Evolutionary science has amassed much evidence that the ancestors of man were primate cousins living in the forests and grasslands of Africa. Religious origins certainly grew out of primitive man’s struggle to define and control his surroundings. Prehistoric man would have respected and hailed the elements such as lighting, thunder and fire for their frightening and destructive power; and he would also have had respect for power mind altering substances found in nature, the most powerful being grassland mushrooms containing psilocybin.

Religious scriptures from several traditions mention mind-altering substances directly, and some scholars believe many other passages contain metaphors for psychedelics. If this is true for the existing scriptures, and churches historically have condemned the practices, one can only imagine what the heavily edited and suppressed scriptures may have contained on this subject. I hope to illustrate a few examples of modern scholarship and anecdotes that point to mind-altering substances that may have shaped early religious visions, religious scripture, and even our own minds.

Psilocybin and mescaline are the active chemicals in many hallucinogenic compounds such as psychedelic mushrooms and peyote cactus. I will be using several interchangeable terms to describe psilocybin-containing substances, including hallucinogens, psychedelics, psilocybin, mushrooms and mind-altering or psychotropic drugs. The term Entheogen was popularized by Gordon Wasson, meaning “god containing,” and certain researchers such as Houston Smith prefer it to hallucinogens and psychedelics due to the negative connotations of these terms. Humanist scholar Terrence McKenna, on the other hand, calls entheogen “a clumsy word freighted with theological baggage” (Horgan, 177)


INDIA
In Gordon Wasson’s Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1967), he argues that the “Soma” mentioned in the Rig Vedas, the Sanskrit scriptures that formed the basis of Hinduism, was actually the amanita muscaria mushroom, also known as the fly agaric. Of the 1000 holy hymns in the Rig Veda, 120 are solely discussing Soma. He notes descriptions of its color, its high elevation growth and descriptions of the liquid tea made from the mushroom, as well as the described effects of the substance during the rituals. Hindu artwork and LSD-induced 1960's American artwork bear striking resemblances in their vivid color and vision content.

SAMPLE 1

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MIDDLE EAST
The Old Testament describes a food called manna in several places that lead many scholars to believe could be psychedelic mushrooms. John Allegro writes that manna, in the biblical book Numbers 11:6-9, is described in terms that are remarkably similar to the appearance and growing conditions of amanita muscaria mushrooms:

 

But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes. And the manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as the colour of bdelliaum. And the people went about and gathered it, and ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar and baked it in pans: and made cakes of it: and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh oil. And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell upon it.

Allegro was a brilliant linguist and the sole humanist scholar who was assigned to the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in the caves near the ruins known as Khirbet Qumran. He fell out of favor with the elder conservative translation team when he disagreed with their methods of secrecy. Allegro wrote several books on the implications of the scrolls. One of the books is titled The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, which argues that the early church portrayed ancient myths as historic facts, and information damaging to the church has been intentionally suppressed throughout history. Allegro points out that many times in the bible the word for “substance” is used when discussing rituals. Also the words flesh is used many times, the taking of flesh, the eating of God’s flesh, so much so that early Christians were accused by the Gnostics of being cannibals. Many passages have to do with anointing their bodies during ritual with sacred mixtures, and list some of the specific ingredients including heavy spices and perfumes. These rituals, which he argues include collecting semen and menstrual blood as part of the anointing, was called Agape, or the Love Feast, possibly a very old Pagan festival.

Another Allegro book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, explores the idea that early Christianity began with a psychedelic mushroom and sex cult. He writes that statements attributed to Jesus in the Book of John concerning life-giving bread takes on entire new meanings if read with this in mind. I find the argument compelling simply by re-reading the book of John:

Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness. As it is written, 'He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’ Jesus therefore said to them, “Most assuredly, I tell you, it wasn't Moses who gave you the bread out of heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread out of heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world.” They said therefore to him, "Lord, always give us this bread." Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will not be hungry, and he who believes in me will never thirst.”

Many more references to bread (dried mushroom) and flesh (fresh mushroom) and blood (mushroom tea) begin to make much more sense when regarded this way. John 6:49 states: “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.” This could allude to the fact that many wild mushrooms are poisonous, and this cult knew the way to differentiate. Allegro argues in Sacred Mushroom that Jesus was actually the mushroom itself, and the allegories attributed to him sound very odd when taken as literal, but fall into place when considering the mushroom angle. In this regard, the last supper also takes on new meaning, as he “turned on” his disciples for the last (or first) time.

