Although the start of the ritual use of cannabis is lost in the mists of time, it comes in for many mentions in the Vedas. The Puranas, part of the Upanishads -- compiled around 1500 BC by the great sage, Vyasa, creator of the Bhavagad Gita and the Mahabharata -- which are thought to repeat many extremely ancient myths, contain a number of tales devoted to the cannabis plant.

Even today in India, the Shiva/cannabis connection survives and even flourishes. For all devotees of Lord Shiva, of which there are many, cannabis is a sacrament and a number of sannyasin sects smoke it freely as part of their daily life. There are also a number of Hindu festivals dedicated to Lord Shiva at which the drinking of bhang and the smoking of charas are an integral part. Indeed, at the Kumbla Mela at Allahabad, which also celebrates an aspect of Lord Shiva, it is said that the Indian government provides a huge quantity of charas to meet the demand. But that is the nature of dope myths.

Although cannabis use goes back to the late Paleolithic Age and maybe beyond, it was not until the development of the written word, starting in the 4th millennium BC, that the extent of its use becomes clear. Picking up its use from the Aryans of Vedic India, the ancient Assyrians (in what is now Iraq,) the Scythians (whose vast empire covered much of what was the southern USSR but is now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and parts of Turkestan,) the Thracians (in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria) and the Dracians (in what is now Romania) all incorporated cannabis use into their ritual practices. There is also evidence of 3rd millennium use in China.

In the process that created the modern cartographic world, empires rose and fell and borders were defined and redefined. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus, known as ‘the father of history,’ reported the use of cannabis by the Scythians. It is also clear that members of the Thracian cult of Dionysus inhaled cannabis smoke in their ritual practises. As the cult of Dionysus was still very much around in ancient Greece at the time Herodotus was writing, it is not too much to assume that cannabis use was still a part of the cult’s ritual ceremonials. (Interestingly, Dionysus would become Bacchus, God of Wine, when Rome adopted and renamed the Greek pantheon.)

Cannabis use spread rapidly across the Middle and Far East. It was incorporated into the ancient Egyptian culture where it was used to create ntr sentra, a prayer incense designed to make prayers more pleasing to the Gods and for magical, ceremonial, ritual and medical purposes. In Hebraic culture it is said that the Holy anointing oil mentioned in various Hebrew texts and in the Old Testament was a cannabis infusion. Such an oil would have been used in the anointing of Jesus.

Whilst most Islamic countries produce hashish for domestic use, Morocco is the only one that exports in quantity. Most of Morocco’s hashish is exported and varieties available on the streets in its country of origin are of poor quality. Most Moroccan’s smoke a unique preparation called kif. Bought as a newspaper-wrapped bundle of long grass buds wrapped in a slab of sticky uncured licorice-like tobacco, kif is always homemade. The process is long and laborious. The buds are removed from the stems and roughly crumbled. Approximately 50% of the bud weight consists of seeds. Those seeds that are fully developed are removed and the plant material is crumbled again. At this point the grass is spread thinly over a board and carefully picked over to remove all the immature seeds. Although seeds never taste good, the little green seeds have a particularly pungent taste. When all the immature seeds have been removed -- a process that is usually carried out over three or four days -- the grass is chopped very finely using a special curved two-handled blade. A portion of the tobacco is also chopped and the two are mixed into a fine greenish brown powder. The ratio of grass to tobacco dictates both the colour and the potency. The resulting preparation is usually a tasty, smooth and potent smoke. Kif is sometimes smoked in hookahs but these are mostly used for straight or flavoured tobaccos; it is more often smoked in long pipes with small clay bowls, called sebsi.

Ritual use of cannabis was not, however, limited to the Middle and Far East. The Norse love goddess, Freya, was directly connected to the female flowers of the cannabis plant and it was thought that by ingesting them one became influenced by her divine force. Although it is sparse, there is some evidence that the Celts, at least in middle Europe, used cannabis in the form of hashish.

Although there is no early evidence of ritual cannabis use in the UK, it seems clear that William Shakespeare indulged in smoking for recreational purposes. And it is probable that a freely available intoxicant such as cannabis would have been a long-standing part of British culture. But who can say?

The cannabis plant was not, of course, limited to Europe and the East. It grew everywhere. And every culture used the plant either for its fibres or for intoxication or for both.

There is strong evidence that cannabis, known as dagga, was used in the ceremonial rituals from ancient times by many tribes in Equatorial Africa. And, indeed, it was those very same Africans who, as slaves, took the smoking habit to Puritan America. Not that it was anything new to the Americas.

The Amazon Basin has been described as ‘the world’s pharmacopeia’ and it is clear from extremely ancient hieroglyphs that the earliest Indian cultures had an extensive interface with a wide range of natural intoxicants. Needless to say that among them was cannabis. However, little is known about its use until the arrival of Hernandez Cortez. He came not only with a household box of matches but a retinue of Franciscan monks and scribes and it is from them that we have some record of the Pre-Columbian use of cannabis. However, with so many much more powerful substances to connect them with the spirit world it is doubtful if cannabis was a featured player.

Although it has been suggested that Cortez took hemp seeds to the New World, it seems unlikely as they already had they own species of the cannabis plant. Cannabis Sativa, which seems to have originated in Columbia and Mexico but is also found in Thailand and parts of Southeast Asia, is a different plant to its sister, Cannabis Indica. The latter grows as a dense, shortish plant with broad leaves, has a flowering period of between six to ten weeks and produces a high resin yield. Cannabis Sativa is a much taller, more sparely branched plant with longer and narrower leaves. It has a flowering period of between 12 and 16 weeks and produces little resin.

Within the myth-ethos that surrounds the cannabis plant, cannabis sativa is thought to provide a more cerebral high than cannabis indica due to the prevalence of CBD over the usual active chemical in grass, THC. However, recent research has shown that CBD is not psychoactive and tends to suppress the euphoria associated with THC. There are, however, a number of secondary psychoactive chemicals in cannabis sativa that are not present in hashish, which is entirely based on THC, but may be present in cannabis indica when smoked as grass.

Although Mexico would become the major supplier of cannabis to the USA in the 1960s, there is little evidence of ritual use of the plant in its early history. Having said that there are a number of India tribes who use the plant today in their ceremonials. Such use would seem to be long-standing and traditional.

Contrary to popular cannabis legend, the peace pipe smoked ceremonially by Native American Indians north of the Rio Grande rarely if ever included cannabis in the mix of herbs it contained. Cannabis is not endemic to North America. The hemp plant arrived with the Puritans who grew it for its fibres.

So, that is a brief look at the spiritual use of cannabis but its use in other forms and under other names is just as influential in world history. In discussing the origins of cannabis it would be remiss to neglect the two other areas in which the plant has had an impact -- medicine and commerce.