From AGAINST THE POSTMODERN GERM (forthcoming)
Bennettian Sleights of Hand: Distortion as Method, Cannabis Fundamentalism and Rhetorical Colonialism
The following three observations address the deeper methodological pattern underlying Chris Bennett’s “scholarship” and situate it within a long, well-documented genealogy of fetishizing Western psychedelic Orientalism. In a recent essay,[i] Bennett presents his thesis as a seamless reconstruction of an “entheogenic continuum” stretching from Zoroastrian antiquity into Islamic esotericism, but this appearance results not from careful historical argumentation but from a series of interpretive manoeuvres that fetishize cannabis as the privileged explanatory key for an entire civilizational archive. Texts of radically different genres and periods—Avestan hymns, Pahlavi visionary narratives, early Islamic ḥadīth, medieval Sufi metaphysics, and even seventeenth-century Indo-Persian sectarian tales—are drawn into a single gravitational field anchored by the drug. In this way, Bennett reproduces a familiar orientalist trope: the East as a theatre of secret intoxicants, psychedelic rites, and intoxicated prophets whose true meaning eludes the natives themselves until recovered by a modern Western “decipherer.” What follows is an analysis of three core moves that sustain this construction and reveal its dependence on selective sourcing, speculative leaps, and the reduction of complex metaphysical traditions to a pharmacological essence.
A first and persistent problem in Bennett’s construction is his treatment of haoma as a de facto cannabis-wine preparation, presented as though this were an emergent consensus of Zoroastrian and archaeobotanical scholarship rather than a highly contested, minority hypothesis—his own. By leaning heavily on McGovern’s speculative biomolecular reconstruction[ii] and a small cluster of secondary remarks about bhang/mang in Pahlavi sources, he quietly collapses a complex philological and ritual debate into a single, convenient formula: haoma = entheogenic cocktail with cannabis at its core. That move allows him to retroject a cannabis-centric reading back onto the Avestan and Pahlavi corpora and then to treat this retrojection as stable ground from which to launch a narrative about “Zoroastrian cannabis infusions” as the primordial matrix of Iranian visionary religion. What disappears in this manoeuvre is the plurality of identifications proposed for haoma, the variety of ritual contexts in which it appears, and the considerable caution expressed by serious Iranists about equating a polyvalent liturgical complex with any one phytochemical compound. Instead, cannabis is fetishized as the hidden substance behind the symbol–the plant that secretly “explains” what prayer, liturgy, ascetic discipline and metaphysical doctrine otherwise render opaque. This is not an innocent error of emphasis: it is a methodological decision to treat Indo-Iranian religion as raw material for a psychedelic salvation narrative in which the author’s favoured drug becomes the master key.
A parallel overreach occurs in his handling of the miʿrāj narratives and their alleged dependence on the Arda Wīrāz cycle. Bennett mines older orientalist and missionary literature–Tisdall, Gowen and their ilk–which long ago sought to discredit Islam by portraying the Prophet’s heavenly ascent as a plagiarised Zoroastrian “vision journey,” and then he updates this polemical template with an entheogenic twist. On the strength of formal motifs shared by late Pahlavi visionary accounts and later Islamic miʿrāj elaborations (bridge, angelic guide, tour of heaven and hell, ritual drink), he confidently suggests not only literary borrowing but a retained ritual technology: a cannabis-infused sacramental beverage allegedly underlying both the Arda Wīrāz vision and the Prophet’s night journey. The “three cups of Zamzam” reported in some miʿrāj recensions are thus quietly recoded as a bhang-like potion, and Muḥammad’s altered state of consciousness is insinuated to be pharmacologically induced. Here again, the pattern is clear: a complex field of late antique eschatological and visionary motifs, traversed by processes of symbolic reworking and theological debate, is flattened into a simple, sensational genealogy whose real protagonist is the plant. The East appears, in classic Orientalist fashion, as a theatre of lurid, drug-fuelled visions waiting to be demystified by the Western psychonaut-exegete who alone recognises the “real” sacrament at work beneath the veil of scripture.
