UFL #06 SWR - Terence & Christian Ratsch 7-95

Awaken one by one. All of us together. Sparkling. We'll become that river. Water is warm and clean. Precious earth forgive us. And then we'll know the way we're going. Let them scatter away.

Good afternoon. This is She Who Remembers, also known as Jeanne Brittingham. The show is Unfolding a Leaf on Planet Health. This is KPFK Los Angeles. Today I'm very excited to have a live guest actually live on the phone from Hawaii. Someone who if you've been a long time listener of Roy Tuckman's Something's Happening show may have heard him many times lulling you off into dreamland with his storyteller voice.

We're going to have Terrence McKenna. He's an ethnobotanist. He's an author of many, many books including Food of the Gods, Archaic Revival, True Hallucinations and many more. And he's been lecturing around the world basically for a number of years now. I've gotten to see him a number of times and I really enjoy it.

We're also going to have on tape a little later another ethnobotanist. His name is Christian Retz. He's a German ethnobotanist and he lives in Palenque, Mexico.

And the talk I have by him on the history of hemp in Germany and Europe will wake you up to some new facts you may not have known.

In fact, I didn't know about him until I heard the tapes. So we've got a really exciting show. I've got some news stories I want to get to today and some events coming up.

And there's a lot going on in Southern California on the issue of hemp. We're here to unfold the leaves of history and plant the seeds of truth about the hemp plant.

And are we ready to go to Terrence? Hello, Terrence.

Hi, I'm standing by. How are you? Just great. You're on the big island of Hawaii, right?

Yeah, I am. Yeah, we can hear you just great. It's so great to hear your voice here on KPFK again.

Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah. One thing that people who've been listening to my tapes for a long time now,

the Seeds tape I put out, which is a tape of information all about hemp,

you were one of the original people on it talking about the archaic history of the hemp plant.

And for those people out here that haven't heard you before,

why don't you give a little brief history of what you know about this plant?

Well, this is probably...

In fact, I believe in Chetalhoyuk they've found hemp linen fibers in the graves that are like 8,000 to 9,000 years old.

I think you're right. It was...

You know, I recently had Lynn and Judy Osborne on with their new book,

Green Gold, The Tree of Life, Marijuana and Magic and Religion.

And the thing that really astonished me was that in all the temples of all the religions,

they've always burned incense.

And originally that incense was hashish.

And what does that say about religion?

And all of these people who were having visions and talking to God were all inhaling the fumes of hashish.

Well, I think, you know, very...

Yeah, and one of the things you've talked about, too,

is how the use of this plant opens the doors of communication amongst people.

Right. Well, language...

Sounds like another hundredth monkey story.

Well, I hope we can put it on these experiments.

Well, I find that when I'm sitting with a group of people

and we may be inhaling the fumes of this plant,

that you get very open and you communicate with people

and you start understanding more where,

as if you sat down and drank a six-pack of beer,

you'd probably end up arguing with each other.

And Lynn and Judy mentioned that a lot of the ancient holy anointing oils

were very psychoactive.

And when they would use these oils on the body,

there would be like take flight from the intoxicants in the oil.

Well, you take oil...

I sent you a copy of the November high times that I had the luck to be in.

I saw it, yeah.

Yeah. There were some great quotes from Fruit of the Gods

on the connection with the feminine and the hemp plant.

Well, yes.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to Native American activist,

singer-songwriter John Trudell on a radio show,

and he pointed out that he didn't think that it was just about money.

It wasn't just about corporations that they keep the hemp plant illegal,

but it's also about perception,

about how it makes you think and look at things

that they don't want us to have.

We can't be good little robots in the New World Order

if we have the perceptions that this plant gives to us.

No, I think it's...

That's right.

They've recently, in the last couple of years,

discovered that there's receptors in our brains

for a number of these psychedelic plants,

one of them being the hemp plant.

And you gave a talk one time,

it was the first time I got to hear you live up in Port Wyneme,

about opening the doors of creativity.

And I'm an artist,

and the use of this plant really helps a lot when I'm just creating

because I don't sit down and follow patterns.

