The Early Church Was Not a Mushroom Cult

Claims that the early church used psychedelics are ridiculous and wrong

[The following is adapted from The Return of the Dragon]

It has become trendy recently to claim that Christianity, like other religions, was birthed using psychedelic drugs. There was John Allegro’s 1970 text, “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross,” that argued for drug induced foundations to the faith and more recently, a guest named Brian Muraresku went on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to make a similar argument to a modern audience. Muraresku, in his book, “The Immortality Key” argues that evidence suggesting contemporary Greek usage of φαρμακεία, suggestive language in the gospel of John and the epistles of St. Paul, frescos from the catacombs with suggestive art, and the pagan continuity theory of Christian origins all point to a psychedelic origin to the Christian faith.

But this is nonsense on many levels and there is a good reason why authors like Allegro and Muraresku sit firmly in the fringe among historians of the early church. But I would like to explain why it is highly unlikely that the early church used psychedelics.

Before approaching the earliest church, one thing should be noted. Most regions of the world did have drug infused religion. As I discussed in my book, the Return of the Dragon, the use of drugs for spiritual purposes was common among the peoples of the ancient near east, the far east, northern Europe and Mesoamerica. But the Christian world has always been different. Never were drugs part of our rites or ceremonies. Never were drugs used to see God. And the reason behind this is not that at some point the priests of the church became fun spoilers or jealous of the general public having visions of the heavenly. No such change is found in the historical records. No, the reason is that the church rejected the use of drugs for spiritual purposes from the very beginning.

Let’s start with the earliest writings of the church: the scriptures themselves.

What does the Bible say about using drugs like those employed by so many other religions as a way to see the gods? What about learning spiritual insights, as some proponents have suggested? What about healing our minds? At first glance, in our English translations of the biblical text, we find scant references to drugs. Google "what the Bible says about drugs" and you will find websites pointing to some basic biblical warnings about not getting too drunk from wine. Taken at face value, these would suggest that the Bible has more warnings about wine than it does about ayahuasca or peyote. Perhaps the Rastafarians are right and Christians should sit around smoking ganja in a worshipful way rather than drinking beer at the church picnic. Given this truth, why do most people think of it as so "un-Christian" to sit around having ecstatic visions on ayahuasca?

The answer is that there is something giant missing from the English translations of the Bible. The New Testament was written in an ancient form of Greek called “Koine Greek,” and the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. But in the first-century world of Jesus and his Apostles, there was a widely-used Koine Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. When the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, it is more often than not the Septuagint that is quoted. So Koine Greek is both the language of the New Testament and the language of the Old Testament Bible that Jesus and his apostles would have read.

And what is the word for "drugs" in Koine Greek? It is “φαρμακεία.” Or transliterated to English letters: pharmakeia. If the word “pharmakeia” sounds familiar, it is probably because “pharmakeia” is where we get our English word “pharmacy.” And this word, in its various forms, is found multiple times in the New Testament and throughout the Koine Greek translation of the Old Testament. The reason that it is not translated simply as "drugs" is that the word has another rendering often used by scholars. Because of context, in most biblical instances, scholars translate the various conjugations of pharmakeia as one of the following: witch, wizard, witchcraft, sorcerer, sorcery, divination. Yes. The word for witchcraft and the word for drugs are the same in the language of the Bible.

The Friberg Lexicon defines pharmakeia as, "one who prepares and uses drugs for magical purposes or ritual witchcraft, sorcerer, poisoner, magician.” The Louw-Nida Lexicon defines it as "the use of drugs for any kind for magical effect, sorcery, magic." Liddell-Scott Lexicon defines it as "the use of drugs, potions, spells..." As is clear from these definitions, this is not a case where the same word has two different meanings such as with the English "bark," which can mean either the sound a dog makes or the outer layer of a tree. No. This is a case where the two translations come out of a single common aspect of sorcery and witchcraft in the ancient world. More often than not, when shamans, witchdoctors, prophetesses, mediums, and sorcerers did their work in the ancient world, a brew of some sort of hallucinogenic form was employed.

