The Action of Psychedelics on Original Sin

In a lot of the therapy conversations I have with people, at some point they will talk about feeling broken, flawed, or some other expressions showing not just that they feel bad, but have a sensation that they are bad. A bad to the core, or a broken from the outset feeling. It’s true that in childhood we can confuse being treated badly with being bad, but it seems to me that the level of shame we all carry is more than just personal guilt for, say, never having once volunteered to do the dishes in your entire childhood, but is a cultural inheritance. What someone said to me is, “the trance of unworthiness.” How did a belief like this worm its way into everybody’s life, and where did it come from?

If you look at Western culture the prime suspect for feeling bad from the core, is the teaching of original sin. It doesn’t matter, I believe, whether or not you were overtly taught in Sunday school how deeply sinful you really are, or if you grew up in an entirely secular setting, the idea of original sin is so deeply steeped in our culture it will be inside you, whether or not you know it. I don’t believe this imposter syndrome-esque belief in how bad one is belongs only to people who are traumatized or depressed, or whatever label you want to give your feeling life, we all carry the virus of original sin in our brains, and it has been there for some 1500 years now, and that is a lot of cultural momentum, infecting every family line. But with psychedelics we can see more deeply into ourselves than we ever do in regular life, and hey presto, we get a different story! Instead of rottenness and sin, and desire to eat stolen apples, what do we find there? Divine light. And so it may be with psychedelics that we can start to unpick the cultural karma of original sin and come up with something better.

The origin point of original sin, naturally enough is in the Bible, but maybe not in quite the way that you expected. Because the Bible doesn’t just have one, it has two creation myths, one which justifies the later invention of the original sin teaching, and one that does not at all. Here is how James Boyce puts it in his book on original sin, Born Bad:

There are two creation stories in Genesis, and each underpinned a rival spiritual stream in the nascent religion of Christianity. In the first, God ‘created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them,’ and ‘God saw what he had made, and it was very good.’ In the second, man is created first, and the woman is made from a man, and she, after a conversation with a snake, defies God’s instructions not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and shares the forbidden fruit (not yet defined as an apple) with her husband. An angry God then banishes them from the Garden of Eden.

Boyce says that for the first three centuries of its existence, Christianity went with the first version, the blame-free one, but then in the Fifth Century with the teaching of Augustine of Hippo, the original sin theory appeared. Elaine Pagels, in Adam, Eve and the Serpent, explains why. She explains it in terms of human capacity for self-government:

Are human beings capable of governing themselves? Defiant Christians hounded as criminals by the Roman government emphatically answered yes. But in the fourth and fifth centuries, after the emperors themselves became patrons of Christianity, the majority of Christians gradually came to say no….Most Christian apologists of the first three centuries would have agreed with Gregory of Nyssa, who followed Rabbinic tradition by explaining that after God created the world, ‘as a royal dwelling place for the future king,’ he made humanity ‘as a being fit to exercise royal rule.’ by creating it ‘the living image of the universal King.’ Consequently, Gregory concludes, ‘the soul immediately shows its royal and exalted character, far removed as it is from the lowliness of private station, in that it owns no master, and is self-governed, ruled autocratically by its own will.’

For as long as Christianity remained a persecuted sect, this sunny take on humanity, and Christians in particular, worked well. The emperor may have dominion in the lowly physical realms, but in spiritual reality, Christians, being adept at self-rule, were the moral superiors of the emperor and had no need for his laws. Once they became more legit and aligned with the empire though, it made much more sense to bolster their own power by asserting that humans were flawed and needed to be curbed in, on the spiritual plane by the bishop, and on the material plane by their dear emperor. You could say that the price of becoming part of the establishment was a teaching that made us feel quietly lousy about ourselves.

The original sin doctrine was created by Saint Augustine, who lived between the fourth and the fifth centuries. As Elaine Pagels puts it;

Augustine… denies that human beings have free moral choice, which Jews and Christians had regarded as the birthright of humanity ‘made in God’s image.’ Augustine declares, on the contrary, that the whole human race inherited from Adam a nature irreversibly damaged by sin. ‘For we all were in that one man, since all of us were that one man who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him.’…The semen (of Adam) itself Augustine argues, already ‘shackled by the bond of death,’ transmits the damage incurred by sin. Hence, Augustine concludes, every human being ever conceived by semen is born contaminated with sin. Through this astonishing argument, Augustine intends to prove that every human being is in bondage not only from birth but indeed from the very moment of conception.

Ouch, on so many levels there. And these fine, if weird, points of theology had their impact down the ages. For instance, it was believed that baptism clears newly born babies of Adam’s sin and allows them the possibility of entrance to heaven. That’s fine, but in eras where infant mortality was high, would babies that died before they could be baptized be consigned to the torture of eternal hell fire? That hardly seems fair to the poor mites, but many churchmen, like 18th century American preacher Jonathan Edwards, were forced into rather extreme positions just to make sense of themselves: “As innocent as children seem to be to us, if they are out of Christ, {i.e. not baptized} they are not so in God’s sight, but are young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers.” Another early American preacher, Cotton Mather, said that “children go astray as soon as they are born. They no sooner step than they stray, they no sooner lisp than they ly.”

 While here is James Boyce again, on what John Calvin, him of Calvinism fame, had to say on the subject:

 Calvin stressed that “the impurity of the parent is so transmitted to the children that all, without a single exception, are polluted as soon as they exist”, and that because all people at their birth have received the “pollution to which the punishment is justly due,” there could be no respite in limbo or purgatory for babies or anyone else who had not been saved by faith in Christ. Babies were not innocent: their “whole nature is as it were a seed of sin, and therefore cannot but be odious and an abominable to God.” Even in the womb, “before we behold the light of life…we are in the sight of God defiled and polluted.”

 Oh John. Get a grip! But another thing these Puritanical types were doing was trying to make sense of a gospel of salvation. There was an urgency to spread this salvation and a need to answer the question, salvation from what? if you could just traipse into this world sinless and, in theory at least, stay that way, more or less, by being a generally good person pretty much unaided, then what exactly was Christ’s sacrifice of dying on the cross for? What was the compelling reason for converting to his religion? But if we are all condemned to hell as a default and the only redemption from that comes through baptism from the right kind of priest, then it becomes urgent that all new born babies, and all the heathens discovered by the various European empires, get baptized as soon as possible into whichever particular branch of Christianity the pastor was preaching. And we have all been taking the hit for these beliefs ever since, not least because as children we were both powerless in the home and at school, and presumed guilty before innocent, for as long as people like John Calvin were doing the presuming. Belief in our innate horribleness has been drummed into us, century after century, until we start to believe that drumbeat, and then later in life we tell our therapists about a strange sense of innate badness inside us. It is our job to hack away at this belief, so we can enjoy our own natural goodness. To the degree that we can shrug off the legacy of original sin, we are getting better, not just for ourselves, but for everybody.