Hydrolife Magazine August/September 2017 [USA Edition]

enjoy
“THE NAME Hindu Kush has reached
mythological proportions in modern
cannabis culture; it lends its name to some
of the most popular strains in the world.”
INDIA: MYTHOLOGICAL CANNABIS
AND THE INHERITANCE OF RITUAL
The travelers of the Hippie Trail entered India with
anticipatory eyes, in which “the West’s greyness
and dullness were juxtaposed to the color and chaos
of the imagined East,” writes Sobocinska. It was
here that young Hippie Trail travelers encountered
perhaps the most influential element of Oriental
culture: the cannabis smoking practices of Hindu
holy men, or sadhus, writes Theodore M. Godlaski in
the article “Shiva, Lord of Bhang.” In India, followers
of the Hindu religion have been using cannabis for
almost 3,500 years. According to Godlaski, sacred
doctrines of Hinduism known as the Vedas describe
the genesis of the marijuana species as a place
where amarita, or sacred nectar, fell to the earth and
“sprouted the first cannabis plant.”
Indian sadhus smoke buds or hashish out of pipes
called chillums, and pass the chillum clockwise in
a circular fashion “in rituals or worship, meditation,
or yogic practice,” writes Godlaski. While outsiders
cannot easily enter into a sacred smoking ritual with
Hindu sadhus—nor is the notion of passing a pipe
in a circular fashion indigenous to India—it is worth
noting that Western, modern cannabis smoking also
functions in a ritualistic fashion.
Likewise, it is safe to assume that in using cannabis in a similar
communal manner, travelers of the Hippie Trail and contemporary
smokers alike have devised a collective social ritual that
blurs and overcomes cultural boundaries. Perhaps this is one
element of Western drug culture that is long since forgotten or
just plain ignored: Hippie Trail participants infused their own
curiosity about the East with consciousness expansion—and
stumbled into something larger than themselves. It’s evident
that no matter how naïve or idealistic these kids were, the
mysterious instillations of exotic lands and cannabis smoking
manifested an elixir of the sacred—which had to have been
instructive. These cross-cultural immersions in the mystical resurface
today with the ritualized sharing of cannabis in a circle
of friends, where, as on the Hippie Trail, the ceremony exposes
something far older, and far stranger, than oneself.
Kent Gruetzmacher is a Denver-based freelance writer
(kentgruetzmacher.com) and the West Coast director of business
development at Mac & Fulton Executive Search and Consulting
(mandfconsultants.com), an employment recruiting firm dedicated
to the indoor gardening and hydroponics industry. He is interested
in utilizing his M.A. in the humanities to critically explore the many
cultural and business facets of this youthful, emergent industry by
way of his entrepreneurial projects.
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