Feb 28, 2025 08:30 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 28, 2025 08:41 PM by C C.)
https://longnow.org/ideas/is-god-a-mushroom/
EXCERPTS: . . . for many such thinkers, a New Age religion was not enough. They thirsted after evidence that psychedelics had always been present — that drugs were, in some way, the essential core of spiritual experience. “A mushroom is God’s signature,” wrote the psychedelics advocate John A. Rush, his “closest worldly condition.” For writers like these, proving some role for psychedelics in the Christian tradition was paramount. If it could be proven that the church was built on the foundation of holy fungi, not only would figures like Allegro be vindicated — psychedelics, too, could no longer be considered so taboo.
In the late 01970s, these writers believed they had found a smoking gun. A team including Hoffman, the classicist Carl Ruck and the celebrated journalist and ethnomycologist Robert Gordon Wasson published an investigation into an ancient Greek cult at Eleusis, known for its initiatic rite which saw participants come face-to-face with the gods by ingesting a mysterious drink known as the kykeon. It would “cause sympathy of the souls with the ritual in a way that is unintelligible to us, and divine, so that some of the initiands are stricken with panic, being filled with divine awe,” the Greek philosopher Proclus once wrote. “Others assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine possession.”
For Hoffman, Ruck, and Wasson, the descriptions of the kykeon and its effects were proof enough of an ancient psychedelic sacrament — likely ergot, they theorized, a fungus that grows on grain. The thesis, like Allegro’s, was largely rejected; but for Ruck, in particular, it was enough to suggest that psychedelic rites had informed the formation of the early Christian church. Eleusis was one of the most popular cults of the ancient world; its mysteries would have been familiar to the likes of John the Evangelist and St. Paul, who describes Christ’s own “mysteries” in similar terms in his epistle to the church at Corinth, just 40 miles from Eleusis. The cult was only suppressed — by Christian emperors — in the late fourth century, at the same time as the church was defining its own nascent orthodoxy.
Soon, Ruck was seeing mushrooms everywhere. Moses, he posited, was a psychedelic shaman, his encounter with the burning bush an allegorized mushroom trip. Paul’s conversion, too, was a “shamanic rapture,” his experience mirroring that of a psilocybin trip. The early Eucharist, he suggested, was an “ecstatic debauchery” like that at Eleusis, “anathematized in what became the official history of the transmission of the faith.” Even St. Catherine and St. Benedict were macrodosing fly agaric, a psychedelic mushroom, tripping far and wide from the seclusion of their monasteries.
Ruck’s theories were rejected by the mainstream scholarly world. “As perverse as it is unconvincing,” was the verdict of one reviewer. They also suffered from the misfortune of bad timing.
[...] Ruck’s ideas may have been an outlier in their grandiosity, but they weren’t without their fans. Forty years later, the thesis of Road to Eleusis was largely regurgitated by the American journalist Brian Muraresku, whose 02020 book, The Immortality Key, was an instant New York Times bestseller.
In explaining the rejection of theses like Ruck’s and Allegro’s, Muraresku blamed an ambiguous mix of ancient suppression — “a war for the soul of Western civilization” — and scholarly ignorance. “Forty years ago the Classics establishment was in no position to seriously consider the controversial marriage of the Mysteries and drugs,” he writes. “Let alone the possibility that the earliest Christians inherited a visionary sacrament from their Greek ancestors.”
At least where Muraresku is concerned, today’s “establishment” is not much more open-minded. Even leading psychedelic researchers like Jerry M. Brown rejected his book as little more than historical fanfiction. “In order to defend his central thesis, Muraresku executes a series of intellectual somersaults that are at best tenuous and at worst unsubstantiated,” Brown wrote in his review.
But in some ways, Muraresku is right to highlight the differences between now and then. Before the War on Drugs put psychedelic sciences on ice, a series of groundbreaking studies explored very real connections between psychedelics and the sacred — and a new generation of scholars is increasingly prepared to follow them up.
One of the turning points in psychedelic science came in 01962, when a PhD student named Walter Pankhe gave 10 theological students psilocybin — the active ingredient in magic mushrooms — and made them listen to the Good Friday sermon at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. Almost all underwent transcendent religious experiences which, 25 years later, they still counted among the most meaningful spiritual experiences of their lives. One had to be restrained from running outside to announce the imminent return of the Messiah.
The now-infamous “Miracle in Marsh Chapel” proved that psilocybin and psychedelics like it could induce real spiritual experiences on par with those described by genuine mystics, the kinds that feature in the stories of religious figures we venerate centuries later. It posed a challenge to religious historians and theologians — largely unanswered by mainstream academia — to explain a role for psychedelics in the history of faith. As the theologian Ron Cole-Turner writes, “If the experiences [psychedelics] seem to induce are phenomenologically indistinguishable from the deepest experiences of the greatest mystics, then how can scholars in theology and religion simply dismiss or ignore them? Is that not willful ignorance of reality?”
