Ronald V Huggins

For decades, a small group of scholars and popular writers have been claiming to find images of psychedelic mushrooms hidden in dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of historic pieces of Christian art, and most especially medieval art. With the recent resurgence of interest in psychedelic therapy and spirituality, which has focused on doing more credible work than has generally been the case since the psychedelic 1960s, we also see the interpretations of these writers seeping unchallenged into mainstream scholarship. The present article singles out the scene of the third day of creation in the 12th century Great Canterbury Psalter as an occasion to analyze and counter these claims while at the same time surveying the iconography of the third creation day especially in 11th–13th century Western European manuscript illumination. Given the focus of the third creation day on the introduction of trees (Genesis 1:11), which these authors tend to identify as psychedelic mushrooms, we shall also describe the medieval artists’ process of drawing and painting stylized trees.

Authors discussed in this article include Don Lattin, Erwin Panofsky, R. Gordon Wasson, John Marc Allegro, Carl A. P. Ruck, Georgio Samorini, Michael Winkelman, Blaise Daniel Staples, Mark Hoffman, Jerry and July Brown, Jan Irvin, John A. Rush, and others.

Some have doubted the sensational claim of “Ex-Evangelical” Mormon convert David Alexander that he was an evangelical for 47 years prior to his conversion to Mormonism.  Part of the reason is that during the past c. 18 of those 47 years Alexander belonged to a communal group called the Twelve Tribes, who follow the teachings of a recently deceased prophet named Gene Spriggs, and which some have labeled a cult.  Alexander insists that they are just another evangelical denomination, which rings false to many and seems to serve his claim of being an evangelical for 47 years. During most of the time prior to the Twelve tribes Alexander jumped from one group to another, something he had in common with Book of Mormon witness, Martin Harris.  The question has been asked whether Alexander is a spiritual "grifter" or a Martin Harris. I argue the latter.

In 1996 Andreas Ebert announced the discovery of a passage by Evagrius of Pontus indicating that the fourth-century desert father used the Enneagram, significant since Evagrius's eight (or nine) deadly thoughts eventually evolved into the seven deadly sins. Many Christians embraced Ebert's claim. This article shows two factors that refute Ebert's claim. First, Evagrius's text is a typical example of a widespread patristic practice that sought theological significance in figurate numbers, and had nothing to do with diagrams such as the Enneagram. Second, the proto-New Age teacher Oscar Ichazo first connected the Enneagram symbol and the seven deadly sins around 1969.

The two key examples of the Enneagram's occult remainders mentioned are (1) Gurdjieff's doctrine of three brains, whose imbalance allegedly leads to the problems of human existence, and (2) the linking of the enneagram's 9 personality types via the alleged numerological significance of the number 142857.

Gandhi is frequently credited with coining "Love the sinner, hate the sin." More informed readers also note that Augustine of Hippo said something very similar in his Epistle 211 (5th cent.).  Normally, however, nothing is said about the history of the saying between Augustine and Gandhi.  Sometimes it is even implied that Gandhi coined the modern form of the saying.  In fact, some form of the saying appeared quite frequently during the intervening centuries.  It was commonplace during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gandhi did quote the saying, as did other Indian teachers before him, including Rama Tirtha and Vivekananda.  But he did not coin it.

The Herod-like “massacre of the innocents” of infants ten days old and younger contemplated by Kaṁsa and his ministers in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa book 10, is not, as Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarker and other early Indologists suggested, due to the influence of Christianity. But it is a later embellishment on the developing story of Kaṁsa’s consultation with his ministers. This is seen in the fact that (1) the consultation itself is absent from earlier accounts of the story, (2) alternate accounts where the killing of children is mentioned do not include the detail about targeting infants ten days old and younger, and (3) the decisions of the consultation are not carried out in any systematic way in what follows in the larger narrative, which turns out to derive its shape instead from a conversation between Viṣṇu and the sage Nārada included in the Harivaṃśa but left out of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. The story of Kaṁsa’s consultation with his ministers originally arose as a response to the goddess telling him that his killer had already been born, a detail not present in certain early accounts. It also serves in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as a plot-enhancement innovation extending the shadow of Kaṁsa’s menacing presence over the entire period of Kṛṣṇa’s youth.

