Luke Caverns
speaker
1,858 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Luke Caverns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
it'll be like if you took a couple of puffs of a blunt or something like that, um, you'd get this kind of soothing feeling. You'd feel a little bit better. Um, and then in consumed in high amounts, like with anything, it's going to have a profound effect. It's going to have a strong effect, probably similar.
What I've seen it, uh, described as is, is it would probably be more similar to, uh, or consuming cannabis. Um, But there's an ancient source that attests to this. And it says, so I'm just going to read this verbatim. So Odysseus visits the land of lotus eaters. This is in the Odyssey, written by Homer in the Dark Ages, probably somewhere around 800 BC.
Likely the island of Gerba off the coast of Tunisia. So this is Odysseus speaking here, but Homer writing. He says, they started at once and went out among the lotus eaters. Now this is his expedition around the Mediterranean trying to get back home to his family in Greece. So they started at once. They went around...
They went about among the lotus eaters who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home and did not even want to go back and say what happened to them, but were for staying and munching on lotus with the lotus eaters without thinking further of their return.
Nevertheless, though they wept bitterly, I forced them back into the ships and made them fast under the benches." Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to go home. So they took their places and smote the gray sea with their oars. So he visits the land of the lotus eaters. And basically what it's saying here is that...
Whoever was eating the fruit of the lotus, which is at the core of the lotus flower. Lotus flower does not grow in Tunisia. It grows on the Nile. Whoever was eating that enjoyed it so much that they just stopped caring about anything, right? It's kind of like the stigma that we have against like potheads. Like, you know, you smoke weed all the time. You're just not going to care about anything.
You start doing drugs, you're not going to care about anything, right? So, there's a lot of people who interpret this as, oh, okay, this is having some kind of, this is not just like they're eating zebra cakes and they're getting fat and just enjoying it and they don't want to go anywhere because it's so delicious.
This is having some kind of effect on them that is affecting their, you know, psychedelic state and making them not care about going home, which is the whole mission that they're on is trying to get back to, trying to get back to Western Greece.
And so I found this really interesting, and I thought, okay, is there any archaeological evidence that we can attest to that the lotus would actually be in Tunisia or on the coast of Tunisia? Well, yes, Phoenician trade routes. The Phoenicians around this period – this is the Late Bronze Age –
um that that the odyssey takes place there are phoenician trade routes going all around the mediterranean and so you have phoenicians that may be stopping in the nile delta where the london where the where the uh the lotus grows in abundance you know acquiring these lotus and then going around on their trade routes and so is this some is this some you know very scant uh
only remaining evidence of the fact that the lotus was a hot commodity, not only in Egypt, where it's clearly being consumed in abundance because it's on every single temple wall in every tomb wall everywhere, but also it's popular in the Mediterranean. So there's something really profound about this, about this flower.
So I say trade routes connecting ancient Tunisia to Egypt through Phoenician trade routes are well-established. Could bundles of the Egyptian lotus have been a regular trade item? Question mark. I say, by the fifth century BC, the Greek traveler Herodotus was certain that the lotus eaters still existed off the east coast of Libya near Egypt. So that's really interesting.
So, you know, that's almost a thousand years later. Is there anything below that, Ryan? Oh wow, okay. Okay, so Herodotus says, a promontory jutting out into the sea from the country of the Gendanis is inhabited by the lotus eaters who live entirely on the fruit of the lotus tree. The lotus fruit is about the size of the lentisk berry and in sweetness resembles the date.
The lotus eaters even succeed in obtaining it from a sort of wine. So there, it's the lotus being mixed and aged into the wine and being consumed that way and clearly having some kind of profound effect on them. That's why they're so famous. And that's the other thing is, okay.
You know, a population of a bunch of fat people gorging themselves on cake is not really attested to in the historical record. There was something even more particular about those people that is worth preserving in history, right?
That can get kind of muddy because we are talking about the Odyssey, which is a historical fiction that's written around 800 BC about events that took place somewhere around 400 years earlier. But there's all kinds of things in Homer's writing where... we have evidence of the fact that he's using real peoples and places as part of his historical narrative.
But that doesn't mean that Agamemnon, Menelaus, Helen of Sparta, Achilles, Hector, you can go Andromache, it doesn't mean any of those people actually existed, but Troy, Mycenae, Sparta, Ithaca, these are all real people and places.
And so that can be, you know, the lotus eaters could have been something that's famous around the Bronze Age, Eastern Mediterranean, that there's this place where these people are constantly getting high, you know? So Egyptian origins of Minoan civilization and religion. So this is a little side note here. So many archaeologists and historians, including Sir Arthur Evans himself.
Now, this is the man who, quote unquote, discovered Minoan civilization. He's really the guy that bought that bought the land that the palace of Knossos on Crete exists. They knew that something was there and they knew that it may be related to this famous King Minos. So he buys it, he discovers it, and he believed or proposed that
Either A, Minoan religion was derivative of Egyptian religion and Minoan society was largely inspired by Egypt, or B, the Minoans were Egyptian colonists who continued to pay back tribute to the pharaoh until the Bronze Age collapsed.
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