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Cannabis, India, Mantra, Mystical, Shiva, Spiritual, Stories, Yoga

Lord Shiva & the Holy Cannabis Plant

January 25, 2023 sakshizion Leave a comment

Once upon a time, a long long way from where we now stand, there lived a powerful and divine being known as Lord Shiva. He was one of the three Supreme Gods of Hinduism and was said to reside atop of Mount Kailash in the Himalayas.

One day, Lord Shiva set out on a journey of self-discovery and exploration. Along the way, he encountered a sacred plant known as cannabis. Feeling the plant’s pure energy, Lord Shiva was inspired and consumed the leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant. The energy of the divine plant was overwhelming, calming and energizing all at once.

Once the effects of the cannabis had taken hold, Lord Shiva experienced incredible visions. He saw both the depths of life and the beauty of it, understanding the intricate balance that exists in the Universe. Upon coming to the realization that each moment of life is a precious gift, he embraced all of creation – from the trees to the stars – as part of himself.

Lord Shiva’s connection to cannabis remained strong, and he is said to have invented the holy bhang, a cannabis infused beverage, to boost himself and his followers’ spiritual awareness and connection to the divine.

And, to this day, Shiva himself is often represented with a cannabis leaf over his third eye, reminding us of the importance of that plant’s power and significance. To this day, many still believe that the true path to inner peace can be found through the use of cannabis and with the blessing of Lord Shiva.

Shiva has been a part of Hindu mythology since ancient times, and he has been greatly revered by millions around the world, in India and beyond. He is the all-powerful Hindu God of destruction and rebirth, often depicted with four arms and a trident in hand, dancing the Tandava. On the other side of the spectrum, Cannabis has been widely used around the world for hundreds of years, both recreationally and medicinally, as an aid in achieving a higher state of consciousness and health. This paper will discuss the relationship between Lord Shiva and Cannabis, looking at their history and uses for religious and medicinal purposes.

History

The relationship between Lord Shiva and Cannabis has been around for centuries. As early as 2000 BC, Cannabis was widely used in India for medicinal reasons and as an aid in achieving altered states of consciousness. Culturally, the use of Cannabis was associated with Shiva, who was often referred to as the Lord of Bhang. Bhang is an Ayurvedic herb mixture including Cannabis as its main ingredient and other herbs such as rose petals and spices. This mixture was then made into a drink and offered to Shiva as a way of showing devotion.

The use of Cannabis in traditional Indian culture is mentioned in various Hindu scriptures such as the Atharvaveda and Sushruta Samhita. It is also mentioned in written records by travelers to India such as the Greek writer Herodotus who noted its medicinal properties. Cannabis was used in India in the form of Bhang as well as charas, which is the resin of the female Cannabis plant smoked in a chillum (ornamental clay pipe).

Symbolism

Cannabis was seen as a symbol of both vitality and destruction in ancient Hindu culture. Shiva’s use of Cannabis is seen as a representation of his ever-changing states from destruction to creation, from death to life. It is thought that the use of Cannabis helped Shiva to both find and maintain balance in his life, and thus provided an example of how Cannabis can be used for personal and spiritual growth.

There is also the idea of Cannabis being used as an offering to Shiva in order to obtain his blessings and bestow prosperity on a person or a kingdom. As well as being consumed as a drink or smoked, Cannabis was also used as a votive offering, where it was offered as an offering of thanks, or burned in the fire as part of a Puja ceremony.

Medicinal Uses

The medicinal uses of Cannabis are well known, and have been around for centuries. Cannabis has been used for a variety of medical conditions, including pain relief, anxiety, and even as an aid for sleep. The active compounds in Cannabis, known as cannabinoids, are known to affect certain receptors in the body, leading to a variety of therapeutic effects. Research has found that the use of Cannabis can be beneficial for a range of medical conditions, and can improve quality of life for those suffering from chronic pain, insomnia, and more.