In springtime the thoughts of young media folk and religious book editors turn fondly to the mountains of shekels they're gonna rake in off this year's just-in-time-for-Easter "scholars discover radical new take on Jesus" story.  The first horse out of the gate this Easter season (2007) was Simcha Jocobovici's documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus that aired on the evening of Sunday March 4th, on the Discovery Channel.

A number of authors in recent years have claimed that Early and Medieval Christian art evidence numerous examples of thinly disguised psychedelic mushrooms. This article examines these claims in reference to a single image in a 13th century bestiary in Oxford's Bodleian Library (MS. Bodl. 602, fol. 27v), which is mistakenly identified by these authors as an alchemical manuscript. We conclude that the authors made many mistakes and failed to make their case and fault them on the grounds that none of them made any attempt to check whether their impressions of the picture was accurate. None consulted the original manuscript to see whether the text accompanying the picture confirmed or their impressions are called them into question. None trouble themselves to discover the manuscript's actual date or name. None tried to verify whether the manuscript containing the image actually represented an al-chemical manuscript, and if it did, which specific alchemical work it represented.

The case of Emil Schwyzer, a.k.a. the 'Solar-Phallus Man', was foundational in giving shape to Jung's early reflections on the concept of the collective unconscious. In 1906 Schwyzer identified a tail of light coming off the sun as a phallus, which Jung interpreted as a particularly important example of 'the fantasies or delusions of…patients…[being] paralleled in mythological material of which they knew nothing' (Bennet 1985:69). This was because it represented not only a single mythological symbol or idea that Schwyzer could not have known but an entire passage from an ancient document known as the Mithras Liturgy. According to Jung, Schwyzer's 'vision' also paralleled a rare theme in Medieval art. Jung's student J.J. Honegger gave a paper on the Schwyzer case at the March 1910 Second Psychoanalytic Congress in Nuremberg. In it he again discussed Schwyzer's description of the light tail on the sun but especially his concept of a Ptolemaic flat earth. Relying largely on archival material not previously discussed, the present article provides a history of the Schwyzer case along with a thoroughgoing evaluation of what Jung and Honegger made of it.

ISKCON founder Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda was convinced that the name Christ was derived from Krishna. He frequently appealed to this as a way of dispelling Western Christian reservations about participating in kirtana. The present article explores (1) the place this etymological claim played in Prabhupāda’s thinking and missionary strategy, (2) how he came to defend it in the first place, and (3) how his defense fit into the ongoing East/West discussion of the alleged etymological interdependence of Christ and Krishna that has been going on since the 18th century. At the heart of Prabhupāda’s argument is the interchangeability of Ns and Ts in the ṭavarga such that Kristo and Kesto appear as common alternative forms of the name Krishna. Prabhupāda then goes on to argue that Christos was similarly derived from Krishna as well. The argument, however, is not tenable because the t in Christos is not actually part of the original Greek verbal stem chri-, but only enters in when the suffix -tos is added to form the adjective christos (anointed). Ultimately Krishna and Christos arose independently from two separate Proto-Indo-European roots, the former from k̑ers- (dark, dirty, grey) and the latter from ghrēi- (to rub).

The Herod-like “massacre of the innocents” of infants ten days old and younger contemplated by Kaṁsa and his ministers in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa book 10, is not, as Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarker and other early Indologists suggested, due to the influence of Christianity.  But it is a later embellishment on the developing story of Kaṁsa’s consultation with his ministers. This is seen in the fact that (1) the consultation itself is absent from earlier accounts of the story, (2) alternate accounts where the killing of children is mentioned do not include the detail about targeting infants ten days old and younger, and (3) the decisions of the consultation are not carried out in any systematic way in what follows in the larger narrative, which turns out to derive its shape instead from a conversation between Viṣṇu and the sage Nārada included in the Harivaṃśa but left out of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. The story of
Kaṁsa’s consultation with his ministers originally arose as a response to the goddess
telling him that his killer had already been born, a detail not present in certain early accounts. It also serves in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as a plot-enhancement innovation extending the shadow of Kaṁsa’s menacing presence over the entire period of Kṛṣṇa’s youth.