The fact is, however, finding definitive historic proof of the use of sacred drugs has long posed a challenge for researchers. Set aside the fact that such substances would likely have been ingested in secret or reserved for a select few; they are all organic compounds, prone to breaking down. “This is the curse of archaeology,” the anthropologist Scott M. Fitzpatrick writes. “Many materials … simply do not preserve well over time except under exceptional circumstances.”
Still, emerging archaeological technologies have vastly expanded the ability of researchers to analyze finds for the chemical signatures that indicate the presence of psychoactive substances...
[...] All this evidence adds up to a simple conclusion: “What is becoming clearer is that the use of mind-altering materials… is not relegated to a shallow period of time,” Fitzpatrick writes, “but goes deep into the ancient past.”
That has given rise to a controversial thesis that our capacity for religious sentiment may actually derive from our habitual use of drugs. After all, our species began as forest-floor foragers, in regions where psychedelic mushrooms grew plentifully in the dung of the very cattle they later domesticated...
[...] This goes some way to justifying the theory that our religious impulses may be born of these fungi, rather than simply activated by them. But such a conclusion, for the theologically inclined, would be revolutionary. What if our revelations — our relics, temples, and testaments — came not from God, but from an evolutionary dance with fungi? Can God still be said to exist if we accept that as true?
According to one line of thinking — a dominant one among cognitive scientists — the answer is likely no. Our “revelations” come from chemical reactions in the architecture of our brains; mushrooms are simply a stimulant for powers that reside, biologically, within us....
[...] The problem is, if religion is born of our habitual ingestion of a toxin, it is a kind of disease, a malfunction, a scar left behind by a foreign invader. This nags at me whenever I think about my psychedelic experiences and the kinds of feelings they engendered. When I’ve taken psilocybin, I’ve felt at one with nature and the earth. I have seen cosmic energy coursing up through the grass and the trees. All I want to do is lie content in the dirt, and let myself be totally consumed by it. Isn’t that exactly what a mushroom would want us to think?
[...] Somehow, some way, we seem to have left mushrooms behind — culturally, at least, if not within the architecture of our brains. Allegro saw this as the result of a vast historical conspiracy, a centuries-long effort to suppress the psychedelic faith of our forefathers. But perhaps it was something much more mundane. As our lives and societies became more complex, more evolved, we simply forgot the face of God. We mistook the revelations for the real thing. We looked for him in temples and in testaments, old and new. But we should have looked back where we, and he, started: in the shady undergrowth, where the fungi flourish... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . for many such thinkers, a New Age religion was not enough. They thirsted after evidence that psychedelics had always been present — that drugs were, in some way, the essential core of spiritual experience. “A mushroom is God’s signature,” wrote the psychedelics advocate John A. Rush, his “closest worldly condition.” For writers like these, proving some role for psychedelics in the Christian tradition was paramount. If it could be proven that the church was built on the foundation of holy fungi, not only would figures like Allegro be vindicated — psychedelics, too, could no longer be considered so taboo.
In the late 01970s, these writers believed they had found a smoking gun. A team including Hoffman, the classicist Carl Ruck and the celebrated journalist and ethnomycologist Robert Gordon Wasson published an investigation into an ancient Greek cult at Eleusis, known for its initiatic rite which saw participants come face-to-face with the gods by ingesting a mysterious drink known as the kykeon. It would “cause sympathy of the souls with the ritual in a way that is unintelligible to us, and divine, so that some of the initiands are stricken with panic, being filled with divine awe,” the Greek philosopher Proclus once wrote. “Others assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine possession.”
For Hoffman, Ruck, and Wasson, the descriptions of the kykeon and its effects were proof enough of an ancient psychedelic sacrament — likely ergot, they theorized, a fungus that grows on grain. The thesis, like Allegro’s, was largely rejected; but for Ruck, in particular, it was enough to suggest that psychedelic rites had informed the formation of the early Christian church. Eleusis was one of the most popular cults of the ancient world; its mysteries would have been familiar to the likes of John the Evangelist and St. Paul, who describes Christ’s own “mysteries” in similar terms in his epistle to the church at Corinth, just 40 miles from Eleusis. The cult was only suppressed — by Christian emperors — in the late fourth century, at the same time as the church was defining its own nascent orthodoxy.
Soon, Ruck was seeing mushrooms everywhere. Moses, he posited, was a psychedelic shaman, his encounter with the burning bush an allegorized mushroom trip. Paul’s conversion, too, was a “shamanic rapture,” his experience mirroring that of a psilocybin trip. The early Eucharist, he suggested, was an “ecstatic debauchery” like that at Eleusis, “anathematized in what became the official history of the transmission of the faith.” Even St. Catherine and St. Benedict were macrodosing fly agaric, a psychedelic mushroom, tripping far and wide from the seclusion of their monasteries.
