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