Jun 17, 2025 19:00:00

About 30 clergymen, including pastors and priests, took high doses of magic mushrooms in a laboratory and had a 'life-changing experience' that truly changed their lives.

In 2015, about 30 clergymen, including a Baptist Bible scholar, a Catholic priest, a Jewish religious leader, and a Buddhist monk, were attracted by an advertisement for a research study on psilocybin (the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms) and holy experiences. They participated in an experiment in which they took high doses of psilocybin. Ten years after the experiment, a paper has finally been published.

Effects of Psilocybin on Religious and Spiritual Attitudes and Behaviors in Clergy from Various Major World Religions | Psychedelic Medicine

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/psymed.2023.0044

This Is Your Priest on Drugs | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/26/this-is-your-priest-on-drugs

What Happens When Clergy Take Psilocybin
https://nautil.us/clergy-blown-away-by-psilocybin-1217112/

The study, conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and New York University, focused on clergy members who were given psilocybin and how they felt about its effects.

The average age of the participants was 49.8 years old, 93% had graduate degrees, and 22 were Christian, five were Jewish, one was Muslim, and one was Buddhist.

Participants were given 20 mg of psilocybin per 70 kg of body weight orally, lay down on a couch, wore blindfolds and headphones, and were asked to focus on what was going on in their minds.

Reverend Hunt, an Anglican priest who participated in the study, recalled that time as follows:

'I began to see amazing images, fractal patterns reminiscent of the mosaics in mosques. Then I felt a spiraling current of electricity flow into my left thigh. It ran powerfully up my body and I felt it catch in my throat. I thought my Adam's apple was going to explode. The two guides present sensed my distress and one of them reached over to calm me down (this was later revealed to be a misunderstanding by Hunt). It felt like

the laying on of hands, a Christian ritual. Something erupted from the top of my head and began to make sounds that were religious, spiritual, holy. I realised I was speaking in tongues , which I had never done before. Speaking in tongues is not part of the Anglican Church.'

After two doses of psilocybin, separated by a month interval, participants were then surveyed 16 months later, asking questions about their religious affiliation, such as, 'Have you noticed any changes in your behavior related to your spiritual/religious mission?'

The researchers found that 79% of participants who had taken psilocybin twice reported that the experience had enriched their prayers, improved their effectiveness in their careers, and enhanced a sense of the sacred in their daily lives, and that 96% ranked their first exposure to psilocybin in the top five most spiritually meaningful experiences of their lives.

Hunt described his encounter with God after taking psilocybin as 'erotic,' and said he felt like he had become a woman, saying, 'God felt more masculine. It felt very strange to me as a man, so I thought maybe this is how women experience sexuality.' Several other subjects also reported experiencing 'spiritual orgasms.'

Not all subjects had mystical experiences, however. A Mexican Catholic priest said he had heard directly from Jesus, while a Protestant pastor shrugged and said there was nothing particularly Christian about it. A Buddhist monk said it wasn't life-changing, but it took him into a completely non-conceptual realm that was hard to describe. Rita Powell, an Anglican

chaplain at Harvard University, declined a second session after facing an 'abyss' during the first session, later saying, 'At one point during the experiment, I felt like I was nowhere. There was no color, no form, no fear, no joy, no revelation. There was nothing.'

The study took a long time to publish because of concerns about possible conflicts of interest over funding sources and an attempt to 'force a link between drugs and religion,' but these issues were resolved and the results were released in 2025.

The researchers acknowledged that the sample was small, predominantly white, male and Christian, and did not include clergy from other religions such as Hinduism, Taoism or Confucianism, so any relevance is limited.

Ten years after the experiment, Hunt and some of the other subjects have become psychedelic evangelists , incorporating them into their religious beliefs. For some, the experience reportedly freed them from 'attachment to dogma' and opened the door to other religious experiences.