The long memory
From a peyote button in a Texas cave to a ballot in Colorado: nearly six thousand years of sacrament and rite, in order. Every entry says how sure anyone can be, because a fellowship that asks for honesty about risk owes the same honesty about the past.
Attested, argued, or only a story
Much of what is written about psychedelics in ancient religion, especially in bestselling paperbacks, is guesswork dressed as discovery. We sort every claim into one of three kinds and say which.
The grades are ours, made from the scholarship as it stands. Where an entry holds a certain fact and an uncertain reading of it, it carries both marks.
In the sources or in the ground
Written in an ancient text, recorded by a witness, or found by archaeologists and accepted by most specialists. We tell it as history.
A serious hypothesis
Proposed by a scholar, with real evidence on both sides and no consensus. We tell it as a question, and we name who asked it.
Lore, not history
A popular claim with thin evidence or none. Some are beautiful and we tell them at the fire. We never tell them as fact.
Pressed juice, burning seed, the barley drink
The oldest evidence comes in three kinds: hymns that praise a drink, historians who watched a rite, and residue scraped from altars and braziers. Each kind can mislead in its own way.
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c. 1500-1200 BCE
The soma hymns
The ninth book of the Rig Veda, a hundred and fourteen hymns, praises a plant pressed between stones and drunk by priests who sang that they had become immortal. The rite is certain. The plant is not: fly agaric, ephedra, Syrian rue and others have all been proposed. See Soma, haoma, and the sacrament that was lost.
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8th century BCE
Two altars at Arad
At the door of the inner shrine of a Judahite fortress in the Negev stood two limestone altars. Residue analysis published in 2020 found frankincense on the larger and cannabis on the smaller, mixed with dung to keep it smouldering. See Smoke on the altar.
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7th-6th century BCE
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter
The founding myth of Eleusis gives the kykeon's recipe: barley, water and tender pennyroyal. It is the only recipe for the sacred drink the ancient world left us, and it names no fungus.
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c. 500 BCE
Braziers in the Pamirs
Wooden braziers from the Jirzankal cemetery in western China, reported in 2019, held burned cannabis richer in its psychoactive compound than wild plants usually are. Someone was choosing it for the effect, and burning it beside the dead.
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c. 440 BCE
Herodotus and the Scythian tent
The Greek historian describes the horse nomads of the steppe throwing hemp seed onto red-hot stones inside a felt tent after a funeral, and howling with joy in the vapour. The frozen tombs of Pazyryk in the Altai, with their braziers and hemp seed, bear him out.
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415 BCE
The profanation of the Mysteries
Athens is convulsed by the charge that Alcibiades and his friends had performed the Mysteries in private houses, as a dinner-party entertainment. Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck read the scandal as a sign that the sacred drink could be carried out of the sanctuary. The scandal is history; that reading of it is a hypothesis.
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405 BCE
The Bacchae
Euripides' last tragedy, staged after his death, remains the greatest portrait of ecstatic religion in Western literature: Dionysus, his maenads on the mountain, and the king who refused the god and was torn apart for it.
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186 BCE
Rome and the Bacchanalia
The Senate uncovers a Bacchic cult spreading through Italy, punishes thousands, and then does something stranger: it licenses the god, in small groups, by permission, under supervision. See Bacchus and the Senate.
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1st century BCE
Cicero on Eleusis
"We have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope." The Roman statesman's verdict on the Mysteries, from his book on the laws, and the best short answer to what initiation was for.
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1st century CE
Spiked wine near Pompeii?
Brian Muraresku points to residue from the countryside outside Pompeii as evidence of wine laced with psychoactive plants in the age of the first Christians. The analysis is thin and little tested, and the road from one jar to a hidden Eucharist is a long one.
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392-396 CE
The end of Eleusis
The emperor Theodosius forbids the old sacrifices, and in 396 the sanctuary is sacked by Alaric's Goths. Nearly two thousand years of initiations end, and the secret, whatever it was, ends with them.
The hedge and the fire
The written record of European folk practice was mostly kept by its enemies: bishops, inquisitors and physicians. It has to be read against the grain, and some of what it says is true.
