It would appear, in fact, that an entheogen was at the origin, not only of primordial religion, but also of the most basic rite of Christianity. A strange event in Corinth at the very inception of Christianity has gone unnoticed, although it is recorded in one of the assuredly authentic documents about the earliest days of the Church. About the year 59, Paul reprimands the congregation he had founded in Corinth about a decade earlier for not performing the Eucharist correctly. Because of this, quite a few people have taken sick, and quite a few have even died. It is highly unlikely that they died from eating too much holy bread and communion wine.
Paul’s is the earliest account of the Eucharist as a sacred ceremony. The gospel accounts do not specify that the Last Supper should form the nucleus of the religious gatherings, and in any case, they were written down after Paul and would have been revised or backdated. In the 2nd century history of the Church, known as the Acts of the Apostles, we learn only that the apostles met daily to take their meals. This is ordinary food, not a sacrament.
Intoxication by drugs seems not to have formed part of the original practice. The use of narcotics is indicative of the decadence of a technique of ecstasy or of its extension to lower peoples or social groups.
—Mircea Eliade
Shamanism
The next-earliest authentic document about the early Church is Pliny’s investigation of the troublesome Christian community in his Anatolian province for the Emperor Hadrian. He reports that the Christians eat their meals together, just ordinary food, innocuous food. This could mean that they are not cannibals in eating their God, or babies, or that there was some suspicion abroad that they ate something special and toxic. He reports, however, that the meal came later in the day, and that they met at dawn to salute the rising sun. This was the essence of their rite. If they ate the Eucharist, it would have been part of this ceremony, rather than their daily bread. It is unlikely also that the special Eucharist was a daily event, since it would incapacitate them for the ensuing workday.
Sanctuary of Aphrodite on the Sacred Road to Eleusis
Paul, moreover, explains the Eucharist as a mystery, which for his Greek audience would inevitably be understood in terms of the great initiation celebrated just a few miles up the coast in the village of Eleusis, where a psychoactive potion was the essence of the experience. The cavernous Telesterion or hall of initiation was carved out of the bedrock side of the acropolis of the village. It is not a traditional Greek temple, but an architectural reconstruction of a subterranean cave, from which a great illumination was said to burst at the moment of the ritual’s culmination. If Paul did actually invent the Eucharist as a Christian ceremony, which is likely, he may have modeled it upon his probable induction into Mithraism, since he came from Tarsus, a stronghold of the new religion, and his wealthy family was assimilated into Hellenic culture and had dealings with the Roman army. Mithraism had some kind of holy bread that was a metaphor for a psychoactive agent.
As someone educated in Hellenism, moreover, he would also have been knowledgeable about neo-Platonism, which he in fact references in this same letter in his famous metaphor of the true reality that is seen only as a reflection in a faulty mirror, through a glass darkly. This is blatantly a reference to Plato’s myth of the Cave. As a philhellene, Paul may well have even been initiated at Eleusis.
As a Jew, moreover, he would have been well aware of the traditions of the magical Mosaic food of manna. Christ is the new manna that comes down from heaven. Paul would also know full well that the holy chrism of Judaism, which Christ as the ‘Anointed’ inherits, was a powerful combination of psychoactive substances. The precise formula is specified in Exodus and the main ingredient is cannabis. It was also burned as incense to fumigate the enclosed space of the inner tabernacle of the Temple in Jerusalem. The chrism was the ordination anointment of the priesthood and the fumigated Tabernacle was something that only the High Priest experienced and on one day alone, on Yom Kippur.
The toxic Eucharist must have been an entheogen, and Paul condemns its abuse. Whoever eats the ‘bread’ and drinks the ‘wine’ without recognizing the in-dwelling Deity is damned. The Corinthian congregation apparently has been using the Body and Blood as a recreational drug.
A drug is not necessary for a mystical experience. Albert Hoffman caught a glimpse of the empyrean in a spontaneously generated rift in the cosmic fabric while a teenager walking in the Alps. St. Teresa of Calcutta had a single experience while riding on a train, and spent the rest of her life devastated by a feeling of abandonment, since she never felt it again. An entheogen is not required. It provides a reliable access, however, as would be needed for initiatory ceremonies where a group of people are expected to have a visionary experience together at the same time. At Eleusis, several thousand initiates had the transcendent experience together on schedule annually after drinking a special potion.
