The Botany of Desire

"...as I delved deeper into the myth of Dionysus, I realized there was much more to his story, and the strangely changeable god who began to come into focus bore a remarkable resemblance to John Chapman. Or at least to 'Johnny Appleseed,' who, I became convinced, is Dionysus' American son.

Like Johnny Appleseed, Dionysus was a figure of the fluid margins, slipping back and forth between the realms of wildness and civilization, man and woman, man and god, beast and man. I found Dionysus depicted variously as a wild man with foliage sprouting from his head, a goat, a bull, a tree, and a woman. Friedrich Nietzsche paints Dionysus as a figure able to dissolve 'all the rigid and hostile barriers' between nature and culture.

The Greeks regarded Dionysus as the antithesis of Apollo, god of clear boundaries, order, and light. of man's firm control over nature. Dionysian revelry melts every Apollonian line, so that, as Nietzsche writes,'alienate, hostile, or subjugated nature . . . celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man.' By worshiping Dionysus and getting drunk on his wine, the Athenians temporarily returned to nature, to a time when, as the classicist Jame Harrison writes, 'man is still to his own thinking brother of plants and animals.' The odd, ecstatic worship of Dionysus, which needed no temple, always took place outside the city, returning religion to the woods where it began."
pg. 37-38

"The challenge these plants posed to monotheism was profound, for they threatened to divert people's gaze from the sky, where the new God resided, down to the natural world all around them. The magic plants were, and remain, a gravitational force pulling us back to Earth, to matter, away from the there and then of Christian salvation and back to the here and now. Indeed, what these plants do to time is perhaps the most dangerous thing about them—dangerous, that is, from the perspective of a civilization organized on the lines of Christianity and, more recently, capitalism.

Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come—whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending. More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-circuits the metaphysics of desire on which Christianity and capitalism (and so much else in our civilization) depend.""
pg. 175