And the two practices became so associated in the minds of the ancient Greek world that they shared a single word: pharmakeia. As Leslie Wilson notes, “The very uncertainty of the exact lines of demarcation (if any exist) of the boundaries between religion, magic, and medicine, has rendered the theoretical distinctions between them untenable in practice.” So when the Jews who translated the Hebrew of the Old Testament into Greek to create the Septuagint and the Jewish Apostles who wrote the New Testament used the word pharmakeia, they were strongly associating pagan and shamanic rituals and drugs.

With this in mind, let's review some of what the Bible says (Old Testament references will be from the Koine Greek of the Septuagint). Let's start with Exodus 22:18. The English translation is:

"You shall not allow a sorceress to live."

The word sorceress is pharmakous — a conjugation of pharmakeia — in Koine Greek. The translation using the Friberg Lexicon would be rendered something like this:

"Do not allow one who prepares drugs for ritual purposes to live."

And suddenly what the Bible says about drugs becomes much clearer. The Bible is saying that the mixing of drugs and religion is so bad that the Israelites should not even let someone live who does it!

Let’s consider the Greek Septuagint’s rendering of Deuteronomy 18:10:

“Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in pharmakous.”

Notice that statement about human sacrifice. The Bible has several links between human sacrifice (widely practiced by ancient religions that did use drugs as part of their worship, as we saw in the previous chapter) and pharmakeia.

Now consider 2 Chronicles 33:6, a verse talking about the evil King Manasseh:

"He sacrificed his sons in the fire in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, practiced sorcery, divination, and witchcraft (epharmakeueto), and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the eyes of the LORD, provoking him to anger."

This conjugation, epharmakeueto, of pharmakeia is rendered thus by the Liddell Scott Lexicon: "1- to administer a drug or 2- to use enchantments." So King Manasseh became so evil that he sacrificed his children in the fire and started administering drugs (with the implication of spiritual or ritualistic usage).

Consider 2 Kings 9:22:

"When Joram saw Jehu he asked, "Have you come in peace, Jehu?""How can there be peace," Jehu replied, "as long as all the idolatry and pharmaka of your mother Jezebel abound?"

Jezebel is the notoriously evil queen in the Bible. When Jehu lists her two greatest evils, he says, "idolatry and pharmaka." Jewish people such as Christ’s earliest followers St. Peter and St. Paul would have grown up reading that one of the two most evil actions of one of the wickedest people in the Bible included using drugs for spiritual purposes.

Nahum 3:4 records the prophet stating that the city of Ninevah "enslaved nations by her prostitution and peoples by her pharmaka." And many other references in the Old Testament carry this theme on. In Exodus 9, the men who prevent Egypt from listening to the warnings of Moses (ultimately bringing on the plagues) were sorcerers (pharmakous). And in Micah 5:12, God promises that when he acts he will act to destroy pharmakeia.

In between the closing of the Old Testament canon and the writing of the New Testament, there were a group of books now described as the Apocrypha. These books are accepted as canonical by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians but not by Protestants or Jews. But whether taken as canonical or not, the books were undeniably influential in the early church, and certainly helped shape Christian thinking about the practice of pharmakeia. Consider the book of Wisdom.

Wisdom 12:4 says God hated the Canaanites because of two things:

“[their] wicked sacrifices” (likely human), and their “pharmakeia.”

Note yet again the close association that the ancient Hebrews had between human sacrifice and pharmakeia.

