By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

A Brief History of Drugs & Authority

Introduction

TL:DR The use of drugs for recreation is as old as time, and the use of drugs for profit has largely driven commerce— but we are only just beginning to understand their impact on religious history.

There are some drugs, like sugar, so thouroughly culturally sanctioned that we don’t even think of them as drugs. Other animals like butterflies, monkeys, and cows seek out intoxicating substances. Drugs are everywhere. They are ubiquitous. The history of human commerce is largely driven by them. But then there are the drugs that our authorities try to keep from us. The story of early Christianity is a suppressed history about forbidden drugs; one that is only just beginning to come to light in our own time. 

History

Drugs are the main gear that turns the wheel of history. The caffeine we enjoy in our stimulating morning beverages, for example, touched off the American Revolution. Let’s not forget; that conflict started as a dust-up over taxes on tea. Having fortified themselves with another drug—booze, Sam Adams and his band of merry pirates  boarded British ships lying at anchor in Boston Harbor and dumped the offending tea overboard. The Brits returned the favor of the “Boston Tea Party” by laying siege to the city, and the revolution was on.

Another drug that changed the course of history is sugar. The people of Europe worked principally as peasants, not slaves, after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The few slaves around during the Medieval period were often cared for in the manner of expensive sports cars. But all that changed on the islands of Madeira, which lie just off the Moroccan coast. Sugar cane juice has to be cooked down at high temperatures to yield sugar—but the sweltering tropical heat of Madeira made that a miserable job. So the Portuguese began importing slaves from West Africa and chaining them to massive cookers. Slavery was back. And with a pernicious new racial component: slaves had a particular skin color for the first time. This brutal economic model was scaled up and deployed onto the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and then onto the cotton plantations of the Southern United States. That’s how the stage was set for the American Civil War. If it weren’t for sugar, there would be no Black Lives Matter today.

Authority

The D.A.R.E. campaign in the 90s presupposed that our government is in the business of protecting us from harmful drugs, but too many substances with considerable body counts are perfectly legal to believe that. Sugar is fueling a modern plague of obesity and heart disease. Opioids are another crashingly obvious example. There’s no connection at all between the dangerousness of a substance and its legality. No one believes that prohibition is for our own good anymore. 

Everyone knows that profit is what actually decides the legality of drugs. Sugar is legal because it's cheap to produce and highly addictive. And sometimes banning drugs is every bit as profitable as legal sales. Magic mushrooms are harmless and they make miraculously effective medicine. But the trillion-dollar-per-year pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want people medicating themselves with home-grown fungus. Their profits depend on selling us instead the drugs they hold patents on. And that’s to say nothing of the police unions and private prisons whose budgets depend on a raging drug war. A small taste from these revenue streams is enough to influence our corrupt political system into keeping poisons like sugar legal—while handing out tough punishments for the use of benign substances like mushrooms.

But there is another factor that determines which drugs are promoted and which are banned: some substances break down mental structures. The therapeutic value of magic mushrooms comes from their ability to do this. They cause us to take inventory of our mental furniture, most of which we took on before we were old enough to think critically. The ruling elite can’t have that. They don’t want us challenging long-held assumptions. They don’t want us thinking too hard about a social order in which they are the wealthy elite and we are their subjects. While the heavily caffeinated make productive workers who earn lots of money for their bosses, shrooms place any hope of productivity quite beyond the pale. Instead, they’ll have you questioning the wisdom of turning up to work at all.  

Christianity

The genesis of Christianity is the prime example of drugs turning the wheels of history. Many of the recognizable elements of that faith, like magic cups and salvation, are borrowed from Greco-Roman predecessor religions and are actually drug-related. Mind-altering substances were every bit as popular in classical Greece and Rome as they are in any society. In 2003, an ancient Greek chalice tested positive for ergot—a psychedelic fungus that grows on cereal grains. Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman first derived LSD from it back in the 1930s. The chalice in question was used to perform the rites of the grain goddess Demeter, a ritual most famously observed near Athens at a place called Eleusis. For centuries, the upper crust of Greco-Roman society—from Plato to Caesar—traveled to Eleusis and drank similar potions from similar chalices. Whatever was in that potion made them declare themselves “saved”. Death was the penalty for revealing the goings-on there. Aeschylus, a townie from Eleusis and the so-called father of tragic theater, got himself prosecuted for including too many details in one of his plays. Because of all that secrecy, we’ve had to wait thousands of years for modern archeo-botany to finally confirm what’s been long suspected: visionary drugs were used at Eleusis.

