Beyond the Mystical Experience Model: Theurgy as a Framework for Ritual Learning with Psychedelics

Abstract

Contemporary interpretations of psychedelic spirituality are dominated by the “mystical experience model,” which emphasizes that psychedelics can lead to well-being through bringing about ego dissolution and a unitive mystical experience. Rooted in perennialist and dualist assumptions—often derived from Christian mysticism, Vedanta, and Plotinian Neoplatonism—this framework has shaped both scientific discourse and popular understanding of psychedelic states. However, the mystical experience model is controversial: (1) secular critics consider it as too religious; (2) it is a form of mystical exceptionalism, narrowly focusing on only certain extraordinary experiences; (3) its ontological assumptions include a Cartesian separation between internal experience and external reality and a perennialist focus on ultimate reality; (4) it neglects psychedelic learning processes; (5) in the ritual and ceremonial use of psychedelics, shared intentionality and practices of sacred participation are more important than the induction of individual mystical experiences. This article proposes an alternative and complementary model grounded in theurgy, based on the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus and the participatory ontological pluralism of Bruno Latour. Unlike the mystical experience model, which privileges individual unitary experiences, theurgy affirms ritual mediation, ritual competence, and both individual and collective transformation. Theurgic ritual practice makes room for the encounter with autonomous entities (framed by Latour as “beings of religion”) that are often reported by participants in psychedelic ceremonies. By examining how the theurgic framework can expand our understanding of psychedelic spirituality in a way that is truer to psychedelic phenomenology, especially the presence of autonomous entities, imaginal realms, and the centrality of intention and ritual, this article argues that theurgy offers a nuanced and experientially congruent framework that complements the mystical experience model. Framing psychedelic spirituality through theurgic lenses opens space for a vision of the sacred that is not about escaping the world into undifferentiated unity, but about individual and collective transformation in communion with a living, differentiated cosmos.

1. Introduction

The psychedelic renaissance has yielded a wealth of empirical data on psychedelics and their tendency to bring about altered states of consciousness, which have been framed as mystical-type experiences: a particular kind of spiritual experience that is characterized by a sense of ego loss and union with a larger reality that is often interpreted as some kind of more ultimate reality (see, e.g., Yaden and Newberg 2022).

On the one hand, this has given a new impetus to the academic study of mystical experiences. Because psychedelics can reliably occasion mystical-type states, empirical research on such states can now be conducted “live” in the laboratory by psychologists and neuroscientists, rather than by theologians and religion scholars at their desk, poring over ancient writings from the mystics and other religious writers. On the other hand, this wealth of data greatly contributes to the development of psychedelic studies. The various disciplinary approaches within psychedelic studies can productively focus on various aspects of such mystical experiences.

Both the academic study of mystical experiences and psychedelic studies share a common philosophical framework that I will call “the mystical experience model.” This model considers mystical experiences to be fleeting and temporally bound non-ordinary mental states that occur within the mind. In such special states, the sense of being an individual, separate self falls away, and there is a sense of merging with a larger reality beyond ordinary reality. Although mystical experiences might be expressed in different ways due to cultural differences, the experience itself is assumed to contain a universal common core that remains constant throughout various times and places (Yaden and Newberg 2022).

The mystical experience model, while widely accepted, is also controversial. It has been criticized in recent studies. Section two of this article will, after introducing the mystical experience model, give an overview of five different kinds of criticism: (1) Secular critics find the mystical experience model too religious and biased. (2) Cavallarin (2025) criticizes the mystical experience model for its “mystical exceptionalism”: the unjustified tendency to see certain mystical experiences as exceptional. He aims to “push the door open” for the academic study of a wider range of extraordinary experiences beyond only the mystical experience. (3) van der Braak (2025b) has criticized the mystical experience model for its Cartesian separation between inner experience and external reality, and its perennialist assumption of the existence of an ultimate reality. (4) Blacker (2024) has criticized the neglect of psychedelic (cognitive) learning processes. (5) This article will argue that such learning processes are often collective and ritual in nature.

