“Entheogens” and “Entheogen Cases”
— A Note on Nomenclature
To begin, I should define a few terms. The psychoactive plants and substances that play such a central role in the cases discussed in this book were conventionally termed hallucinogens by the legal and medical establishments.1 I avoid this label because of its pejorative meanings when used to denote a person’s professed sacrament.
In 1956, the term psychedelic was suggested in correspondence between novelist Aldous Huxley and psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. It later gained popular acceptance. The word psychedelic has, however, been forever time-tainted by 1960s imagery of swirling color posters and television images of apparently naïve and hedonistic “hippies.” Psychedelic is now so over-loaded with mass-media imagery of this type that it too is no longer serviceable in a rational discussion concerning the substances it originally labeled, especially in the context of claimed religious use.
In 1979, a group of ethnobotanical scholars proposed the term entheogen (literally translated as “becoming the god within”) as a more “culturally appropriate [and] non-prejudicial term to describe shamanic inebriants.”2 In the article that first presented the term, entheogen was explained as follows:
In Greek, the word entheos means literally ‘god (theos) within,’ and was used to describe the condition that follows when one is inspired and possessed by the god that had entered one’s body. It was applied to prophetic seizures, erotic passion and artistic creation, as well as to those religious rites in which mystical states were experienced through the ingestion of substances that were transubstantial with the deity. In combination with the Greek root gen-, which denotes the action of ‘becoming,’ this word results in the term that we are proposing: entheogen . . . . In a strict sense, only those vision-producing drugs that can be shown to have figured in shamanic or religious rites would be designated entheogens, but in a looser sense, the term could also be applied to other drugs, both natural and artificial, that induce alterations of consciousness similar to those documented for ritual ingestion of traditional entheogens.3
While not all scholars have adopted the term, in comparison to alternative appellations it is the most appropriate moniker for the plants, cacti, mushrooms, and laboratory-made substances discussed in this book.
Lastly, in this book I will use the term entheogen cases and entheogen law to refer to situations in which a person engages with the legal system and raises religious motivations as a justification for seeking some sort of accommodation from criminal drug prohibition. Entheogens raise numerous legal issues in the broader sense, which will not be discussed here or which will be touched upon only briefly.4
1 The word “hallucinogen” was introduced into English in 1954 to denote “drugs that in small doses could alter perception, thought, and mood.” Ken Liska, Drugs and the Human Body, 2nd ed. (McMillan, NY 1986) p. 255.
2Ott 1993.
3Ruck, et al. 1979.
4 Readers interested in the many unsettled legal issues constellated around entheogens are referred to The Entheogen Law Reporter (TELR), a quarterly publication on those topics and others, edited by the author from 1993–1999.
