Entheogens: What They Are, Where They Come From, and Why the Name Matters

In 1979, a group of scholars sat around a table and decided that the English language was failing them. The word “hallucinogen” — which literally means “a thing that produces hallucinations” — was being applied to substances that indigenous cultures had used for thousands of years in spiritual ceremonies. The implication was that these experiences were false. Hallucinations. Tricks played on the brain by rogue chemistry.

The scholars disagreed. Ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, chemist Jonathan Ott, mycologist R. Gordon Wasson, and classicist Carl Ruck, among others, proposed a replacement. They went back to Greek: entheos (ἔνθεος), meaning “full of the god” or “divinely inspired,” combined with genesthai (γενέσθαι), meaning “to come into being.” The word they coined was entheogen — a substance that generates the divine within.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. It’s the difference between saying these substances break your brain and saying they open a door that was already there.

What Does Entheogen Actually Mean?

The entheogen definition is straightforward once you see the parts: entheos (god within) + genesthai (to become). An entheogen is a substance that brings about or generates a spiritual or mystical experience. Not a substance that makes you see things that aren’t there. Not a party drug. Not a chemical that scrambles your perception for entertainment.

The word was published formally in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs (the irony of that particular journal title was not lost on anyone) in a 1979 paper titled “Entheogens.” The authors argued that existing terms carried too much baggage. “Hallucinogen” implied the experience was pathological. “Psychedelic,” Humphry Osmond’s coinage from the 1950s — meaning “mind-manifesting” — had been permanently stained by its association with the counterculture, Timothy Leary, and recreational use. Neither word captured what a Mazatec curandera was doing when she ate teonanacatl (the Aztec name for psilocybin mushrooms, meaning “flesh of the gods”) to heal a patient.

So they invented a word that put the sacred back at the center. Entheogenic substances aren’t defined by their pharmacology. They’re defined by their use — the intentional pursuit of communion with something larger than yourself.

Whether you find that compelling or a bit overwrought probably depends on how you feel about the experiences themselves. But here’s what’s hard to argue with: cultures across every inhabited continent, separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years, independently arrived at the same practice. They found plants and fungi that altered consciousness, and they built rituals around them. That convergence means something, even if you’re not sure what.

A Short History of Entheogens (Which Is Really a Long One)

The history of entheogens is, functionally, the history of human spirituality. It just took us a while to notice.

The Mazatec tradition in Oaxaca, Mexico, is perhaps the most well-documented. María Sabina, a Mazatec curandera, conducted veladas — nighttime healing ceremonies — using psilocybin mushrooms. She called them “the little saints that make you see.” Her practice was part of an unbroken tradition stretching back centuries, possibly millennia. When R. Gordon Wasson participated in a velada in 1955 and published his account in Life magazine in 1957, the Western world suddenly became aware of something that hadn’t exactly been a secret. It had just been invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking.

The Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece are a different kind of puzzle. For nearly two thousand years — from roughly 1500 BCE to 392 CE, when the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I shut them down — initiates traveled to Eleusis near Athens to drink a sacramental beverage called kykeon and undergo a visionary experience that they were forbidden to describe. We know that Plato attended. Aristotle attended. Cicero wrote that the Mysteries were the greatest gift Athens gave the world. But nobody said what was in the cup.

In 1978, one year before the word “entheogen” was coined, Albert Hofmann (the chemist who synthesized LSD), R. Gordon Wasson, and Carl Ruck published The Road to Eleusis, arguing that kykeon contained ergot — a fungus that grows on barley and produces alkaloids closely related to lysergic acid. The theory remains debated. But the timeline is suggestive: the same scholars who were investigating the Eleusinian Mysteries were the ones who felt the language needed an upgrade.

The Vedic soma is older still, and even more mysterious. The Rigveda, composed between roughly 1500 and 1200 BCE, devotes an entire book — 114 hymns — to a substance called soma, described as a pressed plant juice with profoundly consciousness-altering effects. Wasson proposed in 1968 that soma was Amanita muscaria, the red-and-white fly agaric mushroom. Others have argued for ephedra, cannabis, or combinations. Nobody has settled the question. What nobody disputes is that a consciousness-altering substance sat at the absolute center of early Hindu religious practice.

Ayahuasca in the Amazon basin. Peyote in Mesoamerican and later North American indigenous traditions. Iboga in West African Bwiti ceremonies. San Pedro cactus in the Andes, with archaeological evidence of use dating back at least three thousand years. The list doesn’t stop. The pattern doesn’t break.