On at least five different occasions, C.G. Jung told the story of how he and Toni Wolff saw and discussed four mosaics in an ancient Baptistery in Ravenna, Italy, that turned out not to exist, but rather had apparently represented some sort of shared visionary experience. It was, Jung said, 'among the most curious events in my life' (MDR:285). This article begins by establishing the correct date and location of this incident. Then it seeks to show, with the aid of the author's onsite investigation of the relevant sites in Ravenna, that what Jung and Wolff saw in the Baptistery actually did exist but was partly misremembered and partly misinterpreted. Pictures are included that illustrate relevant details.

This is a doctoral paper I wrote for Patristics scholar Dr. Joanne McWilliam of Trinity College at the University of Toronto (one of my minors was in Patristics).  My subject was how Pontius Pilate came to be in the Creed and what appeals to his name meant in the Early Church.  As it happened she liked the paper (which was no small thing; since she had roughed me up pretty good over the inadequacies of an earlier paper I did for her on Ignatius of Antioch, which naturally contributed to the shaping of this one), and she seemed to want to direct my dissertation.  But alas, I did not end up writing in her area.

Did the so-called Sarmoung Brotherhood, from which George Ivanovich Gurdjieff claimed to have learned so much, exist.  What about their monastery he said was somewhere in the “heart of Asia"? It's hard to say because neither is attested outside Gurdjieff.  Still, Gurdjieff does provide in the same book where he speaks of them  (Meetings with Remarkable Men [1963]) other opportunities to test his general veracity on such subjects.  I refer to another secret “brotherhood” with another monastery of which Gurdjieff claims to have had both direct and indirect contact,  namely, the Essenes whose main monastery he claimed was on the shores of the Dead Sea.  Gurdjieff tells how  his old teacher Father Evlissi (or Bogachevsky) was himself an Essene and assistant to the abbot of the main monastery on the Dead Sea.  The only problem is, the Essenes and their monastery ceased to exist in ancient times, rendering almost everything Gurdjieff says about them and Father Evlissi not only fanciful but impossible.

Can one really claim to be devoted to science without being fastidious about facts? Who would take a contractor seriously who boasted of building the finest quality homes in town but was notorious for cutting corners on materials to save money and increase his profit margin? Isn't it the same sort of thing building arguments upon supposed facts you got wrong because you failed to look them up? These are the questions I often find myself puzzling over when reading the energetic bloviations of atheist apologists like Richard Dawkins. In his illuminating book The Science Delusion, the atheist writer Curtis White accuses Richard Dawkins, and another atheist writer of similar notoriety, of missing the point that "their critics are not only talking about their scholarly limitations but about their errors, errors that a more informed or careful critic wouldn't make…". 1 My purpose here is to examine a single, rather striking, example of the kinds of errors White describes.

Mythicists do not as a general rule, “play well with others,” and so they usually don’t interact much with current scholarship on the Historical Jesus.  Instead they tend to copycat one another and recycle the outdated material of older Mythicists. As a result, their books generally have the musty feel of Old Curiosity Shops specializing in rags and bones, kitschy, period-piece objets d'art, bundles of keys, darkened by oxidation, to doors and locks that no longer exist, heaps of damp, moldering, deservedly out-of-print books, and long-discounted notions.
One such discounted notion Mythicists sometimes recycle is William Benjamin Smith’s idea of the Pre-Christian Jesus.

