Cannabis Across Time in Spirituality & Archaeology

Part 1, Chapter 1

“If the divine personality of Dionysus can be reduced to any one principle, it is the demonstration that conventional logic is an inadequate tool with which to apprehend the universe as a whole.”

Edith Hall – Introduction to Euripides: Bacchae and Other Plays.

A conspicuously titled and efficaciously placed headline caught one’s eye in several on-line metropolitan newspapers recently. At first, it seemed to be a sponsored article, or means to gauge how many people were interested enough to click the link, due to its subject matter.

In spite of this, and being intrigued by the many possibilities and ramifications of the headline, we took the bait, and clicked the link.

Doing so led to a short blurb referencing a recent article from the Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University curiously entitled, Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad. This Judahite Shrine of the paper’s title apparently played a key function of the Fortress it was housed in; which we’re told was located on southern Judah’s border, and thought to be in operation from the 9th to 6th centuries B.C.

The paper goes on to detail that the fortress, and correspondingly, its shrine, were excavated by the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, led by noted Biblical Archaeologists Yohanan Aharoni and Ruth Amiran for the better part of the 1960’s.

However, what immediately seemed off about the article was, whereas Aharoni and Amiran’s Tel Arad dig was conducted from 1962-67, the Cannabis paper we clicked the link to was written by Eran Arie, Baruch Rosen & Dvory Namdar in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, and published in May of 2020.

What happened in the intervening 50 years since the original dig and the Cannabis paper of May 2020?

It turns out the tale of the Tel Arad excavation alone is worthy of retelling, and in many ways, it has; just in the academic prose of Science, and then, only fitfully over the years. As far as Cannabis being linked to the site – a detail that has taken half a century to be discovered (or divulged?) one can only guess as to why it took so long to confirm.

Perhaps it was a fact waiting for the proper technology to uncover it? Perhaps waiting for the appropriate parties to share it? In any event, we had been drawn to the improbable tale of two such unrelated subjects as Cannabis and Judaism being concretely linked to one another through Archaeology.

To further complicate the matter, Aharoni unexpectedly passes away in 1976, and the focus of the dig broadened to include other fascinating findings in the Beersheba valley, some miles away from Tel Arad. In short, the story regarding Tel Arad and the use of Cannabis there, reaches a dead-end.

However, fast-forward to the May 2020 Cannabis & Frankincense paper, which originally piqued our interest, and which reminded us the shrine was first detected during the second season of Aharoni’s excavations in 1963, when a cella – a small room containing cult objects – was unearthed.

It immediately became evident to Aharoni and his team this ‘cella’ was the heart of the shrine, and in fact the entire Fortress. It was therefore referred to as the debir, or ‘Holy of Holies.’

The prized treasure of the Holy of Holies were two limestone monoliths; one slightly taller than the other, yet both determined to have functioned as altars; each still retaining unidentified dark material preserved in the circular depressions on their respective tops.

In his preliminary report of the second season, Aharoni mentions these accumulations of organic matter were submitted for analysis to the Department of Biochemistry of the Hebrew University at the end of the first season, back in 1963.

*Re-imagined photo of the Debir of Tel Arad. Original photo courtesy of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.*

The results came back as “inconclusive” by its examiner, Gad Avigad, who, we are told could only report “that the material contained animal fat.” After this, most biblical scholars begin to refer to the mysterious monoliths as “incense altars,” although no evidence of any incense had yet been found.

A couple years later, in May 1965, an exhibition of the Tel Arad findings, including the incense altars – which are referred to as “sacrificial altars” on the exhibit’s placard – opened at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The exhibit also contained the original stairs and furniture of the debir, or Holy of Holies, and immediately became one of the Museum’s most-attended exhibits, as well as a source of national pride.

The story has no significant changes until 2007, when, during the renewal of the Archaeology wing at the museum, the shrine was relocated to a new gallery and walls from the original site were added to aid viewers in contextualization. These changes also encouraged new analysis of the organic material on top the altars, whose residue was sent to two unrelated laboratories; one at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, the other at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Givat Ram; both labs used similar established extraction methods (Total organic composition extraction, and Gas chromatography with mass spectrometry: GC-MS).

