Medicine has always had a religious character to it, going far back into the obscuring veils of prehistory. In numerous cultures all over the world, we find medicine men or women, witch doctors, shamans, who are not only folk healers but also spiritual leaders, who are believed to heal through divination and communion with spirits, typically achieved through some sort of trance. The very word medicine, it has been suggested by some, finds cognates in numerous Indo-European languages that indicate its connection to the idea of mediation, of acting as a medium or conduit for divine healing. It is no new idea that such trance states as shamans experience may be accessed through the use of psychoactive substances, or drugs. The word drug, derived from the Dutch drogue, referring to the droge vate, or dry vat of the apothecary, who was known to deal in all kinds of substances, both medicinal and poisonous, has always had a double meaning of a substance used for medication or for intoxication, just as today we may talk about a drug store or a drug dealer. The notion of the religious use of drugs is also certainly nothing new. Many today are aware of the South American shamanic use of ayahuasca, of the Native American use of peyote, or even the Rastafarian use of ganja. However, until the 1960s, it seems many in the Western world were utterly ignorant of this aspect of religious experience. When, through the activities of the CIA in their pursuit of mind control technology, psychoactive substances such as the recently laboratory-synthesized LSD and the psilocybin or “god’s flesh” mushroom first encountered by an American in the 1950s, were brought back to the U.S., a whole new vocabulary had to be developed. The terms “psychotropic” and “psychomimetic” were used, as it was believed these drugs may turn one psychotic, or that they caused a mimicry of psychosis. To the newfound enthusiasts of the trance states these substances induced, they were “psychedelic,” or mind manifesting substances. To others they were “hallucinogens,” or generators of hallucination. But to some of the earlier explorers of these substances, none of these terms seemed appropriate. One man in particular, the man responsible for introducing “magic mushrooms” to the world, would thereafter embark on a hallucinatory odyssey through history, coming to understand the widespread use of psychedelic mushrooms in extremely disparate cultures and time periods, and beginning to suspect their use in Western cultures as well. From the late sixties through the 1980s and today, he would champion a conspiracist view of world history and religions, working together with like minded academics to popularize a new term for such substances, “entheogens,” meaning “revealers of the god within.” By the theory he spearheaded, it was the use of these drugs that inspired all religion. Here we have a compelling alternative theory of religion that has received some significant scholarly support but that also relies on tenuous connections through questionable etymology, and dubious claim of a massive, millennia-long conspiracy of silence.

We cannot explore the entheogen theory of religion without examining the life of one man, Robert Gordon Wasson. Wasson was born before the turn of the 20th century. One thing is clear: Wasson was an intelligent man. He only attended three years of high school before travelling abroad and eventually serving in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. On his return, he enrolled in Columbia School of Journalism, and after his graduation, he studied at the London School of Economics for a year before returning to instruct English at Columbia for a year. After that, he began writing for a few newspapers, eventually serving as the financial reporter of the New York Herald-Tribune, a role that he would parlay into a Wall Street career. He went to work for J.P. Morgan and Company, where he would work for almost thirty years, earning a vice-president position after around a decade. During this time, he married the love of his life, a Russian pediatrician named Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, and it was on his honeymoon with her in the Catskills that his interest in mushrooms began. His wife recognized some mushrooms that she knew from her youth in Russia, and this sparked a conversation about differing cultural attitudes toward the “toadstools” that Wasson had always been taught to avoid. From then onward, in their spare time and on the vacations that his lucrative Wall Street career afforded them, they researched fungi together, publishing a book in 1957 called Mushrooms, Russia, and History, and in the process essentially founding the academic field that has come to be known today as ethnomycology. During their research on the importance of mushrooms in Russian culture, Wasson became familiar with the ritualistic use of the psychoactive fly agaric mushroom, Amanita Muscaria, among Siberian shamans. This first suggestion of the importance of psychedelic mushrooms in religious experience was certainly a memorable one, as it involved urine-drinking. In Eastern Siberia, shamans would eat this mushroom, experiencing the full and dangerous effects of the fungus and acting as a kind of filter of its toxins, a true mediator of the experience, as others would then drink the shaman’s urine in order to experience more safely the effects of the mushroom. Reindeer were even known to follow around those who were intoxicated by the mushroom, waiting for them to urinate in the snow so they could eat the snow and become intoxicated themselves, which typically made reindeer easier to capture, and even the meat of a reindeer that had been intoxicated by fly agaric was known to confer some residual intoxication on those who consumed it. This psychedelic mushroom pervaded Siberian cultures. Among the Koryak people it was a delineator of class, as the rich would consume the mushroom, and the poor would wait outside their huts hoping to drink their psychedelic urine. So fascinated were Wasson and his wife with this mushroom that they gradually became more and more interested in psychedelic mushrooms specifically, travelling to Mexico and taking part in shamanic rituals with another kind of mushroom, the “god’s flesh” mushroom, about which Wasson wrote in a very influential LIFE magazine article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” If the name sounds familiar to you, it’s because I mentioned Wasson in my episode on MK Ultra. Unknown to him, his efforts to acquire specimens of these mushrooms, classified today as psilocybin after the psychoactive compounds within them, were actually funded by the CIA as part of their search for a substance useful in mind control. Because of this, Wasson is mostly known as the man who popularized psilocybin mushrooms, and in Western culture, when we think about psychedelic mushrooms, we typically think of this mushroom. But during the course of his lifelong investigations into the topic, Wasson believed he discovered a much greater and seemingly hidden history to the Siberian mushroom, classified Amanita muscaria, whose name relates to flies, as does its more common European name, fly agaric, because to most of the world outside of Siberian shamanic cultures, this admittedly beautiful fungus, with its bright red cap and white spots, was just a poison toadstool known only for its use as a fly trap, as it would attract flies when sprinkled with milk. But Wasson slowly came to believe that fly agaric was more widely and secretly used to induce religious visions and trances than anyone suspected.

