Today, I want to crack open a part of early Christian history that most people never hear about.

A part that would make the modern church clutch its pearls and recite a quick Psalm.

Because the truth is: the earliest Christians weren’t saints… they were outlaws.

For the first 250–300 years, Christians were considered criminals, members of an illegal cult, and a genuine threat to Roman order.

They met in secret, refused to participate in state rituals, and spread like wildfire, only deepening the suspicion surrounding them.

Ironically, these same Christians — whose later successors burned “witches” for using herbs, ointments, and potions — may have begun their movement with something far more psychedelic than communion wafers.

Here’s the part they don’t teach in Sunday school:

Some early Christian mystery groups may have spiked their sacramental wine with psychoactive plants.

According to historians and ethnobotanists, certain early, fringe Christian mystery groups spiked their sacramental wine with psychoactive plants to induce ecstatic states and divine revelations.

These forms of “entheogenic Eucharist” may have included:

• Opium Poppy (Papaver somniferum) - euphoria, pain relief, and dream-like sedation
• Mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) - visions, trance states, aphrodisiac effects, and out-of-body sensations
• Henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) - vivid hallucinations, floating sensations, and altered body awareness
• Belladonna (Atropa belladonna) - visionary delirium, spirit-contact experiences, and profound shifts in perception
• Datura (Datura stramonium / D. metel) - full-spectrum hallucinations, amnesia, and shamanic trance
• Ergotized barley (Claviceps purpurea) - mild LSD-like visuals, euphoria, and spiritual insight
• Cannabis (Cannabis sativa/indica) - heightened sensory perception, euphoria, and introspection

Together, these ingredients could have produced sacramental wines far more visionary and mind-altering than anything resembling today’s communion ritual.

The evidence that early Christians spiked their wine

If we want to understand whether early Christians used psychoactive sacraments, we have to start with one simple fact:

1. In the ancient Mediterranean, wine = a drug. Not a beverage.

The “wine” of antiquity was nothing like the table wine we drink today. It was commonly referred to as a pharmakon, meaning drug, potion, or enchanted substance. [1]

Wine was the universal extraction medium of the ancient world, and it was regularly infused with psychoactive plants that were sedatives, deliriants, hypnotics, narcotics, and even poisons.

So heavily infused that it became intensely intoxicating, visionary, and sometimes dangerous.

We know this because Dioscorides, the most influential pharmacologist of the 1st century AD (the same century the Gospels were written), recorded 56+ recipes for spiked wines in Book V of Materia Medica. [2]

His mixtures included:

• opium
• mandrake
• henbane
• datura
• cannabis
• hellebore
• saffron
• wormwood
• and other botanicals

If this was the standard pharmacopeia of the time, it becomes far less shocking to imagine early Christians doing what everyone else was doing with wine.

2. Ritual Context: Mystery religions all around them used entheogenic brews.

Early Christianity grew up inside a world overflowing with ritual psychedelia.

Across the Mediterranean and Near East, virtually every major mystery tradition used psychoactive sacraments:

• Eleusinian Mysteries → the kykeon (possibly ergotized barley) [3]
• Dionysian rites → ecstatic, wine-based intoxication [4]
• Orphic, Mithraic, Egyptian, and Zoroastrian rituals → herb-infused potions (blue lotus, Peganum harmala, etc.) [5,6]
• Hebrew prophetic traditions → psychoactive incense and anointing oils [7]

Early Christian communities (especially the mystical or Gnostic groups) shared geographic, social, and symbolic overlap with these traditions.

In other words:

They lived in the same pharmacological soup and drank from the same herb-laced wine culture. Syncretism wasn’t just possible... it was inevitable.

3. Archaeological Finds: The plants were definitely present and used ritually.

Even though the institutional Church later tried to purge these practices from history, archaeology keeps uncovering evidence that psychoactive plants were available, common, and used ceremonially during the time of early Christianity.

Examples include:

• Villa Vesuvio (near Pompeii): jars containing grape residue mixed with opium, cannabis, henbane, and nightshade [8]
• Ritual bundles of mandrake, henbane, and other psychoactives found in Mediterranean and Near Eastern temples [9,10]
• Evidence of herbal wines and potions in household shrines across Judea, Syria, and Asia Minor — the exact regions where Christian house-churches met [11]
• Botanical remains of psychoactive plants in burial sites and ritual contexts dating to the 1st century AD [1]

Given this hard data, the exact psychoactive plants associated with entheogenic Eucharist theories were absolutely present in the daily, medicinal, and religious life of the early Christian world.

So what happened?

The earliest Christians weren’t the clean, well-behaved saints we’re taught to imagine. They were outlaws. Mystics, rebels, counter-culture fringe dwellers who gathered in secret and experimented with ecstatic pathways to the divine.

But by the 4th century, everything changed.

Once Christianity was legalized under Constantine and then elevated to the official state religion under Theodosius in 380 CE, the outlaw movement became the empire’s new spiritual authority.

And with institutional power came institutional control:

• Mystical rites became heresy
• Psychoactive sacraments became “witchcraft"
• The plants that may have once fueled early Christian visions were outlawed, suppressed, and demonized
• And the Eucharist standardized into the safe, diluted, non-visionary ritual we know today.

The result? The entheogenic threads woven into the earliest layers of Christian spirituality were cut.

A direct, experiential path to the divine—one rooted in plants, visions, and embodied revelation—was replaced with doctrine, hierarchy, and metaphor.

A revolution of ecstatic experience became a religion of regulation.

Now I want to hear from you:

Do you think early Christians spiked their wine?

And why do you think the Church outlawed psychoactive sacraments once it gained power?

I have my theories… but I’d love to hear yours.

Stay curious,
Onjae