Hindu Goddess Kali and Cannabis

Cannabis is among humanity's oldest and most useful cultivated crops, and so it is not surprising to find that cannabis, in all its forms, has been intricately associated with Goddess worship in many cultures, throughout history.

"Holy pot has been smoked by Goddess worshippers since before history, and was first banned by those who sought to subjugate feminine spirituality"

In most ancient hunter-gatherer societies, women balanced the males' supply of game with their collected harvest from the surrounding wilderness. Women therefore became the first to learn the secrets of plants, and how they propagated themselves.

This knowledge led to the development of agriculture, and the evolution from the animal totems of the hunter-gatherers to images of the Great Mother, who with proper worship produced her abundant harvest in the same way that women produced children.

Kali-Ma

The most ancient goddess still worshiped in the world today is the Indian Kali-Ma, the Mother of Life and Death. Her worship stretches back into pre-history, and is believed to predate that of her more well-known consort Shiva, the longest continually worshiped god on earth. Both Shiva and Kali are strongly associated with marijuana.

Kali is generally depicted with a girdle of human arms and a necklace of skulls, and represents the dark aspect of the goddess trinity of virgin-mother-crone. Both ancient and modern devotees of Kali partake of marijuana in various forms as a part of their worship.

Devotional ceremonies to Kali involve cannabis ingestion and ritual sex, which is directed at raising the Kundalini energy from the base of the spine up into the higher centres of the brain.

Other pot-goddesses

The worship of Kali, under various names, extended into the ancient Near East, and cannabis was also used by many of the worshippers of Kali's ancient world counterparts.

Kali is the Hindu counterpart of the ferocious and sensual Canaanite goddess Anath, (part of a similar trinity with Ashera and Astarte)who is also described with "attached heads to her back, girded hands to her waist."

In ancient Germany, marijuana was used in association with Freya, the slightly tamer Kali-like goddess of Love and Death.

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Cannabis culture