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601
Pope Gregory's letter
Gregory the Great writes that the temples of the English should not be destroyed but cleansed and turned to Christian use, and their feast days kept with new saints. The festivals survived the conversion. Whatever else the old rites held mostly did not.
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725
Bede names Eostre
The Northumbrian monk records that the English named a spring month after a goddess, Eostre, whose name passed to Easter. He is the only source for her, which is why scholars still argue about whether she was ever worshipped.
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857
Fire in the bread
The Annals of Xanten in the Rhineland record a plague of blistering and rotting limbs, generally read as the first written account of ergotism, later called Saint Anthony's fire: poisoning by the fungus that has also been proposed for the kykeon. In bread, ergot was a killer for centuries.
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1456
Hartlieb's book of forbidden arts
Johannes Hartlieb, physician at the Bavarian court, describes an ointment of seven herbs rubbed on benches and brooms: one of the first detailed European accounts of the witches' flying salve. See The flying ointment and the hedge.
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1484-1487
The bull and the Hammer
Pope Innocent VIII's bull of 1484 and Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 give the witch-hunters a theology and a method. The worst of the trials are still a century away.
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1545
Laguna's experiment at Metz
The physician Andres Laguna rubs a confiscated green salve on a sleepless patient, who sleeps for a day and a half and wakes complaining that he has dragged her away from every pleasure in the world. He publishes the account ten years later.
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1558
Della Porta's Natural Magic
The Neapolitan scholar gives two recipes for the witches' ointment. Among the nightshade, aconite and poplar leaves is the fat of children, which tells us as much about the fears of the age as about its pharmacy.
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c. 1560-1630
The worst of the trials
The peak of the European witch hunts, centred on the German lands. Between about 1450 and 1750, historians estimate forty to sixty thousand executions. Most of the dead were women, many were poor, and very few, the trial records suggest, were the healers and midwives of later legend.
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1730
Strahlenberg and the red mushroom
A Swedish officer, twelve years a prisoner in Siberia, publishes the first detailed European account of the fly agaric among the peoples of the far north-east, including the custom of drinking the urine of those who had eaten it. See Fly agaric and the northern winter.
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1784
The berserker theory
The Swedish priest Samuel Odman suggests that the berserkers of the sagas drove themselves into battle fury with fly agaric. No saga says so, and the idea has been repeated far more often than it has been tested.
The oldest sacrament and the first prohibition
The best-documented entheogenic religions on earth are American, and so is the first war on them. Much of what we know was written down by the men who were sent to stamp them out.
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c. 3700 BCE
Peyote in Shumla Cave
Two peyote buttons from a rock shelter above the Rio Grande in Texas have been radiocarbon-dated to about 5,700 years ago. They are the oldest securely dated psychoactive sacrament we know of, anywhere.
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c. 1000-500 BCE
The cactus at Chavin
Stone carvings at Chavin de Huantar, a great temple of the Peruvian highlands, show a figure holding what many archaeologists identify as the San Pedro cactus, wachuma, still used by Andean healers today.
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From c. 1000 BCE
The mushroom stones
Small carved stones shaped like mushrooms, often with a face or a figure in the stem, are found across highland Guatemala and southern Mexico. Wasson took them as evidence of a mushroom cult three thousand years old. The stones are real; what they meant is argued.
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c. 1150-1250
Cohoba in Puerto Rico
Seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina, ground into the snuff the Taino called cohoba, have been identified at a site in eastern Puerto Rico. Columbus's companions would later watch it taken before the images of the spirits.
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1540s-1570s
Sahagun and the flesh of the gods
The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun, compiling his encyclopedia of Aztec life with Nahua scholars, records teonanacatl: mushrooms eaten with honey at feasts, after which people wept, danced, and saw visions of how they would die.
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1620
The Inquisition condemns peyote
The Holy Office in Mexico City declares the use of peyote a superstition and a work of the devil, to be punished as heresy. It is among the earliest written prohibitions of a psychedelic plant anywhere.
