Recently I asked the readers and viewers of VJM Publishing material to ask me any question they liked, in the fields of psychology, politics or spirituality, and I would answer it. The question answered in this essay – and I apologise for not being able to remember who asked it! – is who my guru is.
There’s a very simple answer to that question: Socrates.
There were few positive male role models in my childhood environment. I was the son of a gang member, and various uncles were also gang members, drug dealers or junkies. I was fortunate enough to have an excellent grandfather, who taught me a basic sense of honour and decency, but my philosophical ambitions soon brought me beyond what my family could fulfill. I needed a guru.
My male teachers at school were generally decent men, typical of the high-trust society that was 20th Century Nelson. But they weren’t gurus. The pains of life etched in their faces were understandable even to a child. Clearly, they were struggling through life much like I was, and needed a guru much like I did.
In Classics class during my final year of high school, one assigned topic was the trial and execution of Socrates. We learned how Socrates brought wisdom to the ungrateful masses of Athens, who eventually voted to have him killed. His form of execution was to drink a deadly hemlock tea. As I first learned the story, I presumed that he would refuse to do this, but he did, reasoning that it was not only his duty but he wasn’t afraid of death anyway.
I was awestruck.
Soon I developed a total fascination with this feat. This equanimity in the face of death seemed superhuman to me. Everything I had believed – or been taught – about human nature suggested that death was the most terrifying thing possible, the darkest of all mysteries, the termination of all of one’s dreams.
Everyone around me behaved as if scared stupid of the subject, never speaking about it. Socrates’s example proved that man need not fear death, and not in the delusional, heroin-high manner of the Christians and other religious fanatics. It was possible to die without fearing death simply through philosophy.
About a decade after I finished high school, I had lived a full life. I had earned a couple of degrees, been around the world a few times, even been married and divorced. The problem of death still plagued me though. Haunted me. What was the point of any of this, if I was doomed to die and all of it would be forgotten?
Here Socrates still acted as the guru. It was through studying him, and his disciple in Plato, that I came to realise the role of the Eleusinian Mysteries in the philosophy of fearlessness in the face of death. These Mysteries were famous in ancient Greece for alleviating the participants’ fear of death; Plato and Cicero wrote about their effects, and Aristotle, Epictetus, Plutarch, Alcibiades, Euripides, Sophocles, Pindar, Augustus, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Julian were known to have been initiated.
Through learning about these mysteries, I came upon psilocybin mushrooms – believed by Terence McKenna to be the main psychoactive ingredient of the kykeon drunk by all participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries. This led me to taking psilocybin mushrooms myself and undergoing a total spiritual transformation at age 27, something discussed at length on this website.
Later, when I came to think more about politics, Socrates was still the guru, being the hero of Republic and Plato’s explication of political reality. Socrates’s unsurpassed example of honest reason as a tool to uncover the truth of political questions, despite opposition from liars and fools, inspired me. Like Socrates, but to a lesser extent, I have also been banned, cancelled and suppressed. I am proud to have followed in Socrates’s example!
Even now, I can still gain great insight about the nature of the soul from reading Phaedo. Socrates’s description of philosophy as preparation for death sets my entire life into a perspective that makes sense and gives it meaning. I might be almost 30 years older now than when I first read about Socrates, but his example of assuaging fear of death through pure reason appeals to me just as much today.
Many people think I am crazy for turning my energies away from making money and turning them towards spirituality instead. They don’t understand why a person would meditate or do psychedelics at all, let alone do little else for over a decade. Why philosophise at all, when there is money to be made?
I do it because of the example of relentless pursuit of truth set by Socrates, who is to me the most admirable man of all. This has led me to the spiritual beliefs expressed in Elementalism and in the essays on this website.
‘Wormboy’ is one of Marilyn Manson’s creepiest songs. From the album Antichrist Superstar, it covers typical Manson subjects like death, despair and psychological destruction, possibly in the context of a person who has discovered that Christianity has driven them to ruin. There’s more to these lyrics than goth themes, though. Buried within is some deep esoteric wisdom.
One line in particular stands out, and demands explication from an Elementalist perspective: “When you get to heaven, you will wish you’re in hell.” This is an extraordinarily strange line, but from an Elementalist perspective it makes perfect sense.
The Christian heaven (Manson’s mockery is limited to Christianity; he avoids mentioning Eastern religions) is supposed to be a place of perfect and eternal bliss. For many centuries, ignorant fools have yearned for this heaven, believing it to be a place where they are liberated from all the sufferings of the Earth. But as the lyrics of ‘Wormboy’ suggest, things aren’t that simple, especially when it comes to Christianity.
