Early Christianity and Entheogens

 

Disclaimer: The use of entheogens or psychoactive plants used in the Bible is virtually non-existent. The idea of their use is purely speculative. Of course, it’s not exactly surprising that there are no significant mentions of hallucinogenic plants in the Bible. Any reference would probably be veiled by the religious authorities. So, let’s take a peek behind the veil…

In The beginning…

We all know about the famous fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The serpent’s pitch is “…your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (or another translation might be ‘knowing everything’). Could this be a tantalizing reference to a consciousness-raising plant? Adam immediately gets paranoid and realizes, for the first time, he is naked. He then blames Eve for everything, setting the pattern for future generations. The story could be treated as a cautionary tale about partaking of certain forbidden plants; a warning in the front of the book.

Manna and the Burning Bush

Further along in the story of the Hebrews, Moses goes up to Mount Horeb (also called Sinai) where he witnesses the burning bush. It’s from this holy fire that God tells Moses He wants to free the Israelites from Egyptian enslavement. With God’s help, Moses leads the Israelites out into the desert where they grumble about lack of food. God’s answer is to send them manna from heaven every morning under the dew. We don’t know much about ‘manna’ except it could be baked or boiled, and needed to be eaten within one or two days or it would begin to stink. Could what Moses called this “small round thing” have been an ergot fungus?

There are other possibilities that plants with hallucinogenic properties existed in the barren desert. Benny Shanon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University has written on two plants in the Sinai Desert that have the psychoactive molecules (DMT) found in ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic South American brew. Shanon goes on to hypothesize that the Israelites could have been in an “altered state of consciousness” when they witnessed God descending in a cloud of fire with a trumpet blast. While Moses extends his stay with God on the mountaintop, the people build a golden calf in their frenzy to worship something.

Christ and Contemporaries

In the Passover meal, the bread symbolizes the manna that preserved the wandering tribe in the desert. At original Eucharist on a Good Friday, Jesus tells his disciples that ‘whoever eats of my flesh and drinks of my blood has eternal life.’ (John 6:54) Are the bread and wine symbolic stand-ins for a literal conduit to God or higher consciousness? In his book, The Mushroom and the Cross, Hebrew scholar, John Allegro goes so far as to make a case that the original story of Christ is a metaphor for an ancient mushroom-taking, fertility cult.

Proceeding Christianity by a couple of thousand years was the Eleusinian Mystery Religion. At their annual festival, participants partook of a psychoactive drink and interacted with their goddesses, Demeter and Persephone. Another contemporary of Christianity was the cult of Mithras, where followers shared a meal of sacrificed bull meat before Mithras ascends into heaven. In the 5th century BC, Euripides writes that the god Dionysus was born of a virgin and his blood-wine was shared. Since these groups mixed and mingled, sometimes worshipping at the same temple, it is possible that ideas were swapped and shared.

Apocrypha

One group that reputedly stayed to themselves was the Essenes, a Christian sect who left us the Dead Sea Scrolls, a library of ancient religious texts. Among the books found there was the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of early Jesus’s teachings from a Christian church associated with Gnosticism. We find a few new intriguing sayings of Jesus, along with the more familiar quotes found in the other epistles, albeit often with a slight slant…

Jesus said: If those who lead you say to you: See, the kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of the heaven will go before you; if they say to you: It is in the sea, then the fish will go before you. But the kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty, and you are poverty. (Logion 3)

Like the Gospel of Thomas, 2nd Esdras was also found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. While outside the accepted cannon of scripture (or the “Apocrypha”), they were certainly important to worshippers in their own time. The writing style is apocalyptic, so it is full of symbolic imagery. Never-the-less, we get an intriguing description of a mystical experience.

“And the next day, behold, a voice called, saying Esdras, open thy mouth, and drink that I give thee to drink. Then opened I my mouth, and behold, he reached me a full cup, which was full as it were with water, but the color of it was like fire. And I took it, and drank; and when I had drunk of it, my heart uttered understanding, and wisdom grew in my breast, for my spirit strengthened my memory: And my mouth was opened, and shut no more.”

This section of 2nd Esdras ends with a call to withhold some of the revealed wisdom from all but the worthy and wise (or the initiated). So, while we may not be getting all the information, we get another glimpse into otherwise secret world of early Christian sects. While neither the Essenes nor Gnosticism prevailed as the accepted brand of Christianity, their belief in a more direct mystical experience may have more relevance today.

As Jesus was fond of saying, we need ‘eyes to see and ears to hear.’ How we listen and see is an individual choice, or to borrow a Chinese proverb, ‘there are many paths to the mountaintop.’ We do know some ancient religions used psychoactive plants to better understand themselves and their gods. Taken with respect, psychedelics can still facilitate a mystical experience that can help us ‘know ourselves, and that we are sons and daughters of the living Father.’