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Psychedelic church

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A psychedelic church, also known as an entheogenic church, is a church or religious organization that incorporates the use of psychedelic drugs in its religious practices.[1][2][3][4] They provide psychedelic drugs such as ayahuasca, psilocybin-containing mushrooms, and peyote to their members and operate either legally or illegally depending on the jurisdiction and licensing.[1][2][3]

The first formal psychedelic churches started in the early 1900s, for instance the first peyote church in 1914 and the Native American Church (NAC) in 1920.[5][6] Psychedelic churches are rapidly on the rise as of the 2020s in the United States and Canada.[1][2][3][7]

List of psychedelic churches

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United States

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Brazil

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Japan

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See also

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References

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  1. 1 2 3 4 Tremayne-Pengelly, Alexandra (25 December 2025). "Inside the US's psychedelic church boom, where taking drugs is legal". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 Londoño, Ernesto; Kohut, Meridith (12 May 2024), Drugs, Sacraments or Medicine? Psychedelic Churches Blur the Line., ISSN 0362-4331, retrieved 8 May 2026
  3. 1 2 3 4 Gunther, Marc (25 August 2022). "As Plant-Medicine Churches Grow, Legal Questions Linger". Lucid News - Psychedelics. Retrieved 8 May 2026. Suzi Kalypso, the priestess and founder of the Temple of Eden, a church in southern California, has held ceremonies for about 1,000 people in the last three years, she estimates. Temple of Eden offers people 5-MEO-DMT, an entheogen derived from the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad. Asked if police had visited the church, Kalypso replied: "If they have, I didn't know they were police."
  4. ↑ Steinhart, Eric (15 December 2025). "The psychedelic turn in spirituality". Eric Steinhart » IAI TV. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  5. ↑ Cassels BK, Sáez-Briones P (October 2018). "Dark Classics in Chemical Neuroscience: Mescaline" (PDF). ACS Chem Neurosci. 9 (10): 2448–2458. doi:10.1021/acschemneuro.8b00215. PMID 29847089.
  6. 1 2 3 Stuart, R. (2002). "Entheogenic Sects and Psychedelic Religions" (PDF). MAPS Bulletin. 12 (1): 17–24.
  7. ↑ Browne, Rachel (17 September 2020). "Legal Ayahuasca Churches Are Spreading Across Canada". VICE. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  8. ↑ Thompson, Nick (27 April 2022). "How One Man Tried to Build a DMT-Based Cult on Reddit and Lost Everything". VICE. Retrieved 3 July 2026.
  9. ↑ Fernandes Antunes, Henrique (2025). "On Rights and Risks: The Legal Victories of the União do Vegetal and Santo Daime in the United States". Religion, Drug, or Cult?. Vol. 5. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. p. 83–119. doi:10.1007/978-3-032-04368-9_4. ISBN 978-3-032-04367-2. Retrieved 24 June 2026. The first Santo Daime church in the United States, Céu do Beija-Flor, was founded in Massachusetts in 1988. Just 2 years after its establishment, the church faced a major setback when its leader, Rex Beynon, was arrested following the interception of a daime shipment from Brazil. Beynon spent 4 months in custody, though the case never proceeded to trial, as prosecutors ultimately chose to drop the charges. Despite this legal reprieve, the consequences were severe: Beynon was permanently deported to Wales, leading to a 3-year hiatus in Santo Daime activities across the country.
  10. ↑ Horowitz-Ghazi, Alexi (23 January 2026). "Inside the world's largest psychedelic mushroom church : Planet Money". NPR. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  11. ↑ Yakowicz, Will (17 March 2024). "The Prophet Of Shroom: Inside America's Largest (And Trippiest) Megachurch". Forbes. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  12. ↑ Nakano, Andrea (11 December 2024). "World's largest "psychedelic church" to shut down San Francisco location". CBS San Francisco. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  13. ↑ Fiona Rutherford; Michelle Amponsah (29 August 2025). "Inside the Tiny Church Where Psychedelics Are Totally Legal". Bloomberg.
