Psychedelics and Religion

'Despite the draconian view that most contemporary societies have on mind-altering drugs, whether natural or synthetic, there has always been a religious undercurrent around the world that takes them seriously as a conduit to deep spiritual insight and encounters with the holy. This is the religious - and highly ambiguous - legacy left by two LSD pioneers who died within the past two weeks. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann - who discovered LSD in 1938 - died on April 29, at the age of 102; US psycho-pharmacologist Murray Jarvik - one of the first to study the drug's chemical properties and their mind-altering effects - passed away last Thursday. Both experimented with the drug and vouched for its religious significance. Having lost or severed any connections with natural psychoactive plants, it is not surprising that it took a synthetic drug for the modern industrialised world to retrieve a psychoactive connection with the holy. In her popular book A History of God, the historian of religion Karen Armstrong characterises a pivotal moment in the great religious transformation of the west as that in Judaism when the Jews and their prophets realised a growing unbridgeable chasm had arisen between an increasingly remote God and themselves. This experience of being forsaken was at the root of a predominately western religious view and would find its way into Christianity. It is, however, one that is totally foreign to native religions among indigenous people around the world. For them, the holy spirits are always close by. For many natives, plants with psycho- active properties have always been associated with gods or special spirits. Communal rites and shamanism enable participants to take these psychoactive substances and communicate on intimate terms with these spiritual beings. Centuries of western colonisation have wiped out most of these native communities and their religions'

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