This is the point when the story of Tel Arad was officially resuscitated; it’s Cannabis-related findings propelling it back to the realm of the newsworthy. For, on the smaller altar, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabinol (CBN) were detected, along with an assortment of terpenes and terpenoids, suggesting that cannabis inflorescences had been burnt on it.

However, the larger altar contained Frankincense, burned with animal fat, and is to date the earliest find of Frankincense in a ritualistic setting; whereas the smaller, cannabis burning altar used animal dung to burn its contents, the report stating:

“The temperature required for decarboxylation of the cannabis phytocannabinoids into their neutral and active form is mild, not exceeding 150 ℃. This could be achieved by burning of animal dung-cake. Determining the animal species that donated the dung is impossible in the current case. Frankincense resin, on the other hand, requires a higher temperature to release its fragrance – around 260 ℃. Animal fat can reach and maintain this temperature.”

*Entrance to the Citadel of Tel Arad. Original photo courtesy of the Madain Project.*

Adding a level of intrigue, Arie, Rosen & Namdar remind us that in the 1963 report Avigad had submitted only the material on the shorter altar – the Cannabis altar – and for the 2007 testing of it, little of the material was left; which begs the question, were there other tests which went unpublished, or unnoticed?

If not, then where did the traces of ancient resin disappear to?

If Avigad, Aharoni and their team were proving that the presence of a mind-altering substance had been concretely attached to a Judaic place of worship, then that would have been a fact of great importance. It also occurred to one, that such a discovery undoubtedly would have created a dilemma as how to present such odd and unexpected findings; particularly in the black and white world of the 60’s.

For, back then, as today, it is still a fact that practices in Western religions are predicated on faith-based sobriety in order to clearly and logically ponder scriptural passages meant to be absolute truth.

Primarily, this act is overseen by a Priest or religious representative who ostensibly guides the layman through the underlying meaning of the text. Through this hermeneutical exegesis, all seemingly fantastical or otherworldly elements are attributed to a power above and beyond human comprehension.

In the world of Abrahamic traditions, these mysteries are not for laymen to grapple with, but are entirely the country of the Priestly class, whose sole purpose is to provide responses to adherents’ questions regarding moral quandaries and feelings of doubt.

These responses are codified in religious texts and reinforced in-person with a trained clergy member who prescribes the appropriate passages to the querent, who in turn is meant to reflect on, and potentially emulate their import.

On the other hand, psychoactive experiences are extremely personal and open to individual interpretation; making them exclusive; reinforcing a personal connection to the fantastical and otherworldly earthly manifestations of the divine; which provide opportunity for that elusive “one-on-one” time with god—an essential element in tending to one’s own mental and spiritual health.

Chapter II

Pillow of Dream: Cannabis for the Eternal Journey

*Re-worked photo of Chinese brazier found in grave at Jirzankal cemetery. Original photo credit: X. Wu, Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.*

“One day Liu Chi-nu was out in the fields cutting down some hemp, when he saw a snake. Taking no chances that it might bite him, he shot the serpent with an arrow. The next day he returned to the place and heard the sound of a mortar and pestle. Tracking down the noise, he found two boys grinding marihuana leaves. When he asked them what they were doing, the boys told him they were preparing a medicine to give to their master who had been wounded by an arrow.”

Marihuana: The First 12,000 years. Ernest L. Abel.

Far from southern Judea and the traditions of Abraham, in the high desert of Northwestern China, further evidence of psychoactive ritualism has been uncovered in the form of burials incorporating Cannabis as a component of the after-life journey.

At the dry, sparsely populated Turpan basin of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the Jiayi Cemetery has yielded amazing results, most recently published in the 2016 paper Ancient Cannabis Burial Shroud in a Central Eurasian Cemetery, by the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (Hongen Jiang, et al.), which has produced some concrete results as to how deep the roots of Cannabis in spiritual ritualistic settings is.

According to the paper’s Introduction, “Parts of ancient Cannabis (their italics) plants have been excavated from tombs dated to the first millennium BCE in the south–central region of Russian Siberia and Northwestern China; they also make point of mentioning its early use in grave sites for ritualistic mind-altering purposes has been suggested in earlier archaeological finds from the region.

