'He’s found events in the life of Moses that display classic signs of using ‘entheogens’ – chemicals that give you a sense of the divine.'

Christian youth workers who try to warn their kids about the dangers of drugs may want to look away now, says Steve Tomkins

What do the Ten Commandments, the burning bush, and Moses’ staff turning into a snake all have in common?

Answer: they all happened when Moses was tripping, according the professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Professor Benny Shanon has extensive experience of the use of drugs in religion, and he made an interesting discovery.

Amazonians in search of a holy high mix together two otherwise unexceptional plants, acacia and harmal, and then, pow, they’re in heaven.

And he has discovered the same combination of plants growing in Sinai and Palestine, with the same effects.

Speculating

Speculating that the children of Israel may have taken a trip through the wilderness in more ways than one, he’s found events in the life of Moses that display classic signs of using ‘entheogens’ – chemicals that give you a sense of the divine.

The burning bush, from which God spoke and which never burned up. Turning his stick into a snake to impress Pharaoh. Meeting God on the mountain, with lightning and thunder and trumpets. And coming down again with his face shining (because he was off it).

This is not the first time someone had claimed that believers first found God through pharmacology rather than theology.

38 years ago, in gloriously silly book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, John M Allegro argued that Jesus was not so much a religious teacher as a psychotropic fungus. It’s all there if you read between the lines, depending on what you’ve been smoking yourself.

Then Professor Carl Ruck at Boston has argued that Jesus became the messiah when he was given cannabis (he’s not the only one) by John the Baptist, and the eucharist was originally about hash brownies rather than bread.

The moral of the story is there is no end to what imaginative people can come up with to fill in the gaps in what we know, or simply to avoid the boring obviousness of what we know.

I wouldn’t want to dismiss the possibility that some visionaries and prophets in the 3000 years of our religious tradition had a little help from their friends.

Passages

And I have to say there are certain passages of the Bible that I can only imagine making a lot more sense if we read them in the same spirit.

But the obvious fact is that people have religious experiences revelations today as they have non-stop throughout history, without any narcotic inspiration beyond a slurp of communion wine and a whiff of incense.

I’m 100% certain that the girl in my university’s Christian Union who was given a picture of a football pitch covered in jellyfish wasn’t on anything but the Lord.

To imagine that our whole prophetic tradition throughout the millennia has been sustained by a drug use that not one religious text makes any real mention of – that’s a conspiracy theory so far out, man, that you’d have to be out of your head to buy it.

Just say no.