The History of Religious Use of Psychedelics in the New World

by Ronald W. McNutt

The Religious Use of Psychedelics in the New World

Ron McNutt, May 2022

The plant hallucinogens or entheogens are a great vehicle for the Holy Spirit when used with reverence and sincerity. They are now giving back to the descendants of their former persecutors the mystical vision to foster true aliveness for spiritual traditions that are in need of spiritual vitality. In the New World, psychedelics have been at the deep center of community spiritual understandings since before the Europeans arrived. The major psychedelics, psilocybin, peyote, ayahuasca, San Pedro, ololiuqui, and yopo, were held in the highest esteem by the native peoples, used for healing, divination, and cultural incorporation in rites of passage. The severe repression of the Inquisition led to the tradition becoming obscured in secrecy to outsiders.

The colonial powers persecuted the use of plant hallucinogens in the New World, where the Spanish encountered traditions and cultures that used psychedelic plants, such as teonanacatl, peyotl, and ololiuqui, in Central and South America. The Holy Inquisition of Mexico issued a proclamation in 1616 ordering the persecution and excommunication of those who would be under the influence of, “herbs and roots with which they lose and confound their senses, and the illusions and fantastic representations they have, judge and proclaim afterwards as revelation, or true notice of things to come…” Indians and Spanish would face flogging or execution for using herbs and roots to “lose and confound their senses,” claim to receive revelations, or receive knowledge of the future.

Ancient sculptures show that sacred mushrooms were used in central America and Mexico for over a thousand years. Ceramic figures with mushroom-like headdresses have been dated from 160 A.D. In Guatemala, southern Mexico, and El Salvador, mushroom stones date from one thousand years B.C.E. They are often paired with animals associated with shamanism. When Cortez conquered Mexico, his followers noticed the Aztecs eating mushrooms in a religious setting and calling them God’s flesh or teonanacatl. Historical literature shows that a tradition of using psilocybin mushrooms goes back before the Spanish conquest. Spanish writings in the 1500s from Francisco Hernandez, a physician in the court of the King, and Bernardino Sahagun, a Franciscan friar, and another friar, Diego Duran, described the sacred mushroom divination rituals.

A book in 1629 of collections from Nahuatl (a region in Mexico and Central America that included the Aztec people) had descriptions of a pattern of chanting by Indians of that day which were found by investigators to be employed in the 1950s in a small area of the Western Sierra Madre Mountains: professions of humility, claiming an ability to be able to talk to supernatural beings, and referencing a book of knowledge that was gifted from long before.

The New World had widespread use of an inhaled entheogen called cohoba powder, popularly called yopo, (Anadenanthera peregrina) which was in use at the time the Spanish came to Hispaniola under Columbus. Cohoba was the active ingredient in psychedelic snuff preparations by indigenous cultures of the Caribbean, Central and South America since pre-Columbian times. Cohoba powder snuff is described in writings by missionaries and explorers in 1560 and 1599 as being in general use throughout the New World, including early Central American people.

The West Indian indigenous societies did not survive contact with the Spanish. The practice of inhaling cohoba disappeared in most regions along with the aboriginal people of the West Indies and other areas of the New World. Literature from the time showed that the explorers regarded the hallucinogenic snuff, also called Yopa or Jopa, as an instrument of the devil. Recorded history chronicles Cohoba’s dramatic psychoactive effects centuries, but it was obscured after the practice had largely been wiped out, except in remote areas.

In 1801, Alexander von Humboldt reported cohoba powder still in use in Orinoco River basin area of Colombia and Venezuela border, which, along with the area of northern Brazil, was regarded as the center of its use. The eminent ethnobotanist Richard Spruce documented its use and collected samples of it along with snuffing tubes in 1851 that were recently identified. In the Orinoco region of western Brazil, and other areas, yopo use has continued among various indigenous groups to the present day.

Peyote has been in use ceremonially for 5000 years. Articles in 2002 and 2005 describe how a team of scientists from Sweden and the Netherlands proved that Native Americans used peyote as long ago as 5700 years earlier. The scientists did a chemical analysis of two dried peyote buttons in the collection of the Witte Museum in San Antonio, which were thought to be from the Shumla Cave number five on the Rio Grande. Using radiocarbon dating and alkaloid analysis, their age was identified as being between 3780 to 3660 B.C. The analysis found alkaloids of mescaline. Some samples from an archeological site in Coahuila, Mexico showed peyote with radiocarbon testing dated to 810 to 1070 C.E., about 1000 years old.

For centuries the Wixárika people, who have been called the Huichol in Spanish, have lived harmoniously with the forces of nature in a sustainable way in the Sierra Madre Occidental, in northwestern Mexico. The Huichols practice the oldest current tradition of religious usage of peyote. Their practices include going from their various mountain villages on annual pilgrimages in groups to harvest peyote and visit their sacred ancestral land in semi-desert areas. Their harvest rituals include ceremonially hunting the peyote, calling it the little deer, and they offer prayers to it and thanks for its body and its spiritual essence.

Peyote is a spiritual medicine that brought healing and salvation to North American Indians beginning in the late 1800s. Peyote use was observed by missionaries in Texas in 1760, who viewed use of peyote by the Indigenous as a problem, and it was common among Mexican tribes who viewed peyote as a divine being. After the Civil War, there was more contact between tribes between Mexico and the United States. Peyote use spread from the north of Mexico to Texas and the plains by the Kiowa and Comanche tribes after they visited Mexican tribes, the Carrizo, Tonkawa, Lipan, and Mescalero. They became the primary leaders of the spread of peyote through the plains along with the Caddo.

It is the sacrament at the center of The Native American Church of North America. Ceremonies vary between tribes, and they take place from sunset to sunrise. The Kiowa-Comanche ceremony is the prototype for peyote ceremonies of the plains Indians. Peyote is regarded as a divine messenger and respected for its “medicine power.” There is drumming with a water drum, a fire chief who brings water at midnight, and people offer songs and prayers of devotion and supplication seeking blessings from God. The Native American Church of North America is composed of many tribes with similar traditions, embracing profound respect for the higher power that they experience through their vision. Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanche had a dual heritage. He was a principal founder of the Native American Church, and it had healed him of a blood infection.

In addition to its spiritual properties, peyote is an antibiotic and antiseptic. Ceremonies may center on native doctoring and purification, using sacred elements such as water, tobacco, sage, feathers and bird imagery, and fire. The important elements of the ceremony include half-moon earth altar, songs of praise and devotion, the staff, the kettle water drum, the gourd rattle, the eagle wing bone whistle, and the prayers with tobacco.

People in the circle take turns offering four songs, under the guidance of the roadman, to encourage their minds to see the spirit. Eating the peyote in ceremony with chanting takes those assembled to the peyote road where visions pass between God and the participants. Adherents state that they experience sustaining visions that draw the community together and offer an ecstatic renewal that is the root of lives of love and service.

