Inside Job

A recent Slate.com article about the stimulation of the brain to produce religious experiences--I just got around to reading it--contains the following sentence:

Psychedelic (or entheogenic, literally God-containing) compounds such as LSD and psilocybin represent by far the most mature mystical technology available.

"Literally"? Might want to watch that. The suffix "-genic" has several meanings, which I covered in my first-ever blog entry. It can mean "producing", "produced by", or "pertaining to", but it doesn't mean "containing".

I think a better translation of "entheogenic" would come about as follows: "en-" means "in", "theo" means "god", and "genic" means "producing or causing", so an entheogenic drug or procedure would be one which produces a sense of divinity within oneself--or, more specifically, within one's brain.

And, as it turns out, Wikipedia--which, I swear, I didn't look at until I had written that last paragraph--agrees with me.

"God-containing", my ass.