Page 7 - YZpreambule

we could see our new book had no impact. The Greek
departments both in America and British Universities seem
intellectually inert.

Wasson, Persephone Quest, chap.1. p. 28 (1986).

Students who work with me have been warned that they
should be blacklisted. My textbooks in grammars, as well, as if by
contagion, are viewed by some as suspect and a thread to
normalcy.

C. Ruck the Road to Eleusis, (Hindsight, P. 12), édition du
trentième anniversaire (20O8).

Paradoxalement, devant l’affirmation du “champignon sacré”, les,
scientifiques raisonnables argumentaient parfois sur le mode
affectif, tandis que les exégètes “panmycistes” (l’expression est de
Claude Lévi-Strauss)1 affectaient de penser de façon raisonnée,
mais avec des moyens limités et sur un programme ambitieux,
lequel ne propose rien d’autre que percevoir l’amanite comme clef
de lecture de l’arbre de vie sumérien jusqu’à l’arbre de la
connaissance hébraïque :

If these perceptions are right, then the mycologists were right
also, in a transcendental sense of which neither they nor the artist
had an inkling, when they saw a serpent offering a mushroom to
Eve in the Fresco of Plaincourault. And Ponce De Leon early in the
16th century was still seeking in Florida the pool of living water
that he might have discovered in the Siberian taiga, the pool
where Gilgamesh finally found his Herb of Immortality thousands
of years earlier, only to lose it again to the Serpent who was more
subtle than any beast of the field, the very same Serpent who
engaged Eve in pleasant conversation, whose habitation is in the
roots of the towering Siberian birch.

Wasson, Soma, Epilogue Tree of live and the marvellous herb.

1 ‘Pan-mycisme’ (interprétation tout champignon), Lévi-Strauss, op. cit. (1970);
par extension ici, “panmycisme” et “panmycistes” (groupe d’auteurs imaginant
l’origine des religions dans les champignons).