Saturday, June 29, 2019

Cannabis Seeds From A Divine Source – Shen Nong And The Five Sacred Grains


Cannabis origin myth ancient China fascinates me. When Martin and I were enough to interview Robert Cornell Clarke, I wanted to ask one thousand questions about his travels through the south-west of the Middle Kingdom, with its dreamlike landscape and pockets of culture that has remained virtually unchanged for hundreds, which are not thousands, of years; remote enough to have so far escaped the eradication of all things and Ancient that began with Mao.

Robert had visited many of those places, searching for evidence of how and why he was interwoven with the lives of the people who lived there. Some weeks later, reading a book of Chinese fairy tales and legends, I came across the specific creation myth of cannabis seed.

The ancient city of Lijiang in Yunnan, China (photo: Ariel Steiner, Wikimedia Commons)
Some of the earliest proof of deliberate outdoor cannabis cultivation comes from China, where hemp is still farmed, now on an industrial scale. In 2008, archaeological digs in the Shanghai Tombs near Turpan uncovered a 2,700-year-old shamanic gravesite containing vessels filled with cannabis seeds and buds; when tested, the flowers proved to contain THC. It has long been known that industrial hemp, used as an invaluable source of both food and fiber, has been grown there since Neolithic times. This find proved beyond a doubt that the consciousness-altering properties of the psychoactive variants were also known to the people of ancient China. It’s not surprising that a plant this important would have its legend of how it came to be used by people.

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