I just sit down and it comes to me and I make it, you know.

The Scythians have little tents that they put their head into

so their heads were totally enclosed and just breathed and breathed.

Yeah, well, they...

Well, they've found many cauldron-type things

in the burial mounds in that area where the Scythians were

that had burnt hemp seeds in it.

They just threw the whole butt in these hot cauldrons and breathed.

Well, I have a feeling that the archaeological...

Well, you once said that the possibilities

that this plant had been carried over the Bering Strait from Asia

would tend to lead people to think that it was here

long before the Spaniards came here with it.

Yeah, there's a lot of questions.

Well, one of the things, I think, too,

that I've heard you talk about that not too many talk about,

with all this history that we're unfolding now,

so much of it that's been hidden for many years,

this is something that we really have to be straight with our kids about.

We really have to tell them the truth and be honest with them,

not run and hide in the bathroom to puff a little when they're not around.

Yeah, I think so.

And it's about time to start bringing these truths out to everyone.

There's so many of us across the country that know this information now.

We really need to keep talking to people and explaining to them

before all our rights are stripped away.

Well, it's...

Well, you've been doing a lot to help educate the world, I'll tell you.

I've spent so many hours listening to you on tape.

It's just wonderful to have you on the air again here.

Is there any events you have coming up over on the mainland?

Well, I'm doing a full-time job.

And you're working on a new book, too?

I'm working on a new book.

Is there any way people can get a hold of you?

They can.

Oh, that would be wonderful.

And maybe when you get over to the mainland,

we could do a phone-in from there so you won't have to be on cellular.

That would be nice.

Well, let's bear that in mind.

Okay, well, we'll keep in touch.

And thank you so much for talking with us today.

And I will mail you off a copy of this entire show.

And we're going to get ready to listen to a friend of yours,

Christian Wretch, after we get back here.

All right.

I'll be talking to you.

Okay.

Thanks, Terrence.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

That was Terrence McKenna, live from Hawaii by phone.

If you're interested in the talks he's doing up at Esalon,

I do know that the brand-new Psychedelic Illuminations,

which just came out,

does have the whole schedule of Terrence's talks in there.

And somewhere around here I do have Psychedelic Illuminations.

Oh, here's Psychedelic Illuminations.

Phone number is 714-733-1252.

714-733-1252 to get a brand-new copy of Psychedelic Illuminations.

And it does have Terrence's schedule in there for Esalon.

So what I want to do now is take a quick music break,

and then we'll come back, do a little talking,

and we'll listen to Christian Wretch.

Thank you.

This is KPFK Los Angeles, Planet Health.

The show is Unfolding the Leaf.

I'm She Who Remembers.

And that was Kenny Loggins' Conviction of the Heart,

which I think that most of us who've been active in getting information out

and educating people, it's something that you do from your heart.

And Kenny's been a pretty good activist out there, too,

with the environment and health.

So I'd like to share his music also.

With you guys.

And coming up next, I've got another ethnobotanist.

I don't know if you know what ethnobotanist is.

What they are is a person who researches not only the botany

or the plants in an area, but also the culture around that.

The people who have lived with the plants since the beginning of time,

they search the ancient histories of these plants

and how they've been used medicinally, shamanistically.

And they're very important people.

They have a lot of information out there that we don't get

in our regular history classes at school.

Okay.

The guy I have coming up is someone Terrence knows.

His name is Christian Wretch.

He's a German ethnobotanist.

And he lives and works amongst the people of Palenque, Mexico.

This is a talk that he did in January 1995 in Palenque.

It's a talk called Psychoactive Plants of the Old World.

And I've excerpted the part about the hemp plant.

And after the tape, I will be able to give you an address

where you can write and get copies of this tape if you'd like to.

It was put on by the Botanical Preservation Corps.

And here we go to Christian Wretch.

In the 60s, I was always told there is no traditional use of hashish in Europe.

And because there is no traditional use of hashish in Europe,

it should be illegal because Germans cannot deal with this kind of plant material.

So, I never believed that.

