Counted among my pantheon of personal heroes while growing up in California’s East Bay area were Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. I was a strange kid. I still sometimes mimic Cheech’s purposefully exaggerated Chicano accent, American English with a Spanish rhythm and Aztec intonation, also known as Calo or Mexican American “Spanglish.” Its a sound distinct to the borderlands experience; the echo of Aztlan: the Chicana/o mythical homeland; a sanctuary; a pipe dream. When I speak like Cheech to my close friend and academic colleague, who I affectionately call Chong, we deploy a linguistic code decipherable sometimes only by us, and perhaps a few other confidantes. Referring to four twenty, I often say “los santos,” or just santos, which translates loosely as “the saints.” We conspire in our devotion to them. Like the Rastafarians, the practice becomes a sacred ritual. For us, praying to the saints, our muertos, is an attempt to connect to the divine; a gestural offering in hopes of elevating our spirits to Elysium; the mythical land of the triumphantly dead, or physically displaced, the heavenly space where the souls of heroes dwell. Aztlan by another name. This, I believe, is how my Chicano hero, Cheech Marin, understands his devotion to los santos.

It’s appropriate that Cheech, a Mexican American, would open the artistic space for the popularization and promotion of marijuana into the soul of American popular culture. The word, la palabra, derives from a distinctly Mexican Spanish, with a folk etymology leading to original usage by a legendary diva, señora Maria Juana. The name resonates. Consider the thinly veiled celebration by the late funk sensation Rick James:

I love you Mary Jane, you’re my main thing,
you make me feel alright, you make my heart sing.
And when I’m feeling low, you come as no surprise,
fill me up with your love, take me to paradise.

But there are many names for marijuana; some call it “the Buddha,” others “Ganja,” “mojo,” “ju ju,” and other nomenclature signifying its spiritual import. And yet, its potential to induce a mystical experience has largely escaped the scholarly gaze of religious studies. The term marijuana came into American usage in 1873, plotted into one of Hubert Howe Bancroft’s racist manifestos, Native Races of the Pacific States. There he impugned Mexicans by attributing to them what he deemed barbaric rituals, including the smoking of herbs and roots for purposes of conjuring hallucinations and states of ecstasy. Bancroft was blinded by his racialized vision of civilization.

On the other hand, in 1910 William James claimed that any activity or substance that distracted a person’s fixed attention could open up the psychic terrain wherein mystical experiences unfold. Counted among the catalysts were alcohol and psychotropic drugs, which acted as portals to a spiritual place of fresh revelation. In 1932 Walter Benjamin wrote about his experiments with hashish, a concentrated form of marijuana. In his “Hashish in Marseilles,” he describes the sensations of watching himself from outside of his body: ecstasis. When walking the streets his senses are heightened; he is penetrated by the aromas, the sonic vibrations, the aesthetic assault of a hot day in a pleasantly crowded French city. “It was not far from the first café of the evening,” he proclaims, “in which, suddenly, the amorous joy dispensed by the contemplation of some fringes blown by the wind had convinced me that the hashish had begun to work.” Remarkably he and James (both Rick and William) agree: “And when I recall this state,” Benjamin concludes, “I should like to believe that the hashish persuades nature to permit us—for less egoistic purposes—that squandering of our existence that we know in love.”

The act of smoking cannabis is an erotic spirituality, a praxis initiated by intense sucking, with the goal of capturing the maximum amount of smoke, of inhaling deeply, pulling and holding the breath; testing the limit; spirit. And then there is the release; the small death, that rapturous moment marking the satisfaction and joy of surrender. That is the pivotal movement when the lungs and the heart rock, when pleasure breaches the limen between the sacred and the profane.

Exhaling, some can shape the billowy plume of smoke with their mouths into an ethereal art form.

Indeed, marijuana is a gateway drug. Temporal borders seem to collapse as the act recalls the ancient sages who deemed the smoke sacred in its own right. Like the burning of copal, the cloud signals another state of consciousness, a liminal place where the psyche is permeable to fresh revelation. There, thoughts are intensified, scrambled, and reassembled into fragmented narratives that disrupt mundane cognition. Identity is questioned, challenged, opened, expanded. Though somewhat intellectual, that is the spiritual work.

