Seshat – Goddess of Knowledge and Cannabis

UPDATE 10/15: Seshat is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Seshat (also spelled Safkhet, Sesat, Seshet, Sesheta, and Seshata) was the ancient Egyptian goddess of mathematics, creative thought, knowledge, books and writing (her name means "she who is the scribe"). Sister to Bast and daughter/sister/wife to Thoth or the moon god Djehuti, the Egyptians believed that she invented writing, while Thoth or Djehuti taught writing to mankind.

Often depicted in coronation ceremonies wearing a leopard-skin garment, Seshat's emblem is a seven-pointed hemp leaf in her headdress. Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (1479-1425 BCE) called her Sefket-Abwy (She of Seven Points). See more pictoral evidence.

In this relief (below), she wore her Seven Pointed Leaf to perform the equivalent of laying the cornerstone of the Great Pyramids – "stretching the cord" to mark the direction of true north, calculated by the stars, with a rope made from hemp. It is perhaps hemp's psychoactive effect that is acknowledged in the saying that, "Seshat opens the door of heaven for you."

Ancient Egypt is considered to be an advanced civilization in medicine and many other realms. As far back as 2350 BCE, the stone tablets known as the Pyramid Texts used the hieroglyphic symbol smsm.t—or “shemshemet”—referencing “a plant from which ropes are made,” thought by Archeologist W.R. Dawson to be hemp. The Ebery Papyrus from 1550 BCE, and likely copied from earlier manuscripts, mentions introducing shemshemet ground in honey into the uterus, possibly as an obstetric aid. "It has parallels to therapeutic applications of cannabis as a vaginal suppository in the 19th century to treat gynecological disorders and migraine," writes Ethan Russo in a 2007 paper. 

Seshat and the Pharaoh "Stretch the Cord"

Seshat was associated with Isis in the Late period, and was scribe to Hatshepsut, the female Pharoh of the 18th dynasty (c. 1479-1458 BCE). The Greeks demoted the Goddess to a muse, and in Phaedrus, Plato gives over to Thoth the invention of arithmetic and letters.

Seshat's name has been given to the Global History Databank at the Evolution Institute and Sesheta.net is the name of the African Women's Autobiography project.

Did CBD Oil Help With Valerie Harper's Cancer?

UPDATE August 30, 2019 - The irrepressible Valerie Harper has passed away, at the age of 80, after being given as little as three months to live by doctors in 2013. Rest in Power, Sister.

    

After being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in March 2013, actress Valerie Harper has announced she's cancer free.

This interesting photo of Harper was tweeted out by RS Hemp Oil on October 26, 2013 with the caption:  "Valerie Harper receives a 6 pack of RSHO from Hempmeds PX outside sales manager, Keith Urtubees, at the LA Ultimate Women's Expo."

Hempmeds is a division of Medical Marijuana Inc. Their CBD-rich Real Scientific Hemp Oil (RSHO) is derived from the industrial hemp plant, and therefore, the company argues, is legal under federal law.

Did Harper use CBD oil to treat her cancer? Calls to Hempmeds have, so far, not been returned.

Like other famous cancer survivors Tommy Chong and Michelle Aldrich, Harper also underwent "conventional" therapy. In many cases, doctors were pleasantly surprised at their patients' progress after using cannabis oils. Many states, even unlikely ones like Utah and Alabama, are moving to legalize CBD following the Sanjay Gupta CNN specials about its near-miraculous effects against severe childhood epilepsy.

Cannabinoids (both CBD and THC) have specifically been found effective against brain tumors (gliomas) in cellular studies, starting with a Spanish study in 1998 and confirmed by a group in California in 2005, which noted that THC selectively targeted malignant cells while ignoring healthy ones "in a more profound manner than the synthetic alternative," WIN 55,212-2. Many experts now believe that cannabinoids "may represent a new class of anticancer drugs that retard cancer growth, inhibit angiogenesis and the metastic spreading of cancer cells." Source.

The US Government has known since 1974 that cannabis, like other natural substances, has anti-cancer effects. Nonetheless, it has censored information about cannabis and cancer from the National Cancer Institute website.

UPDATE 1:58 PM -  I'm now reading Harper announced her cancer was nearly in remission as early as August 2013. She was using several alternative therapies, as well as conventional ones.

4/17 - Mississippi has become the 5th state to legalize CBD in some form. 

Oscar Winner Jared Leto Thanks Pot-Smoking Mom

As expected, Jared Leto won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a transsexual in the "Dallas Buyers Club" (pictured). He thanked his mother, his date for the night.

"Thank you for teaching me to dream," said Leto.

When asked recently what was his favorite smell, Leto replied, "The smell of bonfires. And of marijuana. My mom's friends always smoked that."

Matthew McConaughey—who broke out in the stoner flick "Dazed and Confused" and arrested in 1999 for smoking pot and playing bongos in the nude—won Best Actor, also for "Dallas Buyers Club." The Best Actress awards went to Cate Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine" and Lupita Nyong’o in "12 Years a Slave."

Spike Jonze, who directed "Being John Malkovich" and produced "Jackass" won best original screenplay for "Her," about a man's relationship with an  operating system "designed to meet his every need." Thus faux women took as many Oscars as did real ones.

