"[T]he United States is in the midst of a spiritual reboot. Just look at the stats: Four in ten millennials no longer identify with any religion..."

"But while people are leaving organized religion in droves, Americans are still hungry for spiritual nourishment.... Astrology and other psychic services are booming, and the pandemic has only accelerated the trend of consumers seeking out mysticism. Psychedelics fit perfectly into this new framework.... 'Our religious and spiritual institutions have become hollowed-out shells. They’re bereft, in a way, and a lot of people want something more than that—an affirmation to their intuition that there’s something beyond ordinary day-to-day life,' says [ethnopharmacologist Dennis] McKenna... [T]he same religions that people are today abandoning were themselves, [according to Brian Muraresku, author of The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name], built on the foundation of psychedelic mysticism. In his book, he advances a renegade academic theory that claims the original sacraments of Western civilization, born in ancient Greece, were spiked with primitive, mind-altering drugs. Annual pilgrimages were made to an ancient city called Eleusia to participate in secret ceremonies where adherents consumed a potion, kykeon, that contained ergot, the same fungus that Albert Hofmann used to synthesize LSD. Similar rituals and sacraments were then adopted by the earliest Christians sects, which suggests that Christianity itself was potentially founded on a psychedelic sacrament."

 
From "‘Shrooms! Shamans! Kosher LSD! Why Los Angeles Is Suddenly Tripping Out" (Los Angeles Magazine).