Section three of this article describes Blacker’s model for deeper learning with psychedelics but also calls attention to the ritual learning processes that are involved in the religious ritual use of psychedelics. Blacker’s model focuses on cognitive learning, leaving out of the picture the various types of embodied and symbolic ritual learning processes that this article will address: intention-setting, protective invocation, in-ceremony attunement, discernment of beings of religion, and integration practices.

Section four will describe how a group of ethnobotanical scholars and mythology researchers coined in 1979 the new term “entheogen” (awakening the god within), giving rise to a discourse of entheogenic shamanism. It will argue that, because it retains a Romantic and perennialist distortion of shamanism, focusing (once again) only on individual psychedelic experiences, entheogenic shamanism fails to properly describe collective ritual learning processes.

Section five will introduce an alternative framework of theurgy. The notion of theurgy is all but forgotten in contemporary Western thinking. Yet it used to play an important part in the Neoplatonic tradition. The Syrian Neoplatonic philosopher and priest Iamblichus (245–325) defended a ritual and ceremonial approach to spiritual transformation that he called “theurgy.” Theo-ourgia means “God work.” Rather than speaking about God (theology), spiritual transformation is a matter of working with God (theurgy). The most important aspect of theurgic rituals is that the gods do the work, not the ritual practitioner. Theurgic rituals create a resonance that allows divine beings to become manifest.1 Iamblichus’s theurgic framework will be updated with the contemporary thought of the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour (1947–2022).

Section six will argue that the ritual learning processes that occur during psychedelic rituals and ceremonies are best described by this framework of theurgy. Psychedelics are part of a broader ritual technology to bring about religious ritual learning: the cultivation of the capacity to resonate with the sacred. Both the mystical experience model and Blacker’s deeper learning model do not capture this aspect as they are both essentially psychological frameworks that are being used to understand religious learning processes. And while the framework of entheogenic shamanism does make room for such religious processes, it tends to reduce them to individual experiences.

2. The Mystical Experience Model and Its Limitations

Ever since their entry in the Western imagination, psychedelics have been connected to mystical experiences. According to Aldous Huxley’s famous work The Doors of Perception (Huxley 1954), psychedelics can cleanse the doors of perception by disabling the usual filters that help us to survive, letting in what Huxley called “Mind-at-Large.” In 1957, Wasson’s famous article in Life Magazine on magic mushrooms further strengthened the connection between mystical experiences and psychedelics (Wasson 1957). The mystical experience model, framing psychedelics as a technology of ego dissolution that enables mystical experiences, goes back to William James’s chapter on mystical experiences in The Varieties of Religious Experience (James 1902) and was further systematized by Walter Stace (1960).

Throughout the Sixties, psychedelic mysticism flourished. Timothy Leary and his colleagues interpreted the psychedelic experience according to the various Eastern wisdom traditions: Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism (Leary et al. 1962). Alan Watts (1962) published on psychedelics and Daoism. Walter Pahnke conducted his Good Friday experiment at Harvard Divinity School. Theology students received a dose of psilocybin while upstairs a Good Friday service was going on. Nearly all of them reported a mystical experience (Pahnke 1963). The outcomes of Pahnke’s experiment have been replicated various times (Doblin 1991; Griffiths et al. 2006, 2008).

After the War on Drugs commenced in the 1970s, psychedelic studies came to a virtual standstill. The studies by Roland Griffiths and his colleagues (Griffiths et al. 2006, 2008), showing (yet again) that psychedelics could bring about mystical experiences, initiated a psychedelic renaissance that continues to this day. The mystical experience model received apparent neurobiological validation when Carhart-Harris identified neurological correlates of ego dissolution through fMRI brain imaging. However, it has been criticized recently for various reasons:

(1)

Secular critics consider the mystical experience model too religious and dislike the term “mysticism.” This has led to “mysticism wars” in recent years between critics and defenders of the mystical experience model (see Letheby et al. 2024). However, both secular and nonsecular interpretations agree that “mystical experiences” occur to an individual who reports ego loss and a sense of union with a larger reality (see van der Braak 2025b).

