In "Ancient Egyptian Herbal Wines," published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May 2009, McGovern details his analysis of the tomb treasure from Abydos belonging to the proto dynastic ruler Scorpion I. It was unearthed in 1988 by the Cairo branch of the German Archaeological Institute and dated to 3150 BC, at the very beginning of the pharaonic line that would govern the Egyptian kingdom for the next three thousand years. Some seven hundred pottery jars of a "foreign type" were found perfectly intact, amounting to about twelve hundred gallons of a royal potion. After isolating tartaric acid, the key biomarker for wine and grape products, McGovern decided to search the "yellowish flaky residue" within the jars for any herbal additives. His high-tech analysis, using solid phase microextraction (SPME) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), revealed a series of complex monoterpenes that naturally occur in a number of different plants and herbs.' Among other chemical compounds, camphor, borneol, carvone, and thymol were ex tracted from the ancient residue. They are all found in yarrow (Achillea), which McGovern has elsewhere described as "highly suggestive of a ritual involving psychoactive plants."
Because the divine intoxicant was meant to accompany the Egyptian pharaoh into the underworld, however, its use as an advanced religious bio technology cannot be overlooked. Just like the beer from Mas Castellar de Pontós, the special brew may have fueled the visionary states that allowed Scorpion I and later Egyptian kings to both witness and become one with the gods. Although priestesses are thought to have been the original enologists, and "lore surrounding the vine personified it as a female entity," Osiris likely predated Dionysus as the first male wine god.
According to the oldest surviving illustrated papyrus roll, which preserves the ancient Egyptian coronation ceremony in amazing detail, wine would be presented as an "Eye of Horus" in order to cure the king of his "spiritual blindness." A ritual meal was then ingested as part of the "secret rites" engineered to transform Osiris's earthly representative into the wine god himself. In this supreme act of "mystical conjunction" - drinking the god to become the god - the human king sought to merge with Osiris as the Lord of Death. In preparation for his eternal sleep, the royal initiate is said to have traveled to and actually experienced the cosmic underworld, receiving the awesome knowledge of what lies beyond the threshold of death. Thousands of years before Jesus or the lamas interviewed by Father Francis, the Egyptian pharaohs are said to have acquired the light body of a "shining spirit" (akh in Egyptian) that allowed them to traverse the starry afterlife.
Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name
Where the marzeah ends and the Dionysian banquet begins, nobody really knows. The God of Ecstasy had slowly taken root in the "ancient cultural internet” of North Africa and the Levant that Osiris and El had been seeding with their magic for millennia. Eventually, part of the wine god would head west to Greece as Dionysus, debuting on Euripides's stage in the fifth century BC with his Asian maenads after a tour through Anatolia. Over in Athens, Dionysus would become the Lord of Death like his Egyptian and Near Eastern counterparts, leading an annual train of ghosts into the city during the springtime Anthesteria festival. Similar to our Halloween, it was the time of year when, "attracted by the smell of the wine that rose from the opened pithoi (earthen pots) and spread throughout the city, the souls emerged from the underworld. But another part of the wine god would simply stay put, right where it all began over three thousand years before Jesus, who would become the latest God of Ecstasy to overcome death. The Nazarene was well acquainted with the underworld from the Harrowing of Hell episode that supposedly took place in the three days between Jesus's death and resurrection, when the Gospel was proclaimed to those who are now dead. It's a neat line of succession: Osiris to El to Dionysus to Jesus. The critical thing that unites them all is extraordinary wine that blurs the boundary between life and death. Immortality potions. But there's a major difference between Dionysus and Jesus on the one hand, and their divine predecessors on the other a political disagreement. Did this wine belong to the 1 percent or the 99 percent? Was it meant for the pharaohs, royalty, and elite? Or was it meant for everybody? Who should have access to the nectar of the gods? Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name
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