Elaine Pagels, Gnosis, and LSD

Elaine Pagels, the classical and biblical scholar who was among the first to translate and interpret the Nag Hammadi manuscripts writes in her 2019 book Why Religion? A Personal Story that she tried LSD shortly before feeling impelled to write her bestseller The Gnostic Gospels (1979). Gnosis, the direct experience of God, is something often powerfully enhanced by entheogens like LSD. 

Pagels grew up in Palo Alto, the child of academic parents (who were horrified by her dabblings into religion as a child). In high school, she hung out with a group of artists, and writes that she knew the (years older) Jerry Garcia, and attended his first wedding (to a very pregnant young woman). While a freshman at Stanford, she moved to San Francisco along with Garcia and others. A high school friend died in a car crash that Jerry, also in the car, survived, and she surmises that the name The Grateful Dead “must have resonated from the crash he’d survived five years earlier.” 

After graduating Stanford she applied to a Harvard doctoral program in the study of religion, and was rejected by Prof. Krister Stendahl because, he wrote, “women students have always quit before receiving a degree.” However she was encouraged to apply again the following year if she was “still serious," and after completing a Masters in classics at Stanford and continuing to study advanced Greek and Latin, she re-applied and was accepted. There she studied the “secret” gnostic gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, written in Coptic around the 2nd - 4th century AD.

Her husband Heinz, a physicist interested in consciousness, took part in an LSD experiment at Palo Alto Veteran's Hospital while in graduate school. What he took "wasn't a placebo," he told Elaine later, "saying how astonished he was to see stars and galaxies being born and dying, while others emerged, through what felt like innumerable ages." The summer they married (1969), he encouraged his new wife to try it, "promising to cope with any difficulty that might arise." 

Pagels writes she "anticipated that what would happen might involve what I was writing about, some kind of Christian vision. Instead, as I sat in the apartment, looking out at the sky, the trees in light wind, and the garden, I saw everything alive as fire, gloriously intertwined. Watching, ecstatic and speechless, for about five hours, I finally managed to say, 'I guess that solved the dying problem.' What horrified me before, when [her high school friend] Paul died—that a beloved person could simply disappear, and disintegrate—now seemed to resolve into a deeper unity of the whole." 

That fall, she returned to Cambridge to complete her dissertation and doctoral exams, graduating with distinction. She began to teach, writing two "scholarly books" and several articles, and working with a group of nearly 30 scholars to translate, edit and publish more than 50 texts from Nag Hammadi. Concern that their work wouldn't be understood by the public led her to write The Gnostic Gospels, a less academic and more approachable text. 

In 1970 she began teaching at Barnard College (a women's school). Asked to speak at a conference there about women in the early Christian movement, she realized she'd been taught nothing about that. "While thinking about the conference, I suddenly realized that although the sources in the New Testament often marginalize women and minimize their roles, the secret gospels and other texts found in Egypt—some, especially—abound in feminine images, even for God," she wrote. "None of my male colleagues had noticed this, and I hadn't either, until I had been asked to confront the question."

"The Secret Revelation of John, for example, opens as the disciple John, devastated by Jesus's death, goes out in to the desert alone to grieve, when suddenly 'the whole creation shone with light, and the world was shaken.' Terrified, John says be heard Jesus's voice speaking from that light, saying, 'John, John, why do you weep? Don't you know that I am with you always; I am the Father; I am the Mother; and I am the Son!" 

Pagels writes that anyone reading the Bible in Hebrew would see that the words "spirit" (Ruah) and "wisdom" (Hokmah) are feminine, but that when translated to Greek and Latin, Ruah became the genderless pneuma and spiritus, losing connection with the divine Mother. "I realized that Israel's god was an anomaly—a single-male god, who, unlike other male gods among his contemporaries, had no feminine partner, as in Egypt, where Isis and Hathor were worshipped along with Ra and Horus, or in Greece or Rome, where Zeus and Jupiter were paired with divine wives, sisters, and lovers, like Hera and Juno." 

The Gnostic Gospels won both the National Book Award in the category Religion/Inspiration, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Modern Library named it as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Pagels went on to write books like, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation. She had an early fascination with the trippy Gospel of John, which was also Emily Dickinson's favorite Bible book.  

Discovered around the time that the Nag Hammadi texts were found are the Dead Sea Scrolls, containing the oldest Hebrew-language manuscripts of the Bible dating back to the 2nd century BCE. One of the scholars to translate and preserve the Dead Sea Scrolls was John M. Allegro, whose book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross scandalized the research and religious communities by putting forward the theory that stories of early Christianity originated in a clandestine Essene sect centered around the use of psychedelic mushrooms.