Mark S. Ferrara > Quotes

“Zoroaster believed that an individual’s fate was determined by free will, and not heavenly mandate. After the death of the human body, the soul was believed to make its way to a river of fire where the god Mithra—flanked by two celestial beings holding aloft the scales of justice—judged every soul based on its thoughts, words, and deeds in the human world.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“During the Last Judgment in Zoroastrianism, at the end of time, Mithra initiates the final sorting of souls according to deed. This event includes a celestial haoma (soma) sacrifice that ushers in a restoration of an earthly paradise where death is forever vanquished.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“So sacrosanct are the numerous forms of cannabis ingestion in India that its secular use for recreational purposes is regarded as profane.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“In his exculpation of the “erotic poetry” read at Sufi gatherings, Al-Ghazālī warns those with shallow spiritual insight from disparaging the ecstasies experienced by the Sufis. “A wise man, though he himself may have no experience of those states,” Al-Ghazālī writes, will not deny the “reality of a thing merely because he himself has not experienced it!”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“Intoxicated Sufis, such as al-Bisṭāmī, attained divine perception through the repetitive recitation of prayer formulas, the continual remembrance of God, energetic dancing and whirling, and playing or listening to religious music.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“Rūmī compares the yearning of the aspirant for the divine to that of a lover for the beloved, but most famously to a reed-like plant ripped from the riverbed.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“As an old Arabic proverb provocatively recommends: “If you want to find God, look in a hookah.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“During the Eucharist of Mithraism, those present participated in a sacramental feast that contained entheogens. Those sacerdotal meals, sometimes featuring bread and wine (essential symbols in the Christian Eucharist) helped to trigger peak-experiences—and therefore communion in Mithraism was much more than a symbolic reenactment of a sacred myth.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“their herb of choice continued to be celebrated in Islamic poetry, where it was conflated with the “wine of paradise” in the Quran and gave rise to a proliferation of metaphors of intoxication with God as their referent.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“He reimagined Ahura Mazdā as a unitive creative force (whereas before him divine agency was diffuse or unattributable), and as a consequence Zoroaster is often credited with innovating monotheism.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“The Sufi insistence on making cannabis part of spiritual practice is attributable to the fact that, in the right-minded person, marijuana facilitates a heightened state of concentration that can deepen contemplation.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“we realize that the peoples of the Indian subcontinent have long understood that plants such as cannabis are useful tools in exploring consciousness.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“Al-Bisṭāmī turned the Quranic story of the Prophet’s night journey to heaven into a trope for the Sufi search for God, and subsequent Sufi mystics adopted that literary device as well.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“From approximately 10000 BCE onward, central and eastern Asian peoples began to rely on hemp to make rope, fish netting, canvas, and fabrics—and it became a staple source of food for the Han Chinese and their animals.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“Like soma, the exact constitution of the haoma formula remains murky: psychoactive mushrooms, cannabis, ephedra, ergot, and datura are prime candidates for the main ingredients.[”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“In depictions of the ritual slaying, grain springs from the dying bull’s tail and sometimes its wounds, features that connect the sacrificial act to ancient fertility rites and notions of rebirth grounded in the changing of the seasons.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“Cannabis serves not only as an important sacrament for Hindu mendicants, but also for Islamic Sufis, Chinese Daoists, members of African dagga cults, and Jamaican Rastafarians.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“the prophet Zoroaster first taught the doctrines of individual judgment, heaven and hell, the Last Judgment, and everlasting life in a resurrected body—all of which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam later borrowed.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“The use of cannabis as part of spiritual observation persisted most conspicuously in the Persian Sufi sects of Islam.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“That cosmic dualism became embedded in the Zoroastrian notion of time, envisioned as linear rather than cyclic, at the end of which a great battle between the forces of light (benevolence) and darkness (malevolence) concluded with the triumph of the good.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“As the fourteenth-century writer Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥill maintained: “Hashish makes you dispense with wine, / The new leaves with the old one, / And the green one with pure red wine. How great is the difference between emerald and carnelian!” The poet argues that hashish inflicts on the partaker “no hangover, except subtle thinking / That cheers the soul to the last breath. An intoxication such as that wine is unable to offer.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“Practiced widely in the Roman imperial court, including by some emperors, and even a powerful rival to Christianity, Mithraism continued successfully until the conversion of Constantine in 312.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“the syncretic nature of Sufism brought together contributions from pre-Islamic asceticism, Zoroastrianism, Mithra worship, monastic Christianity, and Neoplatonism to create an enduring Muslim mystical tradition that emphasizes love and ecstatic communion with God.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“A cannabis culture persists in parts of the Islamic Middle East in the form of a covert “green language” in popular lore. Cannabis is green, the color of Islam,[35] and also of the so-called hidden prophet of Sufism, al-Khiḍr or the Green Man—a vegetative spirit traditionally associated with fecundity, but later with the Sufi sect more generally.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“Drink your bhangab and be happy— Be a dervish and put your heart at peace. Lose all your life in drinking this exhilaration, And not in sewing shabby clothes.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis

“Fuzuli concludes that a sheik of love finds refuge in cannabis (whereas wine may only point the way to that truth), and he defends the potential for cannabis to contribute to overall self-betterment.”
― Mark S. Ferrara, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis