Initiation into Dream Mysteries by Sarah Janes

Author:Sarah Janes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Self-Transformation
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2022-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

DREAM MEDICINES AND SPELLS

A selection of medical papyri give recipes, formulae, and incantations for the purpose of beneficial dreams, sleep medicine, and the banishment of nightmares. The Egyptians had an expansive pharmacopeia and were known to have used poppy, wild lettuce, chamomile, lavender, vervain, frankincense, Egyptian henbane, belladonna, rue, cannabis, mandrake, and blue water lily. The alcohol content of wine was used to extract psychoactive alkaloids from plants. Many preparations were steeped in wine or beer for this reason. Such substances would have been used in incense, unguents, drink preparations, and as sacred food. Each medicinal plant had a spirit, a divine identity. Many of the compounds found in the plants that ancient Egyptians regularly used are very toxic and lethal in large amounts, so dosing was a careful and considered process acquired through experience and training. As was also the case in Mesopotamia, punishments could be doled out to those medical practitioners who overdosed and subsequently caused injury or death to their patients.

Nefertem, the son of creator god Ptah, was the god of perfume, and he was personified by the blue water lily, which was recognized as a solar symbol. A beauteous smell was seen to be a deific encounter. Poppies were believed to be made by the god Thoth. To be intoxicated on such substances, substances impossible to disentangle from the divine reality of the gods, was sacred and holy. To merely inhale the sweet fragrance of a fine flower was to be in communion with a god, to be lifted up and infused with their unique euphoric emanations.17

Many of ancient Egypt’s most popular social lubricants are also aphrodisiacs: mandrake, blue water lily, and wild lettuce in particular. These substances would have had effects that could be felt in both waking and sleeping states, and they could provoke an erotic trance state. Arousal produces vivid dreams: as an aphrodisiac increases blood flow to erogenous zones, the likelihood of blissful and transcendent episodes of lucidity is increased, as expressed in this anonymous ancient Egyptian love lyric:

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