The *Amanita muscaria*, or fly agaric mushroom.

Wasson’s entheogenic theory of religion did not really start to take shape until he began researching a book on the Indo-Iranian use of the mystery drug called soma in the Rigveda. This was a longstanding historical mystery. The Indo-Iranian peoples that migrated to the Indus Valley in the second millennium BCE brought with them a unique pantheon of deities: Indra, another Sky Father and wielder of lightning, and Agni, the god of fire. Some of these Hindu deities, or Devas, are better known today in the West than others: Ganesha, Vishnu, Shiva. But in the ancient Vedic literature from which these legends evolved, one was different: Soma, god of the Moon and of night, and of plants and vegetation. What set this god apart from the others was that it was believed one could become this god by ingesting a particular sacramental offering, some sort of food or drink that when taken conferred a religious ecstasy and, it was believed, immortality. In the most ancient of Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, and especially the Rigveda, which was orally transmitted over millennia before finally written down in the Common Era, many hymns refer to this substance, soma, which appears to have been literally deified. More than a hundred hymns in the Rigveda are dedicated to this god-food. More than forty potential candidates for what this substance might have been were suggested by scholars in the 19th century, and by the 20th, dozens more were proposed, until more than a hundred contenders existed. Was it honey? Was it alcohol? Could it have been cannabis? Might it have been the plant ephedra, used today in such drugs as nasal decongestants? Perhaps it was a certain vine used for religious purposes elsewhere in India today? When R. Gordon Wasson looked into it, unsurprisingly, he came to believe it was a mushroom, and specifically the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria. He and his fellow researcher, an Indologist named Wendy O’Flaherty insist that he did not begin his research with any such presumption, claiming he only began to suspect the mushroom when he learned that one particular line in the Rigveda mentions the urination of soma, which to him recalled the Siberian shamans urinating after ingesting fly agaric, and the subsequent drinking of their urine by others. I personally find it highly suspect that Wasson, who was an amateur mycologist and arguably the world’s first ethnomycologist, had started looking into soma without any presumption that it might have been a mushroom. I think it is pretty safe to bet that he hoped to make a case that it was a mushroom and was looking for evidence that it was some fungoid substance. However, the case he puts forth, and which others have since developed further, remains pretty convincing.