An ancient stone glyph, or stone relief, excavated at a temple in the northern highlands of Peru, from the Chavin culture, shows a spirt entity holding a stalk of the San Pedro cactus. It has serpentine hair and a serpent belt, fangs, and harpy eagle claws. It is the earliest depiction of a relationship with this mescaline-containing plant, and shows that San Pedro cactus was revered by South American cultures as early as 1300 B.C. It is a tall cactus that grows from sea level to altitudes of 3000 meters. Ceramics from later cultures of the area from 1000 B.C. to 700 B.C. and textiles hundreds of years old also show images of the cactus. Its use was widespread in the regions of the Andes mountains and it was in cultivation but encountered severe persecution after the Spanish conquest, beginning with a campaign to extirpate “idolatry” in the 1600s.

Scientists have found the chemical components of ayahuasca in a cave in the Bolivian Andes 13,000 feet high, and recently showed they were in use around 1000 years ago. In an article published in Science magazine in May 2019, a team of scientists revealed the results of a chemical analysis from this archeological find from 2008. They were part of a group of medicine plants that were dated in a study by the tools for powdering and insufflating them. Dust and debris with harmine, dimethyltryptamine, along with cocaine and bufotenine. These are the essential ingredients of ayahuasca, ordinarily made with the plants, chacruna (Psychotria viridis) and ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) which would grow in the areas of the upper Amazon but the presence of bufotenine indicates that the powder included yopo seeds. These ingredients must have been highly valued because they had been carried far from where they would grow to a burial site location high up in the Andes.

The earliest writings about the ceremonial use of ayahuasca were produced from a perspective that was hostile to practices of employing plant hallucinogens historical records of the Spanish Catholic Church, which was a force of persecution and domination. Having called for repression and death for those who claimed to experience revelations by using roots and herbs, the traditions practicing use of ayahuasca suffered and diminished as a result of contact with the European culture.

In the 1600s and 1700s, Jesuits observed natives using ayahuasca in the Marañón River area. The Marañón runs northwest from a glacier high up in the Andes mountains through Peru along the eastern edge of the Andes. Then, the Marañón turns east and flows into plains and meets the Ucayali River and together they form the Amazon River.

One of the earliest sources documenting ayahuasca use is from Father José Chantre y Herrera, compiled from historical documents of the Jesuit missionaries in the Marañón River area from the time between 1637 and 1767. He included a clear description of an ayahuasca ritual using a liana, or woody vine, with other plants. He described how there would be a night-long divination ceremony held in a house suited to hold many people, with benches placed for the men on one side, and open space for the women on the other. The leader would be in the middle seated on a hammock with a platform beside him, and, Herrera stated, places beside it “an infernal beverage that they call ayahuasca, which is singularly efficient in depriving one of one’s senses.” He continued, “They make the concoction of lianas or bitter herbs, which, after a great deal of boiling, becomes very thick.” Pablo Maroni was a Jesuit missionary in the Marañón River area in 1738 to 1740. He also described sessions with leaders who would use a liana, or woody vine, called ayahuasca, for divination.

In 1853, Richard Spruce, an English botanist, collected the ayahuasca vine and in his travels, he observed it being used in the upper Amazon valley in ceremonies. In November 1852 he drank ayahuasca at a Feast of Gifts among the Tukano on the Rio Uapes, or Vaupés River, a tributary of the Rio Negro, in Amazonas, northwestern Brazil near the Colombian border. Some ethnobotanists believe it spread from the Tukano tribal region near the Colombian Amazon north and south along the Rio Napo possibly with the disruption and movement associated with the first rubber boom from 1879 to 1912.

In Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and other areas, healers have employed ayahuasca in ritual ceremonies to diagnose and ward off disease in keeping with folk beliefs that disease and misfortune arise from malevolent supernatural forces. Ayahuasca in the past was used communally and now helps the community by helping people be healthy. It is a spiritual medicine that helps ordinary people by promoting mindfulness and clarity, cleansing and protecting the body, and increasing agility and problem-solving ability. It has anti-inflammatory properties and stimulates neurogenesis. Its purgative properties and medical uses lead many to call ayahuasca “the medicine.”

Early explorers in South America found many Indian villages along the Amazon and other areas. Ayahuasca use has been concentrated in the Amazon–Orinoco area. Some groups restrict its use to shamans. In the areas of the Uaupés River, however, it has played a central role in religious festivals for people that portray truths from cultural myths. Shamans sometimes would lead ceremonies. The Kamsa and Inga of the Valley of Sibundoy. The Kofán people may have as many payés for their size as any indigenous community.

Healers in the Peruvian area are called vegetalistas because they have gained wisdom and healing ability from the plants and the visions they impart. They view plants added to ayahuasca as “plant teachers” that have spirits and intelligence. The medicine has expanded its territorial range in the past fifty years.

Jose Gabriel da Costa, known as Mestre Gabriel, was the founder of Centro Espirita Beneficente União do Vegetal, the largest, most organized, and most recent of the three main ayahuasca churches in Brazil. União do Vegetal means “union of the plants” in Portuguese, and is a reference to the vine and the leaf, which combine to give the medicine its powerful effect. Mestre Gabriel first had ayahuasca on April 1, 1959 at the Guarapari rubber camp, on the border between Brazil and Boliva. He developed devotional songs and practices. He founded the church on July 22, 1961, near Rondonia in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil, and moved it to Porto Velho in 1965, and it is now centered at the capitol of Brasilia, with centers throughout the world. His purpose was “to heighten spiritual understanding and perception and bring practitioners closer to God.” His vision drew on deeper mysteries that he felt had been lost and rediscovered.

Raimundo Irineu Serra, Mestre Irineu, was born in 1892 and grew to be seven feet tall. He founded Santo Daime, an ayahuasca religion, in 1930 in Rio Branco. He had gone to the western part of Brazil from a poor area in northern Brazil in 1912 to work in rubber tapping, but that industry began to collapse. He was initiated into the mysteries of ayahuasca by indigenous shamans in the upper Amazon near the border with Bolivia. He had a series of visions and revelations that included a vision of the Divine Mother who identified herself as “the queen of the forest.”

Mestre Irineu was a Black man from a slave tradition. He was inspired to form the religion Santo Daime, which combined the medicine practice with African, Christian and folk traditions with teachings about reincarnation and karma and Christian theology. He was not able to read and write, and he composed hymns used in the services that came to him from the medicine, and his followers wrote them down. The services open and close with Christian prayers and there is an emphasis on preparation beforehand for appropriate dedication. After Mestre Irineu died in 1971, different branches and communities formed. The original community continues to function in the same place. Around 1980, Sebastiao Mota de Melo (Padrinho Sebastiao) formed a church and community centered on Santo Daime in Amazonas State, Brazil. This is the branch of Santo Daime that has the most practitioners, up to 10,000, and helped to spread this type of ayahuasca church to many places around the world.

Recent traditional applications:

The study of these alkaloids included a significant discovery, when Arthur Heffter identified mescaline in 1897 and it was synthesized several years later, in 1919. The field exploded with the discovery of LSD in 1943. Not long after revelation of traditional use of psilocybin in 1957, LSD was being studied, with mescaline, first as a way to create psychotic or schizophrenic states, and then as a possible way to help people recover from alcoholism. LSD was marketed in the 1950s for use in psychological research and psychotherapy. There was a proponent of psychedelic therapy, Al Hubbard, who emphasized set and setting. People began to have mystical experiences in comfortable rooms with music.