(2)

Cavallarin (2025) has argued that the mystical experience model contains strong normative assumptions about what counts as a true mystical experience: those ineffable experiences that reflect the nondual monism of Plotinus and Advaita Vedanta. By implicitly treating such mystical experiences as normative, it marginalizes other embodied, symbolic and relational psychedelic experiences such as shamanic soul flight to alternative realities and encounters with animals, spirits or ancestors. In ayahuasca ceremonies, for instance, participants often report interacting with invisible beings in ways that they understand as real, relational events.

(3)

van der Braak (2025b) has argued that the mystical experience model (at least in its nonsecular interpretations) takes for granted the existence of a universal, transcendent, ineffable, formless spiritual reality “out there,” simply waiting to be discovered by humans. It perpetuates a Cartesian distinction between an inner “subjective” experience and an external “objective” reality, whereas this distinction between subjective and objective is exactly what falls away in the psychedelic experience; It also takes for granted that “ego dissolution” is a crucial precondition for the experience of divine union with such a formless spiritual reality.

Van der Braak proposes an alternative participatory framework based on the work of the Spanish transpersonal psychologist Jorge Ferrer and Bruno Latour. Mystical experiences could be redescribed as co-constructed spiritual events in which set and setting play a large role, rather than as inner experiences that occur to an individual (Ferrer 2002). Similar to what will be proposed in this article, psychedelics could be redescribed in Latourian terms as a particular type of technology providing access to Actor–Network that includes a particular religious-type of actors that Latour calls “beings of religion” (Latour 2013; see also van der Braak 2025a).

(4)

The American philosopher of education David Blacker has argued that by only focusing on the correlation between mystical experiences and long-term wellness, psychedelic studies ignore the contribution of long-term deeper learning processes that often include set and setting. He notes that, even though an enormous amount of psychedelic trip reports has become available in recent decades, it is very questionable whether this wide variety of non-ordinary experiences, including mystical experiences, has actually resulted in much learning.2 Such experiences in and of themselves do not guarantee deeper learning experiences and lasting personal transformation. As Blacker puts it, states are not traits. The endless fireworks of psychedelic revelations do not necessarily result in change, learning or transformation. Through its one-sided emphasis on the capacity of psychedelics to bring about individual mystical experiences (whether defined in Cartesian terms or in more participatory terms), the mystical experience model ignores the potential for psychedelics to set in motion such deeper learning processes.

(5)

To these four types of criticism, this article wants to add a fifth one: the mystical experience model assumes that the purpose of psychedelic spirituality is to facilitate a unitive mystical experience. In this way, it ignores the well-documented fact that in the ritual and ceremonial use of psychedelics, shared intentionality and practices of sacred participation are more important than the induction of individual mystical experiences.

By privileging a Plotinian view on the nature and purpose of psychedelic spirituality, the mystical experience model neglects the ritual learning processes, leading to both individual and collective transformation, that are an essential part of psychedelic spirituality. This article wants to “push the door open” for the academic study of such ritual learning processes involved in psychedelic spirituality beyond mystical experiences.

3. Deeper Learning with Psychedelics

The first step in going beyond the mystical experience model is to acknowledge the importance of deeper psychedelic learning processes. Blacker (2024) presents an excellent framework for psychedelic learning consisting of four categories:

