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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gregweller" data-source="post: 316257" data-attributes="member: 879">A couple of thoughts here. First, madness as it relates to hallucinogenic drugs. I remember a party back around 1971 or so. There was a pitcher of beer in the kitchen. I didn't want to stand in line at the keg, so I had a couple of glasses out of the pitcher. A couple of minutes later, someone asked, what happened to all the electric beer? It turned out that there were a 1/2 dozen hits of acid in the beer. Now, not having been a stranger to some of the more esoteric chemicals, I just quietly sat in a corner and prepared to go quietly insane for 8 hours or so. My point is that I knew what to expect. Now imagine someone who didn't know what to expect.  Or even more importantly, someone who had no idea that something like that could happen to their mind. Maybe that's a better way to approach what it would be like to experience the Mythos.  And no, I'm not having a flashback <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> .Second, I think what the Colonel is talking about is the idea of the Kaballistic tradition, which is defined as ' A body of mystical teachings of rabbinical origin, often based on an esoteric interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures.'  Now, this might not be part of any particular person's experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it's pointless to deny that this does exist.  As strange as Crowley's or Blavatsky's beliefs may seem to a heterdox interpretation of Judeo-Chistianity, it does exist as part of a continuum of belief whether or not one chooses to believe in it. When you get into stuff like the Enochian Keys, or the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, or  the Seal of Solomon, this is historical stuff. Whether or not you believe it individually or not, you can't deny that this stuff has been believed by some people at various points in history.  These are the historico-literary precursors of the Necronomicon as a literary text.I just thought of one more thing to throw into this discussion, and that's the poetry of William Blake. Now if you look at Blake's 'prophetic works' such as 'Jerusalem' or 'The Four Zoas', there's definitely a different order of reality at work here. And there's evidence that Blake really did experience this stuff. Now does this make him mad, or simply in possession of knowledge that 'man was not meant to know' ? ...if you want to consult the original texts, his complete works are available here: <a href="http://virtual.park.uga.edu/wblake/home1.html" target="_blank">http://virtual.park.uga.edu/wblake/home1.html</a>(I always did think that it would be interesting to bring Blake's works into a CoC module ...(and if you want to see what Blake's works looked like in the original, you must check out the Blake Archive at <a href="http://www.blakearchive.org/main.html" target="_blank">http://www.blakearchive.org/main.html</a> truely one of the great treasures of the Internet. )</blockquote>

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