The Goddess, Psychedelics and Smashing the Patriarchy

The usage of mood-altering drugs in religious contexts is skyrocketing. Religion, at least for the masses, has been deconstructed to the point where the main point of participation is to feel God… or feel good… or at least, feel SOMETHING. The human soul is wired to experience the divine, which is not on offer in the radically materialist civilization of the Global American Empire.

Neither does it help for us dissident holdouts to offer God. From the outside perspective, God doesn’t act, doesn’t talk, doesn’t even care that His church is mid-transition between a cheap nightclub and a State-run welfare office.

I sympathize with that frustration, even as I also believe that the supernatural is coming dangerously close to the soap-bubble surface of reality. The mutilation of human sexuality, to say nothing of mass human sacrifice and destruction of fatherhood, is about to cause a breakthrough one way or the other.

So then, what IS on offer for people wanting a religious experience? One that does not involve respecting a male deity with His own ideas about progress? Mescaline and peyote, of course!

These Mormons Have Found a New Faith . in Magic Mushrooms

h ttps://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/psychedelics-mormon-church-divine-assembly-1375027/

In a Sunday afternoon in March, a group of 30 strangers huddle under a park pavilion in Salt Lake City, Utah, sipping hot cocoa and shaking hands shyly as snow clots the cottonwoods. A clean-cut gang of mostly white professionals, they are united by their interest in the Divine Assembly, a two-year old church with 3,000 members that considers psilocybin its holy sacrament.

The church’s co-founders, husband and wife Steve and Sara Urquhart, mingle quietly with the psychedelic-curious, many of whom are either new to tripping or considering their maiden voyage. Steve sticks to the sidelines, every so often reaching to smooth a conical white beard that, combined with his blue eyes and bearlike frame, make him look like a punk Santa Claus. The long beard is the only outer marker of his new identity: Before pivoting to mushroom churches, Urquhart was one of the most powerful Republicans in the Utah State Legislature, serving from 2001 to 2016, with a stint as majority whip in the House before eventually moving over to the Senate. Former colleagues and friends recall his small-government brand of Republicanism as .rock-ribbed.. He was also, like more than 60 percent of Utah and approximately 86 percent of the Legislature in 2021, deeply, devoutly Mormon.

I constantly say that conservatives can’t tell a woman No. Here, Steve is a high-level career Republican, yet his wife…

DAYUMN! Not even Central Casting can offer such a convincing witch! One guess who wears the muumuu in that marriage.

[Steve’s sad life story mostly omitted.]

One night, in 2015, Urquhart says, he had been drinking and .couldn.t shake the feeling there was no hope.” He decided to take all the oxycodone he had. But as soon as he swallowed the pills, he says, he realized he didn’t want to die. Losing consciousness, he tried to make himself throw up, not knowing if he would wake up the next morning. When he did, he showered, put on his suit, and went to the Capitol. .I didn’t tell anyone about it for years,. Urquhart says. .It was just one more shameful thing I hid..

What a functional, respectable leader he was. For many years.

Several difficult years ensued. Desperate to save her husband, and their marriage, Sara Urquhart, who was already out of the church herself, agreed to try something she had heard was like five years of therapy in one night: ayahuasca. In 2017, the couple boarded a plane to Amsterdam, and “Yelped us up a shaman,. says Steve. There, in a stranger’s living room, Steve Urquhart says he encountered God. Except God was a woman, he recalls, and she was sitting in a garden. As she beamed at Steve with a trillion watts of unconditional love, Urquhart wept. After a lifetime of believing God could read his thoughts, and hated him for them, the experience . his psychedelic one . was a revelation. .The only word I have for it is rapture,. Urquhart says. He also realized he didn’t know how to love Sara or his children the way he wanted to, the way God loved him.

Textbook Cuckservatism. This account suggests that ayahuasca was his idea, not wifey’s, and his life story contains enough drug abuse to make it plausible. But the next paragraph suggests that Sara is the family authority so it could go either way.

For Sara, a no-nonsense go-getter who favors crisp button-down shirts, the ayahuasca was also .life-changing.” But when they got home and Steve began making noises about creating a church so others could experience what they had under the protection of the First Amendment, she initially put her foot down. .No way,. she told Steve. .I just got out of one goofy religion. There is no way in hell I’m going to start another..