The 240 tombs excavated at Jiayi are of the Subeixi culture, a pastoral people who became increasingly agricultural over the period from 1,000 BCE to 100 BCE, when they flourished in the area and its environs.

The “burial shroud” of the paper’s title was found in tomb M231, a vertical earth pit with a rectangular shape, and oddly enough, containing a low-lying bed frame made of wooden slats inserted at the grave’s bottom with clusters of wormwood attached to its sides. Also discovered were macro-remains of green foxtail millet, Russian box thorn, and naked barley; as well as broken, and intact pottery shards.

However, the site’s main feature, and source of the paper’s title, were the thirteen nearly whole female Cannabis plants covering the grave’s single human inhabitant, a 35-year-old Caucasian Male, that, according to the paper had the plants:

*Ancient Cannabis from grave M231, at the Jiayi cemetery, China. Re-Worked by Aztlan Times. Original photo credit: Ming Ren, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.*

“laid diagonally across the body of the deceased like a shroud, with the roots and lower parts of the plants grouped together and placed below the pelvis; the stems and foliage were arranged in a parallel alignment extending upwards to just under the chin and along the left side of the face.”

In order to establish a definitive age range for the Jiayi cemetery, several samples of random items from grave M231, as well as random material from other sites were tested using an accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) C14 in the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory at Peking University, and then calibrated using Intcal04 calibration curve.

They were then observed and photographed under a Nikon SMZ1000 stereo microscope. The Carbon – 14 dates from the Jiayi cemetery came back as 2800 to 2400 years old. Specifically, a cannabis stem from M231 tested with a date range of 790-520 BCE. Also of note are Cannabis fruits from graves M156, dated at 845-790 BCE, and M157, dated at 830-760 BCE.

The Jiayi cemetery was a ground-breaking find due to the contextualization of the items. It also led to a second site, just to the southeast of Jiayi, called the Yanghai cemetery, also radiocarbon dated to the first millennium BCE, and with a similar presence of cannabis. Of note is grave M90, which, according to the authors:

“Concluded that the finely cut and gathered Cannabis recovered from that Yanghai tomb was associated with the tomb’s occupant, who may have been a shaman based on associated artifacts, e.g., a rare and distinctive harp (konghou) seldom discovered in coeval cemeteries in the region. We suggest that this prepared Cannabis was probably deposited in the Yanghai tomb M90 grave with the corpse for its psycho activity, possibly to facilitate communication between the human and spirit worlds and/or for its medicinal value.”

*Ancient Cannabis plant from grave M231, Jiayi Cemetery. Re-Worked by Aztlan Times. Original photo credit: Ming Ren, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.*

The Jiayi and Yanghai authors bring attention to an integral part of Cannabis in Chinese culture when they suggest it was used, “possibly to facilitate communication between the human and spirit worlds and/or for its medicinal value.”

Cannabis use in Chinese medicine goes back to Shen-nung, the ancient emperor of China (2700 BCE), who is not only credited with bringing farming to China, but for creating among the world’s first Materia Medica, his Pen T’sao - a medical encyclopedia listing hundreds of drugs derived from vegetable, animal and mineral sources. Among these drugs is Cannabis, "ma."

However, not mentioned in the article is the fact that Cannabis and music have been related since antiquity in China, both holdovers of a long-forgotten age in human history. The Shaman’s role as custodian of these two devices which alter human consciousness was taken rather seriously, as attested to in the layout of the tomb and the articles associated with it.

These are items which are meant to cut through space and time to heal the patient in question, i.e., re-connect them to the natural rhythms and cycles of the earth. It is a process that has been with humanity since before myth existed, a part of our prehistoric past etched into our physiology.

However, the importance of the Jiayi and Yanghai digs isn’t so much about trying to interpret how Cannabis was used in the past; or as means to attempt to re-create some ancient Chinese rite, but rather about investigating the most recent archaeological finds using state-of-the-art techniques to get a more concrete view of the spread and uses of Cannabis throughout time, and how that tradition has become what it is today.

