chapter 19

ENTHEOGENIC ESOTERICISM
Wouter J. Hanegraaff

The title of this chapter was not chosen lightly. It brings two highly controver-
sial terms together in a novel combination and, in so doing, attempts to call
attention to a specific phenomenon in contemporary religion, namely the reli-
gious use of psychoactive substances as means of access to spiritual insights
about the true nature of reality. The question of why, and in what sense(s),
this type of religion should be understood as a form of “esotericism” will be
addressed below; but something must be said at the outset about the adjective
“entheogenic” and its implications. The substantive entheogen was coined in
1979 by a group of ethnobotanists and scholars of mythology who were con-
cerned with finding a terminology that would acknowledge the ritual use of
psychoactive plants reported from a variety of traditional religious contexts,
while avoiding the questionable meanings and connotations of current terms,
notably “hallucinogens” and “psychedelics”.1 As suggested by its roots in Greek
etymology (ε’΄νθεος), natural or artificial substances can be called entheogens
(adjective: entheogenic) if they generate, or bring about, unusual states of
consciousness in which those who use them are believed to be “filled”, “pos-
sessed” or “inspired” by some kind of divine entity, presence or force.2 While
the altered states in question are pharmacologically induced, such religious
interpretations of them are obviously products of culture.
Although the terms “entheogen” and “entheogenic” were invented with
specific reference to the religious use of psychoactive substances, it is impor-
tant to point out – although this broadens current understandings of the term
– that the notion of “entheogenic religion”, if taken literally, does not strictly
imply such substances: after all, there are many other factors that may trigger

   1. Ruck et al., “Entheogens”.

   2. On the rich vocabulary for such states of consciousness in classic antiquity, see the exhaus-
tive overview in Pfister, “Ekstase”, especially 955–7.

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 entheogenic esotericism

or facilitate a state of ε’ νθουσιασμός (“enthusiasm”), such as specific breathing

techniques, rhythmic drumming, ritual prayer and incantations, meditation,
and so on. This was already the case in antiquity, and remains so today. It will
therefore be useful to distinguish between entheogenic religion in a narrow
and in a wide sense: with respect to the wider category, one could think of
such cases as the ritual practices known as “theurgy”, described for instance
by the third/fourth-century neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus,3 the compli-
cated techniques known as “ecstatic kabbalah”, developed by the Jewish mystic
Abraham Abulafia in the thirteenth century,4 or even the experience of being
“filled by the Holy Spirit” in contemporary Pentecostalism. The historical evi-
dence in Western culture for entheogenic religion in a narrow sense (that is,
involving the use of psychoactive substances) is a contentious issue to say
the least, and discussing it seriously would require a book-length treatment;
but in order to establish that we are not pursuing a chimaera it suffices, for
now, to point out that the existence of such kinds of religion in indigenous
cultures is well documented, particularly in the Latin American context.5 The
present chapter will focus exclusively on one particular trend of contemporary
entheogenic religion – in a narrow sense – which may be defined as a form of
Western esotericism and has not yet received the attention it deserves.

ENTHEOGENS AND RELIGION: CONCEPTUAL PITFALLS AND PREJUDICES

That entheogens might have a legitimate place in religion at all is controver-

sial among scholars, but for reasons that have less to do with factual evidence
than with certain ingrained prejudices rooted in Western intellectual culture.
Firstly, on the crypto-Protestant assumption that “religion” implies an atti-
tude in which human beings are dependent on the divine initiative to receive
grace or salvation, the use of entheogens is bound to suggest a “magical” and
therefore not “truly religious” attitude in which human beings themselves
dare to take the initiative and claim to have the key of access to divinity. Such
a distinction (in which the former option is coded positively and the latter
negatively) makes intuitive sense to us because modern intellectual culture
since the Enlightenment has internalized specific Protestant assumptions to
an extent where they appear wholly natural and obvious: in Clifford Geertz’s

   3. See e.g. Shaw, “Theurgy”; Luck, “Theurgy and Forms of Worship”. Luck suggests that
Neoplatonic theurgy may in fact have been entheogenic religion in the narrow sense as
well, but the evidence does not allow us to establish this as a fact.
   4. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 146–55; Idel, Mystical Experience in Abraham
Abulafia, 13–52.
   5. See for example the ritual use of ayahuasca (aka yage, hoasca, daime) in a variety of Latin
American religions (Labate & Jungaberle, The Internationalization of Ayahuasca), or peyote
religion in the USA.