Psilocybin mushrooms and synthetic psilocybin have especially great potential for healing when used in a religious context. The many varieties of psilocybin-containing mushrooms were part of a larger religion that was suppressed and persecuted by the colonial powers, and were rediscovered in a remote part of the western Sierra Madre mountains in the mid-1950s. They come to us in the context of a group of devout Mexican Indians who incorporated Christian practices into their nighttime vigils.

Psychedelics alter perception of sensory information — our thoughts, our emotions, and our interpretations of memories and sensations. They can facilitate an emotional release and a new level of acceptance, a rebirth experience of spiritual awakening. It can come in the form of a near-death experience that yields to a non-dual experience of unity and oneness, and a transpersonal identity with nature and the universe. The early phase can be chaotic and persist in confusion, especially about one’s self-image and relation to the reality of every day. This is usually followed by an integration phase, a synthesis of the threads of thoughts coalescing, and an uplifting afterglow. This brings an opportunity for transformation, greater aliveness, and deeper soul connection. An awakening with psychedelics can break barriers of self-imposed limitations and facilitate a transformation of how we see ourselves as part of creation, as an actor in the social systems in which we participate. It can present an invitation, an opening, to new traditions, and a loosening of the ways we identify with our cultural heritage and upbringing.

Research is proving the benefit of psychedelics in helping relieve treatment resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder and promoting spiritual experiences that ease the fear of death.

For people with sensitive feelings and curious minds, the psychedelic experience can bring an intensity of introspection and examination that inspires a deep conviction, confidence, and appreciation of oneself and close ones. There may be an encounter with fear, remorse, and trauma, which are brought to awareness as part of an inner process of opening and shedding resistance and isolation or dependency on others for approval. The psychedelic journey can lead you to identify and embrace another “you” that is wounded where it meets you, but which is vast and conscious and beyond space and time. Scientists and clinicians in the field allow the process to be directed from within the subject as part of a natural process.

The psychedelic experience can seem remarkably familiar, yet deeper, and call for one to modify one’s priorities based upon insight and recognition of deeper levels of experience and compassion. An inner process from the depths of the unconscious provides healing encounters by allowing a suspended ego to stand by as unconscious material manifests experiences and realizations that can be life-enhancing with appropriate preparation and integration. The experience can lead to a suspension of the sense of self and bring about possible ego dissolution, a feeling of oneness, like what could result from prolonged prayer or a vision quest. The psychedelic experience can be a liberation for an individual. People may detach and move away from practices and activities that no longer serve them. The experience can take the form of disenchantment, a disillusionment with social hierarchies and expectations. It can generate the desire to seek a greater sense of connection and to live with a deeper sense of meaning, informed by the gratitude and forgiveness that can feel like a soul healing and a renewal that is welcomed by the person’s family and friends.

Western Culture rediscovers the Mushroom Ceremonies:

Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, was an adventurous botanist who became a professor in the botany department at Harvard University in 1970 and the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum. He is credited with founding the modern field of ethnobotany. He did his undergraduate thesis while at Harvard, in 1936 on the ritual use of peyote among the Kiowa tribe in Oklahoma, studying with an anthropology graduate student from Yale, Weston La Barre. They went to numerous villages and participated in about three peyote ceremonies per week, which would last all night, led by a roadman using a water drum, with the participants seated upright and taking turns chanting. He developed a deep affection for these experiences beyond description and for his colleague and the elders of the tradition.

His research helped lead to the discovery of the hallucinogenic teonanacatl of the Aztecs. Dr. Schultes found a letter from an Austrian in Mexico, Blas Pablo Reko, about the use of divine mushrooms, and he traveled to Oaxaca in 1936 to meet him. In the village of Huatla de Jimines, he acquired a dozen fresh mushrooms that later would be identified as Psilocybe cubensis and Panaeolus campanulatus. In 1939, he returned and explored with a guide and they located another Aztec teacher plant, ololiuqui, vine of the serpent, at a curandero’s home in San Juan Lalana. He earned his Ph.D. in botany in 1941 describing these entheogens and their history of sacramental use.

He traveled in the Colombian Amazon for years beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, and collected over 24,000 species of plants, about 300 of which had not been named by western science. He befriended shamans and elders from many indigenous groups. He authored The Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants (1976) and with Albert Hofmann, he collaborated on books including the 1973 book, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens, which also revealed the mysterious interplay in ayahuasca of DMT and the harmine and harmaline mono amine oxidase inhibitors, manifesting a profound psychedelic effect. They also authored Plants of the Gods in 1979, where they wrote how the plants had been sacred to the past and present indigenous spiritual history: “A few plants had inexplicable effects that transported the human mind to realms of ethereal wonder — in communication with the spirit world. It is little wonder that they have long played an important role in religious rites of early civilizations and are still venerated by people who remain part of ancient traditions.”

The 1953 Velada of don Aurelio Carreras:

In 1952, Robert Graves wrote to R. Gordon Wasson and Tina Wasson, who were investigating the role of mushrooms in society, about traditional use of psychedelic mushrooms in Mexico. On August 15, 1953, while traveling with Roberto Weitlaner, the Wassons had a session with don Aurelio Carreras in Huatla de Jiminez, with his son Demetrio serving as interpreter. Mr. Wasson revealed that their host would provide amazingly accurate telepathic information to the Wassons. Mr. Wasson wrote about that this velada, or sacred mushroom ceremony, in Persephone’s Quest, stating that don Aurelio was a curandero, and one of their best informants. Mr. Wasson wrote that he had not actively emphasized the amazing account of how his visions or predictions that came true because he had not wanted to sensationalize the experience. He wrote about it shortly before his death. The shaman consumed about 13 pairs of mushrooms and quietly smoked a cigar, while providing information to the Wassons about their son, his whereabouts and future involvement with the military, and the approaching death of a relative.

Masha Wasson Britten wrote in a chapter in the book about her father called The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, that the first mushroom rite she and her father attended was the one conducted by don Aurelio in 1953. Her father, she wrote, was very excited, “though we were not allowed to take the mushrooms.” They were accompanied by Robert Weitlaner, a distinguished Austrian engineer ethnologist and linguist who had moved to Mexico in 1922 and who had extensive experience among the people of that region. Don Aurelio had provided them with samples of two varieties of sacred mushrooms and had allowed them to join the Mazatec Indians in a reverent search for the mushrooms. He was a butcher who had lost one eye in an accident involving a bull. When other curanderos had not appeared, they learned that he was “one who knows,” and that his treatments always had been successful. They were planning to depart the following day, and don Aurelio agreed to preside over a ceremony, with the blessings of his relatives, even though his late wife’s mother was gravely ill, because they had come so far.

Don Aurelio instructed them to come to his compound that evening at 9:00 p.m. He told them his son would need to serve as an interpreter, from Mazatec to Spanish, because the mushrooms only spoke to him in Mazatec at nighttime. The curandero (or shaman) ordinarily would take 26 good-sized landslide varieties, which were the strongest of many varieties in the region. He had needed to substitute three Psilocybe mexicana (the species from which Dr. Hofmann later would isolate the active alkaloids psilocybin and psilocin) for the one landslide that he had been unable to obtain. He consumed the mushrooms and quietly smoked a cigar. Mr. Wasson wrote that he did not chant or recite prepared words, but would speak in conversation when the mushrooms would speak to him. He sat on a stool or shifted to his chair, smoking while wearing a sarape (shawl), with embers glowing on the floor.