From this eternal bliss in heaven narrative, one question naturally arises: why would someone wish they were in hell?
Mainstream philosophy has difficulty grappling with such a question. Because even our metaphysical thought is infused with materialist logic, it’s hard to imagine someone desiring anything for non-materialist reasons. Thus, we understand the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. But we don’t understand spiritual motivations nearly as well.
As such, we can understand what would motivate a person to want to get to heaven. The eternal bliss of heaven seems like a never-ending Oxycontin buzz to materialist cultures such as ours. We can all understand wanting pure pleasure.
Most people associate heaven with the ultimate final goal, the victory condition of life. If owning a home with a million dollars in the bank equals success in the physical plane, getting to one of the heaven realms equals success in the metaphysical plane. To get to heaven is to win at life. So why would a person who got there wish that they were in hell?
An Elementalist can readily explain: boredom.
The Fourth Tenet of Elementalism holds that the natural state of consciousness is one of perfect bliss. Following from this tenet, Elementalism teaches that this perfect bliss soon became excruciatingly boring. This boredom was what motivated God (understood in Elementalism to be the same thing as consciousness) to dream up something other than perfect bliss.
Elemental Elementalism 21.2 states: “It was in order to alleviate boredom that God forgot some of Godself, and, in so doing so, dreamed up the Great Fractal.” All of the various worlds in existence were dreamed up in order to alleviate the boredom of eternal bliss.
This includes the lowest of the hell realms.
It’s hard to realise, while on Earth, that any world must eventually become boring after enough time spent there. Earth is such a desperately miserable place that the vast majority of beings who incarnate here come to wish they were somewhere nicer. So, for the vast majority of Earthlings, the entire will is focused on getting to heaven. But when you get to heaven, you’ll get so bored that you will wish you’re in hell.
Infinite suffering is preferable to infinite boredom. At least infinite suffering has variety. Being forced to endure the infinite non-variety of the highest of the heaven realms is a form of suffering that is, in its own way, greater than the suffering of even the lowest of the hell realms.
So few of us appreciate the magnitude of the disappointment that awaits us in heaven!
Appreciating facts as esoteric as these is the preserve of a small number. Marilyn Manson may have seen aspects of reality that very few other humans have seen, and encoded references to this arcane knowledge in the lyrics of his songs.
It has long been known that Marilyn Manson is a fan of esotericism, and references to that are everywhere in his lyrics. Could it be that Manson himself has experienced, on occasion, such perfect bliss that he understands that there’s more to life than mere pleasure? If so, does it mean that Manson has cleared the Third Hurdle, transcended egotheism, and become a Luciferian?
I am writing to seek clarification on New Zealand’s current stance regarding psychedelic substances, particularly in the context where these substances are considered spiritual sacraments.
The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act states in Section 13 that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief”. Section 15 states that “Every person has the right to manifest that person’s religion or belief in worship, observance, practice, or teaching, either individually or in community with others, and either in public or in private”.
A fair reading of these sections suggests that New Zealanders have the right to use spiritual sacraments.
Indeed, this is already true with regards to the religious use of wine in the Christian Eucharist. New Zealand Anglicans use wine as a spiritual sacrament, the psychoactive ingredient being, of course, alcohol. But there are many other substances that serve as spiritual sacraments in the religious and spiritual traditions of the world.
The use of psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca and other entheogens has been deeply rooted in various spiritual and religious practices around the world for millennia. These practices often regard these substances not merely as drugs but as sacraments crucial for spiritual exploration, healing and connection with the divine or the deeper self.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most famous of the mystery schools that characterised pre-Christian European spirituality, running for 2,000 years and attracting anyone who was anyone in ancient Greece or Rome: Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius and the Emperor Julian were all known or believed to have participated.
Cicero wrote of them that “Though Athens brought forth numerous divine things, yet she never created anything nobler than those sublime Mysteries through which we became gentler and have advanced from a barbarous and rustic life to a more civilised one, so that we not only live more joyfully but also die with a better hope.”
Initiation into these mysteries involved the consumption of a drink known as kykeon. The mycologist R Gordon Wasson, the chemist Albert Hoffmann and the historian Carl Ruck have argued that the kykeon contained an entheogenic substance. Their book Road to Eleusis made a compelling argument that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played an integral role in the creation of Western Civilisation.
Robert Graves believed that linguistic evidence revealed the kykeon to include some kind of mushroom. Terence McKenna supported this assertion, pointing out that psilocybin-containing mushrooms had both the capacity to cause extreme psychospiritual change and the safety profile that would have allowed thousands to use them every year without getting a reputation for being dangerous.