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wouter j . hanegraaff

famous formulation, the dominant symbolic system clothes them with such
an “aura of factuality” that the “moods and motivations” connected to them
seem “uniquely realistic”.6 These assumptions are, however, culture-specific
and highly problematic. The underlying opposition of “religion” versus “magic”
(along with “science”) as reified universals has been thoroughly deconstructed,
in recent decades, as artificial and ethnocentric to the core: it depends on nor-
mative modernist ideologies and implicit hegemonic claims of Western supe-
riority that are rooted in heresiological, missionary and colonialist mentalities
but cannot claim universal or even scholarly validity. Ultimately based upon
the theological battle against “paganism”, the “magic versus religion” assump-
tion, including its “manipulative” versus “receptive” connotations, is a distort-
ing mirror that fails to account for the complexity of beliefs and practices on
both sides of the conceptual divide.7
A second cause of controversy has to do with certain idealist frameworks
or assumptions that seem so natural to Western scholars that they are seldom
reflected upon. Religion is generally supposed to be about spiritual realities,
not material ones, and therefore the claim that modifying brain activity by
chemical means might be a religious pursuit seems counterintuitive. It comes
across as a purely technical and quasi-materialist trick that cheats practition-
ers into believing they are having a “genuine” religious experience. However,
such objections are extremely problematic. First, they wrongly assume that
there are scholarly procedures for distinguishing genuine from fake religion.
Second, they ignore the fact that any activity associated with mind or spirit
is inseparable from neurological activity and brain chemistry. In our experi-
ence as human beings we know of no such thing as “pure” spiritual activity
(or, for that matter, any other mental activity) unconnected with the body and
the brain: if it did exist, we would be incapable of experiencing its effects!8
Since all forms of experience, including “experiences deemed religious”,9 are
bodily phenomena by definition, it is arbitrary to exclude entheogenic religion
merely because of the particular method it uses to influence the brain.
A final cause of controversy is, of course, the well-known rhetoric employed
in the “war on drugs” since the end of the 1960s. Here the polemical use of
reified universal categories is once again decisive: rather than carefully dif-
ferentiating between the enormous variety of psychoactive substances and
their effects, the monolithic category of “drugs” suggests that all of them are

   6. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System”.

   7. See detailed discussion in Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, chapter three, with
special reference to Styers, Making Magic.
   8. Some critics might point to out-of-body experiences as counter-evidence, but any account
of such experiences is communicated to us after the fact, that is, after the subject has pur-
portedly “returned” to his or her body. Therefore all we have is memories in the minds of
embodied persons, indirectly communicated to us in the form of verbal accounts.
   9. Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered, 8–9 and passim.

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­ angerous and addictive. Although the medical and pharmacological evidence

d
does not support this assumption, politics and the media have been singularly
successful in promoting the reified category; and as a result, the notion that
entheogens might have a normal and legitimate function in some religious
contexts is bound to sound bizarre to the general public. Scholars who insist
on differentiating between different kinds of “drugs”, pointing out that some of
them are harmless and might even be beneficial,10 therefore find themselves in
a defensive position by default: it is always easy for critics to suggest that their
scholarly arguments are just a front for some personal agenda of pro-psyche-
delic apologetics.
The bottom line is that, for all these reasons, the very notion of entheogenic
religion as a category in scholarly research finds itself at a strategic disadvan-
tage from the outset. It is simply very difficult for us to look at the relevant reli-
gious beliefs and practices from a neutral and non-judgemental point of view,
for in the very act of being observed – that is, even prior to any conscious
attempt on our part to apply any theoretical perspective – they already appear
to us pre-categorized in the terms of our own cultural conditioning. Almost
inevitably, they are perceived as pertaining to a negative “waste-basket cat-
egory” of otherness associated with a strange assortment of “magical”, “pagan”,
“superstitious” or “irrational” beliefs; and as such, they are automatically seen
as different from “genuine” or “serious” forms of religion. The “drugs” category
further causes them to be associated with hedonistic, manipulative, irrespon-
sible, or downright criminal attitudes, so that claims of religious legitimacy are
weakened even further.
In this chapter an attempt will nevertheless be made to treat entheogenic
esotericism as just another form of contemporary religion that requires our
serious attention. A first reason for doing so is strictly empirical: if it is true
that entheogenic esotericism happens to exist as a significant development
in post-World War II religion and in contemporary society, then it is simply
our business as scholars to investigate it. A second reason is more theoretical
in nature: both the “esoteric” and the “entheogenic” dimension of this topic
challenges some of our most deeply ingrained assumptions about religion and
rationality, and studying their combination may therefore be particularly help-
ful in making us aware of our blind spots as intellectuals and scholars.

  10. See for example the clinical research presented in the special issue “Ayahuasca Use in
Cross-Cultural Perspective”, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 37.2 (2005), edited by Marlene
Dobkin de Rios and Charles S. Grob. Obviously, and confusingly, the “harmless or even
beneficial” category is often referred to by the same term “drugs” (as in “prescription
drugs”). That substances such as ayahuasca could be understood as “drugs” in such a sense
is widely experienced as counterintuitive because of its hallucinogenic properties (associ-
ated with the recreational or hedonistic practice of “tripping”); but that such properties are
incompatible with beneficial medical or psychiatric effects is an a priori assumption rather
than an established fact.

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wouter j . hanegraaff

ENTHEOGENS AND THE NEW AGE

The wider context in which entheogenic esotericism has appeared is usually

referred to as the New Age. In my 1996 study New Age Religion and Western
Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, I wrote the following:

One of the most characteristic elements of the counterculture was

the widespread use of psychedelic drugs. It has often been noted
that most of the New Religious Movements which enjoyed their
heyday in the wake of the counterculture (late 1960s and early
1970s) strongly discouraged or flatly forbade the use of drugs.
Instead, they emphasized meditation and other spiritual tech-
niques as alternative means of expanding consciousness. This same
approach has become typical for the New Age movement of the
1980s, which no longer encourages the use of psychedelic drugs as
part of its religious practices.11

Rereading this passage fifteen years later, I must confess that I find it rather
naïve. In my book I analysed the beliefs and ideas of the New Age on the basis
of a representative sample of primary sources, and found almost no evidence
for the relevance of psychedelics. However, I should have been more sensitive
to the social and discursive necessity for New Age authors to be discreet or
secretive about the role that psychoactives might have played in their life and
work, particularly after LSD and other psychedelic substances were criminal-
ized during the second half of the 1960s. A good example is the famous case
of Fritjof Capra. His bestseller The Tao of Physics (1975) begins with an oft-
quoted description of the experience that had set him on the course towards
writing his book. Capra described how, one late summer afternoon in 1969,
he was sitting by the ocean and suddenly became aware of his whole environ-
ment as “being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance”:

I “saw” cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in

which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I
“saw” the atoms of the elements and those of my body participat-
ing in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I “heard” its
sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva,
the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus.12

Capra may have found it preferable to have his readers assume that this expe-
rience happened to him “just like that”; but the description is of such a nature
that, especially coming from the pen of a typical representative of the hippie

  11. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, 11.

