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The Pomegranate on CDROM traditions. British Traditional) Wicca, to me, do seem unfortunate tradition of misadventure BARB DAVY: I’ve recently changed my posi- duotheistic—a term I find quite satisfactory. attached to modern users of solanaceous tion on transcendence, mostly due to reading Duotheism can take a Manichean dualist form If Witches No Longer Fly: entheogens. As well as the edible tomato, Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity. I used according to which one of the two deities is Today’s Pagans and the potato, chile and sweet peppers, and to associate transcendent views exclusively with valorized over the other (because they are seen Solanaceous Plants tomatillo, the botanical family of world denying or world rejecting philoso- as locked in opposition), or a complementarian Solanaceae includes that global drug of phies/beliefs. For Levinas, the idea of infinity is form (that of ‘partnership’, to use Riane Eisler’s by Chas S. Clifton choice, tobacco. In addition, the transcendence: the idea that there is more to term), and the latter, I would say, describes Solanaceae include several plants with the other than the categories the self might Wicca rather well. University of Southern Colorado extensive associations with magic and apply to it. This is transcendence that is found GUS: Several people here apparently consider shamanism, associations that spread from only in the particular, in actual lived reality. English Traditional Wicca as duotheistic… but Asia to the Americas. Notable among For Levinas, a person only finds God in relat- this argument ignores the Dryghton. And that n the summer solstice of 1966, these are the several species of Datura ing with other people in this metaphysical rela- is a central tenet of English Traditional practice Robert Cochrane (magical name of (“thorn apple” or “jimson weed”), Atropa tion of perceiving the infinite in the other. as I have experienced it both within Gardner- O Roy Bowers), an important figure (“deadly nightshade”), Mandragora There’s nothing world denying about this. In ian and King Stone contexts. in the British Witchcraft revival, died (“mandrake”), and Hyoscyamus (“hen- my own work, I discuss this sort of relation If we take the entire Gardnerian liturgy seri- from a self-inflicted combination of bane”).4 None of these plants is an illegal between humans and other than human per- ously we can say something like this: From the sleeping pills, whisky, and Atropa bel- “narcotic” in America; in fact, some are sons, developing it into an environmental Dryghton all things come, including the God ladonna or deadly nightshade. Although a grown as ornamental garden plants as ethic. and Goddess. From them come all aspects of subsequent inquest returned a verdict of well as for pharmaceutical use and genetic In my view, neither reality nor nature can Gods and Goddesses. But just as we do not try “suicide while the balance of the mind research. be transcended in actual physical terms. This is contacting the Dryghton as a means of con- was disturbed,” some of Cochrane’s The term entheogen, meaning “becom- all there is, but reality/nature is far more com- tacting all deities, so often we do not try and friends and coveners believed his act had ing divine within”, was developed by plex than human ideas of it. Transcendence is contact The Goddess, but rather focus in good been one of ritual communion with the three leading writers in the field: the late in recognizing that there is more to know polytheistic fashion on Bridget, Hekate, and so gods, while others leaned towards a delib- R. Gordon Wasson, Carl A.P. Ruck, and about the world, not in escaping the world. on. Other times we do the generic invocation. erate self-sacrifice on the model of the Jonathan Ott. Ott, for instance, writes VIVIANNE: As an aside, I’d never heard of At the level of practice, it sure seems polytheis- Divine King.1 The people who knew him that he uses entheogen as “etymologically panentheism until around ten years ago when tic to me. most closely, however, viewed his death as and culturally appropriate [and] non- the recently retired Canon of Durham Cathe- The Dryghton is not personal. It is the suicide resulting from a marital break-up prejudicial,” compared to such terms as dral, who came around to thinking we were Source. It is acknowledged, regarded as impor- and a failed love affair.2 “narcotic” and “psychedelic.”5 OK people, told me that this is what Wiccans tant, honored, and then the work focuses on Whatever the motivation for Cochrane’s death, while intentional, are. I thought being theologically defined by a the Goddess and the God, either as a duo or Cochrane’s death, his influence has per- also reflected just one of a series of exper- Christian theologian had its amusing/ironic polytheistically. sisted. His correspondence during the iments with solanaceous entheogens that side. years just before his death with a young historically have been associated with ADRIAN: I find it amusing/ironic as well, but American Air