The Role of Entheogens in Human Evolution and Religion

The Role of Entheogens in Human Evolution and Religion
By Rendi

Animals and Natural Intoxication
Going back well before our pre-human ancestor species (proto-hominids) developed from apes, mind-altering experiences have been a part of nature. Humming birds, baboons and elephants have been observed eating fermented fruit to get drunk (it has even been shown that elephants actually specifically prefer a 7% alcohol level in their fruit). They will go out of their way to get these fruits, so we know it is no accident and that they purposely eat these to get drunk. Certain primates will eat certain herbs to get high, and in a more domestic context, we all know most cats love to sniff catnip to get high.

Now, physical dependence on addictive drugs is one matter, but in laboratory tests it has been proven that some animals will choose to take certain extremely powerful non-addictive hallucinogens when they are given the choice – often choosing a mind-blowing experience over food and water.1

In a most absurd example, Terence McKenna claims that in Siberia, when the shaman who is high on Fly Agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria) leaves his yurt to relieve himself, he has to worry about the local reindeer bowling him over to get at the yellow snow he makes because the urine is full of the active hallucinogenic compounds when this mushroom is eaten! While it seems humorously far-fetched that a reindeer will actually ram a peeing shaman to greedily eat the urine-soaked snow, it has been well documented that the urine of a person who has eaten these mushrooms contain the active ingredient in high concentration and that reindeer will intentionally eat Fly Agaric mushrooms and then wildly jump and run as if they are trying to fly (flying reindeer… hmmm…).

Animals Using Plants for Better Survival
Moving into a different area, it has been widely observed that animals will incorporate certain plants and substances into their diet that give them an evolutionary advantage. If an animal eats a particular plant and it gives them an energy boost and allows them to hunt more prey that morning, then such an immediate result will prove to be an advantage they will seek out repeatedly. But even when their effects are not immediate or in any way obvious to the animal it may include plants into their diet if it helps them in any way. For example, in Tanzania, every few days or so chimpanzees will walk from their territory to find and eat some Aspilia leaves. They will roll the leaves around in their mouths then swallow them whole. Scientists have discovered that this leaf has a substance that will kill certain harmful bacteria the chimps in that area have to deal with. Of the four species of Aspilia, the chimps used only three. Later it has been found that indigenous African people of the area use the same three species to treat wounds and to treat stomach aches.2

In general, primates will utilize whatever plants are useful in their area. With this in mind, let’s move on…

The Rise of Humanity
What is now the Sahara desert was, only a few thousand years ago, fertile grasslands. At one time North Africa was Rome’s breadbasket. This means that it was used to grow huge amounts of crops. Today there is a lot of desert and grassland area in Africa, but thousands of years ago the deserts were grasslands and going back further, the grasslands were jungles. Somewhere about 100,000 ago or so, climactic changes brought about from the last ice age began turning the jungles that dominated almost all of Africa into grasslands. Some jungle animals simply retreated deeper into the jungles but other animals were cut off and were forced out into the plains. Around this time we see the rise of herd animals in Africa. Also around this time, some apes moved out into this new environment. It is generally accepted that this is the push that started primates down the evolutionary path towards Homo erectus and later Homo sapiens.

In such a situation, primates will try all new potential food sources. Quite simply they will carefully try small amounts of new foods and either vomit it up or eat more. If the plant or animal is usefull, they will include it in their diet. As it has been shown, even if they do not use it as food, they will eat plants that are useful to them in any way.

Today on the plains of Africa primates know that if they overturn dried cow patties, they will find lots of nutritious bugs to eat. But many thousands of years ago they would find certain species of psilocybin mushrooms growing on cow pies and other species growing in the grasses. There is no reason to suppose that they would not try these mushrooms. Now, if they had tried small amounts of the mushrooms they would have gotten a two-fold evolutionary advantage out of it.

