Entheogen

They put clergy (other humans) between you and mystical experience, doesn't that make you mad?

Introduction

The word entheogen literally means “creating the divine within.” It is built from Greek roots: en (within), theo (divine), and gen (to create or generate). In common usage, the term refers to drugs, plants, or medicines that produce spiritual experiences. But the word was not simply coined as a neutral descriptor. It was introduced deliberately, with intellectual and cultural intent.

Quick Facts

• Term coined: 1979
• First published in: “Entheogens,” The Journal of Psychedelic Drugs (1979)
• Who coined it: R. Gordon Wasson, Jonathan Ott, Jeremy Bigwood, Carl Ruck, and Danny Staples
• Literal meaning: “Creating the divine within” (from Greek en = within, theo = divine, gen = to create/generate)
• Why it was coined: To replace terms like hallucinogen and psychedelic with a word emphasizing sacred, ceremonial, and religious use
• Refers to: Psychoactive plants, fungi, and compounds used in spiritual or ritual contexts
• Examples often described as entheogens: Psilocybin mushrooms, peyote (mescaline), ayahuasca (DMT-containing brew), LSD (in sacramental contexts), iboga

The Birth of a Term (1979)

The term entheogen first appeared in 1979 in a short academic paper titled “Entheogens” published in The Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. The authors represented an unusual coalition: an ethnobotanist, a mycologist, an ethnomycologist, and two classicists.

Three of the contributors stood outside formal academic institutions. R. Gordon Wasson, a self-taught researcher and retired banker, had famously publicized psilocybin mushrooms beyond the Sierra Mazateca. Jonathan Ott, by 1978, had already published three field guides to hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms in North America. Jeremy Bigwood had studied under mycologist Michael Beug at Evergreen State University but did not pursue an advanced degree.

The remaining authors, Carl Ruck and Danny Staples, were classicists affiliated with Boston University and specialists in ancient myth. Their shared interest lay in the origins of religion and the possibility that psychoactive plants and fungi played a formative role in early religious traditions.

This mixture of institutional scholars and independent researchers was significant. Their relative freedom from disciplinary constraints allowed them to explore topics that mainstream academia often regarded as speculative or improper—particularly the theory that religion itself may have roots in psychoactive sacramental practice.

Why a New Word Was Needed

The 1979 paper opens by arguing that existing terminology was conceptually flawed.

• Hallucinogen implied illusion, deception, or delirium—an implicit dismissal of the experiences themselves.
• Psychotomimetic, used in psychiatric contexts, literally means “psychosis-mimicking,” framing the substances as pathological.
• Psychedelic, meaning “mind-manifesting,” had been coined by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in the 1950s during correspondence with Aldous Huxley. Though more neutral in origin, the word had become culturally saturated through its association with 1960s counterculture, popularized by figures such as Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Ram Dass.

By the late 1970s, psychedelic carried heavy political and social baggage. For the authors of “Entheogens,” this was a problem. They sought a term that could remove stigma and reposition these substances within a different intellectual and historical framework.

From Counterculture to Antiquity

The distinction they drew was deliberate:

• Psychedelics were associated with the 1960s, counterculture movements, and forward-looking social experimentation.
• Entheogens were anchored in the distant past—ceremonial, shamanic, and religious practices stretching back millennia.

The word entheogen was intended to describe mind-altering, vision-inducing substances used historically in sacred rites, ecstatic possession, divination, prophecy, and revelation. The authors connected the term directly to their broader theory: that ancient religions may have originated, at least in part, through ritual ingestion of psychoactive plants or fungi.

In this framing, entheogens were not recreational intoxicants. They were sacred technologies of consciousness practice, experiential knowing (gnosis), and self improvement through release of anxieties, fears, attachments, resulting in better integration into a social whole. Tools for making connections and understanding.

Ceremonial Use and Sacred Context

From its inception, entheogen emphasized ceremonial and religious application rather than casual or recreational consumption. The term implicitly evokes a world in which humans commune with the divine (higher more connected mental state) through relationship with plants, fungi, and the natural environment. It suggests a pre-modern harmony between human consciousness and the living world—a communion mediated by ritual entheogenic sacraments.

We see entheogenic use today, still, in shamanic cultures.
This isn't ancient history. We see it today.

Whether or not those more ancient historical claims are fully accurate, the linguistic shift to entheogen itself has been powerful, welcome, and much needed, articulating the immense spiritual and political meaning that countless people find in these plants, fungi, and chemical compounds today.

The word reframed substances once dismissed as pathological or hedonistic into positive virtuous sacraments embedded in myth, ritual, and spiritual practice, technologies of consciousness, used for virtuous improvement when applied correctly.

A Word That Reveals Its Time

The authors of the 1979 paper observed that words are manufactured, and in their making they reveal the incomprehension or prejudice of their age. The term entheogen does more than categorize substances; it expresses a cultural aspiration. It reflects a late-20th-century effort to reclaim these plants and compounds as spiritually meaningful rather than socially deviant.

Today, the word continues to carry immense spiritual and political weight. It signals reverence, antiquity, and sacred purpose. It aligns psychoactive substances with modern consciousness practice, indigenous traditions, mystical experience, and communion with the divine state of mind.

Regardless of debates over historical accuracy, one fact remains clear: the word entheogen did not arise accidentally. It was crafted to restore dignity, to reshape perception, and to relocate these substances from the margins of pathology to the center of sacred history and beyond to modern relevant practice.