In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, we continue with an interview with cannabis historian Chris Bennett. I owe Chris something of a debt: Goddess Bible Study likely would not exist without the historical work he has been doing since the 1990s.
In our conversation, we discuss the cannabis and frankincense found on the altars at Tel Arad, why Yahweh’s priests could never claim he was the only god until the Persians conquered Babylon and Egypt, the Garden of Eden as the divorce papers of the Goddess, the “throne of God” in Revelation as a title of Isis, and why the Mother Goddess is the one threat monotheism can’t absorb. We also discuss current events, including the alarming Third Temple movement in Israel and the possibility of a US push to take Canada.
I have often told the story of how I stumbled onto the Mother Goddess in the Bible while researching marijuana in the Bible. It was Chris who taught me that cannabis is in the Bible but has been mistranslated, so we don’t see it in the text. The idea of qaneh bosm as cannabis comes from the Polish anthropologist Sula Benet, who first proposed it in 1936, and it remains controversial today. But it was Chris who popularized the idea that cannabis is an ingredient in Moses’s holy anointing oil, a recipe given directly by God, and that it was once sacred to the Hebrews.
I wanted to know how cannabis went from being sacred to being rejected. In the course of that research, I first learned about Asherah, the Wife of God, a discovery I owe to Chris.
Chris has written five voluminous books on the role of cannabis in ancient history, religion, spirituality, and politics. He is a longtime cannabis activist and a well-known figure in cannabis culture. His books are wide-ranging, thick with detail, and fully sourced. The research is excellent and deserves to be taken more seriously by academics, but because Chris works outside the academy, he is often overlooked. His most recent book is also his most comprehensive.
Cannabis: Lost Sacrament of the Ancient World - 2021
Liber 420 Cannabis, Magickal Herbs and the Occult - 2018
Cannabis and the Soma Solution - 2010
Sex, Drugs, Violence and the Bible - 2001 (co-written with with Neil McQueen)
Green Gold the Tree of Life: Marijuana in Magic & Religion - 1995 (co-written with Lynn and Judy Osburn)
I have been fascinated by cannabis history since 1991, when I first learned that the cannabis plant provides both marijuana and hemp fiber, and that both have played important roles in human societies across many cultures since the Neolithic Revolution. In the ’90s, I tried to write a book on the subject, and Chris’s first book was a crucial reference. I worked diligently on it for a year, but never finished. Twenty-five years later, that abandoned project became A History of the Goddess: From the Ice Age to the Bible.
Today, Chris maintains an active Substack and writes regularly on current events and politics. We are both deeply interested in, and vexed by, the threats to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem posed by the Third Temple movement.