Aldus Huxley, after describing the Christian church and alcohol as incompatible argues that the Christian religion would be better off using a transcendental substance such as mescalin rather that alchohol, which it tolerates.

The rites of Christianity are incompatible with even religious drunkenness…they take part in rites, they listen to sermons, they repeat prayers; but their thirst remains unassuaged. …The effective object of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria…

He continues:

Christianity and mescaline seem to be much more compatible. This has been demonstrated by many tribes of Indians, from Texas to as far north as Wisconsin. Among these tribes are to be found groups affiliated with the Native American Church, a sect whose principal rite is a kind of Early Christian agape, or love feast, where slices of peyote take the place of the sacramental bread and wine. These Native Americans regard the cactus as God's special gift to the Indians, and equate its effects with the workings of the divine Spirit. (Huxley)

The “forbidden fruit” mentioned in Genesis is also analogous to the later church-banned mushroom. The “fruit” opened the minds of the eaters and brought forth knowledge and loss of innocence. A 12 th century church in France depicts the forbidden fruit tree of Genesis as amanita muscaria mushroom bunch surrounded by Adam and Eve Just as the U.S. government quickly stopped its citizens from having mind-expanding substances in the 1960’s (under the guise of public safety,) the early Christian Church expunged this practice as well to keep a power hold over the citizenry (under threat of death.)

SOUTH & NORTH AMERICA
The Aztecs of pre-Columbian Mexico revered psilocybin mushrooms so much they named them Teonanacatl, meaning “flesh of the gods” or “divine flesh”. (Turner, p.27) Schultes and Hofmann write in Plants of the Gods that Central American cultures built temples to mushroom gods and carved "mushroom stones." These are found in Mexico & Guatemala and date between 1000 and 500 B.C.E.

Mushroom Stones of Central America

Hallucinogenic mushrooms have been used throughout Mexico, North America and Central America for hundreds of years for religious ecstasy. Upon arriving in Mexico in the 1500’s, Spanish priest Bernardino de Sahagun wrote on the use of mushrooms by the Aztecs:

The first thing to be eaten at the feast were small black mushrooms that they called nanacatl and bring on drunkenness, hallucinations and even lechery; they ate these before the dawn...with honey; and when they began to feel the effects, they began to dance, some sang and others wept... When the drunkenness of the mushrooms had passed, they spoke with one another of the visions they had seen. (Plants of the Gods)

 

The Aztecs of pre Colonial and Colonial Mexico used a number of hallucigenic plants, including Psilocybin Mushrooms, Datura, Salvia Divinorem, Peyote, and Morning Glory. The Spanish Christians stamped out the use of these as much as possible. (Plants of the Gods)


EUROPE
The mushroom amanita muscaria was well known to the Koryak tribesmen of Kamchatka in Siberia. The nobles would trade furs and goods for the collected mushrooms and eat them indoors during secret rituals. The poor would know when their rituals were occurring, and would wait outside under roofs or with bowls to collect and drink the urine of the affected men. The urine would be as potent in psilocybin as the original mushroom, and the alkaline effect would make the mushroom’s physical side effects even less severe. Many of the Christian symbols and traditions associated with its holidays were borrowed from earlier Pagan holidays.

James Arthur in Mushrooms and Mankind writes that many of the symbols of Christmas come from Siberia where the amanita muscaria mushrooms were used. Reindeer are naturally attracted to the mushrooms, and the myth is that they fly on Christmas Eve. Red and white gifts are placed under an evergreen tree, and the red and white amanita mushrooms grow under these trees in Siberia. Mushrooms were traditionally strung up and draped across the fireplace mantle to dry, and limp stockings are strung across the mantle today.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were secret fertility rites that lasted up to 2,000 years in ancient Greece. The rites at Eleusis are thought to be of a highly sexual nature, and were accompanied by a mysterious brew that produced ecstasy. Gordon Wasson has proposed that the active ingredient in the brew was Ergot, a psychotropic fungus that grows on barley, rye and wheat. The early Christian Church fathers condemned the Eleusinian rituals, yet they persisted for another few hundred more years.

