Showing posts with label ancient. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ancient. Show all posts

Sunday, July 1, 2018

New Archeological Finds Point to Ancient Cannabis Use, Despite Prejudice of Some Scholars

“For as long as there has been civilization, there have been mind-altering drugs,” begins an article in the 4/20/18(!) edition of Science magazine.

Alcohol was fermented at least 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, the article continues, and psychoactive drugs “were an important part of culture. But the Near East had seemed curiously drug-free—until recently. Now, new techniques for analyzing residues in excavated jars and identifying tiny amounts of plant material suggest that ancient Near Easterners indulged in a range of psychoactive substances."

Australian archeologist David Collard, who has found signs of ritual opium use on Cyprus dating back more than 3000 years, was interviewed for the article, and said that some senior researchers consider the topic “unworthy of scholarly attention.” He told Science, “The archeology of the ancient Near East is traditionally conservative.”

By Einsamer Schütze [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
The Yamnaya people, who traveled from Central Asia around 3000 BCE “and left their genes in most living Europeans and South Asians,” appear to have carried cannabis, which originates in East and Central Asia, to Europe and the Middle East.” They also brought with them the wheel and possibly Indo-European languages.

The Yamnaya were part of the "corded ware culture," so named because of the cord patterns in their pottery, and possibly pointing to the use of hemp for rope.

In 2016, a team from the German Archeological Institute and the Free University, both in Berlin, found residues and botanical remains of cannabis at Yamnaya sites across Eurasia. Digs in the Caucasus have uncovered braziers containing seeds and charred remains of cannabis dating to about 3000 BCE.

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Juno/Hera and the Asterion Plant

Juno by Rembrandt (1665)
The month of June is named for the Roman Goddess Juno, known as Hera in Greek mythology.

Hera's devotees wove garlands made from the asterion plant to adorn her statues as an "offer to divinity," according to the historian Pausanias. Asterion ("little star") was one of the ancient names for cannabis, according to the first century C.E. Greek physician Dioscorides, writes scholar Maugerite Rigoglioso in The Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece. 

While others (Kerenyi) have identified the asterion as "a sort of aster," Rigoglioso counters that the aster's dominant feature, the flower, is not mentioned by Pausanias in describing the asterion plant. In History of Pre-Clusian Botany in Its Relation to Aster botanist Edward Sandford Burgess writes that cannabis sativa was among the plants known as "asterion" to the Greeks "from the division of its somewhat radiate leaves." Pausanias called it "suitable for use in purification" and Dioscordes said it was called "sacred herb" in this context. The asterion was "twined to create garlands in accord with the widespread use of cannabis for rope-making in the Greek and Roman worlds," (Butrica 2002, "The Medical use of cannabis among the Greeks and Romans," Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics 2(2): 51-70).

Writings at least as early as the 5th century BCE indicate that the Greeks knew cannabis to be a substance capable of engendering a non-ordinary state of consciousness. The Greek god Dionysis is known today as an alcoholic, but some modern scholars (e.g. Jonathon Ott and Brian Muraresku) think what we call Greek wines used alcohol mainly to make tinctures of psychoactive plants. Some of these infusions are thought to contain hemp, dubbed "potammaugis" by Democritus (c.a. 460 b.c.) and possibly why we call it "pot" to this day.