I’ve written before about the relationship between LSD therapy and Christianity (specifically Anglicanism), in a British context, focusing on the work of Dr Frank Lake who promoted LSD’s role in pastoral care during the 1950s and 1960s. What became clear was that Lake, and other Christian critics of psychedelia, took umbrage with its mystical and universalist claims. They focused on how the drug either helped or disrupted the secondary, ritual aspects of Church experience.
I am going to briefly touch upon the same territory again, but here in a North American context. Across the pond, LSD therapy, and universalist claims for religious experience, were much more closely allied. Christian elements were certainly there—as one would expect from what was still very broadly a Christian culture—but a process emerges of deterritorializing Christian ritual and meaning, in favour of a medicalized psychospiritual approach with perennialist symbolism.
Peyote, the mescaline-containing cactus, is employed sacramentally by the Native American Church (NAC) as part of a ritual and spiritual framework which first developed against the backdrop of on-going of Christian colonialism. The development of the NAC’s peyote rituals included the adoption of Christian elements, such as prayer and songs of praise, thereby allowing the continuation of older traditions to coexist.1 As a result, something more necessarily syncretic and contemporary evolved.
Western scientists at the turn of the nineteenth century began exploring for themselves the effects of mescaline and peyote. These psychologists were more concerned with its effects on consciousness, rather than its religious ritual use among indigenous peoples of North America. William James famously self-experimented with it, alongside other substances, observing, ‘No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.’2
James drew a disciplinary border around psychology and religion, which cast psychoactive substances as tools for exploring ‘mystical consciousness’. His approach promoted a perennialist reading of all religion that argues a core psychological commonality exists across traditions; in short, a psychospiritual reading. Aldous Huxley, another mescaline experimenter, followed suit in The Perennial Philosophy (1945), writing,
the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality […]. Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal.3
Huxley and his mescaline dealer, psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, exchanged letters about peyote and the NAC, notably discussing the research of James Slotkin and Vincent Petrullo, with specific reference to Christian elements. Osmond, for example, commented that the NAC was unlucky if 95% of participants did not have a transcendental experience, adding ‘Christian churches must be lucky if 1% of their population experience deep religious fervour and understanding at the same time.’4 He was notably less interested in the ritual, shifting emphasis onto the drug or plant itself.
Osmond did attend a NAC ceremony in 1956, however, writing, ‘here is an instrument for group integration at a higher level which may be the instrument for group psychotherapy if we can but refine it a little.’5 While he is certainly recognising an intrinsic value in the ritual set-up here, what is noteworthy is the proposed medicalization of the ritual process.
By universalizing the psychospiritual experience, researchers implicitly aimed at de-culturing, and secularising, the role of the context (ritual). This process of interpretation was similarly applied across different spiritual or religious paths. Moreover, if something is supposed to be universal, it infers that it is perhaps reliably reproducible.
Clinical psychologist William A Richards has noted that thanks to the ‘reliability’ and ‘potency’ of psychedelics, ‘For the first time in the history of science, these two factors allow these revelatory states of consciousness and any changes in physical or mental health, or in attitudes or behavior, that may follow them to be studied carefully and systematically within the context of academic research.’6
This experimental approach to mysticism was explicitly addressed for the first time in a Christian context on Good Friday 1962. In Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, researcher Walter Pahnke famously gave twenty small capsules, half of which contained the mushroom-derived psychedelic psilocybin, to twenty divinity students in order to test the propensity of psychedelics to induce a mystical state.7 Many of those involved reported having something akin to one.
For researchers, however, this said more about psychospiritual perennialism than Christianity itself. Even given the setting and participants, Pahnke was not trying to recreate a specifically Christian mystical experience, but rather to invoke something more generic, what has also been called a ‘peak experience’.
The deterritorializing of Christian meaning, or the sundering of it from ritual, in favour of psychospiritual models and readings also meant that a far wider set of religious traditions could potentially be invoked in discussions—effectively destabilizing church-centred thought.
Writing about LSD culture in 1968, William Braden claimed there appeared ‘a wholesale introduction of Asian theories regarding the nature of man and the cosmos.’8 To some extent this was true, especially culturally. Buddhism and Vedanta were certainly promoted alongside the substances by leading writers and exponents, and several popular books interpolating the psychedelic experience through Eastern scripture were published during the 1960s.9
However, even these were usually demoted to a cultural preference under the predominance of the perennial psychospiritual reading. Indeed, many medical researchers remained deeply suspicious of religiously specific interpretations; when ‘depersonalization is mistranslated into the Body of Bliss.’10
Rather than inferring a particular ritual religious truth or meaning per se, LSD imagery was understood to be mere psychological archetypes, including the widespread appearance of Christ in people’s LSD visions.11 And indeed, unsurprisingly given the cultural background, Christian imagery was widely reported in people’s trips—although it is usually glossed over in commentary.