• Psychedelics tend to bring about epistemic loosening: a Socratic dishevelment of unexamined assumptions about the nature of reality. This leads to what has been called “ontological shock”: one’s ontological assumptions about a stable, external reality that is simply “there”, are thrown into question. Our “consensus reality” is revealed to be a contingent construction. While for some people this can be a terrifying experience, and others might respond to it with indifference, Blacker argues, such epistemic loosening can lead to learning when it is met with a Socratic “readiness to learn.”
• Such epistemic loosening is often followed by a process of hypertrophic identification, where “the destabilized subject is impelled toward an identification with some entity perceived as larger and more durable than the melting ego” (Blacker 2024, p. 52). It is this hypertrophic identification that often brings the subject to report a mystical experience.
• However, Blacker warns that these processes always take place in the context of set and setting. He extends these concepts into the notion of psychedelic envelopment: “the range of sociocultural and ideational frameworks of belief where the compounds are actually administered and interpreted.” (Blacker 2024, p. 52). He distinguishes four psychedelic envelopments: the medical or therapeutic (with the explicit goal of healing individuals), the entheogenic (including shamanic and theological), the intellectual (which is quantitatively much smaller but tends to have an outsized cultural influence), and the recreational informal (which, he suggests, is perhaps the absence of any envelopment).
• Depending on the type of psychedelic envelopment that is present in the person, psychedelic learning can lead to doxastic enhancement: an enlivening and extension of the person’s existing worldview. Blacker suggests that, when properly supported by ritual and ceremonial settings, psychedelics might have a culturally integrative and stabilizing effect, rather than the countercultural “tune in and drop out” effects that were proclaimed by Leary and his associates in the Sixties (Blacker 2024, p. 54). However, he emphasizes that such psychedelic learning processes require the active participation of the person and cannot be assumed.3

Although Blacker’s model of deeper learning is very useful for going beyond the one-sided emphasis on mystical experiences, it still suffers from various limitations. It privileges cognitive learning processes such as doxastic enhancement, leaving out of the picture the embodied and symbolic learning processes that are involved in the ritual and ceremonial use of psychedelics. Just like the mystical experience model, it considers psychedelics as merely a form of technology, a cognitive tool. Through epistemic loosening they can ultimately lead to doxastic enhancement.

However, many users of psychedelics, especially those who use psychedelics in a ritual or ceremonial context, report encountering some kind of intelligence that guides them on their psychedelic journeys. Their experience with psychedelics is dialogical and relational. They report encountering all kinds of nonempirical entities (spirits, fairies, aliens, ancestors) and having meaningful dialogues with such entities. And, most importantly, they report being taught by those beings and intelligences. Blacker’s model for deeper psychedelic learning does not do justice to such emic trip reports.

4. Entheogenic Shamanism and Ritual Learning

In 1979, a group of ethnobotanists and mythology researchers proposed the term ‘entheogen’ for the ritual and ceremonial use of psychoactive substances, especially in a shamanic context (Ruck et al. 1979). Around this new term, a new discourse of entheogenic shamanism arose.4 In this discourse, entheogens are considered “archaic techniques of ecstasy” to use the term that religion scholar Mircea Eliade ([1951] 1972) used to refer to shamanic technologies of altered states of consciousness that enabled soul flight to parallel realities. The term ‘ecstasy’ comes from the Greek term ekstasis, which means “standing outside the self”. Although it is used to describe a similar phenomenon as the more clinical sounding term “ego dissolution”, it has very different connotations. Standing outside the self, one is ready to undertake spiritual journeys to alternative realities. The focus is not on mystical union but on visionary experiences and encounters with entities.

The discourse of entheogenic shamanism is a step in the right direction; however, this Western counter-cultural discourse is still marred by remnants of perennialism and colonialism.5 It still privileges individual experience over ritual transformation. In shamanic cultures, however, it is not the psychedelic experience that is most important, but the result of the collectively performed ritual.