Lord Shiva and Cannabis have a long history together, and are both actively used in various Hindu rituals and traditions. Shiva is often seen as using Cannabis to both achieve and maintain balance in his life, while Cannabis is increasingly being used in the modern world for its medicinal properties. The relationship between Shiva and Cannabis is one that is complex, but ultimately can be seen as a practical way of using a natural substance to achieve balance and better health.

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Cannabis, Christ, Mystical, Natural Healing, Spiritual

Jesus Christ used Cannabis?

January 19, 2020 sakshizion 1 Comment

Last month the Salt Lake City Tribune ran a story titled “Families Migrating to Colorado for a Medical Marijuana Miracle.” It profiled just a few of the hundreds of children and parents currently uprooting their lives and flocking to the Rocky Mountain State in search of a non-psychoactive cannabis medicine that’s shown promise in treating serious pediatric ailments, even when all other possible treatments have proven futile.

“You’re completely re-establishing your whole life,” one father of a two-year old epilepsy sufferer explained of his family’s recent decision to relocate from Tennessee. “We don’t have a support system. We don’t have friends. We had to find a new church.”

“We can’t leave the state with [cannabis] or it would be a federal offense,” his wife added. “But we just felt like if we knew something was out there that might work and we didn’t try it we’d be doing the ‘what if’s’ our whole life.”

Tales of “miraculous” healing through the use of highly-concentrated cannabis oil have been circulating within the global marijuana community for almost ten years, but they only broke into the popular consciousness this August, when Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent, offered millions of viewers a painful apology for previously dismissing mounting evidence in favor of medical cannabis, describing himself as having been “systematically misled” on the subject.

Then Dr. Gupta introduced the world to six-year-old Charlotte Figi from Colorado Springs, Colorado, who used to suffer 300 gran mal seizures per week, even after cycling through every anti-seizure medicine in the pharmacopeia and enduring a series of painful procedures that left her unable to walk, talk or eat. Those seizures started when Charlotte was just three months old, and yet in all that time, not one medical professional ever so much as mentioned cannabis. Her parents only learned the herb might help treat Dravet’s—the rare, intractable form of epilepsy tormenting their child—by watching a video on Youtube, and even then only decided to try it after all else failed.

The first time they gave their daughter a dose of wholly plant-derived non-psychoactive high-CBD cannabis oil, her seizures ceased for seven straight days—a completely astonishing response. She’s now down from more than 1,200 major seizures per month to just two or three mild ones. Towards the end of the CNN segment, as Charlotte happily pedaled her bicycle, her father asked, “Why were we the ones that had to go out and find this natural cure? How come our doctors didn’t know about this?”

SCATTERING SEEDS

Now imagine Charlotte Figi living not in modern day Colorado, but in the Middle East, roughly 2000 years ago. Whether an object of pity, scorn, fear, or fascination, that poor young girl likely would’ve been thought to be demonically possessed—her deeply religious community would have had no concept of epilepsy as we know it today. At least until the day a stranger came to town, calling himself Jesus of Nazareth, but named by his disciples as Christ—a Greek word meaning the anointed.

Following the recipe for holy anointing oil found in the Old Testament (Exodus 30: 22-23), this healer of local renown would infuse nine pounds of a plant known in Aramaic as kaneh-bosm (fragrant cane) into about six quarts of olive oil, along with essential extracts of myrrh, cinnamon, and cassia. He would then apply this unguent concoction topically to the infirm, allowing it to absorb transdermally.

According to conventional Biblical scholarship, the “250 shekels of kaneh-bosm” listed in ancient Hebrew versions of the Old Testament supposedly refers to calamus, but Chris Bennett, author of the 2001 book Sex, Drugs, and Violence in the Bible claims that this is a misconception, and likely a misdirection as well, one stemming from a perhaps willful mistake made the first time the Old Testament was translated into Greek.

Kaneh-bosm, he writes, was cannabis.

