Christians and Early Modern Psychedelic Use

by Jonathan Hansen, MDiv

We seem to be entering a period of time in which the use of psychedelics is becoming, once again, more prevalent. This is becoming obvious to anyone living in both the US and Europe who is paying the least attention to pop-culture. While these powerful substances were wide-spread at one time, taken by literally millions of Americans in the 1960s and 70s, due to the severe backlash from the US government, heavy prison sentences, halting of scientific research, and banning of their use for psychiatric purposes, many Christians have either limited education surrounding them, or have, sadly, been told only false or incomplete information giving the impression that they are somehow, by their very nature, un-Christian, or even dangerous to one’s faith and walk with Christ.

However, there is certainly more to the story than this. In fact, a short telling of the beginnings of their use in the Western world may help dispel some common misconceptions and open some Christians up to the possibility that psychedelics can even help deepen one’s walk with Christ. The truth of the matter is, that the discoverer of LSD was a Christian, and some of the earliest experiences with psychedelics in the West were often spoken of in Christian language. We see, too, that one early experiment showed that psychedelics seem to be able to dramatically help create a legitimately Christian spiritual experience with lasting fruits to prove it. So, I encourage you to keep an open mind, and consider with me for a moment the origins of psychedelics.

Albert Hofmann, LSD-25, and Spirituality

Since awareness of psychedelic substances began to grow in the industrialized world, we have been struggling to come to grips with its ramifications. When Dr. Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD-25 from ergot in 1938, and then five years later self-experimented with it, the scientists he was working under at Sandoz Laboratories were stunned by the powerful and hitherto unheard of effects that such a minuscule dose could engender. A shockingly small 250 millionths of a gram could produce a powerfully altered state of consciousness. At that point, nothing had been found to have such dramatic psychological effects at such small doses. Indeed, nothing has yet been discovered to this day.

What made LSD-25 more unusual yet, was that these effects dissipated with no seeming lasting effects other than a sense of lasting wonder or shock the following days at what the recipient had just experienced. While the chemical itself was found to only stay active and present in the body for roughly 12 hours, the experience nonetheless often changed the partaker for years to come, similar to how any profound experience would. The implications this held for psychology were soon explored leading to its wide use among psychiatric practitioners, their patients, artists, and eventually literally millions of others in the United States alone.

Personally, Hofmann went on to talk extensively about the positive effects that LSD had on his life. Though he did not actually take it very many times, it had a profound effect, nonetheless. Throughout his life he traveled the world extensively, was held in high regard as a spiritual teacher, and gave lectures on the spiritual benefits that can occur from LSD’s proper use. He often spoke about how he looked forward to the day in which it was once again brought into the psychiatric world, and used responsibly, under the supervision of a licensed professional. He also hoped that it could eventually be used by religious practitioners in a way similar to how the Mazatec shaman used it; that is, sacramentally.

“I think the most important thing is that they [native shaman] use it in a religious framework and we don’t. We must learn from them, we must identify the right structures, we must find new uses. I could imagine that it may be possible to create meditation centers for psychedelic use in natural surroundings, where teachers could have experiences and train to become adepts. I perceive this as being possible, but first psychedelics will have to become available to medicine and psychiatry. And then it should be made available for such spiritual centers.”

Though he didn’t talk about his own religious leanings very often, his identity as a Christian did come up from time to time, and it is important to mention that he did not see the careful and responsible use of psychedelics as contrary or at odds with his Christian faith at all. Actually, it only seemed to deepen his faith and understanding of God and specifically, the Spirit of Truth, as the Apostle John often refers to the Holy Spirit. In his book LSD: My Problem Child, he comments on John 14:16–20, saying,

“Jesus speaks to his disciples, as he takes leave of them: And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.

This promise constitutes the heart of my Christian beliefs and my call to natural-scientific research: we will attain to knowledge of the universe through the spirit of truth, and thereby to understanding of our being one with the deepest, most comprehensive reality, God.” (ch. 11)

So, to the point of this paper, it seems that he was able to maintain support for the use of psychedelics and his Christian faith without tension throughout his life and that he supported the use of psychedelics in a religious context. This was his hope for LSD.

On the flip side, it should be said that his respect for the power of these substances made him very cautious about how they are used. In an interview with High Times magazine, he intimated that this was his big sticking point with Timothy Leary. It seemed that Hofmann considered Leary’s approach reckless at best, and possibly dangerous. And so, he encouraged caution and care regarding the taking of psychedelics, and disapproved of its wanton use within the hippie movement.

