Was Jesus a mushroom? 5 Questions on psychedelics and ancient religion with J. Christian Greer

What history can teach us about the current moment in psychedelics.

As an undergraduate, J. Christian Greer studied the history of religion. As he learned about the world’s religions, he noticed a disconnect between the religious texts he was reading and the way he saw real people practicing religion and spirituality. In the bohemian or hippie scene in south Florida, where he grew up, he observed a mix of religious and non-religious values with bits of paganism, Americanized tenets of Buddhism, surfing, and psychedelics mixed in. 

Soon, he learned about esotericism: the study of marginalized or repressed religions across global history. Those scholars often wrote about psychedelics’ role in religion, as well as how historians’ arguments about psychedelics’ role in religion have been received across history. Greer earned his masters in Divinity from Harvard and is now a scholar of Religious Studies with a special focus on psychedelic spirituality. He recently taught a course at Harvard called “Global History of Psychedelic Spirituality: Cultures, Histories, and Practices”, and he is currently a research fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where he’s researching psychedelic spirituality and the Civil Rights movement. The Microdose spoke with Greer about what history has to teach us about the current moment in psychedelics.

Right now, the world of psychedelics feels very future-oriented: the potential for healing, the possibility of scaling treatment options and companies, new research and new drugs. But your work focuses on the past. Why is it important to study the history of psychedelics?

The past can teach us so much about the possibilities and pitfalls of using these substances. Whether it's the medical use or the spiritual use, the historical record is abundant with successes and failures. To move forward without any reference to the thousands of years of history almost seems like flying blind. 

My question is what would be the reason that history is ignored? It could be enthusiasm; the naivete can be excused but it should also be understood. But there’s another compelling reason to ignore history. If you look at the history of psychedelics, it’s cross-cultural. There are forms of community knowledge that need to be marginalized or even suppressed in order to market these substances as a panacea. For example, peyote comes with such an important cultural frame around how to use and acquire it. There’s this very ugly situation happening where the acquisition of peyote has created a shortage among the Indigenous communities that have been using it for the last few thousand years. However, you can't bring that historical knowledge into the frame if you want to market yourself as a progressive industry. 

It's only by studying the history of psychedelic ceremonials that we can fully appreciate how these substances have arrived to the present day, into the world of capitalism. 

People in the U.S. are often familiar with the short-term history of psychedelics in North America and Europe – perhaps they’ve heard of Albert Hofmann’s LSD trip, or Timothy Leary’s work. But as you mentioned, psychedelics have been around for thousands of years. What do we know about the use of psychedelics in early human history?

When it comes to the global history of psychedelics, so much of this conversation begins with a really volatile discussion focused on one substance in one context, and that is: what was soma? If you look at one of the earliest religious texts in human history, people often cite the Rigveda, which was a series of hymns compiled some time between 2000 B.C.E. and 900 B.C.E. Many of these hymns are devoted to soma; soma is a plant, an elixir, and a god. 

So the earliest religious texts of humanity are devoted to a drug! And here I would caution students of psychedelic culture, because there is a very persuasive line of argumentation that says, “Look, we found the oldest religious book, and it's a book about the alteration of consciousness to drugs — therefore, religion is just the shadow of drugs ceremonials.” We found it at the start; the religious imagination of humanity was generated by a psychedelic. Therefore, we can look through the history of religion and ask, where's the psychedelic? 

But I would caution against that view, although I would also say: maybe. But as a more or less sober historian of religion, I need to see a little more evidence first. 

When I read through the syllabus for your class at Harvard, I noticed the title of one session is “Jesus was a mushroom.” Tell me what that means?

I put that on the syllabus as a sort of insider wink — there’s a famous text called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, written by a very highly regarded biblical scholar named John Allegro. This guy was serious: he knew his Aramaic and every ancient language, to the point where he was extremely boring to read. He was one of the scholars called in when archaeologists found the Dead Sea Scrolls. Allegro came in, did some serious research, and his big breakout book after that was this extremely provocative text which was published in the 1970s. 

His book made the argument that we don't know if there was a historical Jesus. Scholars had said that before, so no one was shocked. Then he went a little bit further and said: looking back over the research, I’ve discovered a code that I've been able to decipher, which suggests that paleo Christianity is, in fact, a fertility cult. So if you decode all these oral tales we have regarding this Jewish healer named Jesus, they all point to the use of Amanita muscaria. [Editor’s note: Amanita muscaria is a mushroom with hallucinogenic properties.] 

This book destroyed Allegro’s career totally. The negative response was so disproportionate to his claim that there's actually a famous article, called “Academic Suicide”; basically, it's about John Allegro, and how to ruin your career. The book came out in the mid-seventies; the War on Drugs was on. It was so easy to twist his ideas to make him seem like a fool, and that's precisely what happened.

So the “Jesus was a mushroom” argument didn’t go over so well for Allegro. Has the reception of that idea changed in the last 50 years?

Fast forward to today: in 2020 Brian Muraresku comes out with The Immortality Key. He was not drawing from John Allegro's work, but from another scholar, Carl Ruck, who also more or less committed academic suicide by claiming Jesus used cannabis oils in his public ministry as a healing salve, and made other bold claims about the prevalence of psychedelics in the ancient world. Ruck also brought fantastic insight about the viticulture of the ancient world: the wine of the ancients was always spiked with drugs, like opium or henbane. That’s why in ancient texts people are always watering down their wine, or if you read some of the tales of the Bacchae, the followers of Bacchus, people were dying from two glasses of wine. 

So Muraesku, drawing on Ruck’s work, makes a similar argument to Allegro: that in fact, paleo Christianity was secretly drawing on an age-old tradition of using psychoactive substances to induce mystical experiences. So the tide is turning. That's very clear to me. 

Are there any historical moments that can teach us something about this current moment in psychedelics?

The one that's really fascinated me lately is the case of Carlos Castañeda, and the Don Juan hoax. 

This goes back to what I was saying about really putting a lot of time and consideration into disassembling the master narrative of postwar American psychedelic culture. Because there's a lot of lessons to be learned. One of them can be traced back to Carlos Castañeda, who was a junior anthropologist at UCLA in the late sixties and published one of the bestselling books of psychedelic culture ever, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. He publishes this book and he claims to be an anthropologist who visits a Native American shaman who brings him in as an apprentice to a psychedelic shamanistic practice. The book sold remarkably well, and it's premised on this anthropologist becoming a Yaqui sorcerer by use of a number of psychedelic drugs. The book was a phenomenon in the seventies; it's really hard to emphasize just how big an impact it made. There are seven sequels, and it generated interest in Native American culture, but really homogenizes the view of Native Americans as mystical, spiritual people without humanizing them appropriately. 

Anyway, it came out that he made it up, that Don Juan was a figment of his imagination that he had used to sell a psychedelic narrative. Right now, we're starting to see scholarly research that represents a change in that narrative: it’s not just about Carlos Castañeda faking this, but also about the willingness of scholars to forward a congenial narrative, a publishing industry that didn't care whether it was real or not, and a reading public that was hungry for sensationalized accounts of psychedelic masters and what they can teach. 

I'm going back to this particular hoax to use it as a lens to understand the psychedelic renaissance today. How is the enthusiasm for psychedelics now creating a similar set of circumstances where other bad practices can flourish? And so I'm doing my best not to be a downer, but really dedicating my thoughts, time, and energy to being able to temper the enthusiasm without being a wet blanket. How can we make critiques of psychedelic therapies and trials, without being considered an opponent?

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.