Force enlisted man heavily European witchcraft, according to records also find it useful as a way of delineating a This discussion took place on an email list influenced, through a typically tortuous left by prosecutors and witnesses of the potential common ground between some maintained by the Nature Religions Scholars’ chain of transmission, several American witch trials from the 15th to 17th cen- pagans’ views and some Christians’ (and other Network, whose members study religious Witchcraft traditions, including “1734,” turies.6 According to his contemporaries, monotheists’) views. At the same time, I’m not traditions that regard nature as a source of the Roebuck, and the Mohsian tradition, he had earlier conducted less-lethal convinced of that attribution for Wicca. The spiritual authority. The group meets and hears and he is remembered by one of his experiments using old “flying ointment” term ‘pan-en-theism’ suggests a kind of all-in- research presentations each year during the former coveners, the English writer recipes. Although I would claim that the one-God-ism, where God is seen as both annual meeting of the American Academy of Doreen Valiente, as “perhaps the most “flying ointments” (and other herbal immanent and transcendent, but where there is Religion. For more information, visit powerful and gifted personality to have preparations) represent a significant, ver- no questioning of the oneness (monology) or http://www.uscolo.edu/natrel appeared in modern witchcraft.”3 ifiable link to an ancient European personal nature of God. Most forms of (at least In one sense, Cochrane carried on an shamanic practice—perhaps the nearest 16 THE POMEGRANATE 16 • SPRING 2001 CHAS S. CLIFTON 17 … "flying ointments" represent a recipes were “comparatively reliable.”10 cherry bark, and a host of seeds and significant, verifiable link to an Reliability does not imply safety; among weeds have been used, often with disas- the historians and occultists who them- trous results, by a new generation of ancient European shamanic selves tested these recipes, at least one experimentalists.”12 practice—perhaps the nearest thing other besides Cochrane, Karl Kiesewetter, Further discussion of contemporary died from an overdose. Although it is entheogen use has been complicated by to Margaret Murray’s "Old Religion". beyond the scope of this paper, I would the “war on drugs” waged at various levels argue that the danger of these recipes, in Western countries, which has compli- combined with the centuries-long tradi- cated both academic and practitioner- thing to Margaret Murray’s “Old Reli- accused witches. These men, such as the tion of their use, is the best argument for based discussion of any entheogen. That gion,”—my research suggests that North often-quoted physician Andres de any “Old Religion” surviving from pre- attitude may now be changing, for as Dr. American and British Neopagans today Laguna, offered an essentially materialist Christian times. Without some sort of Albert Hofmann, the nonagenarian Swiss largely avoid them. The exceptions, how- counter-argument against the theological oral tradition of preparation and dosage, discoverer of LSD, remarked in a recent ever, tend to insist—along with some his- arguments of both secular and religious similar to that of the ayahuasca shamans interview, “After years of silence, there torians of religion such as Huston courts. Against the belief that the “witch- of South America, the risks would be too have recently been some investigations Smith—that the ritual use of these sub- craft” being prosecuted involved actual great. Medical journals contain occa- [of scientific research on “psychedelic” stances is to some degree essential, plac- gatherings of devil-worshipers, the skep- sional descriptions of emergency-room drugs] in Switzerland and Germany and ing the users in touch with the “sacred tics pointed out that the flying ointments visits and occasional deaths from the also in the United States.”13 wildness” at the heart of these modern merely produced a stupor from which the casual use of Datura and other solana- Given contemporary Pagans’ extensive nature-based traditions. Sharon Devlin, a “deluded” user awoke, claiming to have ceous plants. mining of earlier Pagan cultures, com- California Witch, told writer Margot experienced nocturnal flight, orgies of Neopaganism’s growth period com- plete with study of dead or marginal lan- Adler in the 1970s, “Flying ointments food and sex, and so forth. Therefore, menced with the “Psychedelic Sixties” guages (for example, Old Norse or Irish), were used in ancent times. Our ancestors prosecuting them for “witchcraft” was a (and Seventies) when fascination with archaeological sites and artifacts, texts, definitely used drugs. Frankly, most waste of time. entheogens zoomed upwards, following a and imaginative reconstructions of the Pagans and Witches are stumbling around What Andres de Laguna and other period during the 1950s when mescaline, past, the omission of ancient ritual in the dark … .
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