SOME VERY STRANGE ENCHANTED BOYS
The Curious Science of Roland R. Griffiths
I know that you’ve started an endowed professorship at Johns Hopkins to study what you call the benevolent—I love how you described it—‘the benevolent mystery of what it is to exist.’ I just love that. And so, what mysteries are you hoping to answer by starting a foundation to study the benevolent mysteries?
—Oprah Winfrey to Roland Griffiths
An article I wrote about Roland Griffiths’ swan song, a scientific paper providing empirical evidence for an esoteric theory concerning the origins of religion, has just been published by the always thought-provoking libertarian magazine Reason. Find it here (and here). If you aren’t familiar with Griffiths, he was a distinguished behavior scientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from 1973 to 2023, when he died of colon cancer, a tragic and unexpected twist of fate delivered at the peak of his career.
Mentored by Joseph V. Brady, the pioneering psychopharmacologist who helped Wernher von Braun launch chimps into outer space, Griffiths began as a self-described “radical Skinnerian,” a methodological perspective he would ultimately abandon. After a few decades studying caffeine and opioids, he became interested in studying the bizarre (but unusually common) mystical experiences occasioned by hallucinogenic drugs.
Griffiths’ efforts (and pristine reputation) led to a “psychedelic renaissance” that is still humming along (albeit, perhaps, with one or two flat tires). I met him in 2014 as a guinea pig in one of his studies. I was writing for the Baltimore City Paper where Griffiths advertised looking for volunteers and happened to live within walking distance of his lab. For a few months, once a week, I walked up Eastern Ave. through Highlandtown in East Baltimore, passing by the Greek diners and smoke shops, on my way to Bayview Hospital. The simple games I was tasked with completing were similar to those Brady administered to chimps half a century earlier (minus the electric shocks and banana pellets). What happened is too strange to recount here.
I would recommend reading the rest of this story after you read the Reason article, it will make more sense. When you are finished, you might enjoy this commemorative video produced by Bob Jesse, Griffiths’ friend and frequent collaborator. Roughly two and a half minutes into the film, you will notice a copy of a book called The Immortality Key sitting on Griffiths’ desk (along with Huston Smith’s Perennialist classic Forgotten Truth). He thought enough of the former title, a controversial bestseller, to cite it in his final paper, which would have received, had Griffiths not passed, the coronation of a major scientific discovery. Over the past few years I have been investigating this book, a peculiar manifesto involving behavior scientists and a wish to revitalize Western civilization by retrieving its archaic past.
The story of The Immortality Key, I would argue, is the story of the psychedelic renaissance itself. The culmination of all its currents boiled down into one text that connects every major figure in this new era of research. I became interested in the book after being introduced to Brian Muraresku through an email by the classicist Carl Ruck, whose work on psychedelics provides the narrative’s foundation. Not long after the book was released, Ruck and others expressed hesitation about it. Where I expected to find excitement, I instead sensed an underlying tension, the reasons for which I would only come to find out in the ensuing years. Knowing the material the book covers well, and knowing it was just a rehash of Ruck’s ideas about magic mushrooms’ secret role in ancient history, it took me a while to crack its spine.
When I finally did, I was fairly shocked, mostly by its introduction, “A New Reformation,” which reads like a high-end pharmaceutical ad. I began to interview those depicted in the book, most of whom were hesitant to speak, leery of Muraresku’s legal training, wealth, and elite social network. I trudged ahead and what I have discovered is extraordinary, a yarn seemingly torn from the pages of Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus trilogy. Below, I will provide a recap of my reporting.
For Compact, I reviewed some of the rhetoric that has been used to sell psychedelics as a medicine, from Albert Hofmann to Brian Muraresku. With a backdrop of looming environmental disaster, drug mysticism becomes the chemical intervention that might just save us. I also looked at how Murareksu’s larger arguments are just warmed-over theosophy and occultism, a relic of Victorian spiritualism and Renaissance magic. Disillusioned radicals have often turned to the dark arts to achieve their old political aims. The fact that he is friendly with “deep state” operatives like John Podesta suggest he may be the most well-financed and ambitious magician in the world today.1 I also mentioned his association with Silicon Valley futurists and how his book was being used by drug salesmen to advertise and peddle their wares.
Whatever anxiety those ties might produce, we can take comfort in his stated heroes being considerably less threatening: shallow pitchmen like Joseph Campbell. If you haven’t read Wendy Doniger’s assessment of Campbell, “A Very Strange Enchanted Boy,” please enjoy. She described something Campbell and Muraresku share, that is intellectual laziness and a willingness to invent ancient history to suit their own purposes. Campbell, Doniger wrote, was neither a scholar nor a gentleman, but someone who “took other people's stories and turned them into easy-listening religion, Muzak mythology. He reduced great books to slogans. He made the myths he retold his myths, instead of letting them tell their own story.”
