Entheogens
Old Rites, New Word
- Earliest record
- 37th century BCEpeyote buttons from the Shumla Caves, Texas, assayed for mescaline and radiocarbon-dated to about 3700 BCE: evidence of use, not of the purpose the word requires
- Said to date from
- around 100000 BCEasserted by Terence McKenna, whose "stoned ape" hypothesis in Food of the Gods (1992) places ritual psilocybin use deep in the Pleistocene
The claim is about 96,000 years older than the evidence.
Its 1979 coiners left a loophole: strictly, drugs shown to figure in shamanic or religious rites; loosely, any drug, natural or artificial, with like effects.
Carl A. P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson, 'Entheogens', Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11 (1979), pp. 145-146
A word coined in 1979 for mind-altering drugs taken in shamanic or religious rites.
More context
Carl Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson proposed the word in 1979, to replace "hallucinogen" and Humphry Osmond's "psychedelic" of 1957. The practices it labels are older, and separate from one another. Peyote buttons from the Shumla Caves, Texas, assayed by El-Seedi's team in 2005, hold mescaline and date to about 3700 BCE: chemistry and chronology, with purpose inferred from context. The Native American Church, incorporated in Oklahoma in 1918, takes peyote as a sacrament. Ayahuasca, brewed in distinct Amazonian traditions, entered Brazilian churches when Raimundo Irineu Serra began Santo Daime around 1930. What the Eleusinian kykeon contained, and what the Vedic soma was, remain unsettled: Wasson's proposals of 1968 and 1978 are hypotheses, not findings. Strictly the word names drugs used in rites, though its coiners allowed a looser sense too.
Light
Congress drew the line by use in 1994: after Employment Division v. Smith (1990), it made Indians' traditional ceremonial peyote lawful.
Shadow
Wasson's mushroom soma (1968) and ergot kykeon (1978) are conjectures the category tends to present as fact.