Pahnke’s “Good Friday Experiment”: A Long-Term Follow-Up and Methodological Critique

The Long-Term Follow-Up Interviews: General Overview

This long-term follow-up was conducted roughly a quarter century after the subjects participated in the original experiment. All subjects contacted live in the United States, with five out of the eight psilocybin subjects and five out of the ten placebo subjects currently working as ministers. Other professions represented are stockbroker, lawyer, community developer, social worker, administrative assistant and educator. Except for one of the psilocybin subjects, all are currently married. All are working and self-supporting. All but two welcomed the opportunity to discuss their participation in the Good Friday experiment.

Each of the psilocybin subjects had vivid memories of portions of their Good Friday experience. For most this was their life’s only psychedelic experience, in part because there have been no legal opportunities for such experiences for the last twenty-five years in the United States (or in any of the roughly 90 countries who are party to the international drug control treaties coordinated by the United Nation’s World Health Organization). The experimental subjects unanimously described their Good Friday psilocybin experience as having had elements of a genuinely mystical nature and characterized it as one of the highpoints of their spiritual life. Some subjects reported that the content of their experience was specifically involved with the life of Christ and related directly to the Christian message while others had experiences of a more universal, non-specific nature. Most of the control subjects could barely remember even a few details of the service.

Most of the psilocybin subjects had subsequent experiences of a mystical nature with which they were able to compare and to contrast to their psilocybin experience. These subsequent experiences occurred either in dreams, in prayer life, in nature or with other psychedelics and seemed to the psilocybin subjects to be of the same essential nature as their Good Friday experience. Significant differences between their non-drug and drug mystical experiences were noted, with the drug experiences reportedly both more intense and composed of a wider emotional range than the non-drug experiences. The non-drug experiences were composed primarily of peaceful, beautiful moments experienced with ease while the drug experiences tended to include moments of great fear, agony and self-doubt.

The discussion of Subject T.B. about the relationship between his psilocybin and his other mystical experiences illustrates how the subjects saw the validity of their psilocybin experiences.

I can think of no experiences [like the Good Friday experience] quite of that magnitude. That was the last of the great four in my life. The dream state … I had no control over when it was coming. It was when I [was about nine and] had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever, apparently at either similar or at the same times. And they thought that I was going to die. And I saw a light coming out of the sky, this is in the dream, and it came toward me and it was like the figure of Christ and I said, “No, let me live and I’ll serve you.” And I’m alive and I’ve served. The prayer state when I was in seventh grade was very similar in the way it happened to me. I intentionally went for an experience with God. In seventh grade. And I also went for an experience with God at the Good Friday experience. And those were similar. The West Point experience was different. In that yes, it was prayers, it was on my knees, it was there, but the face of Christ was … it happened more to me than me participating in it. It was more like a saving experience kind of thing. So I’ve had that and can talk about “a salvation experience,” a born again experience, it was that kind of dedication.

Each of the psilocybin subjects felt that the experience had significantly affected his life in a positive way and expressed appreciation for having participated in the experiment. Most of the effects discussed in the long-term follow-up interviews centered around enhanced appreciation of life and of nature, deepened sense of joy, deepened commitment to the Christian ministry or to whatever other vocations the subjects chose, enhanced appreciation of unusual experiences and emotions, increased tolerance of other religious systems, deepened equanimity in the face of difficult life crises, and greater solidarity and identification with foreign peoples, minorities, women and nature. Subject K.B.’s description of the long-term effects is representative. He remarks:

It left me with a completely unquestioned certainty that there is an environment bigger than the one I’m conscious of. I have my own interpretation of what that is, but it went from a theoretical proposition to an experiential one. In one sense it didn’t change anything, I didn’t discover something I hadn’t dreamed of, but what I had thought on the basis of reading and teaching was there. I knew it. Somehow it was much more real to me…. I expect things from meditation and prayer and so forth that I might have been a bit more skeptical about before. I have gotten help with problems, and at times I think direction and guidance in problem solving. Somehow my life has been different knowing that there is something out there…. What I saw wasn’t anything entirely surprising and yet there was a powerful impact from having seen it.

In addition to self-reports, several subjects who had stayed in contact with each other over the years spoke about the effects they noticed in each other. In the instances where such information was obtained, the observations of fellow subjects were similar to the self-reports and confirmed claims of beneficial effects.

