The Hardest Drug

Have you ever had the desire to be a witch and fly around on a broomstick? Well I can tell you how to make that dream come true. It's quite simple really. All you need is any standard broomstick, some belladonna and a vagina. Belladonna (also known as deadly nightshade) is a highly toxic vine that when ingested, causes severe delirium and hallucinations in addition to wreaking havoc on most vital organ systems. Some credible sources actually contend that the witch-flying-on-a-broomstick myth is derived from an actual practice that some medieval women participated in, which involved their use of a belladonna-soaked broomstick as a dildo. If you ingest the drug in this fashion you can be sure to fly; that is, if you don't perish in the process.

According to folklore, Satan is particularly partial to this plant, and is known to emerge from time to time in order to care for his crop. If you ever want to meet him, belladonna is the way to go. Back in my more adventurous days, I seriously flirted with the idea of attempting this experiment (minus the broomstick and vagina of course). In retrospect, I am thankful that I was not so reckless, but I must admit that this mythical drug still has some allure. I guess I can't completely rule it out.

The following is a direct quote from the website found at this address: http://www.dhushara.com/book/twelve/tw4.htm

All of Mandrake, Belladonna and Henbane contain atropine alkaloids, of which scopolamine is known as the hallucinogenic component. It is from the admixture of these three, along with the fat of a stillborn child that the ointments of medieval witches were prepared: "But the vulgar believe and the witches confess that on certain days and nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places" (S&H 88). The witch riding on her broom is believed to be specifically associated with the application of such an ointment to the vaginal mucosae which forms an ideal method of cutaneous entry. The inclusion of toads legs would also be consistent with the bufotenene present in the skin of the genus Bufo.

The witch preparing herself with her broomstick. Datura meteloides.
A Shiva Datura flower on a Tantric yoni-lingum (S&H 1979).

It was believed that such witches would ride on their broomsticks to black sabbaths where they would cavort with male sexual manifestations of the devil himself in the form of an incubus. A truer picture would be sensation of flying produced by tropane intoxication and the use of the forest as a meeting place for worshippers of the ancient Earth Goddess, possibly in a fertility rite involving the use of the hexing herbs as power plants.

~Wolf

A Review of Fox News's Red Eye

It would be a trying task for even the most imaginative human being to envision a satirical news program worse than Fox News’s Red Eye, which can be seen each weeknight at 2:00 am. The program is hosted by a man named Greg Gutfield, who—if his performance on the show is any indication of the sort of person he is, and I believe it is—is one of the most bucolic, classless, childish, and unfunny people I have ever had the displeasure of watching. Gutfield’s three regular blogger panelists, who somehow manage to be his equal in terms of knavery and tastelessness, ought not to have their names mentioned, lest someone erroneously believe that these two young men and one young woman are worth remembering.

Gutfield too, would be a forgettable figure were it not for his nightly “comedic” performances which are so monumentally awful, so humorless, so artificial, so lacking in anything which even remotely might be said to contain an iota of wit, that the viewer is essentially forced to remember this phony man and his equally phony act.

To call Red Eye sophomoric would be to insult greatly television shows which have been accused of having that characteristic. In attempting to be edgy, the show—steered by the inept Gutfield—quite often takes a politically incorrect turn, and fails to achieve, despite its best efforts, a punch line that any half-wit simpleton from America’s Red State backwaters would find worthy of a whiskey-induced chuckle. The regular panelists, however, frequently cannot help but laugh uncontrollably at each other’s “jokes” and “commentary;” and this simply amplifies the pathetic nature of this half-baked project which not even a stoner who is as high as a kite would find amusing.

Concerning the aforementioned “edginess” of the show, Friday’s program featured a fine example Red Eye’s political incorrectness in action. During a segment which lasted about just under three minutes (which, as a length of time for each of the show’s discussion topics, is par for the course, if not longer than the average), host Gutfield and panel doubted the effectiveness of slipping roofies into drinks as a method for male bar patrons to incapacitate unsuspecting females so that they may rape them. Gutfield implied that the so called date rape drug Rohypnol is just some kind of scapegoat which drunk women who have been taken advantage of blame for their having been raped. Subsequently a comment was made or a verbal exchange occurred, which was missed by this observer (attempts to locate a transcript for this and other episodes of Red Eye on foxnews.com were unsuccessful), that prompted uncontrollable laughter from the pack of cackling hyenas, and carried through the break and into the next segment. Who would have thought that slipping women roofies could make for such knee-slapping conversation?

