From 'Hallucinogen' to 'Entheogen': The Naming of Sacred Experience

“'Entheogen' was coined in 1979 by Ruck, Bigwood, Staples, Ott, and Wasson to describe substances used for religious purposes. It has legal implications that 'hallucinogen' does not.”

Carl Ruck was one of three authors of The Road to Eleusis (1978). A year later, he was one of five authors of a short paper in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs proposing a new word for substances used in religious contexts: entheogen, from the Greek en theos, 'the divine within.'

The paper argued that 'hallucinogen' was inappropriate for substances used in genuine religious practice because it encoded the assumption that what was experienced was unreal. A new word was needed that accurately described the category: substances that occasion the experience of the divine, used within a framework that recognizes that experience as sacred.

'Entheogen' has significant uptake in ethnobotanical and religious studies contexts. The legal significance is not negligible. RFRA protection requires demonstrating that a substance is used for religious purposes as part of sincere religious belief. The word 'entheogen' describes a category of substance use that is, by definition, religious rather than recreational.

The Church of Gaia's May 2025 DEA approval was granted under the entheogenic religious use framework. Whether the framework will expand to cover substances beyond ayahuasca, or contexts beyond formally organized religious institutions, is the open regulatory question. The Road to Eleusis scholarship provides the historical argument for why it should.

Sources

• Ruck et al. Entheogens J. Psychedelic Drugs (1979)
• Wikipedia Entheogen
• Gonzales v. O Centro (2006)