The Dabestān-e Mazāheb anecdote about Muḥammad grinding bhang, staining His turban green, and thereby acquiring esoteric knowledge is handled in precisely the same way. Bennett cites this mid-seventeenth-century Moghul Persian compendium–already recognized as a hybrid of reportage, sectarian lore and playful fiction–as though it were transparent historical testimony about the Prophet’s practice and the origin of Bani Hāshim’s green colour. The obviously legendary and symbolic texture of the episode is suppressed, and its rhetorical function within the Dabestān’s own comparative, often deliberately subversive project is left uninterrogated. Instead, the tale is elevated to the status of an esoteric key: evidence, we are invited to infer, that Muḥammad’s prophetic insight was catalysed by cannabis, and that the “true” lineage of Islamic gnosis runs through a bhang sacrament. This speculative reading then bleeds into his discussion of nabīdh, dūgh-e waḥdat and later hashish-using circles, where scattered references to intoxicating drinks, contested juristic discussions and marginal mystical practices are sewn together into an “unbroken thread” of cannabis-based ego-obliteration stretching from late Sasanian Iran to Persian Sufism. The result is not a careful history of ideas or practices but a kind of cannabis maximalism, in which every green motif, every drink, every ecstatic metaphor is re-coded as evidence of a single entheogenic technology. This is fetishization in the strict sense: cannabis treated as a privileged, quasi-magical object that organises and explains an entire religious world, while the indigenous categories–fanāʾ, ghyān čašm, tajallī, maʿrifa–are stripped of their own internal logics and subordinated to a modern psychoactive master narrative.
Across these moves one recognises not only a recurrent inflation of speculation into certainty but also the familiar tropes of psychedelic Orientalism: the East as the repository of secret drugs and forbidden techniques, the “native” traditions as colourful but confused, and the Western interpreter as the one who decodes their myths, rites and doctrinal elaborations as disguised pharmacology. In such a frame, Arda Wīrāz, Wištāsp, Muḥammad, ʿAlī, the Sufi and the dervish become interchangeable characters in a single drama about cannabis and “ego death,” and the historical and doctrinal distinctions between Zoroastrian priestly rites, Qurʾānic revelation, Shiʿi ʿirfān and Persian Sufism become secondary at best. It is precisely this flattening that allows Bennett to speak, without irony, of cannabis as the “hidden engine of Islamic esotericism,” as though an entire civilisation’s metaphysics, ethics and spiritual disciplines were reducible to a substance hidden in the cup. What masquerades as radical demystification is, in fact, another mystification: the replacement of one teleology (salvation history) with another (entheogenic liberation), grafted onto Iranian and Islamic materials through a set of rhetorical and historiographical short-cuts that owe more to late twentieth-century counterculture fantasies than to the sources themselves.
From his “ancient entheogen” writing to his anti-Bābī/defmation pieces, Bennett repeatedly relies not on rigorous scholarship but on selective quotation and cherry-picking, polemical tropes, and sources either deeply questionable or recognized by experts as forgeries. For example, in his November 5, 2025 article “Getting High With The Báb – The Drug Infused Origins of the Bahá’í?”[iii] he leans heavily on 19th-century anti-Bābī/Baháʼí accusations of hashish and opium use among early Bābīs—accusations that modern Baháʼí historians and scholars themselves treat as exaggerated, politicised, and often demonstrably forged. What Bennett does is not interpret or weigh evidence carefully; he recycles old sectarian smear literature—long exposed as propaganda—stripping it of its original polemical context and presenting it as credible “history.” This is exactly the same slippage of standards as when he turned contested Pahlavi ritual texts into “proof” of a Zoroastrian cannabis sacrament.