I could reel off some further remarks about other segments on the show, but no description, no matter how illustrative, could do justice to that which is being described. To appreciate truly the stupidity of Red Eye, one must witness it first hand, although I will certainly excuse those who wish to spare themselves from such an unpleasant experience. All in all, Red Eye is a forced, awkward, bombastic piece of programming which attains a level of idiocy which might otherwise be somewhat entertaining were it not for the show’s unbelievably pathetic and contemptible nature.

~Max

Rabbit Hole Intellect

We’re in a rabbit hole, man. I’m not sure if it leads anywhere.

This is an unsettling thought for any human being, yet most of us have had this notion cross our minds at some point. It usually follows personal inquiries regarding life’s “meaning,” whether there is “life after death,” or the question as to whether there is something more to life than we now presently perceive. The title of this post is an excellent verbalization of what someone once called, “the existential creepies”—the idea that one hasn’t the slightest clue as to what his life means, if anything at all.

Regardless of what we think about life and its significance or lack thereof, we are all in this rabbit hole. It is a seemingly endless network of tunnels leading everywhere but nowhere. We are frustrated by the sheer infinite number of routes and their lengths and implications because the more we investigate, the bigger our universe becomes, and the smaller we get. Smaller and smaller and smaller, until we are nothing but amoeba dust in an inexpressibly gigantic cosmic Petri dish.

Such a realization would be traumatizing to a goodly number of people, which is why they turn to divinities to help not only explain why they exist, but where they are going after they cease to be as organisms. Notice the need by many an assurance of immortality, of an afterlife. They are not content with their time on Earth. Indeed, life can be addicting; it is the most powerful narcotic ever known. Rare is the person willing to give up his life without the most vigorous and valiant of fights, yet he has no idea just what it is he is fighting for.


Wolfgang and I (Max) do not turn to divinities and grand narratives for insight into this matter. We believe that there is no insight to be had in this regard. It would seem that most individuals blindly accept the beliefs and dogmas handed to them by their parents, who accepted the exact same beliefs and dogmas handed to them by their parents, and so on. As people are gradually inculcated with doctrines, it is only natural for them to accept these as the best explanation for the way things are, since they really know no other approach—at least not to the degree that they are acquainted with the belief system insisted on them from childhood.

In a way, we are paying a price for rejecting the traditional and prevalent beliefs of our society. We are in the minority when it comes to the God question. The best we can do is say that we humans are the result of a countless series of events which came after the Big Bang, a theory which we feel is plausible but not for certain. Of course, we have no explanation for what came before that, and so we are not going to pretend to have one.

No one can really know how the universe came about for sure. Many claim to know for certain that it was God, or Allah, or Brahman, or whatever, that created the universe, but none of this can be demonstrated scientifically, since these explanations cannot even be tested. If God in fact created everything, where did God come from? Who created God? He had to be created somehow. Our Sunday school teachers never seemed to be able to answer this question to our satisfaction. They’d say, “God was always there.” But this will not do. God had to have some kind of beginning. Yet no argument is given for this “fact,” which is very easy to accept when one does not think for oneself, and when one lives in a society where over ninety percent of the population holds this basic belief. Of course, there are variations on the theme, but none of the theistic faiths offer sufficient logical explanation which demonstrates even the remote possibility that God exists. There are some, such as Aquinas and Anselm in the Catholic faith, who have advanced theories attempting to prove the existence of God. Aquinas drew on Aristotle’s notion of the “first mover,” which he understood to be God, but for some reason he was not compelled to theorize about whom moved the first mover, in which case, it wouldn’t be the first mover.

It is not our intention to give an exposé on the philosophical questions surrounding metaphysics, but rather to show some of our basic concerns about something which a substantial number of people believe that we do not. We are skeptics, but are certainly willing to at least entertain certain ideas which may be improvable and even disreputable. In fact, we often go to great lengths to investigate extremely implausible ideas, but do so mainly for the sake of the experience itself. We feel that our perspectives of the world are broadened by exposing ourselves to phenomena outside our conceptions of reality ‘as if’ they were true. This method of investigation not only enriches the quality of experience, but also helps maintain intellectual honesty. Thus, at the end of the day, we still admit that we truly know very little, if anything at all.

~Max and Wolf