The claimed benefits of the Eleusinian Mysteries included losing one’s fear of death, gaining a belief in the afterlife, learning to understand the will of the divine and improvement of moral rectitude. These benefits are very similar to those claimed by modern psychedelic users – Erowid.org lists hundreds of mystical experiences of people who have taken psilocybin.
It’s apparent from these arguments that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played a role in the moral and civil development of Western peoples during our greatest ages. But the potential of psychedelics to induce spiritual insight is not limited to the ancient age or to the West.
The Marsh Chapel Experiment conducted by Walter Pahnke in 1962 discovered that psilocybin is capable of inducing powerful spiritual experiences in modern people. A long-term follow-up questionnaire found “experimental subjects wrote that the experience helped them to recognise the arbitrariness of ego boundaries, increase their depth of faith, increase their appreciation of eternal life [etc.]”
One of the participants in the Marsh Chapel Experiment noted in the long-term follow-up, regarding death, “I’ve been there. Been there and come back. And it’s not terrifying, it doesn’t hurt.” Such an insight is profoundly spiritual. Many of the other participants made similar observations. One remembered their experience as “one of the high points of their spiritual life”.
This experiment demonstrated that the link between psilocybin and spirituality can be established within a modern, scientific paradigm. More recent research has supported this, with a 2024 paper in Current Psychology finding that “psychedelic use is linked with a variety of subjective indicators of spiritual growth, including stronger perceived connections with the divine, a greater sense of meaning, increased spiritual faith, increased engagement in religious and spiritual practices, an increase in feelings of unity and self-transcendence, positive changes in worldview, increased connectedness with others, and reduced fear of death”.
R Gordon Wasson believed that the soma referenced in the Rig Veda was the fly agaric amanita muscaria. Supporting his contention was the fact that Siberian shamans were still using this mushroom for spiritual purposes. More recently, Russian researchers have found evidence suggesting the active ingredient in soma was psilocybe cubensis. In either case, psychoactive mushrooms have a history of religious and spiritual use in India as well.
Although the record of historical psychedelic use is not as strong in Europe as it is in the Americas and Asia, there is still evidence of magic mushroom use in Spain from some 6,000 years ago.
In New Age spirituality, psychedelics are used extensively. In Nelson, where I am from, it’s common to use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments outside the purview of any institutional authority. “Mushroom Season” describes the time of the year beginning in early winter and ending around midwinter when psilocybin-containing mushrooms are foraged, dried and consumed as spiritual sacraments.
In light of all this, significant questions arise concerning the human rights implications of New Zealand’s drug laws as they pertain to psychedelic substances. Once it is understood that psychedelics are spiritual sacraments, there’s a compelling argument to be made that restrictions on their use infringe upon the freedom of religion and belief, a fundamental human right protected under various international treaties to which New Zealand is a signatory.
Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to freedom of religion” and “to manifest his belief in practice”. Given the widespread use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments throughout time and space, this right must surely encompass the right to use psychedelics to manifest spiritual belief in practice.
An appropriate reading of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act suggests that the right to use psychedelics for spiritual purposes is guaranteed. In reality, however, a hierophant who wanted to conduct a sacramental ritual akin to the Eleusinian Mysteries could potentially face life imprisonment for the supply of Class A drugs.
This letter seeks to understand how current New Zealand drug laws reconcile with the rights of individuals to practice their spirituality freely, especially when such practices involve substances that are currently classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
The laws against the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes reflect, to a major extent, the historical Christian dogma against pharmakeia. This is the same dogma that led the Christian fanatics under Alaric to destroy the Eleusinian Mysteries in 396 by killing its priests, that led the inquisitors of medieval Europe to burn witches at the stake for using spiritual sacraments, and which inspired the Catholic invaders of the Americas to eliminate the sacramental use of teonanacatl by murdering the shamans who specialised in it.
It has also been suggested that much of the modern opposition to the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments comes from organised religious groups who want to position themselves as ticket-clipping intermediaries between the people and divinity. However, as can be seen from reading the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, Kiwis have the right to commune with divinity without the need of an intermediary. This necessarily means the right to use spiritual sacraments.
As other laws based on Christian prejudices – such as those regarding marital rape, homosexuality, prostitution and abortion – have been discarded in favour of greater freedom, the laws prohibiting the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes ought to be discarded. Indeed, many countries and territories have reformed their psychedelic drug laws, based on arguments such as the ones made in this letter, plus others.
