3. The Ancient World

In order to understand the ancient stories about the Herb of Immorality you must first understand the differences between the modern world you live in and the ancient Eurasian world. These ancient stories were created in societies whose world view is entirely different than your world view, so it’s important that you begin to understand the ancient world view that these stories originated in.

The first major difference is modern people go to the store for the things we need, in fact most people in the west today are absolutely dependent on the stores. In sharp contrast our ancestors lived in the store, from the forests, fields and streams came everything they used and it was Nature that they were dependant on for food, clothing, housing, medicines, and all the necessities of human life. As a rule Primitive people generally know every plant and animal in their environment and how to use them if there is a use for them. Many ancient Eurasian societies contained healers who were masters at using drug plants for medicine. They did this without the knowledge we now posses of the chemistry involved, since it was only in 1806 that a brilliant chemist isolated morphine from opium and forever changed our view of how these magic plants actually worked.

The perspective on the world at large of the modern person is completely different than the ancient world view of the universe. The relatively recent invention in the 1600’s of the telescope and the microscope changed a world view that had existed basically unchanged for thousands of years, and expanded the modern universe millions of times over the old world view. When you look up into a starry night sky you know that some of these stars are trillions of miles away, to the ancients the Sun, Moon, Planets and Stars were only a few miles away, and things like Comets scared them since they were believed to be so close

The Microscope expanded the world view in the opposite direction

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and radically changed our idea of Nature and our ideas about our own physical body. It has revealed the causes of many diseases and the cellular miracle of all living Creation. To the ancients all of this was completely unknown with things like diseases being given a supernatural cause i.e. Demons, witchcraft, etc or vague natural causes like poisoning, bad water, food or air. The ultimate secret of how plants, animals, and people reproduced themselves was also a great mystery to the ancients who depended on the mysterious fertility of plants, animals, and themselves for their own existence

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Another basic difference between the ancient and modern worlds is how Deities or God(s), are conceived of, in the ancient world only those things that could be seen by the human eye, that were also physically “immortal”, and were of use to, or frightening to mankind, like the Sun, Moon, Earth, Sky and Fire were considered “Gods”.

In the ancient Indo-European theology the God of “heaven” was the Sky Father, Latin; Ju-piter (Jupiter), Greek; Zeu-pater (Zeus), Sanskrit; Dyaus -pita, Proto-Indo-European; Dyeus-pater and the Germanic God; Tues, as in Tuesday. The ancient peoples Sky Father is the same Sky you see everyday, a sky that brings sunshine, rain, wind, tornadoes, hail, thunder, lightning, flood or drought, and the occasional solid rock we call a meteorite. The sky father was a benevolent deity most of the time but he could also be very destructive, even a mass killer of men. The ancients were very aware of this destructive side of the Sky Father and always wanted to be on the good side of the Sky Father. Unlike the modern world there were no ancient atheists since everyone could plainly see the Sky Father, and only an idiot would have claimed the Sky didn’t exist.

In contrast the modern world view has destroyed the ancient Gods of Sun, Moon, Earth and Sky. Since a visible or real “God” no longer has a place in our physical universe, modern people only have “supernatural” Gods. These modern concepts of an invisible God are of course our way of keeping the ancient Sky Father alive in our minds and societies long after we dethroned him and destroyed his heaven with our science.

Modern people have to always remember that the Gods of the ancient people are always real things; and that the stories about these real Gods are describing something real.

Now if we blindly assume that the ancient’s concept of God was the same as our modern concept of a supernatural god then everything the ancient stories say about these real Gods, will always be misinterpreted by us, with the result being that we will fail to understand the real wisdom contained in these ancient stories about these real things.

Another very important thing to keep in mind is that the ancients always personified these real Gods in their stories; so if you naively believe the story is about the “person” in the story and do not know its about a real God/thing personified you can mislead yourself into a supernatural wilderness were absolutely nothing is real. A wilderness were confusion, illusion and misunderstanding rules all and reason can not be found.