Holy magic mushrooms
Clergy in study of drug’s effect on spiritual practice
Moses saw a burning bush. Paul saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. St. Teresa had ecstatic visions.
When psychologist William Richards looks at religion, he sees mystical experiences everywhere. The same sort of experiences, he reasons, that come from mind-altering drugs.
That’s why he’s giving magic mushrooms to religious leaders, for a research project based at Johns Hopkins University and New York University.
“There are — it’s so hard to put this into language — sacred eternal experiences that the human being is capable of having. They seem to be at the origin of most religions,” he said. “What we call the eternal seems incredibly real.”
In the Hopkins and NYU study, two dozen clergy — including priests, pastors and rabbis — are taking controlled doses of psilocybin, the drug found in psychedelic mushrooms, under the watchful eye of scientists.
Richards won’t say much about what has been happening when the clergy try the drugs, in Baltimore and New York settings that resemble living rooms more than laboratories. That’s all part of the ongoing study, which he and his fellow researchers will eventually publish.
What he will say is that when he’s administered psilocybin to research subjects before — studying its potential as a treatment for anxiety and depression — religious imagery tends to come up a lot. Through this study, he hopes to learn about the drug’s effect on spiritual practice; he’ll follow up with the clergy for two years to see how their approach to the mystical is, or is not, altered by their encounter with the drug.
“People see incredible things with their eyes closed that are often very, very beautiful,” including visions of Jesus, he said. “That seems to happen whether people are of religious training or not. It doesn’t seem to be something that’s learned. It seems to be something that’s genetic.”
Religious authorities have typically not looked favourably upon drug use. Some faiths, like Islam and Mormonism, ban all intoxicating substances.
The United Methodist Church, the largest mainline Protestant denomination in the U.S., opposes the use of all psychedelics or hallucinogens “except in cases of appropriate medical supervision.”
When revered rabbinic leader Menachem Schneerson was asked in a letter about LSD in the 1960s, he wrote back that the drug “is not the proper way to attain mystical inspiration, even if it had such a property. The Jewish way is to go from strength to strength, not by means of drugs and other artificial stimulants, which have a place only if they are necessary for the physical health.”
But the Hopkins researchers have found Christian, Jewish and Buddhist clergy willing to participate anonymously in their study. Richards says he’s still hoping to recruit Hindu and Muslim leaders as well. To reduce the risk of adverse drug effects, the researchers first screen clergy for a history of heart, kidney and psychological illnesses.
Richards first tried psilocybin when he was a research subject himself, a 23-year-old graduate student in Germany in 1963. Since then, he has conducted numerous studies on the drug’s effects, becoming convinced that even onetime use helps patients reduce the severity of anxiety and depression.
He compares drug trips to other “unique states of human consciousness,” including sensory deprivation, overstimulation and even childbirth.
When people experience religious visions, he says, those visions are always influenced by bodily chemistry — whether brought on by stress, by fasting, or in the case of religious groups that employ drugs like peyote in their rituals, by substance use.
That’s not to say that God isn’t working through the chemical compounds. “The deep mystical experiences are always discovered as gifts received,” he said. “That’s what we call grace, religiously.”