These aren’t footnotes to human history. They’re chapters.

Types of Entheogens

Not every entheogen works the same way, and not every one carries the same weight of tradition. Here are the major ones worth knowing.

Psilocybin mushrooms are the most widely recognized entheogen worldwide, and the one with the most robust modern research behind it. Over 200 species of fungi produce psilocybin, which the body converts to psilocin — a molecule that fits neatly into serotonin receptors. Golden Teacher is one of the most popular strains for both ceremonial and therapeutic use. The Mazatec, the Mixtec, and the Nahua all have documented traditions of use. At microdose levels — which is what we work with at Kind Stranger’s Apothecary — psilocybin mushrooms offer a different proposition entirely: not a mystical experience but a subtle, sustained shift toward brighter mood, sharper creativity, and a quality of attention that makes the ordinary feel more vivid. For a deeper look at the compound itself, our psilocybin guide goes further.

Ayahuasca is a brew, not a single plant. It combines the Banisteriopsis caapi vine (which contains MAO-inhibiting beta-carboline alkaloids) with Psychotria viridis leaves or similar DMT-containing plants. Neither ingredient does much on its own when taken orally. Together, they produce a four-to-six-hour experience that indigenous Amazonian peoples have used for healing and divination for centuries. The pharmacological synergy — one plant supplying the visionary compound, the other making it orally active — is one of those details that makes you wonder exactly how deep traditional botanical knowledge runs.

Peyote and mescaline. Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a small, slow-growing cactus native to the Chihuahuan Desert. It contains mescaline, a phenethylamine psychedelic that produces a warm, visual, distinctly different experience from tryptamine-based entheogens. The Native American Church has used peyote sacramentally since the late 19th century, and the practice is legally protected in the United States. Mescaline was the subject of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception in 1954 — a book that probably did more to introduce Western readers to entheogenic experience than anything until Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind sixty-four years later.

DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is sometimes called “the spirit molecule,” a name popularized by psychiatrist Rick Strassman’s research and book. DMT occurs naturally in hundreds of plant species and in trace amounts in the human body, though its endogenous function remains unclear. When smoked or vaporized, DMT produces an intensely powerful but short experience — five to twenty minutes — that users frequently describe as the most profound event of their lives. It’s also the active visionary compound in ayahuasca, where the longer duration allows for a more gradual, integrated experience.

San Pedro cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi) is peyote’s South American cousin. It also contains mescaline, but grows much faster and much larger than peyote, and has been used in Andean healing ceremonies for at least three thousand years. Ceramic and textile depictions of San Pedro appear in Chavín culture artifacts dating to around 1300 BCE. It remains widely used in traditional medicine throughout Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

Ibogaine comes from the root bark of Tabernanthe iboga, a plant central to the Bwiti religion in Gabon and Cameroon. In the West, ibogaine has attracted attention primarily for its remarkable ability to interrupt opioid addiction — often in a single session. The pharmacology is unlike anything else on this list: ibogaine acts on multiple neurotransmitter systems simultaneously and produces an extended experience lasting twelve to twenty-four hours. Clinical research is limited due to safety concerns (ibogaine can affect cardiac rhythm), but the anti-addiction results have been striking enough to fuel growing interest.

Salvia divinorum is the outlier. A sage plant from the cloud forests of Oaxaca, used by the Mazatec for divination. Its active compound, salvinorin A, is a kappa-opioid receptor agonist — which means it works through an entirely different mechanism than every other entheogen on this list. The experience is short, disorienting, and difficult to describe. It’s legal in most jurisdictions largely because nobody who’s tried it seems especially eager to do it again, which says something about both the substance and our assumptions about what makes something “dangerous.”

What connects all of these — across continents, across millennia, across radically different pharmacologies — is the context of use. A substance becomes an entheogen not because of what it does to your serotonin receptors but because of what you’re doing with the experience. Intention is the through-line. Every culture on this list arrived at the same conclusion independently: the substance matters less than the container you put it in.

Entheogen vs. Psychedelic vs. Hallucinogen — Does the Terminology Matter?

Yes. More than most people think.

Hallucinogen is the clinical term, still used in pharmacology and law enforcement. It comes from the Latin alucinari — “to wander in the mind.” The problem is the word’s plain-English meaning: a hallucination is something that isn’t real. Calling psilocybin a hallucinogen implies that everything you experience on it is fabricated. When a Johns Hopkins study finds that 67% of participants rank their psilocybin experience among the top five most meaningful events of their entire lives — alongside the births of their children — dismissing that as “hallucination” feels like a category error.

