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Sharday Mosurinjohn escaped what she calls "the nihilistic void" of academia when psychedelics gave her a direct taste of what most religious scholars only theorize about. Now, she's pressure-testing the field’s cherished frameworks and developing new theories of her own.

We asked Sharday what researchers get wrong about "mystical” experiences, why claims about psychedelics in ancient Greek rituals deserve scrutiny, and how her "psychedelic theodicy" can help people handle terrifying encounters in altered states.

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What first drew you to studying psychedelics and religious experience?

It was a lifetime spent in what I came to call "the void"—not the Buddhist luminous void, but a terrifying, nihilistic, metaphysical void that I now recognize as dissociation. I was very interested in how other people made meaning, and initially I got into religious studies almost to "dunk on” religious people because I was jealous they had something I wanted but couldn't admit I wanted.

I pursued a critical religion perspective that reduced everything to discourse. No experience, just discourse. We can only live in the intellect. That was my terrified commitment at the time. But gradually, I started to approach religious experience differently, combining cultural, neurological, and metaphysical explanations.

While researching my first book about the problem of meaning as a spiritual crisis, I came across Paul Stamets's TED talk where he discussed how mushrooms have intelligence, language, and connectivity. I thought, "here's another model for a different kind of mind that feels meaningful." I grew up straight edge, so psychedelics seemed utterly foreign to me. But once I had job security and tenure, I found myself saying "psychedelics" when asked what I'd study next. I threw myself into the psychedelic world during sabbatical and found welcoming communities where I could experience ways of seeing the world that weren't just nihilistic voids.

What do you think other researchers are missing when they frame psychedelic experiences as "mystical"?

I don't want to denigrate the concept of mysticism per se. I actually find it a useful shorthand. What I want to critique is how it's been operationalized in psychedelic literature, which has fallen prey to shaky historical and cultural foundations.

The issue is with the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), which has become central in the research on psychedelics’ therapeutic benefit. It's anchored in Walter Stace's work, who took the global literature on mysticism and narrowed it down to about 11 case examples across all time and space, then abstracted certain qualities. Walter Pahnke used that for his Good Friday experiment and created an instrument where if people met a certain percentage of these features, they could be said to have had a "mystical experience."

But what does it mean to have "60% of a mystical experience"? Or that at 40% you haven't had a mystical experience, but at 60% you qualify? In the mystic literature that Stace draws on, the saints and seers don’t talk in terms of being two-thirds a mystic or perceiving things as 50% sacred. The qualities Stace identified are also totally removed from their traditions.

What these experiences actually mean depends entirely on how different traditions model the metaphysical parameters. Is "unity with everything" understood as ego loss, or is it a sense of distinct identity with deep interconnection? How does that type of unity function for what purpose? Taking these qualities out of the traditions in which they were specified and creating an abstract amalgamation makes them less meaningful as a guide for practice.

You’ve also been challenging Brian Muraresku's claims about psychedelics in the Eleusinian Mysteries. What's the real story there, and why does it matter?

When I pivoted my research to psychedelics, people kept telling me about The Immortality Key and The Road to Eleusis, saying the ancient mysteries were psychedelic. But when I consulted colleagues in biblical studies, classics, and those who studied the ancient Near East and mystery cults, none of them took this claim seriously.

I was curious why scholars weren't responding to these claims that were being repeated on the first slide of every psychedelic science presentation. The answer was basically, "Why would we give this the time of day? It's so clearly bunk." There was a disconnect between the academic and popular discourses developing in isolation, with humanities scholars who could fact-check these stories not bothering to engage.

What I found after diving into all the published evidence is that there are sufficient non-psychedelic explanations for how the Eleusinian Mysteries would have provided transformative death-rebirth experiences. Wouter Hanegraaff’s excellent research explains how dark spaces, incense, mirrors, light, and various ritual preparations like fasting can put people into deep entrainment and altered states. Substances (pharmaka), too! But there’s no conclusive evidence for psychedelics in the Eleusinian case.

A key issue with the ergot theory is that ergot is extremely poisonous. If the kykeon was accidentally impregnated by ergotized barley, you couldn't possibly know the concentration of alkaloids, and there should be a historical record of many deaths. If it was deliberate, it's still difficult to imagine how people would have determined the right concentration to avoid causing ergotism.

Plus, historical reports of ergot trips suggest they tend to be chaotic and disturbing, making it even less feasible to coordinate the trips of a thousand initiates at a time. The desire to keep this hypothesis alive seems like motivated reasoning rather than an objective assessment of the evidence.

You've written about developing a "psychedelic theodicy" for bad trips. What does that mean, and how might it help people make sense of challenging experiences?

After having threshold experiences of direct "gnosis" that the fundamental waveform of the universe might be best described in human terms as love (gratitude to Jim Fadiman for this phrase), I was still left with metaphysical questions about suffering. How do we account for the apparent presence of evil and pain?

In what might be called a "bad trip," people sometimes encounter energy, forces, or beings that feel sinister, malevolent, or evil. Others describe having a noetic sense that reality is nihilistic. What is that when psychedelics don't open us to love and light, but instead seem to reveal hostility?

I've come to see this in two primary ways. First, I think our ontology is musical. It's about rhythm, vibration, attunement, harmony, and dissonance. When I started piano lessons, I was terrible at first. My sour notes weren't from malice but from non-adaptation. The instrument of my body and the piano weren't mutually attuned. But as I practiced, I developed sensitivity.

Some negative experiences are innocent mistakes. We're "new here" and still developing skill. Also, if I sang middle C for an hour straight, would you want to listen to that album? Good music has tension and dissonance that resolves. Friction is part of the harmonic structure that moves things through time.

The second perspective involves predator and prey. A hawk devouring a bunny in front of its family might be a tragedy for the bunnies but a win for the hawk. These are the game conditions. Also, certain beings or environments aren't mutually adapted for one another. If you take a psychedelic and encounter something frightening, it might simply be that you're so far out of each other's frames of reference that it appears threatening, but it might be totally impersonal—and from a wider perspective, part of a picture whose elements are still meaningfully interrelated.

For people who consider themselves spiritual or religious, how do you think psychedelics might enhance or complicate their connection to the divine?

When I spoke at a recent Harvard Law symposium on psychedelics and monotheistic traditions, I was pleased to see how people were using their religious and spiritual traditions for technologies of discernment, guiding practice, and creating enabling constraints on psychedelic practice. It wasn't about adding psychedelics to congregations, but about deep practitioners recognizing that their traditions offer techniques that create containers for psychedelic experiences, with the psychedelics serving as potentiators.

So psychedelics can be a shortcut, and I mean that in a totally non-judgmental way. For people who have a practice, skillful use of psychedelics can provide a quick and reliable path to achieve certain attunements, where they can do spiritual work before the chemical is metabolized. And just because they don’t have to fast for a week to get there doesn't mean they won't ever choose to. But psychedelics make it possible on a Tuesday night.

This approach works best when it's part of a constant way of life. No matter what state you're in, you're in your practice; you're in the larger purpose of the practices you would call spiritual or psyche-delic, in the sense of soul-revealing. Without those established practices and frameworks, it's hard to know what to take forward, how to track evolution, or what these new capacities are furnishing.

Want more from Sharday?

Read her essay on Psychedelic Theodicy in Harvard’s conference anthology.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.