Introduction
Many religions, mostly polytheistic alone, have the concept that the existing reality along with the universe is a place or path in which nature, humans, gods, and various spirits coexist in a cycle of eternal rebirth. Although such a mythical neighborhood is much closer in polytheism than in Abrahamic and other monotheistic faiths like Zoroastrianism, this spiritual linkage is not enough for those looking for genuine and native faith. People whose community role is priesthood or shamanism and just curious enthusiasts have already been looking for ways to start a dialogue with their deities via mind-altering substances in ancient Egyptian times. According to Lawler (2018), “substances less well known today may have played a role in healing or ecstatic rituals in the ancient Near East” (para. 11). However, one can hear nowadays that drug use should be removed from rite practices and spiritual guidance, and this opinion has significant ethical, scientific, and theological justifications. Drug-taking is a necessary element of spiritual guidance, and forbidding it is impermissible as it will lead to the erosion of native cultures and ethnic mindsets.
An Argument for Drug-Taking in Spiritual Guidance
Needed Preliminary Clarifications and Explanations
A good starting point for developing the proving argument stated above would be clarifying the concepts of spiritual guidance and drug use. Many shamans and practicing believers, such as Dirk Wolf (2019), identify spiritual guidance as “the process and experience of receiving wisdom from the divine” (para. 5). One needs to mention that drugs mean hallucinogens in this paper since it is this category of chemical compounds that religious practitioners have always included in rituals throughout human civilization (Hallucinogens drugfacts, 2021). According to health professionals, “hallucinogens are a diverse group of drugs that alter a person’s awareness of their surroundings as well as their own thoughts and feelings” (Hallucinogens drugfacts, para. 1, 2021). These terminological explanations and descriptions are necessary to provide clarity on the lexicon used in the proving argument section presented below.
Substance Use as a Pillar of Religious Tradition
The proving argument about the need for the presence of the drug-taking procedure in spiritual guidance, which will be described below, is a complex one, and each of its segments can be considered a separate point in a thematic debate. It is no secret that any ritual is both a performed sequence of elements of the verbal, tactile, and intellectual traditions of a specific culture and a cumulative tradition by itself. For example, drinking wine was both the foundation of the food culture of the ancient Greeks and a particular method of exalting Dionysus (Clark & the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.). To simplify even more, taking drugs in the course of a priestly or shamanistic rite has the same or similar conceptual and cultural value as taking sacramental wine and bread in Christianity. For those who take substances for religious purposes, the goal is not to achieve relaxing disturbances in the nervous system and body chemistry but to recreate, preserve, and propagate the traditional practices of their theological and ethnic ancestors.
The exclusion of this procedure from tradition directly destroys the culture, leading to a historical trauma similar to that experienced by Hawaiians and many other non-European indigenous communities (Williams et al., 2019). Removing it would begin the loss of sacral, prehistoric meaning and knowledge. In the case of spiritual guidance, this would make it impossible for believers and their leaders to contact, communicate, and cognize gods and other culturally critical spiritual entities. Interruption of religious traditions, especially those that have already been negatively and irrevocably affected by Western colonial and Christian ideological influences, is unethical and destructive even due to medical concerns.
Drug Use in Spiritual Guidance as Temporal Lenses
As mentioned above, shamans and other top representatives of the polytheistic cultic and religious communities resort to the use of drugs to find a direct channel for communication with gods and spirits and cognition of them. Through altered thought processes and perceptions, they and other believers are able to perceive, feel and make sense of the world in much the same way that their theological ancestors did millennia ago (Williams et al., 2019). Therefore, accurate spiritual guidance is authentic and effective only when intergenerational communication is established through hallucinogens.
Another explanatory parallel with the Abrahamic faiths can be drawn here. The shortly described cognition process is similar to how modern Christians become aware of their religious pioneers through the Testaments (Paauw, 2018). Many native communities also have their own records of mythology, spiritualism, and rituals. Still, their problem lies in their lost genuine authenticity due to former colonial influence, and, as a result, old recipes remain the only option for maintaining religious continuity. The ban on drug use would lead not only to the destruction of tradition but also to the interruption of ethnic continuity and the degradation of such religions.
An Argument against Drug-Taking in Spiritual Guidance
The most expected argument to come from the opponent team would be that human life carries far more critical value than any practice, even one as socially decisive as tradition. It is not about the rapid drugs damage to the health of their long-term negative manifestations in the human body but rather about the accidental deaths that insufficiently tested substances sometimes lead to. The case of Henry Miller is a tragic and mournful example of the incompetent use of unchecked rite substances, 2018). Only living persons can maintain and pass on traditional and ritual practices, and if taking away drug use from practiced rites provides this condition, it must be removed. The essence of the ban is to keep both people and fundamental societal norms that they need existing, developing, and prospering.
Conclusion
This paper develops a two-pronged argument for a group of proponents defending the use of mind-altering chemical substances of natural origin in religious ritual practices as spiritual guidance. The pillars of this argument were ethical reasoning, historical data, religious comparisons, and personal logical inferences. The core of the opponent team’s alleged counterargument consists of appeals to logos and pathos. Online written sources of diverse nature were explored and analyzed while creating a logical justification of a given socio-relevant topic.
Interestingly, this dilemma has almost equal stakes on the two sides. First, it is a tradition of mostly small indigenous religious communities that both groups of supporters would protect. The other two are the authentic living style that Team Pro would advocate for and the literal human lives that Team Con would defend. The question arises about the adequacy of applying Western, post-Christian, European, and Abrahamic perspectives on theological issues of such type and narrow category.
References
Clark, W. H., & the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). History of drug use in religion. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Web.
Hallucinogens drugfacts. (2021). National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Web.
Henry Miller died in gap year Colombian tribal ritual. (2018). BBC News. Web.
Lawler, A. (2018). Did ancient Mesopotamians get high? Near Eastern rituals may have included opium, cannabis. Science. Web.
Paauw, G. (2018). Communal Reading in the time of Jesus: How did the first Christians learn the Bible?Institute for Bible Reading. Web.
Williams, I. L., Makini, G. K., & Rezentes III, W. C. (2021). Indigenous Hawaiian psychoactive drug use: Before European contact, and after 1778. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 53(2), 111-126. Web.
Wolf, D. (2019). 10 powerful ways to receive spiritual guidance. Guy Counseling. Web.