Whoever eats and drinks the Eucharist without recognizing the Body is condemned.
—Paul
First Letter to the Corinthians
When Hofmann accidentally discovered LSD years later in 1943, he felt that the substance was calling out to him from the shelf in the laboratory where it had been discarded as something without further interest after the testing five years earlier. After his initial fear that he might have fatally poisoned himself, he came to realize that it was the same experience as the moment on the mountain, but with practice it deepened and could be controlled. With the German novelist Ernst Jünger, he sought out marvelous journeys of the soul to exotic lands.
Although the Eleusinian initiation could be repeated, it was a rare occurrence to be initiated more than once. The considerable expense would have been a detriment for some people, but the ancient testimony indicates that once was enough to last a lifetime. Once seen, the mystical vision suffices as a lifelong enrichment, something to be anticipated as enriching the final moments of breath. One could live one’s life without fear, knowing how it would end.
It happened on a May morning—I have forgotten the year—but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden, Switzerland. As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light. Was this something I had simply failed to notice before? Was I suddenly discovering the spring forest as it actually looked? It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness, and blissful security. I have no idea how long I stood there spellbound. But I recall the anxious concern I felt as the radiance slowly dissolved and I hiked on.
—Albert Hoffman
LSD: My Problem Child
In 1962, Walter Pahnke, a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, conducted a double-blind experiment, supervised by Timothy Leary, with a group of divinity students from the Boston area. The experiment was conducted in Marsh Chapel at Boston University. The event has come to be known as the Marsh Chapel Experiment or the Good Friday Experiment. A double-blind experiment means that half the group is administered some agent and the other half a placebo, and neither the subjects nor the testers know which group received what. This is a standard procedure in order to eliminate prejudicial suggestion for both the subjects and the administrators.
It was assumed that students of divinity would have some inkling of what constituted a religious experience since they had chosen to devote their lives to religion. Half the group received psilocybin, the psychoactive chemical in Psilocybe mushrooms, the other half niacin—Vitamin B, which at high dosage produces physiological changes similar to the onset of a psychedelic experience, but does not result in the visionary state. The subjects who received psilocybin reported experiencing what they interpreted as a profound religious event.
Walter Pahnke went on to become a minister, physician, and psychiatrist, working with entheogens as therapy for alcoholism, neurosis, and terminal life anxiety, until his accidental death in a diving incident in 1971. He was a member of the original team at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, which included Stanislav Grof, Bill Richards, and Richard Yensin. Huston Smith, the respected scholar of world religions, participated in the experiment.
I have a stronger desire for devotion; have increased yoga practice and prayer. I need less food to make me full. My alcohol use has diminished dramatically. I think I’m even warmer towards people and more accepting. I now believe I have something important to tell people about how the universe works.
—Volunteer comment
Johns Hopkins experiment
Similar on-going experiments, beginning in 2006, have been conducted at Johns Hopkins University by a team with foundational support and directed by Roland R. Griffiths, with similar results. The volunteers were given preliminary guidance and four different dosages of psilocybin and one of a placebo in five successive sessions, each a month apart. Most participants reported that the positive effects increased with increased dosages and that the experience ranked among the topmost spiritually significant events of their life.
Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
—William Blake
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Continuing research is documenting the therapeutic benefit of such drugs as LSD, DMT, MDMA, ibogaine, and ketamine, among others, but such work is severely restricted by the difficulty of licensing approval from the concerned governmental agencies.
British-born American novelist Aldous Huxley presented the now classic description of the psychedelic experience in his 1954 The Doors of Perception, which takes its title from William Blake’s poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In it, Huxley details his mescaline trip, which took place over the course of an afternoon, with visions both purely aesthetic and deeply sacramental, which he likens to the experience of Christian mystics. Mescaline is the principal agent in the peyote cactus, which was first isolated by the German pharmacologist Arthur Heffner in 1891. He was the first of a succession of scientists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists to investigate its hallucinatory effects. William Blake’s poem references the Platonic Cave, man seeing “all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.”