  12. Capra, Tao of Physics, 11.

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 entheogenic esotericism

generation, we may safely assume that it occurred under the influence of LSD
or some other psychedelic substance.13 It revealed to Capra that spirit and
matter were not radically separate, and eventually led him to explore the par-
allels and mutual interpenetration of modern physics and Eastern mysticism.
In going through my sample of New Age sources, I came across countless
other descriptions of impressive “mystical” or visionary experiences. Many
authors described them as crucial turning points in their spiritual develop-
ment, and emphasized (like Capra) that they had provided them with essential
knowledge about the true nature of reality. The case of Jane Roberts, author of
the bestselling Seth books and arguably the most influential source of basic
New Age metaphysics,14 may be used here as one more representative exam-
ple. According to her own account, published in 1970, her first exposure to
“spiritual” reality occurred out of the blue on the afternoon of 9 September
1963, when she was quietly sitting at the dinner table:

Between one normal minute and the next, a fantastic avalanche of

radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if
my skull were some sort of receiving station, turned up to unbear-
able volume. Not only ideas came through this ­channel, but sensa-
tions, intensified and pulsating … It was as if the physical world
were suddenly tissue-paper thin, hiding infinite dimensions of real-
ity, and I was suddenly flung through the tissue paper with a huge
ripping sound. My body sat at the table, my hands furiously scrib-
bling down the words and ideas that flashed through my head. Yet
I seemed to be somewhere else, at the same time, traveling through
things. I went plummeting through a leaf, to find a whole universe
open up; and then out again, drawn into new perspectives.
  I felt as if knowledge was being implanted in the very cells of
my body so that I couldn’t forget it – a gut knowing, a biological
spirituality. It was feeling and knowing, rather than intellectual
knowledge … When I came to, I found myself scrawling what was
obviously meant as the title of that odd batch of notes: The Physical
Universe as Idea Construction. Later the Seth Material would
develop those ideas, but I didn’t know that at the time.15

Everything in this description suggests a psychedelic experience, yet nowhere

in her published writings does Jane Roberts mention any instances of experi-
mentation with LSD, mescalin, DMT or other substances that were available

  13. Capra does not mention LSD, but does refer to the powerful impact of his experiences with
unspecified “power plants” (see Ibid., 12).
  14. Hanegraaff, “Roberts, Dorothy Jane”, 999, with reference to my extensive analyses of her
writings in Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture.
  15. Jane Roberts, The Seth Material, 11–12.

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wouter j . hanegraaff

and widely publicized at the time. Her official account should be compared
with the notes in her unpublished journal, now at Yale University. Just two
weeks before, on 23 August 1963, she noted that she and her husband had
“both become very interested in ESP and parapsychology”, and for 9 September
we read only this: “Strange, try to be cautious – but seem to have hit upon new
thought-system. My definition of time is original – I think will have a lot of
work to do on it”. One month later, on 10 October, she noted: “‘Physical World
as IDEA construction’ began today”.16 These scanty notes seem to suggest that
this manuscript was not in fact the result of automatic writing, but a deliber-
ate writing project started a month after the breakthrough experience.
As suggested by the cases of Capra and Roberts, it would be naïve to simply
believe the authors of influential New Age publications at their word when
they write that such experiences happened to them “just like that”, especially
after the start of criminalization. It is obvious that neither they nor their
publishers had anything to gain from acknowledging the role that psychoac-
tives may have played in their spiritual development: if you wish to convince
a general readership that the universe revealed its true nature to you, that
you found yourself communicating with superior spiritual entities on other
planes of reality, or saw spectacular visions of other worlds, it just does not
help your credibility to tell them that it all happened while you were tripping
on acid! Nevertheless, most scholars of New Age – with the notable excep-
tion of Christopher Partridge (see below) – seem to have made the same
assumptions that I made in 1996. J. Gordon Melton’s New Age Encyclopedia
from 1990 and Christoph Bochinger’s 700-page monograph on the New Age
(1994) made no reference at all to “drugs” or “psychedelics”; Paul Heelas’s
study of 1996 mentioned them only in passing; and they are entirely absent
from Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis’s recent multi-author Handbook of New
Age (2007). In the pioneering volume Perspectives on the New Age, edited by
Melton together with James R. Lewis, only one author said at least something
about it: in her research on the Ananda World Brotherhood Village, Susan
Love Brown noted that many of its members had evolved from an initial use
of drugs towards an emphasis on drugless techniques such as meditation.17
Michael York’s Emerging Network (1995) emphasized the same point, quoting
Marilyn Ferguson’s 1980 bestseller: “The annals of the Aquarian Conspiracy
are full of accounts of passage: LSD to Zen, LSD to India, psilocybin to
Psychosynthesis”.18 Evincing a similar pattern, a monograph by Sarah M. Pike

