Shiva
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Shiva (Sanskrit Śiva), also called Mahadeva, "the great god", and Shankar, is a god of Hinduism. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission wrote in 1894 that "it is chiefly in connection with the worship of Siva" that the hemp plant is associated, and that the plant was "popularly believed to have been a great favourite of Siva". Ascetics and much of the public held it to be "a special attribute of the god".[1] Bhang is poured over his linga and drunk in his honour, ganja and charas are smoked as an offering to him, and at his festival, Maha Shivaratri, cannabis is offered to him and consumed by his devotees in India and Nepal.[2]: 251[3]: 9
How old the association is has not been established. Texts that name Shiva together with the plant are medieval, the earliest of them from the 12th or 13th century, and the Indologist Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty counted the tradition that Shiva uses bhang among the "late characteristics of Bengal Śaivism".[4]: 79[5]: 128 The wider place of cannabis in Hindu worship, festivals and ascetic life is the subject of Cannabis in Hinduism.
Names and attributes
The commission traced "many fond epithets ascribing to ganja the significance of a divine property" to the belief that the plant belonged to Shiva.[1] In western India bhang was called Shankarpriya, "the beloved of Mahadev", and vijayā, "the unbeaten", a name J. M. Campbell, a Bombay revenue collector writing for the commission, tied to Shiva as Tripur, slayer of the demon Tripurasur.[2]: 250–251 Campbell opened his note by calling the bhang leaf "the home of the great Yogi or brooding ascetic Mahadev", in the way that Shiva was held to dwell in the bel leaf.[2]: 250 A deputy collector in Gujarat gave the reason for the Shivaratri offering in one line: "Mahadev is an ascetic, and is fond of bhang".[6]: 164
In Sanskrit, the alchemical Ānandakanda of the 12th or 13th century calls cannabis śivamūlī, "the root of Śiva". Stuart Sarbacker, in a study of psychoactive substances in the history of yoga, reads the work as tying the plant to yoga and renunciation, "especially those of Śaiva provenance".[4]: 79 Shiva is portrayed in some contexts as a consumer of datura and in others of "both datura and cannabis", and cannabis is called in some contexts "Gorak's Root" (korakkarmūla), after the Nāth teacher Gorakṣanātha.[4]: 80 Shiva is also the Ādiyogi, the first yogi from whom the discipline descends.[4]: 77
In myth
One story joining Shiva to the plant is that of the poison churned from the ocean. When the gods and demons churned the primal sea for the nectar of immortality, a poison rose that would have destroyed the world, and Shiva swallowed it, becoming Nīlakaṇṭha, "the blue-throated one".[4]: 77[7]: 240 In one version the god then used cannabis "to cool himself down".[4]: 88 Campbell recorded this version in western India, together with others in which the plant sprang from spilled nectar or was made by Mahadev from his own body; these and the verse of the Rājavallabha on the plant's birth from the churning are set out on the page on cannabis in Hinduism.[2]: 251–252
Campbell's note holds several stories found nowhere else in the commission's evidence. In one, Shiva explains to his wife Parvati how hemp should be sown, with the name "Bhangi" repeated at sowing, planting and every watering to keep evil influences away.[2]: 250 In another, fever is the angry breath of Shiva, sent out when his father-in-law Daksha slighted him; pouring bhang over the linga, the Vijaya abhishek, cools the god's breath and with it the patient.[2]: 250–251 Before and during a war, he wrote, the linga of Mahadev "should be bathed with bhang".[2]: 250 The note ends with a devotional verse he attributed to "the Hindu poet of Shiva": "He who drinks bhang drinks Shiva."[2]: 252
Shrines and offerings
Witnesses before the commission testified that siddhi was offered to the image of Shiva at Benares (Varanasi), Baidyanath and Tarakeswar, and that ganja was offered to the god and consumed by certain classes of his worshippers at Shivaratri "and on almost all occasions on which this worship is practised".[1] The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya, reading that evidence, calls Shaiva devotion "the most identifiably coherent set of religious uses of cannabis" in it; the shrines of Vaidyanath in Bihar and Tarakeswara in Bengal drew thousands of pilgrims.[8]: 47–48 At Benares, Campbell wrote, students of the scriptures were given bhang before they sat to study, and fever patients poured bhang over a linga called Jvareshwar, "the Fever-Lord".[2]: 251–252 In 2007 a wire report from Ranchi said that ganja smoking was popular among the pilgrims who walk to Baidyanath at Deoghar in the month of Shravan to pour water on the linga, and quoted a pilgrim: "Marijuana is liked by Lord Shiva."[9]
In Bombay the bhang offered to Shiva was plain, without pepper or spice, and mixed with water, with milk or with milk and sugar. Campbell found the rite "seldom performed except in the Bhuleswar and Babulnath temples and there only on special occasions", and recorded the formula with which a smoker or drinker offered the drug to the god before taking it: "be pleased to take it Shankar, take it Babulnath".[2]: 251 In the Berar evidence bhang was used to "bathe the idol of Shiva" at Mahashivratri, though it was "not considered to be an essential material of worship".[10]