In closing, I respectfully request a detailed clarification or review of how New Zealand’s drug policies align with the principles of religious and spiritual freedom and human rights. Understanding the government’s perspective on this matter would not only inform those within New Zealand who use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments but would also contribute to broader discussions on drug policy reform that respects cultural and spiritual diversity.
Thank you for considering this important issue. I look forward to your insights and hope for a dialogue that can potentially lead to policies that honour both the law and the deeply held spiritual convictions of many New Zealanders.
The Mithraic Ladder is an occult concept referring to a ladder of seven steps. This ladder is not a physical object, but something that exists in the World of Forms. To climb the Mithraic Ladder is to perfect oneself spiritually. Thus, climbing higher involves going through a number of spiritual transformations. Symbolically, this ascent represents a return to God, to fully harmonise with the will of the Tao.
The Ladder of Mithras was a concept from the Mithraic Mysteries, a mystery school of ancient Persia. The Roman Empire stretched as far as Persia during the time of Trajan, and some of the Persian gods were syncretised into the Roman pantheon. By the time of the Late Empire, many legionnaires had been initiated into the Mithraic Mysteries and were followers of Mithra.
Initiation into the Mithraic Mysteries involved a series of seven degrees, wherein the candidate was subjected to a number of ordeals, with each ordeal somehow related to the degree in question. Precise knowledge of the true nature of each ordeal has been lost, but it is known that each one had an alchemical correspondence.
Symbolically, the Mithraic Ladder can be understood as the entire spectrum between good and bad, arranged vertically and then divided into seven steps, such that the bottommost step was the most bad and the topmost step the most good. These seven steps represent ascension through the degrees of the Mithraic Ladder.
The Mithraic Ladder is very similar to what an Elementalist would call the Great Masculine Axis. This is because it is in the nature of the masculine to divide between good and bad (as opposed to the nature of the feminine, which is to divide between masculine and feminine). It’s a line that runs directly upwards.
The seven steps of the Mithraic Ladder are roughly equivalent to the seven chakras in Vedic philosophy. As such, the process of rising up the Mithraic Ladder is similar to a kundalini awakening. Because this book is written primarily for a Western audience, it uses primarily Western esoteric terms to describe this process. Thus, the seven steps, from lowest to highest, are named in this book after the seven alchemical metals: lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, mercury and gold.
The level of spiritual development of any person – whether real or fictional – could be described as a position on the Mithraic Ladder. The bottommost step represents an undeveloped person, still an animal. The uppermost step represents a spiritually perfected person. The five steps in between represent the intermediate stages.
The book makes the argument that the most interesting thing about the development of any character (in this context, we are talking about fictional characters, but much applies to real-life ones) is their spiritual development. As such, the plot of any story can be summarised as the protagonist’s efforts to climb the Mithraic Ladder – or to descend it, in the case of tragedies and anti-heroes.
The Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Journey is the ultimate archetype of fictional stories.
The most complete description of the Hero’s Journey was made by Joseph Campbell, the American mythographer. Campbell, in his landmark Hero With A Thousand Faces, wrote “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men”.
Campbell described the Hero’s Journey as the monomyth underpinning the heroic stories and folk tales of cultures all around the world and all throughout history. It’s the one basic template of a story that everyone seems to naturally take an interest in, whether old, young, male, female, educated, uneducated, black, white or anything else.
Campbell’s basic formula is separation-initiation-return. The hero begins the story in their ordinary world, where their ordinary life progresses as usual. Then, some event upsets the natural order of life. Usually there is an evil antagonist behind this event. The hero is then cast into the special world, where they undergo a number of trials. If they pass them, they are initiated into a higher order of being. Then they return to their ordinary world, transformed into a hero.
Over the course of an interesting story, the protagonist has to change – from an ordinary person into a hero. They have to develop, otherwise the author is writing pulp fiction. The term ‘Hero’s Journey’ describes the typical pattern of development. It can have up to 20 stages depending on how detailed a person wants to get.
In children’s stories, it’s acceptable for the protagonist to develop in crudely material ways. They gain a fortune, they kill the enemy commander, they rescue the princess. But the sort of person who keeps reading fiction into adulthood soon wants more from their literature. They want more subtle character development.
Sophisticated literature is more about the emotional, mental and spiritual journeys than about physical ones. Readers want characters who change, who become permanently transformed by the trials they have undergone. What they want is a relatable Hero’s Journey that appeals to them on a deep level.
In a complete story written for modern audiences, the plot will be more complicated than separation-initiation-return. There will be multiple separations and initiations, and multiple false returns. The tripartite nature of the monomyth doesn’t change, however. The general pattern can be thought of as a descent down the Mithraic Ladder, then a spiritual transformation, then an ascent back up.
