Julie M. Brown M.A.

I am a holistic psychotherapist and health coach, who researches the role of sacred plants in religion. I’d like to briefly share the journey that led my husband Jerry and me to write a book on the controversial theory of the role of psychedelics in Christianity. Most of my prior work has been in the area of health and wellness. In my private practice, I specialized in working with cancer patients. I also served as resource director for the national Baby Teeth Study, which measured children’s teeth for the presence of radioactivity. In 2006, after reading about Rosslyn Chapel in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Jerry and I visited this unique “bible in stone” and made a surprising discovery. There sculpted on the forehead of Rosslyn’s most prominent green was a psychoactive mushroom—which had remained hidden in plain sight for half a millennium. This was the catalyst for our decision to undertake a decade-long anthropological journey, visiting churches and cathedrals throughout Europe and the Middle East, in search of iconic evidence of the presence of entheogens (God-generating-within plants) in Christian art. While our findings are startling, it is not our intention to question people’s faith in Christianity, but to uncover a mystery that we believe applies to many religions. We do not deny the importance of religious sacraments, but suggest that they should encompass all of God’s creations, including psychoactive plants which provide an ancient pathway to the divine. In the concluding chapter, “Psychedelic Renaissance,” we advocate the responsible exploration of entheogens for religious and spiritual purposes as a fundamental right under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.