Don Aurelio asked what problem was troubling them and Mr. Wasson mentioned his concern about their teenage son, Peter, who had not been in contact, saying he was near Boston, where he had a summer job. Don Aurelio had to focus a while and then located him. He said that he was alive, but that people were reaching out for him to send him to war and it was hard to say if they would get him. Don Aurelio mentioned that he might have military service in Germany. He also told them that he was in New York and he was thinking of them and was to the point of being in tears, and was having difficulty coping with inner turmoil. He then invited them to smoke cigars. Later, he told them that one of Mr. Wasson’s relatives would fall seriously ill within a year.

Although Mr. Wasson did not believe the predictions or, more accurately, divinations, of don Aurelio during the ceremony, he wrote that they proved to be correct. Mr. Wasson found out that his son Peter had had a party at their home in New York that weekend. Peter was in the National Guard but due to an emotional ordeal with his girlfriend, he enlisted in the Army shortly afterward, and ended up doing service in Germany for two years, followed by tours of duty in Vietnam. The following January, one of Mr. Wasson’s cousins, who had been in his forties and apparently healthy, died of heart failure.

Gordon and Valentina Wasson continued to travel to Mexico, and in 1956, Dr. Roger Heim, director of the Museum of Natural History in Paris and a leading researcher on mycology, traveled with them. In 1956, Dr. Heim contacted Dr. Albert Hofmann to do a chemical investigation of psilocybin mushrooms he had grown after discovering them in Mexico with Gordon Wasson. Dr. Hofmann had tried mushrooms given to him earlier by Dr. Richard Schultes. Dr. Hofmann isolated and named psilocybin and psilocin, the active alkaloids, publishing his research in 1958. (Dr. Hofmann also derived compounds from psilocybin mushrooms that became beta blocker cardiac drugs).

When Mr. Wasson returned in 1958, don Aurelio officiated the velada with Maria Sabina. He wrote that she treated don Aurelio with marked deference, and called him a respectful term in Mazatec meaning “one who knows.” After Tina Wasson’s death in 1958, Dr. Heim returned with Gordon Wasson in 1959 and 1961, and in 1962, Albert Hofmann and his wife Anita traveled there. A 1958 recording with translations from the Mazatec language, released as Maria Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada, was his proudest accomplishment among many discoveries. An excellent source about these discoveries is The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, (1990), a series of essays about Gordon Wasson edited by Thomas Riedlinger. The Mazatecs reported to Mr. Wasson that the mushrooms would reveal to them secrets such as the location of a young wife who had vanished, where money that had been taken was located and who was keeping it, what had happened to a missing burro, and news of the activities of a missing son and where he was staying.

Maria Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada:

The American public learned of the revelation of the sacred mushroom ceremony when Gordon Wasson and photographer Allan Richardson revealed a June 1955 velada or sacred mushroom ceremony led by Maria Sabina in a Life magazine article in 1957. They had participated in the ritual themselves. Mr. Wasson was inspired by the fantastic effects and concluded that humans exploring foods in ancient times would have encountered the mushrooms and that the impact “could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas.” He wrote that when Cortez conquered Mexico, his followers noticed the Aztecs eating mushrooms in a religious setting and calling them God’s flesh or teonanacatl. He described art works in the region going back to a thousand years earlier, such as mushroom stones in Guatemala. In addition to Central American mushroom stones 1000 years old, the ceremonial use of psilocybin mushrooms is apparently depicted on the Aztec Prince of flowers, a seated divine male figure, carved in stone during the 1500s, with stylized mushrooms on its body, along with tobacco, ololiuqui, the hallucinogenic morning glory, and Helma salicifolia.

Maria Sabina was born Maria Sabina Magdalena Garcia around 1894. She became a shaman or curandera when she was about forty. She had a hard life in a beautiful mountain area of Oaxaca, in the Sierra Mazateca of Mexico. She and her sister worked hard on a small farm with a few goats, doing chores such as tending chickens in the woods. There was no school available. Their father died when she was a few years old. She was always hungry and cold. When she was about six years old, a wise man came and cured her uncle using the sacred mushrooms in a traditional healing ceremony. Her people always spoke quietly and would use terms of respect to describe the sacred mushrooms, such as the little ones that leap forth or the saint children. Her father’s father and his father also had been wise ones, who could cure with mushrooms. She recognized the mushrooms from the woods and she and her sister ate them many times. Maria Sabina heard beautiful voices from another world giving beautiful advice and leading her to sing beautifully. One time, she had a vision of her father, who said to her, “Maria Sabina, get on your knees and pray.” She then spoke to God and became closer to God.

Maria Sabina had an arranged marriage and three children with her first husband but he left her and she was widowed after a six-year marriage. A few years later, she was required to intercede for her only sister who was having a health crisis with stomach pains and she could not get out of bed. She ate 30 pairs of the most potent variety of saint children and observed the ancient Mazatec vigil practices using candles of pure beeswax, flowers with scent and color, copal incense to bless the sacrament, and tobacco to put on the skin, and then proceeding in pure darkness. The spirit of the mushrooms guided her hands and her words, causing a large amount of blood to be expelled from her sister, and she stopped groaning and slept.

Their mother attended her sister, while Maria Sabina went off and she received a revelation vision of the Principal Ones she had learned about from her ancestors. Six or eight of the spiritual beings were before her at a table. The voice of the saint children told her these were the Principal Ones. One of them told her, “Maria Sabina, this is the Book of Wisdom. It is the Book of Language. Everything that is written in it is for you. The Book is yours, take it so that you can work.” She gladly accepted it and they left her. She contemplated it and she began to speak, realizing she was reading its contents. She realized that the gift had been bestowed upon her because she was pure, and that she had attained the wisdom beyond being an apprentice and had become a Wise One. She also received a visit from the Lord of the Mountains, Chicon Nindo, later that night because in her wise language she had called him. He rode up on a horse and she went outside. She then received a third revelation when a luminous vegetal being like a bush with flowers of colors with a halo and radiance, fresh and alive, appeared before fading into a splendid red background. She cried, whistled, clapped and danced, realizing that she was now the Lord Clown Woman.

Maria Sabina continued working with wool and cotton, planted corn and beans, and harvested coffee. She sold bread, candles and pots, and she raised silkworms. She remarried after twelve years. Both times while she was married, she would not eat mushrooms because their tradition required four-day periods of celibacy before and after mushroom ceremonies, or veladas. After she was widowed for the second time, she dedicated herself to curing with the saint children. She would access the Book of Wisdom in her visions until she could access it from memory, using the language to heal, as a shaman mediating a world of heaven to this world, finding soul illnesses and curses and cures for various diseases. She would accept gifts but not charge for the medicine. Maria Sabina and the Mazatec people believed that a youthful man that later became identified as Christ brought the sacred mushrooms, or saint children, as a gift and that they sprang up from where his blood would drop.

