Abstract
A limitation on most past and current religious research is that it is primarily anecdotal, descriptive, or correlational. Entheogens, psychoactive plants and chemicals used in a religious context, overcome this barrier by providing a way to explore religious questions through experimental research. In spite of a large database of scientific and scholarly information, entheogens have systematically been excluded from religious studies. Focusing on mystical experiences as an experiential basis of religion, entheogens reframe current issues, reformulate standard research topics, and propose new questions. To illustrate how entheogens can enrich religious studies, this chapter poses questions, new and old, whose answers can now be informed by experiments using entheogens. The questions fall into four areas: mystical experiences, the sciences, the humanities, and church and polity. Because a primary duty of humanistic and scientific disciplines is to include all the data within their fields, scientists, theologians, and scholars in religious studies owe it to themselves, their colleagues, students, and disciplines to include information about entheogens.
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