  16. Jane Roberts, “Journal”. Note that Roberts’s notes about the murder of President Kennedy,
later that year, are much longer and evince much more bewilderment and emotion.
  17. Susan Love Brown, “Baby Boomers, American Character, and the New Age”, 89, 94–5.
  18. York, The Emerging Network, 50; see also 111 and 181 about the neopagans Starhawk
and Margot Adler. In Adler’s 1985 questionnaire among pagans, fifty-six respondents are
quoted as responding “never, never, ever, ever use drugs” (certainly not a formulation used
identically by all of them), but 76% of her sample responded that it was a matter of personal

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and an overview for the general public by Nevill Drury (both 2004) referred
to psychedelics only in discussing the 1960s counter-culture, implying that it
ceased to be a factor after that period.19
That a widespread shift from drugs to meditation occurred during the
1970s is not in doubt, and it is easy to understand that for organized groups
(spiritual communities, new religious movements) it became a practical neces-
sity to regulate or prohibit drug-use among their membership. However, this
should not make us overlook the other side of the coin: the fact that putting an
emphasis on their development from hedonistic drug use to more respectable
and safe alternatives was simply quite convenient for erstwhile countercultur-
alists. As they were losing popular credit due to the excesses of the psych-
edelic era and the criminalization of psychoactives, it was in their best interest
to emphasize the pursuit of “spirituality” as a healthy and socially responsible
way of life rather than advertise the use of drugs. As a result, we cannot deter-
mine with any degree of certainty how many of the experiences highlighted
by New Age authors were in fact linked to clandestine experimentation with
psychoactives, and how many of them somehow occurred spontaneously,
resulted from specific drugless techniques, or were simply invented or exag-
gerated. But absence of evidence is no evidence of absence, and the argumen-
tum ex silentio is rightly classed among the logical fallacies. In a society where
psychoactives were the talk of the town and widely available, it stretches cre-
dulity to assume that the entire 1960s generation that created the foundations
of New Age religion would suddenly have become so obedient to authority as
to have stopped using them privately as a means to explore spiritual realities.
It is more reasonable to assume that while many replaced drugs by meditation,
others continued using psychoactives but just stopped talking about it. This
makes it relevant to be attentive to passing hints such as this one by the holis-
tic healer William Bloom in 1993: “At the very least you should know about
[psychedelic drugs], for they are – albeit secretly – a portal of change and illu-
mination for many people.”20
In short, my suggestion is that after its sensational and exhibitionistic public
phase during the 1960s, the use of psychedelics in a spiritual context evolved
after 1970 into a private and discreet, individualist practice, which continued
to have a considerable impact on New Age religion because of the types of
religious experiences and visions that it produced or facilitated. This makes
it into an aspect of “esotericism” in the specific dictionary sense of secrecy
and concealment – but not of the well-known discursive practice of secrecy as
“skilled revelation of skilled concealment” (as elegantly formulated by Michael

choice because such substances were “occasionally very valuable”, and thirteen respondents
saw them as “a powerful tool” if used in a sacred context.
  19. Pike, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America, 83–5; Drury, The New Age, 73–4, 76–96.
  20. Bloom, First Steps, 65, as quoted in Steven J. Sutcliffe, Children of the New Age, 235n9.

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wouter j . hanegraaff

Taussig21), where secrets are forms of social capital that impart power to those
who are in a position to hide or reveal them. Instead, we are dealing with prac-
tices of secrecy and concealment born simply out of social or legal necessity.
The obvious difficulties of finding hard data under such conditions are not a
sufficient reason to ignore this dimension of New Age, for at least two rea-
sons. First, simply by being more attentive to it, evidence relevant to enthe-
ogenic esotericism may be noted and recognized that would otherwise be
overlooked: authors and practitioners do make references to it, but often just
in passing and by means of coded language (e.g. “power plants” and “psycho-
technologies” rather than “drugs” or “psychedelics”). Second, even where there
is no strict empirical proof of entheogenic esotericism, it may still be the most
plausible explanation in specific cases, such as those discussed above. The
assumption that spectacular experiences as reported by Capra and Roberts
happened “just like that” (because we cannot think of anything better), are
unsatisfactory and in fact rather lazy from an intellectual point of view: until
somebody comes up with a better explanation, it seems much more reason-
able to attribute them, at least provisionally, to the use of substances that are
known from clinical research to have exactly these kinds of effects.

ENTHEOGENIC SHAMANISM

The only scholar who has given systematic attention to the role of entheo-
gens in what he calls contemporary “occulture” is Christopher Partridge. In a
very well-documented overview, he distinguished between three phases in the
“modern spiritual psychedelic revolution”:

1. from Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD in 1938 to the end of the 1950s,
with Aldous Huxley as the central figure;
2. the psychedelic era from the 1960s to 1976, with Timothy Leary at the
centre; and
3. the development of rave culture since the mid-1980s.22

Publishing his book in 2005, Partridge sketched the emergence of a fourth

phase dominated by cyberculture as well. While such a periodization makes
perfect sense, I will be emphasizing an element of continuity from the 1960s
to the present (with roots in the 1950s), concerning a specific current or sub-
culture that is usually discussed in terms of (neo)shamanism. It is in this con-
text that we find the clearest examples of what I propose to call entheogenic
esotericism.