At very small does, psilocybin mushrooms increase visual acuity.3 They increase edge-detection and night vision. This means that one can pick out separate objects and animals from their surroundings (one could tell that there is a little brown mouse camouflaged in amongst those brown leaves over there, for example) and that one could both hunt better at night and also see the predators sneaking up in the shadows. It has been shown that at doses too small to notice any mental effects, human subjects will score much higher in visual acuity tests than subjects that were not given psilocybin.

I have not heard or read it mentioned by any one else, but personally I have found that small to moderate doses of psilocybin mushrooms will produce a peculiar effect on my hearing ability. I call it the audio-scopic effect. What this means that faint and distant sounds suddenly become louder and clearer once attention is focused upon them just as distant objects become larger and clearer when a telescope is pointed at the object. Notice I am not saying that all sounds are louder and clearer, only those that I focus on. This is not to be dismissed as mere hallucination because I had repeatedly confirmed this effect by following the sound into other rooms or even down the block to discover that the source of the sound was indeed real. But I digress…

It should also be mentioned that according to Terence McKenna slightly larger doses psilocybin increases sexual activity in primates. I have not seen any scientific support for this particular claim.

It is easy to see that increased ability to hunt and evade predators and increased reproduction (and perhaps increased auditory abilities) are evolutionary advantages and that any plant or mushroom that gives these advantages will be included in the diet.

Of course, at larger doses these mushrooms will give a mind-altering experience, the kind of experience that (it has been shown) a primate will return to repeatedly by choice.

So far we have gone over proven facts scientifically well-founded speculations (and one personal observation tossed into the mix). We will now move into two ideas that are more controversial, the first idea is too shocking for most to even think about and the second is an idea slowly being more and more considered by historians and scientists.

The Missing Link?
At some point there was an unimaginable huge leap from pack hunting proto-hominids to fully conscious modern Homo sapiens. From our perspective, this occurred over a period of thousands of years, but on the scale of evolution, this happened in a millisecond. In nature, species make slight evolutionary changes over millions of years. With primates, we see the hugest change in evolution occurring in the shortest time.

It took millions of years for primates to evolve into pack hunters who could use basic grunts to help them work as a team to take down prey and who could use rocks and sticks as weapons. Then suddenly they were making fire, cooking, using animal skins for clothing, making shelters, using language, sharpening sticks, stones, and bones, making weapons (instead of just picking up rocks or sticks) making fabric, passing on knowledge with words and memory instead of just genes, making new social structures, customs, religious thoughts, and art. This is what is called an epigenetic evolution. In other words, evolution that is not based on genetic make-up alone, but – in the case of Homo sapiens – with such things as language, culture, a collective informational construct (knowledge, history, etc.).

In the scale of normal terrestrial evolution, this all happened in an instant. In labs scientists will let rats run through mazes or give them similar tasks to accomplish and they will allow only the rats who complete these tasks the best to breed. Over time successful generations of rats improve their ability to conquer these tasks. But imagine if overnight these rats start talking, reading, writing, inventing computers, flying around in little airplanes, and so on. This seems absurd to us because even if rats could learn to do all these things they would need hundreds of millions of years to do so. But essentially this is how fast humans have evolved from primates into what we are now.

Recording history, extracting metals from the ground to build weapons and create empires, building cities, inventing math, using fuels and building machines to carry us over huge distances of land and air, isolating chemicals to do incredible things, harnessing electricity to do other incredible things, communicating across the globe, putting machines into space and moving out into the solar system to other planets, using machines to see out to other galaxies and in to molecules and atoms… radio waves, atom-splitting, computers, internet… what has happened? It took millions of years for a primate to figure out how to make fire and it took merely thousands of years to go from an animal that wasn’t significantly different from a chimpanzee to what we are now.

