Students of religion appear by and large to be dismissing the psychedelic drugs that have sprung to our attention in the sixties as having little religious relevance. The position taken in one of the most forward-looking volumes of theological essays to have appeared in recent years accepts R. C. Zaehner's Mysticism Sacred and Profane as having "fully examined and refuted" the religious claims for mescaline which Aldous Huxley sketched in The Doors of Perception. This closing of the case strikes me as premature, for it looks as if the drugs have light to throw on the history of religion, the phenomenology of religion, the philosophy of religion, and the practice of the religious life itself.
Drugs and Religion Viewed Historically
In his trial-and-error life explorations man almost everywhere has stumbled upon connections between vegetables (eaten or brewed) and actions (yogic breathing exercises, whirling dervish dances, flagellations) that altered states of consciousness. From the psychopharmacological standpoint we now understand these states to be the products of changes in brain chemistry. From the sociological perspective we see that they tended to be connected in some way with religion. If we discount the wine used in our own communion services, the instances closest to us in time and space are the peyote of The Native American (Indian) Church and Mexico's 2,000- year-old "sacred mushrooms," the latter rendered in Aztec as "God's flesh"—striking parallel to "the body of Christ" in the Christian Eucharist. Beyond these neighboring instances lie the soma of the Hindus, the haoma and hemp, identical with and better known as marijuana, of the Zoroastrians, the Dionysus of the Greeks who "everywhere taught men the culture of the vine and the mysteries of his worship and everywhere was accepted as a god " the benzoin of Southeast Asia, Zen's tea whose fifth cup purifies and whose sixth "calls to the realm of the immortals," the pituri of the Australian aborigines and probably the mystic kykeon that was eaten and drunk at the climactic close of the sixth day of the Eleusinian mysteries. There is no need to extend the list, especially as Philippie de Felice's comprehensive study of the subject, Poisons Sacrés, Ivresses Divines (Sacred Poisons, Divine Raptures), is about to appear in English.
More interesting than the fact that consciousness-changing devices have been linked with religion is the possibility that they actually initiated many of the religious perspectives that, taking root in history, continued after their psychedelic origins were forgotten. Bergson saw the first movement of Hindus and Greeks toward "dynamic religion" as associated with the "divine rapture" found in intoxicating beverages. More recently Robert Graves, Gordon Wasson and Alan Watts have suggested that most religions arose from such chemically induced theophanies. Mary Barnard is the most explicit proponent of this thesis. She asks in the autumn 1963 journal of Phi Beta Kappa:
Which was more likely to happen first–the spontaneously generated idea of an afterlife in which the disembodied soul, liberated from the restrictions of time and space, experiences eternal bliss; or the accidental discovery of hallucinogenic plants that give a sense of euphoria, dislocate the center of consciousness, and distort time and space, making them balloon outward in greatly expanded vistas?
Her own answer is that "the latter experience might have had an almost explosive effect on the largely dormant minds of men, causing them to think of things they had never thought of before. This, if you like, is direct revelation." Her use of the subjunctive "might" renders this formulation of her answer equivocal, but she concludes her essay on a note that is completely unequivocal:
Looking at the matter coldly, unintoxicated and unentranced, I am willing to prophesy that fifty ethnobotanists working for fifty years would make the current theories concerning the origins of much mythology and theology as out-of-date as pre-Copernican astronomy.
This is an important hypothesis–one that must surely engage the attention of historians of religion for some time to come. But as I am concerned here only to spot the points at which the drugs erupt onto the field of serious religious study, not to ride the geysers to whatever height, I shall not pursue Miss Barnard's thesis. Having located what appears to be the crux of the historical question, namely the extent to which drugs not merely duplicate or simulate theologically sponsored experiences but generate or shape theologies themselves, I turn to phenomenology.
Dr. Huston Smith
Huston Smith (1919– ) is a religious scholar who’s book The World's Religions (originally published in 1958) is one of the most popular introductions to comparative religion. Born to Methodist missionaries in China, Dr. Smith not only studied, but practiced Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism for over ten years each.
ReplyDeleteHe taught at the University of Denver (1944–1947) and Washington University (1948–1957) before being appointed professor and chair of the philosophy department at M.I.T. (1958–1973). After leaving M.I.T., he was the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University until his retirement in 1983. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
http://www.hustonsmith.net/