The first solid evidence of the Hebrew use of cannabis was established in 1936 by Sula Benet, a little known Polish etymologist from the Institute of Anthropological Sciences in Warsaw. The word cannabis was generally thought to be of Scythian origin, but Benet showed that it has a much earlier origin in Semitic languages like Hebrew, and that it appears several times throughout the Old Testament. Benet explained that “in the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament there are references to hemp, both as incense, which was an integral part of religious celebration, and as an intoxicant.”

Benet demonstrated that the word for cannabis is kaneh-bosm, also rendered in traditional Hebrew as kaneh or kannabus. The root kan in this construction means “reed” or “hemp”, while bosm means “aromatic”. This word appears five times in the Old Testament; in the books of Exodus, the Song of Songs, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel…. and has been mistranslated as calamus, a common marsh plant with little monetary value that does not have the qualities or value ascribed to kaneh-bosm. The error occurred in the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint in the third century BC, and was repeated in the many translations that followed.

While that etymogical argument in no way serves as material proof, the “aromatic reed theory” can serve as the basis for a set of assumptions. Assuming the oil described in Exodus did in fact contain high levels of cannabis, the effective dose of the plant’s medicinal compounds would certainly be potent enough to explain many of the healing miracles attributed to Jesus, as marijuana has been shown to be an effective treatment for everything from skin diseases and glaucoma to neurodegenerative conditions and multiple sclerosis. Also, while it’s highly unlikely anybody back then had herb capable of competing with the 20-25 percent THC super-chronic Cannabis Cup winners of today, there’s also no reason to believe that artful botanists of the ancient world couldn’t have bred and grown plants in the 10 percent THC range—with perhaps even higher levels of CBD than our modern hybrids—a cannabinoid profile that advocates claim is potent enough to produce a truly profound reaction when absorbed in such large amounts.

MOSES THE STONED SHAMAN

Kaneh-bosm makes its first, rather auspicious appearance in the Bible as part of the story of Moses and the burning bush, when the revered Jewish prophet gets the holy anointing oil recipe direct from the Lord, along with clear instructions to anoint only the priest class—a restriction later eased to allow kings access as well.

Exodus 30:31

You shall speak to the sons of Israel, saying, “This shall be a holy anointing oil to me throughout your generations. It shall not be poured on anyone’s body, nor shall you make any like it in the same proportions; it is holy, and it shall be holy to you. Whoever shall mix any like it or whoever puts any of it on a layman shall be cut off from his people.

Unfortunately for the priests and their erstwhile marijuana monopoly, however, many other competing religions and spiritual paths active at the time—including pagans and those who worshipped the Goddess Ashera—had their own far more free-flowing kaneh-bosm supply. Cannabis, after all, has been grown as a food crop since at least 6,000 BC and was well known and widely available in Moses’s time.

“There can be little doubt about a role for cannabis in Judaic religion,” according to Carl P. Ruck, a professor of classical mythology at Boston University who studies the way psychoactive substances have influenced humanity’s spiritual development. “There is no way that so important a plant as a fiber source for textiles and nutritive oils and one so easy to grow would have gone unnoticed… the mere harvesting of it would have induced an entheogenic reaction.”

Which means it wasn’t so much the cannabis plant that ancient Judaic priests tried to keep to themselves, as the healing potential of high-potency anointing oil passed down to them by Moses. A prohibition they maintained by targeting for elimination anybody who dared to break God’s commandment by sharing the elixir with the masses, assuming that kaneh-bosm is cannabis.

JESUS THE REBEL

Aside from crucifixion, Jesus’s baptism is considered by many researchers the only historically certain fact about his life. The New Testament’s vivid accounts of the ceremony make it clear that the apostles considered their savior’s encounter with John the Baptist to be a pivotal and transformative event, one that marks the beginning of his public ministry.

