Psychedelics and Monotheistic Traditions:
Sacramental Practice and Legal Recognition
Harvard Law School, March 2025
Videos
Psychedelics and Monotheistic Traditions: An Introduction
Professors Noah Feldman and Jay Michaelson, Harvard Law School
Professors Feldman and Michaelson welcome participants to the symposium and offer introductory remarks. Professor Michaelson discusses the three overlapping forms of contemporary psychedelic use -- recreational, therapeutic, and religious/spiritual -- and the varying ways in which practitioners and scholars of Abrahamic traditions have understood the relationship between psychedelic practice and religious tradition. Professor Feldman discusses scholarly methodologies for understanding the meaning of religion, the nature of religious evolution and syncretism, and how these categories affect legal understandings of psychedelic religious practice.
The Drum and the Vineyard: Priestesses Changing Consciousness in Ancient Israel
Rabbi Dr. Jill Hammer, Academy for Jewish Religion
Biblical texts reveal that women in ancient Israel used the drum, dance and song to create sacred experience and change consciousness. Archaeology bears out that women with drums, acting as sacred musicians, were important figures in biblical culture, and were sometimes named as temple workers or prophetesses. While they used these tools in a variety of contexts, we can particularly note that women were the celebrants of biblical vineyard dedication rituals and annual vineyard celebrations. It is possible to conclude that wine was also involved in these celebrations—a further tool for trance. Set in the wider context of women’s sacred ritual in ancient Israel, these musical, earthy rituals seem to suggest that music and wine were openings to deep ritual experience and even to prophecy.
Jewish Magical Techniques as Model for Psychedelic Practice
Dr. Elly Moseson, Columbia University
The Jewish magical tradition is an important resource for understanding the place of altered states of consciousness within Jewish culture, and has much to contribute to the discussion on the integration of psychedelics into religious life and practice. The magical literature preserves techniques for a rich variety of altered states and reveals previously unconsidered context for their transmission and practice. In addition to broadening the framework for exploring the relationship between psychedelics and religion, these traditions can suggest new ways and new context for their integration. As a type of lore concerned with individual empowerment, magic is also an analogue that is perhaps more resonant with contemporary individualistic and universalistic sensibilities than our mystical traditions. And the magical traditions' deep engagement with diverse healing practices that address both body and soul can serve as a source of inspiration for emerging forms of Jewish psychedelic shamanism and other psycho-spiritual therapies incorporating psychedelic substances.
Enlightened Amnesia and Entheogenic Memory: The Case of Modern Judaism
Professor Sam Shonkoff, Graduate Theological Union
In recent generations, entheogenic experiences have served as lenses through which Jews (among others) have contemplated traditional sources. Hasidic sources have been a primary hotspot for Jewish entheogenic memory. I want to think about two different modes. First, there is the historical variety, which claims that Hasidic mysticism might have—or must have—erupted through ingestions of psychoactive substances. Second, there is also a hermeneutical or interpretive mode, which is somewhat subtler. This approach does not necessarily wage claims about ancestral ingestions of psychedelics. Rather, there is a sense that psychedelic experiences somehow illuminate the depths of Jewish sources, and vice versa. In other words, the hermeneutical variety of entheogenic memory imagines that psychedelic experiences grant us first-hand insights into the experiential headwaters of traditional sources, which then lets those sources speak more deeply and even in entirely new ways.
Searching the Depths of God: Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness in Scripture
Rev. Dr. Jaime Clark-Soles, Perkins School of Theology
The Bible often describes altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and the methods for inducing them. We do not know is whether the earliest Christians specifically used psychedelics, but we do know that they valued ASCs and knowledge (gnōsis) not apparent to all. How might this inform (or not) our current consideration of legalizing psychedelics for the purposes of spiritual formation within Christianity? Here, I will provide a brief survey of two categories of experience – ASCs and Christian mysteries in the Bible – and demonstrate that such experiences have always been part of the religion. They are neither foreign nor new to Christianity. Across the Old Testament and New, across literary genres (including gospels, epistles, historiographical literature, and apocalypses), and across social class and gender, such experiences appear voluminously. Sometimes they occur spontaneously and at other times they are induced by various means. I conclude by proposing how such evidence should, and should not, inform debates about psychedelic use today.
Psychedelics & Catholicism: Affirmation and Ambivalence
Dr. Joshua Falcon, Florida International University
This presentation is based on original research among Catholics in the Miami area who have used psychedelics. The research shows the diverse ways in which individuals reconcile their Catholic backgrounds with their psychedelic experiences. While some see psychedelics as a means of deepening their spirituality, others view them as a departure from traditional religious beliefs. Most respondents support the legalization of psychedelics, with some advocating for regulation, and there's a division on whether the Catholic Church should endorse psychedelics, with concern about institutional control over spiritual experiences.
Psychedelic Christianity: Real and Imagined
Dr. Christian Greer, Stanford University
Was the original Eucharist a psychedelic? Were the original Christian communities entheogenically supercharged? Was Jesus actually a mushroom? These are some of the questions that historians of drugs field on a regular basis. And to be clear, our answers are almost always disappointing, because all of the arguments that suggest a psychedelic origin of Christianity are pure conjecture. Rather than map all of the deficiencies in the arguments suggesting a psychedelic origin of Christianity, this talk focuses on the stakes involved with this preoccupation with an imagined psychedelic Christian origin.
The Church of Eugenics? Envisioning Psychedelic Dystopias
Professor Laura Appleman, Willamette University Law School
Today’s much-fêted psychedelic renaissance is less an unprecedented cultural awakening than the third iteration of our cyclical engagement with psychotropics, a revival of desires and anxieties long embedded in the American psycho-pharmacological imagination. In the past as now, many prominent psychedelics enthusiasts were also fervent eugenicists, often treating ecstatic (peak) experiences as proof of their evolutionary advancement, framing them in mystical, religious, and poetic terms. Our third psychedelic renaissance once again places us at a strange, liminal crossroads of mysticism, capitalism, and eugenics, this time dressed up in the language of human optimization and existential salvation. The long tail of eugenics has likewise re-emerged as part of a spiritual-techno resurgence, where altered consciousness and authoritarian futurism walk hand in hand.
Pharmacological Reductionism, Anti-Blackness, and Religious Freedom
Ayize Jama-Everett
As I speak on psychedelics and religious freedom, Frederick Douglass' speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" comes to mind. That oration, delivered on July 5, 1852, demands the question: Is freedom for some true freedom? I bring the query to the broader psychedelic religious community. Is it true spiritual freedom if only some faith traditions are allowed to practice with only some of these compounds, plants, and fungi? Black spiritual leaders' freedoms remain conditional, contested, and often denied, even when no psychedelics are present. Even the clinical trials in scientific communities have so few Black bodies in them, we can't grasp the promises they put forward. And so the Black entheogenic minister must step forward on her own, facing the trenched waters of legality and legitimacy.