  21. Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism”, 273.

  22. Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West, vol. 2, 82–134; see also parts of the chapter on
“Cyberspirituality” (135–64).

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Neoshamanism has attracted much attention from scholars in recent years,

but even in some of the best research we find, once again, strange blind spots
that have more to do with the intellectual preoccupations of academics than
with the subjects they are studying. The evidence shows beyond a shred of
doubt that what is now known as neoshamanism emerged during the 1960s
as a movement dominated by enthusiasm for natural psychoactives (peyote,
ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms and various other less well-known species),
but many scholars of the phenomenon seem remarkably blind to the evidence
in that regard. For example, all specialists of neoshamanism acknowledge the
books by Carlos Castaneda as a major catalyst (Kocku von Stuckrad even
calls Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan the “foundational document of mod-
ern Western Shamanism”23), but, amazingly, they tend not to mention, even
in passing, that his spectacular “shamanic” experiences were described, in
explicit detail, as being induced by psychoactive “power plants”.24 No gen-
eral reader of Castaneda misses this fact, and it accounts in no small meas-
ure for his bestselling success; so how could it have escaped the academics?
Similarly, the anthropologist Michael Harner is rightly highlighted as semi-
nal to the development of neoshamanism since the 1970s, but, again, the fact
that he was initiated into shamanism by drinking ayahuasca in the Ecuadorian
Amazon forest, and discussed it as almost inseparable from hallucinogens in
his earlier work,25 is usually treated as irrelevant or marginal at best.26
The basic flaw in these analyses of neoshamanism is that they automatically
equate the legally enforced turn away from public entheogenic practice with
a freely developed preference for drugless techniques. For example, Andrei
Znamenski notes that Harner “purposely moved away from replicating [hallu-
cinogenic] experiences in Western settings”, searching instead for alternatives
“by experimenting with drugless techniques from native North American,
Siberian, and Sámi traditions”.27Strictly speaking, these statements are cor-
rect, but they fail to mention the most decisive factor: the simple fact that,
after 1970, Harner had no other choice if he wanted to organize anything pub-
lic and stay out of jail. In a very similar way, the closely related movement of
transpersonal psychotherapy pioneered by Stanislav Grof was forced to aban-
don the use of LSD and develop “holotropic breathing” as a legal alternative.28
In both cases, there is no reason to doubt that workshop leaders would have
continued using psychedelics (albeit perhaps more cautiously and with more

  23. Von Stuckrad, Schamanismus und Esoterik, 155.

  24. E.g. Hutton, Shamans, 156–9; von Stuckrad, Schamanismus und Esoterik, 153–5.
  25. Harner, Hallucinogens and Shamanism; Harner, “Sound of Rushing Water”; Harner, The
Way of the Shaman, 1–19.
  26. It is not mentioned at all by Hutton, Shamans, 156–61. Von Stuckrad, Schamanismus und
Esoterik, 157–8, and Znamenski, Beauty of the Primitive, 233, discuss it as merely a prepa-
ration for the development of his “core shamanism”.
  27. Znamenski, Beauty of the Primitive, 233.
  28. Grof, Beyond the Brain; Grof, LSD Psychotherapy.

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safeguards than during the wild 1960s) if only the law had allowed it. For these
reasons, applying the post-1970 model of Harnerian “core shamanism” as a
model for describing the nature of neoshamanism as a historical phenomenon
is anachronistic and misleading: it reduces the phenomenon to only its sani-
tized and politically correct dimension intended for the general public. Much
more than as an example of the literary and popular reception of Siberian and
Native American spirituality – a sophisticated etic focus congenial to aca-
demic interests, and certainly fascinating in itself, but rather remote from the
emic concerns of practitioners “on the ground” – neoshamanism should be
seen, first of all, as a form of modern entheogenic religion. Having been born
from experimentation with natural psychoactives (entheogenic in the narrow
sense), it branched off into two directions after 1970: a “safe”, legal and there-
fore publicly visible ritual and psychotherapeutic practice (entheogenic in the
wider sense), and a clandestine underground culture that continued to work
with psychoactives.
The main outlines of the pre-prohibition phase are reasonably clear,29
although more critical research from outsiders would certainly be welcome.
The most crucial pioneer was the investment banker R. Gordon Wasson, who
developed a fascination with the cultural significance of mushrooms since
1927 and, in the summer of 1955, participated in mushroom ceremonies with
the Mexican Mezatec shamaness Maria Sabina. Two years later, in 1957, a
lavishly illustrated account of these sessions in Life magazine30 made Wasson
and Sabina into instant celebrities. The article in question, “Seeking the Magic
Mushroom”, inspired Timothy Leary to follow in Wasson’s footsteps and travel
to Mexico, where he set up the Harvard Psilocybin Project; later in the 1960s,
Maria Sabina’s residence Huautla was overrun by hippie tourists. A parallel
and converging development emerged from William Burroughs’s participa-
tion in ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon in 1953, and similar explorations
by his friend Allen Ginsberg in 1960, resulting in a classic of the psyche-
delic counterculture known as the Yage Letters (1963).31 Riding the wave of
growing popular excitement about these indigenous entheogenic traditions,
anthropologists like Carlos Castaneda and Michael J. Harner began exploring
Mexican and Amazon traditions; and it is on this basis that they eventually
became literary and practical founding figures of what was to become known
as “neoshamanism”.
After the prohibition of psychoactive drugs, this original form of neosha-
manic practice somehow continued as an underground tradition through the
1970s and into the 1980s. How this happened exactly and on what scale, which
personal networks were involved, how they developed, and how its partici-
pants communicated and exchanged information, remains largely unknown

  29. For a short overview, see e.g. Znamenski, Beauty of the Primitive, 121–64.
  30. Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom”.
  31. Burroughs & Ginsberg, Yage Letters Redux.

