editorial
by Melanie Fire Salamander
Seattle's local pagan paper is nine years old this Beltaine -- a considerable age for a pagan publication.
Now that we're so old, we need to have a little talk with you about sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. (Though we're only nine, I don't think we're underage as a publication. Believe me, publication years are longer than dog years.)
We always talk about sex at Beltaine, because in many witch traditions that is when the Goddess and God make love and engender the universe, and most pagan traditions witch and otherwise celebrate the life-creating, life-affirming energies these deities make manifest. This Beltaine, Lisa brings us a thoughtful story on how to protect our community from sexual predation. Rock 'n' roll and other pagan musics we cover every issue, thanks to our marvelous music reviewer, Genevieve Williams.
Drugs we don't touch on often, but drugs and pagan worship share a long history. As long as humans have been doing ritual, they've been doing mind-altering drugs in ritual. The rites of ancient Sumer, older than any other recorded, incorporate beer. The ninth book of the Rig-Veda of India, nearly 3500 years old, consists exclusively of hymns addressed to the deified drug Soma. The Greeks and Romans drank wine to see the god in the rituals of Dionysos. The Northern traditions made liberal use of mead. European witches concocted flying ointments with the hallucinogens belladonna and aconite. Siberian shamans ingested Amanita muscaria to jump-start their trance journeys. In this hemisphere, the Maya incorporated beer, mead and tobacco in religious rites, and later Central and South American cultural groups ingested peyote and ayahuasca in ceremony.
Here in twenty-first century America, most of nature's mind-altering bounty is illegal. I personally think it's foolish to legally lump relatively benign mind-alterants such as marijuana, Ecstasy and hallucinogens in with heroin and cocaine, but my civil disobedience tends to run to marching in rallies or writing letters, not eating blotter acid. My main drug ritual most years involves Dionysos and a lot of red wine. Many of my most intense, moving, often frightening visionary experiences happened to me without anything more mind-altering in my body than sugar and caffeine.
That said, others take a different path. There remain pagans who reclaim their birthright and storm the psychic gates using drugs. This issue, we investigate. Besides Felicia's story, Faun discusses mushrooms and Thea in her astrology column celebrates a magickal or drug pioneer with each Sabbat or moon she covers.
We at Widdershins don't condone illegal activities, but that's a little different from pretending they don't happen. If you must do drugs in ritual, do them safely, do them wisely, may the gods protect you, and know you follow the footsteps of many, many pagans who have gone before.
Copyright © 2006 by the article's author