Mark 1: 9-13

It came to pass in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And straightway coming up out of the water, He saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon Him. And there came a voice from Heaven, saying, ‘Thou Art My Beloved Son, In Whom I Am Well Pleased.’ And immediately the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness. And He was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto Him.

But if water served as the catalyst for Jesus’s spiritual ascension, why does he never perform a baptism? Why take the name Christ? And why anoint his flock in oil before sending them out to anoint others, as described in Mark 6:13: They cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them.

To those who believe that Christ used cannabis oil, the answer lies in non-canonical Christian texts. The canonical texts of the New Testament, that is the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, etc, were not selected as such until around 325 years after Jesus’s death, when the Roman Catholic Church culled them from a large number of contenders in hopes of uniting all of Christendom under one banner—their own. The Church then sought out and destroyed every account that differed from their now official version of events. Allowing the very empire Jesus once virulently opposed to seize control over the practice of Christianity for a thousand year period known as the Dark Ages.

Meanwhile, any Christians who continued to promote alternate views of Jesus and his teachings were labeled heretics and brutally suppressed. Much of their scripture and dictates were thought to be lost forever as a result, until 1945, when an Egyptian peasant digging for fertilizer in a cave unearthed a dozen leather-bound codices inside a sealed jar, a treasure trove purposely buried there by scribes at a nearby monastery sometime around AD 367, when the Church first condemned the use of non-canonical texts.

Within these volumes—many of which predate the books of the New Testament—Biblical experts discovered a parallel but radically different telling of the life of Jesus, one that places the anointing ceremony squarely at the center of Christianity. So much so that these various sects were given the blanket name Gnostics (from the Greek word for “knowledge”) to highlight their shared focus on first-hand experience of the holy oil as what defines a christian, rather than second-hand faith in scripture or the priesthood.

The Gnostic tractate The Gospel of Phillip, for instance, proclaims that any person who “receives this unction…is no longer a christian but a Christ.” A transformation then compared to the placebo act of baptism adopted by the Roman Catholic Church, in which would-be initiates “go down into the water and come up without having received anything… [Because] there is water in water, there is fire in chrism [an anointing].”

Basically, the Gnostics believed Jesus’s baptism took place, but only as a kind of cleansing ritual, in preparation for receiving holy anointing oil—the true sacrament. As Chris Bennett writes, “The surviving Gnostic descriptions of the effects of the anointing rite make it very clear that the holy oil had intense psychoactive properties that prepared the recipient for entrance into ‘unfading bliss.’”

THE SKEPTICS

Lytton John Musselman, a Professor of Botany at Old Dominion University and author of A Dictionary of Bible Plants (Cambridge 2011), says he’s familiar with the theory that keneh-bosem refers to cannabis, but remains wholly unconvinced, calling the evidence claiming marijuana to be part of the holy anointing oil “so weak I would not pursue it.” He also defends calamus as capable of producing medicinal effects on par with those described in the Bible.

“Calamus is a very important component of Ayurvedic medicine and has been shown to have efficacy,” according to Musselman. “For example, in Sri Lanka it is available in any herbal remedy shop and also universally grown in home gardens. The North American species was and is so important to Native Americans in the Northeast that land with natural populations is highly sought after.”

Like most Biblical scholars, Musselman gives little consideration to the idea that Jesus used marijuana to perform the kind of healing miracles we now see on CNN and read about in the Salt Lake City Tribune.

Understandably, for children like Charlotte Figi and their families, religion, history, politics, medicine, and the law all must take a backseat to the positive effects they are experiencing treating illness with marijuana. As Jesus said to his apostles after preaching at Lake Galilee:

Mark 4: 21-23

Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed? Instead, don’t you put it on its stand? For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open. If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.

Remember, lamps back then were fueled with oil.

Article from : https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/bn5z7v/did-jesus-perform-his-miracles-with-cannabis-oil

Cannabis, India, Mantra, Mystical, Natural Healing, Rastafari, Spiritual, Yoga

Ganja Mantras & Cannabis History in Religion

June 2, 2017 sakshizion 16 Comments

In India, Shiva is invoked before taking the first puff of Ganja by shouting one of many chilam-mantras :

Alakh! Bam Bam Bholanath! Bom Shiva!

