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In 1962, an experiment by Harvard graduate student Walter N. Pahnke, supervised by Timothy Leary (the influential ‘counter-cultural’ advocate of psychedelics), named the “Good Friday Experiment” took place. Inspired in part by Indigenous use of psychedelics, the study sought to determine if the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms could induce a religious, spiritually-affirming experience.
All non-placebo participants were given 10 milligrams of psilocybin. Then, they listened to a Good Friday service in the basement of a church. Afterward, each reported that the mushrooms evoked feelings of awe and divine ineffability. Famously, the experiment concluded that ingesting the psychedelics spurred a profound mystical state.
A 1991 study by Rick Dublin, the head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), confirmed these results by interviewing the original participants 30 years later. The participants uniformly maintained that it was one of the most consequential experiences of their lives. However, in the subsequent decades since that original study, federal scheduling of classic psychedelics virtually halted research.
Now, after the emergence of psychedelic churches and a loosening of regulatory measures around research, researchers released a study in the lineage of the “Good Friday Experiment.” This one takes Pahnke’s study even further. Instead of non-religious laity ingesting the psychedelic capsule and having a transcendent experience, it was 30 religious leaders. The participants (pastors, scholars, clergy), who hold disparate religious beliefs—Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist—were given psychedelics in a controlled, clinical environment.
High Divinity: New Research on Religion and Psychedelics
Like the “Good Friday Experiment,” the new study found that consuming psilocybin capsules facilitated a distinctly religious contact with a creator. For the participants, this seemed to deepen their spirituality and, for many, further solidified their religious convictions.
Of the 30 participants, 92% found it to be one of the top five “profoundly sacred” experiences of their lives. They also gained the traditional psychological benefits. For example, 83% found it one of the most “psychologically insightful” moments of their lives.
After interviewing many of the study’s participants, author Micheal Pollan said that virtually all the participants encountered the divine. Their ingestion of psilocybin, these religious leaders—who had all been worshipping and even preaching to others of the enigmatic contour of their God—experientially felt God. In short, psychedelics brought them into immanent communion with the transcendent beyond, whatever that may be. For the Buddhist, this was presumably not in the form of a creator, but instead voidness itself.
Nearly all the religious leaders described their psilocybin trip as sacred or mystical. But, for some, it was not what they expected. The particularity of their religion was, in some instances, universalized. Pollan quotes one rabbi who says, “All the truths are in all the religions, the active ingredients are all the same.”
One participant, a Christian, had a vision of a Hindu God. Many leaders felt the presence of a divine being, not as a patriarchal Father, but instead a maternal Mother.
While researchers conducted the study in 2016, it was not published until this year—nearly a decade later. While its results corroborate similar findings from other studies from the 1960s to today, there were concerns with the study.
The study was delayed primarily due to accusations regarding a financial conflict of interest. A member of the research team funded the research. Ordinarily, researchers should have no monetary investment in the study. Additionally, two researchers did not obtain Institutional Review Board approval. This study, like others similar to it, has the issue of small sample sizes and self-selection (participants responded to an ad for the study). Following an intensive review, the peer-reviewed journal Psychedelic Medicine finally published the study.
Religion—With a Kaleidoscopic Twist
Outside the empirical findings of the study, the participants’ actions following the study offer a glimpse into the potential of psychedelics. One participant began an organization dedicated to psychedelics, related to Christianity, though certainly outside the mainstream in its sacrament. Hunt Priest, a somewhat unorthodox Christian pastor, started the Christian Psychedelic Society, Ligare.
Priest’s participation in the study directly animated this psychedelically oriented institution. The organization seeks to unite psychedelic experiences of divinity with Christian beliefs. They state on their website: “We believe psychedelics may be used sacramentally as a way of experiencing God’s grace.”
Twenty years ago, around 42% of Americans consistently attended church or some religious service. Today that number is around 30%, according to Gallup research. To Priest and those at Ligare, incorporating psychedelics into religious practice could be the anecdote to dwindling numbers of church-goers and clergy-members.
Ligare seems to ask: Could the presence of divinity, offered by psychedelics, act as an authentic supplement to religious practices?
While research on psychedelics as a medicine is proliferating, research on psychedelics and spirituality is less prevalent. Can such research reshape how people approach faith and meaning? In a secular world that often appears meaningless and alienating to so many, psychedelics could, potentially—with the correct arrangement of preparation, chemical, guide, and receptiveness—bring a new orientation to religiosity.
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