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The International Journal of Drug Policy. He sits on the editorial board of the addiction journal Drugs and Alcohol Today and on the board of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation. He lives in England.
(Reuters) - Owsley "Bear" Stanley, a 1960s counterculture figure who flooded the flower power scene with LSD and was an early benefactor of the Grateful Dead, died in a car crash in his adopted home country of Australia on Sunday, his family said. He was 76.
The renegade grandson of a former governor of Kentucky, Stanley helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a million doses of LSD at his labs in San Francisco's Bay Area.
"He made acid so pure and wonderful that people like Jimi Hendrix wrote hit songs about it and others named their band in its honor," former rock 'n' roll tour manager Sam Cutler wrote in his 2008 memoirs "You Can't Always Get What You Want."
Hendrix's song "Purple Haze" was reputedly inspired by a batch of Stanley's product, though the guitarist denied any drug link. The ear-splitting psychedelic-blues combo Blue Cheer took its named from another batch.
Stanley briefly managed the Grateful Dead, and oversaw every aspect of their live sound at a time when little thought was given to amplification in public venues. His tape recordings of Dead concerts were turned into live albums, providing him with a healthy income in later life.
"When it came to technology, the Bear was one of the most far-out and interesting guys on the planet," Cutler wrote. "The first FM live simulcast could be, in part, attributed to his vision, as could the first quadraphonic simulcast on radio."
The Dead, a fabled rock band formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 known for its improvisational live concerts, wrote about him in their song "Alice D. Millionaire" after a 1967 arrest prompted a newspaper to describe Stanley as an "LSD millionaire."
Steely Dan's 1976 single "Kid Charlemagne" was loosely inspired by Stanley's exploits.
'COMMUNITY SERVICE'
According to a 2007 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanley started cooking LSD after discovering the recipe in a chemistry journal at the University of California, Berkeley.
The police raided his first lab in 1966, but Stanley successfully sued for the return of his equipment. After a marijuana bust in 1970, he went to prison for two years.
"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he told the Chronicle's Joel Selvin.
"What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."
He emigrated to the tropical Australian state of Queensland in the early 1980s, apparently fearful of a new ice age, and sold enamel sculptures on the Internet. He lost one of his vocal cords to cancer.
Stanley was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Kentucky, a state governed by his namesake grandfather from 1915 to 1919. He served in the U.S. Air Force for 18 months, studied ballet in Los Angeles and then enrolled at UC Berkeley. In addition to producing and advocating LSD, he adhered to an all-meat diet.
Cutler, speaking on behalf of the family, said in an interview that Stanley and his wife, Sheila, were driving to their home near the city of Cairns along a dangerous stretch of highway when he evidently lost control during a storm. He died instantly; his wife broke her collar bone.
Stanley is also survived by four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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PROGRAM NOTES: [From Wikipedia] Jonathan Ott has written eight books, co-wrote five, and contributed to four others, and published many articles in the field of entheogens. He has collaborated with other researchers like Christian Rätsch, Jochen Gartz, and the late ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson. He translated Albert Hofmann‘s 1979 book LSD: My Problem Child (LSD: Mein Sorgekind), and On Aztec Botanical Names by Blas Pablo Reko, into English. His articles have appeared in many publications, including The Entheogen Review, The Entheogen Law Reporter, the Journal of Cognitive Liberties, the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (AKA the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs), the MAPS Bulletin, Head, HighTimes, Curare, Eleusis, Integration, Lloydia, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, and several Harvard Botanical Museum pamphlets. He is a co-editor of Eleusis: Journal of Psychoactive Plants & Compounds, along with Giorgio Samorini.
Letter to Eric Gutkind By Albert Einstein (1954) May 16, 2008 Letter sold at auction for $404,000.00 Translated from the German by Joan Stambaugh
... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilized interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything "chosen" about them.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted; as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual "props" and "rationalization" in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes.
NASA Finds Earth-size Planet Candidates in the Habitable Zone
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun.
Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. Kepler also found six confirmed planets orbiting a sun-like star, Kepler-11. This is the largest group of transiting planets orbiting a single star yet discovered outside our solar system.
"In one generation we have gone from extraterrestrial planets being a mainstay of science fiction, to the present, where Kepler has helped turn science fiction into today's reality," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "These discoveries underscore the importance of NASA's science missions, which consistently increase understanding of our place in the cosmos."
The discoveries are part of several hundred new planet candidates identified in new Kepler mission science data, released on Tuesday, Feb. 1. The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter.
Of the 54 new planet candidates found in the habitable zone, five are near Earth-sized. The remaining 49 habitable zone candidates range from super-Earth size -- up to twice the size of Earth -- to larger than Jupiter.
