What Is Entheism?

Entheism is the practice and worldview of using sacred plants, fungi, and other psychoactive substances to catalyze direct experiences of the divine, the sacred, or an expanded state of consciousness. Rather than treating these substances as recreational drugs or purely clinical tools, entheism frames them as doorways to spiritual insight, connection, and healing — a tradition as old as human religion itself.

The word gives its name to entheology: the study of entheogens and the spiritual, cultural, and therapeutic frameworks built around them.

Where the Word Comes From

"Entheogen" — the substance-focused term entheism is built on — comes from the Greek entheos ("full of the god within," the root of our word "enthusiasm") and genesthai ("to come into being"). Together: "that which generates the divine within."

The term was coined in 1979 by a group of classicists and ethnobotanists — Carl A. P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and R. Gordon Wasson — in a short paper titled "Entheogens," published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. Their goal was deliberate: "psychedelic" had become tied to 1960s counterculture, and "hallucinogen" carried clinical overtones of delirium and pathology. Neither did justice to millennia of religious and shamanic practice built around these substances. Entheogen offered a more precise, more respectful alternative for that specific use case: substances used to occasion religious or mystical experience.

Entheism, then, is what you get when you turn that noun into a practice and a worldview — spirituality oriented around entheogenic experience.

Freedom of religion and belief — the foundation of entheogenic practice

A Much Older Practice Than the Word

While the vocabulary is modern, the practice isn't. Entheogenic traditions run through much of recorded religious history:

Ancient Greece — The Eleusinian MysteriesCentered on kykeon, a ritual drink some scholars believe contained a psychoactive ergot derivative — consumed annually by thousands of initiates, including major historical figures, for nearly two millennia.
Ancient India — Vedic ReligionRevolved around soma, a sacred plant-based drink described at length in the Rigveda as a means of divine communion.
Mesoamerica — Maya and Aztec TraditionsUsed psilocybin mushrooms (teonanácatl, "flesh of the gods") in religious ceremony long before European contact.
The Americas Today — Native American Church & Brazilian TraditionsThe Native American Church has used peyote as a sacrament since the 19th century, and Brazilian traditions like Santo Daime and União do Vegetal use ayahuasca as the center of their religious practice today.

Entheism names and organizes what these traditions already had in common: the substance is not the point — the encounter with the sacred is.

Entheogen vs. Psychedelic vs. Hallucinogen

These three terms overlap but aren't interchangeable, and the distinction matters for how entheism positions itself:

Psychedelic

From the Greek for "mind-manifesting," coined by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1957 in correspondence with Aldous Huxley, and the dominant cultural term through the 1960s counterculture.

Hallucinogen

The clinical/pharmacological term, emphasizing perceptual effects and often carrying an implicit framing of pathology.

Entheogen

The narrowest of the three: it refers specifically to use in a religious, spiritual, or ceremonial context, regardless of the pharmacological class of the substance.

Entheism claims that third framing as its foundation — not anti-psychedelic, not anti-clinical, but insistent that the spiritual use case deserves its own vocabulary and its own seriousness.

Why This Matters Now

Entheogens are having a documented resurgence in both science and law. Research programs at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Imperial College London have spent the past two decades studying psilocybin's effects on mystical-type experience, existential distress, and treatment-resistant depression. In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protected a small U.S. ayahuasca church's sacramental use of the tea. Oregon voters passed Measure 109 in 2020, creating the country's first regulated psilocybin services program, with licensing beginning in 2023; Colorado followed with its own Natural Medicine Health Act.

None of this makes entheism new. It makes it newly legible — a centuries-old practice re-entering public, legal, and scientific conversation under a name coined to take it seriously.

Entheism and the Entheology Project

This is the ground the Entheology Project stands on. We treat entheogenic experience as a legitimate spiritual practice deserving of preparation, integration support, harm reduction, and community — not a fringe behavior to be managed, and not a purely clinical intervention to be optimized. Our work, from EntheoIM to PsiloScreen to our harm-reduction resources, exists to support people moving through entheogenic experience safely, thoughtfully, and with real spiritual context.

Support a Project → About the Entheology Project

Sources

Ruck, Bigwood, Staples, Ott & Wasson, "Entheogens," Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11:1–2 (1979); Wikipedia entries on "Entheogen" and "Humphry Osmond"; Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418 (2006); Oregon Measure 109 (2020).

How much would you like to donate?

Your donation is being processed

Thank You for Supporting Entheology Project

We could not complete your donation.

Subscribe