Now we are beginning to use genetics to conquer biology, computers to conquer information and nanotechnology to conquer matter itself!4

The difference between other primates and culture creating, science wielding, history-making humans is almost as dramatic an inexplicable as the difference between normal consciousness and the consciousness brought on by large doses of psilocybin mushrooms. This may be more than just a parallel. One may have caused the other. In the film 2001: a Space Odyssey, we see simple apes going about their natural habits then suddenly they encounter a transcendental object (much like the philosopher’s stone of traditional alchemy) and suddenly the ape wields a bone as a weapon, tosses it into the air and the next thing you know we have hurled a great vehicle out into space and we are going to another planet. The leap from bone wielding to space travel occurred just as instantly by the perspective of nature.

It has also been noted that less than 100,000 ago, the human brain size has doubled, even though we only use from 10%-20% of it’s potential today (and much less earlier on in human history).

So what happened? Surely it was no magical black monolith. But what was it? What it “God” or aliens? Perhaps, but there is absolutely no evidence to lead to this conclusion. Was it a certain food, certainly eaten by proto-humans, that radically changed their consciousness and gave them new ideas, art, mystical experiences, religious thoughts, and more importantly language? Was it psilocybin mushrooms?

Now, notice I mentioned language as being most important. This is because language and human consciousness arose together. One facilitates the other in a feedback loop. So what was once just grunts and gestures to aid in pack-hunting and mating signals, developed into more specific sounds. Then we had actual words to indicate things like certain plants or animals, and then individual members of the primate-group. From this, it is easy to see that human awareness increased with the development of language. Language was first used orally to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next, thus building up a body of knowledge, then writing was invented (but note that art was invented tens of thousands of years earlier) to permanently record information, thus greatly increasing knowledge and making it accessible for many generations over time.

It has been shown that tryptamine-based hallucinogens (psilocybin mushrooms being one of them) increase activity in areas of the brain associated with language. Aha! Now it is becoming a little more plausible, isn’t it? But wait, we will take this further at a latter point in this essay when we see that psilocybin can induce a voice (seemingly from some other being) heard in the head that one can talk with and get information from and that DMT (an other tryptamine hallucinogen that is closely related to psilocybin and which is our brain) can give one the experience of creating objects by speaking a spontaneously created language that just seems to flow out of nowhere.

So, to sum up this first idea, it is theorized that through unimaginably intense stimulation of the imagination and of language (and by other means), psilocybin use may have given rise to human consciousness, and language sustained this consciousness. Indeed, no other known theory is nearly as plausible to explain it.5

Mushrooms and Religion
Now for the second idea; that psilocybin gave rise to religion. As stated earlier, this idea is more acceptable and there is a body of evidence is quickly building to support it. Primarily the works of R. Gordon Wasson and his co-authors Valentina Wasson, Carl Ruck and others have made strong cases for this in their books.

Before proper religion (with dogma, doctrines, rules, ceremony, etc) there was spirituality. Before priests there were shamans. Before we delve into the beginnings of spiritual thought, it is perhaps necessary to make a brief distinction between the different types of religion (generally agreed upon by theologists and historians) that arose over time.

The earliest is called animism, which gives rise to spiritism, then paganism, then monotheism, and today we have atheism. Atheism is the belief that there is no God.6 Of course this is a modern development.

Monotheism is the belief in one God. Of course the great monotheist religions have dominated history for roughly two thousand years. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the major Monotheist religions.7

Monotheism arose from Paganism, which is the belief in multiple divine beings.8 Even in Judaism, we see a lot of evidence of Paganism. In the book of Genesis, it speaks of Gods (not God) creating the world. In the original Hebrew Scriptures they use the word Elohim (which is feminine / plural and means “Gods”) in the account of creation. And indeed, in early Judaism, they were not telling people their God was the only God, but that their God was the best God. They proved this because God (then called El Shaddai which meant “Lord of Armies”) allowed them to conquer other tribes in war. Therefore he was stronger. After a long time they decided there was no other God anyway.