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at present. Since many participants and sympathizers are still alive and poten-
tially available for interviews, one can only hope that somebody will pick up the
question and try to write the history of this ­lineage, particularly for the period
of the 1970s and the early 1980s. There is no doubt that with the emergence
of rave culture by the mid-1980s and the spread of the Internet, entheogenic
neoshamanism (in the narrow sense) re-emerged in public view. It became
accessible and attractive to a new generation, and because the Internet makes
discussion of potentially illegal practices so much safer and easier, the number
of online sources relevant to entheogens and shamanism has exploded expo-
nentially. At present, it is simply overwhelming.

ENTHEOGENIC ESOTERICISM

In this short programmatic article I cannot do more than try to illustrate the
nature of contemporary entheogenic shamanism as exemplified by a few rep-
resentative figures. Arguably its central figurehead was the American prophet
of an “archaic revival”, Terence McKenna (1946–2000). Elsewhere I have
described how his intense entheogenic experiences in the Colombian Amazon
forest in 1971, together with his brother Dennis and some friends, inspired
him to develop a radical spiritual worldview that stands at the very origin of
contemporary millenarian fascination with the year 2012.32 Several books
published by McKenna in the early 1990s have become classics of the new
underground scene of entheogenic shamanism;33 and McKenna himself has
attained an iconic status as “public intellectual” in that context, not least due
to a series of audio and video recordings of his lectures that are now easily
accessible online. His charismatic status rests upon the unique combination
of a sharp intellect, a high level of erudition, a delightful self-relativizing sense
of humour and excellent communication skills (his books are extremely well
written, and his unmistakable nasal voice and hypnotic style of delivery has
even been sampled in trance music recordings online) – all in the service of
expounding one of the weirdest worldviews imaginable.
McKenna’s mature work is a 1990s upgrade of the radical countercultural
ideals of the 1960s, and appeals to a new generation that sympathizes with the
hippie culture of that period, but does not share its anti-­technological bias.34
At the heart of this “cultic milieu” we find a profound sense of ­cultural cri-
sis: Western society, built upon the life-denying and totalitarian dogmatisms

  32. Hanegraaff, “‘And End History’”. On McKenna’s worldview, see also Kripal, Esalen, 369–
375. In spite of its remarkable popularity, 2012 millenarianism is another aspect of contem-
porary esotericism that seems to be neglected almost completely by academic research.
  33. McKenna & McKenna, Invisible Landscape; McKenna, Archaic Revival; McKenna, Food of
the Gods; McKenna, True Hallucinations.
  34. Zandbergen, “Silicon Valley New Age”, 161.

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wouter j . hanegraaff

of traditional Christianity and materialist science, is spiritually bankrupt and

heading for military and ecological disaster. In a deliberately utopian search
for how humanity might find a way “back to the garden”, McKenna is referring
first of all to indigenous cultures that are still in touch with nature and with the
“archaic” roots of humanity. But underneath this most immediately obvious
emphasis on “shamanic” cultures, there is an intellectual discourse grounded
in assumptions proper to Western esotericism. While references to it can be
found throughout his work, this background is nowhere more explicit than in
a series of unpublished “Lectures on Alchemy” delivered at Esalen, California,
around 1990, available online as an unedited transcript.35
These lectures show the enormous impact of what I would like to refer to as
Eranos religionism. Religionism means the exploration of historical develop-
ments in view of eternal truths or realities that transcend history and change.36
Characterized by a valuation of myth and symbolism over doctrine and dis-
cursive rationality, this inherently paradoxical but intellectually fascinating
project was central to the famous Eranos meetings organized since 1933 in
Ascona, Switzerland;37 and largely due to the financial support of the Bollingen
foundation, it became enormously successful in the United States after World
War II. Many of the central scholars associated with Eranos – notably Carl
Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, D. T. Suzuki, James Hillman
and Joseph Campbell – achieved an iconic status in the American popular
(counter-)culture, and their ideas have become essential to post-war under-
standings of “esotericism”.38 It is only since the “empirical turn” in the study of
Western esotericism since the early 1990s that this religionist perspective has
come to be perceived, at least in the academic world, as primarily an object of
research – a sophisticated form of post-war esotericism – rather than as an
appropriate methodology for research.39
McKenna’s understanding of “alchemy” and “hermeticism” turns out to be a
typical example of Eranos religionism, with Jung and Eliade as central figures.
From this perspective, he was making a valiant effort to introduce his audi-
ence to Frances Yates’s classic Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
(1964), her ideas about the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and even a wide col-
lection of original hermetic and alchemical texts, next to some of his favourite
philosophers such as Plato, Plotinus, Bruno, Bergson, and Whitehead. During

  35. McKenna, “Lectures on Alchemy”. The transcript available online would deserve some
thorough editing, particular as regards the many spectacular misspelling of titles and
names of authors that were clearly unknown to the transcriber but can still be identified
(although sometimes barely) by specialists.
  36. For extensive discussion of religionism and its various manifestations, see Hanegraaff,
Esotericism and the Academy, especially chapters 2 and 4.
  37. On Eranos and its cultural impact, see Ibid., chapter 4, and the standard history by Hakl,
Verborgene Geist von Eranos.
  38. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, chapter 4.
  39. Ibid.