So marijuana is medicine, at once traditional and modern. Today, sixteen states and our nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, have recognized its medicinal value and legalized medical marijuana. Hence, in states like my own, California and Colorado, pot production and consumption have created an epic artistic and spiritual awakening. The shift from an underground culture to a mainstream movement is transforming American society and architecture. A neighborhood in Oakland has been renamed “Oaksterdam” and is the site of the first American Cannabis college. Recently thousands jammed into the Colorado Events Center for the 2011 Cannabis Cup competition and expo. All across America dispensaries are sites of spirituality. New strains of marijuana (Purple Haze, Train Wreck, AK47, Blue Skies, Yellow Kush), new forms of distribution, and new information all contribute to the emergence of artistic and ritualistic communities. Dispensaries frequently hold events and those in California can offer areas to medicate, free food, television and movies, internet access, and games, providing a platform to experience shared rites and community—the communitas.

The dispensary is a liminal space wherein the spirituality of cannabis can implode and explode. Each time I experience the warm embrace of my dispensary, I bask in the light emanating from the freedom of religion we as Americans so pompously celebrate. This is my church. There I connect to a community of likeminded believers and practitioners. There I am confronted by the awe-inspiring miracle of marijuana cultivation and presentation, the dozens of strains each distinct in color, shape, texture, odor, and effect. I am dazzled by the narrative of mixed strains, and by the array of precise medicinal properties each boasts. How can my provider be so knowledgeable of this one sacred plant? And how can there be so much to know? He, my “caretaker,” is truly my priest, a master of the botanical arts, a holy alchemist of spiritual ecstasy. My offering seems the lesser of our ritual exchange; money is eclipsed by the weight of his gifts.

¡Viva la Revolución!

The importance of blood in American race discourse can hardly be overstated, and its particular, if hardly unique, function is generally granted. From slavery to eugenics, the practices of blood quantum, the one-drop rule, and everything Orlando Patterson called “rituals of blood”—all this testifies to the indisputable significance of blood in race discourse and racist practices. This significance carries over into law and into science but it still speaks, as if by containment, to the issue of race. Robert Cover did remind us that the relation between blood and law goes further, arguing that law is “that which licenses in blood certain transformations, while authorizing others only by unanimous consent.” Similar statements could be averred with regard to science, or to medicine at least, and perhaps to political science as well, since William Harvey’s discoveries on the circulation of the blood were picked up by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, by John Adams and countless others. At this point, however, we already run the risk of courting a strange but banal universalism (menstruation might be invoked for good effect), whereby blood could appear as a matter of concern common to every culture.

Presumably consumed with anger and revenge—not to mention law—the Old Testament famously seems to confirm, and partake of, such universalism. The soul is blood, it (approximately) said. The more widespread translation, however, from Luther onward, has it that “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” which introduces a massive innovation, a new kind of universalism. Consider that where the ancient texts (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin too) asserted an equality of creatures, the new dispensation offers blood as a principle of difference, which implicitly separates human from (soulless) animal. Thus, Acts 17:26 was translated: “And He hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth,” leaving the door open to doctrines of “lower” races as animals. In the early version, in other words, neither life nor difference was quite what was at stake. Only in this light can we take the measure of the transformation that has taken place and understand the peculiarity of the new universalism of blood, and the difference blood makes. Not surprisingly, the translation, which averred the contiguity of (human) life, blood, and spirit, was spectacularly reiterated by G. W. F. Hegel, philosopher of the universal par excellence. Hegel enacted the new universalism, the universalism of the new, when he stated that the “simple infinity, or the absolute Notion, may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is self-identical, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none.” As a universal, the soul of the world, and the simple essence of life, blood had become the absolute notion, which divides and differentiates—the difference, Shakespeare’s Salarino had proclaimed in The Merchant of Venice, “between bloods.”

Let us linger for another moment with the suggestion that blood is universal. In that perspective, America would merely, and merely illustratively, partake of blood. Such universals, though patently false (as the Old Testament demonstrates), do make it easier, but not necessarily compelling, to consider the specificity of the American spirit in its rapport to blood, to ponder the plausibility of its circulations. There is, however, no mention of blood in the Declaration of Independence, and the American Constitution only refers to blood once, in the context of treason and its effect on blood, which it calls, after English law, “the corruption of blood.” This older phrase signals the legal consequences of the act of treason and the cancellation of property rights, forbidding family members the inheritance of a traitor. More important, the text points well beyond the general matter of blood in law, and underscores the particularity of the new universalism. Here law establishes (and naturally reiterates) two essential components of the American spirit. The first has to do with kinship, immortalized by Lewis Henry Morgan as the “community of blood,” and which David Schneider famously designated as “American kinship.” The second component is the foundation of the American economic regime (among others), namely, property. I quote from a 1792 Act of the Laws of Virginia, which deploys the device of blood quantum in a context that has little to do with race:

And, in the cases before mentioned, where the inheritance is directed to pass to the ascending and collateral kindred of the intestate, if part of such collaterals be of the whole blood to the intestate, and other part of the half blood only, those of the half blood shall inherit only half so much as those of the whole blood.