Anyway, the belief in many divine beings (with distinct personalities more or less like people) arose from Spiritism, which is the belief in spirits. In Spiritism, these disembodied beings are not yet Gods and Goddesses who create and destroy the world and whom we must worship. They are simply spirits. Some are helpful, some harmful, some can be appeased with sacrifice or driven away with magick, some talk to the shaman, and some do not. Now, Spiritism is the belief in beings without bodies that sometimes live in bodies and then leave these bodies when the bodies die.

Before Spiritism there was Animism. Spiritism makes a distinction between the body and the soul, but Animism is simply the belief that everything is alive and can interact in some way. To an Animist, the Earth itself is alive; the river is alive and can dry up when sick, give forth fish when it is fertile, or flood when it is upset; the cloud is alive (and can thunder when angry); the sun is alive, he sleeps each night and grows old, dies, and is reborn every winter solstice; the moon is alive and goes through moods every 28 days just like a woman does. In Animism, everything is alive with energy.

Almost anyone who has taken psychedelics (unless they are a moron and take them simply to get “fucked-up” and party) has noticed that sometimes everything does seem to be alive or at least buzzing / glowing with energy.

So this is the first point in the theory that psilocybin gave rise to religion. Here is a summary of this point. Psilocybin may have allowed people to notice that everything seems to be full of energy and is alive in some sense (Animism). Then people thought of this energy to be something that can leave the physical object or animal (Spiritism). Then they thought that some of these spirits were greater than the rest (Paganism). Then they thought that there was only one great spirit (Monotheism). Then after some time some people believed there was no God (Atheism), while others were just not sure (Agnosticism).

Religion, Yoga and Entheogens
Now, let us take a brief excursion into the meaning of the word religion as it is relevant at this point. Religion is from the Latin word religio which means “re-linking”. This of course refers to re-linking with the divine. It implies that we were once one with the divine and through religion, through ritual, prayer, and other means we seek to re-link with the divine once again.

Now, let’s examine the word Yoga. Most Westerners think yoga refers to a variety of odd postures and stretches. This discipline of working with the physical body is actually Hatha Yoga which is merely one of eight major “limbs” or branches of yoga (and contrary to popular belief, the real point of Hatha Yoga is to master the body so that you can conquer it and go beyond it). There is also Bhakti Yoga which is the practice of devotional prayer and worship to merge with the divine, Raja Yoga which concerns the intellectual understanding of the universe, and other forms of yoga. These are different approaches to what we in the West call Religion, magick and science. They are all methods of reconnecting with the divine. In fact the word Yoga shares the same Indo-European root as the Latin word yogum from which we get the word yoke. The idea is that with Yoga, we are linked to the divine just as a bull (crude or lower self) is linked to his master (refined or higher self) and harnessed with yoke, or as one can say in yogic terminology, with yoga we yoke Bindu (the individual / ego) to Ojas (the all / divine).

Now let’s examine the latest word for mind-expanding plants and drugs – entheogen. This word means creating (gen as in generate, Genesis, genes, origen, etc.) divinity (theo as in theology) within (en). R. Gordon Wasson (the man who rediscovered the traditional use of psilocybin mushrooms by a shaman Maria Sabina in the rain forests of southern Mexico in the 1950’s) used this word in his scholarly works and now most serious scholars who write about the use of “hallucinogenic” plants for spiritual purposes use this word today. This word entheogen refers not only to particular substances but to these substances when used in a certain way. We can not say that someone who eats peyote just to “party” is using and entheogen. But when a member of the Native American Church uses peyote to connect with the Great Spirit we can say that she is using an entheogen for an entheogenic experience.

With this word entheogen we can see the timeless connection between the use of certain plants and the whole concept of spirituality or religion itself. Entheogens give rise to the divine within oneself. They re-link oneself to the spirit of Nature. They yoke the individual to the universal.

Think of the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve eat a fruit that gives them knowledge. It takes them from a sort of semi-conscious state to a state of full consciousness in the human sense. They eat of the fruit and become like the gods. Is this not the definition of entheogens?