The contention made by this book is that this Hero’s Journey is most interesting if it’s considered in alchemical terms. Thus it is changes in a character’s frequency of consciousness over time that primarily makes a story interesting to a sophisticated, intelligent reader.
Alchemy
Alchemy is defined in this book as the process by which a person goes up or down the Mithraic Ladder. It has nothing to do with the transmutation of anything physical into anything else physical – it’s all about spiritual transformations. As such, there are two major types of alchemy: anabatic and katabatic.
Anabatic alchemy is the process of increasing one’s frequency of consciousness and ascending the Mithraic Ladder.
The ordeals of the early stages of this process only require small efforts, but they must be diligently repeated. Once the process is underway, greater efforts must be made to progress further, but with less emphasis on repetition. The process is finalised by a few acts of immense will.
This is what is typically referred to as the alchemical process. Spiritual lead is made into spiritual gold through a series of six refinements: enlarging, hardening, colouring, brightening, quickening and perfecting. This process is discussed in detail in the six chapters under the ‘Anabasis’ heading.
Katabatic alchemy is the process of decreasing one’s frequency of consciousness and descending the Mithraic Ladder.
As with anabatic alchemy, the process of katabasis begins with a large quantity of actions of individually low impact, and ends with major acts of high impact. The essential difference is that acts of katabatic alchemy are bad ones, increasing the suffering and misery in the world. Thus, spiritual gold is made into spiritual lead by a series of six defilements: imperfecting, retarding, dullening, discolouring, softening and shrinking. These stages comprise the six chapters under the ‘Katabasis’ heading.
This reverse alchemical process is not generally considered to be alchemical or heroic, but the fact is that before any character can rise to perfection, they must have first fallen out of it. As Carl Jung wrote “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” Any character can be made more realistic and easier to identify with if they have a bit of a dark side. Also, katabatic alchemy can help expand your antagonist’s back story, letting the reader know how they became that way.
The alchemical maxim solve et coagula, is very much like separation and return. This is closely analogous to the katabatic and anabatic stages of the alchemical process. The idea is to break apart one’s consciousness and then build it back stronger, like an athlete breaks apart his muscles in order to grow them.
The initiation phase, which occurs outside, between and beyond katabasis and anabasis, is where the real magic is. This initiation phase, in alchemical terms, is where the real magic of the fictional story happens, where katabatic energy is transformed into anabatic energy, and a character begins to ascend the Mithraic Ladder again.
At least in theory: a real story plot will be far more complex than this. In practice, a character attempting to rise up the Mithraic Ladder will encounter numerous obstacles, reversals, challenges and setbacks that will knock them back down a level or two. Betrayals and unexpected events might demand a temporary step down the Mithraic Ladder in order to get business done.
The Alchemy of Character Development
Understanding the Mithraic Ladder, the Hero’s Journey and alchemy, the reader of this book will understand the essential nature of excellent literature. The alchemy of character development is the storytime magic that causes your fictional characters to transform from one spiritual level to the next.
Almost everyone can relate to the basic struggle of wanting to be good but sometimes being bad out of weakness. Even young children understand the basic challenge of temptation to do things that aren’t in their long-term interest. This is why so many intriguing stories are based around temptation and moral dilemmas (for more on this specific topic, see Book 3 in this series, 16 Moral Dilemmas).
In alchemical terms, this is the struggle of wanting to rise up the Mithraic Ladder. The desire to rise up and reunite with divinity is understood by people everywhere. Mature readers will also understand that there is a dark side to the human being, something that drives them down the Mithraic Ladder, and that this is in conflict with the first force.
This alchemy is what makes fiction good, and what makes literature memorable.
The goal of this book is to describe, in the clearest terms, all the possible alchemical journeys that could be taken by a character in dramatic fiction. This description can be thought of as a series of archetypal templates of psychological transformation. How those transformations happen is explained in depth in each of the individual chapters.
This magic of alchemy, as described in this book, is not limited to the protagonist of your story. Minor characters that undergo the transformations described in this book will be much more interesting than static characters. So will antagonists that undergo katabatic processes. Even characters that are only described in passing can be made more interesting if their backstory is explicated in alchemical terms.
You can also use this book as a source of prompts by randomly choosing one of the twelve transformations described in the Anabasis and Katabasis sections, and using that as the basis for a story.
However this book is used, the information contained herein will deepen and broaden the reader’s understanding of the spiritual aspects of reality as well as the alchemical process.
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This is an excerpt from Vince McLeod’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.