Several of the psilocybin subjects discussed their deepened involvement in the politics of the day as one result of their Good Friday experience. Feelings of unity led many of the subjects to identify with and feel compassion for minorities, women and the environment. The feelings of timelessness and eternity reduced their fear of death and empowered the subjects to take more risks in their lives and to participate more fully in political struggles.

Subject T.B. discussed how his perception of death during the Good Friday experience affected his work in the political field. He remarked:

When you get a clear vision of what [death] is and have sort of been there, and have left the self, left the body, you know, self leaving the body, or soul leaving the body, or whatever you want to call it, you would also know that marching in the Civil Rights Movement or against the Vietnam War in Washington [is less fearful]…. In a sense [it takes away the fear of dying] … because you’ve already been there. You know what it’s about. When people approaching death have an out-of-body experience … [you] say, “I know what you’re talking about. I’ve been there. Been there and come back. And it’s not terrifying, it doesn’t hurt.”

Subject S.J. found that his Good Friday experience of unity supported his efforts in the political field.

I got very involved with civil rights after that [his psychedelic experience] and spent some time in the South. I remember this unity business, I thought there was some link there. There could have been. People certainly don’t write about it. They write about it the opposite way, that drugs are an escape from social obligations. That is the popular view….

Only one of the control subjects felt that his experience of the Good Friday service resulted in beneficial personal growth. That particular control subject thought he was probably the one in the original experiment reported to have had a partial mystical experience. Ironically, he felt that the most important benefit he received from the service was the decision to try psychedelics at the earliest opportunity. The Good Friday service had that same effect on one other placebo subject, who also had a subsequent psychedelic experience.

The actual experiences of the original psilocybin subjects are best communicated by quoting from the transcripts of the long-term follow-up interviews. Reverend S.J. had an experience almost uniformly positive. He describes his experience as follows:

Something extraordinary had taken place which had never taken place before. All of a sudden I felt sort of drawn out into infinity, and all of a sudden I had lost touch with my mind. I felt that I was caught up in the vastness of Creation … huge, as the mystics say. I did experience that kind of classic kind of blending. Sometimes you would look up and see the light on the altar and it would just be a blinding sort of light and radiation. The main thing about it was a sense of timelessness.

The meditation was going on all during this time, and he [Rev. Howard Thurman] would say things about Jesus and you would have this overwhelming feeling of Jesus…. It was like you totally penetrated what was being said and it penetrated you. Death looked different. It became in focus…. I got the impression, the sensation … that what people are essentially in their essence that somehow they would continue to live. They may die in one sense, the physical sense, but their being in heaven would survive….

We took such an infinitesimal amount of psilocybin, and yet it connected me to infinity.

Subject L.J. confronted the issue of personal mortality, which he described as follows:

I was on the floor underneath the chapel pew and he [a group leader] was looking after me and sort of aware of, you know, “L.J. is down there, is everything all right?” I was hearing my uncle who had died [several months before], the one who was a minister, saying, “I want you to die, I want you to die, I want you to die” I could hear his voice saying. The more that I let go and sort of died, the more I felt this eternal life, saying to myself under my breath perhaps, “it has always been this way, it has always been this way. O, isn’t it wonderful, there’s nothing to fear, this is what it means to die, or to taste of eternal life….” And the more I died the more I appropriated this sense of eternal life. While the service went on I was caught up in this experience of eternal life and appreciating what the peyote Indians or the sacred mushroom Indians experienced with their imbibing of the drug. Just in that one session I think I gained experience I didn’t have before and probably could never have gotten from a hundred hours of reading or a thousand hours of reading.

I would have to say as far as I’m concerned it was a positive, mystical experience … confirmed by experiences both before and after.

Reverend L.R. had one of the most difficult experiences of all the psilocybin subjects. He described the early portion of his experience as follows:

Shortly after receiving the capsule, all of a sudden I just wanted to laugh. I began to go into a very strong paranoid experience. And I found it to be scary. The chapel was dark and I hated it in there, just absolutely hated it in there. And I got up and left. I walked down the corridor and there was a guard, a person stationed at the door so individuals wouldn’t go out, and he says, “Don’t go outside,” and I said, “Oh no, I won’t. I’ll just look outdoors.” And I went to the door and out I went. They sent [a group leader] out after me. We [L.R. and the group leader] went back into the building and again, I hated to be in that building and being confined because there were bars on the window and I felt literally like I was in prison. One of the things that was probably happening to me was a reluctance to just flow. I tried to resist that and as soon as resistance sets in there’s likely to be conflict and there’s likely, I think, for there to be anxiety.