As the American anthropologist Manvir Singh demonstrates, psychedelics such as mushrooms and ayahuasca are used in Western neoshamanic ceremonies for very different purposes than in traditional shamanistic settings (Singh 2025). The traditional shaman serves as a ritual specialist who uses entheogens to solve problems or answer questions for his clients or protect them from sorcery. In neoshamanic ceremonies, the client uses entheogens to achieve an altered state of consciousness for inner exploration and psychological healing under the neoshaman’s supervision. They do psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

Anthropologist Alexandra Sheren stresses the importance of ritual learning processes in the shamanic use of ayahuasca.6 I define ritual learning as a special kind of learning that can take place during rituals, in which experience is rapidly reorganized under special conditions, resulting in long-term changes in cognition, emotion and meaning making. She divides the altered state of consciousness brought about by ayahuasca into two phases. The first phase roughly corresponds to the process of ego dissolution and epistemic loosening: “You cross into a domain where the emptiness behind all phenomena becomes clear. For the first time, you see how your mind has always navigated holographic projections, not the essence of things.” (Sheren 2025). The second phase is “centering and entering the spirit world. However, this second phase does not come to everyone, especially not to newcomers. It takes skill to reach it.” (Sheren 2025).

A prerequisite for developing such skill is the healing that can take place as a result of “straightening—bringing all structures within the patient’s universe into a state of coherent alignment.” (Sheren 2025). In the entheogenic ceremony, “in the deepest recesses of our psyche, the curandero illuminates any fractures in our wholeness and offers the chance to feel, fully and in detail, all that our body and memory had kept hidden from us. Once this core structure is brought into balance, we gain access to more complex levels of consciousness.” (Sheren 2025). When such straightening has occurred, the nature of the mind shifts, and it itself becomes an agent of healing.

Such a process of straightening and centering is the essence of ceremonial work, Sheren argues. The visions, messages and spirit encounters are secondary. Also, “without the necessary skill of centering oneself, any visions or information received during ceremony are likely to be useless, chaotic, or untrue.” (Sheren 2025). Sheren would agree with Blacker that such extraordinary experiences would amount to sound and fury signifying very little in the end. Therefore, not only cognitive learning processes, but especially ritual learning processes are crucial to the psychedelic process. We need a framework that can accommodate such ritual learning processes. Section five will present such a framework: the ancient, but almost forgotten, framework of theurgy.

5. A Theurgic Framework

The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (200–270) considered the material world to be an emanation from a higher spiritual reality.7 The human soul has descended into this material world where it is currently trapped in a human body. However, through philosophical contemplation it becomes possible for the soul to escape its material confinement and engage in a spiritual ascent that will ultimately result in a divine union (Plotinus 1966–1988).8 This Plotinian metaphysical system, as defended by this pupil Porphyry (234–305), was challenged by the Syrian Neoplatonic philosopher and priest Iamblichus (245–325).

According to Iamblichus, the material cosmos is not a hostile and alienating prison but a beautiful and harmonious place. And the soul is not a divine spark that is trapped in a human body, but an embodied divinity that participates in the divine cosmos (Iamblichus 2003; Shaw 1995, 2024). It does not need to ascend towards mystical union with the One, but it needs to learn to communicate with the gods and become their companion. This becomes possible through theurgic rituals.

The term “theurgy” was first introduced in the second century in the Chaldean Oracles: revelatory texts and esoteric practices that were said to go back to ancient Egyptian spirituality. Iamblichus defends theurgy as the highest form of spiritual practice because it acknowledges the soul’s embeddedness in a cosmos infused with divine power. Rather than seeking to escape or transcend the material world, theurgy teaches the practitioner to resonate more fully with it (Iamblichus 2003).

Iamblichus disagrees with Plotinus that the practice of philosophical contemplation alone can effect spiritual transformation. For him, only divine symbols, sunthēmata, which are received through ritual and tradition, can realign the soul with the cosmos. Through ritual enactment involving these symbols, the practitioner enters into an active relationship with divine powers, not as mere objects of belief, but as living, active presences (Iamblichus 2003).

The way to salvation is not through transcending this material world, but through becoming fully aligned with it, and learning to fully participate in it. This is because the divine is not separate from the material world: it permeates it through the sunthēmata. Through theurgic ritual it becomes possible for the soul to learn to more fully resonate with these sunthēmata. In this way, the soul recovers its divine embodiment. It starts to be able again to hear the messages from the gods. It learns to communicate with the divine forces that permeate reality. And ultimately, it learns to work together with such divine forces and become their companion.

