Persephone's Quest

Entheogens: Psychedelic religion in the United States, part two

“…Potential problems include, first, that the members of these communities often embrace historical narratives that are not supported by the historical and archaeological data. Scholars and entheogenic activists (admittedly, that line is blurry, if it exists at all) have associated entheogens with ancient Hinduism (Kuddus et al., 2013; Wasson, 1971), Buddhism (Badliner, 2002; Crowley, 2019; Osto, 2016), ancient Chinese religions (Touw, 1981), ancient Greek religion (Wasson et al., 1978), African religions (Duvall, 2019), Native American religions (Lee, 2013), Judaism (Lattin, 2023), Christianity (Allegro, 2009), Islam (Khalifa, 1975; Rosenthal, 1971), and with other major so‐called world religions (Wasson, Kramrisch, Ruck, and Ott, 1986). As evidenced by the New York Times Best Selling book The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (which argues that the original Christian sacrament was psychedelic—Muraresku, 2020), this literature is often engaging and interesting, although it stretches the boundaries of credible academic historical analyses as it often speculates on historical innuendo and reaches historical conclusions on information that is subject to reasonable interpretation.…”