The findings are based on the results of observations conducted May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009, of more than 156,000 stars in Kepler's field of view, which covers approximately 1/400 of the sky.
"The fact that we've found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy," said William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the mission's science principal investigator. "We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone, some of which could have moons with liquid water."
Among the stars with planetary candidates, 170 show evidence of multiple planetary candidates. Kepler-11, located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth, is the most tightly packed planetary system yet discovered. All six of its confirmed planets have orbits smaller than Venus, and five of the six have orbits smaller than Mercury's. The only other star with more than one confirmed transiting planet is Kepler-9, which has three. The Kepler-11 findings will be published in the Feb. 3 issue of the journal Nature.
"Kepler-11 is a remarkable system whose architecture and dynamics provide clues about its formation," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist and Kepler science team member at Ames. "These six planets are mixtures of rock and gases, possibly including water. The rocky material accounts for most of the planets' mass, while the gas takes up most of their volume. By measuring the sizes and masses of the five inner planets, we determined they are among the lowest mass confirmed planets beyond our solar system."
All of the planets orbiting Kepler-11 are larger than Earth, with the largest ones being comparable in size to Uranus and Neptune. The innermost planet, Kepler-11b, is ten times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. Moving outward, the other planets are Kepler-11c, Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e, Kepler-11f, and the outermost planet, Kepler-11g, which is half as far from its star as Earth is from the sun.
The planets Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e and Kepler-11f have a significant amount of light gas, which indicates that they formed within a few million years of the system's formation.
"The historic milestones Kepler makes with each new discovery will determine the course of every exoplanet mission to follow," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Kepler, a space telescope, looks for planet signatures by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars caused by planets crossing in front of them. This is known as a transit.
Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take three years to locate and verify Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars.
The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescopes and the Spitzer Space Telescope to review observations on planetary candidates and other objects of interest the spacecraft finds.
The star field that Kepler observes in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can only be seen from ground-based observatories in spring through early fall. The data from these other observations help determine which candidates can be validated as planets.
I feel it's sort of like the Vimalakirti Sutra, an ancient work from ancient India, in which the Buddha appears at the beginning and a whole bunch of people come to see him from the biggest city in the area, Vaisali, and to bring some sort of jeweled parasols to make offering to him. All the young people, actually, from the city -- the old fogeys don't come because they're mad at Buddha, because when he came to their city he accepted -- he always accepts the first invitation that comes to him, from whoever it is, and the local geisha, a movie-star sort of person, raced the elders of the city in a chariot and invited him first.
So he was hanging out with the movie star, and of course they were grumbling: "He's supposed to be religious and all this. What's he doing over there at Amrapali's house with all his 500 monks," and so on. They were all grumbling, and so they boycotted him. They wouldn't go listen to him. But the young people all came. And they brought this kind of a jeweled parasol, and they put it on the ground. And as soon as they had laid all these, all their big stack of these jeweled parasols that they used to carry in ancient India, he performed a kind of special effect, which made it into a giant planetarium, the wonder of the universe. Everyone looked in that, and they saw in there the total interconnectedness of all life in all universes.
And of course, in the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it, and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets. So they don't, when they look out and they see those lights that you showed in the sky, they don't just see sort of pieces of matter burning or rocks or flames or gases exploding. They actually see landscapes and human beings and gods and dragons and serpent beings and goddesses and things like that.
He made that special effect at the beginning to get everyone to think about interconnection and interconnectedness and how everything in life was totally interconnected. And then Leilei -- I know his other name -- told us about interconnection, and about how we're all totally interconnected here, and how we've all known each other. And of course in the Buddhist universe, we've already done this already billions of times, in many many lifetimes in the past. And I didn't give the talk always. You did, and we had to watch you, and so forth. And we're all still trying to, I guess we're all trying to become TEDsters, if that's a modern form of enlightenment. I guess so. Because in a way, if a TEDster relates to all the interconnectedness of all the computers and everything, it's the forging of a mass awareness, of where everybody can really know everything that's going on everywhere in the planet.
And therefore it will become intolerable -- what compassion is, is where it will become intolerable for us, totally intolerable that we sit here in comfort and in pleasure and enjoying the life of the mind or whatever it is, and there are people who are absolutely riddled with disease and they cannot have a bite of food and they have no place, or they're being brutalized by some terrible person and so forth. It just becomes intolerable. With all of us knowing everything, we're kind of forced by technology to become Buddhas or something, to become enlightened.
