Was there a whiff of cannabis about Jesus?

Health & Happiness — POSTED BY Prof. Carl Ruck on April 19, 2010 at 9:17 pm

picture of Jesus Christ and healing herbs

Claims of drug use by biblical figures surprisingly have susbtance,
says Professor Carl Ruck

Was Jesus a Stoner? is the mischievous title of an article about the use of cannabis in
ancient Judaism in next month’s High Times, a pro-cannabis magazine. Its author,
Chris Bennett, likes to shock. He is the host of Burning Shiva, a show on Canada’s
Pot-TV, and an advocate for the medical use and decriminalisation of marijuana.

Bennett first looked at the use of drugs in religion two years ago in his book Sex,
Drugs, Violence, and the Bible. He postulates that Jesus’s ministry was fuelled by
mind-altering substances, that he may have used cannabis-based oils to heal eye and
skin diseases and that his very name – Christ – derives from being anointed with
cannabis-enriched oil.

His politics and television career might make it tempting to dismiss him but what
Bennett says makes perfect sense. Over the centuries drugs have been used by
virtually all religions. Why not Christianity?

In ancient times cannabis was widely cultivated throughout the Middle East. It grows
like a weed and provides nourishing seed, which is also a good source of fibre used
to make rope.

People certainly knew of its pleasurable effects; it would have been impossible to
harvest it without becoming ecstatic as the drug would be absorbed through the
skin. And as long ago as 1935 a Slovakian linguist identified the plant known as
“fragrant cane” in the English Bible as flowering cannabis, a link since accepted by
some Jewish authorities.

Ancient people were fascinated by herbs and their healing powers and knew much
more about them than we do; at least about mixing herbs to release their potency.

Ancient wines were always fortified, like the “strong wine” of the Old Testament, with
herbal additives: opium, datura, belladonna, mandrake and henbane. Common
incenses, such as myrrh, ambergris and frankincense are psychotropic; the easy
availability and long tradition of cannabis use would have seen it included in the
mixtures. Modern medicine has looked into using cannabis as a pain reliever and in
treating multiple sclerosis. It may well be that ancient people knew, or believed, that
cannabis had healing power.

Much of their knowledge, passed down through an oral tradition, has been lost and
to some extent it is the modern prejudice against drugs that has stopped us looking
for it. Revulsion against drugs and the hippie culture even led to the term
“entheogen” being coined to describe a psychotropic substance used in religious
rituals.

Entheogen comes from the Greek entheos (meaning “god-inspired within”) and the
word is now commonly employed in English and European languages to discuss
sacramental foods used by shamans (mystic or visionary priests) to achieve spiritual
ecstasy.

So what of the early Christians? At the time they were evolving, they had to compete
with other religions of the Roman empire. The strongest of those was Mithraism,
imported from Persia, which exists today as Zoroastrianism.

Its sacrament, Haoma, was virtually identical to what we know of soma, in
Brahmanism. Worshipped as a god, soma was a strange plant without leaves or roots
that needed little light and induced religious ecstasy. It was most likely amanita
muscaria: a magic mushroom. In ancient Rome sharing the Haoma cemented the
bond of brotherhood of emperors, bureaucrats and soldiers. Pagan Greek
celebrations at the sanctuary of Eleusis, meanwhile, included a visionary experience
for a crowd of 1,000 people, from drinking a potion made from a fungus that grows
on wheat and produces an effect similar to LSD.

So, did Jesus use cannabis? I think so. The word Christ does mean “the anointed
one” and Bennett contends that Christ was anointed with chrism, a cannabis-based
oil, that caused his spiritual visions. The ancient recipe for this oil, recorded in
Exodus, included over 9lb of flowering cannabis tops (known as kaneh-bosem in
Hebrew), extracted into a hin (about 11� pints) of olive oil, with a variety of other
herbs and spices. The mixture was used in anointing and fumigations that,
significantly, allowed the priests and prophets to see and speak with Yahweh.

Residues of cannabis, moreover, have been detected in vessels from Judea and
Egypt in a context indicating its medicinal, as well as visionary, use. Jesus is
described by the apostle Mark as casting out demons and healing by the use of this
holy chrism. Earlier, from the time of Moses until the later prophet Samuel, holy
anointing oil was used by the shamanic Levite priesthood to receive the “revelations
of the Lord”. The chosen ones were drenched in this potent cannabis oil.

Early Christian documents found in Eygpt, thought to be a more accurate record
than the New Testament, portray Jesus as an ecstatic rebel sage who preached
enlightenment through rituals involving magical plants. Indeed, Bennett goes so far
as to say that Jesus was probably not born the messiah but acquired the title when
he was anointed with cannabis oil by John the Baptist. The baptism in the Jordan
was probably to wash away the oil after it had done its work. The early Christians
fought hard for followers in the ancient world, recognising the similarity of their own
“foreign” god and his eucharistic meal to the Greek gods. Various sects and even the
elite in what would eventually become the Roman Catholic church probably used the
full range of available entheogens for baptism, ordination and the eucharistic meal.

What we now call the host might have been more than just bread. There are
indications that early Christians shared magic mushrooms – and the spiritual visions
and ecstasies they occasioned – as their eucharistic meal. A 4th-century mosaic
discovered at a basilica in Aquileia in northern Italy depicts baskets of mushrooms.
Why? This wasn’t a restaurant. Could the “red mushrooms” have been the ritual
meal?

Eating bread and sharing wine together was, and remains, at the heart of the
Christian ritual. We’ll never know exactly what Jesus and his disciples consumed at
the Last Supper, but as they believed they were drinking the blood of Christ we must
accept it was – if not actually hallucinatory – at least fortified by God.

Carl Ruck is professor of classics at Boston University