Consider Soma. Soma is the inspiration and the basis for the Vedas which are the oldest and most important scriptures of Hinduism. Soma is a drink that transforms one from human into the divine.

Consider Haoma. What Soma is for the Hindu tradition of the Indian subcontinent,
Hoama is for the Zoroastrian tradition of the middle east.

Consider Kykeon. This is the secret drink that was central to the mystery rites of Eleusis in ancient Greece. These rites forever changed the lives of everyone who experienced them. All those who attended these rites were sworn to secrecy but history tells us that they had an intense experience with the divine in these rites.

Soma, Haoma and Kykeon are all drinks that hold a mystery for us today. The actual content of these drinks were held as a sacred secret in the ancient past and no one knows for sure what they contained although strong cases have been made that Soma contained the juice of Fly Agaric mushrooms, and that Kykeon contained LSA (a substance much like LSD) – the contents of Haoma are more elusive to scholars.

What are we to make of Manna? Manna was some sort of food that the Israelites ate in the desert with Moses that gave them an experience of the divine. Manna may have been a mere myth or it may have been based on an actual entheogenic substance.

What about the wine of the ancient cult of Dionysus? Could a mere wine (which had a very low alcohol content in those ancient days) really have induced an experience of the divine or did it contain some other more entheogenic substance?

These are all long lost ancient practices of the old world that are open to debate. But in the new world various cultures unquestionably have been using entheogens as the very basis for religion for thousands of years. Consider the ayahuasca of Central and South America, the psilocybin mushrooms of the Mayans and Aztecs and in certain American Indian tribes in North America, the Salvia used by the descendants of the Mayans in modern day Mexico, the Peyote of the South West and so on. With these practices it is not a matter of scholarly debate and archeological evidence. With these people the connection with the spirit is right there to be consumed and experienced!

Further…
This little essay is merely a gross summation of the hypotheses advanced by others. It seems that it was R. Gordon Wasson who first put forth the hypothesis that entheogens gave rise to religion. It was Terence McKenna who advanced the idea that consciousness itself rose from the symbiosis between proto-humans and psilocybin mushrooms. Since Wasson first started writing about his hypothesis many others have looked further and wider and many great works have given his hypothesis support. His hypothesis is a question of historical evidence; evidence in ancient literature, art and artifacts. McKenna’s hypothesis is younger by a few decades and evidence in support of his hypothesis can not be found in history but rather is such disciplines as biology, neurochemistry, ethnopharmacology and so on.

I have added a few thoughts and bits of evidence of my own but is essence I am merely putting forth their ideas.

For those readers interested in looking at Terence McKenna’s hypothesis that human consciousness was catalyzed by psilocybin mushrooms his book Food of the Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs and Human Evolution (http://www.erowid.org/library/books/food_of_the_gods.shtml ) is recommended. It is an excellent and very readable book that fully lays out the hypothesis itself and also makes a compelling case for re-establishing the link between our species and Nature herself.

The book Invisible Landscape ( http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Landscape-Mind-Hallucinogens-Ching/dp/0062506358/sr=1-1/qid=1171778797/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-6781496-9177250?ie=UTF8&s=books) that he co-authored with his brother Dennis McKenna lends scientific support to the hypothesis laid out in Food of the Gods but it is a difficult work for those not well versed in molecular biology, neurology, pharmacology, quantum physics and other such disciplines.
For those readers who are interested in the idea that entheogens gave rise to religion the following books are recommended;

SOMA: Divine Mushroom of Immortality by R. Gordon Wasson. It is in this book that Wasson first fully laid out his hypothesis that Fly Agaric gave rise to spirituality. (http://www.erowid.org/library/books/soma.shtml )