And I never believed what people told me about hashish.

Saying it makes you addicted to it and it takes your motivation to do work.

And you're, well, in the same sentence they always told me,

you never get to a job if you have long hair.

Just one of these other lies.

And I had enough jobs and I never cut my hair.

And I never believed in that foolish statement

that hashish does not belong to German culture.

Well, this was a feeling.

So, I started smoking dope when I was 12 and that's now for 25 years.

And I'm still waiting for the day not to wake up and have any motivation to work or to do anything.

When I wrote my dissertation, I smoked a couple of grams every day.

And so, I found out that the hashish increased my intuitive intelligence quite a bit.

So, I continued to smoke it and eventually I started to do research on the history of cannabis.

And I always had also the feeling cannabis is healthy.

Well, when I was a kid, I was told it's very bad for your health, of course.

But then I started a research project and it was called

An Ethnomedical Investigation into the Use of Hemp as a Remedy.

So, I looked through the literature of ancient healing systems and healing arts

and looked up the herbal books of old China and Japan

and looked up the Ayurvedic stuff and folk medicine and Eurasia

and looked up the literature on Africa and around the world.

So, for a couple of years, I collected data on the medicinal use of hemp products.

And there were two things I was really amazed.

First of all, I was able to find over 130 illnesses

which had been medicated with hemp throughout history.

So, I don't know of any other plant with such a big medical usage as hemp.

There was the first surprise and the second surprise was I always had the idea that hemp is a plant

which came from Asia in the beginning and spread over Eurasia

and finally reached Europe and so forth.

But the oldest evidence for the use of hemp is not found in Asia, it is actually found in Germany.

And this was a bud containing seeds they found in Neolithic caves in East Germany.

And these layers are supposed to be 7,000 years old.

So, I couldn't believe what I found and the evidence is very clear and it's not written up in high times.

It's, you know, it's written up in the annual archaeological report of the archaeological institute of some German university

and stuff like that.

So, I thought to myself, well, this proves at least that the plant was known to all my ancestors and all over Germany.

And that showed me that my intuition as a kid was right, that hashish has something to do with German history and prehistory.

And I found a lot of other evidence.

For example, in Germany and Switzerland, they discovered tombs, maybe Germanic, maybe Celtic, 2,500 years old.

And in these tombs, they always discovered female cannabis flowers and seeds.

So, at that early time, Germans and Celts already used hemp as a grave good, give it to the deceased.

And then, sometime later, the whole plant was sacred to Freya.

Freya is the Germanic goddess of love, and to me, it's, of course, very natural to have a sacred plant of the goddess of love,

which acts as an aphrodisiac.

Maybe you came across this effect, too.

So, I think hemp is one of the best aphrodisiacs so far, especially if they are mixed with some other herbal materials.

My favorite, my favorite recipe to use hemp as an aphrodisiac is a smoking mixture.

One-third hashish, or female buds, one-third bright datura, or henbane leaves, and one-third bright amanita muscaria.

That's a very delicious, nice little smoke for tantric practice.

Well, so, the German goddess of love is equivalent to Venus, to Aphrodite, and sometimes they are identified.

And in the 19th century, Freya was totally identified with Venus.

But it was very clear that this plant is sacred to Freya because of the effects caused by the same plant.

So, even in the past few centuries, there had been some rituals preserved among peasants when they went out to harvest hemp.

Well, the old Germans used the hemp also for making fiber and used the seeds for food and used the oil for food and for lambs.

They used the leaves for food, too.

You can eat the leaves like spinach.

Maybe you know the comic strip of Popeye, who eats the spinach.

I think that's a symbol for hemp, actually.

So, and they used the bud for medicine and obviously for ritual purposes.

And I think they were basically used as aphrodisiacs because they were sacred to Freya.

Well, when they had this hemp harvest, the whole community came together and they sent in some nice, beautiful young ladies, of course.

They went to the field, cut some of the stuff, and then they made a fire.

So, the whole community was smoked with a burning hemp.

And then they started to harvest and it said that the harvest was always very funny and entertaining and people laughed a lot and made a lot of love in the field and so forth.

