Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Entheogens: True or False?

2003; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.24972/ijts.2003.22.1.1

1942-3241

Roger Walsh,

Biochemical Analysis and Sensing Techniques

States of consciousness believed to be sacred, and drugs to induce them have been remarkably widespread throughout human history (Bourguignon, 1973; De Ropp, 1987). Historical examples include Hinduism’s soma, the Zoroastrian haoma, the Australian Aboriginals’ Pituri, Zen’s tea, the kykeon of the Greek Eleusinian mysteries (Smith, 1964), and the wine of Dionysis Eleutherios (Dionysis the Liberator) (Marrero, 2003). Contemporary examples include the native American peyote, the Rastafarian ganja (marijuana), and the South American shamans’ ayahuasca (Harner, 1973; Walsh, 1990). Clearly there has been wide spread agreement across centuries and cultures that psychedelics are capable of inducing genuine religious experiences (Grinspoon & Bakalar, 1997; Grob, 2002; Hunt Badiner, 2002; Roberts, 2001; Smith, 2000). However, the story is very different in the West. For centuries psychedelics were all but unknown, until in the 1960s they came crashing into a culture utterly unprepared for them. For the first time, a significant portion of Western society experienced powerful altered states of consciousness. Some of these were clearly painful and problematic. Yet others were apparently transcendent and illuminating. Suddenly the question of whether drugs can induce genuine religious and mystical experiences morphed from dry academic debates to pitched political battles. The very names given to these curious chemicals say it all. For nay sayers these drugs are “psychotomimetics” (mimickers of psychosis) or “hallucinogens” (hallucination inducers). For most people and some apologists they are psychedelics (mind manifesters). More recently, some researchers have suggested that they can be entheogens (revealers of the God within). Are they one or the other, can they really be entheogens, or can they be all four, depending in part on set and setting? In this paper I will primarily use the more neutral term “psychedelic,” while building an argument that they can sometimes be “entheogens.” Unfortunately, careful analysis and dispassionate discussion were long ago overwhelmed by political posturing and media madness. Misinformation has flourished. Some apologists denied the drugs’ dangers; some opponents and even governments exaggerated them. For example, drug opponents repeatedly misused shaky scientific research to bolster claims of neurotoxicity, a process that continues to the present day, especially with MDMA (ecstasy) (Concar & Ainsworth, 2000), though the actual nature and significance of MDMA induced neural effects remains moot and much debated (Grob, 2002; Holland, 2001). And yet the question—one of the most important of all concerning these drugs—still remains: Can psychedelics induce genuine mystical experiences? Stanislav Grof (2001, p. 270), the world’s most expe-