The Encyclopedia of World Religions

druids S 125

In the mid-20th century, a new interest in the spiritual meaning of drug experience arose. One important impetus for it was a book, The Doors of Perception (1954), by the famous mystic and novelist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). Huxley viv idly described the way the ordinary world became transfigured and splendid as though it were all divine, like the way it was seen by great artists and Zen masters, after he had taken mescaline, a substance made from peyote. However, Huxley also believed such stimulants should be restricted to those truly mature and ready for them. Another impetus was the invention of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), a highly visionary synthetic sub stance. The use of drugs, allegedly for spiritual purposes, was an important aspect of the coun terculture of the 1960s. But the “drug culture” quickly filled with drug-induced crime, sickness, mental breakdown, and exploitation, and halluci nogenic drugs were outlawed everywhere in the United States by 1966, with exceptions allowed for the Native American Church, where drug use has continued to be a legal issue. Whatever role drugs may have had in the religious life of the remote past, they are generally not welcome in that of the modern world, and most faiths see combating drug use as an important part of their mission to help people live disciplined and productive lives. druids Ancient Celtic priests. The word druid means “wise one.” The druids formed a separate, elite class of Celtic society ( see C ELTIC RELIGION ). They were close allies of the kings. According to Julius Caesar, the druids “watch over divine mat ters, administer public and private sacrifices, and rule all matters of religion” ( Gallic Wars 6.13). Caesar goes on to describe the druids as preserv ing the sacred verses of the Celts in memory rather than in writing, educating the young, and teaching that at death souls are reborn. In all of these characteristics the druids resemble the BRAHMINS of India. Unlike brahmins, however, druids did not have to inherit their sta tus. They could choose to become druids. Other ancient authors identify different kinds of druids:

world, whether as the voice of the divine or as warnings not to get lost in fantasy and that which is passing away. See also VISIONS .

drugs and religion The religious use and mean ing of mind-altering drugs. There are drugs both natural and synthetic that can produce experiences similar to religious experiences: VISIONS , ecstasy, cosmic journeys, what the poet Baudelaire called “artificial paradises.” They can also produce inner HELLS as terrible as any that can be imagined. None theless drugs have had a spiritual or sacramental use the world over. Shamans of P RIMAL R ELIGION in Siberia and the Americas have taken hallucino genic mushrooms, peyote, datura, and other plant substances to help induce visions of the divine realms and messages from gods. Some scholars believe that soma, the famous sacred drink spoken of in the V EDAS of ancient India, may have been made from the fly-agaric mushroom, and a few have speculated that the mysteries of Eleusis in ancient Greece may have employed the same hal lucinogenic plant ( see G REEK RELIGION ). Today the Native American Church in the United States uses peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus, as a sacramental substance to be taken in a reverential setting as a means of communion with G OD . ( See N ATIVE A MERI CAN RELIGIONS .) However, religions such as J UDAISM , C HRISTIAN ITY , I SLAM , and the major eastern FAITHS have gen erally rejected the use of drugs in religion, believ ing that the visions and raptures they induce are spurious and not authentically from God. (Cer tain nonmainstream Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist sources, chiefly related to T ANTRISM , have seen some positive spiritual value in the materials, but for the most part as an initiation into reali ties that ought later to be realized by nondrug means.) They have recognized and condemned the dangers that can lie in drug use: lethargy, escapism, indifference to other issues of life, and finally addiction to the point that one will neglect responsibilities and commit crimes for the sake of the drug.