What I am about to describe may sound like the first five minutes of an old episode of the X-Files.
Before I get to the heart of this true story, I will need to establish a perspective that may not be known nor shared by those outside of the clergy community.
You may know your rector or pastor as a good, salt-of-the-earth type, responsible to his or her family, aware of the realities of the world, dependable in those situations where calmness and faith are required.
Yes, there are some spuds out there, but that is true of any profession. For the most part, clergy are normal, reliable people and not ones who veer too far outside of the bounds of reality and common thought.
Now, this may surprise you. Most clergy, even the most suburban, have an understanding that there are spiritual things beyond human understanding that may require some form of external empowerment.
We know, for example, that monasticism is filled with behaviors and practices designed to knock consciousness outside of its normal rhythm of sensory input and output. That is generally accomplished through persistent fasting, absence of sleep, physical discomfort, and extended periods of silence.
Very ancient religions and tribal groups used those and other means to the same effect, with members receiving special training and enduring measured types of hardship.
Extreme exposure to the elements, the eating of various hallucinogenic foods, or inviting venomous animals to bite them to encourage the visions necessary to aid tribal decisions are among the methods used.
It is said that Greek oracles would ingest the mushrooms from the island of Patmos, prized for their hallucinogenic quality, to enhance their prophetic visions.1
When I was a first semester student at what was then the rather grand, and financially solvent, flagship institution of The Episcopal Church, The General Theological Seminary in New York City2, I was randomly seated at a refectory table with some of the senior doctoral candidates. As I was too junior to have a role in their conversation, I was ignored when they began to talk about the ways in which they had tried to expand their understanding of spirituality.
Warning: This section is recommended for adults.
It was for them an unguarded moment as I, the outsider, was all but invisible to them. They spoke of drug use, blood flow restriction through self-asphyxiation, and one particularly memorable moment when one of the women spoke of attempting to “see Jesus through orgasm” by being vigorously serviced on an altar.
Yeah, I was never so glad to be invisible in my entire life. I also never looked at the seminary’s chapel altar the same way again.
I mention such things not to be prurient, but to allow the reader to understand that extremity in spiritual pursuit is not an uncommon feature.
Gladly, I happily confess to being gloriously Midwestern vanilla in such matters and have had my greatest moments of spiritual awareness in the pulpit and, in the standard manner, at the altar.
One might think that such things were a product of more recent times, but there have been many attempts to use artificial means to enhance spiritual awareness stretching to at least the early Middle Ages.
Even Willliam James, Harvard’s great scholar of the psychology of religion, of whom we have written, was known to use ether, mushrooms, and nitrous oxide to enhance his awareness as far back as the late 19th century. None of those were of particular use to James, but this does illustrate the ubiquity of such practice.
Now, our tale.
In 1962, the halls of Harvard [that place, again] were graced by Walter Pahnke, a simultaneous student at both Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School. At that time, Timothy Leary was on the faculty of the medical school and was pursuing his experiments in the therapeutic use of hallucinogens, particularly LSD3. [Much more of Leary may be found online.]
As Pahnke’s interest in the spiritual psyche intertwined with his work in both the M.D. program and the divinity program, it was natural that he would seek the tutelage of Leary. Between the two of them, they had an idea.
On Good Friday of that year, in a makeshift auxiliary chapel constructed in the basement of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, Leary, Pahnke, and some others gathered with twenty volunteers4 from Harvard Divinity School and nearby Andover-Newton Theological School to engage in mainstream Christianity’s most notorious 20th century experiment.
Ten of the volunteers were given psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, and ten were given a placebo. Then they were to sit and participate as best they could in the Good Friday service that was being held above them.
It was as complete a service as one could expect on a campus in the early ‘60’s, with prayer, sacred music, the deep reading of the Passion Narrative, and an eighty-five-minute sermon preached by Walter Thurman, no less.5
Pahnke was seeking to prove that psychedelic drugs could prompt religious experiences and prove of long-term benefit for the individual. Unfortunately, what appears like sound reasoning on paper can prove to be beyond the control of researchers in the field, especially when dealing with a substance as unpredictable as psilocybin.
