Not available to order
Publication date:
20 October 2016Length of book:
198 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442271920
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.
Mark S. Ferrara is your affable liberal professor who is not so secretly known to take a puff or two. Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis is a brief but scholarly history of the role of marijuana within spiritual and religions traditions from ancient India to modern Europe. Ferrara’s basic thesis is that humanity has for millennia used cannabis as an entheogen, or ritual drug, to stimulate what he calls 'peak experiences'— a term borrowed from psychologist Abraham Maslow that refers to brief moments of sudden spiritual insight, 'an important response to the panhuman yearning for paradise.' [Ferrara's message is] warmhearted and inviting.