Psilocybin and Sacred Mushrooms

The church’s teaching

The Church of the Only Begotten Son counts psilocybin mushrooms among the sacred plants and fungi it holds to be created by God. Among the writings it recognizes as scripture is a manuscript by Jack Herrera, which, the church explains, gives an account of the first miracle of Jesus at the wedding at Cana:

“…explains the miracle of turning water to wine by claiming Christ added Psychedelic Mushroom Powder to the water, allowing the congregation to experience the divine conversation facilitated when one prayerfully ingests the sacred sacrament God has created for this express purpose.”

That reading is the church’s religious teaching, drawn from a text the church holds sacred; it is not the reading of mainstream biblical scholarship. The church also recognizes Dr. Jerry B. Brown’s book as “scripture and historic evidence of scripture which reveals the historic truths regarding ethnobotanical plants and their ceremonial and sacred use throughout the scriptures.”¹

Sacred mushrooms in history

Psilocybin-containing mushrooms have a long ceremonial history in Mesoamerica, where the Aztec name teonanácatl is often translated “flesh of the gods.” Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth century described their use in ritual, and the Church of the colonial period suppressed it. In 1957 the banker and amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson published an account in Life magazine of a mushroom ceremony led by the Mazatec healer María Sabina, which brought the subject to a wide audience.⁴

Mushrooms in Christian art

In The Psychedelic Gospels (2016), the anthropologist Jerry B. Brown, a founding professor at Florida International University, and Julie M. Brown documented images in medieval churches and manuscripts that they interpret as sacred mushrooms — among them the Garden of Eden fresco in the chapel of Plaincourault in central France.³ In a 2019 paper they set out the history of the debate: Wasson had accepted the art historian Erwin Panofsky’s view that such “mushroom trees” are stylized trees, while the Browns, building on the work of Giorgio Samorini, argue that the resemblance is intentional.²

Contested Whether medieval artists meant to depict mushrooms, and whether any early Christians used them, remains disputed. An earlier, more sweeping theory — John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), which claimed Christianity began as a mushroom cult — was rejected by most scholars.⁷ The fresco is examined further on the Amanita muscaria and Psychedelic Christianity pages.

Modern research on mystical experience

On Good Friday, April 20, 1962, Walter Pahnke, a Harvard graduate student in theology, conducted an experiment during a service at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel: divinity students received either psilocybin or a placebo, and most of those given psilocybin described profound religious experiences.⁵ In 2006 a team at Johns Hopkins led by Roland Griffiths published a controlled study reporting that psilocybin could occasion mystical-type experiences of “substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.”⁶ The church’s own account of faith and science is set out in The Science Behind The Religion.

Colorado today

In 2022 Colorado voters approved Proposition 122, the Natural Medicine Health Act, and in 2023 the legislature followed with Senate Bill 23-290. The state’s Natural Medicine Division now oversees licensed psilocybin healing centers.⁸ State regulation and the church’s religious freedom are separate questions; see the religious freedom page. Nothing here is legal or medical advice.