#The entheomycological origin of Egyptian crowns and the esoteric underpinnings of Egyptian religion

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[T]here are grounds for believing that the Pharaohs – who also served as high sem, or herbal, priests – were essen­tially shamanic herbalists, whose well-documented belief in their own divinity and immortality was induced by Psilocybe cubensis ingestion, and that these monarchs then paid homage to the Psilocybe cubensis, first by wearing various stages of it on their heads and, later, by wearing representations of those stages as crowns.

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[T]his identification can explain why the so-called Triple Crown (Fig. 2B), or hemhem, strongly suggests it was designed to represent a cluster of Psilocybes (Fig. 2A and B), while the hieroglyph for the Egyptian Double Crown, known as the shmty or pschent, comprising the White and the Red Crowns, was determined by two plants...each obviously intended to represent one of these crowns.

It is generally believed that the Red Crown represented Lower Egypt, the White Crown Upper Egypt, and the Double Crown the unification of these regions under King Narmer. However, Wainwright (1923) presented evidence that the Red Crown may have actually originated in Upper Egypt.

In any event, no theory has explained what either the Red or the White Crown was designed to represent, why both crowns were determined by plants, or why an enigmatic inscription in the tomb of the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoah Unas clearly states, “He has eaten the Red Crown, He has swallowed the Green One [and] delights to have their magic in his belly.” (Faulkner, 1998, Utterance 274).

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In any case, Egyptologists have interpreted the above state­ment as a metaphorical reference to, for example, Upper Egypt swallowing Lower Egypt, whereas these statements can and should have been taken literally, particularly considering that the practice of wearing edible plants, especially psychotropic ones, as headdresses was widespread in antiquity. For example, Fig. 3 depicts: (1) the head of a Greek deity, often identified as Demeter, wearing a crown depicting the poppy capsules that yield opium; (2) two versions of the Egyptian Nile God Hapi, one wearing a papyrus crown and the other psychotropic lotus flowers (Emboden, 1978); (3) a Hawaiian helmet sporting mush­rooms that Hoffman (2002) argued were entheogenic.

Stephen Berlant, The entheomycological origin of Egyptian crowns and the esoteric underpinnings of Egyptian religion

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Besides having been considered a personification of the White Crown, the Egyptians regarded Osiris as the personi­fied spirit of barley; for example, the Coffin Texts quote Osiris as saying, “I am Osiris ... I am barley ...” (de Buck, 1947). Osiris therefore appears in Fig. 18 covered by and shedding the barley he personified with the Atef or Osiris crown, com­prising the White Crown flanked by feathers, literally grow­ing from his head, just as Cheops and the Magicians explains allegorically how the White Crown grew from the stored barley.

Osiris was therefore typically depicted monopodially [one-legged] with arms akimbo (Fig. 19, left), obviously so he would look remark­ably like a mushroom (Fig. 19, right), especially to anyone who was privileged to the esoteric information that Osiris’s original nature was mycological. In fact, because the practice of per­sonifying mushrooms as monopodial beings was widespread in antiquity, mummies were apparently fashioned with a sin­gle or fused legs and arms akimbo to look like mushrooms, as explained more below vis a vis the tekenu.

Stephen Berlant, The entheomycological origin of Egyptian crowns and the esoteric underpinnings of Egyptian religion

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The theory that the White and Triple Crowns were designed to represent Psilocybe cubensis primordia can be supported by noting that this mushroom is commonly cultivated today in essentially the same way an ancient Egyptian story, known as Cheops and the Magicians, allegorically describes how crowns were bestowed on the newborn rulers of Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty in a document known as The Westcar Papyrus. That is, Psilocybes are commonly cultivated today by placing grain in containers, inoculating the grain with spores, and keeping the grain moist for approximately 14 days while the spores incubate. Simi­larly, in Cheops and the Magicians, crowns are bestowed on Egypt’s rulers by deities who had hidden them in barley that they exposed to a storm and later incubated in a storeroom for 14 days (Lichtheim, 1975).

The manuscript fails without explaining what happened to the hidden crowns, which Lichtheim (1975) suggested were “mag­ical tokens of kingship,” rather than crowns, in an obviously strained effort to explain the peculiarity of crowns being hidden in barley. But considering: (1) the striking resemblance the typ­ical, and particularly the atypical, White Crowns in Fig. 1 bear to Psilocybe cubensis primordia; (2) the anciently widespread practice of wearing psychotropic mushrooms and other plants as crowns; (3) the rupestrian and iconographic evidence that the ancient Egyptians had Psilocybes; and (4) the well-known practice of cultivating Psilocybes on grain, it can be inferred with a fair degree of assurance that Cheops and the Magicians was designed to allegorically explain that Egypt’s crowns were originally Psilocybes that grew from barley.

It is apparently for this reason that the hieroglyph for the White Crown (Fig. 9) comprises what can now be identified as a Psilocybe primordium, ostensibly as the White Crown, over the Egyptian hieroglyph for a basket, evidently designed to represent the barley from which the crowns emerged in Cheops and the Magicians. Hence, in Fig. 10, the Egyptian solar deity Horus holds the White Crown up to his face in a bowl or basket to signify that the crown is edible (Fig. 10).

Stephen Berlant, The entheomycological origin of Egyptian crowns and the esoteric underpinnings of Egyptian religion