Hara Hara Mahadev Shambo! Hara Hara Ganja!

In India, a significant section of Shaivite Tantrics and Devotees of Shiva ritually partake of marijuana as part of their sadhana (spiritual exercise).

“With the first drag, Shiva (a Hindu deity) made the sky. With the second, he made the earth and with the third he made this world.”

This, according to Dr Molly Kaushal, research officer at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, is how the Gaddi tribals of the northern Indian hill state of Himachal Pradesh describe the act of Creation. The ‘drag’ here, of course, refers to a puff of cannabis.

As she tells me this, an excited Madhusudan Baul, a folk singer from the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, chips in: “These three puffs are extremely important. There is a proper ritual involved in taking them. There should be a gap of at least 90 seconds between each puff. And the high that you reach after three puffs is the climax. No further smoking will make any difference.”

And what does he feel when he is on such a high? Madhusudan closes his eyes in bliss as he recalls: “We all know that God resides everywhere. But we see Him in bits and pieces. Cannabis makes me see God in His entirety. It is a sight of such unalloyed joy that tears well up in my eyes.”

Neem Karoli Baba forwarded a similar view when he was asked by one of his disciples whether taking hashish helps spiritual development. “You should smoke hashish like Lord Shiva,” he said, “only to be with God. But smoking hashish is not necessary to reach God. The effect only lasts a short while. Devotion to God is an addiction that lasts all the time.”

Excerpt from Sadhus: India’s Mystic Holy Men, by Dolf Hartsuiker Inner Traditions, Int’l. (1993), p. 97-98 :

A common ritual [for devotees of the God Shiva] is the smoking of a mixture of tobacco and charas (hashish) in a chillam (pipe). Although this undoubtedly serves the more earthly purpose of socializing with Sadhu-brothers and devotees, the smoking of charas is nonetheless regarded as a sacred act. Intoxication as a ‘respected’ — amongst Babas anyway — method for self-realization is related to the drinking of soma, the nectar of the gods, which is recommended in the Vedas as a sure means of attaining divine wisdom.

Mythologically charas is intimately connected with Shiva: he smokes it, he is perpetually intoxicated by it, he is the Lord of Charas. He is invoked before taking the first puff by shouting one of many chilam-mantras: Alakh! Bam Bam Bholanath! Bom Shiva!

Babas offer the smoke to him; they want to take part in his ecstasy, his higher vision of Reality. As a final gesture of devotion, a Sadhu may mark his forehead with the chilam-ashes, or even eat them, as prasad from Shiva. Charas may be used by Shaivas (Shiva worshipers) and Vaishnavas (Vishnu worshipers).

Lord Balarama & Ganja
Worshipers of Shiva traditionally offer their ganja to Shiva before smoking, but what about followers of Krishna? Krishna generally does not accept ganja offerings, although He clearly states that He is the healing essence of all herbs. In ancient India, the temple incense was infused with hashish so worshipers could inhale the sacred smoke and experience love of God. Although hash incense is no longer available, Krishna worshipers offer ganja smoke to Krishna’s brother, Balarama, and receive the Lord’s blessings. Mantra for offering ganja to Balarama: Baladev Baladev Hara Hara Ganja.

She brought out a heavy auburn cone of clay which had an inner rod that fit snugly inside the hollow cone. She ripped a tattered fragment off of her orange sarong and tied it around the thinner end of the cone, brought out a small cup made from an immature ash-blackened coconut in which she crumbled up a 1:2 mix of charas and rare ganja which she tightly packed into the wide end of the chillum.

Om Shiva Shankara Hara Hara Ganga!

Ditto. I mimicked her mantra and we began. “I got this pipe from a baba who resides in the Shiva Temple at Hampi.”

