Why Use “The Word”, Entheogen?
The following was taken from the book,
The Age of Entheogens & The Angel's Dictionary by Jonathon Ott
Carl A.P. Ruck, Danny
Staples, Jeremy Bigwood, and I, in collaboration with Wasson, proposed the neologism “entheogen” [ic]
in 1973, as a term “appropriate for describing states of shamanic and ecstatic
possession induced by ingestion of mind-altering drugs.” Noting that shamanic
inebriants did not provoke hallucinations or other psychiatric pathologies, we
deemed “hallucinogen” [ic], “psychotomimetic” and its congeners to be pejorative,
prejudicing “transcendent and beatific states of communion with deity” characteristic
of traditional use of visionary drugs. We noted that, besides being pejorative
outside of the counterculture, psychedelic was “so invested with connotations
of the pop culture of the 1960's that it is incongruous to speak of a shaman's
taking a 'psychedelic' drug.”
“Entheogen” [ic]
(literally 'becoming divine within') was derived from an obsolete Greek word
describing religious communion with visionary drugs, prophetic seizures and erotic
passion, and is cognate with the common word “enthusiasm”. Since the neologism
is apposite to traditional contexts of use of shamanic inebriants, it has met
with an enthusiastic reception by ethnographers and historians, and has appeared
in print in all of the major European languages, plus Catalan.
“Entheogen” [ic]
has now become the primary term for shamanic inebriants in the Spanish-speaking
world, and bids fair to become the predominant term for these drugs in the ethnographic
and ethnopharmacognostical literature worldwide. Although we have thus elegantly
solved the problem of a culturally-appropriate, non-pejorative term to describe
the context of use of these drugs, the phytochemists and pharmacologists have
yet to agree on a term to categorize their pharmacological action. There is no
facile chemical classification, as many structural types of alkaloids, terpenoids,
amino acids, even coumarins are psychoactive in various shamanic inebriants.
Similarly, there is considerable pharmacological variability within this class of drugs. “Hallucinogen” [ic] remains the predominant term for the older generation of scientists, despite the fact that most of these drugs usually do not produce hallucinations in the clinical sense. “Psychedelic” is still much used by younger scientists, but generally only in reference to drugs with effects like LSD or mescaline; while important shamanic inebriants like the mushroom Amanita muscaria (l. ex Fr.) Pers.ex Gray, the mint Salvia divinorum; Epling et Jativa, tobacco (the shamanic drug of the Americas par excellence)-- all likewise used culturally as entheogens--are said not to evoke psychedelic effects.
Although we may presently speak of all these shamanic 'plant-teachers' as “entheogenic” drugs or as “entheogens”, we as yet have no single word to describe their pharmacological effects, and must still have recourse to cumbersome binomials, like visionary effects, ecstatic effects, etc.; and we might just as well resurrect the obscure, but quite elegant, term “psychoptic”: “producing mental or spiritual vision”.
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