A 1957 Life Magazine article ran a momentous article that Gordon Wasson wrote after he and Allan Richardson, the photographer, participated in her veladas. A municipal sindico or magistrate, for whom Maria Sabina had provided counsel for his decisions for three years, had been approached by Mr. Wasson and had directed him to her. The world was amazed by the news of the tradition that she and her people had preserved and Maria Sabina had many people come to see her from around the world. Recordings of her chanting from 1957 were released on Folkways Records the following year.

Maria Sabina said that the saint children speak and she would have the power to translate. She was aware of the dark places where illnesses of the soul would lurk, but she would go upward to commune with the Principal Ones. She would see the saints appear in the ceremonies when she sang their names. In her chanting, she proclaimed, “I am the woman of the winds, of the water, of the paths, because I am known in heaven, because I am a doctor woman.” She would clap, whistle and chant with a beautiful sing-song cadence, proclaiming her purity of heart for the service of Christ and the saints, and becoming the voice of the divine mushrooms. She stated, “I know that God is formed by the saints. Just as we, together, form humanity, God is formed by all the saints.”

Maria Sabina said, “Nothing that the mushrooms show should be feared.” After effecting a cure with the language of the children, she would say something like, “the one who has healed your son is God who is raising all of us.” She was active in a church group, Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and she was great friends with the local priest. She said she had respect for everything that has to do with God. She was happy to share the ceremony with strangers, but she regretted the way the notoriety affected her village and the careless use of the mushrooms by some of the hippies. She came to be honored by Mexico and many people.

R. Gordon Wasson:

R. Gordon Wasson was an ethnomycologist, a lover of fungi, who helped people learn about the natural psychedelic medicines that he preferred to call entheogens, plants and fungi that bring about the divine within. His field explorations and careful research, combined with his brilliant interpersonal skills and respect for Indigenous people, led to important discoveries about how humanity uses entheogens and has done so since ancient times.

He was an investment banker in Danbury, Connecticut, but his physician wife, from Russia, shared her love of mushrooms with him, an intriguing discovery on their honeymoon. Their thirty-years of research led to the scientific discovery of the forgotten tradition of using psychedelic mushrooms for spiritual healing among the Mazatec Indians of the western Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico.

They had researched mushrooms and learned from Robert Graves and Hans Mardersteig about use of sacred mushrooms among indigenous people in Meso-American cultures. He contacted Richard Evans Schultes at the Harvard Botanical Museum, who provided his 1939 paper, based on his field explorations with Blas Pablo Reko, showing that the sacred medicine of the Aztecs, teonanacatl, was a psilocybin-containing mushroom.

On June 29–30, 1955, Mr. Wasson and photographer Allan Richardson were the first outsiders to participate in the sacred mushroom ceremony, under the direction of the curandera Maria Sabina. They had traveled to the Mazatec Indian community of Huautla de Jimenez, 5500 feet high in the mountains of Oaxaca, a journey that included a harrowing flight and several miles on horseback. He had approached an official at the town hall respectfully, and used the correct pronunciation for the word to describe the mushrooms, and the man showed Wasson a place where the mushrooms were growing so he could gather many of them. Then, he was introduced to Maria Sabina, who led the ceremony with her daughter at night, with many members of the community.

An article in Life magazine on May 13, 1957 by Gordon Wasson described how the ritual was full of reverence, and “hedged about with restrictions of many kinds.” The mushrooms are gathered at a new moon before dawn by a virgin, consecrated on an altar at a Catholic church, and are eaten fresh in pairs. Before the ceremony, the mushrooms were held over copal incense. They are called littles ones who spring forth, and their society believed the Christ spirit would come to them through the mushrooms, called as the curandera prevailed upon it to come down in her singsong prayers. “They carry you there where God is,” the Mazatec would say, and they are approached with reverence and regarded as a blessing on their people because they were poor.

The curandera ate 13 pairs and Wasson said he was served six pairs. He wrote that he emerged awestruck and described visions more wonderful and real than ordinary life, of magnificent journeys and overwhelming beauty. Before the article came out, he had repeated the experience three days later and saw visions of people in another world, and felt his consciousness as not having a body. Six weeks later, he had some dried and he stated that they had all their potency. As he wrote it, he was making his fifth trip there, and he had her words translated from later ceremonies he participated in when he recorded her chanting. In 1956, he was accompanied by a chemist and an anthropologist, as well as having a leading mycologist, his friend Roger Heim, the director of the French National Museum of Natural History, to help collect and identify the mushrooms. Dr. Heim illustrated in watercolors the seven different varieties of divine mushrooms he had seen them use, four of which had never been seen before. Mr. Wasson collaborated with Dr. Heim, writing books about the discovery.

Dr. Heim grew enough varieties that in 1958, Dr. Hofmann synthesized psilocybin and psilocin using mushrooms he supplied. In 1956, Roger Heim, the director of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, contacted Albert Hofmann to do a chemical investigation of psilocybin mushrooms he had grown after discovering them in Mexico with Gordon Wasson. Dr. Hofmann had tried mushrooms given to him earlier by Dr. Richard Schultes. He isolated and named psilocybin and psilocin, the active alkaloids, publishing his research in 1958. Dr. Hofmann also derived from psilocybin mushrooms compounds that became beta blocker cardiac drugs.

When Mr. Wasson returned to Oaxaca in 1962 with Albert Hofmann and his wife, don Aurelio was also in attendance at the ceremony. Dr. Hofmann wrote that he had a strong presence. Dr. Hofmann participated in the mushroom ceremony, and shared his psilocybin pills with Maria Sabina and don Aurelio. at dawn she told him the pills “had the same spirit as the mushrooms.” Before they departed, Dr. Hofmann gave her a gift of the psilocybin pills, which she accepted with gratitude. Maria Sabina told him that she would be able to use them during dry seasons when the mushrooms would not grow.

It was during this 1962 trip when Dr. Hofmann and Mr. Wasson learned about the ritual use of Salvia divinorum, which curanderos would use when the sacred mushrooms were not available. Another discovery that Dr. Hofmann made completed what he called “the magic circle.” His friend Gordon Wasson obtained ololiuqui, Morning Glory seeds, from Zapotec Indians and provided them to him for analysis. He discovered lysergic acid amides in them, like in his original discoveries with ergot.

The Good Friday Experiment in 1962:

Walter Pahnke was a Ph.D. student at Harvard University when he conducted the Good Friday experiment on April 20, 1962. It was the most significant studies of the Harvard Psilocybin Project and for years was the leading experiment showing that psilocybin can facilitate experiences of mysticism in people disposed toward spirituality when used in a conducive setting. The project was carefully designed to provide supportive conditions to induce a profound experience which could be measured by psychometric assessments. It was the basis for the Ph.D. thesis for his program in religion and society. He previously had earned M.D. and M. Div. degrees.

The event was held at the Boston University Marsh Chapel on Good Friday in a downstairs chapel. By the time it was conducted, the subcommittee that became responsible for supplying the psilocybin for experiments refused to provide it for this experiment. He was studying under Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert, and they obtained supplies that had been withheld from the university authorities, stressing that it was the very type of research for which the psychedelics were intended. The volunteers for the experiment were twenty divinity school students from Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, and ten leaders who were professors or graduate students with psychedelic experience. Dr. Leary had insisted that half of the leaders also receive the psilocybin. No one knew who would receive the psilocybin, which was a 30 mg. dose for participants and a 15 mg. dose for the leaders, and who received an identically-appearing control of nicotinic acid.