My first goal was to find the Baba who taught Eleanor the art of chillum smoking. Before we slept she gave me the full story of the Baba, how he dosed her whole body with blue ash, dabbled salt on her eye lids, blew incense on meridian points of her body and quivered with joy when she told him that she was to pack a chillum of only cannabis as opposed to partitioning it with tobacco. “It will please Shiva most!” she said.

The Sumerians of the Ancient Near East each developed their own`personal deity’ whom they would worship each day by burning cannabis. The Sumerians believed that the daily worship of their personal deity assisted them in earning a living and being courageous in battle. Creighton asserts that over the years the Hebrew words `yagarah hadebash’ have been translated incorrectly into `honey comb.’ He says that, “The earlier [translations], however obscure, show that the`honey’ was of a peculiar kind” and that the Syrian version of the text is actually a better account. The Syrian account says that Jonathan dipped his rod in a field of flower-stalks with resinous exudation, which would be produced in times of heat similar to the behavior of cannabis resin.

The word `kaneh bosm’ appears several times in the Old Testament “both as incense, which was an integral part of religious celebration, and as an intoxicant,” but a specific example sees Moses using it in Exodus 30:23 when God commanded him to make “holy anointing oil of myrrh, sweet cinnamon, kaneh bosm, and kassia.” Benet explains that in this passage the Hebrew definition of kaneh bosm is `aromatic reed,’ kan meaning `reed’ or `hemp,’ while bosm means `aromatic.’ The linguistic resemblance of the word `kaneh bosm’ to the Scythian word cannabis, and the Hebrew definition of kaneh bosm provide Benet and Bentowa with enough evidence to assert that the intoxicating properties of cannabis were probably first used by the peoples of the Near East and then spread through contact with the Scythians.

Today, there are groups such as The Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church who fully believe in the teachings of the Bible and that “marijuana is a godly creation from the beginning of the world. Its purpose in creation is as a fiery sacrifice to be offered to our Redeemer during obligations. Ganja (cannabis) is the sacramental right of every man worldwide.” As further confirmation of this belief, they point to the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s section on Pharmacological Cults, which states: “the ceremonial use of incense in contemporary ritual is most likely a relic of the time when the psychoactive properties of incense brought the ancient worshipper into touch with supernatural forces.”

An Indian god named Siva is described as The Lord of `Bhang,’ the drink made of cannabis leaves, milk, sugar and spices. Historically and continuing today, “bhang is to India what alcohol is to the West.” Orthodox Hindu rules have traditionally prohibited the use of alcohol except for the warrior Rajput caste who, despite the rules, indulge in alcohol. For Members of the Brahmin caste, cannabis was unequivocally sanctioned for social use in order to help achieve the contemplative spiritual life they strive to lead. According to one historian of cannabis, even in the 1940’s bhang was integral to social activities including special festivities and in the home.

In special festivities such as weddings, it was said that a father must bring bhang to the ceremonies to prevent evil spirits from hanging over the bride and groom. Bhang was also a symbol of hospitality. “A host would offer a cup of bhang to a guest as casually as we would offer someone in our home a glass of beer. A host who failed to make such a gesture was despised as being miserly and misanthropic.”

Cannabis is also renowned in India for its use in the Tantric religious yoga sex acts. About an hour before carrying out the yoga ritual, the devotee would put a bowl of bhang before him and after reciting a mantra to the goddess Kali, the devotee would drink the bhang potion. “The goal of the Tantra initiate was to achieve unity of mind, body, and spirit through yoga and marathon sexual episodes. This was fueled by bhang, which heightens the experience.”

The most potent Indian preparation of cannabis called `charas’ has the same religious importance to many Hindus that wine has to Christians celebrating the Eucharist. The Hindu mystics who smoked charas in the prayer ceremony called Puja especially favored charas. As well, the holy men called `fakirs’ who were famous for walking on hot coals and sleeping on beds of nails, believed that charas put them in closer communion with their gods.

