The Forbidden Sacrament (Psychedelics and the Hidden Origins of the Sacred)

Entheogens, consciousness, and the suppressed spiritual history of humanity

• Reveals how the kykeon of Eleusis, soma and haoma of ancient Indo-Iranian religions, and Amazonian ayahuasca, have been suppressed by religious and political institutions

• Examines entheogens in shamanism, ancient mystery cults, early Christianity, European witchcraft, Renaissance alchemy, and Buddhist and Hindu traditions

• Challenges the purely medical framing of today’s psychedelic renaissance, calling for a transpersonal approach and the fundamental right to explore one’s own consciousness

For tens of thousands of years, human beings used sacred plant medicines to pierce the veil of ordinary reality. Historically, the deeper and wider perception created by sacred plants has threatened established institutions. Stephan Schillinger asks why, and what have we lost in the silence that followed the institutional suppression of these plants?

Drawing on two decades of personal experience and encounters with leading thinkers, Schillinger traces a single suppressed heritage across cultures and centuries. He argues that the psychedelic Eucharist of early Christianity, the burning acacia of Moses on Sinai, and the sacred mushrooms depicted in medieval church art are not separate phenomena but expressions of the same forbidden wisdom, one that frightens religious institutions as it removes the need for priests and intermediaries, giving supplicants a direct connection to the divine. Moving beyond history, Schillinger also shows how today’s psychedelic renaissance risks repeating the historic pattern of confiscation. Where priests once stood between the seeker and the sacred, clinical protocols threaten to reduce these experiences to mere brain chemistry.

Schillinger shows that entheogens are not the sacred path itself but a glimpse of the destination—tools that demand preparation, humility, and integration. The Forbidden Sacrament holds open what he calls “a fragile but fruitful middle way between science and mystery.”