Cannabis

Cannabis has its deepest and best documented religious role in South Asia, and specifically in Shaiva devotion.

It is associated above all with Shiva, who is said in popular tradition to have taken it, and it is used by the sadhus and ascetics who follow him, particularly the Naga and Aghori renunciants for whom it is part of a discipline rather than a pleasure. Three preparations are distinguished: bhang, the leaves ground and drunk in milk with almonds and spices; ganja, the flowering tops smoked; and charas, hand rubbed resin. Bhang is the most socially accepted and the most ritual, drunk in quantity at Holi and at Maha Shivaratri, when it is distributed at temples.

The textual footing is older than the devotional practice but thinner than often claimed. Cannabis is named in the Atharvaveda among a short list of beneficial plants said to release from anxiety, which establishes early significance without establishing psychoactive ritual use.

In Tibetan tantric material it appears among substances used in specific practices. In Chinese sources the evidence is largely medical and for fibre, and the case for ritual use rests on a small number of ambiguous passages that do not carry the weight sometimes placed on them.

Cannabis attracts more speculative religious history than any other plant here, and separating the documented from the asserted is most of the work.

Rastafari, emerging in Jamaica in the 1930s, treats cannabis as a sacrament, smoked in reasoning sessions and in the ritual chalice, and supports the practice with scriptural readings, commonly Genesis on the herb bearing seed and Psalms on the herb for the service of man. This is a genuine and recent religious use, and it is well documented. It is also the origin of much of the plant's modern spiritual vocabulary in the West.

Two older claims are repeated far more confidently than they deserve. The first is that the qaneh bosem of the Hebrew Bible, an ingredient of the holy anointing oil in Exodus, was cannabis. The argument is philological and rests on a proposed connection between the Hebrew and the later term kannabis; it has some support and a good deal of opposition, and calamus and other identifications remain live. The second is that Scythian funerary practice described by Herodotus, in which hemp seed is thrown on hot stones inside a tent, constitutes a religious rite; the passage is real and the archaeology from Pazyryk supports the practice, but Herodotus presents it as purification and enjoyment rather than as worship.

There is also a modern pattern worth naming: contemporary movements assert ancient sanction for present use, and the atlas records the modern practice as real and the ancient claim as unproven.