The Psychedelics And Religion

Walter Houston Clark

Introduction by Peter Webster

In 1968 Ralph Metzner wrote of Walter Houston Clark, (in The Ecstatic Adventure)

THERE ARE NOT too many men in their sixties, professional academics at that, who have preserved sufficient openness to experience and receptivity to new ideas to accept the idea of personal experimentation with psychedelic drugs. Old age is too often synonymous with rigidity rather than wisdom. Not so with Walter Houston Clark, Professor of Psychology of Religion at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Massachusetts, former dean and professor at the Hartford School of Religious Education, author of The Oxford Group (1951) and The Psychology of Religion (1958), and founder of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

In an article on "Mysticism as a Basic Concept in Defining the Religious Self," Professor Clark wrote that

The [psychedelic] drugs are simply an auxiliary which, used carefully within a religious structure, may assist in mediating an experience which, aside from the presence of the drug, cannot be distinguished psychologically from mysticism. Studies have indicated that, when the experience is interpreted transcendentally or religiously, chances are improved for the rehabilitation of hopeless alcoholics and hardened criminals. Even though observations like these mean that the psychologist can learn a little more of the religious life, in no sense does it ultimately become any less of a mystery. Though man may sow and till, winds may blow and the rains fall, nevertheless it is still God that gives the increase.

Today, amid the confusion of grave problems caused not so much by decades of "drug abuse" as by decades of increasingly futile attempts to legislate away the use of prohibited substances by pious decree, it is all too easily forgotten that the rediscovery of the psychedelic drugs mid-way through the present century was as promising a find as mankind has seen. A significant, if minority group of our best scientists, doctors, philosophers, writers, artists, and intellectuals of every description began explorations with the psychedelics, a search that was really only the continuation of an age-old quest involving the great majority of peoples and tribes of the ancient world. Psychedelic drugs have, in fact, been used as religious and curing aids since the very beginning of human existence, and only in the 1950's was any significant "scientific" research begun using them.

This research planted the seeds of a revolution of a kind that science purportedly thrives upon, but the sprouting of the seeds was aborted early on by scandal. In the following article we read about some research that was later to be ignored not so much because it was scandalous, but because it challenged some of the underlying paradigms of the entire scientific enterprise. Some of the findings of psychedelic research seemed to herald a merging of the "scientific" and "religious" or "mystical" viewpoints, despite very powerful resistance by both sides to opposing views. The scientific viewpoint had for a long time generally disdained religion as primitive superstition, and religious thinkers of every denomination had tended to view the destructive uses to which science had been put as evidence of its ultimate inability to advance the human condition. Yet some scholars such as Professor Clark saw the rediscovery of psychedelics as the key to the blossoming of a new view. In the words of Alan Watts,

For a long time we have been accustomed to the compartmentalization of religion and science as if they were two quite different and basically unrelated ways of seeing the world. I do not believe that this state of doublethink can last. It must eventually be replaced by a view of the world which is neither religious nor scientific but simply our view of the world. More exactly, it must become a view of the world in which the reports of science and religion are as concordant as those of the eyes and the ears. (Preface to The Joyous Cosmology, 1962).

In retrospect, it will be seen by historians of the 21st century that the scandal of the 1960's was not Dr. Timothy Leary leading a generation down the road to a drugged oblivion, (for that generation is today doing quite well!) but rather that such Puritanical views of mere over-enthusiasm for a new discovery led a generation of scientists and world leaders to throw away what in any other epoch would have been a Holy Grail, a discovery of such fundamental importance that the great discoveries that had made modern technological civilization possible would seem almost trivial by comparison. The situation continues today unabated, despite the continued availability of the wisdom of Professor Clark and the many other pioneers of psychedelic discovery.

-- Peter Webster

The Psychedelics and Religion

Walter Houston Clark

from: PSYCHEDELICS, edited by Bernard Aaronson and Humphrey Osmond,

Doubleday & Company, 1970. ©1970 Aaronson & Osmond.

The recent discovery of the religious properties of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25 is not such a wholly new phenomenon as some people seem to believe. There is some evidence to suggest that the secret potion that was part of the ordeal of initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece contained a psychedelic drug. The somewhat mysterious drug called soma, used in India, sometimes for religious purposes, was psychedelic, while the Mexican mushroom whose active principle is psilocybin has been used by the Aztecs for centuries in their sacraments. Their word for it, significantly, meant "God's flesh."

The peyote button, the top of a certain spineless cactus plant, has been and is now used by some members of nearly all the American Indian tribes in cultic ceremonies. The peyote religion goes back nearly a century in historical records and certainly is even more ancient. At present it is represented by the Native American Church, a loose collection of some two hundred thousand members, according to its claim. Peyote among the Indians has had a history of controversy not unlike LSD among whites. However, despite years of repressive laws and legal harassment, there has been little or no hard evidence of claims made as to its harmfulness, and some indication