With passover approaching, everyone's searching for strategies as to how to endure yet another interminable trip down the memory lane of old mitzraim. Surprisingly, painting eyeballs on your lids and napping doesn't fool anyone! PSPs, iPhones, and other electronic devices are banned. Clandestine messages in morse are too time consuming to decode. What's left? A magical inner voyage? Counting to ten thousand? Drugs? Well, that's how Moses apparently started Passover:
According to Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, psychedelic drugs formed an integral
part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times.
Writing in
the Time and Mind journal of philosophy, he says concoctions based on
the bark of the acacia tree, frequently mentioned in the Old Testament,
contain the same molecules as those found in plants from which the
powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.
Burning Bush explained! Not only was Moses passing the bitter herb back in the day, but so were the rest of the gang. (Wouldn't you if you were stuck in the desert all that time?) In fact, it sounds like the whole Sinai scene might have been a proto-rave:
"The
thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus
says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a
people in an altered state of awareness," writes Shanon. "In advanced
forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by
profound religious and spiritual feelings."
My guess is that Moses broke those tablets because he was pissed that no one gave him a flyer for Golden Calf 1280 BC, Mark II.