Entheogen: the Source, Substance, and Bane of Religions

Art by Alex Grey

The strangest thing about the major religions isn’t that their practitioners are adults that have childlike beliefs about invisible persons, miracles, and life after death. No, what’s most puzzling about religions is that they aren’t upfront about the fact that the entheogen or psychotropic substance is their source and essence. We know from ancient religious art and from scattered references in religions such as Hinduism and the Eleusinian Mysteries that their practitioners employed hallucinogenic drugs. We know also that shamanism is likely the oldest religion, associated as it was with Paleolithic animism, and that shamans used these drugs and other techniques to achieve altered states of consciousness.

There are at least three possible reasons for the religions’ coyness about their psychedelic basis.

First, assuming that the drug produces only hallucinations or perceptual illusions, the extent to which a religion is based on such experiences could easily be the extent to which the religion is a fraud, in which case this origin of theological content could be kept hidden out of embarrassment or denial.

Second, there’s the social need for the esoteric/exoteric divide, since the knowledge or experience nevertheless obtained from the use of entheogens is potentially harmful both to the individual’s mental integrity and to social organizations. This means that religious myths may refer obliquely to their true source and substance, as a test of the readiness of the audience to absorb the shocking truth. As Jesus says about his use of parables, “The mystery of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside, everything is expressed in parables, so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven’” (Mark 4:11-12). Here Jesus quotes Isaiah 6, where the prophet receives his commission from an angry Yahweh who condemns the people of Judah for their faithlessness in the face of the Assyrian invaders. The message is that most people aren’t fit for spiritual wisdom and so the ultimate truths have to be protected with secrecy.

Third, the secrecy empowers some at the expense of others. The point needn’t be that those who have religious power are familiar with the psychedelic basis of religion, and that they mean to retain their advantages by guarding the source of their knowledge; on the contrary, the exploitation of others is a sign that the dominator has only a mundane mentality. (Even the psychopath who’s abandoned social norms and who is thus in some ways freer than the benighted followers typically reverts to a standpoint of genetic egoism.) The third possibility, rather, is that those with religious power over others mean to eliminate the substance of religion, such as by helping to ban entheogens, and to distract the masses with cheap and shallow substitutes, to ignore existential questions and indulge in profane games.

An Apparent Psychedelic Epiphany

But is psychedelic experience the basis of theistic beliefs? I suspect that it is. Here, for example, is a description of an experience I had recently in a relatively mild altered state of consciousness. I’ve never used any psychoactive drug beyond cannabis, and I’ve smoked that only a handful of times in total. Cannabis is now legal in Canada where I live, and a few weeks ago one of my brothers left me some marijuana and a vape pen on his way back to the States. One evening, I stepped outside and took two deep inhalations of the drug. I sat down on the couch and soon felt vibrations throughout my body, as though every part were being massaged even down to my feet. I had a glass of water with me, believing (wrongly) that water can moderate the effects. The last time I smoked cannabis, some years ago, I had a jarring experience since I had tried to fight the full impact on my mind. This time there would be no fighting that impact, since apparently my inhalations were more successful or the weed was stronger than in my previous attempts. As I write this, I can’t now recall the details as well as I did shortly after the experience, but there was an expanded sense of interoception, which is to say I felt more strongly my body’s interior processes such as my heartbeat, which sped up alarmingly. My mind felt like it was being ripped from my head and there was a strange sense that I was controlling my body as if in a video game. There were hypnagogic flashes of rectangular shapes in my field of vision, as though I had to mentally turn a few levers to break through to the higher state. In general, there was a sense that I was rushing internally elsewhere. By that point I thought I should be near a tap in case I needed more water, so I moved to the kitchen sink, which was soon to feel like my version of the Buddha’s Bodhi tree.

My mind seemed to shoot upward and then to swell with what felt like omniscience. It felt like I had access to all ultimate knowledge, but there was a duality, which is to say my ordinary consciousness or ego remained in the background. That limited, more familiar side of my mind asked the apparently omniscient side questions and received the answers. And what answers they were! The curious point is that when you’re in that state, there’s no doubt whatsoever about the truth of the answers you receive. There’s implicit trust or faith in the entheogenic partner, in the part of my brain that was possessed or inflamed by the cannabis. As strange as the psychedelic speculations were, when I was “high”—and that term itself is significant since you do feel literally high, as in an out-of-body experience—I felt like I knew the absolute truth of those thoughts, to the point where I kept thinking with respect to those thoughts, “This can’t be real,” and then came the sense, the feeling, the experience that of course it is indeed real, as mind-blowing as that may be.

So what were those psychedelic thoughts? I came to know, in that seemingly omniscient state, that all of reality consists fundamentally of one mind and one body. Our creaturely-conscious selves are fragments or bridges to that omniscient mind, and the natural universe is that mind’s body. My mundane, limited self raised the doubt that any such revelation for me must be drawn merely from my philosophical and religious studies, meaning that I couldn’t be learning some great truth but was only magnifying or toying with ideas I read or wrote somewhere. The strangest response to that doubt popped into my head, and again this answer came with the implicit trust or ecstatic acceptance of the truth of that response. I wasn’t just receiving answers in the form of words or opinions but was experiencing the thoughts as ecstatic revelations. The response to that doubt—and I still shudder to think of it—was that all of cultural history consists of the attempt to remember the truth of our divine identity, so that the texts I read, such as Plato’s dialogues and various religious scriptures were so many attempts to recapture the one mind’s self-awareness via the imperfect means of mundane, often distant and garbled representations.

