Facebook
Twitter
Pocket
Reddit
Email
Almost a decade ago, a Baptist Biblical scholar, a Catholic priest, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, a Zen Buddhist roshi, and more than a dozen other religious leaders walked into a lab—and took high doses of magic mushrooms.
All of them said it was their first time taking the drug. The mind-altering details of these guided trips were recorded at the time and over the following 16 months, but it wasn’t until recently that the results of the controversial experiment came to light.
One might wonder how a single psilocybin trip could compare to the catalog of rich transcendent experiences that might accumulate over a lifetime of religious devotion. But according to the findings, which were published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychedelic Medicine, the vast majority of the 33 clergy who participated in the study—more than 90 percent—said taking psilocybin was one of the most spiritually meaningful and deeply sacred experiences of their lives. Almost half said it was the most profound thing they had ever experienced, period. Many of them also said it made them better religious leaders.
Now, years later, some of these clergy have become evangelists for psychedelics, incorporating them into their own religious teachings. For some of them, the experience led to a release from attachment to dogmas and greater openness to other forms of religious experience. For at least one participant, it was a dark, empty, terrifying trip. Still, none of them ruled out using psilocybin again in the future.
Publication of the study took so long in part due to charges of ethical lapses, including potential conflicts of interest related to funding sources, as well as the direct involvement of a funder in the research itself. But these conflicts were eventually resolved through disclosure, which the authors say they always intended. Questions also swirled around certain flaws in the study’s execution, which even the authors, scientists at Johns Hopkins University and New York University, admit.
One issue was bias: Participants may have been primed to see their experiences as sacred by language used in recruitment ads and by the expectations of those running the experiment. (Many of those who chose to participate were also considering leaving the profession at the outset and so could have been seeking a way to reconnect with the divine.) The sample was also small, heavily white, male, and Christian; and representation of a number of major world religions, including Indigenous religious traditions, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism, was absent.
Still the results raise questions about the relationship between hallucinogens and religious experience. Most of the major world religions today (Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam) do not advocate the use of mind-altering substances. But psychedelic plants and mushrooms have been employed in sacred ceremonies by Indigenous cultures in the Americas for millennia, and many psychedelic researchers suspect they drove pagan mystical experiences in ancient Greece that may have served as the foundations for some religions, including Christianity.
William James, considered the father of American psychology and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, is said to have to come to many of his own most central ideas at least in part through hallucinatory experiences with nitrous oxide: the value of religion, the importance of mystical experience, the universe as pluralistic. But transcendence is not an unequivocal good: As one religious scholar found, you can have too much of it. 
Lead image: New Africa / Shutterstock