While charges of sexism and racism have long dogged the Latter-day Saints (women are still not allowed to receive the priesthood, and Black men were only permitted to do so in 1978, whereas all white males over 12 receive it virtually automatically), many post-Mormons cited 2015 as the year their frayed faith finally broke. That.s the year the LDS Church classified members in same-sex marriages as “apostates.” The policy (since marginally backpedaled), combined with a disturbing number of gay teen suicides in Utah (highlighted by Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds in the 2018 documentary Believer), woke a lot of people up, multiple post-Mormons tell me. Although, as Sara Urquhart is quick to point out, .It took a bunch of white men dying for some people to notice there might be a problem..

What a pity that we live in a world so overcome with cowardice. Again, that’s a direct consequence of objective religion being hollowed out by feel-good spirituality. When I opposed the Plandemic, I did so in the belief that somewhere in Heaven, Christ approved of my effort. Had Christianity been just a social club, why choose to suffer? Why take a risk? I would not have.

Do you think these acid-trippers will ever stand their ground for their beliefs? Me neither. And that is why the Plandemic was so successful. People didn’t oppose the State taking ownership of their bodies because they had no moral principle by which to risk hardship, suffering and death.

And they won’t thank us dissidents for offering them one.

The LDS Church is far from the only organized religion in decline. As of 2020, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1937, less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque. Nevertheless, according to another recent survey from Pew Research, 90 percent of Americans still say they believe in a higher power, with 56 percent placing their faith in a theistic god, and 33 percent acknowledging a more abstract spiritual force. All told, it appears God is not, after all, dead; neither science nor technology have sated man’s need for meaning. Now, as psychedelics such as psilocybin are reentering the mainstream for their promise in treating some aspects of the mental-health crisis . a crisis Utah leads the nation in by some counts, with more residents depressed and suicidal than those in almost any other state . a second question is emerging, perhaps intertwined with the first: Can psychedelics help heal us and restore our connection to the divine?

No. It’ll encourage us into a solipsistic delusion in which we are gods choosing what we want to be real. If we’re lucky. If we’re not then permanent psychosis wouldn’t be the worst case scenario.

For Professor John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist and psychologist at the University of Toronto, the answer is a cautious yes, although he prefers the term “sacred” to “divine.” .When I hear .divine,. I hear there’s a consciousness, and there’s an intelligence attached to that,. he says. .I don’t know about that. But do I think there are depths of reality that we can fall in love with that transform us? Yes. Yes, I do..

He doesn’t want a god that makes demands of him. He instead wants an empowering, transformative experience into… spoiler for him… a lobotomized, gelded drone in a WEF factory who has been cured of the need to take bathroom breaks by a starvation diet of maggots.

Most transformative!

Vervaeke relates to the LDS experience because he, too, was raised Christian fundamentalist before finding his spiritual home in practices such as meditation and tai chi chuan, and he has been a repeat guest on the Mormon podcast Where Will You Go. His work focuses on what gives our lives meaning, a concept psychologists tend to measure by how connected we feel to ourselves, others, and the world. In the past, he says, religion gave people this sense of connectedness. The Latin word itself, .religio,. shares a root with .ligare,. meaning to bind. In other words, religion was supposed to be a ligament connecting us to the sacred.

Vervaeke considers that ligament badly torn, which explains the psychedelic renaissance. .If religions were really healthily functioning,. he says, .there wouldn’t be this turn to psychedelics..

Wrong. If people wanted the truth instead of a convenient, ego-feeding lie, THEN there wouldn’t be this turn to psychedelics. The collapse of religion didn’t happen in a vacuum. Example, most of the Church’s Boomer clergy felt called to the altar because the alternative was being called to Vietnam. What a surprise that they failed to transmit a devotion that they’d never personally experienced.

Blood doesn’t lie, though. Cucked men have love for Jesus but we have scars for Jesus. Now, they have love for peyote while we have a Brother In Heaven.

Vervaeke has found that people who have mystical experiences . a state of union with “ultimate reality” that is often described as both ineffable and realer than real . tend to report their lives as more meaningful. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found similar results, showing that newcomers to psychedelics often rank their first psilocybin trip as being on par with the birth of a child. Clergy also experience powerful effects: .The dead dogma comes alive for them in a meaningful way,. Hopkins researcher Dr. William Richards told The Guardian in 2017. .They discover they really believe this stuff they’re talking about..

We always knew that their faith came in a bottle. We just thought it was whiskey.

Many of the post-Mormons I spoke with see the leap from Joseph Smith to mushrooms as shorter than one might think. .We believe in the gift of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions, healing, interpretation of tongues, and so forth,. wrote Smith in 1842. The core principle of the faith is revelation, or the idea that God spoke to Joseph Smith, and can speak to you and me, too.

Cults gonna cult.