In the western Himalayas, surveys in the Manikaran valley of Kullu in 2015–17 and across Kullu district in 2021–22 found hemp leaves offered to Shiva in daily worship, and leaves and seeds made into the drink ghota for him at Shivaratri.[11]: 129[12]: 7 In Nepal the Shaiva shrine of Pashupatinath in Kathmandu draws sadhus from Nepal and the neighbouring Indian states at Maha Shivaratri, when the use of cannabis, illegal in Nepal, is tolerated.[3]: 10–11
Shaiva ascetics
The commission reported "the almost universal use of hemp drugs by fakirs, jogis, sanyasis, and ascetics of all classes, and more particularly of those devoted to the worship of Siva".[1] George Abraham Grierson called the jogis "well-known consumers of bhang and ganja", and worshippers of Shiva.[13]: 249 Campbell singled out the Atits as "specially devoted to hemp": no gathering of Atits was complete without ganja or bhang.[2]: 252 George Weston Briggs, in his 1938 study of the Kanphata or Nath yogis, recorded the legend of Dharamnath's monastery at Dhinodhar in Kutch, in which the company, coming down the hill after the saint's penance, "decided to have bhang", and Pir Pathao struck a spring from the hillside for water to make it.[14]: 117 Briggs wrote that "the Yogis are notorious as drug addicts" and that hemp was among the drugs used to induce ecstasy, a judgement that is his own.[14]: 347 John Campbell Oman, writing in 1903, saw yogis at the installation of a new head of a Gorakhnathi temple slip away "to have a pull at the churrus pipe".[15]: 256
Oman described sannyasis wearing the rudraksha bead sacred to Shiva, some painting "an eye, like the central eye of Siva" on the forehead, who lit a fire whenever they sat down and smoked ganja.[15]: 154
In a survey of 200 sadhus at Pashupatinath during Shivaratri in 2014, members of the Naga order were the more likely to give cannabis to devotees and to hold that Hindus should use it.[3]: 9, 11 In 2013 the head of an akhara of Naga sadhus at Nashik told Hinduism Today that "our naga sadhus have chillum as part of their sadhana".[16]
Not all Shiva's ascetics hold that the god asks for the plant. In the 2014 survey 13.5 per cent of the sadhus said that Shiva had said cannabis should be used.[3]: 12 Sarbacker finds "debate within and among sādhu communities" over the place of cannabis in ascetic and yogic practice, with some communities prohibiting it.[4]: 79 The practice of ascetics in general is described under Sadhu and Cannabis in Hinduism.
In painting
A late 19th-century drawing from the Punjab plain, collected at Lahore or Amritsar by John Lockwood Kipling and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, shows Shiva and Parvati "preparing bhang, with Nandi seated before them".[17] In a Kalighat painting of about 1890 from the same collection, the museum reads Shiva's "sleepy eyes" as "indicating that he is under the influence of bhang (cannabis)".[18] Briggs, describing the god of the Purāṇas as a mendicant in a tiger skin with matted hair and a trident, wrote that his "half-shut eyes are watery, and his garb and demeanour suggest a person under the influence of wine and narcotics".[14]: 153
How old the association is
Two verses of the Atharvaveda name a plant bhaṅga, and whether it is cannabis is disputed: the Sanskritist G. Jan Meulenbeld placed the earliest incontestable reference to cannabis as a medicine in the 11th or 12th century, and Dominik Wujastyk dates reliable references to after about AD 1000.[19]: 64[20]: 55 The Rigvedic hymn to the long-haired ascetic who drinks a poison with Rudra, the Vedic precursor of Shiva, is read by Sarbacker as a theme that later stories of Nīlakaṇṭha take up, and suggests that the drink may have been another psychoactive plant, "perhaps even datura or aconite".[4]: 77
The texts that join Shiva and the plant are later. The Ānandakanda names cannabis "the root of Śiva".[4]: 79 Grierson wrote that Vidyāpati, about 1400, called Shiva "Digambara bhanga" in a hymn, "in reference to his habit of consuming that drug".[13]: 248 The farce Dhūrtasamāgama, dated by different scholars between the 14th and the early 16th century, has a Shaiva mendicant carrying a bag of ganja.[13]: 247–248[20]: 61
Modern writers have not agreed on why the god and the plant came together. O'Flaherty held that the bhang tradition of Shiva belonged to late Bengal Śaivism.[5]: 128 The anthropologist Khwaja A. Hasan wrote in 1975 that "it is not clearly known why Hindus associate hemp drugs with Shiva", and cited M. M. Underhill's suggestion that the moon was identified both with Shiva and with soma, the plant of the Vedic sacrifice.[7]: 240 In a 2023 review of research on cannabis in India, P. Karki and M. Rangaswamy wrote that its consumption is still "regarded as auspicious" at Shivaratri, Krishna Ashtami, Kali puja and Holi.[21]
Law at Shiva's shrines
