Publication date:
20 October 2016Length of book:
194 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442271913
One of the most important relationships that human beings have with plants is changing our consciousness—consider the plants that give us coffee, tea, chocolate, and nicotine. Sacred Bliss challenges traditional attitudes about cannabis by tracing its essential role in the spiritual and curative traditions in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas from prehistory to the present day. In highlighting the continued use of cannabis around the globe, Sacred Bliss offers compelling evidence of cannabis as an entheogen used for thousands of years to evoke peak-experiences, or moments of expanded perception or spiritual awareness.
Today, the growing utilization of medical cannabis to alleviate the pain and symptoms of physical illness raises the possibility of using cannabis to treat the mind along with the body. By engaging sacred and secular texts from around the world, Sacred Bliss demonstrates that throughout religious history, cannabis has offered access to increased imagination and creativity, heightened perspective and insight, and deeper levels of thought.
Today, the growing utilization of medical cannabis to alleviate the pain and symptoms of physical illness raises the possibility of using cannabis to treat the mind along with the body. By engaging sacred and secular texts from around the world, Sacred Bliss demonstrates that throughout religious history, cannabis has offered access to increased imagination and creativity, heightened perspective and insight, and deeper levels of thought.
Ferrara examines how cannabis has informed the history of religions, tracing this history geographically to show the ways that Indians, Middle Easterners, Chinese, Africans, and Native Americans have variously incorporated cannabis as a psychoactive, medicinal, or textile plant throughout most of human history. In addition to Rastafarians, religious users include Zoroastrian mystics, Muslim Sufis, and Native American shamans, who relied on the drug to achieve experiences that blurred distinctions between self and other. Casting such experiences as central to religious expression, Ferrara suggests that cannabis can provide mystical experiences for many who cannot achieve them otherwise. He provides significant context to understanding the religious traditions he discusses, a helpful move to ensure that cannabis appears as an ancillary rather than central component. His final chapter on the Euro-American literary connection to cannabis feels slightly out of place, but shows that experimentation with the substance has a long history in the West. The work remains mostly analytic, but his afterword moves slightly toward arguing for increased legalization of cannabis. After laying out the history of potential spiritual benefits, this convincing conclusion provides a quiet rationale for more openness and a return to cannabis use as a spiritual practice.