Entheogens

Old Rites, New Word

First attested
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
Claimed
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 runs about 96,000 years ahead of the evidence.

The word was proposed in 1979, to replace 'hallucinogen' and Osmond's 'psychedelic' of 1957 — and the category flattens what it collects: Wasson's mushroom soma and ergot kykeon are conjectures now repeated as fact.

Names a use, not a substance: a single word for rites that are old, separate, and not alike.

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. The term names a use, not a class of chemicals.

Light

Names a use, not a substance. The Supreme Court refused that distinction in Employment Division v. Smith (1990); Congress wrote it into the 1994 American Indian Religious Freedom Act amendments, for peyote taken ceremonially by tribal members, with elders, songs and a fixed setting.

Shadow

The category flattens what it collects: Wasson's mushroom soma of 1968 and ergot kykeon of 1978 are conjectures now repeated as fact, and the communities whose rites it names face ayahuasca tourism and dwindling wild peyote, assessed Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List in 2013.

Sources and verification6 sources · 2 links

Primary source

  • Carl A. P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson, Entheogens, 1979, Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, vol. 11, nos. 1-2, pp. 145-146The word was coined here, in 1979, explicitly to replace "hallucinogen" and "psychedelic", and defined by religious use rather than by chemistry
  • Supreme Court of the United States, Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 1990, 494 U.S. 872The Court held that a neutral, generally applicable drug law could be applied to sacramental peyote use, refusing the use-not-substance distinction
  • United States Congress, American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994, 1994, Public Law 103-344; 42 U.S.C. § 1996aCongress protected ceremonial peyote use by Indians who are members of federally recognised tribes: one named substance and one class of users, not a general principle

Scholarship

  • Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History, 1987The spread of the peyote rite across North America and the incorporation of the Native American Church in Oklahoma in 1918
  • Hassan R. El-Seedi, Peter A. G. M. De Smet, Olof Beck, Göran Possnert and Jan G. Bruhn, Prehistoric peyote use: alkaloid analysis and radiocarbon dating of archaeological specimens of Lophophora from Texas, 2005, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, vol. 101, nos. 1-3Mescaline was detected in the Shumla Cave specimens, which returned calibrated radiocarbon dates of roughly 3780-3660 BCE; the paper establishes chemistry and chronology, not ritual purpose

Where this claim originates

  • R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, 1978The ergot hypothesis for the Eleusinian kykeon is set out here, by the same authors, as a proposal and not a finding

Linked entries

  • Set againstPhilosopher's StoneA modern connection

    Both name a substance said to transform whoever takes it, but the entheogen literature points at identifiable plants and datable rites, while the stone was never anything a person could gather.

  • Set againstThe Holy GrailA modern connection

    Both are vessels of a draught that changes the drinker, but from Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1180) onward the romances never say what the Grail holds, while the entheogen literature names species and assays them.

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