R. Gordon Wasson, Magic Mushrooms, and Spirituality

The discovery of LSD-25 soon led to a speculation as to what other substances may yet remain to be discovered that could have similar effects on the human psyche. This question eventually led the American banker and ethno-mycologist R. Gordon Wasson and his translator Allen Richardson to follow a lead concerning the fabled ‘magic mushrooms’ of Oaxaca. While there, under the guidance of a local Christian curandera, or medicine woman, named Maria Sabina, they were given the privilege of becoming the first non-natives to participate in a religious ritual for the consumption of the locally sourced psilocybe mushrooms.

Throughout the centuries of foreign occupation, the practice of ingesting magic mushrooms for religious purposes moved underground, and had all but died out; though, according to early historical reports of the colonists, it was at one time widely practiced, but fiercely persecuted by the Spanish nearly to the point of extinction. The tradition persisted in the rural hills of southern Mexico, and as the centuries wore on, and Catholicism became more and more woven into the warp and weft of life, something interesting happened: Christian concepts became entwined within the practice. Considering the clandestine quality that the mushroom ritual took on, the introduction of Christian elements appears to be unforced, and natural on the part of the participants. The syncretism apparently just seemed to make sense, as if they shared a common spiritual quality.

In fact, it’s important to note that Maria Sabina was a practicing Catholic until the day she died, and had a good reputation among the community. Her neighbors who knew her well described her as ‘a lady without blemish’. Notably, her bishop, Fr. Antonio Reyes Hernandez, never discouraged her from her work, seeing the healing that came from her mushroom rituals, and presumably the Christian element that she incorporated into her practice. It is said that ‘he appreciated her spirituality and treasured her work as a life-long member of his church.’

Wasson, having been raised in a strictly Christian household, and drilled with Scripture memory by his comically irksome father — a protestant pastor — found Scriptural language to be most fitting for his experience with Sabina.

At the time, the tiny mountain village of Huautla de Jiménez in Oaxaca was extremely difficult to access. So, it was not without a little difficulty that Wasson and Richardson made their pilgrimage. When they got to town, they met up with their liaisons, Cayetano and Guadalupe García, who guided them to a pile of composting sugar cane where they were able to harvest the fruiting bodies of Psilocybe caerulescens mushrooms, after which they located Sabina, the only curandera willing to allow outsiders into the mysteries.

To aid in the ceremony, Sabina placed two pictures of Jesus on a small altar in a corner of the room — one showing Jesus as a child, and another showing his baptism by John in the Jordan river. Then, that night after the mushrooms were eaten Maria Sabina called on Christ, as well as Peter and Paul, to aid them in their experience. Then, according to Wasson’s description, the event that followed seemed to have Pentecostal elements to it. A small, hand-written note that he penned at the beginning of the ceremony simply read ‘The Spirit came down from above’, before his lettering became illegible.

He went on later to call the experience a kind of ‘holy communion’, and described it as a first person religious experience, as opposed to just ideas or words written by someone else that he was asked to believe on faith.

Most of what I am basing these accounts on can be found in Riedlinger’s wonderful paper entitled ‘Sacred Mushroom Pentecost’, which can be read in full in the library. Its author seems to be quite the authority on the history and historiography leading up to and following this first encounter, and says ‘Wasson almost certainly perceived the ecstasis evoked by the mushrooms as something akin to possession by the Christian Holy Spirit.’

All this notwithstanding, considering the long history of persecution, the remnant of practitioners in Mazatec were not exactly supportive of allowing outsiders to participate, and Maria Sabina faced not a little backlash from her neighbors for the gesture. At one point, her disgruntled neighbors went so far as to burn her house down. Nonetheless, the genie was let out of the bottle, so to speak, and there was no putting it back in. The phenomena that Wasson and Allen experienced would soon be published in the July edition of Life magazine in 1957, which ultimately enticed thousands of fledgling psychonauts to the hills of southern Mexico in search of Sabina and her ‘magic’ mushrooms.

Walter Pahnke and the Good Friday Experiment

So from the above accounts we can see that even in the early days of the discovery of psychedelics within the Western world, their spiritual significance was quickly recognized, and those who partook of them saw them as at least compatible with Christian faith, and even able to deepen such faith.