There was thus a chicken and egg problem: Which came first, the rapture or the series of philosophical and theological descriptions? Was I thinking about metaphysical matters in my altered state, because I enjoyed thinking about such things in my ordinary life? Or do philosophy and religion exist in the first place because of a universal psychedelic experience? I remember thinking how ironic it was that the truth is so near and yet so far. Just two puffs are all I took and suddenly my ordinary worldview was blown apart. So people throughout history would have come upon these altered states, thanks to entheogens or fasting, drumming, dancing or other ways of inducing a trance, including perhaps a near-death experience; the altered state would wear off and they’d try to put the pieces back together. More specifically, they would remember different fragments of the experience, depending on the drug they took or the assumptions they had brought to bear.

Thus, culture consists of something like memories in Plato’s sense: scattered echoes of euphoric self-knowledge, echoes which are eventually ossified and falsified like the artifacts that accumulate in the process of making copies of photocopies. Indeed, Plato loomed large in this experience, since he wrote of transdimensional memory, of the world-soul in the Timaeus, and of false or illusory reality as a system of second-rate copies. Again, I knew in the back of my mind that I’d already read about this, some years ago as a philosophy undergraduate, but now it felt like I knew the truth of such speculations, because it felt like a part of my mind was the omniscient One, the source with access to the Forms or general knowledge of all things. So which came first? Was Plato an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries in which he partook of a psychoactive substance? Was his Orphism based on altered states of mind, so that when his writings happened to survive and end up in my hands, many centuries later, they effectively forewarned what I might learn in a comparable altered state? Or putting aside Plato, did the concepts similar to that of the world-soul or anima mundi, found in numerous major religions and philosophies, including Christianity (Holy Spirit), Taoism (Tao), Hinduism (Atman), and Mahayana Buddhism (Buddha-nature) derive from a real, psychedelic feeling of being one with a universal mind?

Another of the thoughts that seemed to come to me from a higher source was that prophets or charismatic individuals who lead religious movements without cynicism or ulterior motives must be precisely those who do remember the experience of feeling like God, but who are overwhelmed by these memories so that they lose their mundane preoccupations. Their minds become completed bridges to or vessels for the higher Mind. I mused what it would be like if I were lost in that state, if the drug were to permanently rewire my brain so that I’d have to try to function throughout life with a sky-high mind. Would I come across as profound or as pretentious and incoherent like Gerald in the South Park episode “Major Boobage”?

In any case, each of these revelations felt like a wave crashing through my limbs. So standing at the sink, hunched over, my arms spread apart and my hands grasping the edges of the counter, my limbs would periodically go weak as one after another Thought flashed through me. This was due to the drug’s relaxing effect on my muscles: although my heart was seemingly racing to keep up with the expanded consciousness, my limbs and neck felt as loose as water, so I was waving along with the rhythm of the divine discourse. At the start of the high I drank lots of water, but it didn’t reduce the high, so eventually I remember putting the glass into the sink for fear that I’d drop it in my relaxed state. Gradually, the high faded and ordinary objects like the window and cabinets snapped back into their familiar forms, without the background hyper-awareness. But the high dissipated in waves, not all at once, so the great understanding would return but for shorter and shorter durations. I recall looking at the clock over the stove to determine how much time I’d been standing there, and it was around thirty or forty minutes. One of the last of the “high” thoughts I had was, “…if you can remember it,” as in, “All of which revelations are there for the taking, but good luck remembering them or feeling their profundity for long.”

The Conspiracy of Authentic Religious Experience

The religious implications even of that low-grade altered state are obvious. Hinduism, in particular, could easily have arisen from similar states, as could the prophetic tradition of Judaism. Moses saw God in a burning bush, he heard God’s voice, and he asked God questions and received divine answers. Is the reference to a bush a faded reflection of the fact that, when ingested, certain plants actually produce the feeling that you’re talking to a deity? The duality of theophanies, their question-and-answer dialectic could be due to the fact that certain entheogens don’t obliterate the ego, so that your ordinary conscious self is left to gape in awe at the Mind encountered with the drug. The entheogen may relax the mind as well as the body, removing your pragmatic focus on what you deem rationally probable, so that you implicitly trust or marvel at whatever you receive in that altered state. Could that drug-induced ecstasy be the source of genuine religious faith, with dogmatic certainty in uninspired or contrived theological doctrines being due more to the exploitation of the child’s comparable innocence in the societal process of religious indoctrination?

There are two big questions raised by this hypothesis, that religions are based on altered states of consciousness caused by the use of psychoactive plants. The first question is whether the experiences are of some supernatural reality. For example, do you feel like you’re in touch with God, while high, because you really are so? Does the drug alter the brain and somehow liberate the mind to literally contact a divine intelligence? Are some or all of the entities hallucinated in psychedelic trips real rather than illusory?