The event was hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, who recently Tweeted about pot being available in The Ellen Shop and told a pot joke the last time she hosted the show (and this year delivered munchies).

Pink did a fantastic job singing "Over the Rainbow" in front of images of the poppy fields and the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz. In 2002, the singer-turned-mascara-model said, "I don't consider pot a drug. It's a plant. It comes from the earth. George Washington smoked pot." [Not necessarily true, but he did grow hemp and encourage others to "sow it everywhere."]

Female empowerment song "Let It Go," with the trippy lyric: "My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around" won best song. Bette Midler, who just played pot-loving Hollywood agent Sue Mengers in a one-woman play, sang "The Wind Beneath My Wings" for the yearly memorial tribute, which omitted screenwriter and drug war activist Mike Gray. 

Angelina Jolie was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her "courageous, compassionate work" to aid women and children throughout the world. (She's smoked pot, but said she didn't like it.) "The Great Gatsby" won deserved Oscars for Best Costumes and Production Design; I think there was more to it than that.

Steve Martin, who "poked smot" with Meryl Streep and was "feelin' groovy" in 2010's "It's Complicated," received an honorary Oscar. He made no comment tonight like he did when he got the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in 2006, when he joked, ""If [Saturday Night Live producer] Lorne Michaels had told me I'd receive this award one year after him, I'd have said, 'Let me have a hit of that.'" When he appears with his Bluegrass band, the banjo-playing comedian jokes about the downside of touring without a drummer: "No pot!"

This was not the case for attendees, according to TMZ, which reported some LA cannabis delivery services had to hire more drivers to service the celebs during Oscar week. Portable vaporizers were particularly popular.

Leto said upon accepting his award, "This is for the 36 million people who have lost their battle with AIDS, and to those of you out there who have ever felt injustice because of who you are or who you love. I stand here in front of the world with you and for you."

Another Buyers Club connected with the AIDS crisis was Dennis Peron's Cannabis Buyers Club, which opened following San Francisco's passage of the first-ever medical marijuana law in 1992. We wouldn't have medical marijuana in California or the other 20 states where it's now legal if it weren't for AIDS activists who fought for their right to life-saving medicines of all kinds. A recent study found that, as with cancer, marijuana may not only help with the symptoms AIDS, it may cure it.

This Week’s Sermon from The Evangelista Sista

The evidence is in. In persecuting cannabis connoisseurs we’re effectively silencing the intelligencia, the artist, the poet, the peacenik – and it’s high time (ahem) it stopped. The other side has raised the white flag for a truce and it’s time to come to the table and negotiate a Peace for Pot package. We need our own two-state solution, with tolerance in between. As Allen Ginsberg said to Jack Kerouac in 1965, “It’s time for poets to influence American civilizaton.”

Our country’s version of the Tianamen massacre—the War on Drugs-- has arrested 20 million pot smokers, unlawfully detained or searched countless others, harassed, ridiculed, frightened, turned neighbors into informants and informees, and robbed our school budgets for prisons.  In fact, by some estimates if the WOD escalates at current rates, half of the country will be behind bars with the other half its keepers, here in the Land of the Free. Let’s not forget that softer rhetoric hasn’t always meant kinder policies.

How wimpy is our increasingly strident and un-listened-to conservative faction if it’s fearful of a little Latina on the Supreme Court? As if by saying she is proud of the way her brain works and would pit it against the whole of Mt. Rushmore and beyond, she would heartlessly rule against anyone. That’s our opposition’s job.

How popular are drug warriors these days? The UK’s home secretary Jacqui Smith, who successfully pushed for a rollback of Tony Blair’s more liberal pot policies (just after admitting she’d smoked it in college), has resigned in disgrace over a sweeping set of misuse of public funds scandals.

One of the recommendations of the Beckley Foundation report, presented at UN meetings in Vienna in June, is to look at cannabis and creativity.

Just look around.

Bob Hope told jokes about marijuana like, "Instead of taking it away from the soldiers, we ought to give it to the negotiators in Paris," and he just got his own postage stamp. His partner on the Road to Morocco, Bing Crosby, was an admitted smoker who advised his son to put down the booze and pick up the pipe. Sammy Davis Jr., who once played the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, was reportedly a viper. Rodney Dangerfield wrote about it extensively in his memoir No Respect, and said he saw Jackie Gleason procuring some from his hotel room in the 1940s. To say these icons aren’t representative of Americans is to belittle us, and them. And there’s been quite enough belitting going on.

Let’s start with the uplifting, already.

Keep Up the Good Words, 

Evangelista Sista

www.tokinwoman.blogspot.com

Hempy Spring, 2009

How wild, I just resurrected this blog exactly one year after my last post. And  the symmetry continues: where last year I celebrated the introduction of Barney Frank's national legalization bill, this spring I'm happy about the first-ever state legalization bill, introduced in California by Tom Ammiano (AB390). Read more.

Inspired in part by the Wanted: Female Pot Icons discussion at celebstoner.com, I'm doing a Tokin Woman show on KMUD radio on Wednesday, April 8 between 10 am and noon. I'll be playing tunes by Very Important Potheads Who Are Women, starting with Bessie Smith (hear her sing "Gimme a Reefer"). Stay tuned for more updates.