Intoxicating Questions about Drugs and Religious Life

This paper will explore how coffee culture and yoga intersect in anglophone postural yoga with reference to the lineage of the formative guru T. Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) and his disciples B.K.S. Iyengar (1918-2014) and K. Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009). Iyengar’s Light on Yoga (1966) famously recommends drinking coffee—even on an empty stomach—before practicing yoga postures (āsana), and Jois is famously quoted as having said “no coffee, no prāṇa (life energy).” These attitudes are reflective of the shifting social and cultural ethos that modern yoga was situated within and of deeper Indian philosophical conceptions regarding the use of herbs (oṣadhi) as an exogenous adjunct to the endogenous self-discipline of yoga. This duality is evident in the late 20th century embrace of postural yoga by coffee-friendly upwardly mobile North Americans and in the framing of coffee as an invigorating āyurveda-like herb (oṣadhi) providing a remedy to physical dispositions antagonistic to yoga practice.

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, poets, physicians, historians, and jurists writing in Arabic devoted literary efforts to the new psychoactive drug, cannabis. In these texts, the Sufis, orders of Islamic mystics, are closely associated with weed, both in its origin story and in its spread westward. Their enthusiasm for eating cannabis – it wasn’t yet typically smoked – was contagious, and out from Khorasan it becomes a well-known mind-altering edible.

In this paper, part of a larger project on weed texts in Arabic, I will draw on texts in both prose and verse, for the most part never translated before, to offer a survey of Sufis and weed in these texts. I will investigate questions such as the role of Sufis in the discovery of weed as a psychoactive drug, the characterization of weed as a Sufi drug, and weed’s effect on dhikr (remembrance of God).

This paper examines the convergence of two late-twentieth-century moral panics, the War on Drugs and the Satanic Panic, arguing that they functioned as a symbiotic project to police American consciousness. While the 1980s "Just Say No" campaign is often viewed as a secular public health initiative, this paper demonstrates how the Religious Right weaponized anti-drug rhetoric to validate theological fears of demonic infiltration. Drawing on the history of occult drug use (from Aleister Crowley to the psychedelic era), I analyze how the "drug-fueled occultist" became the central villain of 1980s folklore, exemplified by the Ricky Kasso case and D. Corydon Hammond’s conspiracy theories. I argue that for the Reagan-era Religious Right, the War on Drugs was a form of spiritual warfare: a crusade to sanctify sobriety and criminalize altered states as inherently demonic, reframing the drug war as a contest over the legitimacy of religious experience.

This paper examines the role of entheogenic substances in Zoroastrian ritual, literature, and visionary theology. While the tradition is often framed primarily in ethical and doctrinal terms, textual and ritual evidence reveal a history of altered states associated with sacred plants and narcotic preparations. Focusing on the ritual use of haoma, references to intoxicants such as bang, and visionary narratives like the Arda Wirāz Nāmag, the paper explores how these substances functioned as ritual technologies enabling spiritual perception and otherworldly travel. These practices are analyzed alongside broader traditions of visionary intermediaries in Zoroastrian literature and interpreted through ritual theory and the anthropology of religious experience. By situating entheogenic practice within Zoroastrian cosmology and esoteric discourse, the paper argues that such experiences are understood in Zoroastrianism as legitimate means of accessing divine knowledge and perceiving the spiritual realities underlying the material world.