Wasson argued that soma could not have been alcohol, for the Brahmans, the Hindu priesthood caste, had alcohol in the form of beer, and this drink was generally disapproved of because of its fermentation process. He suggests that, judging by the geography of the Indus Valley, adjacent to mountains that may have been temperate enough to foster a birch forest, such as the ones in which the fly agaric typically grew, it was possible the mushroom was present there. More than that, in all the hymns, there is no mention of roots or leaves or seeds or flowers in relation to soma, but there are, according to his partner’s translation, lines that refer to stems and caps, and all descriptions of the color of soma match with the red and white color of the Amanita muscaria. Even some lines about a “single eye,” Wasson claims, refer directly to the sight of a mushroom cap sprouting out of the ground. But his clincher was the single line about the urination of soma. Converts of the Wasson view of soma have sought further confirmation in nearby and related cultures, such as in Tibetan Buddhist rituals that involve the ritual drinking of colored water that may be meant to represent urine-drinking in antiquity, but the key word here is “may.” As the critics of Wasson would point out, his theory of soma is as much speculation as any other. The line about the urination of soma, for example, makes no mention of urine-drinking, suggesting he may be misconstruing its meaning. The translations he relied on can be challenged in numerous regards. His argument that nearby mountains might have had birch forests is unconvincing without evidence that birch or any similar woods that act as host to these mushrooms ever grew there. And the fact that there is no mention of leaves or seeds does not mean with any certainty that it must have been a fungus. Perhaps they simply did not mention those particular aspects of it because they ate it as a paste or drank it in a tea. And though the effects described in the hymns do not sound like an alcohol, they also don’t sound like a psychedelic, as a sensation of greater alertness and clarity is mentioned, making it sound rather more like the stimulant ephedra. Perhaps the strongest candidate remains the Cynanchum acidum, or “creeping soma,” a vine and thus leafless and seedless, which remains in use in religious ritual in South India and is widely regarded by Indians as the soma of the Rigveda.

The ritual drinking of Soma, as referenced in the Vedas.

Despite some academic resistance, though, Robert Gordon Wasson moved merrily along, insisting he had proven beyond doubt the identity of the Vedic soma, and intent on further proving the widespread use of hallucinogens among those not only in the East but also in the West, setting his focus next on the Eleusinian Mystery. In ancient Greece, the agrarian mystery cult of Demeter and Persephone, which it is believed had derived their rituals from the more ancient practices of the Mycenaean civilization, held initiation ceremonies every year in the sanctuary at Eleusis. These ceremonies, which were kept secretive and considered profane if performed outside the sanctuary, involved in a variety of dramatic reenactments of myths, the displaying of certain sacred objects, and commentaries on all of them, including warnings that if one were to divulge the mysteries, the penalty was death. It sounds very much like Masonic ritual in that way, and also like Mormon temple rituals, which were cribbed from Masonry. The Eleusinian Mystery was supposed to climax in a grand vision of the afterlife. This, of course, is what led Wasson to suspect the involvement of psychedelics, or entheogens, and he recruited classics scholar Carl Ruck to help him investigate. At some point in the Mystery ceremony, a potion or philtre was consumed by the participants, called a kykeon, so Wasson and Ruck homed in on that element of the ceremony as the ingestion of a psychoactive substance. Unfortunately for Wasson’s mushroom theory, the kykeon’s ingredients were recorded: water, barley, and mint or pennyroyal. But not all hope was lost for their theory, as they brought on a third collaborator, Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, who told them just what they wanted to hear, that a certain fungal parasite, Claviceps paspali, commonly known as ergot fungus, tended to grow on barley and other grains, and alkaloids present in it, long term exposure to which can cause convulsions and gangrenous symptoms called St. Anthony’s Fire, also caused hallucinations. It was in fact ergot from which Hoffman had synthesized lysergic acid.

So it seemed Wasson had found his entheogen theory for the Eleusinian Mystery, which he and Ruck argued was strengthened by the fact that Socrates’ protégé Alcibiades, a known libertine, was once convicted in absentia of having participated in the Mystery rite in a private residence rather than in the sanctuary, giving the impression that the use of this psychedelic was spreading outside the cult of Demeter and Persephone into illicit recreational use. While Wasson might have been disappointed that it wasn’t fly agaric, he seems to have taken comfort in the fact that ergot fungus also, sometimes, developed little tiny caps like miniscule mushrooms. And not to let his beloved mushrooms languish too much, he and Ruck still suggested that, while the potion used in the central, so-called “Greater Mystery” initiation ceremony was infused with ergot, in the preliminary “Lesser Mystery” ceremony, a wild mushroom might have been ingested. Again, as with soma, their theory is by no means proven, but some evidence supporting it did recently turn up outside of Greece. In northeastern Spain, in what was once a colony of Greater Greece, Mas Castellar de Pontós, a sanctuary built for Greeks unable to sail across the Mediterranean to participate in the Demeter and Persephone Mystery rites at Eleusis, was excavated in the 1990s by an archaeologist, and in one miniature chalice there, not unlike the cups in which the kykeon was served, the chemical signature of ergot alkaloids was detected. Of course, it was also detected in teeth among remains discovered at the site, indicating that ergotism may have been rampant in the region and offering the further possibility that there are other reasons the alkaloids may have been present, but it is at least some archaeological support for the theory, something that Wasson’s soma theory has always lacked. And ergot, it turns out, would take the entheogenic theory of religion a lot further than Wasson’s toadstools.

