Actual Sex

Belcutassi first observed something was terribly wrong with himself, that his inner processes seemed to not proceed with “sane logic.” What is exceptional is that this self-observation fostered an impulse to wish to change, rather than making excuses, rationalizing, comparing his irrationality to others who are worse and declaring it ‘not so bad.’ He didn’t let pride, egotism, vanity, etc., totally cried out his voice of reason, in other words. What’s even more exceptional is he embarked upon and saw through a plan to correct himself and try to act according to this “sane logic”, which, part of him could initially perceive, darkly. He “began making sincere observations” on himself, on the things he perceived, and on the impressions (automatic chains of ‘thought’ and mental associations) it produced in him. He used whatever level of objectivity he had to verify, compare, how his different ‘parts’ perceived these data.

The original:

Bee Maidens Every other year, however, the god of the lower sanctuary went into exile and the ritual reverted to the site of the ancient Corycian wolf cave. Meanwhile another deity stood in for him as a surrogate substitute for a ritual regression to the old rites of ecstatic possession and lycanthropy. He turned over the sanctuary to one of his brothers, either Hermes or Dionysus. These revels are commemorated in the column of the dancing three bacchant Thyiades that once stood before the god’s Temple. The priestesses of the cave ritual were named as three bee-maidens, a designation rich in metaphoric symbolism, inasmuch bees not only display the matriarchal society of the hive, but also set the pattern for herbalists, gathering the nectar of flowers to produce honey with its implication of mellifluous shamanic speech, but also the toxins of their sting. In this regard, they are analogous to serpents in antiquity, whose sting came from the flowers they ate, and they conversely transferred their toxins to the plants in their vicinity. Honey was the source of the earliest fermented intoxicant as mead, which is cognate with ‘mad,’ ‘mania,’ and the source of the common word for ‘drunk’ in Greek. The first Temple at Delphi was remembered as a beehive, such as is commemorated in the fifth-century BCE thólos Temple in the Pronaos sanctuary, below the Apollonian Temple complex. —Carl Ruck, Reorienting the shamanic axis: Apollo from wolf to light

It's at least a little insane that in mystery cults you could do a ritual and at the "moment of revelation" behold some objects/σύμβολα, get oneshotted by them and promptly exit present reality These were a technology, systematized, replicable You can just close the screen lmao