Anglicans on Mysterians

From The Christian Challenge: The Only Worldwide Voice of Traditional Anglicanism, Volume XLII, No. 3/ May-June, 2003

BUBBLING BELIEF: And here we thought we had just about heard it all.

It was a few months ago that we reported on a San Francisc group's ideas about "sacramental" drug use at an Episcopalian parish. Now we hear of a Dallas-area group known to treat nitrous oxide (laughing gas) as a sacrament- and to throw Jacuzzi parties. Welcome to the "Hot Tub Mystery Religion."

"It's adherents hold to no particular spiritual dogma, borrowing freely from such sources as Jewish mysticism, Roman paganism, Islamic heresy and experimental art," reports www.reason.com. "One of its founders has compiled a reading list for the faithful; it includes a collection of Tantric exercises, a text on Sufism, one of Philip K. Dick's Gnostic science fiction stories, and a novel by Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton."

Perhaps it is just the kind of "hot water" that Frank Griswold- ECUSA's presiding bishop of "pluriform" truth, who not long ago quoted a Sufi poet- wouldn't mind getting into.

Then again, the hot tub faithful are said to number well under 100 practitioners- not exactly a socially influential force. That would never do for the boy from Bryn Mawr.

The story, by the way, notes that the Jacuzzi group, while part of a wider syncretic trend, is unusual because it is so radical. "Most people do not feel the need to be the authors of their own religions," said reason,"though quite a few are happy to be the editors." Yeah, we've noticed that.

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What is particularly interesting about this little barb is the pretense that there is anything unusual in the idea that drugs, particularly certain plants and fungi referred to as entheogenic, can be sacramental. Indeed, many scholars suggest that the kykeon elixir of the mysteries was a psychedelic blend.

As for nitrous oxide, William James ,the father of modern psychology, wrote of his laughing gas experience in terms that echo the mystical experience of coincidentia oppositorum ,"It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxixation, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thous, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the nunc stans of life. The thought of mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgement of opposition, as "nothing--but," "no more--than," "only--if," etc., produced a perfect delirium of the theoretic rapture."

The Christian Challenge's witty religio-cultural denigration seems to be part of the largely unquestioned war against indigenous folkways perpetuated by the Roman Christian Church and its Protestant variants. One need only consider the fate of indigenous peoples and their entheogenic traditions at the hands of this tradition's staunch defenders to see one culmination of such marginalization. Stick with bread, folks, and let us tell you what God meant.