Religious practice

Treloar, F.E. Ritual objects illustrating Indian alchemy and Tantric religious practice. Isis 58, no. 3 (1967) 396-397. 

One notable characteristic of religious practice in the United States is the almost completely separate worship practices of African Americans and whites (Schaefer, 2000). According to Lincoln and Mamiya (1990), a black sacred cosmos emerged historically that cut across denominational lines. They posit that regardless of denomination a qualitatively different cultural form of Christian expressions is found in most black churches. Moreover, the authors contend that there has always been a small sector of unchurched black people - young African American males or maverick types determined to resist the powerful social control of black churches in the small rural towns and in urban areas. One interviewee cautiously stated ... 

Apart from psychopharmaceuticals in the spiritual sense, at all times and in most cultures psychotropic plant drugs have played a role in religious practices, magic rituals and healing. The substances best known in Europe and the Mediterranean area are opium, hashish and hellebore in the medicine of India and other southeast Asian countries, ramvolfia traditionally has been of great significance (Wittern. 1983). 

Three thousand six hundred years ago, remedies such as honey and terebinth resin started to be used, and, since then, have been used all along history. The second recipe illustrates the mix of magic or religious practices and treatment. 

Spirit I seek spiritual understanding and inner peace through reflection and religious practice. 

ENTHEOGEN A term from the Greek meaning God-facilitating substance. Some scholars prefer this term to hallucinogenic when applied to plants such as the peyote cactus that are used in religious practices. 

For thousands of years, cannabis has enjoyed historical significance as a recreational drug, a useful fiber, an oil, an edible seed, and a medicine. It has been used to aid religious practices, alter mood (psychoactive effect), stimulate creativity, treat disease, relieve anxiety and boredom, enhance sensory experience and pleasure, rebel against authority, and go along with peer influence. That is a lot of work for one plant to do. This probably explains why cannabis has always been an important cultivated crop and is currently a cornerstone of controversial debate in all sectors of U.S. and international society. 

The use of peyote was basic to pre-Columbian religious practices, and it spread throughout many Central American tribes to those north of Mexico, in spite of the Christian missionaries who discouraged its use. Hostility toward highs from mushrooms and other plants grew as LSD appeared on the drug scene. 

Out of this work developed a third area of inquiry the resemblance of mystical experience induced by psilocybin to mystical states brought about by spontaneous rapture or by religious practice. This eventually became a "double-blind study, described by Leary as a "tested, controlled, scientifically up-to-date kosher experiment on the production of the objectively defined, bona-fide mystic experience as described by Christian visionaries and to be brought about by our ministrations. It was conducted by Walter Pahnke as part of his Ph.D. dissertation for the Harvard Divinity School. 

If you use metallic mercury or azogue in religious practices, you may expose your children or unborn child to mercury or contaminate your home. Such practices in which mercury containing substances have traditionally been used include Santeria (a Cuban-based religion whose followers worship both African deities and Catholic saints), Voodoo (a Haitian-based set of beliefs and rituals), Palo Mayombe (a secret form of ancestor worship practiced mainly in the Caribbean), or Espiritismo (a spiritual belief system native to Puerto Rico). 

The system of kosher laws is part of a larger religious and historical context in Judaism and must be considered as such. It is contained in the Bible, particularly in the first Five Books of Moses which constitute the Torah . It has been translated into religious practice from there. Kosher laws are not health laws as such. Many of them may make sense from a health point of view especially historically, but that has not been their justification. 

---