Examples include a bank robber who saw Christ in a vision and partook in the crucifixion drama, or an account by a Protestant minister who sensed her own lust and desire killing Him.12 An Australian psychiatrist wished to get insight into his ‘aboriginal roots’ having been ‘essentially contaminated’ by Christianity but was confronted by Christ, experiencing crucifixion and resurrection, leading to three days of ‘stunned silence’.13 Elsewhere, one atheist had a titanic struggle with God over several sessions, entering into Luciferian myths and riling against Christ.14
Often interpreted as a process of psychospiritual rebirth, these experiences tended to be hostile to Christian rituality, and could easily be interpreted as not simply culturally specific, but (given psychospiritual readings) a path away from the predominance of church-centred Christianity in American culture. One contemporary study reported that 96% of 206 subjects experienced religious imagery, 58% saw religious figures (including Christ, Buddha, and saints), yet only 8% had scenes of religious rites from the three major Abrahamic religions.15
Nutritionist Adelle Davis is a good example of how the ritual side of Christianity was being sidelined by psychospirituality. She underwent a series of LSD experiences with the intent of finding ‘a chemical Christianity’ under the pen name Jane Dunlap.16 First experiencing a perennialist cascade of religious figures from different traditions, she eventually purported to be confronted by Christ Himself and the spirit of Christian evangelism, but concluded,
to think of religion as confined to church attendance was a mockery and a hypocrisy. Again the conviction came that religion was a deep inner need of every person who ever lived, a soul crying for spiritual growth and fulfilment.17
Her objection to the Christian institution and its own rituals underlines an LSD-mediated negotiation between religion and psychiatry in which the secondary aspects of ritual and teachings were being rejected in favour of different goals and secular forms of ceremony. This is of course not so much a particularity of psychedelic drugs, but of a historical era, in which New Age spirituality was becoming more predominant among certain sections of the middle-classes.
This process was not lost on contemporary theological critics. Wayne Oates, for example, a professor of the Psychology of Religion at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, recognized the importance of the Marsh Chapel experiment. For him, however, psychedelics were a method of emotional elevation rather than a direct ‘love of God’.
Oates argued that ‘Today we are caught between the “far-awayness” of such experiences as that of the Apostle Peter and the “way out” experience of the LSD enthusiast.’18 For him, secondary religious experience was the work of the Holy Spirit, and using psychedelics revealed an emotional failure in people’s lives due to a lack of religious affiliation.
Obviously the question of what role religion and spirituality played in mid-century America, especially Christianity, is a large one, far outside the remit of this short article. It is clear, however, that Christianity was a thread woven through psychospiritual research and experiments during the era. Moreover, it has been largely sidelined in commentary since, possibly due to the very process of secular deterritorialization its presence in psychedelic therapy exemplified.
The fact that there has always been a strong universalist Christian trend in North America might also indicate that it never actually fully went away, merely taking on a progressively new guise—but that again is a question for another time.
In the meantime…
Jay, Mike (2019) Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic. Yale University Press. 59
James, William (2012 [1902]) The Varieties of Religious Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 296
Huxley, Aldous (1946) The Perennial Philosophy. London: Chatto & Windus. 1
Bisbee et al. [Eds] (2018) Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond. McGill University Press. London. 30 & 79
Ibid 299
Richards, William (2016) Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experience. New York: Columbia University Press. 12
Pahnke, Walter (1963) Drugs and Mysticism: An analysis of the relationship between psychedelic drugs and the mystical consciousness. Harvard University. Unpublished PhD thesis
Braden, William (1967) The Private Sea and the Search for God. London: Pall Mall Press. 18
The most famous examples being The Psychedelic Experience: Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964) and Psychedelic Prayers: After the tao te ching (1964) by Timothy Leary et al.
Masters, Robert and Jean Houston (2000) The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The classic guise to the effects of LSD on the human psyche. Rochester: Park Street Press. 260
Richards 2016, 95 & 175
Clark, Walter Houston (1969) Chemical Ecstasy: Psychedelic Drugs and Religion. New York: Sheed & Ward. 3
Richards 2016, 81
Masters & Houston 2000, 277-278
Masters & Houston 2000, 265
Dunlap, Jane (1961) Exploring Inner Space. London: Scientific Book Club
Dunlap 1961, 188
Oates, Wayne E (1968) The Holy Spirit in Five Worlds. New York: Association Press. 21
Thank you for this timely article. As an Anglican priest (The Episcopal Church), the executive director of Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society, and a participant in the Hopkins/NYU religious, I am happy to report that there is growing interest in the intersection of psychedelics and Christian ritual and practice. Sadly, many American Protestants and evangelicals aren’t aware of and often disdainful of Christian ritual and spiritual practice. I believe that healing liturgies, rites of reconciliation, prayer and meditation, lectio divina, chanting, retreats can and should be part of psychedelic experiences for Christians. On retreat, holy Eucharist could begin and end a 3 day retreat. We don’t need to appropriate rituals and practices from other traditions. We have our own, used for millennia, to hold and facilitate experiences of God.
The NAC got its start in part when RLDS prophet Fred M. Smith became a user and advocate of peyote in the early 1900s, at one point as early as 1914 advocating its use from the pulpit. Smith was on friendly terms with native peyote users who initiated him into its use, and some of whom converted to the RLDS faith and later left for reasons having less to do with ‘Christian colonialism’ (whatever that undefined term means), and more about the Mormon prohibition against tobacco. Dig deeper and you’ll find the Christian connection to psychedelics has historical roots in Mormonism that precede the Good Friday experiment by decades to more than a century.