And some of that is still going on in peasant areas in Germany.

But it's basically lost.

Well, the hemp plant was used in Germany for 7,000 years until World War II.

And after World War II, when Germany became a colony of the United States, we were not allowed to have hemp growing anywhere.

So, the whole hemp industry was cut down after World War II.

And the knowledge was lost immediately.

And in the 60s, when hashish appeared on the scene, nobody realized that hashish is a product of the hemp plant.

So, that was very bizarre not to understand that something you want to use comes from a plant which grows next to your house.

That was very bizarre and it took some years for people to understand that hashish is a product of the hemp plant.

And even today, there is this belief in Germany, well, if you plant German hemp, you can't smoke it.

It won't turn you on because they think German hemp does not contain THC, which is not true at all.

Because German hemp grows very well, grows very big, gets big buds like this long, sometimes sticky, and very good to get high.

Well, maybe you have heard of what was going on in Germany last year, the decision by the Supreme Court that people with a small amount of hemp can't be prosecuted any longer.

And then the next question was, what happens if we plant it?

And there is no clue for politicians or for judges, or they just don't know what to do.

But the chief of the police department in Hamburg was asked what he would do against the marijuana plant.

And his only answer was, aren't these plants neat?

So, that was his only answer to it.

And, well, that sounds good.

So, now you can see the plant growing in many households and many gardens and people getting back to it.

And, because of mine and others' publications, many people realize now that there has been a long history of hemp use in Germany.

And they know this was sacred to Freya.

And many people are now back to paganism.

So, the whole thing turns back now.

It's very nice to see.

Well, what I forget to tell you is some very interesting story.

In the 15th and 16th century, there had been a couple of physicians who wrote and produced large volumes on the herbs.

And in Germany, we call them the fathers of botany.

The fathers of botany.

And it's about eight, nine physicians.

And they lived more or less at the same time.

And they produced big volumes on the use of plants.

Very interesting literature.

And they all have big sections on hemp.

And they have lots of different recipes how to use hemp for certain illnesses and so forth.

And one guy, Tabernay Montanus, there's a plant named after him, Tabernay Montaner.

And I was told this plant contains ibogaine and similar alkaloids.

Well, this guy, Tabernay Montanus, he was a German physician and he worked in Basel,

the place where Albert Hoffman worked later and where Paracelsus worked too.

And he stated that if women have troubles with their wombs, cramps and similar ailments,

they should inhale the smoke of the female hemp flowers.

So this is the very first written statement about the use of marijuana smoke as a medicine.

And this is published in the 16th century by a German physician.

So we have a lot of other evidence.

And I don't want to get into that.

But to me, it was like a revelation to understand that this plant belongs to my ancestors

and belongs to my cultural roots.

And therefore, I have to worship it and to use it to continue the tradition of the place.

This is She Who Remembers.

We were listening to Christian Retsch, a German ethnobotanist.

He spoke in Palenque, Mexico, in January 1995.

This is KPFK Los Angeles.

You're listening to Unfolding Relief on Planet Health.

If you're interested in getting copies of this lecture, and there's more tapes than just this,

it was an event put on by the Botanical Preservation Corps.

And Christian did a number of different talks.

You can write for these tapes.

And his name is Christian Retsch, but his last name is not spelled the way it sounds.

His last name is spelled R-A-T-S-C-H.

The name of the talk was Psychoactive Plants of the Old World.

And you write to BPC, that's for Botanical Preservation Corps,

at P.O. Box 1368, Sebastopol, California, 95473.

That's BPC, for Botanical Preservation Corps, P.O. Box 1368, Sebastopol, California, 95473.

And I will leave this information at the KPFK switchboard,

as well as many other numbers that you may need to get in touch with people in the hemp movement.

We're going to go to another short clip here.

I wanted to get to some news stories and some events coming up,

but I've got another clip that I brought along of Terrence McKenna

that he did in Santa Monica at the Phoenix Bookstore back in 1993.

He did a talk about his book, True Hallucinations.