  14. ↑ Michaels, Andrew C. (17 March 2026). "Ayahuasca and Religious Freedom". Pepperdine Digital Commons. For example, in January 2024, the Eastern District of California in Church of the Celestial Heart v. Garland ruled that a church had standing to assert RFRA claims in court despite not having applied for an exemption with the DEA.203 The Church of the Celestial Heart ("CCH") is a "syncretic religion that incorporates several religions and spiritual traditions," using ayahuasca as a sacramental communion through which members are able to "come to a profound sense of healing, peace, and understanding that brings about transformation in all levels of human existence."204 In June 2025, CCH reportedly entered into a settlement agreement with the government, becoming the fifth group to have obtained some form of legal protection for ayahuasca use in the United States.205 Following a seizure by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of one of the church's shipments of ayahuasca, and the arrest of one the church's board members, the CCH brought suit against the Attorney General, the DHS, and the DEA, pursuant to RFRA as well as the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).206 The government moved to dismiss for lack of standing and failure to state a claim, or in the alternative, for a stay of the litigation until the CCH applied to the DEA for an exemption, but the court denied the motion.207
  15. ↑ Fernandes Antunes, Henrique (2025). "Ayahuasca's Path in the United States: The RFRA and the Sincere Exercise of Religion". Religion, Drug, or Cult?. Vol. 5. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. p. 121–158. doi:10.1007/978-3-032-04368-9_5. ISBN 978-3-032-04367-2. Retrieved 24 June 2026.
  16. ↑ McGhee, Ali (9 June 2025). "Church of the Celestial Heart Wins Legal Protection for Ayahuasca Use". Chacruna. Retrieved 9 July 2026.
  17. ↑ "The Church of the Eagle and the Condor Settles with Federal Agencies, Can Continue Importing and Using Ayahuasca". Psychedelic Alpha. 8 May 2024. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  18. ↑ Lattin, Don (11 October 2022). "A Santo Daime Church's Legal Success Paved a Path Towards Psychedelic Legalization". Lucid News - Psychedelics. Retrieved 24 June 2026.
  19. ↑ Busby, Mattha (8 June 2023). "This New Church Wants to Get You High on Synthetic Toad Venom". VICE. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  20. ↑ Holyanova, Maria (26 April 2023). "Investigating Psilomethoxin: A "Novel" Psychedelic Drug Used as a Sacrament: Fact or Fiction?". Psychedelic Spotlight. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  21. ↑ Farah, Troy (20 April 2023). "Church claims to have made a super-drug that combines shrooms and toad venom". Salon.com. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  22. ↑ Stoddard, Brad (31 July 2024). The Production of Entheogenic Communities in the United States. Cambridge University Press. pp. 36–37. doi:10.1017/9781009429412. ISBN 978-1-009-42941-2. [Greg Lake] and [Ian Benouis] also started their own entheogenic church, the Church of Psilomethoxin, later renamed the Church of the Sacred Synthesis, a community that consumes psychoactive mushrooms.27 [...] Lake and Benouis formed this church in 2022 and it was quickly embroiled in controversy. They claimed that the church's sacrament was a novel tryptamine, or a new psychedelic. As scholars Samuel Williamson and Alexander Sherwood described the church, "The Church of Psilomethoxin claims to produce a novel tryptamine by adding 5-MeO-DMT to the substrate of cultivated Psilocybe mushrooms, which is then biosynthesized into psilomethoxin, the church's sacrament" (Williamson & Sherwood 2003, unnumbered page). People across the country joined the church by submitting an online application and were granted access to the church's sacrament, which they received via mail. The so-called "mail-order mushroom church" attracted a lot of attention; but the church received even more scrutiny and condemnation after Williamson and Sherwood conducted tests on the church's sacrament and were not able to find evidence of psilomethoxin. They did, however, find psilocybin, baeocystin, and psilocin, suggesting the church was distributing and consuming "normal" psychedelic mushrooms. They published their results in April 2023 and subsequently amended their findings in June 2023. The findings were quite damning, putting Lake and Benouis on the defensive and ultimately prompting them to change the church's name to Church of the Sacred Synthesis. Lake himself responded publicly to the controversy on the Plus Three podcast in May 2023 (Lake 2023).
