Do Drugs Have Religious Import?
The Journal of Philosophy – October 01, 1964
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
A compelling finding from the 1960s reveals how ten theological students and professors experienced profound religious states after ingesting psilocybin during a Good Friday service. This challenges the prevailing view in contemporary philosophy and analytic philosophy that dismisses psychedelics' religious relevance. Despite these powerful experiences, scholars in Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology often overlook their implications for Epistemology and the study of Religion and Society Interactions, prematurely closing the case on their potential to illuminate religious history and practice within Psychedelics and Drug Studies.
Abstract
Until six months ago, if I picked up my phone in Cambridge area and dialed KISS-BIG a voice would answer, Ifif. These were coincidences: KISS-BIG simply happened to be letter equivalents of an arbitrarily assigned telephone number, while I.F.I.F. represented initials of an organization with improbable name of International Federation for Internal Freedom. But coincidences were apposite to point of being poetic. Kiss big caught euphoric, manic, life-embracing attitude that characterized this most publicized of organizations formed to explore newly synthesized consciousness-changing substances, while organization itself was surely one of iffy-est phenomena to appear on our social and intellectual scene in some time. It produced first firings in Harvard's history, an ultimatum to get out of Mexico in five days, and the miracle of Marsh Chapel in which during a two-and-one-half hour Good Friday service ten theological students and professors ingested psilocybin and were visited by what they generally reported to be deepest religious experiences of their lives. Despite last of these phenomena and its numerous if less dramatic parallels, students of religion appear by and large to be dismissing psychedelic drugs which have sprung to our attention in sixties as having little religious relevance. The position taken in one of most forward-looking volumes of theological essays to have appeared in recent years (1) accepts R. C. Zaehner's Mysticism Sacred and Profane as having fully examined and refuted religious claims for mescaline which Aldous Huxley sketched in The Doors of Perception . This closing of case strikes me as premature, for it looks as if drugs have light to throw on history of religion, phenomenology of religion, philosophy of religion, and practice of religious life itself.