Surprisingly, that first question seems less important than the second, which is this: Is culture largely a linguistic or behavioural echo of the ecstatic, entheogenic experience? Do some of the foundational presuppositions of most cultures derive from so many interpretations of firsthand altered states of awareness? The reason the second question seems more important is that, given the universality both of religions and of entheogens in both history and around the planet, the answer to the second question is more clearly in the affirmative. Occam’s razor precludes a realist answer to the first question. In the case of my experience, for example, I was indeed just going with the flow of enhanced imagination, riffing on my various studies. Cannabis is famous for opening up the mind’s creativity, freeing it to explore ideas by dampening your skeptical or cynical impulses and imbuing each idea with a magical aura.

But this only pushes the problem back a step. If my seeming epiphany was influenced by specific writings in the culture, what would have been the content of such an entheogenic experience in prehistoric times, prior to writing? The hunter-gatherer’s oral traditions maintained by the tribe’s elders might have dictated the contents of the revelations, and the drug would have been revered and might have been reserved for the shaman’s use. At some point, though, entheogens were discovered and used for the first time in a cultural lineage. Intuitions, instincts, and the background assumptions of hunter-gatherer life, then, would have directed the contents of the first apparent theophanies, as would the phenomenological structure of the experience.

That structure is universal for each entheogen, since the physiological changes underlie any theological or skeptical interpretation of the altered state’s contents. I’ve already suggested some elements of that structure for cannabis: the muscle relaxation, the reduction of inhibitions, the enhanced creativity, the duality in the question-and-answer dialectic, and the enchantment of the ensuing introspection that inspires faith and euphoria. In the Paleolithic period, there must have been early, relatively unprejudiced encounters with entheogens, which could have initiated the animistic beliefs and shamanic practices of the earliest religions. Philosophy and theology unfolded by cultural memory (oral and written traditions) and cross-cultural interactions up to the present, as civilized ways of coping with the potential for what feels like real theophany or for re-immersion into a mythopoeic headspace.

What’s at least as certain as the unlikelihood of any supernatural effect of entheogens is that the religious experience itself is real, historically very early, and universally available. This isn’t to say that the contents of everyone’s altered states are identical. Different drugs, ideological intentions, and settings will produce different psychedelic trips. But according to my readings, what’s universal is the religious overtone of these trips, particularly with respect to certain psychoactive plants such as cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, and ayahuasca. The drug’s effects may fade, allowing the skeptical, pragmatic mindset to reassert its control, but the experience isn’t easily shaken off. What persists is the memory that the experience felt far more real even than ordinary perceptions.

This must be comparable to the through-the-looking-glass glee of the conspiracy theorist who’s undergone a permanent gestalt switch. There’s consensus reality, dictated largely by the powers that be, and then there are radicals who challenge conventional wisdom. Conspiracy theorists differ from philosophers, though, in that the former don’t know how to think well, so they end up fallaciously assimilating the evidence to suit their radical presumptions. But the point is that you can be radicalized, meaning that you can reject a popular worldview in favour of a bizarre minority viewpoint. Unless you unquestionably witness a UFO or Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, you have little reason to regard such wild things as real. However, it’s a lot easier to have a seeming epiphany than it is to break into Area 51 or to track down a fabled creature in the forest; all you have to do is take a proper dose of the right intoxicant.

Regardless of whether mainstream religious folks are aware of what they’re doing, the function of these religions seems to be to suppress religious experience, by the devious method of offering up a debased, milquetoast form of that experience. The more acceptable the religion is to conventional society and the more dependent the religious institution is on secular mores, the more likely that religion will call for the prohibition of psychoactive drugs for recreational or entheogenic use. This is like a painter who produces scores of paintings which are systematically stolen, scribbled over, and sold as if they were the originals, while the fraudster bans the original artist from producing more paintings. The chutzpah of organized religionists is off the charts and this audacity is only an indirect measure of the strangeness of the psychedelic religious experience: to cover up something so world-altering and so readily available, you need to resort to the least honourable tactics. Thus, religions are supposed to be about finding God, but instead of wholeheartedly recommending the use of entheogens to mass produce religious experiences, organized religions hold out their institutions as socially-acceptable intermediaries. To be sure, these religions pretend to long for God’s final judgment, even though God would be least inclined to accept any human society. But rather than subvert societies by way of foreshadowing God’s apocalyptic judgment, organized religions compromise with secular, implicitly atheistic goals.

Of course, the mainstream religionist will say that psychoactive drugs produce only illusions that have nothing to do with God. In that case the religionist will have shot herself in the foot, since the very concept of God surely derives from interpretations of altered states of consciousness. If even the prehistoric origin and apparent experiential essence of religions is hallucinatory or otherwise mentally projective, how could lame theological substitutes, such as mere creeds and doctrines bring anyone closer to divine reality? If the actual feeling of talking to God in an altered state is an illusion, how could the mere preposterous assertion that you’ll talk to God after you die be at all trustworthy, let alone central to a respectable way of life?