Ruck’s theories were rejected by the mainstream scholarly world. “As perverse as it is unconvincing,” was the verdict of one reviewer. They also suffered from the misfortune of bad timing.
[...] Ruck’s ideas may have been an outlier in their grandiosity, but they weren’t without their fans. Forty years later, the thesis of Road to Eleusis was largely regurgitated by the American journalist Brian Muraresku, whose 02020 book, The Immortality Key, was an instant New York Times bestseller.
In explaining the rejection of theses like Ruck’s and Allegro’s, Muraresku blamed an ambiguous mix of ancient suppression — “a war for the soul of Western civilization” — and scholarly ignorance. “Forty years ago the Classics establishment was in no position to seriously consider the controversial marriage of the Mysteries and drugs,” he writes. “Let alone the possibility that the earliest Christians inherited a visionary sacrament from their Greek ancestors.”
At least where Muraresku is concerned, today’s “establishment” is not much more open-minded. Even leading psychedelic researchers like Jerry M. Brown rejected his book as little more than historical fanfiction. “In order to defend his central thesis, Muraresku executes a series of intellectual somersaults that are at best tenuous and at worst unsubstantiated,” Brown wrote in his review.
But in some ways, Muraresku is right to highlight the differences between now and then. Before the War on Drugs put psychedelic sciences on ice, a series of groundbreaking studies explored very real connections between psychedelics and the sacred — and a new generation of scholars is increasingly prepared to follow them up.
One of the turning points in psychedelic science came in 01962, when a PhD student named Walter Pankhe gave 10 theological students psilocybin — the active ingredient in magic mushrooms — and made them listen to the Good Friday sermon at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. Almost all underwent transcendent religious experiences which, 25 years later, they still counted among the most meaningful spiritual experiences of their lives. One had to be restrained from running outside to announce the imminent return of the Messiah.
The now-infamous “Miracle in Marsh Chapel” proved that psilocybin and psychedelics like it could induce real spiritual experiences on par with those described by genuine mystics, the kinds that feature in the stories of religious figures we venerate centuries later. It posed a challenge to religious historians and theologians — largely unanswered by mainstream academia — to explain a role for psychedelics in the history of faith. As the theologian Ron Cole-Turner writes, “If the experiences [psychedelics] seem to induce are phenomenologically indistinguishable from the deepest experiences of the greatest mystics, then how can scholars in theology and religion simply dismiss or ignore them? Is that not willful ignorance of reality?”
The fact is, however, finding definitive historic proof of the use of sacred drugs has long posed a challenge for researchers. Set aside the fact that such substances would likely have been ingested in secret or reserved for a select few; they are all organic compounds, prone to breaking down. “This is the curse of archaeology,” the anthropologist Scott M. Fitzpatrick writes. “Many materials … simply do not preserve well over time except under exceptional circumstances.”
Still, emerging archaeological technologies have vastly expanded the ability of researchers to analyze finds for the chemical signatures that indicate the presence of psychoactive substances...
[...] All this evidence adds up to a simple conclusion: “What is becoming clearer is that the use of mind-altering materials… is not relegated to a shallow period of time,” Fitzpatrick writes, “but goes deep into the ancient past.”
That has given rise to a controversial thesis that our capacity for religious sentiment may actually derive from our habitual use of drugs. After all, our species began as forest-floor foragers, in regions where psychedelic mushrooms grew plentifully in the dung of the very cattle they later domesticated...
[...] This goes some way to justifying the theory that our religious impulses may be born of these fungi, rather than simply activated by them. But such a conclusion, for the theologically inclined, would be revolutionary. What if our revelations — our relics, temples, and testaments — came not from God, but from an evolutionary dance with fungi? Can God still be said to exist if we accept that as true?
According to one line of thinking — a dominant one among cognitive scientists — the answer is likely no. Our “revelations” come from chemical reactions in the architecture of our brains; mushrooms are simply a stimulant for powers that reside, biologically, within us....
[...] The problem is, if religion is born of our habitual ingestion of a toxin, it is a kind of disease, a malfunction, a scar left behind by a foreign invader. This nags at me whenever I think about my psychedelic experiences and the kinds of feelings they engendered. When I’ve taken psilocybin, I’ve felt at one with nature and the earth. I have seen cosmic energy coursing up through the grass and the trees. All I want to do is lie content in the dirt, and let myself be totally consumed by it. Isn’t that exactly what a mushroom would want us to think?
[...] Somehow, some way, we seem to have left mushrooms behind — culturally, at least, if not within the architecture of our brains. Allegro saw this as the result of a vast historical conspiracy, a centuries-long effort to suppress the psychedelic faith of our forefathers. But perhaps it was something much more mundane. As our lives and societies became more complex, more evolved, we simply forgot the face of God. We mistook the revelations for the real thing. We looked for him in temples and in testaments, old and new. But we should have looked back where we, and he, started: in the shady undergrowth, where the fungi flourish... (MORE - missing details)