MODERN STUDIES OF ETHNOGENS Western study of hallucinogenic substances began in 1890’s when Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell studied the peyote cactus that was revered by the Mexican Indians. Gordon Wasson is also credited with beginning the second explosion in scholarly interest of psychotropic compounds. Wasson first wrote Seeking the Magic Mushroom, a 1957 Life Magazine article on the use of psilocybin mushrooms by the Maztec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico. The article had a profound effect in the U.S., with many traveling to the same Mexican village to experience the same mushroom ceremony as Wasson, the famous Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary among them. Leary later stated, "I learned more in six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist." By 1960 Leary had convinced Harvard to let him study the compounds with his assistant, Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass.) In 1962 the psychologists added LSD to the list of compounds being studied.

Albert Hoffman synthesized LSD from ergot compounds (a fungus) and ingested the chemical himself as an experiment. He later noted that after a series of disorienting and horrific hallucinations, the experience gave rise to “a feeling of good fortune and gratitude…the world was as if newly created.” Leary went on to champion the idea of widespread usage of LSD, saying it was a sacrament everyone should enjoy, while Huxley believed LSD should be used as a reward for the intellectual elite. Many writers credit Leary and the thousands of artists and college students that used LSD for the revolutionary attitudes that launched the Vietnam era anti-war movement.

Nine years turned out to be the window scientists had to study psilocybin, LSD and similar compounds before the U.S. federal government made it illegal to possess or study them. Many scientists had no idea their study would be so limited, and had only begun to work on them. However, Leary and Alpert had very interesting results with studies in that time in regard to prison recidivism (LSD), and enlightening communication between disgruntled married couples (MDMA) (Doblin and Forcier.) Studies since have been forbidden with these substances, much to the disgust of U.S. scientists.

Some scholars have argued that psilocybin and related compounds could have even shaped the way the human mind is developed today. Ethno-botanist and scholar Terrence McKenna writes in Food of the Gods that possibly for a hundred thousand years or more, our proto-human ancestors’ tendencies to form dominant hierarchies using violence and intimidation was interrupted by psilocybin use. The mushrooms readily available in the Paleolithic diets, he argues, would have given an evolutionary advantage to these early primates. In low dosages, the mushrooms would have given rise to better visual acuity, leading to better hunting skills. At the National Institute of Mental Health, Fisher verified this idea with students by giving them low dosages of psilocybin. Their visual edge detection improved (Omni). In medium dosages, heightened sexual arousal would have lead to more orgiastic sex, and therefore more pregnancy. In higher dosages, ego-dissolving states would be reached, as well as the full-blown psychedelic experience, “about which we are as uninformed and as easily amazed as our remote ancestors were.” (Omni).

With a newfound respect for these substances, he argues, our ancestors would have limited the mind-expanding trips to special events and rituals, possibly at each bright full moon, giving rise to the lunar cults of Pagan descendants. With no more than a few weeks between these ego-dissolving states, he proposes that our primate-dominant instincts could be suppressed and could give way to advanced language usage, artistic creativity and communal child rearing, made possible by boundary dissolution. This could have been happening for as much as a half-million years, he argues, shaping much culturally of what we think of as being human. Eventually the substances were scarce and impossible to find in such quantities due to climate change and nomadic traveling. It is when these substances disappeared, he says, accompanied by agriculture, that our original ego rose again: “The bestial nature, the animal nature, that had been suppressed by the psilocybin in the diet, re-emerged, so you get male dominance, standing armies, kingship, walled cities, the whole bit that leads to western civilization.” (Fraber)

McKenna goes one stranger than this. He also postulates that spores from these mushrooms could contain an alien intelligence that is much older than life on Earth. Studies conducted by astrophysicists in the Netherlands have discovered that certain mushroom spores could survive a supernova and subsequent interstellar travel for up to 45 million years in the vacuum of space (Turner, 28)

ENTHEOGENS AS GNOSIS
My interest in psychedelics was greatly defined when I tried psilocibe semilanceata, a common American psilocybin mushroom, twice in the 90’s. I remember telling myself during the high point of the event that this was a religious experience, as close as I’ve been to a mystical experience, and that I must do this with semi-regularity, as a ritual, to keep in touch and reconnect to whatever these sensations were.

The perceptions I had were extraordinary in every sense. I was able to change the color of objects at will. The clouds seemed to race by faster than time would allow, and I could slow them down for fun. I understood spatial relationships in a completely new way, such as the distance from myself to a tree compared to the distance from the tree to the moon. I seemed to have a newfound empathy with other people and could sense where their thoughts were coming from before they spoke, or if their speech agreed with what they thought internally. But the indescribable part of each event was the feeling of unity with creation, the realization that life was incredibly complex and interesting, and the accompanying optimism that came with these feelings.

