Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
The Boo Hoo Bible.
Kleps, Art. (1971).
San Cristobal, NM: Toad Books.
ISBN: 0-9600388-1-7
Description: Paperback,
ii + 217 + vi pages.
Contents: Essays, drawings,
press clippings, cartoons.
Note: This excerpt gives
a good sense of The Boo Hoo Bible; it comes from In the
United States District Court for the District of Columbia, United
States of America v. Judith H. Kuch,
Criminal No. 1473-67: Reading the so-called " Catechism
and Handbook" of the Church containing the pronouncements
of the Chief Boo Hoo, one gains the inescapable impression that
the membership is mocking established institutions, playing with
words and totally irreverent in any sense of the term. Each member
carries a "martyrdom record" to reflect his arrests.
The church symbol is a three-eyed toad. Its bulletin
is the " Divine Toad Sweat."
The Church key is, of course, the bottle opener. The official
songs are "Puff, the Magic Dragon" and "Row, Row,
Row Your Boat." In short, the "Catechism and Handbook"
is full of goofy nonsense, contradictions, and irreverent expressions.
There is a conscious effort to assert in passing the attributes
of religion but obviously only for tactical purposes. Constitutional
principles are embraced wherever helpful to the cause but the
effect of the "Catechism and Handbook" and other evidence
as a whole is agnostic, showing no regard for a supreme being,
Gerhard
A Gesell, United States District Judge. (page 89)
Excerpt(s): The Neo-American
Church is one of the four major religious organizations in the
United States to use psychedelic substances as sacraments. We
maintain that the psychedelic substances are sacraments, that
is, divine substances, no matter who uses them, in whatever spirit,
with whatever intentions; it is not just a question of terminology.
The other three groups are the Church of the Awakening, the Native
American Church, and the League for Spiritual Discovery.
Our church might be considered "to the left"
of these other three, as we do not employ set rituals,
make conditions for membership other than agreement with our principles,
or regulate the frequency or intensity of the sacramental experience.
Many of our members are damned fools and miserable sinners; membership
in the church is no guarantee of intellectuality or of spiritual
wisdom; it may even be possible that one or two of our Boo Hoos
are opportunistic charlatans, but we are not dismayed by these
conditions; it has never been our objective to add one more swollen
institutional substitute for individual virtue to the already
crowded lists. We are, however, somewhat dismayed by the prevailing
habit of "doing" (really not doing) things through institutional
identification, and have, accordingly, injected massive doses
of absurdity into our embryonic social fantasy [footnote: This
was written in '64. What was then merely a gleam in the mad scientist 's
eye has now become a monstrous growth, pulsating in every tentacle]
hoping that it may grow up to be an instructive puzzle rather
than the usual collection of dead-letter laws. (page 3)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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