The goal of the spiritual path, according to Iamblichus, is to become a co-worker in the ongoing co-construction of the cosmos. The point is not to escape the material world by transcending it into mystical union, but to more fully embrace the world and become complicit in its ongoing healing.

At first sight, the Iamblichan framework of theurgy might seem limited in its usefulness for understanding psychedelic spirituality, because it seems tied to a Neoplatonic metaphysics. It seems to require us to believe in the existence of gods and other divine beings that mediate the sacred.9 Such beliefs seem out of place today. However, there is a way to understand the theurgic framework in a postmodern context by updating it with the thought of Bruno Latour.

Latour’s philosophy is deeply anti-metaphysical. There is no way the world “really is.” Reality, for Latour, could best be approached as an ongoing and ever-changing plurality of construction projects, consisting of different human and nonhuman actors that maintain mutual connections and entanglements that he calls actor–networks (Latour 2007). Such actor–networks can give rise to different modes of existence. The material world with its stable and independently existing objects such as tables and chairs is just one of these modes. There are also legal, esthetic, moral, and other modes of existence. Each of these modes is characterized by its own type of beings that exist in that specific mode (Latour 2013).

For our purposes, the religious mode of existence is of most interest. For Latour, religion is not about belief in transcendent realities but about reprise: the continuous rearticulation of the sacred through religious-type actor–networks. Spiritual practice is about maintaining a connection with divine presence. The goal of such spiritual practice is to transform the self through mediated encounters with divine presence, which Latour conceptualizes as “beings of religion”: beings whose way of existing is specific to the religious mode of existence (Latour 2013).

Beings of religion exist, in a relational and contextual way, within the actor–networks that make their appearance possible. Their way of existing is participatory. They are both constructed and real: constructed by the actor–networks that make their appearance possible, real within those actor–networks as long as these sustain them. They disappear when these actor–networks dissolve.

In On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Latour (2010) coined the term factish, a contraction of the terms ‘fact’ and ‘fetish.’ The term ‘fetish’ refers to an object that is incorrectly believed to have inherent spiritual power, such as a statue that houses a god or spirit. The term ‘factish’ challenges the binary between “real” facts and “imaginary” fetishes.

Latour argues that beings of religion are such factishes. They exist because they are being collectively re-enacted and reconstructed in rituals and ceremonies, over and over again. Their existence can never be objectively verified, because it depends on their ongoing mediation through religious-type Actor–Networks.

6. Theurgic Ritual Learning with Psychedelics

A Latourian translation of premodern Iamblichan theurgy may help us to better understand reports of psychedelic entity encounter experiences (e.g., Davis et al. 2020). In psychedelic spirituality, Latourian beings of religion emerge through the proper performance of psychedelic rituals. Such rituals are necessary to establish the actor–networks that enable their relational and participatory existence. They show up in different forms in psychedelic phenomenology: as the experience of being “called” by a plant spirit, as receiving a vision, or as encountering autonomous entities.

The appearance of beings of religion depends also on set and setting. A theurgic framework allows us to ask: what mode of existence is being activated for someone in a psychedelic encounter with invisible beings? Depending on set and setting, such a reported encounter could be an esthetic experience, a psychological insight, or a religious transformation.

Approaching psychedelic ceremonies as theurgic rituals also helps to account for the role of ritual learning processes. Psychedelic practitioners have a conscious intention to learn to navigate the actor–networks that allow beings of religion to appear. They aim to develop the ritual competence that is necessary to have beings of religion appear to them.

In a well-performed psychedelic ritual, with ritually competent participants, psychedelics are not instruments for bringing about mystical union. They are mediators of reprise, helping to sustain a mode of relational engagement that includes beings of religion.

They are not so much a technology that can be controlled by humans (although they can be used as such a technology in medical and recreational contexts) but a sacrament with a potential to mediate the sacred. Their role in psychedelic rituals is to enable access to divine beings, who are always the ones that are doing the work, and that are initiating such access.