Mythicists often make statements about books that demonstrate they haven't read them. In his book Godless, Dan Barker, Christian music man turned Atheist, repeats a passage from another Mythicist about the first-century Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria. In the process it becomes clear that both he and the author of the quotation lack basic essential knowledge of Philo and his writings: One of the writers alive during the time of Jesus was Philo-Judaeus (sometimes known as Philo of Alexandria). John E. Remsburg, in The Christ, writes: "Philo was born before the beginning of the Christian era, and lived until long after the reputed death of Christ. He wrote an account of the Jews covering the entire time that Christ is said to have existed on earth. He was living in or near Jerusalem when Christ's miraculous birth and the Herodian massacre occurred. He was there when Christ made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He was there when the crucifixion, with its attendant earthquake, supernatural darkness and resurrection of the dead took place-when Christ himself rose from the dead and [254] in the presence of many witnesses ascended into heaven. These marvelous events which must have filled the world with amazement, had they really occurred, were unknown to him. It was Philo who developed the doctrine of the Logos, or Word, and although this Word incarnate dwelt in that very land and in the presence of multitudes revealed himself and demonstrated his divine powers, Philo saw it not." Barker goes on to elaborate: Philo might be considered the investigative reporter of his day. He was on location during the early first century, talking with people who should have remembered or at least heard the stories, observing, taking notes, documenting. He reported nothing about Jesus. John E. Remsburg's book The Christ was published in 1909. 1 As this quotation, and much of what else was said in the book, make it clear that he was not a scholar of religion.

The 19th century writer Jacob Burckhardt, who claimed Constantine never claimed to be a Christian, called Eusebius liar for unduly hagiographizing the first Christian Emperor.  Dan Barker quotes the Burckhardt passage to claim Eusebius invented the Testimonium Flavianum out of whole cloth.

How often was Josephus quoted before Eusebius?  Many have wondered why it would take so long for such an important passage to be quoted.  Mythicists often feel sure that Eusebius made it up himself, a view most scholars would dismiss, and something in any case that can’t be proved either way.  This study gives a brief overview of quotations of Josephus in Origen and other Early Church writers.

I came upon the following example of Christopher Hitchens plagiarism in his National Book Award finalist volume, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007). Hitchens gives himself away by copying the misspelled names of several gods from his plagiarized source.

I came upon the following example of Christopher Hitchens plagiarism in his National Book Award finalist volume, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007). Hitchens gives himself away by copying the misspelled names of several gods from his plagiarized source (detailed discussion follows the comparative chart). This example of Hitchens's plagiarism came to my attention when I was trying to make sense of his referring to the mother of the Hindu deity Krishna as " Devaka "

This is the original introduction to my dissertation. I put it out there (for what its worth). In it I featured the controversies and events surrounding the April 8, 1994, unveiling of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment after its having been cleaned and restored at the expense of the Japanese Nippon Television Network as a lead in to my subject. My main concern with it when I turned the dissertation in was that I had gone on far too long, but curiously, I don’t remember anyone objecting to that.

While one of my readers, Marion Ann Taylor, kindly praised the introduction as “bold,” my dissertation director, Gerald T. Sheppard, obviously hated it and spent most of his time during my defense criticizing it. The gist of his criticism was that my introduction was altogether too frivolous, too ironic, too bereft of gravitas, too downright carnivalesque, to have any place in a serious piece of academic writing. And that furthermore my flippant style caused the drift of what I was getting at there, which he also disliked, to come across as even more irritating than it would have been had I adhered to a more strictly academic style.

The major reason I think that Sheppard took umbrage at my introduction was that he was a protégé of Brevard Childs and as such a strong advocate of Canonical Criticism. There was, I have to admit, an implied gentle little poke at that approach in my discussion of whether one should prefer the older dirty version of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, which had entered into the Western Imagination as a "Canonical Image," or the new recently cleaned one, which may look strange or even offensive to us, but nevertheless gave us better and more direct experience of what Michelangelo had actually been trying to do.

In any case, I remember trying to defend myself by explaining that I was merely trying to set the tone for the carnivalesque character of the larger story I was unfolding in the dissertation as a whole and that, in my view, if one fails to keep one’s eye out for the carnivalesque aspect of all human endeavors, that yeast of folly inevitably sown in the dough of all human goings on, one ends up giving too much weight to human pretensions. I am not sure how well I succeeded in getting that point across.