*The Return of Persephone,* by Frederic Leighton, a depiction of the myth that formed the basis of the Eleusinian mystery cult.

Already in the late 1980s, before Wasson’s death, he was extending his entheogen theory to encompass all forms of religion, seeing in every culture and every age the presence of his beloved mushrooms or some similar psychoactive agent. While the academic partner he had inspired, Carl Ruck, focused still on ancient Greece, arguing that hints in Greek theatrical writing and philosophy further suggested that the mysterious wine of Dionysus was an entheogen and the mythical Hyperborean fruits from Appollo’s garden were none other than the Siberian fly agaric mushroom, Wasson turned his dilated pupils to another region on the Mediterranean and began to suggest the influence of his mushrooms in ancient Hebrew religion, thus ushering in Judaism and by extension Christianity into the entheogenic fold. He suggested that the biblical story of Adam and Eve eating of the fruits of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was yet another reference to eating the fly agaric, which grew only at the foot of a certain type of tree in certain climates. The fruits eaten by Adam and Eve made them in some way like God, just as the soma Wasson claimed to be the same mushroom allowed its consumers to partake of the divine. He further suggested that any culture that deified or considered sacred a tree, any Tree of Life myth the world over, must also have been a reference to trees at whose foot grew the sacred mushroom. After Wasson’s passing, there was a long lull in publications on the topic, but eventually Carl Ruck and others, like Daniel Merkur and Brian Muraresku, took up where Wasson left off. Merkur argued in his book The Mystery of Manna that manna, the miraculous bread that God provided the Israelites to sustain them in the wilderness, which according to his interpretation of scriptures was also associated with visions of God, was actually bread with ergot fungus. There are, unsurprisingly, problems with this interpretation as well. Even if we were to accept his explanation that the notion of manna having fallen from heaven was pure myth, which I would certainly be disposed to accept, he suggests that this ergot-tainted bread was purposely given to the Israelites by Moses because the prophet had promised them a vision. This would suggest that Moses just had a huge quantity of this tainted bread on hand and knew it would give them visions. If we were to accept this, then we must also ask why there is no mention of ergot poisoning occurring among the Israelites who ate this tainted bread daily. Merkur goes on to connect manna with showbread, a sacramental bread placed in the Temple of Jerusalem, within the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. He argues that this ergot-tainted bread was taken as a prophetic initiation, inducing visions, and that if any died of ergotism because of taking it, they were considered to have been smitten by God himself, a further explanation for the deaths said to have been caused by the Ark. This is certainly a creative explanation, though it does not seem to accord with the biblical accounts of people who died instantaneously simply from touching the Ark, or the many people said to have been killed simply from looking at it the wrong way. And though it is tempting to suggest the plague of tumors visited upon the Philistines when they stole the Ark was really ergotism, which causes extreme skin conditions, the fact is that the small amount of showbread kept not in the Ark but near it at any given time would not have been enough to affect entire populations of people even if it were what Merkur suggests it was and had been stolen along with the Ark.

Merkur and Ruck and most recently Brian Muraresku have extended the ergot sacrament hypothesis further in the last 20 years or so, arguing what is essentially a psychedelic version of the pagan continuity concept, the idea that pagan traditions did not cease to exist but were rather adopted and changed to suit the needs of early Christians—a concept that is all but proven in many regards, as I have demonstrated time and again, particularly in my holiday special episodes. Their argument is essentially that the psychedelic ritual experience of the Eleusis Mystery was embraced by early Christians in the form of the Eucharist, the ceremony commemorating the Last Supper, in which bread and wine were ritually consumed. As with other examples used in the entheogen theory of religion, the Christian sacrament was said to be the consumption of Christ’s flesh and blood, the ingestion of God himself, which confers some aspect of godliness upon the participants. This can be compared to the Mexican ingestion of “god’s flesh” mushrooms, the Hindu ritual of eating the deified soma, and the notion that when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree’s fruit they became like God. Therefore, whether the bread of the Eucharist were originally an ergot-tainted bread, or whether the wine drunk were some psychedelic brew hearkening back to the powerful wines of Dionysus, they argued that the Eucharist ceremony was, in its earliest and most true character, a hallucinogenic experience. One specific piece of supposed evidence Ruck relied on was the 16th century Isenheim Alterpiece, a German painting of the crucified Christ that depicts his skin as pitted with lesions or sores, which Ruck suggested lends credence to the notion that Christ suffered from ergotism. As usual, though, this logic just doesn’t hold up. First of all, we know why Christ was depicted this way on the alterpiece. It was painted for a monastery that specialized in caring for plague victims and those suffering from ergotism, so the idea was clearly to draw a connection between Christ’s suffering and the suffering of the ill at the monastery. But even if we reject this explanation, the idea that the painting revealed a secret about Christ’s ritual use of ergot would require us to believe that this was a known fact even in the 16th century, that it had been kept as a secret for more than a thousand years, only occasionally hinted at in iconography. As we will see, this is the central problem with the entheogen theory of the origins of religion, that it depends on a massive conspiracy theory.