Van der Braak’s notion of ayahuasca as liquid divinity is illustrative: in the Brazilian Santo Daime church, ayahuasca (which is called Daime) is understood to incarnate a divine being (often identified with Christ) through the consecration ritual (see Barnard 2022). Thus, drinking ayahuasca (or rather, Daime) is not merely a matter of ingesting a pharmacological substance in order to induce a mystical experience, but it means entering into communion with a divine presence in material form (van der Braak 2023, p. 87). As one ayahuasquero puts it, “You are not drinking a plant that allows you to see spirits. You are drinking spirits in a liquid form. Ayahuasca is spirit, millions of spirits, turned into liquid for you to drink.” (van der Braak 2023, p. 87).

According to the theurgic framework, psychedelic spirituality is not about ego dissolution and mystical experiences, but about ritually learning to cultivate and navigate divine engagement: learning to enter into conscious relation with the divine dimensions of reality. And access to those divine dimensions is always through ceremonial mediation, instead of through the unmediated awareness that the mystical experience model stresses.

Such divine engagement necessitates ritual learning with psychedelics. It requires developing discernment skills: it is important to learn to pay attention to which beings of religion are manifesting, how one is being addressed by those beings, and what particular transformation is being invited.

Ritual learning processes take place prior to, during and after ceremonies: prior to the ceremony, they involve cultivating the ability to set a proper intention at ever deeper layers of the psyche and learning how to invoke guidance and protection; during the ceremony, they involve learning to ritually ingest the entheogen, maintain a stable, positive and receptive state of mind and body, and develop discernment skills to properly navigate the particularity and differentiation of the psychedelic effects; after the ceremony, they involve developing various integration skills.

Due to such ritual learning processes, those various skills can vary widely from inexperienced users to experienced practitioners. This also means that it is counterproductive to flatten “the psychedelic experience” into some kind of universal mystical experience. There is a wide variety of psychedelic effects, and those effects are also dependent on the skills of those that ingest them. This is a very different framework than the mystical experience model, which seems to assume near-total passivity in the psychedelic users to which the mystical experiences happen.

For example, Santo Daime ceremonies are not seen as passive experiences for which only receptivity is required, but as demanding “works” or trabalhos that require active participation. Such trabalhos start out with intention-setting and the invocation of protection by guardian beings of religion. The ceremony itself may induce intense catharsis that involves physical purging or emotional release. Such purifications are necessary to be able to discern the presence of beings of religion, learn to properly engage with them, and receive their transmissions, in the form of visions (mirações) that involve encounters with deities, spirits, ancestors or other beings. After the ceremony, the trabalho still continues in the form of various integration practices such as physical self-care, contemplation and meditation.

Psychedelics can indeed cleanse the doors of perception, as Huxley claimed, not only to possibly let in Mind-at-Large but also—and especially—to allow for the cultivation of the capacity for participatory attunement with a reality that is always in the making, due to a continuous process of co-construction. This resonates with Latour’s Actor–Network Theory, that considers reality as an ongoing process of co-construction between various human and nonhuman actors (Latour 2007). Iamblichan theurgy and Latourian actor–networks can be said to be complementary. Whereas Latour’s Actor–Network Theory can help to understand how religious rituals can offer indirect access to religious actor–networks, Iamblichan theurgy can help to explain why religious beings can become manifest in such rituals.

