7 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
British novelist and philosopher — author of Brave New World, Point Counter Point, and The Doors of Perception — who created the pleasure-engineering dystopia and wrote the most influential account of a psychedelic experience.
American lawyer and author — author of The Immortality Key — who argues that ancient Greek and early Christian religious rites used psychedelic beverages, and that these rites are the origin of Christianity.
German-American psychologist who was Timothy Leary's colleague at Harvard — co-writing The Psychedelic Experience with Leary and Alpert — and who went on to explore consciousness transformation, shamanism, and ecological spirituality, founding the Green Earth Foundation.
American psychologist who was Timothy Leary's colleague at Harvard, where he was dismissed for psychedelic research — then traveled to India, met Neem Karoli Baba, became Ram Dass — and whose Be Here Now (1971) and subsequent teaching made him one of the most influential spiritual teachers in America.
Aldous Huxley's 1954 account of his mescaline experience — arguing that psychedelics work by reducing the brain's filtering function, allowing more of reality (which Huxley associated with Bergson's Mind at Large) to enter consciousness — the founding text of the psychedelic intellectual movement.
Brian Muraresku's 2020 argument — that ancient Greek mystery religions (especially Eleusis) used psychedelic beverages, that early Christianity adopted these rites, and that psychedelic experience is the origin of Western religion — combining classical scholarship with chemical archaeology.
John Allegro's 1970 argument — that Christianity originated as a mushroom fertility cult, and that biblical names are encoded references to Amanita muscaria — the most linguistically elaborate psychedelic-origins theory in religious history.