And of course, we all will be deeply disappointed when we do. Because we think that because we are kind of tired of what we do, a little bit tired, we do suffer. We do enjoy our misery in a certain way. We distract ourselves from our misery by running around somewhere, but basically we all have this common misery that we are stuck inside our skins and everyone else is out there. And occasionally we get together with another person stuck in their skin and the two of us enjoy each other, and each of us tried to get out of our own, and ultimately it fails, of course, and we're back into this thing.
Because our egocentric perception -- from the Buddha's point of view, misperception -- is that all we are is what is inside our skin. And it's inside and outside, self and other, and other is all very different. And everyone here is unfortunately carrying that habitual perception, a little bit, right? You know, someone sitting next to you in a seat -- that's OK because you're in a theater, but if you were sitting on a park bench and someone came up and sat that close to you, you'd freak out. What do they want from me? Like, who's that? And so you wouldn't sit that close to another person because of your notion that it's you versus the universe -- that's all Buddha discovered. Because that cosmic basic idea that it is us all alone, each of us, and everyone else is different, then that puts us in an impossible situation, doesn't it? Who is it who's going to get enough attention from the world? Who's going to get enough out of the world? Who's not going to be overrun by an infinite number of other beings -- if you're different from all the other beings?
So where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way: through art, through meditation, through understanding, through knowledge actually, knowing that you have no such boundary, knowing your interconnectedness with other beings. You can experience yourself as the other beings when you see through the delusion of being separated from them. When you do that, you're forced to feel what they feel. Luckily, they say -- I still am not sure -- but luckily, they say that when you reach that point because some people have said in the Buddhist literature, they say, ooh, who would really want to be compassionate? How awful! I'm so miserable on my own. My head is aching. My bones are aching. I go from birth to death. I'm never satisfied. I never have enough, even I'm a billionaire I never have enough. I need a hundred billion, so I'm like that. Imagine if I had to feel even a hundred other people's suffering. It would be terrible.
But apparently, this is a strange paradox of life. When you're no longer locked in yourself, and as the wisdom, or the intelligence, or the scientific knowledge of the nature of the world, that enables you to let your mind spread out, and empathize, and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing, and realizing that you are the other being, somehow by that opening, you can see the deeper nature of life, and you can, you get away from this terrible iron circle of I, me, me, mine, like the Beatles used to sing.
You know, we really learned everything in the '60s. Too bad nobody ever woke up to it, and they've been trying to suppress it since then. I, me, me, mine. It's like a perfect song, that song. A perfect teaching. But when we're relieved from that, we somehow then become interested in all the other beings. And we feel ourselves differently. It's totally strange. It's totally strange. The Dalai Lama always likes to say -- he says that when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion, it's because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theater for your intelligence. It's really too boring whether you feel like this or like that, or what, you know -- and the more you focus on how you feel, by the way, the worse it gets. Like, even when you're having a good time, when is the good time over? The good time is over when you think, how good is it? And then it's never good enough.
I love that Leilei said that the way of helping those who are suffering badly on the physical plane or on other planes is having a good time, doing it by having a good time. I think the Dalai Lama should have heard that. I wish he'd been there to hear that. He once told me -- he looked kind of sad; he worries very much about the haves and have-nots. He looked a little sad, because he said, well, a hundred years ago, they went and took everything away from the haves. You know, the big communist revolutions, Russia and China and so forth. They took it all away by violence, saying they were going to give it to everyone, and then they were even worse. They didn't help at all.
So what could possibly change this terrible gap that has opened up in the world today? And so then he looks at me. So I said, "Well, you know, you're all in this yourself. You teach: it's generosity," was all I could think of. What is virtue? But of course, I think the key to saving the world, the key to compassion, is that it is more fun. It should be done by fun. Generosity is more fun. That's the key. Everybody has the wrong idea. They think Buddha was so boring, and they're so surprised when they meet Dalai Lama and he's fairly jolly. Even though his people are being genocided -- and believe me, he feels every blow on every old nun's head, in every Chinese prison. He feels it. He feels the way they are harvesting yaks nowadays. I won't even say what they do. But he feels it. And yet he's very jolly. He's extremely jolly.
Because when you open up like that, then you can't just -- what good does it do to add being miserable with others' misery? You have to find some vision where you see how hopeful it is, how it can be changed. Look at that beautiful thing Chiho showed us. She scared us with the lava man. She scared us with the lava man is coming, then the tsunami is coming, but then finally there was flowers, and trees, and it was very beautiful. It's really lovely.
So, compassion means to feel the feelings of others, and the human being actually is compassion. The human being is almost out of time. The human being is compassion because what is our brain for? Now, Jim's brain is memorizing the almanac. But he could memorize all the needs of all the beings that he is, he will, he did. He could memorize all kinds of fantastic things to help many beings. And he would have tremendous fun doing that.
