The pre-Islamic Persian psychoactive potion called mang was used as a technology to induce a visionary voyage to the world beyond, in such Zoroastrian apocalyptic texts as Ardā Wīrāz-nāmag. I will discuss the debates surrounding its ingredients and its possible relations to the ancient Iranian haoma or hom plant. I will propose that the visionary use of mang, also known as bang (from the Avestan banha/bangha and Arabicized as banj), associated with such apocalyptic Iranian texts is later transmitted into early Islamicate magic (Picatrix), Sufism, and to European otherworldly journeys such as Dante’s Commedia (without reference to the psychoactive substance). The aural and visionary experience effectuated by mang/bang may be seen as a sort of pre-cinematic experience, a cinema of inner space, as it were. Although there is a substantial body of film theoretical literature on film spectatorship from middle of the 20th century onwards, certain experiences of early or silent film spectatorship have not received the theoretical attention that they rightly deserve. In an essay called The Horrors of Film written in 1926, the Japanese writer of crime and mystery fiction, as well as gothic and weird tales, Edogawa Rampo writes of his cinematic experience: “I am terrified of moving pictures. They are the dreams of an opium addict.” Indeed, in the literature of early film spectators (in both East and West), especially within certain avant-garde circles (e.g., Surrealism), the visual and aural experience of the cinema is correlated to an opium dream, to ecstatic visions, hallucinations, delirium, or trance, whereby the cinematic experience itself is related to altered states of consciousness. This paper will propose a correlation between the aural and visual sensorium of early cinema spectators and the ecstatic state conjured by mang/bang. Thus, this early plant-based media technology can be seen as an origin story for cinema as an opium dream. Bibliography Matthee, Rudi. 2005. The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History (1500-1900). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic. 2019. Trans. and with an introduction by Dan Attrell and David Porreca. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Rosenthal, Franz. 2015. “The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society.” In Man versus Society in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill. 131–334. Vahman, Fereydun. 1986. Ardā Wirāz Nāmag: The Iranian ‘Divina Commedia.’” London and Malmö: Scandinavian Institue of Asian Studies Monograph Series no. 53, Curzon Press.