Like all good parents, I mindlessly pass on cultural traditions to my kids and usually don’t have a clue where they came from. We decorate a tree in December, hide colored eggs on Easter, and in October we dress up and carve pumpkins, and my kids tape up pictures of witches on broomsticks on the window. I’ve heard theories about some of these other things, but where did the “witches flying on broomsticks” thing come from?
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The easy take on the witch’s broomstick is that it’s a burlesque of female domesticity. But you needn’t have an especially dirty mind to realize that a woman riding a pole has sexual connotations–and not merely as a metaphor for the phallus. Before we get into that, though, we should talk about drugs and religion. Tolja this would be weird.
A lot of people who did drugs in the 60s thought, Wow, man, I can see God! (Now they think, I better get my gun and head over to the post office.) A few writers had thoughts along the following lines: (a) We’re not the first people who ever did drugs. (b) Many leading religious figures have been mystics, and mystical experiences have been a primary source of religious revelation. (c) A good way to have a mystical experience is to do drugs. (Forty days of fasting in the desert will do in a pinch.) (d) Ergo, many of the world’s major religions owe their origins to drugs! I’m oversimplifying, but not much. See for example Weston La Barre, “Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion,” in Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens (1972).
Scant underpinning for a mighty far-fetched theory, you may say, and I won’t deny it. Still, gives you something to think about next time you’re dressing your daughter for Halloween.
