Extract from In Search of the Ultimate High by Nicholas Saunders, Anja Saunders, Michelle Pauli. Published by Random House. Copyright Anja Saunders 2000. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the copyrightholder.
"The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can
haveis the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion
as well as all serious endeavour in art and science"
Albert Einstein
At first glance the world religions all agree - drugs have no role to play in religious practice. On closer examination the situation is less clear-cut. The traditions vary in the strength of their views on the subject and within each faith there are also maverick voices speaking out for a more open outlook on the issue.
For the believer, psychoactives may act as an awakening vehicle, resulting in conversion to a major religion. Some followers also choose to continue to use drugs as an aid to their spiritual life while remaining within a mainstream religion. But the taboo against drug use, both in a societal and religious context, means that most do so silently and at risk of losing much if discovered.
Attitudes towards drugs in mainstream religion
In the mainstream religions, while such mind-altering exercises as meditation, fasting or even flagellation may be encouraged, introducing particular psychoactive substances into the body is considered unacceptable.
The exception is alcohol. In Christianity, wine is a sanctified intoxicant with a purely symbolic function. It is canon law that fermented wine be used for Mass, rather than a substitute such as grape juice, but the levels are not such that they would produce an altered state. The imagery of intoxication is used, though, an example of which is one of the early Latin hymns for the daily office, from the fourth century, which talks of the 'sober drunkeness' of the spirit. In Judaism, alcohol plays a key social role, especially during Passover.
Within Hinduism all psychoactives (incuding alcohol) are prohibited and in some sects, such as the Krishna Consciousness movement, even stimulants such as caffeine and nicotine are forbidden.
Islam also has strict views on the use of drugs. The Muslim College of London, for instance, told us that:
"The use of drugs that affect human perception and consciousness is totally prohibited by Islam. The only Muslim community who reportedly made use of drugs are the Hasheesn who used to persuade their disciples through the use of hasheesh to murder their enemies and who gave us the word assassin. They are regarded as heretics"
(There is more information about the exploits of the cannabis-consuming Order of the Assassins later in this chapter.)
Buddhist teachers argue that the insights derived from drugs may be illusory, and a spiritual experience on drugs can hide the depth of change needed to transform oneself. Drugs reinforce the belief that external help is necessary to reach a certain state of mind when in fact one should be seeking that state from within. The guidelines in Theravada Buddhism for dealing with intoxicants are included in the five basic precepts for living a wise life and require one to abstain from using intoxicants to the point of loss of awareness. Responsibility is thus placed on the individual to recognise the varying degrees of psychoactivity.
The first and perhaps most obvious reason for the discouragement of drug use by religious groups is the illegality of drugs. As in the rest of society, misinformation from media and governments can also lead to a knee-jerk reaction against all drugs. However, the reasons for prohibiting drugs in world religions depend to some extent on the beliefs of each religion.
Hindu teachers regard drug-induced experiences as dangerous as they are believed to cloud one's vision, thus compounding the illusory state (Maya) from which humans should be seeking to liberate themselves.
Evangelical Christians regard most drugs which alter one's perception (whether illegal or not) as sinful. Drugs are generally seen as unnatural, and leaving one out of control and in a state of openess to the devil. Drug use is seen as a substitute for authentic spiritual life, rather than a means of accessing spirituality, a point made by the Board of Social Responsibility of the Church of England: "Drug use reflects and inner spiritual emptiness, and the search for a rich and fulfilling life".
Ironically, many of the early therapeutic LSD trips were taken by Anglican clergy under the psychiatric supervision of Dr Frank Lake. An Anglican clergyman himself, he founded a school called Clinical Theology. Lake did not see LSD as simply a therapeutic tool. He practised therapy within a theological and mystical framework and used LSD in that context.
But a deeper reason for the reluctance of the mainstream religions to acknowledge that psychoactives may have a role to play in spiritual life could lie in the question of control. The word 'religion' itself comes from the Latin to bind (re-ligare, to bind back), whereas drugs are often seen as a vehicle of release. Mystical experiences on drugs tend to be very private, personal affairs. It is generally a solitary path. While there are some churches that use a drug as a sacrament in a communal setting, such as the Santo Daime in Brazil, even then when an individual is in the depths of their experience they are completely alone. This has implications for religions where the priest or teacher has a mediating role. If a follower is able to experience a direct, personal relationship with the divine, the need for an intermediate authority may be reduced.
This point also applies to the wider issue of how the mainstream religions view the role of the mystical experience within their faith. Throughout history there has been a tension between the mystical and mainstream wings of certain of the world religions. Meister Eckhart, the German Dominican mystic of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, for instance, was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic church because of his teachings.