They listened below Marsh Chapel at Boston University to a 2 ½ hour service with music, prayers, and a sermon by Rev. Howard Thurman. The experiment employed a questionnaire which Dr. Pahnke prepared to measure the experience, adopting categories identified by the work of William James and W.T. Stace as representing the characteristics of fundamental, universal mystical experiences. The responses showed the active participants responded that they experienced: (1) sense of unity or oneness; (2) transcendence of space and time; (3) deeply felt positive mood, blessedness, peace; (4) sense of sacredness; (5) objectivity, reality, and intuitive knowledge; (6) paradoxicality; and (7) alleged ineffability, which refers to the difficulty of grasping the experience by language and logical thinking; (8) transiency; and (9) persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior.

Social and scientific involvement with psilocybin as a source of renewal:

The early experiments and the CIA mind control efforts did not show psychedelics to be a trigger for psychosis. The scientists expected LSD and psilocybin to reveal the way to understand the origins of psychosis or to present a means to control thought. Instead, psychedelics appeared to be respectable and potentially viable agents for transformation. Through many efforts, and social history, and highly successful recent experiments, the wisdom traditions from the ritual use of hallucinogens in traditional healing is being taken seriously now as a catalyst for personal regeneration, radical change, processes of growth and maturity, and rites of initiation.

The 1960s was a time when there was wide access to psilocybin and LSD for use in research and in therapy. There had been over one thousand publications presenting encouraging results with about 40,000 participants in LSD therapy, in well-funded studies with very capable staff. It was the subject of six international conferences. Western culture had a challenging reaction to the way the hallucinogens came to assume a central role in a movement that began to question many of the basic values and precepts of mainstream Euro-American culture.

William A. Richards, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who was at the forefront of the original entheogen studies in the mid-1960s and is again one of the leading psychotherapists during the psychedelic renaissance. Dr. Richards earned two degrees from divinity schools and a Ph.D. in education and counseling. In his 2016 book, Sacred Knowledge, Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, Dr. Richards, wrote about his religious experience during his first session with synthetic psilocybin. It was on December 4, 1963, part of a program intended to shed light on schizophrenia, headed by the psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner, in Germany. Amazing undulating designs, a field of flowing energy filled with multidimensional symbolism, gave way to a full mystical experience outside of time, flooding him with awe, glory, and gratitude. He realized that he was incapable of describing what had happened to him, after the summation of his revelation, “Reality is. It is perhaps not important what one thinks about it!” did not convey its power. He found, however, that the memory remained vividly accessible and it was a “pivotal fulcrum that provided clarity and direction” as his path unfolded.

In 1977, after the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970, and the response of the funding agencies, Dr. Richards had the distinction to be the clinician to deliver the final administration of psilocybin at a research project with cancer patients at Maryland Psychiatric Center. Before that, he did significant research with his friend Walter Pahnke, a leading researcher on psychedelics and religious experience. After they met in 1964, they worked together on psilocybin assisted therapy research project in Boston and worked on psychedelic research with terminal cancer patients with LSD, DPT, (dipropyltryptamine), MDA and psilocybin at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in the Division of Clinical Sciences, on the grounds of Spring Grove Hospital. They co-authored Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism.

A veil of silence descended over the role of hallucinogen research in psychiatry, and there was little discussion about the merits of this research for 25 years, except for some brave souls willing to be marginalized in their careers.

In 1999, Bill Richards and Roland Griffiths spearheaded a study at Johns Hopkins, using a double-blind experiment with psilocybin or Ritalin, in which two-thirds of the active subjects said it was among the five most important events of their lives and many volunteers experienced enduring positive effects. Recent studies have shown that with three sessions with psilocybin, 80 % of the volunteers were no longer smoking cigarettes after six months.

Since 2000, Dr. Richards has been Clinical Director of the States of Consciousness Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine at the Bayview Medical Center. He found that the volunteers often had mystical experiences that they treasured, and that these experiences were remarkably similar. Dr. Richards also found that the volunteers would have healing realizations about the importance of resolving conflicts in their lives and reconciling with people, and strengthening friendships. The wisdom within the mind could bring awareness of unexpected realizations and lead people to balance life interests well. People would often experience not what they wanted or expected, but what they seemed to need.

The experience needed preparation, about eight hours of therapy beforehand. The best practices are selected including music to facilitate an inward process. He writes that the experience with psychedelics involves increase of serotonin and reduced activity in the amygdala. Dr. Richards writes that psychedelic-assisted therapy effectively can generate various types of healing experiences by the way entheogens prompt access to the mystery of the collective unconscious. People experience a presence and power beyond oneself as the ego humbly and unconditionally will choose to trust, receive, and participate with all that is emerging from within the depths of the mind. He said that “the ego is best transcended through acceptance, forgiveness when appropriate, and unconditional love.”

Successful results continue in the treatment of alcoholism, narcotic and tobacco addiction, treating people with anxiety and depression, and the psychological distress associated with terminal cancer. They also have great results with psychedelics for insight with religious and mental-health professionals. He sees a potential for their use in helping people with severe personality disorders, and individuals with highly functioning autism or Asperger’s spectrum conditions.

The symbolic life of the unconscious will present scenes to help with balancing a person’s life and breaking away from fossilized patterns and resentments. A natural inner process will lead people to let go, to penetrate to the core of truth, to express honest emotion, and remove artificiality in their relations. Dr. Richards writes that faith, the courage of the healthy ego to trust something greater, can lead to experiences that result in positive character traits and spiritually dedicated, imaginative lives. But the lever that opens the door to full mystical experience can be in resolving conflict in mundane areas of life.

The classic serotonergic psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT, are similar to the hormone and neurotransmitter serotonin. The psychedelics bind to receptors for serotonin, the primary neurotransmitter system, especially the 5-HT2A receptors, which are especially active in the cerebral cortex and the claustrum, known as the “seat of consciousness,” a membrane highly connected to many parts of the brain which is associated with regulating the default mode network. They also are in the neocortex, the mammillary bodies, and the lateral nucleus of the amygdala. The psychedelics depolarize these serotonin receptors and they become sensitized. The claustrum, which resides under the cortex, may send out glutamate and amplify connectivity and sensitivity in the brain to produce a biological response with subjective changes in thoughts and mood, a mixture of senses in perception, depersonalization, synesthesia, and a blurring of subject and object. By rapidly destabilizing local brain network hubs and transforming global brain network connectivity, the psychedelics have shown promise as a means of overcoming mental health problems and a way to regain vitality and life energy.

Psychedelics act as a reset for expansion of one’s mind. They permit consciousness to go beyond the default mode network, including the dysfunctional patterns we develop, to be transformed through the journey to go to a more natural resting state, a healthier mindset. Psychedelics are classified as tryptamines, including psilocybin, psilocin and DMT; ergolines, such as LSD; and phenethylamines, like mescaline and its derivatives. Phenethylamines, such as mescaline, which is in plants like peyote and San Pedro, bind to the 5-HT2A receptor at a lower binding affinity than tryptamines and ergolines. LSD contains both the tryptamine and the phenylethylamine chemical structures and will occupy four serotonin receptors, while the tryptamines will occupy three. MDMA, ketamine, and iboga act in different ways from serotonergic psychedelics, which act as agonists, replacing the serotonin.

