Practices — 75 entries | Encyclopedia of Mystery

Practice · 37th century BCE

Entheogens

Old Rites, New Word

Names a use, not a substance: a single word for rites that are old, separate, and not alike.

What it isThe word was coined to say something precise: god-within-generating. Its makers wanted a term that named a sacramental use rather than a chemical or an effect, against 'hallucinogen', which prejudges the experience as false, and 'psychedelic', which had acquired a decade.

The FindingThe word was proposed in 1979, to replace 'hallucinogen' and Osmond's 'psychedelic' of 1957 — and the category flattens what it collects: Wasson's mushroom soma and ergot kykeon are conjectures now repeated as fact.

Read this entry

Practice · the 1650s

Ifá Divination

A Corpus Held in Memory

The cast does not forecast, it prescribes: the reading ends in an act, so destiny stays negotiable.

What it isThe cast does not tell you what will happen; it identifies which odù you are standing in, and the verses of that odù prescribe an act. Destiny in this system is real and it is negotiable — the reading is incomplete until something has been done.

The FindingIfá's 256 odù are not a table of meanings but an index into a corpus of verse carried by trained memory rather than closed by any book, and whether its sixteen figures descend from Arabic ilm al-raml, or ilm al-raml from them, is still argued.

Read this entry

Practice · 8th century

Neidan

The Furnace Is the Body

Chinese internal alchemy: the elixir compounded inside the body, in the borrowed language of the laboratory.

What it isIt takes the whole vocabulary of the outer laboratory — furnace, crucible, cinnabar, firing times — and relocates it in the body. The elixir is compounded from jing, qi and shen, refined upward and returned to emptiness. Nothing is ingested; the adept is the apparatus.

The FindingThe story that elixir deaths drove Chinese alchemy indoors is the account of waidan's own specialists, and Fabrizio Pregadio rejects it — it would have alchemists needing several centuries to notice their ingredients were fatal — tracing neidan instead to Daoist meditation on the inner gods.

Read this entry