Soul or spirit? A misunderstanding at the heart of shamanism
It is worth starting with a distinction that is almost always overlooked. Vegetalist shamanism, as documented by Stephan Beyer in Singing to the Plants—probably the best contemporary encyclopedia-guide on the subject—does not inhabit the “realm of the spirit” but rather the landscape of the soul. The shaman, Beyer writes, deals with illness, envy, betrayal, loss, failure, hatred, and death, including their own; their craft is to dwell in the valley of the soul and repair what has been broken in the body and the community.
That image clashes with the one popularized by Mircea Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, where shamanism appears as an ascent to the heavens, flight of the soul, and ecstatic journey toward the divine. It is a vertical, mystical vision that has taken deep root in the West. But the shaman’s daily practice is not played out in the ascent to heaven, but in the horizontal movement through the territory of the soul, where one heals and negotiates with evil.
The misunderstanding becomes historical when Robert Gordon Wasson “discovers” María Sabina in the Mazatec mountains of Oaxaca. The niños santos—psilocybin mushrooms—were not used to seek God, but to heal and resolve community conflicts. María Sabina herself summarized it unambiguously: “To meet God, one goes to church.” Wasson, however, went to Mexico looking for a mystical experience, and he had one. His account speaks less of the curandera’s therapeutic work than of his own subjective experience. After that exposure, María Sabina suffered rejection from her community—her house was burned down more than once—and she felt that the mushrooms had stopped “speaking” to her. A cost that rarely appears in romanticized versions of the episode.
Wasson, Castaneda, and the trap of the word “entheogen”
Here it is worth pausing at a paradox that is uncomfortable for the psychonaut culture itself. Wasson, an amateur ethnomycologist, went down in history as the heroic “discoverer” of a tradition; Carlos Castaneda, author of The Teachings of Don Juan and a doctoral thesis on Mexican shamanism, was branded an impostor. And yet, Castaneda altered names, places, and data—perhaps protecting his informants and a culturally fragile tradition—while Wasson published his finding as a full-page spread in Life magazine, with notable cultural colonialism and without assuming the consequences for those who welcomed him. This is not about canonizing one or sinking the other, but about observing how easily the “entheogenic intelligentsia” hands out labels of hero and fraud.
The term entheogen (literally, “generating the divine within”) was proposed by Wasson and his collaborators, and it carries that same burden: it describes a Western, theocentric gaze on practices that, in their original context, sought exactly something else. Its defenders clarify that it does not designate a pharmacological category, but a ritual use in indigenous cultures; yet, in those very contexts, the goal is not communion with any divinity, but to heal and deal with physical and social ills. Those who pursue the mystical experience through substances are, above all, Westerners. Taken to its logical conclusion, the term would only be accurate when applied to Western use for spiritual purposes—the opposite of what it was coined for.
The takeaway from all this is sobering: there is no god encapsulated inside any substance waiting to manifest. What exists is a cultural and religious tradition that conditions what we look for and what we believe we find. Mystical experiences are culturally determined, and the substance, at best, opens a door to that prior cultural reality. Understanding this helps explain why Western science has dedicated itself to measuring the mysticomimetic capacity of hallucinogens: it responds to a context where “spirituality” means, almost by default, union with the divine.
From Huxley to Leary: mysticism as a laboratory object
Aldous Huxley defined the psychedelic experience as “gratuitous grace” and, lucidly, avoided theological explanations: for him, the substance acted on a prior cultural and physiological substrate, not on an inner divinity. Huxley mentored Timothy Leary, who was fascinated by that state of “grace.” Leary was the one who devised the first experiment to test whether, with the right context and the right people, psilocybin could induce mystical experiences. It is no coincidence that this turn toward mysticism occurred in the United States: the enormous weight of religion in that society helps explain why there, and almost only there, psychedelic research was oriented for decades toward the spiritual.
The Good Friday Experiment (1962)
The study, known as the Good Friday Experiment, was part of the doctoral thesis of Walter Pahnke, a student of Leary and a theology student. Pahnke constructed a questionnaire with nine traits that the literature on mysticism attributes to the mystical experience: internal and external unity, transcendence of space and time, deeply positive mood, sense of sacredness, sense of objective reality, paradox, ineffability, transcendence, and persistent positive changes in attitudes and behavior.
During a service on the night of Good Friday in 1962 at a Boston church, half of the volunteers received psilocybin and the other half received nicotinic acid, an active placebo that mimics physiological symptoms but lacks psychological effect. There were significant differences in favor of the psilocybin group in eight of the nine categories, and at six months, the difference remained. On paper, an impeccable result.
The fine print, however, was not published at the time: one of the participants suffered a psychotic break and had to be medicated, and several went through very difficult experiences that did not appear in the reports. Almost three decades later, a follow-up led by Rick Doblin reconnected with the participants and confirmed that, despite those difficult experiences, a life impact perceived as positive persisted. An important nuance: “difficult” experience and “valuable” experience are not mutually exclusive categories, but they are not interchangeable either.
Johns Hopkins: modern replication
More than forty years later, the team of psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths, at Johns Hopkins University, resumed this line of research with contemporary methodology and a particularly careful experimental design. In the first study, psilocybin was administered to volunteers with prior spiritual practice, compared to methylphenidate as an active placebo. A majority of the participants—22 out of 36—rated the session as one of the most significant and spiritual experiences of their lives; the assessment remained fourteen months later and was accompanied by personality changes measurable with standardized questionnaires. A subsequent study with different doses showed that only high doses induced that type of experience.
It is worth highlighting two facts that are rarely cited. First, a portion of the volunteers also had an experience described as mystical with the placebo: a warning about how powerful suggestion and context are. Second, although psilocybin proved physiologically safe, about 40% of the participants went through episodes of intense anxiety and fear, which were resolved favorably within a highly controlled environment and with support. That they were resolved well does not make them anecdotal: they are the reason why touting the “harmlessness” of these substances is imprudent. The other research in this family that evaluated the mystical experience was the Baggott group’s study with MDA.
Critical reading
Summarizing what the evidence seems to support: certain hallucinogens can induce mystical-type experiences, and those experiences are associated with changes perceived as positive in personality that tend to persist over time. On that basis, researchers are discussing their potential utility in addictions and in the anxiety and depression of people with serious terminal illnesses. A reasonable hypothesis is that feeling part of something larger reduces the sense of isolation and alleviates existential weight.
That said, it is advisable to maintain skepticism on several fronts. The “mystical experience” scales measure, to a large extent, a culturally defined experience: they do not validate any metaphysics, they only record that people describe it in those terms. The placebo effect is large enough to cloud any naive reading. The samples are small, the participants are selected and motivated, and the “set and setting”—expectation and environment—does much of the work. And the data on acute fear episodes reminds us that these experiences can be overwhelming even under optimal conditions; outside of a clinical framework, with support and screening, the nature of the risk changes. Harm reduction over enthusiasm.
This text is an educational piece by Psiconáutica that collects and reorganizes a now-classic debate—supported by authors such as Beyer, Eliade, Huxley, Pahnke, Doblin, and Griffiths—and does not constitute a recommendation for use or a usage guide.