  23. ↑ Hu, Jane C. (12 April 2024). "DEA announces hearing on obscure hallucinogenic compounds; Petitioning the FDA for a public meeting on Lykos and MDMA; Psychedelic church sues for defamation". The Microdose. Substack. Retrieved 9 February 2025. 'Psychedelic' Church sues detractors for defamation: The Church of Sacred Synthesis, formerly known as the Church of Psilomethoxin, is suing its critics for defamation, libel and slander in a Texas district court, according to a new piece published in DoubleBlind. The church formerly claimed that its "sacrament", a supposedly novel psychedelic drug called psilomethoxin, was created by feeding 5-MeO-DMT to psilocybin-producing fungi. In April 2023, two chemists working at the non-profit medical research organization Usona Institute, tested a sample they claim came from an anonymous member of the church and concluded that there was no evidence it was psilomethoxin. Shortly after, the psychedelics publication Psymposia published a four-part series investigating the church and its claims. Journalist Mattha Busby reports in DoubleBlind that the civil suit names Usona, the Promega Corporation, whose founder Bill Linton also co-founded Usona, Psymposia, and a user on the social media site X.
  24. ↑ Marinacci, Mike (4 July 2023). "The Church of the Tree of Life: The Sacramental Garden of Legal Highs". Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground America. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781644117088.
  25. 1 2 3 Marinacci, Mike (4 July 2023). Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground America. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781644117088.
  26. ↑ Gorman, Peter (January 1990). "Divine Smoke and God's Flesh: Psychedelics and Religion". High Times. No. 173. pp. 41–44, 75.
  27. ↑ Lattin, Don (26 October 2022). "A Legal Ayahuasca Church Thrives in Southern California". Lucid News - Psychedelics. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  28. ↑ "The Church With No Doctrine: Rethinking Power in Psychedelic Spaces". Third Wave. 5 November 2025. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  29. ↑ Horgan, John (5 July 2017). "Tripping on Peyote in Navajo Nation". Scientific American. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  30. ↑ Helmore, Edward (11 January 2025). "'White people shouldn't mess with it': Native American church laments psychedelic cactus shortage". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  31. ↑ Kim, Eddie (19 February 2023). "The Mysterious Disappearance of America's Favorite Psychedelic". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  32. 1 2 Marinacci, Mike (4 July 2023). "Temple of the True Inner Light: A DPT Eucharist on the Lower East Side". Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground America. Simon and Schuster. pp. 219–231. ISBN 9781644117088.
  33. ↑ Morris, Hamilton (31 May 2019). "Finding Hide-and-Seek". The Museum of Modern Art. Supplemental Video
  34. ↑ Lekhtman, Alexander (7 September 2017). "Does the First Amendment Protect Spiritual Cannabis Use? A D.C. Activist Plans to Argue For It". Psymposia.
  35. ↑ Fisher, Louis (2003). Congressional Protection of Religious Liberty. Nova Publishers. p. 56. ISBN 9781590336694.
  36. ↑ Lander, Devin R. (1 February 2011). "Start Your Own Religion: New York State's Acid Churches". Nova Religio. 14 (3): 64–80. doi:10.1525/nr.2011.14.3.64. ISSN 1092-6690. Retrieved 15 August 2026.
  37. 1 2 Lyttle, Thomas (1988). "Drug Based Religions and Contemporary Drug Taking". Journal of Drug Issues. 18 (2): 271–284. doi:10.1177/002204268801800212. ISSN 0022-0426. Retrieved 21 June 2026.