I am not suggesting that property, rather than race, is systematically tied to blood (even race was never fully so), only that the blood of kinship is determining of both race and property as inheritance. And when considering the endurance, the further importance of blood in economic thought, what Hobbes referred to as the “sanguification” of the body politic, Marx as the vampirism of capitalism, and which Henry Giroux recently described as “the shameless blood lust of contemporary captains of industry,” blood would have to be recognized in its extensive, familial and domestic, social and national, and indeed, economic, dimensions. To which one would of course have to add the current sedimentations of the slogan “No Blood for Oil.”

So blood in America was never exclusively about race. Nor has it been a mere instance of an alleged universal. Humankind, in the Bible or elsewhere, was never made “of one blood” (unless one reworked the old Latin or followed equally overdetermined, but faulty, translations). Blood is rather the mark and marker of a specific conception, and projection, of law and kinship (Abraham Lincoln put it best when he said “Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father”). It is the mark and marker of a particular regime of economy and medicine (the expansion and proliferation of which might come to constitute a problem). In the medical field in particular, from sickle cell anemia to the invention of the terminology—and modus operandi—of “blood banks,” shipping these ahead of the bombs too, the investment in blood, Douglas Starr rightly points out, has long been about “medicine and commerce,” and about much more. The emphasis on race science therefore does a dual disservice to our understanding when it turns our attention away from the considerable role blood played in American society at large, preventing as well a recognition of “the enormously powerful symbolic role of blood in American culture and politics,” as Susan Lederer has it. One can therefore speak, with Keith Wailoo, of “the rise of an independent hematological sensibility” in the United States. One can speak, finally, of the “hematological style in American politics.”

Consider Samuel Sewall who, in 1700, understood the presence of Africans on the continent as constituting “in our Body Politick . . . a kind of extravasat Blood.” Or John Adams, again, who, commenting on the British constitution, wrote that “a political constitution is like ‘the constitution of the human body’; ‘certain contextures of the nerves, fibres, and muscles, or certain qualities of the blood and juices’ some of which ‘may properly be called stamina vitae, or essentials and fundamentals of the constitution; parts without which life itself cannot be preserved a moment.’” James Madison, for his part, reminded his listeners of “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies.” There were a couple of relevant Roosevelts, and then there was Ronald Reagan, who buttressed a widespread regime of “hemophobia,” as Michael Davidson calls it. And after September 11, Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell tell us, “the excessive desire to give blood was perhaps driven by a sense that the body politic was itself wounded in the attacks.” Barack Obama made clear, in his inaugural address, that he continues to hold up the bloody torch: “Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man—a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake.”

I submit therefore the following formulation toward an understanding of the American spirit, of American spirituality through its generations.

Blood is spirit. Blood is the American spirit.

This statement could easily have been misunderstood as a contrived reduction of American history, of American religion. Does it not seem to summon race first and foremost, one of America’s more embarrassing, yet ephemeral and marginal, facets? One might retort with some reason that race is hardly so negligible, or obsolete, yet that case would be misguided, or at the very least difficult to advance, by having recourse to an argument on the spirituality of race in America. But what if race was derivative instead, a moment or component in a larger spiritual movement? What if that movement and its history were carried by blood, by a Great Awakening, and quickening of blood? What if blood defined a more expansive history of America, of spirituality in America? What if America was possessed by blood?

But blood is a metaphor, is it not? It cannot—more precisely, it should not—be read literally in most of the instances I have recalled. The domains of its operations are not to be over-interpreted, as if one could find bits of flesh and drops of blood in the law or in the economy. Besides, blood is a universal! I have begged to differ on a number of counts here, locating these very claims, along with other moments and practices, in a larger, American hematology. I will now content myself with the following remark: the possibility of reading blood spiritually, the insistence on its metaphoricity, rather than on a literality to be exposed and interrogated—in reading the Old Testament, for instance—is precisely what the formulation I offer here seeks to make explicit. The very possibility of distinguishing between a “literal” blood and a (notably massive) series of metaphorical displacements is constitutive of our hematological condition. No blood could be extricated from the determinations America has construed, elaborated and deployed. To the extent that blood continues to be seen as a metaphor that would have been (wrongly) literalized in race discourse and practice, to the extent that blood continues to be unreflectively seen as if it were distinctly spiritual or physiological, it maintains its covert hold on us. In the United States of America, at any rate, all blood is spirit, and all spirit is blood. Literally.

QED.