Rather than only being imagined as pharmacological substances that can alter our experience, psychedelics can also be imagined as deeply relational tools that are capable of transforming the way that we resonate with the world, not only cognitively, but also emotionally, esthetically and in embodied ways. Under the right circumstances, psychedelics can serve as world building tools.10

The theurgic framework makes room for exactly those types of psychedelic experiences that the mystical experience model tends to marginalize, such as visionary encounters with intelligent beings. Those are not seen as distractions from an experience of mystical union but are honored as modes of divine revelation. This view resonates with van der Braak’s redescription of Santo Daime rituals, where sacred objects like hymns, perfumes, and the Daime brew itself function as tangible sunthēmata—divine signatures that mediate the sacred (van der Braak 2023, p. 171). Through drinking the Daime, singing hymns, and participating in ritual acts, practitioners receive esoteric transmissions in the form of visions (mirações) that gradually transform the soul and enable it to resonate with the wider cosmos.11

7. Conclusions

This article has argued that the mystical experience model, with its language of ego dissolution and mystical unity, is not so much wrong as it is incomplete. Even though the mystical experience is all about nonseparation, the language of the mystical experience model still implicitly assumes the illusory separation between the individual and a participatory cosmos. In this way, it misses the relational fullness of what is happening in psychedelic processes. However, this does not imply a rejection of mysticism altogether. The close connection between psychedelics and mysticism is still valid. Instead, this article rejects the narrow interpretation of mysticism that is implied in the mystical experience model, which privileges apophatic experience.12

Shifting to a theurgic framework not only allows us to understand the mystical experience better but it also allows for a richer understanding of the transformative potential of psychedelics and their potential to set deeper learning processes in motion. The theurgic framework extends Blacker’s deeper learning model by including ritual learning processes rather than only cognitive forms of learning such as doxastic enhancement.

While a theurgic framework does more justice to the full range of psychedelic experiences, including visionary encounters with beings, cosmological revelations, and moral lessons, it also allows for studying ritual learning processes. It can enable empirical researchers to reframe outcomes research beyond the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, including the observation and measurement of ritual competence in various areas such as intention-setting, protective invocation, in-ceremony attunement, discernment of beings of religion, and integration practices.

The theurgic framework provides not only a new perspective on psychedelics, but also on religion. The divine is not supernatural and transcendent, but fully natural and immanent. It helps restore the sacred to the fabric of this world. Theurgic ritual learning processes facilitate access to the divine, not by transcending the mundane world through a mystical experience but through embodiment and ritual participation. Religion is not about escaping the world, but about becoming more deeply entangled with it, and being willing to fully embrace it.

Learning to work together with the divine is exemplified in the Iamblichan ideal of becoming a “companion of the gods” (sunopados theōn). This also involves personal healing, albeit not as a goal in and of itself but as a necessary precondition for being a good co-worker with the divine for the benefit of others. In Chinese Mahayana Buddhist traditions, this can be found in the bodhisattva ideal, in which the Buddhist meditator vows to liberate all sentient beings (van der Braak 2023, p. 177). Santo Daime practitioners see themselves as co-workers with Christ and other saints and spirits in a mission of global healing (see Barnard 2022; Blainey 2021; van der Braak 2023).

This article recommends that future studies on psychedelics first of all extend their research to the relational and visionary aspects of psychedelic experience. Such a development is already under way, as recent publications attest to (e.g., Barnard 2022; Blainey 2021; van der Braak 2023; Davis et al. 2020; Cavallarin 2025). However, the next step would be to also take seriously the ritual learning processes that these aspects are embedded in. New research tools need to be developed, beyond questionnaires and fMRI, that are able to assess such ritual learning processes.

In a time when psychedelics are increasingly being approached through secular and therapeutic frameworks, it may be good to remind ourselves of the ritual learning processes that they can facilitate. Psychedelics not only have great potential for healing the individual self; as traditional indigenous communities have known for a long time, their greatest power may lie in collective ritual learning processes that re-situate the self within a participatory and inherently meaningful cosmos. A rediscovery of the importance of such ritual learning processes may hopefully serve to encourage psychedelic practitioners and facilitators to design innovative new ritual and ceremonial containers that support the kind of partnership with the sacred that theurgic rituals were historically aimed at.

Such new ritual containers can complement existing recreational or therapeutic contexts, in which psychedelics are treated as merely a medicine for individual healing, or as a catalyst for a mystical experience. They can also remind us that religion is ultimately not about transcending the world but about finding ways to participate in it more fully, faithfully and reverently.