Psychedelic is Humphry Osmond’s word, proposed in a 1957 letter to Aldous Huxley. It means “mind-manifesting” — a genuinely good description of what these substances do. The problem is cultural, not linguistic. “Psychedelic” conjures tie-dye, the Grateful Dead, Woodstock, acid trips gone wrong. For a Mazatec healer or a Bwiti initiate, that association is somewhere between irrelevant and offensive. And for someone considering psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, “psychedelic therapy” can sound less like medicine and more like a party.

Entheogen centers the sacred. It says: these substances have been used intentionally, in ceremonial contexts, to access experiences that participants understand as genuinely spiritual. The word doesn’t require you to believe in God. It requires you to take seriously the possibility that these experiences are about something — that they point toward something real, not just a pharmacological glitch.

The terminology you choose reveals your frame. Science says psychedelic. Law enforcement says hallucinogen. Tradition says entheogen. All three are describing the same molecule. None of them are neutral.

What Modern Science Is Finding

Here’s where things get interesting for the skeptics, the nervous newcomers, and anyone who needs data before they trust an ancient tradition.

Johns Hopkins University opened its Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research in 2019 with $17 million in funding — the first center of its kind at a major U.S. institution. Their work with psilocybin has produced some of the most cited papers in modern psychiatry. A 2020 study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that psilocybin-assisted therapy produced rapid and sustained decreases in depressive symptoms, with 71% of participants showing a greater than 50% reduction at the four-week follow-up. The effect sizes were roughly four times larger than traditional antidepressants. Their earlier work found psilocybin helped 80% of participants in a pilot study reduce cigarette smoking — a quit rate that dwarfs any existing treatment.

Imperial College London established the Centre for Psychedelic Research in 2019 as well. Their landmark study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021, compared psilocybin therapy head-to-head against escitalopram (a common SSRI) for major depression. Psilocybin performed at least as well on primary measures and significantly better on secondary measures including emotional responsiveness, psychological well-being, and social functioning. That last detail matters: SSRIs are notorious for emotional blunting, and psilocybin appears to do the opposite.

MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) spent decades shepherding MDMA-assisted therapy through clinical trials for post-traumatic stress disorder. Their Phase 3 trials showed that 67% of participants no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD after three sessions — compared to 32% in the placebo group. The FDA pathway for these therapies has been turbulent, but the clinical data remains remarkable.

The research picture for entheogens overall is the same story told from different angles: substances that were dismissed as dangerous for decades are producing some of the most significant results in psychiatric medicine. The key word in every study is “assisted” — psilocybin-assisted therapy, MDMA-assisted therapy. The substance isn’t the treatment. The substance plus intention plus guidance is the treatment. Which is, if you think about it, exactly what the Mazatec have been saying all along.

For those curious about how microdosing fits into this picture, products like our Daydream blend and Brighten blend aren’t trying to reproduce the clinical psilocybin experience. They’re working at the other end of the spectrum — sub-perceptual doses combined with adaptogenic herbs for daily, sustainable benefit. Different tool. Same underlying respect for the compound.

Entheogens in Canada

Canada occupies an unusual position in the global entheogen landscape. Psilocybin remains a controlled substance under Schedule III of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Possession, production, and sale are technically illegal.

And yet.

In 2020, Health Canada began granting individual exemptions under Section 56 of the CDSA, initially for end-of-life patients seeking psilocybin-assisted therapy. Those exemptions expanded. In 2022, health care professionals were also granted exemptions for personal training purposes — the logic being that a therapist should understand the experience they’re guiding patients through.

British Columbia has moved furthest. Vancouver, in particular, has taken an approach that mirrors its earlier progressive stance on supervised injection sites: enforcement has been functionally deprioritized. Several brick-and-mortar psilocybin dispensaries have operated openly. The federal government hasn’t cracked down with the force that the letter of the law would permit.

The result is a legal grey zone — not quite legalization, not quite decriminalization, more like a sustained look-the-other-way that allows harm reduction, therapeutic access, and yes, businesses like Kind Stranger to exist in a space that the law hasn’t fully caught up to yet.

This isn’t Amsterdam-style tolerance. It’s something more Canadian: pragmatic, quiet, and evolving. Whether formal legalization or decriminalization follows — as it has for cannabis — depends on politics, public pressure, and the clinical evidence that continues to accumulate. But the direction is clear, even if the timeline isn’t.

Read the full article on Kind Stranger: What Are Entheogens?