Our home, planet Earth, is amazing and thanks to the age of information and the Internet all mighty, we have the pleasure and privilege to be fascinated on a daily basis. Hopefully, all that knowledge will help to improve our fleeting human experience here. Meanwhile, there are trending spiritual practices which we are turning towards and endeavour to expand and transcend that knowledge of ourselves, the world and the Universe.
And ironically, we are also presented with the reminder that everything: “new is in the old concealed, and the old is in the new revealed”.
This is exactly the case with hemp. Hemp is such a versatile plant with a truly mind-blowing range of uses.
Hemp is one of the earliest domesticated plants with its cultivation dating back to the Neolithic Era, according to archaeological artefacts found in Chinese pottery from circa 5000 BC. The Chinese used hemp because of its strong, quality fibre to make rope, clothes, paper and food from it, just to name a few.
The Greek historian Herodotus had mentioned in some of his writings about the tribes of Scythia, that the inhabitants have been known to inhale the smoke of hemp seeds for recreational pleasure alone and also as a ritual. Nowadays, there is an ongoing debate about one of hemp’s cousins from the Cannabis family, which has higher levels of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the chemical responsible for most of the effects of cannabis.
Other than that, hemp seeds are considered a super food and have gained popularity among the ever growing community of vegans and vegetarians for being a fabulous protein source and their multiple uses in the kitchen, including the fact that they can be consumed raw.
And when comes to the etymology of the word, traced down to its roots, hemp is being considered the Germanic cognate of the Greek kannabis and the Latin cannabis, in the Slavic languages the root is konop- and in Persian – kanab.
According to the Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabulary of Thomas Wright and Richard Paul Wuckler, the word hemp was defined for the first time in English sources at the beginning of the 11th century: “Cannabum, haenep”.
Another curious fact is that there are male and female hemp – respectively summer and winter hemp. As the nick-names reported by John Gerard, in his 1597 history of plants, The herballL “The male is called Charle Hempe, and Winter Hempe. The female Barren Hempe, and Sommer Hempe.”
And going back to the time when we explored the Indian milk drink Bhang, one might remember that it is only the female plant that produces THC.