*The Gathering of the Manna* by James Tissot

Many other claims about entheogens influencing the foundation of both Judaism and Christianity have been put forth. It has been suggested that, since the acacia tree contains DMT, another entheogen that has been called the God or Spirit Molecule, perhaps Moses inhaled it during the episode of the burning bush. And since cannabis grew commonly in the Middle East, perhaps it was the original incense burned at altars, a theory that appears to be supported by recent archaeological discoveries at shrines in Israel, where traces of cannabis were found. This leads to the further notion that cannabis may long have been infused in the anointing oil so commonly described as being applied in biblical times. The anointing oil used by Moses in Exodus is described as being composed of cinnamon, myrrh, and something called “kaneh-bosm,” which it was understandably thought might be cannabis, though others argue that it was actually calamus, or sweet flag. In the early 2000s, Ruck promoted the research of Chris Bennett and Neil McQueen, pointing to the discovery of traces of cannabis in vessels from Judaea and Egypt as further evidence that holy anointing oil was infused with cannabis, leading to the further suggestion that when Christ anointed the sick and healed them or anointed the possessed to cast out their demons, he was actually applying a cannabis salve, the effects of which are known to ease pain and calm seizures, which might of course have been mistaken for demonic possession. Then there was the further and far more extreme argument of John Allegro that early Christians were really a mushroom cult, and that there really was no Jesus at all, that he was just a personification of their sacred mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, an untenable claim that likewise partook of the vast conspiracy theory on which much of these wider claims about the origin of religion rely. I’ll talk in greater detail about Allegro’s claims in this year’s Xmas special, but we can see this tendency just in the theories of Robert Gordon Wasson, the Mushroom King, who more than any others who might have been inspired by his thinking tried to connect all religions to some ancient precursor religion based on ritual psychedelic use.

By Wasson’s reckoning, wherever coniferous trees grew, the fly agaric might grow, and the prehistoric cult of the mushroom may have begun in Siberia, spread to Europe, the Middle East, and even the Far East from this mysterious northern Mushroom Kingdom then called Hyperborea by some. Likewise, this mushroom cult must have been carried over the land bridge into the Americas, thus explaining its persistence among indigenous cultures. And throughout the millennia it evolved, through syncretism entering into new religions and developing new mythological trappings. As evidence, he strings together numerous disparate images, suggesting that the Indo-Iranian people’s reference to the “single eye” must surely have referred to his beloved mushroom, and therefore all other references to beings with only a single eye, like the cyclops, must also have been coded references to psychedelic mushrooms. Likewise, he draws a tenuous connection between any possible mythological creature that has only a single leg or foot as necessarily being a cryptic reference to the mushroom that grows on a single stalk: the “single-foot” soma, the Greek Monocoli or “One-leg” people, the Steganopodes or “Cover-foot” monsters of medieval legend, the “one-sided man” of Siberian Chukchi lore also known as the “halfling” (a connection to Tolkien that I didn’t expect to find), and the hurakan or “one-leg” mentioned in the Mayan Popol Vuh. He even goes so far as to suggest that Satan might represent the red fly agaric mushroom because the devil is commonly depicted as having a club-foot, and thus has only one good foot, though how this identification of the mushroom with evil would work with an overall theory that the mushroom was sacred in Western religions is not entirely clear. When issues like this come up in Wasson’s writing, he merely suggests that the sacred mushroom has been suppressed by what he calls “mycophobes,” or mushroom haters. He blames mycophobes for the negative reputation mushrooms have developed, for insulting nicknames like “toadstool,” and for the disappearance of their use in modern Western religions. Whenever the point is made that mushrooms and other psychedelics are not in use in the very same religious rituals today, he rationalized that in all but a few of the cultures that supposedly used to consider the ingestion of entheogens sacred, their ritual use was put to an end and they were replaced with other substances. As to why this would happen, it must have been the mycophobes who wanted rid of their hated mushrooms, or perhaps it was because of a shortage—though this last notion really doesn’t make sense when it comes to ergot fungus, which might grow on bread anywhere. And the central role of these entheogens in so many religions was kept secret, only referred to in ambiguous language, because, Wasson argued, talking about the most holy mysteries of religious rituals was a taboo. But let’s consider this a moment. The idea that a taboo prevented the open revelation of the nature of so many different religious rituals, even after those rituals had changed and no longer used their former hallucinogenic sacraments, is a bit hard to believe. If the practice was stamped out as a kind of reform, it would have been written about in polemics and preached against. And if it had been suppressed, when had it been suppressed? If clues were present even in medieval and Renaissance art, then it was either still active relatively recently, or at least known about. So in the end, the entheogenic theory of the origin of religion is essentially a claim of massive cover-up, perhaps the most massive conspiracy theory ever dreamed up, as it must involve almost every culture and people from every era of human history. Such a conspiracy claim simply cannot be credited.

