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The word entheogen literally means "generating the divine within". The word was created in 1979 by a group of ethnobotanical scholars, and in its strictest sense refers to a psychoactive plant or chemical substance taken to occasion spiritual or mystical experience. In a looser sense, the word refers to non-addictive artificial and natural substances that induce alterations of consciousness similar to those documented for ritual ingestion of traditional shamanic inebriants. "Entheogen" replaces the judgment-laden misnomer "hallucinogen and the culturally freighted term "psychedelic. However, many people object to using the word "entheogen" to describe taking psychedelic drugs for recreational, and not spiritual/religious purposes.
Entheogenic plants or chemicals can provoke in human beings an enlargement of usual consciousness, in which there is a kind of contemplative or meditative experience.
The familiar shamanic entheogen that the Indo-Europeans brought with them was the Amanita mushroom. When they reached the world of the Caucasus and the Aegean, they encountered wine, the entheogen of Dionysus, who brought it with him from his birthplace in the mythical Nysa, when he returned to claim his Olympian birthright. The Indo-European proto-Greeks "recognized it as the entheogen of Zeus, and their own traditions of shamanism, the Amanita and the 'pressed juice' of Soma&mdash but better since no longer unpredictable and wild, the way it was found among the Hyperboreanss: as befit their own assimilation of agrarian modes of life, the entheogen was now cultivable." (Ruck and Staples).
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Reference
Carl Ruck and Danny Staples, The World of Classical Myth 1994
