The Psychedelic Roots of Religion

“Religion is bullshit.” That is how you could summarize the stance of an average Western young adult on religion, if one would have only three words to spare. Whatever metric you use, the trend is clear: The global West, from Greece to Alaska, rooted in Judaeo-Christian values, feels increasingly estranged to Christianity itself. For many, going to church, praying for divine support and paradise on earth, seem like anachronisms in the 21st century; evaluated somewhere on the spectrum between irrelevant and dangerous.

At the same time, there is a trend in the opposite direction emerging in the very same cultures, and it can be fittingly summed up into four words: “Spiritual but not religious”. While the young are severing the ties with religious institutions, the desire to believe in something bigger than oneself has increasingly shifted to the individual sphere. Instead of muttering Amen after the sermon, people are experimenting in their own ways with spiritual practices: from yoga over meditation retreats to ayahuasca ceremonies – religious practices that have existed for thousands of years mostly isolated from each other are being fused into a kaleidoscopic blend of belief systems and practices.

Despite the West consciously rejecting religion, the echoes of various religions are resounding through less obvious paths to this day: Ancient Egyptian or Hinduistic symbols tattooed on the bodies of a generation enchanted with psychedelic festivals, where millions search for trance-like states resembling shamanic experiences.

On the surface, these modern trends seem to be as far removed from religion as it gets. However, these same minds, which oppose religion as a burdening relic of the past, might be reenacting the kind of rites which could have instigated the formation of religion in the first place. More specifically, religion might turn out to be rooted in psychedelics, if we peel away the layers of institutionalised dogma, power games and other historic noise.

This is exactly the mind-boggling hypothesis, which the scholar Brian Muraresku (2020) posits in his book “The Immortality Key: The Secret History of The Religion with No Name”. And he entertains suggestions about religious history, which might sound even more preposterous. After twelve years of research, his perspective on the roots of religion read like the following:

Thousands of years ago, the cultivation of mind-altering substances made the human species sedentary and kicked off the agricultural revolution – not vice versa. Out of psychedelic cults ingesting spiked beverages, civilizations evolved with their manifold deities and rituals. The Ancient Greeks were not just hosting psychedelic ceremonies for their privileged members, including Plato and Aristotle, but were following in an imported hallucinogenic tradition, which existed already millenia before them. Finally, early Christianity democratised the participation in these mind-altering experiences and was only the latest beat of the same pulse, which runs through the veins of human civilization since the dawn of history.

One might ask how many psychedelic rituals it takes to come up with all of these seemingly outrageous claims. However, no hallucinogenic trips are required to arrive at such a reading of religious and human history; the sober evidence alone suffices to reasonably call for a thorough scientific revaluation of our assumptions about religion and its origins. In order to make sense out of these bold hypotheses, we need to look at an interdisciplinary body of evidence, ranging from Archaeology over Anthropology and History to even the novel discipline of Archaeochemistry. We will start, however, with history, travelling back to the cradle of human civilization.

One might or might not have heard of Göbekli Tepe, an archeological site in Southeastern Anatolia, founded around 9000 BC, shortly after the end of the last Ice Age. Neolithic humans have erected a monumental stone formation (some of them weighing 40 tonnes) with animal statues and carvings all over this mysterious site, whose purpose is speculated to have been the world’s first temple (Curry, 2008). How is it possible that humans were willing to congregate and sacrifice such enormous manpower required for erecting a seemingly ritualistic site, when they had just before lived as hunters and gatherers?

The potential missing link between the coinciding agricultural revolution and the advent of religious practices might seem like an unlikely one: beer. One has to know that primitively brewing beer out of grains is significantly easier than processing it to bake bread out of it. It is very likely that the beer predated the bread by centuries, possibly millenia: 13000-year-old remainders of ritual feasts and brewing equipment were recently discovered in Israelian caves, giving clear indications that mind-altering substances had been around since the dawn of civilization (Liu et al., 2018). There is good reason to assume that the spell of the intoxicating grain has led humans to settle for its farming in the first place (Braidwood et al., 1953). Following this line of thought, civilization with its cities, institutions and states would be historically downstream from religious experience – and not vice versa.

Following the archeological trails that our distant ancestors have left behind reveals the continual use of mind-altering substances for ceremonial rituals: Around 6000 BC in modern-day Georgia, grapes were added to the primordial brew (McGovern et al., 2017). This concoction did not resemble in any way, but in its name, our modern light refreshment, till the “Reinheitsgebot” did away with its more unorthodox addings. Over time, the spiked beer turned into wine and chemical residuals of it have been found from the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs (McGovern et al., 2009) over religious sites from the Middle East to Spain (Blasco et al., 2008). The ancient Anatolians and their special drinks and rituals spread across the whole Mediterranean.

Of course, the Aegean which was to become the birthplace of Western philosophy has not been spared by this trend: Ritual mugs from 1600 BC have been recovered in Greece, suggesting that the ancestors of Socrates and Plato have continued the ritual ingestion of mind-altering substances. Everything points to the fact that over time, however, the ritualistic trips to a different dimension had become more exclusive: By the time that the Greek culture had reached its zenith, only exalted members of the Greek society were selected to be introduced what is

called the “Dionysian / Eleusinian Mysteries”. What exactly participating in the secret rituals in Eleusis implied remains to be uncovered to this day. However, evidence suggests a continuity with millennia-old drug rituals: The mysterious initiation to be experienced in Eleusis was one of “mass spiritual possession” (Ruck, 2009) with participants “abandoning themselves in the state of ekstasis” before “becoming identified with the god himself at the moment of intense rapture” (Hoyle, 1967). Not coincidentally, the Greek god Dionysus after whom the Dionysian were named, was the god of (spiked) wine and religious ecstasy. Now, how does Jesus, the arguably most influential man ever, fit into the scene?

