Mary Jane

this song is about chineese food

Contrary to popular beleif this song is NOT about marijuana. It's about a girl who takes up witchcraft, to which her father disowns her. She commits suicide and haunts the forest where she practiced witchcraft

The Chorus is also reportadly taken from her tombstone.

ok...

possibly...

I think it's pretty ambigous though...

Mary Jane is an euphemism for marijuana

Its basically about marijuana induced neurosis and lung cancer

yes witch craft makes is what i always believed it was about. but why would he call it 'mary jane'? dont say its because it was the chicks name, because everyone on earth knows mary jane is marijuana's nickname

The song is a work of art, and all works of art are open to further interpretation even beyond what the creator of the work intended. This is not true only for others, but also for himself. How could he not be free to see more in his own work of art than he explicitly thought he intended it to express? How could someone else not be? It is the nature of art to be open to further interpretation than what appears on the surface, that's what makes it something other than just a set of sensations and bare perceptions!

Without going into the metaphysics of art, I'll just say that it can be about anything that comes up in your mind when you experience it, since in your mind these are the images, feelings, thoughts and so on which come up "about" this song. If it were simply that you were a typical "pothead" or something, then I'll bet you prefer your own interpretations than someone insisting to you that it MUST BE ABOUT A GIRL WITCH!! Actually, you might say it IS about a "girl witch"... Since the cannabis plant which produces the desired materiel for the avid drug user is in the female plant, and he often feels quite bewitched by her charms. Girl witch.

But let's say you AREN'T a pothead, or even a cannabis user of any kind. You may never have touched it and never intend to. Fine. So is it still possible to understand someone who has? Is it possible to understand what they may have as an experience? Yes, it is not only possible but normal to interpret things according to what we understand about others' experiences and not merely our own.

Without going into the dynamics of interpersonal, intersubjective experiential communication, we can just ask ourselves a simple question: what is there in the song, AS IT IS PRESENTED, that lends itself to ANY interpretation, as well as to specific interpretations?

There is the voice, spoken in the first person. It is a testimonial, confession, warning, etc.

There are descriptions of psychological states which are filled with anguish, passion, and perhaps some altered states of consciousness involving either other states of mind, of being, or of both, either temporary or permanent.

There is a name "Mary Jane"

There is also the second person voice, as someone tells us that he hears "her" voice calling him.

There are two persons in the song's narrative, minimum. Perhaps some of the litany which is spoken is simply a recapitulation of things once said by one of the persons, and not necessarily being said in "real time" in the narrative (assuming it takes place in such a time space as a narrative, something going on in time and space as witnessed by those present in some way).

Now, how to interpret these phenomena? That depends. Taking the approach of a loose description of some haunted grave site, we can imagine a story where a girl named Mary Jane was buried alive because she was thought a witch. It turns out that there may even be some knowledge of history of such events in the mind of the interpreter to suggest this, and we may even find out that it was also the case that Mustaine was inspired along such lines. Perhaps he's envisioning her death and haunting, and what it would be like to be her in those various states, as he might have if he were a traveler through that haunted area who was chilled by visions of Mary Jane's suffering. Nothing in this song or any of this supporting evidence goes against that interpretation. If that's your thing, GO FOR IT.

I find such a story interesting. It was my sense of the story when I was a kid and was first listening to Megadeth, and it is an understandable, if quite simple, straightfoward, and even superficial interpretation. I would add that there are multiple ways one can go about even this interpretation. What is meant, for example, by "forgive me, father"? As printed it is a lower-case "f", but what if in hearing the song our mind is freed from the imprisonment of thinking of just that printed "f" and we imagine to hear "Father"? Ah, perhaps she did have her episode of punishment or rejection by her biological father. Perhaps also she incurred the judgment of the local church father! Or perhaps it was that they were one and the same person. Perhaps she also incurred, or feared she incurred, the wrath of God the Father? Perhaps...

Perhaps her terror isn't yet at being buried alive by her own father. Perhaps it is at being found still "alive" in some form (still wide awake) on another plane of existence. Is it because she has left her body and gone to the astral? Is it an altered state due to some self-hypnotic spell or spiritual influence? Did she get the inquisition from the local villagers, though her own biological father had tried so long to hide her proclivities from them, and she is now in the astral after being killed? Is she in horror because she broke a taboo and crossed over a line in her religion and now simply suffers a sense of alienation from her former psychospiritual comfort zone, including her former sense of being of one cloth with others? She secretly warns her past self, or others "out there" by calling forth through the ethers, emotionally, as if to say "this is a dreaded thing to do, do it with dread".