To most people who are even moderately experienced with entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace, agapé, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul, born-again, heaven, and hell are more than theological ideas; they are experiences.
—Thomas B. Roberts
Professor Emeritus
The British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond admizistered Huxley’s dosage. It was he who invented the term psychedelic, which he proposed at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957. Huxley had sent Osmond a rhyme with his own suggested term: “To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.” Osmond responded: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.”
The ditty encompasses the two directions for the soul’s journey and the dangers of the trip without a road map. The complete title of Huxley’s book is The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, the latter being the second essay.
What characterized Huxley’s vision was that objects took on meaning, acquired salience. He saw the Platonic forms outside the cave, what the German mystic Meister Eckhart termed Istigkeit, ‘Is-ness,’ Being What Is: “A bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged.” “Things were nothing more and nothing less than what they were, a transience that was eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen, the divine source of all existence.”
The Psychedelic Revolution engendered a need for modes of interpreting the mystical experience. The fierce condemnation of John Allegro’s work made Judeo-Christianity a hostile area and forced investigators to the margins of serious scholarship. Officially, there were no drugs in Christianity. The rich traditions of Classical mythology that could have offered a paradigm of the shamanic initiatory journey were similarly declared off-limits for anyone intending to have a successful professional career. The role of a psychoactive potion at the Eleusinian Mystery is neither discussed nor rejected in the standard treatments of Greek mythology. It simply does not exist.
Wasson was expressly warned against seeking mushrooms among the ancient Greeks. Robert Graves, the English poet and novelist, was Wasson’s friend and advisor on Classical scholarship. He had known Wasson ever since he had contacted him about the mushroom poisoning of the Emperor Claudius for his novel I, Claudius. Graves published the Louvre bas-relief from Pharsalos in northwest Greece depicting Demeter and Persephone holding a mushroom as the cover of his Greek Myths, and he identified the sacrament of the Eleusinian Mystery as a mushroom in his Food for Centaurs, but he was deemed too “individual and unconventional” to deserve professional consideration. Graves retaliated by commenting that Classical scholars lacked “the poetic capacity to forensically examine mythology.”
I do not think that Mycenae had anything to do with the divine mushroom or the Eleusinian mysteries either. May I add a word of warning? Stick to your Mexican mushroom cult and beware of seeing mushrooms everywhere. We much enjoyed your Philadelphia paper and would recommend that you keep as close to that as you can. Forgive the frankness of an old friend.
—Letter
R. Gordon Wasson archives
There is a neo-pagan attempt to revive the ancient gods in Greece, known as the religion of the twelve gods, but it faces fierce rejection by the Christian Orthodox Church; and its adherents must shield their identities to avoid discrimination in the labor market. The ancient sanctuaries, moreover, are protected as archaeological sites. Any rebuilding of even the most minor shine is forbidden as altering the historical record.
To fill the vacuum created in the Judeo-Christian Hellenic-Roman tradition, many people sought paradigms in more exotic mythologies from cultures further afield. Historians of religion describe the years of the Psychedelic Revolution as a marketplace for religions. Buddhism and Hinduism seemed attractive alternatives, since the Soma sacrament is still today recognized as something intended to be psychoactive and Buddhist monks admitted that LSD induced an experience like nirvana, something not claimed as the sole property of a deity. Buddha is not a god, but merely someone who has attained enlightenment, and there are many Buddhas.
As further evidence that the original Soma was a mushroom, Wasson examined the supposed “Last Meal of the Buddha”. According to what is probably an authentic historical account, around the year 483 BCE, Siddhartha Gautama, the supreme enlightened one known as the first Buddha, accepted a dish of mushrooms prepared for him by a blacksmith, and fell violently ill. There is no suspicion that the mushrooms were poisonous. The unlikely role of a blacksmith as the culinary chef suggests an alchemical theme and perhaps indicates an element of mythologized history with a volcanic crucible.