The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries by Wasson, Carl A.P. Ruck (a classical scholar specializing in the ethnobotany of ancient Greece) and Dr. Albert Hofmann (the chemist who discovered LSD and who first isolated psilocybin from the mushrooms that Wasson rediscovered). In this book the authors argue that the sacred drink that was used in the famous Rites of Eleusis – a rite that was held in ancient Greece for many centuries and which was immensely influential and which inspired some of the greatest famous Greek thinkers – contained the entheogen ergot which contained LSA (which is similar to Hofmann’s LSD). (http://www.erowid.org/library/books/road_to.shtml )

The Age of Entheogens by Jonathan Ott. Ott picks up where Wasson left off. As is evidenced in his books, Ott has an incredible wealth of knowledge on ethnopharmacology (the traditional use of psychoactive plants in various cultures) and like Wasson his writings have the utmost integrity. (http://www.erowid.org/library/books/age_of_entheogens.shtml )

The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist by Carl A.P. Ruck, Blaise Daniel Staples and Clark Heinrich. As the subtitle indicates, this book focuses on the Eucharist (the “body and blood” of Christ that is handed out in the Catholic Communion ritual). The wine and those little wafers handed out in Catholic churches today may have been effective entheogens in ancient history. (http://www.erowid.org/library/books/apples_apollo.shtml)

DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences by Rick Strassman M.D. In this book, Strassman discusses his professional medical studies with the potent chemical DMT (a substance found in many plants that is a simpler version of the psilocybin molecule and which is chemically related to LSD and LSA) on human volunteers. His studies demonstrate that with high reliability, DMT induces the inexpressibly profound experience of contact with the other (be they “gods”, “spirits”, “fairies”, “aliens” or what have you). His book focuses more on the connection between brain chemistry and the subjective experience of the divine. This book is an indispensable work of what is being called neurotheology; the study of the connection between religious experiences and the chemistry of the brain. (http://www.erowid.org/library/books/dmt_spirit_molecule.shtml )

Cleansing the Doors of Perception by Huston Smith. Smith is generally considered to be the world’s authority on comparative religion. In this book Smith makes a strong case that religious experiences induced by entheogens are not invalid but rather that they are more accessible means for the same primary religious experience that others have only occasionally achieved through lifelong meditation, prayer, near-death experiences and the like. (http://www.erowid.org/library/books/cleansing_doors.shtml)

The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible by Dan Merkur. In this book Merkur not only looks into the Manna that Moses and the Isrealites ate but into the very question of the central role of entheogens in many different traditions. (http://www.erowid.org/library/books/mystery_manna.shtml)

Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma by Peter Lambourn Wilson. In the books mentioned above, Wasson, Ruck, McKenna and others look into the role of entheogens in prehistoric shamanism in general and in particular the pagan traditions of the ancient Mediterranean cultures, the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Vedic (Hindu) tradition. But this book is the first one that seriously looks into the possibility that the Celtic civilization used entheogenic mushrooms and that this is why they placed such an emphasis on the faerie world with its elves, pixies, gnomes and what not. Haven’t you ever wondered why all these fanciful beings are so closely related to mushrooms? They don’t call a circular formation of mushrooms a fairy ring for nothing. (http://www.erowid.org/library/review/review.php?p=207 )

There are many other works along these lines but in my experience, these are the books to start with.

NOTES

1.Jacobs 1984. The tests showed that many monkeys will choose DMT (an extremely intense and short-acting non-addictive hallucinogen) over food and water.

2.This was observed in Gome National Park in Tanzania. Biochemist Eloy Rodriguez of the University of California, Ivine, isolated the active ingredient thiarubrine A. from the Aspilia leaf and Neil Towers of the university of British Columbia found that it can kill common bacteria in less than one part per million. It was Eloy and Neil who later found that the same leaf was used by the African people of the area.

3.Rollin Fisher from late 1950’s to early 1960’s.

