Entheogen means generating the god within, a word invented to escape hallucinogen
Scythians burned hemp seeds in the 5th century BCE, Vedic priests sang to a pressed juice called Soma, and some scholars think initiates at Eleusis drank a mind-altering brew. In the late twentieth century researchers coined a new name for these sacred substances, hoping to shed the baggage of the 1960s.
Jonathan Ott, R. Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck are credited with the term, built from Greek roots meaning within, god and generate. They disliked hallucinogen because of its etymological ties to delirium and madness, and felt psychedelic sounded too close to psychosis and had become fused with sixties pop culture. Strictly, an entheogen is a vision-producing substance shown to have figured in shamanic or religious rites. Pharmacologist David E. Nichols wrote in 2004 that formal science would probably never adopt the word, though counterculture users increasingly prefer it.
The best-known examples come from the Americas. The Maya and Aztecs used Psilocybe mushrooms, peyote and morning glory seeds in ceremonies to reach their gods and heal the sick; the Native American Church still uses peyote, and Amazonian shamans drink ayahuasca. Archaeology adds hemp seeds found at Pazyryk, which confirm Herodotus's account of Scythian rituals. In Africa the Bwiti tradition uses the root bark of Tabernanthe iboga, and some amaXhosa healers have adopted the synthetic compound 2C-B, calling it Medicine of the Singing Ancestors.
Many claims about antiquity remain speculative. The Road to Eleusis proposed that the kykeon drunk before the Eleusinian Mysteries was psychoactive. Ruck and colleagues argue that early Indo-Europeans knew the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, and Robert Graves guessed that the ambrosia of pre-Greek tribes was the same fungus. A bolder suggestion holds that Egyptian crowns were shaped to depict stages of a mushroom. Evidence for such theories is often fragmentary.
Interest has returned in medicine. Early clinical research suggests psilocybin and MDMA may help with depression, post-traumatic stress and anxiety, particularly near the end of life, though the work is preliminary. Users commonly describe ego dissolution, a sense of the self melting away, and compare it with meditation, near-death episodes and mystical states. Religious leaders have also long chewed khat leaves to stay alert through all-night prayer.
Source: Entheogen