Siddhartha was on his final journey to the place he had selected to cease living, to stop of his own volition, the event called the Great Demise. He had attained complete mastery over his physical being and could control his own mortality. His companions as Brahmins were not allowed to eat mushrooms, but Siddhartha, knowing his own intention to cease, chose to break the dietary prohibition and ingest the tabooed mushrooms for his final meal.
Brahmins eat no beef, since the animal is sacred, and similarly all vegetative growths, like mushrooms, that spring from impure substance like the dung of cattle are forbidden. Mushrooms, as in the Selva Pasquala rock shelter, are commonly seen as a bullish zoomorphism, and cattle dung, commonly called ‘cow pies,’ is the common medium for the growth of Psilocybe mushrooms.
The case of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints, is even more revealing of the role of entheogens in the origin of religion. His family had been caught up in the religious fervor of the bible-camps as practiced in nineteenth-century America. It is difficult, as one authority noted, to draw the line between religious ecstasy and complete nervous disorder. Accounts of their ecstatic camp meetings describe divine services where women enter such violent spasms that they strip themselves naked and jump into rivers, swooning away by the hundreds, worn out by ravings and fits, sometimes aborting from the exertions, or running on all fours and growling like animals.
The Smiths also practiced folk magic, apparently with herbal knowledge assimilated from the indigenous people. Joseph Senior and his wife experienced visions and direct communication with the Deity. The young Smith, indoctrinated by his father, began to have visions around 1820. He engaged in treasure digging, using seer stones upon which he could read or hallucinate messages. The official history of the LDS claims that this was a common practice of the day, as indeed it was, although it might seem bizarre to look for treasure buried in the primordial forest. Treasure digging was metaphoric for root doctoring. A root doctor was an herbal healer, who dug up plants looking for spiritual gold.
In 1832, the angel Mormon visited Smith and revealed the location of a buried treasure. Actually, the senior Smith had already shown his son something similar in 1827, a stone box containing the so-called golden plates, but Junior still had certain requirements to fulfill before he was qualified to touch them. The young Smith saw in the box something like a toad, which soon assumed the appearance of a man, who struck him on the head. By 1893, as the mythologized history grew, the guardian of the treasure became an enormous toad, a flaming monster with glittering eyes.
Amanita muscaria as gold plates inscribed with occult letters,
Needless to say, the golden plates are no longer extant. Young Smith later found them for himself in a cave on the nearby Cumorah Hill, a forested drumlin where there are no caves. Drumlins are mounds of glacial deposits, forming a ridge elongated in the direction of the original ice flow, without solid rock formations capable of affording caves. Fortunately, he also found a set of magical spectacles that would allow him to read them. Like the tablets of Moses on Mount Sinai, it was a book that no one could read.
When the mushrooms taught me the road of God and they handed over the Sacred ‘Book of Knowledge,’ I heard these words: ‘The world is yours, you can no longer turn back.’
—Juan García Carrera
La Otra Vida de María Sabina
Smith, who barely had a grade-school education, was able to translate the plates miraculously with the aid of angels, from their original Egyptian, which purportedly was the language of the indigenous inhabitants of the American continent. It is not hard to conclude that the gold plates are a metaphor for something more apt to be found growing on the hill, with a toad sitting on it as its toadstool, and with a golden surface whose scabby remnants of the shattered fungal universal veil might be interpreted as an exotic language.
María Sabina similarly reported receiving a book full of wisdom from the hand of God Himself, from which she learned her songs and all her medicinal remedies. It was a book that she could not have read since she was totally illiterate. She signed her name with a thumbprint.
Smith and the early brethren routinely accessed the religious ecstasy at the divine services with a Holy Eucharist and anointing chrism that obviously was doctored with magical plants: jimsonweed, the fly-agaric toadstool, and perhaps cannabis and even peyote. The Algonquin Indian shamans of the northeast and central regions of the North American continent are known to use the two former plants in their religious ceremonies.
Smith, as a ‘root-doctor,’ would also have picked up traditions of voodoo magic from African-American slaves, one of whom, named Black Pete, he met in 1825, while they were both out in the woods digging for the so-called buried treasure.
