Jacob Böhme (1575-1624), German Philosopher and Christian Mystic, had visions which revealed to him a special vocation from God, the spiritual structure of the world, the relationship between God, Man, good, and evil, and the unity of the cosmos. From his artwork and testimony we can deduce the source of his visions or sacred schizophrenia.
“In one-quarter of an hour, I saw and knew more than if I had spent many years at a university. For I saw and knew the being of all things.”
— Jacob Böhme
“And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.”
— Black Elk
“I learned more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than in the preceding fifteen years of studying and doing research in psychology.”
— Timothy Leary
I consider myself schizophrenic and I have observed schizophrenia in other members of my family at close up and in great detail. And, what it is, is simply the breakdown of casuistry and then ordinary people, imprisoned in the hallucination of culture, language and linear time, lock you up and put you away because you’re reporting from outside the cultural envelope and carrying information that terrifies, alarms, disturbs and drives other people crazy.
I’m talking now about process schizophrenia, which is the spectacular kind: where you bring back information that is absolutely incommensurate with the models of your culture. It’s been said that the world is becoming more schizophrenic. Well, that’s just because they didn’t have the word “psychedelic.” Psychedelic experience is essentially a kind of schizophrenia and the people who, in the early phase of psychedelic research wanted to call it a psychotomimetic, meaning it mimics psychosis. It doesn’t mimic psychosis; it’s a schizomimetic of some sort. Psychosis is a whole different pathology. But schizophrenia is simply a category for behavior and insight that the rest of society is unable to do anything with.
The schizophrenics return with the great aesthetic visions and the scientific breakthroughs and the poetic understandings and, it’s almost as though they have been aided by the demon artificers. They have taken into their retinue supernatural helpers and a shaman would say, of course, allies. And, I’m sure you all know the way in which schizophrenia and shamanism map together. I mean, our own Julian Silverman is the great pioneer in the one-to-one mapping of shamanism and schizophrenia. And years ago, when I was completely bananas, every time they would approach from three sides with nets, I had Julian’s paper called, “Shamans and Schizophrenia,” and I could quote it chapter and verse and back them off because what is called the initiatory crisis in shamanism is nothing more than a schizophrenic break with ordinary reality.
The problem is, we freak out completely and rush to drug people and give them electroshock and tie them down and slap them around. Well, so then the unfolding of the process is interrupted and it’s as though you were to, you know, perform surgery on a fetus and then be amazed when it turns out a monstrosity. When, you should have just left it alone, for crying out loud, while it was unfolding along its own cryodes of morphological development.
To become schizophrenic is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. The trick is to make sure that you’re nowhere where straight people can get at you. And my schizophrenic episode occurred in the Amazon basin and it was a five days march to just a mission. And, I’ve always felt that evading modern mental health care facilities saved my mind. Absolutely! And, in a traditional [tribal] society, it’s supported. If someone shows signs because their dreamy or they hallucinate or they’re epileptic or something like that then this is encouraged and they’re put under the care of shamans, and drugs are used to initiate the crisis in some cases. And, it’s a cause for great rejoicing to have these personalities in the culture because they’re the antennas of culture that are contacting the raw stuff of real being and transducing it down into cultural artifacts and institutions that then are useful.
— Terence McKenna: Time Travel, Psychedelics, and Physics (1991)
— Zelator, Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia
Mystical Secret Societies and Brotherhoods were often formed “secretly” due to the Inquisition in Europe threatening the lives of anyone working with psilocybin mushrooms, DMT alchemy, or anything that gave way to prophesy or the apparition of angels and spirits. Mystical sacraments were typically presented in art in a way that it would only stand out or have meaning to those who had received them, yet Böhme seems to make a rather bold statement in his artwork here.
“I never desired to know anything of the Divine Majesty… I sought only after the heart of Jesus Christ, that I might hide myself therein from the wrathful anger of God and the violent assaults of the Devil.”
— Jacob Böhme