Historical use
Looking to history, however, there are examples where the boundaries between religious drug use and the mainstream faiths have been less fixed.
Soma
Soma is a substance written about in the Vedas, an group of sacred texts which was used in 2000 BCE in the area known today as Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India.
A collection of hymns - the Rig-Veda - is the earliest of the Vedic texts. Among the thousand hymns in the Rig-Veda, many portray soma variously as a god, a sacred plant and a celestial drink, transporting those who drink it into ecstatic, transcendental realms. The Vedic texts are obscure on the identity of this plant drug and give no explicit descriptions, but the methods of preparation of soma, and some of its uses, can be inferred. It is clear that it was a plant found near mountains, which was gathered by moonlight, then crushed to produce a golden liquid. Soma was used in a fire ritual in which three gods are celebrated: Agni (fire), Indra (god of the sky) and Soma (a god considered to be the divine personification of the soma liquid, and also the moon). Although the fire ritual continued to be observed after the Vedic period, the use of soma waned, perhaps due to supply difficulties, and soma instead became a philosophical concept, coming to mean any offering burnt on the ritual fire, the contents of the material world, or the 'life-force'.
While Sanskrit scholars have shown little interest in the identity of the soma plant, the subject has been much debated among entheogenic explorers in the west. In 1971 Gordon Wasson published Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality , setting out his theory that soma is the Amanita muscaria mushroom.
What is Amanita muscaria?
Amanita Muscaria is a bright red mushroom, speckled with white, known also as the Fly Agaric (said to derive from the belief that flies can be killed by it). Many people will recognise it as the 'fairy toadstool' often seen in fairy tale illustrations, suggesting ancient magical use of the mushroom.The best-known ritual use of this plant is by shamanic tribes to induce religious trance. In some tribes only the shaman would eat the mushrooms, while in others all the men of the tribe would partake, but in all tribes where it was used it was central to their religious practices.
The mushrooms were usually dried, increasing their psychoactivity five-fold, and then chewed. The principal psychoactive ingredients in Amanita muscaria are ibotenic acid and muscimole, an alkaloid which remains active even when passed through kidneys. The psychoactive constituents remain present in the urine of person who has eaten the mushroom, leading to the practice of 'recycling' the effects of the mushroom through urine-drinking.
Wasson suggests that soma is a mushroom because in the Rig-Veda no mention is made of leaves, roots nor branches in relation to the plant, and it is referred to as 'the Not-Born Single Foot' which fits with the way mushrooms spring up suddenly and without seed, while 'single-foot' and -one-legged' are widespread euphemisms for mushrooms. To support his argument that soma is the species of mushroom Amanita muscaria, he points to passages in the Rig-Veda which allude to urination, given the practice of recycling the urine of one who has consumed Amanita Muscaria amongst Siberian tribes. He points to one in particular:
"Those charged with office, richly gifted, do full homage to Soma. The swollen men piss the flowing [soma]".
This, however, does not actually link soma and urine drinking. Other criticisms of Wasson's theory relate to the geographical availability of soma.
The true identity of soma continues to be debated but it is clear that it was a psychoactive substance and that it was used as part of a religious rite.
The Order of the Assassins
It has been claimed that hashish played a leading role in the Ismaeli sect of Islam, the Order of the Assasins. Founded by Hasan I Sabbah in eleventh century Afganistan, its followers were completely unafraid of death. They were certain that they would, on death, be entering a wonderful heavenly realm, and they <I>knew /I> it would be wonderful because they had already experienced it, through the 'magic' of their leader.
Robert Anton Wilson explains:
"The secret of Hasan's power - the trip to paradise given to all his followers - rested upon the powerful combination of hashish and some talented young ladies... Filled with hashish-stuffed food, the candidate for initiation was ushered into a certain Garden of Delights in Hasan's fortress temple of Alamout, high in the mountains of Afganistan. There, the ladies, pretending to be the supernatural houris described by Mohammed in his vision of heaven, performed in such a manner that the men came out of their hashish trance with very clear memories of 'divine' sexual experiences and other earthly delights. None ever doubted that they had been in heaven..."
[RA Wilson, Sex and Drugs: a journey beyond limits, Phoenix, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1982.]
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
Rather more idiosyncratic speculation comes from a theory about the true origins of the Christian church. In The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross John Allegro puts forward the theory that the Christian church stemmed from an ancient fertility cult centred around the Amanita muscaria mushroom cult. Biblical stories of Jesus are to be seen as mushroom myths, a cover story, written in a secret code during a time when the cult was under threat. The cult eventually perished but the stories became an historical peg on which a new cult - Christianity - was founded. This theory is very controversial and has not received much support from other scholars of religion.
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