Demeter’s magic potion was eventually liberated by the common people. Democracy, after all, is based on rosy ideals of political equality. And in those days, Greece and Rome were becoming the first formal democracies. The notion of exclusive secrets reserved only for the upper class fell out of vogue. The democratization of government brought about the democratization of the secret drug-laced potion. A new cult sprang up around the wine god Dionysus, and his wine replaced the beer of the grain goddess as the mixer. Thanks to the potent drugs, Dionysus’ cult became all the rage. It wasn’t long before he was the most popular deity of all in the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods But then, in a tale as old as time, the government swooped in to spoil the fun. In 186 BC, the Roman Senate busted the cult of Dionysus and put 6,000 of its followers to death. 

The power of drugs dramatically changed the course of history after that crackdown. Their ability to break down mental structures changed everything. Temporary relief from ego is what made Eleusinian pilgrims describe themselves as “saved”. Ego is the mental conception of ourselves that we each carry around inside our heads. It’s entirely separate from the moment-to-moment feeds of raw sensory data that we call experience. The family dog has experiences. But she lacks a detailed enough mental abstraction of her entire life to lie awake at night agonizing over her own mortality. That’s for us, the ape poets tortured by our own egos. We fret about the end of the symphony because we hear the melody AND see the sheet music. But these egos of ours are pieces of mental furniture that can be broken down pharmacologically. That’s why, as the great Will Durant once wrote, contentment is as rare in humans as it is common among animals. 

Temporary ego-death is the key to understanding the response of the Dionysian cultists to their persecution. Those scofflaws combined the sacraments of Demeter and Dionysus into a new ritual of both bread and wine. They adopted as their new central figure a man on the outer fringe of the empire who was so egoless that he volunteered to let the local Roman governor destroy his body in a grim public display. Most of us are far too engrossed in our sheet music to allow such a thing. But the story of Jesus emphasized supreme egolessness. And so did the drugs in the Christian sacrament inherited from Demeter and Dionysus. They immunized the fledgling Christian faith against violent repression. When the Roman authorities again arrived to break up the party, they discovered to their horror that Christians happily accepted being thrown to lions in the Colosseum. This time around, the druggies wouldn’t be controlled by violence. A fresh strategy for getting rid of their drugs was called for—one that was actually quite brilliant. The authorities finally got control over the new cult by adopting it as the state religion of Rome. They installed the emperor as the head of this new Roman church and swapped out those psychedelic ergot sacraments with ordinary bread and wine. That’s been the state of play for two millennia.

Conclusion

Christianity as we know it resulted from the collision of certain drugs with Greco-Roman history. And now, after 2,000 years, these same mysterious substances are back. In 1938, Albert Hoffman synthesized LSD from the same ergot used by Christianity’s pagan predecessors. In 1957, R. Gordon Wasson broke the news about magic mushrooms in Life magazine. The impact these substances have had on our culture can hardly be overstated. The Beatles LSD-fueled trip to an Indian Ashram blew open the doors of their creativity. The drugs propelled them on a journey from superficial pop-music to immortality; from the surf guitars of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to the culture-defining Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and White Album. Steve Jobs made no bones about the influence of LSD on his creativity. The aforementioned Albert Hoffman wrote him a letter about it in 2007. Microdosing magic mushrooms has recently become like a standard operating procedure in Silicon Valley. The computer revolution would have come much later, or never happened at all, if not for these drugs. And now science is beginning to grapple with their miraculous healing properties. The work of people like Dr. Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins has produced dramatic results in psychotherapy, addiction treatment, and creativity enhancement. 

Drugs have always been tightly woven into the realms of recreation and commerce. But the early history of Christianity shows us the banality of those applications. Roman society was rocked by substances that break down mental structures; they forever changed the course of politics and religion. The Romans authorities managed to get rid of those drugs for a few millennia. But now they are back—and they are deranging our society as they once did to mighty Rome. Maybe the old Christian prophecies about a second coming were never about a man, but actually about these plant hallucinogens. As it says in the Gospel of Matthew: “by their fruits ye shall know them.”