News
Everglades Moon responds to Florida Surgeon General claims of spiritual consequences of cannabis use
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Everglades Moon Local Council responds bluntly to Florida’s surgeon general about his claims regarding the spiritual dangers of cannabis.
Asia
Ancient burial suggests ritual use of cannabis in Western China
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Scientists report on the likely use of cannabis in ritual at a 2,000 year-old burial site in Western China where little is known about the spiritual practices of its ancient inhabitants.
Culture
Unleash The Hounds (link roundup)
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There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans and Heathens out there, more than our team can write about in depth in any given week. Therefore, The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up. Religious Freedom and Diversity News
How people around the world define religious freedom can seemingly be at odds. Here are just a few stories from around the web that illustrate just how different those interpretations can be. The Basilica of the National Shrine of Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC joined churches across the globe to bring awareness to the religious persecution of Christians by participating in the “Courage in Red – Stand Up for Faith and Religious Freedom” by bathing parts of the basilica in red light.
Culture
New books explore entheogens
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TWH – When psychonaut Stephen Gray writes “What a long, strange trip it’s been,” he’s playfully referencing that Grateful Dead album with the same title. But Gray is after bigger game: The “trip” he’s actually citing is humankind’s “incredibly rich history of plant-entangled religion and magic,” as he writes in the forward to the book Psychedelic Mystery Traditions: Spirit Plants, Magical Practices, Ecstatic States by Thomas Hatsis. For Pagans who refer to their practice as an “earth-based spirituality” or “nature spirituality” (see circlesanctuary.org), those terms can carry various meanings. For Pagans whose paths include entheogens, “earth-based” is a very literal term. The website oxforddictionaries.com defines entheogen as “a chemical substance, typically of plant origin, that is ingested to produce a non-ordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes.” The term dates only to the 1970s, and its Greek roots literally mean “becoming divine within.”
The Oxford site reports the word was “coined by an informal committee studying the inebriants of shamans.”
A psychonaut, by the way, is someone who explores altered states of consciousness — especially but not always through hallucinogens — for spiritual or scientific purposes.
Canada
Recreational marijuana legal in Canada
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CANADA – The use and sale of recreational marijuana became legal Wednesday, making Canada the second nation behind Uruguay to legalize cannabis. The Cannabis Act, as it is called, was passed by the Canadian House of Common in Nov 2017 and then by its Senate in June 2018, and approved that month. Recreational cannabis became legal midnight October 17 and, according to news reports, there were shops and buyers ready and waiting. Heathen Robert Rudachyk, who lives in Saskatchewan and has been involved in local government for years, told The Wild Hunt: “It is long past time. Whether you choose to smoke it or not is and has always been a matter of personal choice.