Human psychopharmacology and dose-effects of Salvinorin A. A kappa opioid agonist hallucinogen in the plant Salvia divinorum. By Johnson, M.W.,et al. Drug and Alcohol Dependence Journal (2010)
In what is believed to be the first controlled human study of the effects of Salvinorin A, the primary active constituent in Salvia divinorum. Johns Hopkins researchers report that the effects are surprisingly strong, brief, and intensely disorienting, but without apparent short-term adverse effects in healthy people.
Since the NIH-funded research was done with four mentally and physically healthy hallucinogen-experienced volunteers in a safe medical environment, researchers say they are limited in their conclusions about the compound’s safety, according to Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the study’s lead author.
Johnson and the Hopkins team say they undertook the research to try and put some rigorous scientific information into current concerns over the growing recreational use of Salvia divinorum, which is an herb in mint family. The plant, which has been used for centuries by shamans in Mexico for spiritual healing, is the target of increased nationwide legal efforts to restrict its availability and use. Though little is known about the compound’s effects in humans, some legislators have been spurred to action after watching one of thousands of online videos chronicling the uncontrolled behavior that sometimes follows its use. However, because animal studies show that Salvinorin A has unique effects in the brain, some scientists believe that the drug or a modified version of it may lead to medical advances in the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, chronic pain and drug addiction.
Salvia leaves are typically smoked. Often the quantity of Salvinorin A in the leaves has been boosted by the addition of a concentrated extract of the compound. The drug is available online or in “head shops” and is legal in most states. More than a dozen states have outright bans on the product and eight others have restrictions such as prohibitions for minors. About a dozen nations have also outlawed it. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administration has included it in their list of “drugs and chemicals of concern,” but to date there is no federal prohibition against it.
The findings of the Hopkins study are published online in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
“Everything we knew up to this point about the effects of this drug in humans, other than a few surveys or anecdotal case reports, comes from accounts on websites or YouTube videos,” Johnson says. “Those are hardly scientific sources enabling a rigorous understanding of the effects of the drug. Even though the sample size in this study is small, we used an extremely well-controlled methodology, which provided a clear picture of the drug’s basic effects.”
Johnson and his team say this is not just a first step toward greater understanding of the unique compound and its effects, but of the kappa opioid receptors in the brain, which animal studies have suggested Salvinorin A targets. Researchers see potential in kappa opioid receptors — which are different from the receptors targeted by other hallucinogens or opiates like morphine and heroin — for the development of therapeutic medications.
“We’re opening the door for systematic study of this class of compounds, about which we know precious little,” says Roland R. Griffiths, Ph.D., a Johns Hopkins professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study’s senior investigator.
The study found that salvia’s effects begin almost immediately after inhaled, are very short acting — with a peak of strength after two minutes and very little effect remaining after 20 — and get more powerful as more of the drug is administered. Salvinorin A produced no significant changes in heart rate or blood pressure, no tremors and no adverse events were reported. But, Johnson cautions, the sample size was small and only healthy and hallucinogen-experienced volunteers participated, so conclusions of safety are limited.
The study was conducted on four healthy, paid subjects — two men and two women — who had taken hallucinogens in the past. Each participant completed 20 sessions over the course of two-to-three months. They inhaled a wide range of doses of the drug in its pure form. At some sessions, they were given a placebo. Participants were asked to rate the strength of peak drug effect on a scale of 1 to 10. Participants were allowed to drop out of the study at any time if they felt they could not tolerate a stronger dose on the following visit. No one withdrew.
Researchers say they were struck by the reaction of two participants who rated the strength of a high dose a 10, or “as strong as imaginable for this drug.” It is unusual, the investigators said, for volunteers with prior hallucinogen experience to report such intensity. Despite these strong experiences, heart rate and blood pressure were unaffected.
While no adverse effects were noted in the controlled laboratory environment, Johnson says, the drug’s effects could be disastrous if a person were, for example, driving a car while on salvia. Few emergency room visits have been linked to its use, which researchers believe is because it wears off so quickly.
He says subjects in the study reported very different experiences from those caused by hallucinogens like LSD and so-called “magic mushrooms.” Those drugs, Johnson says, tend to have powerful effects, but the person is typically still aware of the external world and can interact with it . “With salvia, the subjects described leaving this reality completely and going to other worlds or dimensions and interacting with entities,” Johnson says. “These are very powerful, very intense experiences.”
Animal data suggests the drug is not addictive, Griffiths says, and its intensity could keep people from returning to the drug again and again. “Many people take it once and it produces such profound dysphoria that they don’t want to do it again,” he says.