According to Tess Huntington, a 29-year-old Divine Assembly member who has emerged as a prominent member due to her personal charisma and extensive experience using psilocybin to heal her own sexual trauma, Latter-day Saints are “already programmed to ” seek the divine on the daily.” She quips, .A married [Mormon] couple probably talks to God more every day than they talk to each other..

Nothing says charismatic like using hallucinogens to process your sexual trauma.

Huntington, a grimacing blonde in old photographs who now sports a shaved head, feather earring, and crocodile tattoo, says that losing this personal relationship with God, and the intricate myth of Mormonism, is one of the worst parts about leaving the church. .You just need something to matter again,. she says while describing the loss, a creeping sense of nihilism so shattering she bought a dog just to have something to tether herself to.

.Then you eat some fungus,. Huntington continues, “and it’s like hitting the jackpot.” Everything she had been grasping for as a Mormon was suddenly .IV.ed. into her arm on psychedelics. After years of seeking magic in the world, says Huntington, sometimes even feeling it ripple through LDS gatherings, psychedelics “validated this guttural desire for a rich and meaningful existence” outside the patriarchal confines of Mormonism.

Tess was not improved by trading Joseph Smith for Psilocybin.

Female spirituality is self-centered and experiential. Woman does not naturally gravitate to principles and traditions, which explains much about why God didn’t want her calling the shots or teaching the… principles and traditions. Better for everybody if she focuses on serving her husband. Even if her husband is not a believer, she’ll be a better Christian by learning to respect and obey him.

The U.S. has known about psilocybin for less than a century. In comparison, the Maya, Aztecs, Huastec, Totonac, Mazatec, and Mixtec people all used hallucinogenic mushrooms in religious ceremonies stretching back thousands of years, with the Aztecs calling it teonan?catl, or “flesh of the gods.” Because the Spanish violently suppressed the Aztecs. customs when they sacked Tenochtitl?n in 1521, teonan?catl was forced underground, resurfacing nearly four centuries years later when Mexican ethnobotanist Dr. Blas Pablo Reko spotted it in use among the indigenous people in Oaxaca. In 1955, Mar?a Sabina became the first indigenous “wise woman” to introduce psilocybin to an American when she permitted Gordon Wasson, an amateur mycologist with a controversial legacy, to participate in one of her ceremonies.

I read a claim somewhere that all psychedelic plants are New World. While there’s probably something I don’t know of, offhand the only Old World plant that comes close is hashish. Not close at all.

That raises fascinating theological questions. Did God hide the keys to fast-track diabolism in the New World, so that it would not be discovered until the groundwork was started for the End Times?

Both Mazatec and Catholic, Sabina reported she used mushrooms to commune with God about how to best treat her patients, and did so in full view of the local bishop, Father Antonio Reyes Hern?ndez. According to Sabina biographer ?lvaro Estrada, who also spoke Mazatec like Sabina, Hern?ndez was untroubled by Sabina’s syncretism, and in 1970 told Estrada that Sabina, far from being a heretic, .doesn.t do harm to anyone.” That Sabina considered the mushrooms to be the body and blood of Christ was apparently unremarkable to the father, but the parallels to the Eucharist so enthralled Wasson that he would devote his career trying to prove psychedelics . or entheogens as he preferred they be called, meaning .god-generated within. . were the secret heart of many world religions, an argument that modern scholars such as Brian Muraresku (The Immortality Key) and others are resuscitating today.

Dr. Reko, Austrian, developed his botanical interest while working at a mining operation in Oaxaca and eventually changed careers. His work was eventually discovered by… CIA’s MK-Ultra.

Segue

h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Gordon_Wasson

[D. Gordon] Wasson began his banking career at Guaranty Trust Company in 1928 [age 30], and moved to J.P. Morgan & Co. in 1934. That same year, he published a book on the Hall Carbine Affair, in which he attempted to exonerate John Pierpont Morgan from guilt with respect to the incident, which had been viewed as an example of wartime profiteering. As early as 1937, Wasson had been attempting to influence historians Allan Nevins and Charles McLean Andrews regarding Morgan’s role in the affair; he used Nevins’ report as a reference for his own book on the topic. The matter of Morgan’s responsibility for the Hall Carbine Incident remains controversial.

…By 1943 he was vice president for public relations.

How did a bootlicking bankster develop an interest in mycology, you ask?

Wasson’s studies in ethnomycology began during his 1927 honeymoon trip to the Catskill Mountains when his wife, Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, a pediatrician [who emigrated during the Russian Revolution], chanced upon some edible wild mushrooms. Fascinated by the marked difference in cultural attitudes towards fungi in Russia compared to the United States, the couple began field research that led to the publication of Mushrooms, Russia and History in 1957.