In an ongoing series, here and here, I looked into some of Muraresku’s “influences” and attempts to incorporate psychedelics into both Christian and neopagan religious frameworks. I also discussed his financial and social networks, and how he synthesized a good amount of the psychedelic literature into a popular mystery that functions as a marketing pamphlet for psychedelic therapy. Bill Richards, Anthony Bossis, and Rick Doblin all advised Muraresku on the contemporary psychedelic landscape while he was writing the book, allowing him to dovetail his conclusions with their political program.
What extent Bob Jesse played in encouraging Griffiths interest in the book remains to be seen, but Jesse has met with and knows Muraresku personally. Michael Pollan provided a thin preface for the 2023 paperback edition. Considering it doesn’t add much in terms of insight, Pollan’s stamp must have been a blessing, signaling to timid academics that it was safe to bring Muraresku into the fold.
The Pollan-Muraresku alliance combined forces again to shepherd a $16 million dollar donation to Harvard University. Paid for by an “Elon Musk loyalist” named Antonio Gracias, the “visionary gift” was trumpeted by Pollan and Muraresku in a blitz of media fanfare and social media promo where the two patted themselves on the back. Coincidentally, a long-winded review essay of The Immortality Key, written by Charlie Stang, the director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, then appeared in the Harvard Theological Review.
The document went through a belabored editing process which included obtaining feedback from Carl Ruck, Robert Forte, and strangely, Muraresku himself. Designed as a diplomatic grand statement and (presumably) gentle reprimand for Muraresku’s naughty behavior, its cordial nature is undermined by a passage—a brief comment buried way down in the mix—where Stang makes it clear that the book is a work of fiction aimed at “underwriting a psychedelic future.” If elite grooming schools teach nothing else, it is politeness and camaraderie.
Despite Stang’s special pleading, The Immortality Key is ultimately a hoax. That term is particularly fitting because it is derived from hocus pocus, a 17th century sham-Latin invocation used by jugglers and magicians. A perversion of the sacramental blessing from the Catholic Mass, Hoc est corpus meum (“This is my body”), the term implies bullshit, hokum, mumbo jumbo. A hoaxer attempts to deceive with a fabrication or invented story. The impostor pretends to be someone else in order to mislead others and Muraresku is a dealmaker, not a journalist.2
He was not interested, as David Hewett masterfully demonstrated in his exhaustive deconstruction of the book, in advancing the scholarship in this area, but taking his readers on a “long journey,” presumably cleaning out their pockets along the way. He is not an expert on these topics, as he pretends to be, instead relying on the generosity of others including Chris Bennett and Patrick McGovern. He then turned around and ghosted them. Hocus is trickery, to “befuddle with drugged liquor.”
The mushrooms' association with fairy tales should have been a warning to take everything he says with a fairly large grain of salt. The book is a sleight of hand; a piece of slick drug marketing masquerading as popular scholarship. There is no secret religion with no name, there is only shamanism on which mountains of actual scholarship already exist. The New Testament is not “outdated and impenetrable,” it is a document of great people struggling with their souls and a source of inspiration for some of the most courageous and brilliant people in human history. The idea that a drug could or should replace it is not just stupid and vulgar, it is preposterous.
The Immortality Key displays the trademark maneuvering of a lawyer; the fast-talking style of a salesman; the chauvinism of a political fanatic; and the foul odor of a pharmaceutical advertisement. Signs of the serious intellectual are nowhere to be found. There is no oppressed sisterhood of psychedelic witches, this is simply a projection of Muraresku’s generic politics onto the ancient past. We don’t need a “New Reformation” or a popular outbreak of mysticism, we need common sense and the willpower to stamp out government corruption and corporate greed.
Muraresku fooled his readers when he presented Griffiths’ work as empirical scientific proof and himself as an unbiased observer, instead of a behind the scenes activist and financier. He failed to inform them of voluminous evidence showing that the conversion testimony that opens his book is mostly an illusion, a relic of the revival tent spectacle. Boris Sidis, a student of William James, argued in a critical review of Edwin Starbuck’s ‘science of religion’ (the philosophical basis of the Hopkins protocol), that what is being analyzed here is not healthy mindedness but the psychology of “revival insanity.” Even worse, some of his associates presented the book as a new narcotic gospel, the Book of Brian, using figures like Jesus and Plato as brand ambassadors in a scheme to convince the public that psychedelics are a commodifiable panacea.