Previous Cannabis finds in archaeology were centered primarily around secondary items generally constructed of hemp, i.e., rope, textiles and clothing. While these earlier finds were important in establishing the history of Cannabis as a major part of the human experience, they generally relate its use was primarily utilitarian in nature; as opposed to medicinal, or spiritual.

What the Western Chinese sites made clear, though, is that Cannabis, and the sites themselves are part of a larger network which spans from Eastern Europe to Western China, encompassing many cultures who simultaneously utilize hemp and cannabis in a variety of ways, including clothing, paper, medicine, foodstuff, as well as psychoactive agent.

After reading all three Cannabis – related archaeological papers in the span of about a week, one couldn’t help but feel the surface of something immensely larger than previously thought had just been scratched: that what was just digested were merely clues in a grander scheme of humanity, religion, medicine, and, dare we say...the sacred.

Chapter III

In Memory’s Mystic Band

Scythian Cauldron from *Frozen Tombs of Siberia*, *the Pazyryk Burials of Iron-Age Horsemen,* Sergei Rudenko. Re-worked by Aztlan Times.

“In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away into the grass, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass

In his 2003 article, Archaeological Evidence for the Tradition of Psychoactive Plant Use in the Old World, in Economic Botany 57 (3), by The New York Botanical Press, Mark D. Merlin, a Botany Professor at University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and co-author of Cannabis and Ethnobotany (UC Press 2016) begins:

“We live in an age when divine vision is dismissed as hallucination, and desire to experience a direct communication with god is often interpreted as a sign of mental illness. Nevertheless, some scholars and scientists assert that such visions are fundamentally derived from an ancient and ongoing cultural tradition. The hypothesis presented here suggests that humans have a very ancient tradition involving the use of mind-altering experiences to produce profound, more or less, spiritual understanding.”

As one read the previous passage, the immense weight of what undoubtedly would be a variety of endless documents, viewpoints, and emotions relating to the topic of the ancient, ongoing tradition of using Cannabis (among others) to produce a spiritual connection to god, which one would have to meticulously sift through, felt immensely unbearable.

Although, also in that moment, our first question was; if, as Merlin asserts, there is a very ancient tradition involving the use of mind-altering experiences to produce profound, more or less, spiritual understanding, where did that culture originate?

Who were these ancestors of ours that connected with the universe and lived the concept of god in a personal way we can’t, or won’t?

And, lastly, where did that culture go?

In the Introduction to his 1995 co-authored book Consuming habits: drugs in history and anthropology, noted Oxford historian A.G. Sherratt says the following regarding a 1973 cross-cultural survey of “relevant ethnographic literature” involving 488 societies which indicated 90% of these groups utilized institutionalized, culturally patterned forms and altered states of consciousness:

“A large percentage of these altered states are produced through consumption of psychoactive drug plant substances, supporting the idea that “...the ubiquity of mind-altering agents in traditional societies cannot be doubted – just as the moods of industrialized societies are set by a balance of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, among many others.”

Reading the above quote had one thinking how quickly in one’s mind the connection between “mind-altering,” and “illegal,” had been made; reminding one of the pre-conditioning around the subject experienced in contemporary American culture.

One was also reminded of the “very ancient tradition of using mind-altering substances to procure spiritual understanding,” Merlin wrote about, and how that was now framed in our mind between the bookends of ancient archaeological sites on one side, and what is happening in the world today, on the other.

Whether it be 6th century BC Judea, or ancient Western China, or Siberia, or modern-day global megalopolis, we began to wonder more about the institutionalized forms of altered states that seemed to be at the heart of any culture from ancient, till now that predicates what is prescribed and what is not; what is encouraged, and what is punishable.

Or, as Andrew Sherratt states, in his Preface to Consuming Habits: Global and historical perspectives on how cultures define drugs, Second edition (1995):

“The boundary between illicit and licit is a shifting and negotiable one, historically and cross-culturally. As Richard Rudgley reminds us, restrictions on psychoactive substances embody the outcome of conflicts over who has access to the means to alter consciousness and behaviour, such as bodily control. Such proscriptions specify who is permitted to alter their state of consciousness and under what circumstances.”