Ah, well, so many ways to go about the "witch girl" interpretation. What else is there? NOTHING ELSE?

"From the earth, up through the trees"

Cannabis grows up from the earth, and perhaps "her" voice calls up from the earth and through the trees, as in her scent, her offering, her energy. She is a female of the plant who does this, not the male.

Later he has "listened" to her influences, and now he wonders if he's going insane. But he finds that part of him is coherently aware of everything going on, and he realizes he isn't, he's more or less intact, but what has he gotten himself into.

But perhaps he's taken too much, or else had a bad set/setting, or both. This would account for the fear that he's "gone too far" (I've sinned) and he's a bit afraid for his soul, so he asks God for help to protect him from his trespass beyond what was wise.

He may have a fear that his "bad trip" is going to damage him, make him insane, take him from his body forever, or something else to that effect. He has become some sort of "witch of the wind", a "child of the air". He's never going to be the same now!

Perhaps he doesn't himself say it, but perhaps he is paranoid that about him hands the air of his deeds, his condition, as if screaming out to others in a warning "don't end up like THAT guy". Perhaps he is simply having a bad ego reaction to his mind's changes under the influence, but perhaps that's the image he really projects to others, who may take that scene in and see it that way, or else perhaps ignore him altogether. Is he paranoid? Maybe it's not his first time, and maybe he had never been much of an abuser, or maybe he abused a lot, and now this time he's "gone to far", and now he's playing that role of "pothead" and he doesn't even care, he doesn't even mind being the poster boy for "this is why you don't do drugs, kids". Who's to say?

Or maybe this is just a series of stereotyped cannabis reaction responses as to its freakier effects? Perhaps he is having one hell of a bad reaction, and he swears it off, feeling the "breathing aches" which he takes to be the result of cannabis. Though this is a psychological interpretation of physical phenomena with psychosomatic components... perhaps he always feels subconsciously "choked" by social norms, and all this is in his body armor, right down to his breathing capacity and patterns, as well as the emotional, thinking, and behavioral actions in connection with his breath.

This connection is often discovered in psychotherapeutics, in spiritual practices in which breathing is altered and controlled (and studied, period), or else developed into a regimen of disciplined self-transformation. For the spiritual aspects one needn't look far, for example: Yoga, Qigong, Sufism, Meditation, Martial Art, etc. In psychology these patterns are intensely studied, and some therapy is centered upon their alteration (Alexander Technique, Rebirthing, etc).

Well, perhaps he's paranoid that he's being destroyed, suffocated, driven insane, but perhaps his rigid ego and its bodily correlates of posture and breathing are what were really killing him, as inculcated by bad habits and perhaps some rather unhelpful social conditioning. If Mary Jane drove him beyond those norms as his body and mind had absorbed and identified with them, then perhaps it would be liberating at first. But as the effects wore off, or as events overwhelmed the effects (perhaps off and on), then perhaps he'd likely go back and forth in interpreting those effects as the result of cannabis, of evil spirits, or of other minds, or perhaps if he is familiar with the psychological theory, elements of his own subconscious. Perhaps it is all of the above, and also psychotronic attacks from some asshole CIA agent in the woods nearby his "spot", aiming some EM weapons at him. Is he that important? Who knows...

Perhaps this is going on in the woods as he came across the haunted grave site of Mary Jane. All ironies aside, that's quite a wallop to endure. Talk about a rough trip or misadventure!

What then if perhaps Mary Jane herself was an avid toker and taker of "potions" in her day, and was quite the "herbalist". Perhaps this is part of what often led to the deaths of such "witches", not only then, but also now, as the police helicopter overhead joins in the party as a modern witch hunter, and as perhaps does the psychiatrist who awaits this stoner's capture and being brought in for treatment for his "psychosis" (demons).

Society has, in any of these interpretations, enforced its ugly and naked power over the individual, driving them to insanity and death...

Contrary to once popular belief, this song is not about marijuana. It is actually about a girl who takes up witchcraft. Eventually, she wants to get out of it and in an effort to do so, she confesses to her father, who not only doesn't forgive Mary Jane, but buries her alive. That's why she haunts the forest.

nah its about the efects of pot on the mind nad lungs =p

its what cjf said, except the father buries her alive

I love this song and I think it is about the witchcraft When I first heard this song I couldn't see ANY connection between it and marijuana. I thought it was about someone asking for forgiveness and being chocked or drowned or something, causing her not being able to breathe. When I heard she was buried alive, it was pretty obvious to me.

Gonna see Megadeth februari the 14th! @ Paradiso, Amsterdam