And I found a very interesting clip that was an answer to a very McLuhan-istic question.

And I thought it was really interesting, so I had to bring this along.

And plus a short acoustic song that someone wrote for Terrence

when we went up to tape him in Ojai down in back in 1992.

So now we're going to go back to Terrence McKenna.

It seems to me that what's happening is in our minds and outside our minds,

if there is an outside our minds, but in the three-dimensional space of culture,

we're undergoing an informational revolution of some sort.

All data is rising to the surface.

Nine million computers a month are being connected into networks worldwide

at the very moment that some unknown number of people,

because we can't get data on this,

are taking psychedelics per month.

And clearly, the thing that is unique about us as a species

is that we have made much of information.

You know, ants have scripted it down into a few pheromonal signals.

Coyote packs have a kind of a pre-language.

You can make what you wish of the dolphins and the whales.

But no species has ever grabbed on to information the way we have.

And I believe that history is a self-limiting process,

that we are coming to the end of it,

that business as usual has been taken off the menu.

And that if you take all these curves,

the curve of petroleum extraction,

the curve of the spread of epidemic diseases,

the curve of the dissolution of the ozone hole,

the curve of the rise of global population,

if you plot all these curves together,

you reach the conclusion that sometime in the second decade of the next century,

the contradictions become so excruciating

that the entire thing is going to be forced into some kind of phase transition.

It may be extinction.

It may be a planetary Bosnia.

Or it could be something positive.

But business as usual is off the menu.

And the psychedelics connect you up to this looming event

because we are now having journeyed toward it for at least 10,000 years.

We're less than 20 years away from it.

So it is imminent in every sense of the word.

And to contact it, all you have to do is close your eyes,

smoke a bomber, eat a mushroom,

sit in yoga for a moment.

I mean, it is very, very near.

The energy threshold between us and the transcendental object

is very, very thin.

And that's why things are so peculiar.

Because the architecture of our collective lives

and the architecture of our individual lives

have fallen under the domain of a kind of attractor.

And this is the attractor which,

when it penetrated into our primate ancestors,

it drew out of a higher animal ourselves.

We are literally being sculpted on a scale of a million years.

An animal species, some kind of advanced monkey,

is being turned into the carrier

for a projection from the transmundane

that leaves us with one foot in the primate world

and one foot firmly planted in the angelic world.

We are a species in the process

of being alchemically transformed by the other.

And we can't know what that means for ourselves,

for the fate of the planet.

It is an absolute mystery.

It is the mystery of our own becoming.

We'll just start with a song

that was inspired by some experiences

that Terrence had started.

This is She Who Remembers.

You were listening to Terrence McKenna

from 1993 at the Phoenix Bookstore.

And also a friend of Terrence's

with a song he wrote for him

that we had the opportunity to tape up

in Ojai in 1992.

I did want to mention that

if you're interested in Terrence McKenna books,

that I do know that Deep River Books

out in Santa Monica,

512 Santa Monica Boulevard,

has many of Terrence's books and tapes.

And the number for the Deep River Bookstore

is 310-451-1224.

And that number will also be at the switchboard.

I'm getting very close to the end of the show.

I want to make sure that I announce

that there is a meeting tonight

for those who want to be involved

with the California Cannabis Health

and Hemp and Health Initiative.

Jack Harris, the chief proponent,

they meet out at his office in the Valley.

That's at the corner of Burbank and Kester.

The number there is 818-988-0285.

My next show will be on August 17th,

and the one after that, August 31st.

I get two in August.

I have some surprise guests coming.

I'm still working on them,

so I'm not going to tell you who they are.

I hope you'll join me back again then.

I will always bring to you

the most interesting people

in the hemp movement

and connected information.

This is She Who Remembers

for Unfolding Belief

on Planet Health, KPFK Los Angeles.

This was a message of hope.

And that the way we can participate in it

is by talking about it,

by telling each other about it,

by...

Flexing the muscle of language

To dispel the fear

This is the great

weapon of simple people is plain talk

with each other

Plain talk that topples government

Nothing else will do

It's always plain talk that brings on great new

ideas