In his November 16, 2025 hit piece “Questions about the 2014 Iranian ‘Psychedelic Fatwā’ and Wahid Azal”, and the November 20 follow-up “The Strange Case of Wahid Azal: Bayān Messiah or Blaspheming Madman?”, Bennett again uses a pattern found in the earlier “entheogen history”: he conflates rumor, unverified claims, and hostility-laden testimonies with factual evidence; he unfairly pathologises dissenting religious perspectives as “madness” or “delusion”; and he presents complex doctrinal or historical issues (like legitimacy of religious succession, authenticity of claims, or apostasy debates) as if they were merely the predictable effects of drug-induced intoxication. In doing so, Bennett reproduces classic Orientalist tropes: the exotic, drug-fuelled “East” full of secret sects; the “mystical addict” as archetype; and the notion that non-Western religions only make sense when decoded through Western categories of drugs and intoxication. The repeated invocation of hashish, intoxication, hypnosis, and drugs—whether in early Zoroastrian ritual, medieval Sufism, or 19th-century Bábism—reduces complex spiritual traditions to a psychoactive core, stripping them of their metaphysical, social, and cultural dimensions. In the Bābī/Baháʼí context, this reduction becomes a political weapon: using the “drug origin” narrative to delegitimise entire religious identities, to cast believers as deluded, immoral or insane. That is not historical critique—it is defamation cloaked in “research.”
A further problematic pattern is the reuse of long-discredited or obviously forged sources, without any scholarly qualification or caveat. In his Bābism article, Bennett resurrects the so-called “Dolgorukov memoirs”—widely accepted by historians as fabrication—as a key piece of evidence for hashish use among Bābīs. That is identical to the way he treats contested ancient texts in most of his work: once a source (even a weak one) mentions “mang,” “hashish,” “intoxication,” or “ecstatic state,” for Bennett it becomes definitive proof of a cannabis-based sacrament or shared entheogenic lineage. The leap from “marginal rumor / contested text / folklore / alleged forgery” to “historical fact” is not an accident—it is his working method everywhere. In short: the same methodological flaws that undermine his “Zoroastrian to Islamic entheogen continuity” thesis—selective sourcing; disregarding scholarly consensus; conflation of metaphor/legend with literal history; fetishization of cannabis; reliance on orientalist and sectarian tropes—are at work in his hit-pieces against Bābism/Azalism and me. The result in both domains is not illumination or scholarship but narratives of defamation and delegitimisation—and, we would argue, a classic attempted colonial infiltration of communities. Bennett transforms complex religious histories into simplified stories of drug-fuelled cults—and in doing so, he trades real historical insight for sensationalist propaganda.
The methodological tendencies outlined above—selective sourcing, fetishisation of cannabis as a master-explanatory key, reliance on discredited or polemical texts, Orientalist narrative templates, and the conflation of metaphor with literal pharmacology—do not merely represent intellectual sloppiness. They form the operational grammar of a parapolitical disinformation architecture, one that thrives on epistemic shortcuts, emotional priming, sensationalist synthesis, and the weaponisation of ambiguity. Bennett’s work, both in his “historical entheogen” essays and his recent hit-pieces targeting Bábism, Azalism, and me personally, displays all the structural traits of an information-ops ecosystem rather than those of responsible scholarship. What is marketed as “research” functions, in practice, as a hybrid genre: part tabloid provocation, part ideological laundering, part destabilising agitprop dressed in academic costume. The porous boundaries of his method—the willingness to treat folklore as fact, polemic as testimony, and conjecture as certainty—are not accidents; they are what make the writing so easily repurposable in parapolitical contexts where plausible deniability, discursive contamination, and narrative confusion are essential.