In 2005, neuroimaging studies at Imperial College London identified the “default mode network” that is involved in depression, rumination, rigid thinking and post-traumatic stress disorder. It had reduced involvement in the psychedelic state with psilocybin while previously-suppressed neural networks and regions “light up” and become more active under the influence of psilocybin. The results suggest that psilocybin seems to reduce repressive control and promote other pathways increasing communication.

David Nichols is one of the world’s leading experts on the chemistry of psychedelics and their effects on the body. In 1993, he was a founder of the Heffter Research Institute, which has many illustrious members of its board and which has been the major organizer and funder of clinical research with psilocybin at research institutions in the United States and Europe. Psychedelic research has not been funded by the government and does not represent a profit-making venture for the pharmaceutical industry, so the Heffter Research Institute relies on private funding to promote scientific studies. Currently, Dr. Nichols states, it can cost $ 25,000 per participant to conduct clinical trials.

Dr. Nichols and Heffter have directed their energy to help fund and promote scientific research with psilocybin, a tryptamine alkaloid that binds with serotonin 2A receptors. They have been responsible for producing scientific studies that clearly show the benefits of psychedelic-induced mystical experiences and meaningful, spiritually significant experiences with enduring effects on ordinary people. The experiences can improve interpersonal closeness, decrease resistance, increase gratitude, life meaning or purpose, and forgiveness, and relieve anxiety about death and social expectations, and enhance religious faith and coping ability.

Dr. Roland Griffiths is the founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, established in 2020 with private philanthropy. He is a psychopharmacology professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and is the author of over 400 journal articles and book chapters. Dr. Griffiths has led research projects that have demonstrated clear potential for psilocybin in therapeutic settings in a carefully-structured program, to help relieve cancer-related distress, treatment-resistant depression, addiction behavior, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. His team of clinicians upholds high standards for scientific study. Dr. Griffiths stresses that psychedelics should be used with a monitor and with a process for incorporating their insights into their daily lives. The sessions include facilitators with 8 contact hours ahead of the sessions. The people are told to “be interested and curious,” and look within, or “go back in,” during their sessions rather than engage in cognitive processing. He states that he tries to cultivate deep gratitude for the astonishing mystery of consciousness and “sacred feelings of wonder about all that we do not and quite possibly can never know.”

In 1999, Dr. Griffiths launched scientific research with colleagues on the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy. It was a scientific study, authorized with FDA protocols, and was recognized for good clinical experimental design consisting of two to three sessions with psilocybin at two-month intervals. The subjects were healthy volunteers who had meditation practices, regularly participated in religious or spiritual activities, or were religious leaders, and who had no experience with psychedelics. It was a double-blind experiment with psilocybin and a control of Ritalin. The study reported that the volunteers who had psilocybin experienced “sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” The results were astonishing: two-thirds of the active subjects said it was among the five most important events of their lives and many volunteers experienced enduring positive effects.

An article in July of 2006 by Dr. Griffiths and researchers, William A. Richards, U. McCann, and Robert Jesse, was published in the journal Psychopharmacology and was a major breakthrough in showing the benefits of psychedelic therapy. The article was titled “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” The results showed that 58 % had had a complete mystical experience. After two months, two-thirds of volunteers said that the psilocybin session was the most, or one of the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. At 14 months afterward, 58 % stated that it was among the most meaningful, and 67 % said it was among the most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.

Dr. Griffiths published similar research in 2008 showing long-term benefits from psilocybin in people who participated regularly in religiously-oriented activities. Thirty participants reported improved positive attitudes about life and self, mood, altruism, and behavior. Two-thirds rated the experience as the most or one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives, while a similar number, 64 %, reported having greater life satisfaction and well-being due to the experience.

It remains a great mystery about how psychedelics like psilocybin help bring about or “occasion” mystical experiences, feelings of oceanic boundlessness, anxious ego dissolution, and visionary restructuring. Dr. Griffiths explains that the major psychedelics are unspecific amplifiers of unconscious processes, and through enhanced insight, the subjects can observe what drives their own objectionable behaviors. His research indicates that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity in brain function, which can help people transform through experiencing and integrating deep inner experiences. People have experiences that reset them into a new world view with opportunities for positive changes and choices.

In 1998, Amanda Feilding, a British psychedelic activist, founded what is now the Beckley Foundation, an important source of scientific research and publications, as well as consulting and advocacy for making psychedelics available in safe settings for therapeutic use and for spiritual transformation. Albert Hofmann was the president of the Beckley foundation until his death in 2008 at the age of 102. She states, “The best way to overcome the taboo, and re-integrate psychedelics into the fabric of society, is by undertaking the very best scientific research.” Ms. Fielding has participated in about 40 scientific publications, one of which was the first imaging study of LSD’s impact on brain connectivity. The Beckley Foundation has pursued over twenty psychedelic research projects, including studies in Australia using psilocybin with terminally ill cancer patients to promote acceptance.

The Beckley-Imperial Research Programme began conducting psilocybin research at Imperial College in 2009 that shows outstanding success in treatment of patients with severe depression who had shown little to no improvement from traditional treatment. The trial concluded in 2016 and showed that all of the subjects reported scores below the level of moderate depression afterward, and a significant reduction that lasted until the five-week follow-up evaluation. Even six months later there were significant benefits from that one psychedelic therapy session, averaging slightly above the threshold for moderate depression. In January 2019, the study entered phase 2 with a larger group of subjects. Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris published an article in Wired on January 1, 2021, about studies with psilocybin. He wrote: “In a study we carried out at Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research, which I head, 100 per cent of participants ranked a 25 mg. psilocybin experience as the single most intense state of consciousness of their lives.”

The studies at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine show the benefits of psilocybin to alleviate depression in terminally ill patients. Eighty percent of the participants had significant decreases in depressed mood. From 2007 to 2014, Dr. Griffiths led a large study into the effects of psilocybin, using high-and low-dose experiences, with anxiety in cases of life-threatening cancer illness. The study had 51 participants whose symptomatology met the definition of a mood or anxiety disorder. After having the high dose, 76 % had substantial relief five weeks later for anxiety and 92 % showed significant antidepressant response. After six months, there was a 78 % response rate for anxiety and 83 % success rate for depression. The experience provided sustained death acceptance, life meaning, optimism, and quality of life. The best measures were from those reporting mystical-type experiences. Seventy percent stated it was the most or among the five most significant spiritual experiences of their lives and 67 % reported that it was the most or among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives.

These results show that perhaps the greatest potential for entheogen assisted psychotherapy would be in palliative care units in the hospitals. Bill Richards wrote that the best time to institute the series of about three sessions of high dose psilocybin, would be about six months prior to transition. He believes that this will provide the greatest benefits, providing less anxiety around death, and opportunities for deepened family relationships in time for that growth. He encourages a spirit of honest curiosity toward death and entrusting one’s life to a sacred dimension greater than one’s everyday personality.