In 2022 the High Court of Karnataka, granting bail to a man held with bhang, held that the leaves of the plant fall outside the definition of ganja in the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985, and called bhang a traditional drink consumed "especially near the Shiva temples".[22] In May 2023 the government of Odisha told its districts that ganja "in no form be used in any Shiva temple in the state", after the head of a religious trust asked the excise department to restrict it. Ganja had been used for a century in the Gharsana ritual of the Akhandalamani shrine at Bhadrak, and an opposition legislator objected that "ganja is offered to Lord Shiva" as bhog, food offered to the god.[23] The law on cannabis at Shiva's festival in India and Nepal is set out on the page on the festival.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IX, "Social and religious customs", para. 435, pp. 160–161 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 Campbell, J.M. (1894). "Note on the religion of hemp". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–1894. Vol. III. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. Appendix.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Acharya, S.L.; Howard, J.; Pant, S.B.; Mahatma, S.S.; Copeland, J. (2014). "Cannabis, Lord Shiva and holy men: cannabis use among sadhus in Nepal". Journal of Psychiatrists' Association of Nepal. 3 (2): 9–14. doi:10.3126/jpan.v3i2.12379.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 Sarbacker, Stuart (10 September 2026). "Psychoactives and psychedelics in yoga: historical contexts and contemporary culture". Journal of Contemplative Studies (1): 73–100. doi:10.57010/exia6450.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger (1968). "The post-Vedic history of the soma plant". Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Ethno-mycological Studies. Vol. 1. by R. Gordon Wasson. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IX, "Social and religious customs", paras. 431–450, pp. 159–166 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Hasan, Khwaja A. (1975). "Social aspects of the use of cannabis in India". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 235–246. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.235.
- ↑ Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (June 2026). Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India. Oakland: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/luminos.276. ISBN 9780520425699.
- ↑ "Brisk sale of marijuana in Jharkhand". TwoCircles.net. 11 August 2007. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Memorandum on hemp drugs in Berar". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. pp. 107–109 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Rathore, S.; Shashni, S.; Samant, S.S.; Sundriyal, R.C. (2018). "Indigenous uses of wild hemp (Cannabis sativa) by the local inhabitants in Manikaran Valley of Himachal Pradesh, North Western Himalaya". Journal of Non-Timber Forest Products. 25 (3): 127–130. doi:10.54207/bsmps2000-2018-7393KF.
- ↑ Thakur, Smriti; Jamwal, Radhika; Negi, Subodh (2023). "Ethnobotanical survey of plants used in magico-religious practices in Kullu district of Himachal Pradesh, India". Ethnobotany Research and Applications. 25: 1–18. doi:10.32859/era.25.39.1-18.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Grierson, George Abraham (1894). "Note on references to the hemp plant occurring in Sanskrit and Hindi literature". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–1894. Vol. III. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. pp. 246–249.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Briggs, George Weston (1938). Gorakhnāth and the Kānphaṭa Yogīs. The Religious Life of India. Calcutta: Y.M.C.A. Publishing House; Oxford University Press.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Oman, John Campbell (1905) [1903]. The Mystics, Ascetics, and Saints of India (2nd impression ed.). London: T. Fisher Unwin.
- ↑ "Issues: The Chillum Question". Hinduism Today. July–September 2013. Archived from the original on 18 May 2026.
- ↑ Victoria and Albert Museum. "Shiva and Parvati, drawing, Punjab Plain, late 19th century, IM.2:217-1917". V&A Collections. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ Victoria and Albert Museum. "Shiva on Nandi, painting, Kalighat, Kolkata, ca. 1890, IM.2:190-1917". V&A Collections. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ Meulenbeld, G.J. (1989). "The search for clues to the chronology of Sanskrit medical texts, as illustrated by the history of bhaṅgā (Cannabis sativa Linn.)". Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik. 15. Reinbek: Dr. Inge Wezler, Verlag für Orientalistische Fachpublikationen: 59–70. ISSN 0341-4191.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 Wujastyk, Dominik (2002). "Cannabis in Traditional Indian Herbal Medicine". In Salema, A. (ed.). Ayurveda at the Crossroads of Care and Cure. Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar. pp. 45–73. ISBN 972-98672-5-9.
- ↑ Karki, P.; Rangaswamy, M. (March 2023) [published online 15 August 2022]. "A review of historical context and current research on cannabis use in India". Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine. 45 (2): 105–116. doi:10.1177/02537176221109272.
- ↑ Roshan Kumar Mishra v. State of Karnataka. High Court of Karnataka (26 August 2022). Criminal Petition No. 6611 of 2022.
- ↑ "Odisha: Government bans consumption of Ganja at Shiva shrines". Free Press Journal. Press Trust of India. 24 May 2023. Retrieved 13 November 2026.