This theme was then noticed by a minister and former Harvard Divinity School student, Walter Pahnke. While working toward a Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Science Ph.D. under Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary, Pahnke, realizing that these newly discovered chemicals were eliciting what he termed ‘Intense Religious Experiences’, thought such a phenomenon warranted further study. He wanted to see if psilocybin could dependably produce a religious experience when done within a religious setting by people who were open to such an experience. Accordingly, he crafted an experiment which later became known as the Marsh Chapel, or Good Friday Experiment, as it was conducted in a chapel during a Good Friday service during which, coincidentally, Howard Thurman was preaching.

A group of students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary were given either 30 mg of psilocybin, or a placebo of nicotinic acid (vitamin B-3), and observed during the course of the religious service. Not surprisingly, those who had taken the psilocybin indeed reported having ‘intense religious experiences.’ While sadly, the questionnaire provided by Pahnke for the test subjects to answer later did not have questions specific to Christian religious experiences, per se, the questionnaire that he did provide, with the comments collected later, do help us to get a good idea about what it was like for the test subjects.

When asked six months afterwards about feelings of unity, transcendence of time and space, sacredness, ineffability and persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior, all of the students who received psilocybin confirmed having them in spades. All of them claimed to have had a religious experience that far exceeded those given only a dose of nicotinic acid and a religious service.

A follow-up study was then conducted 25 years later in which they provided answers that even surpassed those from decades earlier. So, it was obvious that the religious effects of a dose of psilocybin done within a religious setting by those who are expecting such an experience had, far and away and by their own account, provided what appears to be an authentically divine experience — one that drew them closer in their walk with God, and did so in a very lasting way. In fact, they all unanimously reported having had a truly mystical experience. One participant was careful to point out that a spiritual encounter he had with Christ while in the seventh grade and the one that he had during the Good Friday Experiment were equally life-changing. To him, they were both equally valid.

Across the board, the students told of how their faith was deepened, the appreciation for eternal life was increased, the sense of the meaning of Christ was strengthened, that their sense of beauty and joy grew, and that all of these benefits stayed with them throughout the years. Some of the students involved even reported later that this experience played an integral part in their decision to enter the ministry or other important life decisions. As for the control group, no such lasting positive effects were reported. All this is to say that, Pahnke’s report concluded that using psychedelics in a religious setting is capable of engendering a predictably religious experience.

It should also be said that though one student reported having a troubling experience, and was even tranquilized on account of it, no lasting negative effects were reported. It should also be pointed out that Pahnke made no provision in his questionnaire for a possibly uncomfortable yet religious experience. This shows a level of myopia on his part, especially considering the abundance of reports of such experiences within the Christian tradition. Though it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance, a conversion experience often takes place when one reaches rock-bottom, and provides positive change precisely because of that. Provision should have been made for this.

Much of the information I’ve provided concerning the Good Friday Experiment comes from a paper written by Rick Doblin.

Conclusion

The purpose of this paper is to show that the burgeoning of psychedelics in the modern world is not as merely secular as many would have the world believe. On the contrary, it was often ushered in by Christians, and promoted for their spiritual effects. Whether the misconception that it is spiritually dangerous has come from people such as Timothy Leary, or the overly-cautious legends propagated to a wide swathe of the American public through government initiatives like D.A.R.E. is perhaps for another paper. However, the fact that psychedelics have been painted in a light that depicts them as incompatible, and perhaps even antithetical to the Christian faith and doctrine is pretty self-evident to anyone living in the United States, and Europe today.

However, I hope that this short paper has shown that this perspective is not true. From the very earliest days of the discovery of LSD, Dr. Albert Hofmann reported having spiritual experiences with it, and was able to maintain a Christian faith throughout his entire, long-lived life. In fact, as we’ve seen, he claimed to have been helped in his spiritual walk by LSD. Likewise, R. Gordon Wasson, upon being invited to partake of psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico by the fine, upstanding Christian woman Maria Sabina, also reported having what he would call a legitimate spiritual experience that he felt only Biblical language could describe. And, years afterward, Walter Pahnke further showed that, when done in the right setting, for religious purposes, psychedelics can be counted on to provide what everyone reported as being truly divine encounters. Considering the lasting fruits that came from these encounters, we are given no reason to doubt them.

I certainly hope no one interprets this paper as saying that Christians need to take psychedelics in order to deepen their faith in Christ. Christ’s Church has and will continue to be united with him and the Father through the power of the Spirit, with or without them. I simply hope to persuade some of my sisters and brothers to be open to the possibility that there are Christians out there whose walk is indeed deepened by these substances. That is how it has been since the beginning of their (re)discovery, and that is how it could continue to be. So, let us not judge those who follow the same Lord, only in a different, though equally valid way.

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