In February 2021, Charles Grob, M.D., and Jim Grigsby, Ph.D., released a textbook they edited, titled Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens. From 2004 to 2008, Dr. Grob conducted an important study that showed the beneficial use of psilocybin in terminal cancer patients, helping people come to terms with death and easing the emotional burden they were facing. In his research, he showed that the mystical experience is a potent indicator of positive outcomes with favorable and lasting changes, when used in settings with careful preparation, administration, and integration. His results were influential in encouraging more research, and were published in a 2011 article in Archives of General Psychiatry, and in a 2013 chapter with Roland Griffiths and Tony Bossis.

Recently, there has been important work to help explore the potential of psychedelic-mediated spiritual experience for other types of healing and wellbeing. Dave Nichols explains that there are extremely successful results with double-blind experiments with psilocybin-assisted therapy with tobacco addiction, led by Matt Johnson, cocaine addiction in Birmingham, with cluster headaches, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. A study with cigarette smoking at Johns Hopkins showed that 80 % of the participants had stopped smoking after two one-day psilocybin sessions. These studies show that the profoundly moving experiences evoked by psychedelics in therapy can bring about long-lasting brain and personality changes.

Recently, the Usona Institute announced a research project with psilocybin in phase 2 clinical trials at several locations in the United States is underway for studying treatment of major depressive disorder. In July, 2020, the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation announced a multi-site clinical trial to be led by Dr. Grob and Dr. Anthony Bossis of New York University to study the effects of psilocybin to ease existential distress for patients with serious illness. Dr. Griffiths and Dr. Stephen Ross, of N.Y.U. School of Medicine, are leading ongoing studies with psilocybin for religious professionals, to understand mystical experience and its enduring effects on attitude, behavior, and vocation.

Legal considerations for religious and therapeutic use of psychedelics:

In People v. Woody, 61 Cal. 2d 716, 394 P.2d 813, 40 Cal. Rptr. 69 (1964), the California Supreme Court reversed the convictions under state law of members of the Native American Church for possession of peyote. The court noted that the church had articles of incorporation that included: “That we further pledge ourselves to work for unity with the sacramental use of peyote and its religious use.” In finding an undue burden was placed upon their freedom to exercise their religion, the court stressed that the adherents were sincere and that the peyote was central to the religion, that the Indians would pray to peyote. It struck down the application of the law, stating that peyote “incorporates the essence of the religious experience,” and that barring the use of peyote would “remove the theological heart” of the religion.

In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act, placed LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin in highly restricted category I, having no medical potential, being subject to abuse and presenting grave dangers. The Single Convention, an international treaty, applied similar restrictions throughout the world. Scientific research and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy ended by 1977 here and in Europe.

Psilocybin and other psychedelics remain in the most restricted category today under the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the US 1970 Controlled Substances Act and the 1971 UK Misuse of Drugs Act, among others. The Vienna Convention of 1971 suggested a scheduling system for all 131 agreeing countries to follow, classifying drugs into categories of harm and the laws controlling psychotropic substances are part of that. The Vienna Convention was directed toward the manufacturing of synthetic substances. Many, but not all countries have applied it broadly to psilocybin, mescaline-containing cactus plants, and the plants composing the natural psychedelic ayahuasca.

After an adverse decision by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1990, Employment Division v. Smith, failed to extend constitutional protection to two of its members in Oregon, the Native American Church of North America received protection by an act of Congress to use and possess peyote for its religious ceremonies. The Supreme Court majority opinion, a 6–3 ruling by Justice Scalia, gave very limited protection under the free exercise clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that the free exercise of religion provision could not be used to invalidate laws that are considered neutral and generally applicable. The Congress in 1993 responded by overturning the decision by legislation, with the enactment of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which restored the previously-applied higher level of scrutiny to laws that burden religious exercise. Similarly, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 protect the rights of American Indians to use and possess peyote for traditional Indian religious ceremonies. (42 U.S.C. section 1996). The Supreme Court in City of Boerne v. Flores, ruled in 1997 that RFRA was unconstitutional as applied to states.

In 1988, União do Vegetal began in the United States with a session in the mountains of Colorado with a small group of people, some of whom are still UDV members today. By 2017, there were 500 members in the United States, according to one of the captions posted by the organization. The example set by the people of the denomination helped bring about legal protection in Brazil, in the United States, and in European countries. After being without the sacrament and using only drinking water for five years, they won a favorable result from the Supreme Court in 2006. The U.S. Supreme Court rendered a unanimous (8–0) decision in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418 (2006), which upheld the right of practitioners in a religious context to use ayahuasca as a sacrament. The Gonzales case held that the federal government had failed to demonstrate a compelling interest in prohibiting that use under the Controlled Substances Act. The state interest in regulation was not deemed to be sufficient to burden the right to religious experience due to practices that help minimize the potential for harm in supportive settings. The Court held that the branch of the União do Vegetal church in New Mexico had guaranteed protection under the free exercise of religion clause of the first amendment.

The courts considering protection of religious practices favor the religious liberty interests when there are not social problems and costs to society that outweigh them. A ceremonial context for psychedelic usage, as a sacrament, combined with implementation of harm reduction strategies, will help produce benefits such as strengthening the members’ sense of purpose and their social responsibility that will be more likely to receive constitutional protection. The courts appear to be more attracted to the familiar types of ceremonies, although the decisions emphasize that it is the sincerity of the adherents that is a principal area of focus, along with a showing of low risk of harm. Greater protection for sincere religious practices using psychedelics is likely through court decisions, state and federal legislation, and local ordinances as scientific research and legal psychedelic assisted psychotherapy yield results showing spiritual transformation and other benefits, particularly with psilocybin, which is very safe from a physiological standpoint.

Municipalities, such as Oakland and Denver have had success in passing ordinances to remove enforcement of restrictions on psilocybin under state law, while remaining schedule I controlled substances under federal law. In 2019, Denver became the first U.S. city to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms, followed by Oakland and Santa Cruz in California, which decriminalized all entheogenic plants. In September of 2020, the Ann Arbor, Michigan City Council voted unanimously in favor of a resolution declaring psychedelic plants and fungi the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. The move means that authorities will not investigate and arrest anyone for planting, cultivating, buying, transporting, distributing, engaging in practices with or possessing entheogenic plants or plant compounds. Similar measures have passed in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. California is in the process of removing state criminal sanctions against natural psychedelic substances. Oregon’s Measure 109, which passed in a November 2020 election, legalizes use of psilocybin mushrooms in a supervised therapeutic setting under state law.

Going forward:

Three varieties of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, Psilocybe cyanescens, Psilocybe allenii, and Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata, are proliferating, spreading from areas of the Pacific Northwest or the Ohio River Valley. After having been identified not long ago, have elected to show up in the urban environments, mainly in areas with large mulch beds and broken-down wood chips and open spaces where humans gather all over. The author of an April 2022 National Geographic article, Daniel Merino, the author, says the three varieties are “in lockstep with human expansion,” offering companionship for life’s journey. The spores “colonize” in areas that have not been occupied by other fungi, carried by the wind. The earliest variety was found at the royal Kew Gardens in England in 1946, and they have spread into Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. It seems like they are hovering around people. One is described as a “synanthrope,” a living organism that thrives in places built by and for humans.