At the level of technique, this parapolitical architecture operates by fusing incompatible registers—historical, mythographic, conspiratorial, and psychonautical—into a single, emotionally resonant storyline. In his Zoroastrian-to-Islam entheogen narrative, Bennett turns heterogeneous materials into a single, seductive continuity by dissolving temporal, doctrinal, and methodological distinctions. The same manoeuvre reappears in his Cannabis Culture articles, where Bābī history, sectarian polemics, forged diplomatic memoirs, legal controversies, and defamatory psychologisation are blended into a single narrative of “drug-infused origins,” “psychedelic delusion,” and “mad messianism.” This merging of registers is a hallmark of parapolitical disinformation: it creates a cognitive environment in which readers cannot clearly discern where history ends and insinuation begins. The resulting ambiguity is fertile ground for reputational harm and ideological manipulation, because it invites the reader not to evaluate evidence but to feel the plausibility of the narrative through repetition, vivid framing, and the aura of “hidden truth revealed.”
Another distinguishing feature of this architecture is its simultaneous reliance on Orientalist and countercultural mythologies as vectors of psychological persuasion. By casting the East as a domain of secret intoxicants, esoteric cults, mad prophets, and drug-fuelled revelations, Bennett taps into long-standing cultural tropes that have been repeatedly deployed in colonial, missionary, and Cold War information operations. These tropes function as ready-made interpretive scaffolds: once activated, they allow new targets—here, Bābism/Azalism, and specific critics of established religious organisations—to be folded into older narratives of exotic irrationality and inherent instability. When these tropes are attached to living individuals, as in Bennett’s personalised attacks on me, they become potent instruments of character assassination, echoing the tactics used by parapolitical actors who seek to discredit dissidents by pathologising or exoticising them rather than engaging their arguments.
Perhaps the most telling indicator that Bennett’s work participates in a parapolitical ecosystem is the way it interfaces seamlessly with broader sectarian and ideological agendas, whether intentionally or not. His hit-pieces, echoing decades of anti-Bābī/anti-Azalī propaganda and personal defamation, recycle lines of attack that have been circulated by organised religious and parareligious networks such as CESNUR with vested interests in shaping public perceptions. The cannabis-fetishising frame provides a “neutral” or “countercultural” aesthetic that obscures these connections, giving the impression of independent discovery rather than participation in a disinformation lineage. This is precisely how parapolitical architectures operate: through the creation of semi-autonomous nodes—journalists, bloggers, think-tank affiliates, “independent researchers”—whose work reproduces strategic narratives while maintaining enough distance to deny coordination. The fact that Bennett’s narratives align so closely with established smear-patterns, while deploying his trademark entheogenic maximalism as a delivery system, suggests a functional integration into this wider ecology of discourse even if the cooperation is indirect or opportunistic.
In all these respects, Bennett’s corpus behaves less like the output of a sincere, if eccentric, researcher and more like a vector within a larger disinformation-assemblage: one that exploits the aesthetics of psychedelic revelation and historical excavation to launder polemic into “insight,” smear into “analysis,” and ideological hostility into “cultural commentary.” His methods—porous, promiscuous, rhetorically loaded, never mind false—are well-suited to the parapolitical function of degrading epistemic environments, seeding doubt, and delegitimising targeted individuals and communities under the guise of alternative scholarship. The cumulative effect is not merely the distortion of specific historical traditions but the construction of an informational climate in which meaning itself becomes precarious—an outcome beneficial to any actor, institutional or informal, who seeks to weaken public trust in legitimate dissent, living religious minorities, or critics who challenge dominant narratives.
[i] Zoroastrian Cannabis Infusions and Islamic Elixirs of Ego-ObliterationMang, Nabidh and Dūḡ-e waḥdat: Tracing Cannabis-induced Visionary Trance from Ancient Iran to Medieval Islam, online https://chrisbennett420.substack.com/p/zoroastrian-cannabis-infusions-and
[ii] See Patrick E. McGovern Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages (University of California Press: Oakland, 2009), esp. chps. 3, 4 and 7.
[iii] https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2025/11/05/getting-high-with-the-bab-the-drug-infused-origins-of-the-bahai-some-notes/