Specifically, she cooked them and he refused to eat them.

In the course of their investigations they mounted expeditions to Mexico to study the religious use of mushrooms by the native population, and claimed to have been the first Westerners to participate in a Mazatec mushroom ritual.

Wasson’s 1956 expedition was funded by the CIA’s MK-Ultra subproject 58, as was revealed by documents obtained by John Marks under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents state that Wasson was an ‘unwitting’ participant in the project.

Unwitting? A JP Morgan bankster with a Bolshevik wife accidentally ended up working for the CIA by pursuing an innocent interest in mind-altering Mexican mushrooms? Bullshit err, mushroom food.

The funding was provided under the cover name of the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research (credited by Wasson at the end of his subsequent Life piece about the expedition).

Together, Wasson and botanist Roger Heim collected and identified various species of family Strophariaceae and genus Psilocybe, while Albert Hofmann, using material grown by Heim from specimens collected by the Wassons, identified the chemical structure of the active compounds, psilocybin and psilocin

I confirmed that’s Albert Hofmann of LSD infamy. When MK-Ultra learned of psychedelic drugs, they dove in so hard and fast that they resurrected dead religions.

End Segue

Steve Urquhart knew little of this history in April 2020, pacing downtown one morning after his latest psychedelic ceremony, the twin spires of the LDS Church and the Utah State Capitol piercing the dawn sky. All he knew was that he was a tiny part of something magnificent . something infinitely bigger than regular reality.

As a maverick Republican senator, Urquhart had sparred with the LDS Church several times, mainly over LGBTQ rights. In doing so, he had come to appreciate how powerful the First Amendment is, eventually sponsoring an antidiscrimination bill that, as a compromise, included some religious exemptions. If religion could be used to protect anti-gay sentiment, he mused, why not a mushroom church?

I was not expecting this “Mormons are turning to Mescaline” article to morph into “MK-Ultra is using drugs to create a new, pro-LGBT religion”.

Rather than a religion, Urquhart prefers . in the crypto argot of the day . to characterize the Divine Assembly as a “platform” on which “anyone can build.” Anyone can facilitate a mushroom ceremony, and no one is required to ask Urquahrt or anyone else for permission. In some instances, the facilitators are trained psychedelic therapists, educated at institutions like the California Center for Integrated Studies. More frequently, they are ordinary people with a penchant for hosting, and often very new to psychedelics themselves.

If any of those “facilitators” are CIA agents infested with unclean spirits desiring new hosts, in a room full of people with souls rendered psycho-chemically vulnerable, the result would look like the couch scene in the movie The Thing.

According to Salt Lake County District Attorney Simarjit Singh Gill…

Now there’s a proper Mormon name for you. My suspicions about ongoing CIA involvement remain unsettled.

…no one has ever brought a case against the Divine Assembly, or Urquhart. If law enforcement theoretically were to, says Gill, he would have to weigh the specific complaint against the fact that religious groups receive the greatest amount of Constitutional protection . .it’s like the thickest part of the ice.” Gill says that ice is even thicker in Utah, which was settled by LDS pioneers fleeing religious persecution back east, mainly for the practice of polygamy.

Deep State is creating a new religion based on drug use and Globohomo, and they’re going to use the First Amendment to shield it.

[Kim Raff for Rolling Stone is speaking here:]

No two Divine Assembly ceremonies are alike. During my stay in Salt Lake City I witnessed two: one as an observer, and one as a participant. The one I observed took place on a Sunday morning in the home of Valerie, a retired banker who often hosts other retirees after meeting them in person first. The atmosphere was warm and welcoming, if incongruously staid given the journey her guests were about to go on. Valerie opened the ceremony by tapping a sound bowl, and reading a brief invocation. Then she passed out three grams of lemon tek . tea made from mushrooms soaked in lemon so the chitin is easier to digest . and led her four charges to various pieces of furniture. Thus tucked in, they snapped eye masks and iPods into place.

Turn on, tune in, drop out, find God on your terms exclusively! Priestess Valerie is here to service you!

After about three hours, Valerie reconvened the day-trippers at her dining room table and fed them French toast and berries with powdered sugar as they shared their experiences . Martha Stewart meets psychedelics.

The second ceremony I observed, from the perspective of a partaker, was far more irreverent . and profound. The group I was there to join calls themselves the Witchy Women.