The participants of the experiment, those who had received the psilocybin, began to exclaim like those “slain in the spirit” at a charismatic liturgy, with great shouts of “Glory” and “Alleluia.”
One student was so convinced that it was his mission to represent the Gospel that he ran out of the basement and onto Commonwealth Avenue to preach the imminent coming of Christ. A couple of folks claim he was doing so shirtless.
Another became so agitated that he needed to be injected with Thorazine6. Others experienced debilitating anxiety.
However, in the “after action report,” some of the students involved wrote the following:
“Matter and time seemed to be of no consequence. I was living in the most beautiful reality I had ever known, and it was eternal.”
“I had a vision in which the flowing colors seemed to be me. It was infinity.”
“I attempted to play the organ, wanting to play Christ the Lord is Risen Today, being motivated by a strange sense of joy.”
“I immediately began to meditate and pray and read my New Testament — 1 Corinthians 13. … I began to pray for forgiveness and praise God for the blessings of life.”
“Before, I just felt as if I should enter the ministry, but now I know that I must.”7
Pahnke would conclude his report by noting, “The drug experience is similar if not identical with changes resulting from mystical experiences.”
Huston Smith, who would later write several helpful and popular texts on comparative religion, would publicly admit to his participation in the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Of it he wrote it was "the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced."8
One of the other students, Paul Lee, who had been given the placebo, noted years later that “I again had the impression of the room being a vast sensorium, where all nuance and subtleties are vividly and emphatically experienced.”9
The Marsh Chapel Experiment is not mentioned much these days, even at Marsh Chapel and Boston University. In fact, it seems like an embarrassing artifact from a time when we were certainly more naïve.
In reading through the descriptions and later follow-up studies that were done twenty-four years later, and without Walter Pahnke’s participation as he had died in a scuba diving mishap in 1971, the conclusion notes there is “a considerable doubt on the assertion that mystical experiences catalyzed by drugs are in any way inferior to non-drug mystical experiences in both their immediate content and long-term effects."
Personally, I am old-fashioned about such things. If grounded in faith, familiar with sacred literature, and trusting in the Godhead, I would rather have my brain “altered” through worship and fellowship than by artificial means introduced into my physical being.
Still, with the increasing legality of drugs, and the much wider use of pharmaceuticals, including psychotropics, it is inevitable that the relationship between them and spiritual inquiry will continue to be explored, even in a mainstream forum.
Heck, we may be only a decade away from arguing about the efficacy of “hallucinogenic liturgy” at The Episcopal Church’s General Convention.
Readers of The Wandering Coracle will note the coincidence [?] that the most hallucinogenic work of the Newer Testament, The Book of Revelation, was written by John of Patmos.
Now a sad shadow of its once famous glory, mismanaged into the ground. I can’t bear to link to its website as it grieves me.
LSD was not illegal until 1966.
Divinity students were all male in those days.
We wrote about Thurman on Monday. He was fully knowledgeable of the experiment that was taking place below the main chapel and was interested in the results. Again, even mainstream clergy have that side to their nature.
Since Pahnke’s report on the results avoided any mention of these less savory episodes, it is possible that this was the same student.
from The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin
from Smith’s Cleansing the Doors of Perception : the religious significance of entheogenic plants and chemicals
from The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment by Jennifer Ulrich
Wow! The psychiatric community is looking into psilocybin as a treatment for depression. Where do I sign up?
Fascinating! Tho, this is a bit disapointing: "Gladly, I happily confess to being gloriously Midwestern vanilla in such matters and have had my greatest moments of spiritual awareness in the pulpit and, in the standard manner, at the altar." :P Was hoping with that lead up to hear of your experiments in unconventional ways to spiritual awareness. But, there's still time.