Paper short abstract:

The paper aims at providing a concise history of the cultivation of cannabis in Eurasia and of its ritualised consumption. I will argue that its diffusion following the migratory movements of Central Asian nomads contributed to the spread of ideas and rituals related to shamanism.

Paper long abstract:

Mind-altering plants have always played a very important role in human religious life and cannabis has been one of the most widely used from a very early date. Although the genus cannabis includes several species, the most common subspecies are Cannabis sativa L., commonly known as hemp (whose levels of cannabinoids are low), and Cannabis sativa or marijuana, which contains tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a psychoactive constituent which induces a variety of psychological effects. Cannabis grows spontaneously across much of Central Asia; however, it has been suggested that domesticated cannabis – with higher levels of THC – first appeared during the Neolithic in western China, where it was used to make ropes, paper, clothing, as well as being consumed by Chinese shamans for its psychoactive properties. Even if it is probable that cannabis arrived in western Eurasia at an early date, its use in shamanic rituals was most likely introduced by nomadic peoples from Central Asia such as the Scythians, among whom shamanism was common, as attested by the well-known passage from Herodotus’s Histories (IV, 73-75), where a funerary session is described which made use of cannabis as a means of inducing an altered state of consciousness. In the first half of the XX century, the discovery of cannabis seeds in one of the frozen tombs of Pazyryk in the Altai provided significant evidence on the plausibility of Herodotus’s passage, but new discoveries in Central Asian funerary sites, especially in the Xinjiang and the Pamir Plateau, have greatly enriched our knowledge of the ritualized consumption of cannabis. In this paper, I will present some of the most significant discoveries and try to provide a synthesis of the history of cannabis as a vehicle of shamanic religious ideas and rituals in Eurasia.