This type of book, blending comparative mythology with psychology, magic, and perennialism, has a long history, going back much further than Erich von Däniken or Graham Hancock. As the classical scholar Peter Green wrote of one such book: “A half-educated age that questions all established beliefs will inevitably create its own crop of synthetic absolutes and instant folk-dogma. These are then sold to the unwary, packaged in a pseudoscientific format that apes the external trappings of scholarship.” The fact that Roland Griffiths didn’t see this is disappointing. I told him but he didn’t want to listen, becoming defensive when I brought it up.
My latest article for Reason began as a rebuttal of a piece in the New York Times that called the integrity of Roland’s research into question. I wanted to offer an alternative or additional perspective out of a sense of duty. Roland and I were not close by any means, but I appreciated him taking the time to speak and correspond with me in the months leading up to his death. Hoping the controversy would evaporate if starved of oxygen, many of Griffiths’ colleagues declined to discuss the matter on the record.
However, I think there is something we can all learn from looking at Roland’s life, especially his shift toward a more mystical view of history, a belief that only a radical shift in human behavior—a new way of being—could save the human species from self-destruction. Why was he so willing to risk his reputation? Why did he feel so passionately about this work? Are the stories of his worst critics really true? He had certainly read the warning of Gordon Wasson, someone he cited in numerous papers, that whoever “undertakes to study soberly [the mushroom’s] properties is inviting disaster to his career.” How sober he was is now a matter of debate.
In the process of reporting, stories sometimes evolve, mutate, or take a turn. This one did. Many comments were left on the cutting room floor. Others arrived after my deadline had passed. I would be remiss to not offer the perspective of Bob Jesse who vehemently disagreed with Rick Doblin’s opinion that he and Roland held the paper back out of “conservatism” or “fears of a fundamentalist backlash against psychedelic research.” “Jung said something terrific,” Doblin told me. “Which relates to this, which is ‘the most important political, social, and therapeutic work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.’ I do think that Roland was doing some of the most important work, with the most important political implications, but then his cautiousness muted the benefits from it.”
To that, Jesse offered the following comments: “Rick's representation about me is untrue, and it’s untrue about Roland, as I know from frequent conversations with Roland right up to his last few earthly days. I have no doubt that the religious leaders’ study will be a valuable contribution. Meanwhile, psychedelic research will continue to advance on multiple continents, in accord with its merits.”
The comments of Ralph Hood, one of the most original thinkers in the field of psychedelic research, were more extensive than it was possible to include. Hood offered both a defense and critique of the psychedelic renaissance, particularly the narrow mindedness and careerism of some of the researchers and their overemphasis on politics and public relations. Griffiths wasn’t infusing his research with a belief in spiritual realities, Hood said, he simply wasn’t willing to exclude it, an open minded and unbiased approach he and others took from William James. Controversy, it seems, is now unavoidable if not preferable.
I told Hood that I thought Griffiths was a worthy disciple of James, the patron saint of paranormal research. He agreed. The future of psychedelics was bright, Hood told me, because for-profit psychedelic therapy was doomed to fail. “What's good about that,” he said, “is when you try to ban psychedelic substances, it turns out there are so many naturally occurring psychedelic substances that it's impossible, people would have to get prescriptions to buy a banana.” Hood also had advice for those continuing Griffiths work into psychedelics and spirituality: “Keep doing what you're doing but even more strongly, don't back off. You don't have to back down.”
The field of psychedelic research is at a crossroads. With little to show in terms of progress and the old guard under fire for their mystico-utopian leanings, who will steer the ship into a new era? A sober, charismatic leader has yet to materialize in the wake of Griffiths’ passing. Will the field evolve out of its esoteric swaddling’s and become a grownup drug developing powerhouse? Or will it bloom, as its leaders hoped, into a full-blown mystical religion? Only time will tell, but if anyone can be ‘born again’ again it should be those who claim to possess the secrets of alchemical rebirth. Here’s to rising up from the ashes like a phoenix.
Though my essay was met with total silence on the psychedelic media front (and a flood of negative responses from the Muraresku-Graham Hancock fever swamp), one historian at NYU called it ‘fantastic.’ “You're totally right,” they said, “that this is a re/mis-use of [James George] Frazer turned into a self-satisfying ideology.” I was surprised when Compact’s founder, Sohrab Ahmari, a Catholic, later linked to my article in an account of his own ayahuasca journey, crediting the controversy with spurring his interest in taking the drug. Rod Dreher responded to Ahmari by admonishing him for toying with demonic forces.
Mr. Muraresku was employed by the Inter-American Development Bank, an organization that, according to journalist Matt Kennard, “works in tandem with the Pentagon and CIA.” See Kennard’s The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire.
Your work on muraresku is really interesting, I’m sure there’s more weird shit to uncover there! He was so well funded, like 200k from cohen foundation for a documentary that as far as I can see never got made!
Damn man!!