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1629
A treatise on heathen superstitions
Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon, a parish priest in Guerrero, records the prayers said over ololiuqui, the morning-glory seed, and over peyote, and describes burning the seeds he found. Much of what survives of those prayers survives because he wrote them down in order to destroy them.
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19th century
The peyote road travels north
From the Lipan Apache to the Comanche and Kiowa, the peyote ceremony spreads across the southern plains, replacing the older and more toxic mescal bean, and becoming, in an age of reservations and boarding schools, a way of healing and of staying Indigenous.
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1890
A letter from the Bureau of Indian Affairs
An official letter complains that peyote use among the Kiowa and Comanche is "interfering quite seriously with the work of the missionaries." As Brian Muraresku points out, the American war on drugs begins as a war on a Native ceremony.
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1918
The Native American Church
Peyote people from several nations incorporate a church in Oklahoma to give their sacrament the protection of a religion. It is now the largest Indigenous religious body in North America. See Living traditions.
Rediscovered, named, measured and banned
In fifty years the Western world found the sacraments again, synthesised one of them, gave the experience a name and a measuring stick, and then outlawed nearly all of it.
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1930s
Mestre Irineu and the Daime
In Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, Raimundo Irineu Serra, a rubber tapper, receives the Indigenous vine-and-leaf brew in a vision of the Queen of the Forest and founds the religion that will be called Santo Daime. See Churches of the vine.
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1938-1943
Hofmann's problem child
Albert Hofmann, a chemist at Sandoz in Basel, synthesises LSD from ergot in 1938, sets it aside, and in April 1943 discovers its effects, first by accident and then, three days later, on a famous bicycle ride home.
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1953-1956
The doors of perception
Aldous Huxley takes mescaline under the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond's care and writes that he was "seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation." In 1956 Osmond coins the word psychedelic: mind-manifesting.
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1955-1957
Wasson at Huautla
R. Gordon Wasson sits in Maria Sabina's velada in 1955 and publishes the night in Life magazine in 1957. The mushrooms reach the world; Huautla pays for it. See Maria Sabina and the cost of being found.
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1961
The Uniao do Vegetal
Jose Gabriel da Costa, another rubber tapper of the western Amazon, known as Mestre Gabriel, founds the UDV on 22 July 1961. Its tea, hoasca, will one day reach the United States Supreme Court.
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1962
Good Friday at Marsh Chapel
Walter Pahnke gives psilocybin or an active placebo to twenty divinity students before a Good Friday service in Boston. The psilocybin group reports far more of what he defined as mystical experience. See the research.
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1968
Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality
Wasson argues that the soma of the Rig Veda was the fly agaric. Vedic scholars have argued about it ever since, and no candidate has won.
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1970
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
John Allegro, a respected scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, claims that Christianity began as a cult of the fly agaric and that Jesus never existed. His colleagues disown the book at once. See Did the sacrament make the religion?
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1970-1971
Prohibition
The United States Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971 put LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT in the most restricted class. Research all but stops for thirty years.
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1978
The Road to Eleusis
Wasson, Hofmann and the classicist Carl Ruck propose that the kykeon carried ergot. See What happened at Eleusis.
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1979
A new word
Five scholars coin entheogen, "the god within," for a substance used to generate the divine in a religious setting. See Entheogen: the word and the argument.
Courts, clinics and a patchwork of laws
Thirty-odd years of court victories for a few old churches, a revival of research, new local laws, and a rush of new churches. Decriminalised is not legal; read the Safety page.
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1990
Employment Division v. Smith
The United States Supreme Court holds that Oregon may deny unemployment benefits to two Native American Church members fired for sacramental peyote use. Neutral laws, it says, need no religious exemptions.
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1993-1994
The answer from Congress
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act restores the rule that the federal government may burden religion only for a compelling reason, by the least restrictive means. Amendments in 1994 protect peyote use by members of federally recognised tribes.
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2006
A court and a laboratory
In February a unanimous Supreme Court protects the UDV's tea in Gonzales v. O Centro. In July, Roland Griffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins publish the study that restarts the science of mystical experience.
