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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
Living With Drugs.
Gossop, Michael. (1996).
London: Arena/Ashgate,
Brookfield, VT: Ashgate.
- ISBN: 1-85742-216-3 paperback
- 1-85742-350-X hardcover
Description: paperback, fourth edition, xiv + 225 pages.
Contents: preface to the fourth edition, author's apologia,
acknowledgements, 12 chapters, selected bibliography, index.
Excerpt(s): This tendency to resist using drugs other than
alcohol may have owed much to the dominant cultural
influence of the Christian Church. Despite a distinctly
secular attitude towards certain pleasures of the flesh, the
use of drugs (other than alcohol) to modify states of
consciousness has been consistently reviled by the Church.
This may have been because of their links with other, more
'primitive', religions. Alternately, it may have been
because dramatically altered states of consciousness were
thought of in terms of possession usually possession by
devils. Consequently, knowledge about the uses of drugs
remained in the hands of various closed groups
apothecaries, alchemists, physicians and a few individuals
who involved themselves with such esoteric practices as
witchcraft. (page 6)
It is currently fashionable to sneer at the hippies.
Yet the hippie subculture was a most interesting
development. In some respects it was a spontaneous religious
(some would prefer to call it quasi-religious) movement with
LSD as its sacrament. Of course the hippies were not a
unified group. They included among their numbers drug
addicts, the emotionally disturbed, social misfits, hangers-
on and others who were interested mainly in the extravagant
clothes and music of the movement. But beneath the surface
carnival, there was still a core of hippies by whom LSD was
used to pursue a new set of religious, spiritual and
intellectual values. Their deliberate rejection of the
spiritual and religious vacuum of what they contemptuously
called *the plastic society' is summed up in their creed
*Turn on, tune in, drop out.' (page 41)
The hippies were not continuously preoccupied with the
transcendental state, but the LSD experience was always
there to redirect their attention back to it. The
psychedelic experience is often spoken of as if it were a
casual diversion. This is misleading, perhaps dangerously
so; such drugs are not to be used casually. (page 42)
At the heart of many psychedelic experiences was a
fundamental sense of the oneness of things, a belief that
all contradictions were resolved, all opposites joined. In
this, the LSD experience resembles the mystical experience,
which is usually defined by its ineffability (it cannot be
described or expressed), its noetic quality (to those who
experience it, it is a state of knowledge), and its
transiency (mystical states cannot usually be sustained for
long; (page 42)
It would be a remarkable irony if an ordinary person could,
merely by swallowing a pill, attain those exalted states of
consciousness which often elude the most committed seekers
of mystical enlightenment after a lifetime's spiritual
exercises. Not surprisingly, the suggestion has evoked angry
dismissals in many quarters. Whatever the true validity of
the LSD experience, the hippies shared an immense
knowingness, a conviction of their own superiority. Even if
they could not reach the profound truth beneath the surface
of things, they felt they had at least travelled beyond the
meager frontiers of normal, rational consciousness. (page
42)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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