Among the main deities worshiped in India is Shiva, god of destruction. He is said to have been a shaman who lived before 1000 b.c.e. and brought cannabis down from a mountain. A popular form of worshipping Shiva is to smoke charas in a chillum, a straight pipe smoked through the hands (to prevent contagion). The chillum is first touched to the forehead with the mantra, “Boom Shiva”.

Within a few hundred years, the Hindu reformer, Buddha, is alleged to have lived for six years on nothing but cannabis before attaining illumination. Many Buddhists venerate the plant and have ceremonial uses for it. Cannabis use spread to Japan as well and was used as a blessing in Shinto marriage ceremonies and to drive away evil spirits.

Before this time, cannabis use spread to the Middle East. At around 550 b.c.e., the Zend-Avesta — the holy book of the Zoroastrian faiths — listed hemp first among its 10,000 medicinal plants. There is also evidence of earlier use by the Hebrew priestcraft. In 1936, an etymologist named Sula Bennet found that the Hebrew word “kaneh-bosm” really means cannabis and had been mistranslated in the past.
According to his theory, the word appears throughout the Bible, for example,in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. According to him, there are references to cannabis as both an incense used in religious ceremonies as well as an intoxicant.

By 800 e.v., when Mohammed established his religion, cannabis use was still allowed, though other intoxicants were forbidden. The lack of religious and social restraints led to cannabis being produced for a number of products (like paper, medicine and rope). As well, hashish (called Khaneh) was being widely produced and used by Sufis and other Islamic holy men and women for religious experiences and communion with God. Hashish production is still high in many Islamic countries.

We know from the Roman historian Herodotus writing at about 450 b.c.e. that the Sythians used cannabis in their sacred rituals (such as the funeral rites). He stated that they placed the seeds (probably not separated from the buds) on hot coals under small tents and breathed in the smoke. They then “transported by the vapor, shout aloud”. There is also evidence from several grave sites that the Sythians smoked cannabis for pleasure.

The Sythians were nomadic tribes from central Asia that spread across Europe starting near 1000 b.c.e., which is about the earliest reference we can find for the drug cultivation of cannabis. The Greek Thracians were closely tied to the Sythians and are alleged to have used cannabis as well, mostly in connection with the ecstatic worship of Dionysus. The noted historian M. Eliade claimed that they maintained a shamanic ritual of divination involving placing dried herbs, including cannabis, on hot coals and breathing in the smoke. Their shaman or “those who walk in smoke” were called “Kapnobatai”.

Horseback riding first appeared on the Ukrainian Steppes of Central Asia at around 4000 b.c.e. and led to numerous nomadic groups spreading out into the world. Many of these brought cannabis with them. Around 1500 b.c.e., nomadic Aryan tribes moved into India and integrated with the existing culture. Cannabis quickly became popular there. It’s common to find three main preparations of cannabis in India: bhang, ganja, and charas. Bhang is a beverage made from the dried leaves and is often very mild. Ganja is the flowering tops of female plants (buds) and charas is a form of hashish made by rubbing off the resin.

There are numerous “Dagga” (cannabis) religions in Africa, and some tribes claim that it was brought by the sacred star Sirius. When Africans were enslaved in Jamaica they brought their sacramental use of cannabis with them and, combining it with Indian use and mythology, created the religion of Rastafari. Many Rastafarians smoke cannabis religiously and use it to help them communicate with “Jah” (god). In Egypt and Ethiopia, a Christian group arose, the Copts, that considered cannabis to be a sacred herb, incense, and oil. The Coptic Christians used references in the Old Testament to back up their claims.

I think it is pretty clear that cannabis is a very sacred plant and has been used as such amongst various ancient cultures through-out history! Free the Herb! Legalize It! Don’t Criticize It! And I Will Advertise It! Boom Shiva! Jah Rastafari!

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~Sakshi Zion