It might explain how they got lost for 40 years

To keep them in? It's not as if he didn't try to keep them in, at almost all cost...

But I question the premise of the original article. What difference does it make if Moses' experience was facilitated by some substance?

I don't think the psychedelic theory has any explanatory power regarding the question why the Israelites adopted a Bedouin lifestyle for a while after leaving Egypt and before settling in Canaan.

 

Well having dismissed the supernatural, there are a host of possibilities ... and a simple hallucination, or psychotic disorder is as likely as anything. Was Moses an epileptic? It goes all the way down to a con-trick: "I'll go up the mountain and see what God has to say, you all stay here ... "

I would have thought, if not revelation, then a legend is the next most likely, the story having been shaped over time and not written down until what, nearly a thousand years later, when Josiah was establishing the Second Temple era, which was something of a resurgence, if not the appearance, of a Law-based Judaism.

Ah ... the Bultmann error:
A is an account by Moses of a revelatory experience;
B is an account of my experience of narcotics'
A reads like B,
Therefore A is the result of narcotic ingestion, not a religious experience.

+++

The use of narcotics in the pursuit of religious experience is universal, not only shamanism. Or rather, it's the basic shaman principle spread broad. The Eleusinian and other mystery cults of the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians through to Voodoo etc., in more recent times. It's all grouped under the banner of 'eros experience' in which the person surrenders their will and their senses.

As a side-note: As one who has used psychedelics for fun, the link between the psychedelic and 'religious/spiritual experience' is more, I would suggest, in the mind of the seeker who interprets or filters the experience accordingly, reading it in a self-fulfilling or self-realising way, rather than a particular psychedelic being causative of pseudo-religious/spiritual experiences. So if you take it in pursuit of, then that's the likely outcome ...

 

By "historical people", do you mean the ancient people living in previous epochs, or contemporary persons with an interest in history? (I'm not a native speaker of English)

 

So people who received a classical education knew about the classical texts, and were interested in more than just the books of the bible.

I didn't quite grasp the conclusion you drew from that.

 

I must admit I keep having difficulties following your posts.

I'll try again another day.

 

Before and/or after you opened the :kitty: tabs? More addicting, yet safer, than self-medicating.

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine