The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

their lover, whom they had clad in a stag’s skin. 264 The women wore red
war paint boiled from ivy gum and urine, painted on like the stripes of a
Spartan Penelope duck. 265 The woof and warp pattern on their limbs
suggested a ladder. In Thrace, the Maenads tattooed themselves with
spider web designs. One Greek vase shows each maenad has a stag
tattooed on her forearm. 266
The maenads’ ferocious behavior involved strong
hallucinogens. 267 This included spruce-beer laced with ivy, sweetened
with mead, and the mild panaeolus papilionaceus mushroom. More
effective were the Priestesses’ laurel leaves containing potassium cyanide,
hippomanes, which was perhaps the slimy vaginal tissue of a mare in
heat, and juice from the mistletoe of the Eastern European Oak, called
ixias or loranthus. 268
One of their most powerful hallucinogenic substances was the
raw mushroom amanita muscaria. A. muscariae grows on conifers and
oaks. It has wide effects inducing berserker rage and feats of
extraordinary muscular strength. Following this physical ecstasy comes a
period of peace where the person touches the divine and believes that the
drug has opened a spiritual, or third eye. 269
In the fifth century BCE, Euripides wrote in The Bacchantes of
the frantic ceremonies of the Bacchanals or maenads. He described that
from every ivy-wreathed staff sweet rills of honey trickled. To crown their
revelries, the Bacchante raised loud his voice and cried:
On, on, ye Bacchanals, pride of Tmolus with its rills of gold.
Euripides was referring to the even more potent substance that the
melissae priestesses chose for their sacrificial king ritual, green or unripe
honey. This deadly honey came from plants of the heath such as
oleanders, azaleas, rhododendrons and laurel. 270
The dangerous element in green honey is acetylandromedol,
which is a grayanotoxin that acts on the central nervous system. Just two
tablespoons of this honey induces acute breathing impairment, perilously
low heart rate and hypnotics. 271 The green honey from Trebizond,
Colchis and the Black Sea region is particularly toxic. In 401BCE,
Xenophon’s Greek army behaved like lunatics after eating Colchian
honey. Seized with vomiting, they collapsed by the thousands. In
67BCE, Mithridates, the king of Pontus, won a battle against Pompey the
Great after the Romans ate toxic honey. 272
Pliny called toxic Black Sea honey meli maenomenon. European
taverns later used it as miel fou to intensify the intoxicating effect of
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