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the course of his lectures he read and discussed long passages from the Corpus
Hermeticum, the Asclepius, and the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. In
short, he was giving his audience a crash course in the main currents of early
modern esotericism, presented as the epitome of a traditional enchanted
worldview radically different from the waste land of modernity and contem-
porary society. A good example of how McKenna combined his considerable
knowledge of alchemical literature with a creative form of “esoteric herme-
neutics” is his discussion of mercury:

You all know what mercury looks like – at room temperature it’s
a silvery liquid that flows, it’s like a mirror. For the alchemists,
and this is just a very short exercise in alchemical thinking, for
the alchemists mercury was mind itself, in a sense, and by trac-
ing through the steps by which they reached that conclusion you
can have a taste of what alchemical thinking was about. Mercury
takes the form of its container. If I pour mercury into a cup, it takes
the shape of the cup, if I pour it into a test tube, it takes the shape
of the test tube. This taking the shape of its container is a qual-
ity of mind and yet here it is present in a flowing, silvery metal.
The other thing is, mercury is a reflecting surface. You never see
mercury, what you see is the world which surrounds it, which is
perfectly reflected in its surface like a moving mirror, you see. And
then if you’ve ever – as a child, I mean, I have no idea how toxic
this process is, but I spent a lot of time as a child hounding my
grandfather for his hearing aid batteries which I would then smash
with a hammer and get the mercury out and collect it in little bot-
tles and carry it around with me. Well, the wonderful thing about
mercury is when you pour it out on a surface and it beads up, then
each bead of mercury becomes a little microcosm of the world.
And yet the mercury flows back together into a unity. Well, as a
child I had not yet imbibed the assumptions and the ontology of
science. I was functioning as an alchemist. For me, mercury was
this fascinating magical substance onto which I could project the
contents of my mind. And a child playing with mercury is an alche-
mist hard at work, no doubt about it.40

In this passage it is easy to recognize a whole range of basic esoteric assump-

tions central to McKenna’s thinking: the interconnectedness of mind and mat-
ter, the notion of microcosmos/macrocosmos, the idea of individual minds
being ultimately part of a universal Mind, and the idea of the human mind as
the “mirror of nature” (and the reverse). Interestingly, he pointed out that as

  40. McKenna, “Lectures on Alchemy”, lecture 1.

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wouter j . hanegraaff

far as he was concerned, the occultist currents since the nineteenth century
were of little interest, since they had already been infected by modernizing
and secularizing trends. McKenna was pointing towards pre-Enlightenment
hermeticism – flourishing, as he emphasized, first in late antiquity and then in
the Renaissance, both periods of “crisis” similar to our own – for models of a
“magical” and enchanted revival that was still in touch with the symbolic and
mythopoeic thinking in analogies and correspondences proper to “archaic”
cultures. As I have explained elsewhere, it was precisely from such a perspec-
tive that the counterculture had been reading Frances Yates’s narrative of “the
Hermetic Tradition”.41 Authors like McKenna perceived it as a tradition domi-
nated by magic, personal religious experience, and the powers of the imagina-
tion; it promoted a world-affirming mysticism consonant with an “enchanted”
and holistic science that looked at nature as a living, organic whole, perme-
ated by invisible forces and energies; and it reflected a confident, optimistic,
forward-looking perspective that emphasized humanity’s potential to operate
on the world and create a better, more harmonious, more beautiful society. To
all this, McKenna added a direct avenue towards the attainment of gnosis: the
use of entheogenic substances.
Few participants in the contemporary subculture of entheogenic neosha-
manism are as well read in alchemical and hermetic literature as McKenna
was, but they do share his basic worldview. Elsewhere I have argued that the
various currents and ideas that may be constructed as “esotericism” have
ultimately emerged from the encounter in Western culture between biblical
monotheism and hellenistic paganism.42 First, they share a rejection of the
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, emphasizing instead that the world is co-eternal
with God. This basic principle may lead to an extreme “gnostic” dualism or
to radical pantheism, but most commonly it has taken the shape of a “cos-
motheism” in which the divine is present in the visible world of creation with-
out being identical with it. From this first principle there emerged a second
one: the belief that as human beings, we are able to attain direct experiential
knowledge of our own divine nature. We are not dependent on God revealing
himself to us (as in classic monotheism, where the creature is dependent on
the Creator’s initiative), nor is our capacity for knowledge limited to the bod-
ily senses and natural reason (as in science and rational philosophy), but the
very nature of our souls allows us direct access to the supreme, eternal sub-
stance of Being. Such direct experiential knowledge, or gnosis, is believed to
be attained through “ecstatic” states of mind. Seen from this perspective, con-
temporary neoshamanism as represented by a central author like McKenna is,
indeed, a typical form of entheogenic esotericism in the narrow sense of the
word. McKenna’s “archaic revival” means a revival of cosmotheism against the

  41. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, chapter 4 (section on Frances Yates).
  42. Ibid., conclusion.