4.In our lifetime (if the life on Earth survives) we will see science being able to do just about anything whatsoever with matter and mind. In other words, one may be able to say, “I feel like having a smoke” and your personal satellite microscopic nanotech bots (always hovering about your body) will produce a cigarette out of surrounding atoms and it will appear in the palm of your hand. After you smoke it your internal personal health nanotech bots will repair all damage done to your lungs and blood resulting from the cigarette. You will be able to store and retrieve more information in your brain than the best modern computers and recall them in perfect detail instantly just by thinking about it. You won’t need to look it up, you’ll just have all the answers. If you decide you are a little depressed, you can have your nanotech bots up the levels of dopamine (or your own personal favorite chemical) in your brain. If one wants, one will be able to have windows of menus appear in space before ones eyes to access information one could not normally remember in such detail. One could change ones eye color in a second, or imagine an object and have it made it a real thing in front of you (seemingly out of thin air, but actually constituted from basic atoms in ones’ immediate area). One may be able to artificially stimulate your senses to simulate a total environment (you wish you were in the Caribbean, so, drawing upon data banks for accuracy, your nano-tech bots simulate all the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings of the Caribbean)

The possibilities may prove to be endless, but the greatest uses would be to convert abundant molecules into nourishment for the starving millions of the world, and to break down noxious material and pollution in the environment such as CFCs, nuclear waste, discarded plastics, etc.

5.The theory that psilocybin gave rise to human consciousness was first put forth by Terence McKenna first and foremost in his book Food of the Gods, and then also in The Invisible Landscape and The Archaic Revival.

6.Notice we are saying that Atheism is a belief that there is no God. It is just as much a belief (and remember, to believe is to accept something as truth without proof) as any other religious belief. If you just don’t know if there is a God or not, or a Great Mother Turtle or an afterlife or whatever, then you are an Agnostic, not an Atheist.

7.Some may argue that Buddhism is not Monotheism because it is not the worship of Buddha as a God. But if one thinks about it, most Buddhist nations practice a superstitious version of Buddhism in which they do worship Buddha. They simply pray to Buddha and try to live their lives as the Buddha instructs them to. The more intelligent and serious practitioners of Buddhism consider the individual self as the one ultimate being, which is a form of monotheism.

8.Undoubtedly the largest pagan religion today is Hinduism. Hinduism has thousands of Gods and Goddesses. Although Hinduism is united in the three main gods Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver) and Shiva (the Destroyer), it is really a combination of many different pagan religions of the subcontinent of India, some of which believe that Kali is the mother Universe and the supreme being; others that feel Shiva is the first, the last and the supreme; others feel Vishnu is the highest; still others feel that Krishna (who is an incarnation of Vishnu, just as Jesus is an incarnation of Yahweh) is the supreme being, etc. Most Hindus will concede that behind these supreme deities lies the Brahman (not to be confused with Brahma) that is so far beyond description and comprehension by the human mind that they do not even attempt to describe it.

However, traced back far enough, the earliest Hindu scriptures (dating back many thousands of years) show plainly that the supreme form of worship was of and through Soma, an unknown entheogenic drink.

Also, there has been a reemergence (mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom) of paganism that began with a vague mix of various old European religions and magick practices (commonly known as Witchcraft) as best as could be understood at the time. Almost all of this was born of the works of Gerald Gardener, beginning with his book Witchcraft Today in 1954. (It has been argued that Gardener had gotten some help from Aleister Crowley, and indeed these two men knew each other but mainly Crowley just lent Gardener his knowledge in composing rituals). This gained popularity in the latter half of the 1960’s and has come to be known as Wicca, the Craft of the Wise or simply the Craft. This has since branched off into more specific and historically accurate renovations of specific traditions and magickal practices. The Asatru, for example are deep into Norse religion and magick, but there are also Celtic, Welsh, Gaelic, and many other traditions. Some are based on research, intuition and knowledge grown from the actual practice of these traditions and a few rare traditions are familial, meaning that they have been passed down through the generations of a family reaching all the way back to the medieval practices of these traditions and they have only recently felt comfortable enough to “come out of the closet”.