Smith would also have picked up the motif of digging for hidden golden knowledge from a distant relative and member of his inner circle, Dr. Luman Walter, a physician with a reputation as a magician and mesmerist. He had traveled extensively in Europe and brought back German alchemical lore of the sacred mushroom that was the elixir of drinkable gold.
We partook together of the emblems of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost was poured out upon us in a miraculous manner. Many of our members prophesied, whilst others had the heavens opened to their view and were so overcome that we had to lay them on beds. Brother Newel saw the heaven opened and beheld the Lord Jesus Christ seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
—Joseph Smith
Conference of the Church June 1830
It is unbelievable that so many of Smith’s congregation had such frequent and intense mystical revelations. The Eucharist routinely opened the heavens and Jesus walked among them. The dependability of the occurrence of such mystical experience by an entire congregation bears comparison with the ancient Mysteries. It is probably significant that in all the anti-Mormon rhetoric and subsequent persecutions, Smith’s brethren were not blatantly accused of taking drugs, although a deposition was made against his family as intemperate or drunkards. There was nothing illegal about a special Eucharist and it was probably a common element of 19th Century revivalist evangelism. Significantly, with the passing of the original prophetic leaders of the congregations, the heavens closed. The formula for the Eucharist and anointing chrism passed away with them.
Smith’s School for Prophets, founded in 1833, is similar to the Pennsylvanian Ephrata Cloister. At the School, it was the purpose and outcome that the initiates saw Jesus Christ walking among them, causing a thrill felt through their entire body.
We, the undersigned, being personally acquainted with the family of Joseph Smith, Sr., with whom the celebrated Gold Bible, so called, originated, state: that they were not only a lazy, indolent set of men, but also intemperate.
—Neighbors of the Smith family
Mormonism Unveiled
At Ephrata, founded in 1732, a forty-day strenuous ordeal of sequestration, austerities, physical discomfort, sleep deprivation, near starvation, thirst, constant prayer, and a regime of special elixirs ended with the initiates speaking with angels. The last surviving resident of the Cloister died in 2008. Ephrata was assimilated into the German Seventh Day Baptists, who today, like all these revivalist religions, pursue a vigorous anti-drug agenda.
Similarly, the Church of Scientology, established 1953, is a science fiction assimilation of occultism, Western technology, pulp fiction, and Oriental philosophy, and has attracted many adherents with its emphasis on self-help and drug rehabilitation. Its founder claimed that the new religion was comparable to the discovery of fire. He saw a Promethean sign in his own flaming red hair. The religion condemns both psychiatry and drugs; and a group of Scientologists picketed the conference in Basel, Switzerland, which celebrated the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann. Its slogan is: “Leading the Way to a Drug-Free World.” The condemnation of psychiatry is based on the Church’s belief in their more efficient procedures of electronically assisted reprogramming and indoctrination.
Despite the Church’s Puritanism about drugs, its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, left a personal history of fraud, false accreditation, drug addiction, and psychotic behavior. His son signed a sworn affidavit stating: “I have personal knowledge that my father regularly used illegal drugs including amphetamines, barbiturates and hallucinogens. He regularly used cocaine, peyote, and mescaline.” Others have added opium, alcohol, and a variety of prescription drugs to the list. His wife, married in bigamy, glossed this as self-medication. Hubbard died in strange circumstances, apparently from an overdose of a prescription anti-psychotic drug.
Hinduism encompasses a wide variety of religious traditions in India, traceable back to the Iron Age and further back into prehistory. Soma is an essential element of the religion. Paul’s toxic Eucharist is at the very earliest formation of the version of Christianity that would dominate through the Church of Rome. On the other hand, in Scientology we witness the beginning of a new religion for the 21st Century.
Despite the chorus of denials, entheogens were at the origin of religions, both the most ancient experience of the cave and of new ones forged for the interplanetary journey into the empyrean of outer space. Scientology enlists its most elite organization of the Soldiers of Light for an unending journey through the trackless galaxy. These are the origins of the religions, not the decadent phase when the lower class seeks to have a mere taste of god. Even those ministering to the problems of addiction and proselytizing an arduous pathway to the empyrean have kept secrets reserved for only the most elite.