Composed that night of Huntington and four working mothers, mostly in their forties, they had met one another just a few months prior via the Divine Assembly.

Yes way. A group of women trying to find “God” without a husband around? Using hallucinogens to force a “connection”? Witches, I say!

As they swept me into their midst, bedazzling my face with plastic jewels and placing a garland of mushrooms on my head, it was hard to believe; they seemed more like childhood friends, or the coolest women in your sorority. They laugh when I share this observation. .I was the goodest Mormon girl ever!. squeals Brooke Lark, our emcee for the night in leather pants.

Huntington, too: .My cousin said to me, .It was more jarring for me to hear you say you were leaving the church than when I found out my parents were getting divorced..

Where’s Daddy? The absence of fathers and continued persecution of men has left women wide open… no pun intended… to being voluntarily possessed by a ‘higher’ power.

We settle onto the floor of Lark’s living room, slumber-party style. While the scene feels familiarly feminine to me, it’s still new and electric to them. All five women are discovering, with the help of psychedelics, what it means to connect with themselves, and one another. From Huntington’s perspective, the LDS Church systematically robbed them of that. When Huntington was around 20, she served a mission to Brazil, where she fell deathly ill. Unable to eat or walk without blinding pain, she sought help from an older sister, who told her they should pray. By the end of their supplication, Huntington recounts, both women were crying. .Sister, you need to go home,. the older woman told her. But when they informed the mission president they had received a revelation, Huntington remembers, he was unmoved. .That’s not how it works. Huntington says he told her, spelling out the byzantine hierarchy of men who would first have to approve the decision.

She was oppressed by men in the LDS, now she’s proudly acid tripping in a gynarchy.

In that instance, Huntington recalls, she felt “completely imprisoned.” She had no money, no telephone, and no autonomy over her body . a female body that suddenly seemed to count for way too much. .Or discount me way too much,. Tess recalls, because while she was busy selling the principle of direct revelation for the church by day, in practice, she wasn’t allowed to receive it herself . even about her own self.

As Jon Krakauer argues in his book Under the Banner of Heaven (now a drama series on FX) this catch-22 of the LDS religion . that direct revelation is encouraged, unless it contradicts male authority . is the mechanism by which cults spring out of the mainstream.

What is the secret to Mormonism being stable & successful while most cults fail spectacularly? Could it be that they still respect the Father, even if not actually Christ?

Although the LDS Church swore off the polygamy Joseph Smith preached in exchange for Utah’s admittance to the Union in 1896, thousands of fundamentalists still practice it in places like Colorado City, Arizona. By Krakauer’s account, LDS men typically become fundamentalist when they receive a “direct revelation” that they should take another wife. LDS women, he contends, can be uniquely vulnerable to offshoot cults because they’re raised to trust their husbands to accurately interpret God’s word, and to obey.

That attitude is coming to a church near you.

.Which is exactly why psychedelics are so healing for post-Mormon women,. Wharton says. Psychedelics often produce a feeling of tapping into one’s own intuition, or higher self. Wharton, whose clients are mostly current or former Latter-day Saints, says a good portion of her work involves helping women learn it’s OK to listen to their inner voices. I think back to Valerie’s ceremony. .I got complete confirmation of some things I sort of already knew,. one female participant shared afterward. .I felt utter clarity..

Women do not have an independent existence. Even in the Garden of Eden, when Eve disobeyed she did it by changing loyalties from God-via-Adam to the serpent. She will submit to SOMEBODY. If not her husband then a church leader, a neighbor or…

Or a spirit guide? A woman riding a dragon, maybe?

By this point, the walls are undulating with fractals. Someone offers me a vape pen loaded with DMT . the main active molecule in ayahuasca. Although I’ve never tried DMT, I feel safe enough to go a little deeper. Surrounded by the witches, trying to figure out how I ordered my steps to this, I breathe in three times, and . whoosh. The living room is gone.

Out of the darkness, a colorful mandala appears. I pass through its aperture, and am immediately face to face with . the Goddess herself. Crowned in a gold headpiece, dripping in jewels, and flanked by a never-ending procession of cats and snakes, the Mother of All Creation regards me with a Mona Lisa smile as if she’s been waiting for me. She is gorgeous, and terrifying, like a multiheaded dragon who could birth a planet or destroy a galaxy, simply by licking her numerous lips. .So you’re who the patriarchy is afraid of,. I think, and for once in my life, I feel like I’m batting on the stronger team.

That’s an image of the Whore of Babylon, straight outta Revelation. Although Apostle John didn’t say anything about the Whore of Babylon also being a crazy cat lady.