It is easy to stand back as a disgruntled scholar or scripture apologist and dismiss ideas of mushroom cults without having had the experience. McKenna jokes,” The theory I'm putting forth--to disprove it you would have to get your feet wet and get stoned. Anybody who doesn't want to do that should rule themselves off the case. So that presents academic types with a real problem.”

Accompanying our loss of touch with these experiences as a societal tool, Huxley, McKenna and others describe mankind trapped in a teaching system for the masses based on descriptions of events, and not the direct gnosis itself. This illustrates the fundamental split from Newtonian physics (maps of reality) to quantum physics (reality does not exist without the mapmaker). Huxley in Doors of Perception writes:

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's.

 

The removal of these psychedelic experiences from mankind, even for a select few “sanctioned” users, whose role it would be to impart the collected gnosis, may be leaving an experiential void in humanity. The hallucinogenic drug literature, a small library to be sure, still is filled with amazing accounts of the personal experiences of psychedelic use, mostly in small anecdotal form by their authors.

Huston Smith’s most important mystical experiences, he tells John Horgan in Rational Mysticism, were entheogenic. A few hours after Timothy Leary gave him two capsules of mescaline, he described seeing the reality described in the Hindu Vedas and other mystical texts. He was seeing “through the mundane reality around him to the ground of being, the clear light of the void underlying all things.”

Smith has been cautious about revealing his entheogenic events, fearing misunderstanding, realizing the dangers involved for the uninitiated and also realizing that entheogens alone do not constitute a spiritual path.

As frightening as lightning and thunder was be for prehistoric man, as awe inspiring a raging fire would be to a primitive mind--a psilocybin trip seems to trump all these emotional events with plenty to spare. Entheogen use, if temporarily, may also eclipse the experiential rewards of meditation, flagellation, fast, and all forms of mind alteration through denial or exciting of sense. Huxley argues that if such practices are meant to ultimately change brain chemistry enough to have a mind-altering experience, wouldn’t one then prefer a substance that drastically and safely changes brain chemistry in a desired direction?

If primitive man and early Pagan cults were ingesting these substances, they were surely being temporarily ripped out of their worldview, what ever it consisted of, and experiencing the world at a quantum mechanical level, an awe-inspiring all-encompassing matrix, millennia before these ideas were described by the Hindu Vedas and later, modern physics. The power of the psilocybin experience, the availability, and the matching descriptions throughout art and scripture lead me to believe that entheogens played a significant role in early religion formation.


BOOKS ON ENTHEOGENS



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Works Cited
Horgan, John (2003). Rational Mysticism. Boston & New York. Houghton Mifflin. Wasson, R. Gordon. (1967),

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Harcourt. Numbers 11:6 through 9 Allegro, John M. (1984).

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. New York. Prometheus
Books. Allegro, John M. (1970).

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and
Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East. Hodder
and Stoughton. John 6:31-35 Huxley, Aldus. (1954).

The Doors of Perception. Harper and Brothers. Turner, D. M. (1994). The Essential Psychedelic Guide. San Francisco. Panther Press. Schultes, Richard Evans ; Hofmann, Albert; Ratsch, Christian. (2002).

Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred,
Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers. Healing Art Press.
Arthur, James. (2003).

Mushrooms and Mankind. The Book tree. SAS. (1999). The History Of Substance Control As It Relates To Religious Persecution and Discrimination During The Medieval And American Colonial Periods < http://entheogen.netfirms.com/articles/articles/substance.html > Doblin, Rick and Forcier, Ph.D., Michael. (1992-93).

A Long-Term Follow-Up to Dr. Timothy Leary's 1961-1962 Concord State Reformatory Rehabilitation Study. from the Newsletter of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Social Science Research & Evaluation, Inc. Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
< http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v03n4/03404lea.html >

McKenna, Terrence. (1993). Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge:
A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. Bantam. OMNI Magazine.(May 1993).

Interview with Terrence McKenna.< http://www.deoxy.org/t_omni.htm > Fraber, Philip H. (1999).

Terence McKenna: Mushrooms Sex and Society. Reprinted from New History Magazine (June 1993). < http://members.aol.com/discord23/mckenna.htm >

Photographs
Figure 1. Dr. Donald Huber . The Hebrew Tradition, Genesis and Exodus. Slide 16.
< http://www.sewanee.edu/humanities/huber/hebrew/>

Figure 2a and 2b.
Snow, Joel. Meso-American Mushroom Stones . < http://physics.lunet.edu/~snow/stone.html>