Jewish Psychedelic Historiography: The Search for a Trippable Past | Bar Ilan University
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Jewish Psychedelic Historiography: The Search for a Trippable Past
Abstract
Some of the best-known and best-selling books on psychedelics are what might be termed speculative psychedelic histories, alleging psychedelic traditions in Biblical Israel, Ancient Greece, and the Mediterranean at the time of Early Christianity. Examples of this genre include Rusk, Wasson and Hoffman’s The Road to Eleusis; Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key; and John Allegro’s The Mushroom and the Cross.
Jews, and even some Jewish scholars, have likewise written speculative histories of Biblical, Talmudic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic psychedelic use, including scholars Benny Shanon, Yaffa Eliach, Sharon Packer, as well as Danny Nemu, Rick Strassman, Dan Merkur, Yoseph Leib, and Harry Rozenberg.
Scholars have already heavily critiqued the historical, or pseudo-historical, claims made by these authors. Suffice to say that the evidence of pre-modern psychedelic use in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean is extremely sparse, though not entirely nonexistent – especially if one includes cannabis among the class of substances under investigation. But affirming or debunking these claims is not my interest here. Rather, in these reflections, I am interested in the motivations for these efforts, what their authors hope to accomplish, and how we might understand this historiography as a present-day religious expression. I am interested in the theological, psychological, and social functions of these imaginative psychedelic histories, their place within a postmodern religio-cultural context, and how they creatively construct a Jewish psychedelic ‘usable past.’