That forensic evidence has linked other hallucinogenic substances to a good deal of archaeological sites, in particular fossil evidence for the opium poppy in Neolithic, copper, and bronze age sites in Switzerland, as well as remains of various fungi (particularly Amanita muscaria), most famously found in possession of the 5,000-year-old Alpine Iceman, made it evident to one, that when it comes to psychoactive drug consumption; humans are no late-comers to the party.

It also seemed that as the institutional apparatus grew and spread, particularly at the onset of the industrial revolution, when there was a drastic change in the ways humans interacted with said institutions, the use of psycho-actives as medicine or spiritual balm was frowned upon, and in order to keep up with the dizzying pace of modern society, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine gained prominence. In addition to the change in the pace of life, and in the absence of a framework to engage in psycho-actives in a spiritual setting, the meanings and motivations of imbibing mind-altering substances changed from, as Merlin summarizes:

“predominantly dictated by spiritual and/or medicinal requirements,” which, since ancient times has dictated the use and setting of partaking, to the current situation in Western culture whose motivations for engaging in psycho-actives are, “personal recreational desires to experience euphoria, and frequently is impelled by peer group pressure.”

One cannot ignore the role of advertising in the institutionalized spread of nicotine and alcohol, which is a direct corollary to the sort of peer pressure Merlin speaks of. Global corporations have supplanted organized religion regarding scope and efficacy of their message reaching the masses, although the impulses corporations encourage us to experience are the result of a post-industrial pace which we never truly became accustomed to as a species.

That is, the interplay between the public and our institutions have undergone massive transformations in the past several centuries. In Merlin’s previously cited work, he brings up an important question regarding this exchange. Primarily, that in the interplay between the two; institutions and the public; human behavior has a significant impact on the functioning of the society. However, more importantly, and what drew my immediate attention was:

“the capacity to experience altered states of consciousness is a psycho-biological capacity of the species, and thus universal, its utilization, institutionalization, and patterning are, indeed, features of culture, and thus variable.”

If, in fact, we are, as Merlin states, “psycho-biologically programmed to experience altered states of consciousness,” and if we know from the archaeological and written records this capability was a major function of society’s well-being, why have we in the West been so intent on altering the pattern, and disassociate spirit from mind? To so drastically change the time-tested medicine cabinet of our species?

Chapter IV

The Wonderfully Diverse Medicine Cabinet of Time

Opening page from the Welsh Tale, The Mabinogion. Written by Anonymous. Translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, 1877. Re-worked by Aztlan Times.

“All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks or the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?”

– Donna Tartt, The Secret History.

A 1970 Economic Botany article featuring the ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes and the anthropologist Weston La Barre gave some insight into our many queries. Primarily in the regard that at the outset of the article, Shultes poses La Barre a question concerning the known distribution of traditional psychoactive drug plant use in the Old versus the New World, particularly:

“Why there are so few known psychoactive drug plants associated with traditional cultural use in the Old World.” He pointed out that although there is much more ecological diversity and a much longer history of human occupation in the Old World, the New World has many more of these known culturally associated ‘plants of the gods?’ La Barre replies there must have been numerous other species that were used in the Old World for such purposes, but the rise of civilization, and in particular monotheism eliminated most of these traditions in the Old World (and in those areas of the New World, where European religious influence has affected the pre-contact uses of such species).”

The irony that the basis for this article is predicated upon our amazement and fascination that there were psychoactive elements at the ruins of Tel Arad, specifically Cannabis, and that the site was part of a monotheistic religion, had one wondering how these two stopped intermingling, and why?

If, as La Barre suggests, the rise of civilization, and in particular monotheism eliminated most of these traditions in the Old World, it seemed pertinent to question this assumed “rise of civilization,” and how it was connected to the concept of the “one god.”

According to La Barre, humans in pre-industrial contexts were culturally programmed to find plants or fungi which would allow them to communicate with the ancestors, who were the underlying connection to their spiritual world. La Barre suggests this practice goes back to the Paleolithic Era, prior to the advent of agriculture, when we were hunter/gatherers, and as we spread out into new regions and ecological situations, we brought with us a culturally inspired motivation to find and incorporate newly found species into religious practice.