A depiction of the first ritual taking of the Eucharistic elements.

I am not sure how many people of faith listen, how many religious listeners I may still have. While I recognize that several of my episodes in the past may have driven such listeners away, I nevertheless like to think that some remain, listeners whose faith is not shaken by my skeptical polemics. Perhaps some of you who find that your faith does not rely on a literal interpretation of the Bible or who can comfortably reconcile your beliefs with science find that you can enjoy my podcast for what it is: one man’s rational seeking after the truth. For those of you who have faith and still listen, this one’s for you. Although the entheogen theory of religion seems like it might be the kind of view of religion that I would support, as it’s a great topic for atheists and agnostics who may want to make religions look foolish or hypocritical, on further researching the topic, I simply found the scholarship questionable or even downright sloppy, and the overall premise fundamentally flawed. And considering the source, Robert Gordon Wasson, it appears unreliable from the start. He was a tool of the CIA and MK Ultra, but we maybe won’t hold that against him. What’s more relevant is that Wasson was an amateur, a hobbyist. He may have invented the field of ethnomycology, but he didn’t study botany or cultural anthropology. He was a Wall Street guy who got turned on by psychedelics. It’s true, he studied journalism, but he spent far more time with JP Morgan, and it should be noted that he got the job at JP Morgan because he had written an article in 1937 that attempted to exonerate JP Morgan of certain war-profiteering accusations. After the firm hired him, he became a vice president, but it’s not often mentioned he was Vice President, specifically, of Public Relations. His job was rhetoric, spinning the facts to make his preferred view convincing, and that is what he did in his spare time too, arguing that psychedelics had fostered all religion. And certainly he was not neutral in his research, as he sometimes liked to claim. In his dismissal of mycophobes, he identified himself as a mycophile. In his discussion of mushrooms as the forbidden fruit, he portrayed himself and his wife, with whom he began his study of mushrooms, as a kind of Adam and Eve who had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. In short, he was quite a character, but not very credible. As for those who came after him, Carl Ruck, who certainly was an expert classicist, was again no authority in the more relevant fields of history, religion, ethnology, mycology, chemistry, etc., and certainly was working out of his field of expertise when he began writing about Christian sacraments and Renaissance art. Daniel Merkur is a clinical psychoanalyst, and thus also appears to be a researcher into these religious topics in an amateur capacity. The most recent proponent of the theory, Brian Muraresku, whose book, The Immortality Key, resurrected the claims of Carl Ruck, is a lawyer, but at least his undergraduate degree appears to have been in the Classics, with a linguistic focus on Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. However, one need only look at who he has associated himself with to begin to question his reliability. History falsifier Graham Hancock wrote the foreword to his book, which should be a massive red flag, and he tends to promote the book on the podcasts of those who amplify misinformation and toxic ideology, like Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan. Overall, while the corpus of writings developing the entheogenic theory of religion do make convincing individual arguments, such as that the Vedic soma and the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mystery were likely some sort of psychoactive substance or narcotic, the grand unifying theory of religion it puts forth has never convinced the scholarly community and cannot be credited as anything other than a conspiracy claim. And I hope that this conclusion will demonstrate to religious listeners that in this podcast, in my own evaluation of claims about religion, I can be open-minded and am willing to defend religions and religious beliefs at least against attacks that lack merit.

The Mushroom Kingdom: The Entheogen Theory of Religion

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