Do Drugs Have Religious Import?

Abstract

Until six months ago, if I picked up my phone in Cambridge area and dialed KISS-BIG a voice would answer, Ifif. These were coincidences: KISS-BIG simply happened to be letter equivalents of an arbitrarily assigned telephone number, while I.F.I.F. represented initials of an organization with improbable name of International Federation for Internal Freedom. But coincidences were apposite to point of being poetic. Kiss big caught euphoric, manic, life-embracing attitude that characterized this most publicized of organizations formed to explore newly synthesized consciousness-changing substances, while organization itself was surely one of iffy-est phenomena to appear on our social and intellectual scene in some time. It produced first firings in Harvard's history, an ultimatum to get out of Mexico in five days, and the miracle of Marsh Chapel in which during a two-and-one-half hour Good Friday service ten theological students and professors ingested psilocybin and were visited by what they generally reported to be deepest religious experiences of their lives. Despite last of these phenomena and its numerous if less dramatic parallels, students of religion appear by and large to be dismissing psychedelic drugs which have sprung to our attention in sixties as having little religious relevance. The position taken in one of most forward-looking volumes of theological essays to have appeared in recent years (1) accepts R. C. Zaehner's Mysticism Sacred and Profane as having fully examined and refuted religious claims for mescaline which Aldous Huxley sketched in The Doors of Perception . This closing of case strikes me as premature, for it looks as if drugs have light to throw on history of religion, phenomenology of religion, philosophy of religion, and practice of religious life itself.