  38. 1 2 Stoddard, Brad (2023). "Entheogens: Psychedelic religion in the United States, part one". Religion Compass. 17 (10). doi:10.1111/rec3.12474. ISSN 1749-8171. Admittedly, the U.S. government has only officially recognized that a handful of groups have the right to consume for religious reasons what are otherwise illegal psychoactive substances. These groups include Native Americans, whose use of peyote is protected by the most recent version of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act; União do Vegetal, a group in New Mexico that consumes hoasca or ayahuasca (Beyer, 2010); two branches of Santo Daime in Oregon, a group that consumed Daime or ayahuasca (Dawson, 2013); Flower of the Divine Mother church in Los Angeles, a group affiliated with Santo Daime in Oregon (Lattin, 2022); and Oratory of Mystical Sacraments, a church in New Hampshire that consumes mushrooms (Hayward, 2020). If there are more churches that have obtained full legal recognition, they have kept their status private and not, to my knowledge, shared it with the public.
  39. ↑ Elcock, Chris (15 May 2023). Psychedelic New York: A History of LSD in the City. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 255. ISBN 9780228016724.
  40. ↑ Harjani, Hanisha; Fishman, Sydney (2 January 2023). "Church uses psychedelics to experience divine presence". Berkeleyside. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  41. ↑ Shipley, Morgan (10 October 2023), How 'nones' − the religiously unaffiliated − are finding meaning, purpose and spirituality in psychedelic churches, The Conversation, doi:10.64628/aai.gw77em4er
  42. ↑ Busby, Mattha (7 August 2024). "The Bankrupt Ayahuasca Church Where Negligence Led to Death". VICE. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  43. ↑ Busby, Mattha (1 April 2025). "No Shame in the Neoshaman: The Deadly Rise and Fall of a Florida Ayahuasca Church". VICE. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  44. ↑ Niermann, Ingo; Sack, Adriano (2008). The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends: A Very Trippy Miscellany. Penguin. p. 79. ISBN 9781440651182. PSYCHEDELIC CHURCHES: The following churches were founded in the United States and Canada starting at the end of the nineteenth century. Each of them either once involved or currently involves partaking of psychoactive sacraments: [...]
  45. ↑ Breau, Jeffrey (4 November 2025). "Charting Novel Psychedelic Spiritual Communities". DASH Home. Retrieved 15 August 2026. A directory compiled by J. Gordon Melton and John Rapp in 2025, "Entheogenic Churches and Religious Bodies in the United States," identifies over 250 psychedelic churches operating in the United States.
  46. ↑ "Police say Japan cult used drugs". UPI. 10 July 1995. Retrieved 30 August 2026. The hard drugs cited by leaders under arrest include LSD, mescaline and related hallucinogenic drugs. The cult's chief chemist, Masami Tsuchiya, reportedly told police 'doctors used secretly produced LSD, mescaline and other psychotomimetic drugs on followers.'
  47. ↑ Danzig, Richard (20 December 2012). "Aum Shinrikyo – Second Edition – English". CNAS. Retrieved 30 August 2026. While these efforts were undertaken, Tsuchiya was reassigned to numerous new research projects, each to run simultaneously with his sarin work. Between the fall of 1994 and the March 1995 subway attacks, he remembers manufacturing research quantities of: lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD); sodium pentothal; phencyclidine (PCP); methamphetamines; soman (another chemical agent, of which he produced about two to three grams); GF nerve agent; VX nerve agent (several times – he produced a total of about 200 grams); gunpowder; barbiturates (phenobarbital); mescaline; and catalysts for ammonium and nitric acid.171
  48. ↑ SpokesmanReview (13 October 1995). "Cult Reportedly Made Lsd To Use As Weapon". The Spokesman-Review. Retrieved 30 August 2026. The cult suspected of attacking Tokyo subways with deadly nerve gas produced 200,000 doses of LSD to use in initiation rites and as possible weapons, a television network reported Thursday. The Aum Shinri Kyo cult also made unspecified quantities of mescaline, anesthetics and stimulants, the NHK public television network said. Cult leader Shoko Asahara dispatched one follower to Russia to get material to make LSD and another to the United States to find out how to produce it, the report said. Asahara ordered production of the drugs in May 1994 and they were given to thousands of new members, in the hope they would have mystical experiences like he did when he took LSD, the network reported, citing cult members.
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