I recall that when I was young my mother forced me to attend midnight mass for Easter at our church, always an exasperating and nightmarish situation due to the late and long hour, the lack of food, the ghoulish candlelight and chanting, and such copious amounts of frankincense that I felt nauseous and distorted, like under the effects of some heavy narcotic, and had to go sit out in the hall to recover. To this day I can't smell incense without being taken back to that dark, ritualistic place (which is not really such a bad thing, as long as I have a full stomach first).
New research suggests that what I felt was not just the effect of sensory-overload generally accompanying the elaborate ritual paraphernalia of Catholicism, though there was plenty of that too, but the effect of
Bosweilla, the psychoactive chemical in incense, which, like other religious uses of
entheogens, really does make religion the opiate of the masses.
[via
Technoccult]
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