Prime example of this connecting to the spiritual world are the early European witch-cults, who derived their flying ointments from a variety of plants prepared in a time-tested manner. These “flying ointments,” as Richard Rudgley of Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, tells us, had nothing to do with flight, but were hallucinogenic salves administered trans-dermally.

Among the psychoactive substances of plant origin included in these flying ointments were: alcohol, opium, cannabis, datura, sweet flag (Acorus Calamus), and the ‘infernal trinity’ of solanaceous plants – deadly nightshade, black henbane and the mandrake, all three of which contain the tropane alkaloids scopolamine, hyoscyamine and atropine; the hallucinogenic properties of all three have been verified by modern experimenters including the noted toxicologist Gustav Schenk, as detailed in his 1956 work The Book of Poisons.

Rudgley also saliently points out that the European witch’s highly sophisticated cultural complex in its ethnobotanical sophistication and integration of intoxicants into daily religious life (my italics), is comparable with Shamanic uses in Mesoamerica and the Amazon basin. However, as we all know, the days of widespread witchcraft and shamanism have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Almost overnight, the hallucinogens consumed in their sacred rites became degraded to “satanic plants” under the intellectual and political domination of the Church. But exactly how we got from here, to there, Rudgley succinctly sums up in the closing paragraph of his Editorial, The archaic use of hallucinogens in Europe: an archaeology of altered states, in Addiction (1995):

“Thus, not only is European history preceded by a long and continuous prehistoric tradition of intoxicant use (refuting any notion that opium and cannabis are recent, exotic imports) but it is also accompanied by a shadowy substratum of hallucinogen use preserved in the annals of witchcraft. The post-war proliferation of hallucinogen use in Europe is, in light of such archaeological and archival findings, not so much an experiment with exotic drugs but a revival of archaic practices, albeit in a debased and almost exclusively recreational form.”

As witchcraft was demonized for its use of hallucinogens; their archaic healing practices abolished and that immense void replaced with faith-based sobriety, Europe began its long march away from the pharmaceutical wisdom of the ancestors, headlong into a morass of, as Rudgley so aptly calls it, “a debased and almost exclusively recreational form” of drug consumption.

Further developing the concept of a schism between ancient and modern psychoactive consumption, A 1991 Oxford University Committee for Archaeology conference featured a presentation from noted Oxford Prehistorian A.G. Sherratt, entitled Sacred and Profane substances: the ritual use of narcotics in later Neolithic Europe, where he informs us:

“In modern societies, psychoactive materials are used in a variety of ways. These include religious, medical, and secular applications, which in ancient times may or may not have been viewed as separate…Such ‘religious’ uses no doubt would have included ‘medicinal’ uses as well, since it would be artificial to separate physical healing from ritual observance.”

Separating physical healing from ritual observance is a fact of contemporary Occidental society considered to be part of the natural order of things. This regardless of our innate quality as a species to experience spirituality and use that process as medicine – a process that has been widely detailed and shown to be a major component of the human story.

Removing the ability to experience ecstasy – or step outside oneself, i.e., to heal oneself by partaking of the Materia Medica in order to achieve a sense of well-being, is somewhat of a new state of being for us.

Perhaps many of our mental health maladies are due to a subconscious desire to experience a sense of wholeness not currently available. Our collective, recent past has re-arranged our collective memories, shuffled our priorities and limited our options for taking care of ourselves; in the process, shutting off parts of what it means to be human, creating a new and even more dangerous sort of existential dilemma.

It had one wondering that if we are psycho-biologically predisposed to connecting with the universe, what happens when we deny that impulse? In the context of today’s recreational drug culture, there is little or no opportunity to experience institutionalized spirituality which utilizes psycho-actives.

The societal focus has drastically shifted away from promoting self-gnosis (knowledge of self) via psycho-actives, to a straight-jacketed approach which separates facts from values, needs from directives, and focuses on the marketing, sales, and distribution of said psycho-actives for profit: in essence, reducing them to commodities.

End, Part 1

Part II dropping on 5/20/22

the cool head Aflame with smoke