![Lab desk with magnifying glass, scrolls, plant specimens, and tinctures](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-05/iStock-1185392487.jpg?itok=gKt3__wz) # How Psychedelic Science Invented a History of Religion Humphry Osmond, the man who coined the term "psychedelic," saw his own psychiatric discipline as the latest iteration in an ancient tradition including all manner of medicinal and religious techniques. May 26, 2026 [ Paul Gillis-Smith ](/people/paul-gillis-smith) Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey *The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.* It is challenging for me to imagine a time before the concept of “the psychedelic” existed, despite its emergence only seventy years ago. Intended for the broadest possible application, it includes medical experimentation, religious experience, or some yet-unnamed phenomenon transcending both. The concept is so robust that it is applied to peoples and places in any culture, at any time. Such broad use was precisely the intention when the word “psychedelic” was coined. This capacious application also entailed a revisionist history of religion that would include the modern medicine of the mind from which the word emerged. In a 1956 letter to Aldous Huxley, the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond proposed the term “psychedelic.” Osmond was preparing for a presentation at the New York Academy of Sciences, in which he introduced *psychedelic* as part of a transhistorical and transcultural view of human beings’ chemically-induced mental exploration, invoking religious experience and practice among any mode of self-experimentation “by which man could alter, explore, and control the workings of his own mind.” Psychiatrists, Osmond notes, are the latest generation of such experimenters, preceded by “Aztec and Assassin, Carib and berserker, Siberian and Red Indian, Brahmin and African.” Osmond’s psychedelic experiments in a rural Canadian psychiatric hospital were but the latest iteration of a millennia-spanning tradition that includes all manner of religious and medicinal knowledges. Osmond’s proposition of *psychedelic* also required a novel historical interpretation, in which such experimentations of the mind become part of a transhistorical narrative that includes all manner of religious and medicinal enterprises. An invented history of religion, if you will. Despite carrying out his research at a newly established and well-resourced hospital in Saskatchewan, supported by the first democratic socialist government of North America, Osmond faced the inadequacy of conventional tools for psychiatric treatment: long-term institutionalization, dangerous physiological interventions like electric shock and insulin comas, and psychoanalysis. He and other clinician-researchers considered novel pharmacological research, including psychedelics, to be the medical frontier for notoriously difficult-to-treat psychoses. ![Vial of LSD sitting on a small round platform on a surface draped by blue cloth of some kind](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-05/pretty-drugthings-RfPN6a62B6w-unsplash.jpg?itok=1Gi7J-Q1) A bottle labeled as LSD is staged in the center. LSD blotter leans against the bottle, adorned with an abstract painting of Albert Hofmann, the chemist who synthesized LSD. Image courtesy of Unsplash.Osmond initially found immense promise in mescaline and LSD as training tools for clinicians working with psychoses. Perhaps the drugs were hallucinogens or psychotomimetics—drugs mimicking psychosis—but Osmond concluded these drugs did more than offer new solutions to psychiatry’s feeble attempts to treat psychosis. The feelings of insight occasioned by these drugs were too profound, too real, and too enjoyable to be relegated to the lowly status of “psychosis,” for psychosis could only indicate pathology, delusion, and undesirability. After witnessing a Native American Church’s peyote circle, Osmond could not deny that these molecules were relevant to religion, camaraderie, and social good. Osmond saw his own psychiatric discipline as the latest iteration in an ancient tradition of mental experimentation, identifying the alteration of the mind through pharmacy as a core feature of this tradition. Psychiatry was but one mode of exploring the antipodes of the mind. Osmond folded psychedelics and psychiatry into a rich cadre of global medicinal and religious practices by ritualists, apothecaries, and devotees. *Psychedelic* created a religio-medical complex, and Osmond proposed it to indicate a transhistorical phenomenon of pharmacologically assisted mental experimentation. Osmond’s proposal proved persuasive, and scientific and clinical researchers continue to carry out his project. This invented history of religion continues to shape psychedelic discourse to this day. While Osmond testified to the inadequacies of psychiatry in his invented psychedelic history, the physician and scholar of religion Walter Pahnke sought to operationalize the psychedelic religious experience for clinical benefits. Pahnke proposed that psychedelics could occasion a “mystical state of consciousness,” an experience that could be measured, after the fact, with a questionnaire based on philosopher Walter Stace’s 1960 typology of mystical experience, which described the experience as unitive, objective or real, transcending time and space, sacred, engendering positive mood, paradoxical, and ineffable. Through quantifying the psychedelic effects of this experience-deemed-mystical, psychedelic researchers such as Pahnke took up the gauntlet thrown down by Osmond. In fact, this mystical experience typology became essential for treating psychological distress in what came to be known as “psychedelic psychotherapy.” Pahnke’s experience-deemed-mystical went on to take several other names in the 1960s and 1970s, and it continues to develop in recent psychedelic research and new measures for psychedelic experiences: a peak or transcendental experience, an experience of oceanic boundlessness, ego dissolution, or unity. Contemporary clinicians understand the various questionnaires about psychedelics to measure the same underlying experiential construct, whether it is called mystical, ego-dissolution, unitive, peak, or something else. While the object of study in psychedelic research, the psychedelic experience, has been removed from the explicit religious valence that Osmond proposed, researchers continue to focus on those experiences-deemed-religious, deploying elements of Osmond’s *psychedelic* concept and the invented history of pharmacology and religions that it relies upon. The *psychedelic* continues to be a concatenation of medicine and religion, or perhaps an attempt to transcend both. See also:- [ psychedelics ](/topic-tags/psychedelics) - [ Researcher Reflections ](/topic-tags/researcher-reflection) - [ Transcendence and Transformation ](/programming-threads/transcendence-and-transformation) - [ Spirituality and Psychedelics ](/programming-threads/spirituality-and-psychedelics) - [ Psychedelics and the Future of Religion ](/programming-threads/psychedelics-and-future-religion)