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2009-2010
The Daime in Oregon, the brew in Brasilia
A federal court protects the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen, a Santo Daime church in Ashland, Oregon. In January 2010 Brazil's national drug policy council issues rules for the religious use of ayahuasca.
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2019-2022
Cities and states
Denver makes psilocybin its lowest enforcement priority and Oakland decriminalises entheogenic plants in 2019. Oregon votes for licensed psilocybin services in 2020, and Colorado for a broader natural-medicine law in 2022. None of this is a religious exemption, and none of it is federal.
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2020
The Immortality Key
Brian Muraresku revives the Eleusis hypothesis with archaeochemistry: ergot in a ritual vessel in Catalonia, residue in a Roman jar. A bestseller, and a serious question, not an answer.
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2022
Wachuma as heritage
Peru's Ministry of Culture declares the traditional use of the San Pedro cactus in the north of the country part of the national cultural heritage.
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2024
The medical road is slower
The United States Food and Drug Administration declines to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress and asks for a further trial: a reminder that the clinic is stricter and slower than the headlines.
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2020s
The new churches
Hundreds of new psychedelic churches appear in the United States. A few ayahuasca churches win exemptions from the Drug Enforcement Administration after suing; others are raided or refused. See The new churches.
Blessed is the one who has seen these things before going beneath the earth: that one knows the end of life, and knows its god-given beginning. Pindar, fifth century BCE, on the Mysteries of Eleusis
Eight stories, and what is left of them
These turn up in pagan books, psychedelic podcasts and the comment sections of both. A few survive the check. Most come out smaller and more interesting than they went in.
"Nine million witches were burned."
The figure began as an eighteenth-century extrapolation and was popularised in the nineteenth. Historians working from the trial records now estimate forty to sixty thousand executions between about 1450 and 1750: a horror, but a countable one. In England, witches were hanged, not burned.
"The witches were the village herbalists and midwives."
The most beloved story in modern witchcraft, and the trial records do not bear it out. The accused were mostly ordinary people, often poor, often older women, denounced by neighbours in quarrels over debts, sickness and dead cattle. Historians who went looking for midwives among them found fewer than chance would predict.
"The broomstick was how the ointment was applied."
A handful of fifteenth-century writers mention witches anointing a staff before riding it, and the anthropologist Michael Harner made the idea famous in 1973. It is possible. It is also a modern reading of a few lines, and most of the flights it would explain were confessed under torture.
"Ergot in the kykeon has been proven."
Nothing from the sanctuary at Eleusis has tested positive for anything. Traces of ergot have been reported at Mas Castellar de Pontos, a Greek-influenced settlement in Catalonia: real evidence of something, a long way from Eleusis. And the Eleusinian kykeon, by the hymn that founded the rite, was barley, water and pennyroyal, not the honey of some retellings.
"The berserkers ate fly agaric before battle."
Proposed by a Swedish priest in 1784 and repeated ever since. No saga mentions it, the mushroom is more likely to make people sleepy and sick than furious, and henbane, the other favourite candidate, has no better evidence behind it.
"The Delphic oracle breathed an intoxicating gas."
Ancient writers spoke of vapours rising from the earth at Delphi. In 2001 a team led by a geologist and an archaeologist reported faults beneath the temple and traces of ethylene, a sweet-smelling gas, in a nearby spring, and the press loved it. Later critics argued the gas could never have reached a strong enough dose. Not proven, not dead.
"The holy anointing oil in Exodus contained cannabis."
The anthropologist Sula Benet argued that kaneh bosem, an ingredient of the oil, was cannabis. Most plant lexicons identify it as sweet calamus or lemongrass instead, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica dropped her theory from its second edition. The altar at Arad shows cannabis in Judah's worship; it does not settle what a word in Exodus meant.
"The Church built on pagan festivals on purpose."
Partly true, and better documented than most of these. In 601 Pope Gregory the Great advised that English temples be converted rather than destroyed and that the old feast days be kept with new saints. That is a policy of adaptation. It is not proof that every Christian feast hides a pagan one, and many do not.
The history is the reason. The Library is the argument.
Every entry above has a longer essay, a book on the reading list, or both.