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Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives.
Dobkin de Rios, Marlene. (1990).
Bridport, Dorset: Prism.
ISBN: 1-85327-061-X
Description: paperback, x + 255 pages.
Contents: preface, 14 chapters divided into 3 parts: 1 introduction, 2.
ethnographies, 3, Cultural Universals and the Hallucinogens, references,
index.
Note: First published in 1984 by the University of New Mexico Press.
Ethnographies include the following: Australian Aborigines, Reindeer Herdsmen
of Siberia, Plains Indians of North America, Nazca Fisherman of Coastal Peru,
New Guinea Highlanders, Mochina of Peru, Ancient Maya, Aztecs of Mexico, Inca
of Peru, Fang of Northwestern Equatorial Africa, Urban Amazonian Mestizos of Peru.
Excerpt(s): This book is based on a report that I prepared for the Second
National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, published in 1973 under the
title The Non-Western Use of Hallucinogenic Agents. Subsequently, in 1976, it
was published by the Sage Publishing Company in abbreviated form as The
Wilderness of Mind: Sacred Plants in Cross-Cultural Perspective. (page ix)
It is my firm conviction, based on more than fifteen years of specialized
study of hallucinogens and culture, that these substances have played more
than a minor role in structuring the lives, beliefs, hopes, and values of
large numbers of people. Members of preindustrial societies in many cultures
with varying epistemological perspectives have always incorporated
mind-altering plants into facets of daily activity. The economic behavior,
the social organization, and the belief systems of some societies, for
example, have been affected by the use of mind-altering plants. (page 3)
The contribution that anthropology can make to the study of the use of
mind-altering plants throughout the world is to show how cultural variables
such as belief systems, values, attitudes, and expectations structure one of
the most subjective experiences available to humankind. (page 4)
The internal thespian flavor of the hallucinogenic journey can never be
sensed by an impartial observer. ... Unlike the urban theatergoer, however,
who finds his way to a physical structure called a theater, in which actors
give life to a script which another person has created in imitation of real
events, the hallucinogenic questor experiences an entirely different genre of
drama. In such drug rituals, the imbiber is
actor, playwright, stage director, costumer, and make-up artist — even
musician ... produced entirely from within the individual’s psyche.
There is, however, in traditional societies, a stage manager for this
hallucinogenic drama — the shaman/priest. ... Our early work pointed out that
music, with its implicit structure, provides a substitute psychic structure
during periods of ego dissolution. According to this hypothesis, music
functions not merely to create mood within the drug setting. The shaman-guide
creates — just as a stage director might — a corpus of music whose intrinsic
structure provides the drug user with a series of paths and banisters to help
him direct his visions during the actual experience, instead of becoming
disoriented by the change in ego structure, anxiety, fear, and somatic
discomfort brought on by the drug. (pages 10-11)
The sacred in traditional society has often been manifested in the powers
attributed to stones, trees, rivers,
and the sky, which may have been revered because they permitted man a glimpse
of the divine. Not only may such aspects of nature be consecrated in
traditional societies, but powerful plants that bear messages of supernatural
portent, too, easily fall within this realm. ... As Eliade describes sacred
time, it is circular and
reversible. In this philosophical view, an eternal mythical present exists
which is reintegrated into the religious rites of human beings. The
properties of time suspension as it is experienced under the influence of
plant hallucinogens can be seen to aid in reaffirming the sacred nature of
man’s sojourn on earth. (page 194)
Such powerful potentiators as plant hallucinogens lend themselves to
religious elaboration. Those individuals using them often make the
association of their “force” to cosmic powers. ... The forces or powers of a
person’s unconscious may, in other words, be projected outward to the forces
of nature to enable the drug-using shaman to believe that his world is an
understandable and charted one and that he will
not founder on its shoals. Insofar as spirit helpers stereotypically seen in
hallucinogenic visions enable man to put on a good face and to go about the
business of hunting, staying alive, curing illness, and incapacitating
his enemies, then hallucinogenic drugs do seem to have been adaptive for
human beings, at least from a psychological perspective. (page 200)
A general overview of the function of ritual in human society, while not
exhaustive in scope, can be applied to drug use and can allow us insight into
the continuities and changes in man’s use of psychoactive substances
throughout human society. Students of cultural aspects of drug use have
repeatedly noted the way in which such use in traditional societies is benign
when there is ritual associated with its ingestion. (page 207)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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