Moses on the Mountain

In 2008, Professor Benny Shanon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem published a quiet, careful, scandalous paper in the journal Time and Mind. Its argument: the encounter of the Israelites with God at Mount Sinai — thunder, voices, the bush that burned without burning — fits the phenomenology of a powerful psychedelic trip.

Shanon is not a stoner with a theory. He is one of the world's leading cognitive scientists of altered states, author of The Antipodes of the Mind, a 500-page study of ayahuasca experiences in the Amazon. He knows what these encounters look like from the inside.

The chemistry of the desert

The Sinai is home to two plants central to his case. Acacia trees, sacred throughout the ancient Near East, contain DMT in their bark. Peganum harmala, Syrian rue, grows across the region and contains the MAO inhibitors needed to make DMT orally active. Together, they form a desert ayahuasca — the same pharmacology Amazonian shamans discovered an ocean away.

“As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe, or a third option — that he was bonded to a [psychedelic] altered state.”

Light that does not consume

The signs are familiar to anyone who has read trip reports. Geometric light experienced as alive. A voice that is not heard with the ears. Awe sharp enough to leave physical marks — Moses, the text tells us, came down with his face shining so brightly he had to veil it. Whether you read it as theology or pharmacology, something extraordinary happened on that mountain. Shanon's claim is only that we know one reliable way to make it happen again.