Now let us move to the New Testament. Things do not get any rosier for those who practice pharmakeia. The Apostle Paul, in Galatians 5:19-20, lists pharmakeia as one of the things that are signs of having a sinful nature, and that those who practice such things "will not enter the kingdom of heaven." The Book of Revelation has several condemnations of pharmakeia, including Revelation 9:21 where a church is condemned for failing to set aside their pharmakeia. One wonders if this early church hoped to learn about God in the same way modern thinkers do, using some ancient Near East version of ayahuasca. Revelation 21:8 and Revelation 22:15 list those who practice pharmakeia as the people who will be cast out of the Kingdom on the Day of Judgment. Interestingly, Revelation 18:23 says that "all nations were deceived" by the pharmakeia of Babylon. This echoes Nahum 3:4 where Nineveh enslaved whole nations by her pharmakeia.

Let us stop our review of the biblical teachings on pharmakeia. The biblical indictment against it seems almost unhinged. Here is a summary of what the Bible says:

1- Those who practice pharmakeia are not worthy of life (Exodus 22:18).

2-There is a close association between pharmakeia and human sacrifice (Deuteronomy 18:10, 2 Chronicles 33:6, Wisdom 12:4).

3- It deceives/enslaves whole nations (Revelation 18:23 and Nahum 3:4).

4- Those who practice it will be cast out of God's presence (Galatians 5:20 and Revelation 22:15).

And the earliest doctors of the church maintained this hostility toward pharmakeia. Ignatius of Antioch (c 110 AD) calls the Lord's Supper the "pharmakeia of immortality" in his Letter to the Ephesians, leading some (including Muraresku) to claim that perhaps the Church did not continue this condemnation — but this is misleading. In fact, Ignatius uses the phrase with the specific purpose of differentiating Christianity from the pagan cults. In the context of his Letter to the Ephesians, chapters 19 and 20, Ignatius is arguing that Christianity is not like paganism. He is saying that pagans use sorcery and spells, but that those have lost their power. He argues that real power is in Jesus Christ the King. It is only after this that he notes that the Eucharist is the true "drug of immortality". He is not saying “we are doing the same thing” he is saying that our drug of immortality is this little drink of wine in which Christians partake of Jesus. In other words, he uses the word of the pagans to differentiate Christianity, not to make it the same. And we can be doubly sure that Ignatius was not endorsing φαρμακεία here because elsewhere Ignatius specifically condemns pharmakeia.

But what about other early church fathers? What do they have to say? Among the writings commonly described as “Apostolic Fathers” (writers of the late first and early second century thought to have close connections to the apostles), there are two other authors who discuss pharmakeia, and both speak of it in very negative tones. In the Didache (c 90AD), the author says Christians must not practice magic and do not practice pharmakeia (2.2). Later, he lists pharmakeia as a “way of death” (5.1). Here, one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament makes it clear that pharmakeia and Christianity are completely incompatible.

And in the Shepherd of Hermes, Vision 3 (early 2nd century), the author says, “Be not like the sorcerers (pharmakois).”

So here we have three of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament (Ignatius, Didache, and Shepherd of Hermes) all unreservedly condemning pharmakeia. And as the centuries unfolded, this attitude in the Church never softened. We see a clear and consistent succession of bishops and church leaders making it clear that pharmakeia had no place in Christianity.

The early church was firmly rooted in the writings of the Old Testament prophets and carried on that tradition. The fact that the pagans (as Muraresku perhaps rightly notes) used drugs for spiritual purposes is not evidence that Jesus, the Apostles, or the early church did. His tendency to read into texts and art as suggestive is more of a Rorschach test indicating his own mindset rather than an expression of objective facts. In fact, all the real evidence supports the opposite. Even Muraresku admits that he didn’t find any hard evidence to suggest otherwise.

So what is behind the effort to paint Christianity as a mushroom cult? I would argue that it has a few benefits for those doing so. First, for those advancing the legalization and normalization of psychedelic drugs, it provides a layer of credibility among those who consider themselves Christian. Second, for those opposed to Christian teaching it provides a tool to undermine the historic teaching of the church (suggesting the early church was quite different from the modern one). But whatever the reason for the push, it is bound to fail. Because all the evidence is against them. The bible and the early church were always opposed to the use of drugs for spiritual purposes.