Chris Bennett

Chris Bennett

Chris Bennett has been researching the historical role of cannabis in the spiritual life of humanity for more than three decades. He is co-author of Green Gold the Tree of Life: Marijuana in Magic and Religion (1995); Sex, Drugs, Violence and the Bible (2001); and author of Cannabis and the Soma Solution (2010);  Liber 420: Cannabis, Magickal herbs and the Occult (2018); and Cannabis: Lost Sacrament of the Ancient World (2024) . He has also contributed chapters on the the historical role of cannabis in spiritual practices in books such as The Pot Book (2010), Entheogens and the Development of Culture (2013), Seeking the Sacred with Psychoactive Substances (2014), One Toke Closer to God (2017), Cannabis and Spirituality (2016) and Psychedelics Reimagined (1999). Bennett’s research has received international attention from the BBC , Guardian, Sunday Times, Washington Post, Vice and other media sources. He currently resides in Nova Scotia, Canada.

CANNABIS CULTURE – The Immortality Key is a bestselling book, which suggests a entheogenic role in the ancient Christian Eucharist, that originated with and was passed down from the cult of Dionysus and the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. In this article Chris Bennett, who has written about some of these same themes and areasRead More

CANNABIS CULTURE – The Indo-European language is the mother tongue of many modern dialects. Even before this language was spoken the ancestors of these people, the proto-Indo-europeans, were ritually using cannabis — a technique of worship that continued for thousands of years and spread throughout the ancient world, leading to its continued use in variousRead More

CANNABIS CULTURE – Up until recent times, many Egyptologists, failed to acknowledge much of a role for cannabis in ancient Egypt beyond that of a source of fiber for ropes, but recent research identifying a plant in the Egyptian texts with fibrous and medicinal properties, as well as edible seeds, under the name shemshemet, orRead More

CANNABIS CULTURE –  In the 19th and early 20th century, hashish played a prominent role in the occult scene, and was used in initiatory rites by certain secret societies, such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.

CANNABIS CULTURE. References to cannabis appear in both alchemical and magical manuscripts tied to Jewish culture, and this use was likely an extension of the Hebrew’s much more ancient relationship with the plant. Excerpted from Liber 420.

CANNABIS CULTURE –  Islamic accounts refer to a potent hash oil preparation known as dūḡ-e waḥdat, which may be similar to the Zoroastrian mang/bhanga infusions which I discussed in an earlier article.

CANNABIS CULTURE –  Nepenthe was an ancient herbal infused wine, that appears in Homer’s famous tale The Odyssey. Its use to quell grief in a funerary setting has caused many researchers to identify it with cannabis.

For more than a quarter century, I have been writing about a theorized role of cannabis in ancient Judaic temple worship. Cannabis Culture published one of my first articles on this in 1996, Kaneh Bosm: Cannabis in the Old Testament. Many disputed these claims, and rejected my work, others however embraced it, and word spreadRead More
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