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Rastafari, and the Claims That Outrun the Evidence

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Rastafari, and the Claims That Outrun the Evidence

Cannabis attracts more speculative religious history than any other plant here, and separating the documented from the asserted is most of the work.

Rastafari, emerging in Jamaica in the 1930s, treats cannabis as a sacrament, smoked in reasoning sessions and in the ritual chalice, and supports the practice with scriptural readings, commonly Genesis on the herb bearing seed and Psalms on the herb for the service of man. This is a genuine and recent religious use, and it is well documented. It is also the origin of much of the plant's modern spiritual vocabulary in the West.

Two older claims are repeated far more confidently than they deserve. The first is that the qaneh bosem of the Hebrew Bible, an ingredient of the holy anointing oil in Exodus, was cannabis. The argument is philological and rests on a proposed connection between the Hebrew and the later term kannabis; it has some support and a good deal of opposition, and calamus and other identifications remain live. The second is that Scythian funerary practice described by Herodotus, in which hemp seed is thrown on hot stones inside a tent, constitutes a religious rite; the passage is real and the archaeology from Pazyryk supports the practice, but Herodotus presents it as purification and enjoyment rather than as worship.

There is also a modern pattern worth naming: contemporary movements assert ancient sanction for present use, and the atlas records the modern practice as real and the ancient claim as unproven.

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