In order to understand the connection between Ancient Greek culture and the early days of Christianity, some eerie parallels between them are worth looking into. First of all, Dionysus deserves some more thorough inspection: Who is this self-proclaimed “son of god”, born to a mortal virgin mother? He is described as a long-haired wizard, who is able to turn water into wine, which is supposed to convey to the drinker the gift of immortality. Even if one is just barely familiar with the Biblical stories about Jesus, this should ring a bell. John the Baptist, who was writing his gospel in Ancient Greek, must have been well aware of the prominent role Dionysus played in Greek mythology, when he was describing Jesus in his gospel. According to his account, Jesus was announcing during the crucial Christian ritual of the Eucharist: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life”. The Ancient Greek words used for “flesh” (sarx/σαρξ) and “blood” (haima/αἷμα) are even the same ones that were used 500 years before in the myths of Dionysus. All of these facts should make you raise an eyebrow at least. Is it possible that Western culture and religion, deeply embedded in its Greek and Christian heritage, derive from psychedelic cults?

As a matter of fact, Christianity itself was in its very early days up to just one more cult that the Roman overlords tried to suppress, which ultimately led to Jesus being crucified as a heretic. Nonetheless, his message persisted, unlike Roman polytheism, and became the dominant world religion up to this day. Countless kings, bishops, even empires, tried to legitimise their power by Christian tenets, leaving the origins of its message in the dust behind increasingly institutionalised power games. Until Archbishop Athenasius of Alexandria called for a “cleansing” of the biblical canon from “apocryphal books filled with myth” (Pagels, 2005), early Christians insisted on the practice of “gnosis”: the immediate experience of God as self-knowledge. God as the self, not the other, a demanding father up in heaven. It appears that gnosis, the immediate experience of divinity, was an induced one, as also the tradition of the Eucharist suggests: Jesus’ wine drinking as a religious ritual follows right in the same footsteps of the Dionysian ceremonies hundreds of years before in Ancient Greece; the self-proclaimed “son of God” Dionysus incited similar rituals of hallucinogens-induced religious ecstasy (Muraresku, 2020). What distinguished the Christian ritual from its Greek counterpart and possible ancestor, is its revelation of the practice to a wider audience, while the mystical experience in Ancient Greece were exclusively for only exalted individuals.

Looking at this newly emerging evidence, with the help of state-of-the-art methods from disciplines like Archaeochemistry, our assumptions about religion and its roots deserve a thorough revaluation. If Christianity emerged as only the latest popularised spinoff of a

psychedelic religion indistinguishable from the founding stone of civilization, what does that tell us about the modern “Spiritual but not religious” phenomenon after the rediscovery of psychedelics?

Psychedelic-induced or not, the spiritual instinct, which brought about religion and its institutions, seems to lie at the root of human civilization. When churches and other decorated religious institutions all around the world are bemoaning their constantly declining popularity, they would be well advised to reconsider these historic developments. The modern Western civilization ever more clearly comes to the conviction “Religion is bullshit”, while it is opening up for psychedelics and individual spiritual experience. It might be just about to rediscover that is unwittingly reenacting mind-altering practices without which we might still be roaming in the wild.

References

Blasco, A., Edo, M., & Villalba, M. J. (2008). Evidencias de procesado y consumo de cerveza en la cueva de Can Sadurní (Begues, Barcelona) durante la Prehistoria. In IV Congreso del Neolítico Peninsular: 27-30 de noviembre de 2006 (pp. 428-431). Museo Arqueológico de Alicante-MARQ.

Braidwood, R. J., Sauer, J. D., Helbaek, H., Mangelsdorf, P. C., Cutler, H. C., Coon, C. S., … & Oppenheim, A. L. (1953). Symposium: did man once live by beer alone?. American Anthropologist, 55(4), 515-526.

Curry, A. (2008). Gobekli Tepe: The world’s first temple. Smithsonian magazine, 3, 1-4. Hoyle, P. (1967). Delphi. Cassell.

Liu, L., Wang, J., Rosenberg, D., Zhao, H., Lengyel, G., & Nadel, D. (2018). Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel: Investigating Natufian ritual feasting. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 21, 783-793.

McGovern, P. E., Mirzoian, A., & Hall, G. R. (2009). Ancient Egyptian herbal wines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(18), 7361-7366.

McGovern, P., Jalabadze, M., Batiuk, S., Callahan, M. P., Smith, K. E., Hall, G. R., … & Lordkipanidze, D. (2017). Early neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(48), E10309-E10318.

Muraresku, B. C. (2020). The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. St. Martin’s Press.

Ruck, C. A. P. (2009). Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess and the Secrets of Eleusis 2006. Gr. Transl., Α. Καλοφωλιάς-Π. Τομαράς, Κυκεών tales, Athens.

Pagels, E. H. (2005). Beyond belief: The secret gospel of Thomas. Pan Macmillan.