Though it isn’t an exhaustive, scientifically thorough exploration of psychedelic plants or a highly considered botanical guide, Ott’s role in popularising the term “entheogen” was perhaps his most important contribution to the psychedelic community. It is not simply the creation of a new piece of lexical jargon; “entheogen” was a carefully crafted, philosophically grounded intervention to alter the perception of psychedelics by the public and the scientific community.
The word “entheogen” was first formally proposed in a 1979 article in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, co-authored by the cream of the crop of Ott’s contemporaries: ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, classicist Carl A. P. Ruck, ethnobotanist Jeremy Bigwood, and Greek scholar Danny Staples.
The argument central to the article was that the two terms commonly used to describe entheogenic plants, “hallucinogen” and “psychedelic,” were not adequate, and they were steeped in prejudice and cultural misunderstanding. “Hallucinogen”, they believed (and I tend to agree), was pejorative, derived from the Latin “alucinari”, meaning “to wander in mind”. This frames the experience as a negative one, a delusional departure from the single, objective reality we know. This inherently scientific, or medically driven, position fails to recognise the literally thousands of years of usage of these substances from various cultures all around the world. This usage was designed to facilitate access to more profound states of ultimate reality, so describing these experiences as divorced from, distorting, or breaking the objective truth of perception is frankly rude, offensive, and more than a little short-sighted.
The term “psychedelic”, coined by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1957, was derived from the Greek terms “psyche” and “delein”, which, when combined, mean “mind manifesting”. While it was seen as somewhat of an improvement over “hallucinogen”, the authors believed it had become irreversibly tainted by its prevalence in the counterculture. Ott’s view specifically was that the term was a relic of the 1960s, inextricably linked in the public imagination to excess, drug abuse, hedonism, and political turmoil. The cultural baggage associated with it held too much weight. Using it as a means for sober, scientific discussion of these powerful substances seemed inappropriate.
To replace these terms, the authors proposed “entheogen”, derived from the ancient Greek words “entheos”, meaning “full of the god, inspired, possessed”, and the word “genesthe”, meaning “to come into being”. So, combined, the term translates literally as: “Generating the divine within.”
The difference here is profound. It shifts the focus from mental pathology (hallucinogen), or psychological exploration (psychedelic), back to the realm of spiritual sacrament. This places the substances back into their historical context, with a term imbued with respect, grounded in the necessity of ritual. The term argues that while there may be no unambiguous scientific truth to the experience of the divine, however you choose to define it, the experience is a powerful, valid, and extremely valuable element of the human experience. If these plants are one of the most reliable, ancient and effective means of accessing these states, then they deserve care and reverence.
The term has been widely adopted in both academic and religious studies, and has been embraced just as widely in anthropological circles, which is a direct testament to the power and precision of the decision to craft a better name. It allowed for a more nuanced conversation to begin. A conversation which actively acknowledged the millennia of human history with these plants prior to their comparatively recent discovery by Western science. It is a kind of bold acceptance of our collective lack of knowledge, and a signal for us to explore this, as yet, relatively unknown frontier of human consciousness.
(Not every psychedelic enthusiast was on board with the coinage of “entheogen”, however. Ott said, “Terence McKenna dismissed ‘Entheogen’ as a word ‘freighted with theological baggage’ in a book titled Food of the Gods”.)
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