In the end, I was just happy that Donald W. Dayton, who knew my subject better than anyone else present, and was one of Sheppard’s best friends, was there to defend me and keep a focus on the bigger picture. After the ordeal was over, and the announcement was made that I'd passed, Sheppard and Dayton took me out to dinner to celebrate in a pub they liked in downtown Toronto. The introduction (the offending part) was afterward duly removed, replaced with something more appropriately bland and descriptive, and everybody was happy. Yet I still consider it to be some of the best writing in my dissertation, or at least the writing I liked best and had most fun with.

This is my original 1996 University of Toronto/Toronto School of Theology Doctoral Dissertation.  I have previously uploaded a gussied up version of the dissertation under the title Romans 7, Conversion & Sanctification from Arminius to Ironside (1591-1928): How Theology, Personal Experience & Wishful Thinking Shaped our reading of the Seventh Chapter of Romans.  The latter has been corrected and changed and added to at points.

This  paper was presented in the Sayings of Jesus Consultation at the 2014 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. It argues that in order to understand ancient texts  we must pay attention not only the  Sitz im Leben ([motivating] life situation) of the ancient writer or writers of the text but also tthat of the current interpreters of the text. The failure to recognize this has lead to a great deal of confusion in current Biblical Insterpretation do to the fact that interpreters tend to uncritically attribute their own motives and concerns to ancient writers.  In the case of Jesus this has meant recreating Jesus in the image of the ideal human being of our own imagination. In this paper we describe three dominating Sitzen affecting interpreters of our time, in terms of their own spiritual formations and with special reference to the influence of Eastern Thought:

(1) Mainline Protestantism’s Scientistic Monism with its implicit debt to India,

(2) Psychedelic Questers’ Anti-Scientistic Monism, with their explicit embrace of India, and

(3) Third Great Awakening Christians with their explicit rejection of India.

This is my University of Toronto, Toronto School of Theology, Doctoral Dissertation.  I am putting it up for a limited period of time.  It deals with poppular interpretation of ROmans 7 from the Arminian controversy to tyhe year prior to the publication of Werner Georg Kümmel’s pivotal Römer 7 und die Bekehrung des Paulus (1929).

Endorsements:

DONALD W. DAYTON: “The heart of [Huggins’s work]…is given over to a history of the interpretation of Romans 7 over almost 340 years…This central section is an extraordinary achievement and constitutes as careful and detailed a theological analysis of these figures as one will find anywhere, on this or any other topic.”


MARION ANN TAYLOR: “…Huggins goes beyond the bounds of history of interpretation to include the social history of popular religion, the sociology of knowledge and biography.  However, his treatment of exegetical issues and modern critical scholarship also shows that he is able to engage effectively with modern as well as historical and theological issues….Moreover he sensitively judges the merits of the various interpreters and streams of interpretation past and present…He has shown impressive research and analytical skills.  His work is cross disciplinary in many ways.  It shows an expertise in New Testament Studies, with a special concern for the history of the interpretation of texts, in American Church History, and in theology with its keen sensitivity to theological issues relating to the interpretation of biblical texts.  Huggins’ thesis is also very creative…his style of writing effectively draws the reader into the subject matter in an engaging way.  His use of long but fascinating quotations from diaries, journals, sermons, tracts, commentaries and other pertinent materials as well as his ability to paint very life-like portraits of the individuals he is writing about also make his thesis fascinating to read.”

Did the so-called Sarmoung Brotherhood, from which George Ivanovich Gurdjieff claimed to have learned so much, exist.  What about their monastery he said was somewhere in the “heart of Asia"? It's hard to say because neither is attested outside Gurdjieff.  Still, Gurdjieff does provide in the same book where he speaks of them  (Meetings with Remarkable Men [1963]) other opportunities to test his general veracity on such subjects.  I refer to another secret “brotherhood” with another monastery of which Gurdjieff claims to have had both direct and indirect contact,  namely, the Essenes whose main monastery he claimed was on the shores of the Dead Sea.  Gurdjieff tells how  his old teacher Father Evlissi (or Bogachevsky) was himself an Essene and assistant to the abbot of the main monastery on the Dead Sea.  The only problem is, the Essenes and their monastery ceased to exist in ancient times, rendering almost everything Gurdjieff says about them and Father Evlissi not only fanciful but impossible.