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­ orldviews of classic monotheism and rationalist science; and he highlights

w
entheogenic substances as providing a direct doorway to gnosis.
McKenna died of brain cancer in 2000, but remains alive on the Internet.
His most prominent successor in recent years is another American, Daniel
Pinchbeck, who has inherited a somewhat similar “neoshamanic” worldview,
including a millenarian focus on 2012.43 They represent two different gen-
erations, but have much in common. McKenna often contrasted his mature
worldview against the “intellectual despair” of post-war existentialism that
was dominant during his childhood:

I grew up reading those people and it made my adolescence much

harder than it needed to be. I mean, my god, there wasn’t an iota of
hope to be found anywhere. That’s why, for me, psychedelics broke
over that intellectual world like a tidal wave of revelation. I quoted
to you last night Jean Paul Sartre’s statement that nature is mute.
Now I see this as an obscenity almost, an intellectual crime against
reason and intuition. It’s the absolute antithesis of the logos.44

Pinchbeck, for his part, actually converted from existentialist despair to enthe-
ogenic esotericism. The typical case of a “jaded Manhattan journalist”, he had
fallen into a deep spiritual crisis: “Wandering the streets of the East Village,
I spent so much time contemplating the meaninglessness of existence that I
sometimes felt like a ghost. Perhaps I am already dead, I thought to myself.”45
He experimented with psychedelics, but without much result, until he made
the radical step of travelling to the African country Gabon to participate in
a ritual with the Bwiti people, who used a famous psychoactive substance
known as Iboga. This was the beginning of what he describes, in his Breaking
Open the Head (2002), as an initiation into shamanism that cured him of exis-
tential ennui and despair.
Pinchbeck now stands at the centre of a new movement that has been
referred to by various terms, including “cyber-spirituality”, “techno-shaman-
ism”, or “new edge”. As explained by Dorien Zandbergen in a recent analysis:

The rise and popularization of digital technologies such as Virtual

Reality and the Internet in [the 1990s] was accompanied by the
hopeful expectation of spiritual seekers that these would make
permanently available the utopian worlds and the altered states
of consciousness sought after by a previous generation of hip-
pies. … Because of the supposed inherent disembodied nature of

  43. Pinchbeck, Breaking Open the Head; Pinchbeck, 2012; Pinchbeck, Notes from the Edge
Times (based on columns for his website www.realitysandwich.com).
  44. McKenna, “Lectures on Alchemy”, lecture 2, part 2.
  45. Pinchbeck, Breaking Open the Head, 14.

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cyberspace, some scholars argued in the 1990s that cyberspace

has become the “Platonic new home for the mind and the heart”, a
“new Jerusalem”, or a “paradise”.46

In the decade after 9/11, the high-tech hippie utopianism of this New Edge
movement (visible not just as an online community but also in very popu-
lar annual festivals such as Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert) has
taken on progressively darker and apocalyptic shades. In its stronger versions,
global capitalist consumer society is perceived as a huge, impersonal, demonic
system of dominance and control, with politicians and the media hypnotizing
the population into tacit submission and enslavement to “the matrix”.47 In that
context, Native American cultures and their shamanic spirituality are seen
as preservers of a traditional wisdom that Western society has tragically lost:
they belong to the “Forces of Light” set against the powers of darkness that
seek to enslave and dominate the planet. Entheogenic sacraments are credited
with the capacity of breaking mainstream society’s spell of mental domination
and restoring us from blind and passive consumers unconsciously manipu-
lated by “the system” to our original state of free and autonomous spiritual
beings: quite like Morpheus’s “blue pill” in The Matrix, they open participants’
eyes, causing them to wake up to the true nature of the collective deception
passed on as “reality” (“the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind
you from the truth”48), and introduce them to a wider, meaningful universe
of spiritual truth, love and light. In short, they are seen as providing gnosis in
a “gnostic–dualistic” rather than a “hermetic” sense: a salvational knowledge
of the true nature of one’s self and of the universe, which does not just open
the individual’s spiritual eyes, but liberates him from dominion by the cosmic
system.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

It is, of course, impossible to predict how these contemporary manifestations

of entheogenic esotericism will develop in the future. But that they already rep-
resent a significant phenomenon in contemporary culture is clear, and schol-
ars of religion have an obligation to study them closely and find ways to place
them in their proper historical, social, and cultural contexts. The gist of this
chapter is that in order to do so, scholars will need to take the ­phenomenon of

  46. Zandbergen, “Silicon Valley New Age”, 161, 163.

  47. The reference is, of course, to the famous 1999 movie by the Wachowski brothers. On
the gnostic nature of The Matrix series, see e.g. Flannery-Dailey & Wagner, “Wake Up!”;
Bowman, “The Gnostic Illusion”.
  48. Formulation by Morpheus during his first meeting with Neo in The Matrix. This dialogue
amounts to a short catechism of neo-gnosticism.

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“entheogenic religion” much more seriously than they have been doing so far.
Whether we like it or not, we are dealing here with a vital and vibrant dimen-
sion of popular Western spirituality that has been with us for more than half
a century now, and shows no signs of disappearing. It challenges traditional
assumptions about what religion is all about, and its radical focus on ecstatic
gnosis within a cosmotheistic context makes it particularly interesting from
the perspective of the study of Western esotericism. Specialists in the field
of contemporary religion should become aware of their inherited blind spots
regarding the role that entheogens have been playing in these contexts for half
a century. That role is not marginal, but central, and requires serious study.
Scholars may have agendas and preoccupations of their own, but these cannot
be an excuse for refusing to take notice of what is happening right in front of
our eyes.

409