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Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion.
Campbell, Joseph. (1988).
New York: Harper Collins.
ISBN: 0-06-096353-0
Description: Perennial
Library edition, paperback, 170 pages.
Contents: Prologue, 3
chapters, chapter notes, acknowledgments, index.
Note: Originally published
in 1986 by A. van der Marck Editions, ISBN: 0-06-055152-6. The
chapters of this volume have been developed from lectures delivered
in San Francisco, 1981-1984.
Excerpt(s): In the 1950's
R. Gordon Wasson's investigations of the
Mexican bian
Albert
Hofmann, the Swiss chemist renowned for his discovery of LSD in
1943) established beyond question the prominence of hallucinogens
in the religious exercises of the whole Mayan-Aztec
culture field. The same investigators in conjunction with the
classicist, Carl A. P. Ruck, have lately
revealed the likelihood of the influence of a hallucinogen (ergot
of barley) in the Greek mysteries of Eleusis. Already in 1968,
Wasson published his disclosure of the mysterious Vedic sacramentals,
Soma, as probably a product of the mushroom Amanita muscaria
(fly agaric). Aldous Huxley's The Doors
of Perception (1954), describing his own visionary experiences
under the influence of mescaline, opened the way to a popular
appreciation of the ability of hallucinogens to render perceptions
of a quasi, or even truly, mystical profundity. There can be no
doubt today that through the use of such sacramental, revelations
indistinguishable from some of those reported of yoga have been
experienced. Nor can there be any doubt that the source of the
revelations is the psyche of the practitioner-the unconscious,
that is to say. They are revelations, that is to say further,
of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, elementary ideas
a priori of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, such
as may appear spontaneously no matter where. (page 90)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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