In addition to his emotional struggles, Reverend L.R. discusses the mystical aspect of his experience as follows:

The inner awareness and feelings I had during the drug experience were the dropping away of the external world and those relationships and then the sudden sense of singleness, oneness. And the rest of normal waking consciousness is really … illusion. It’s not real and somehow that inner core experience of oneness is more real and more authentic than normal consciousness. I was also experiencing some of those same kind of states that produced anxiety, and I wanted to try to get at the bottom of it.

I personally feel that the experience itself was, and I know his [Pahnke’s] research came to the conclusion, that the effect of the chemicals like that is very similar, parallel to, perhaps the same as a classical mystical experience….

Reverend Y.M. describes his experience, which also had some difficult moments, as follows:

I closed my eyes and the visuals were back, the color patterns were back, and it was as if I was in an ocean of bands, streams of color, streaming past me. The colors were brilliant and I could swim down any one of those colors. Then that swirl dissolved itself into a radial pattern, a center margin radial pattern with the colors going out from the center. I was at the center and I could swim out any one of those colors and it would be a whole different life’s experience. I could swim out any one of them that I wanted. I mean I could swim metaphorically. There wasn’t the sense that I could actually paddle. I could choose any one I wanted, but I had to choose one.

I couldn’t decide which one to go out, and eventually it connects to the decision I was in the midst of making about career choices … when I couldn’t decide, I died. Very existential … for a brief moment there, I was physically dying. My insides were literally being scooped out, and it was very painful. … I said to myself … that nobody should have to go through this … it was excruciating to die like that. Very painful. And I died….

After the psilocybin experience, I never consciously made the choice as to what I was going to do career-wise, but the choice was made. It was made while I was on the psilocybin. But it never had to be consciously, intentionally, “Ah, let’s see, what I am going to do is….” It was made, and I was confident of it, it was going to be. And I did it afterwards….

Reverend K.B. describes his mystical experience in the following manner:

I feel almost whatever I say about it … is a little bit artificial in terms of describing. What it is is something deeper and probably also more obvious and I think I endeavor to put it into some kind of category which may obscure the point in some way. I remember feeling at the time that I was very unusually incapable of describing it. Words are a familiar environment for me and I usually can think of them, but I didn’t find any for this. And I haven’t yet.

I closed my eyes, either thinking of meditating or maybe I was drowsy or something. I closed my eyes and it seemed to be darker than usual. And then there was a sudden bolt of light which I think was entirely internal and a feeling almost like a shock or something and that was only for an instant. It wasn’t violent but it was a definite tingling like taking hold of a wire or something.

I closed my eyes and … thought that this would be a fine time for [meditating on the Passion]. So I did think about the procession to the cross. And with my eyes closed I had an unusually vivid scene of the procession going by. A scene quite apart from any imagining or anything on my part. A self-actualizing thing; kind of like watching a movie or something. It was apart from me but very vivid. I had a definite sense of being an infant or being born, or something like that. I had a sense of death, too, but I think actually the sense of death came after the sense of birth…. I had my hands on my legs and there wasn’t any flesh, there were bare bones, resting on my bones. That part wasn’t frightening, I was just kind of amazed. I think I must have gone along through the life of Christ identifying in a very total sort of way; reliving the life in some way until finally dying and going into the tomb.

I really am glad I took it. And glad that I was a subject. I don’t think it would be a particularly memorable experience if I just had listened to the service. I’ve heard some good services and I imagine this was as moving as most. But I think it would be in that category instead of a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing….

I’ve remained convinced that my ability to perceive things was artificially changed, but the perceptions I had were real as anything else.

Subject T.B. was very comfortable with the effects of the psilocybin, perhaps because he had had mystical experiences prior to the experiment. He describes his experience in the following way:

I was kneeling there praying and beginning to feel like I was experiencing the kind of prayer life that I experienced back when I was in the seventh grade, eleven or twelve years old. It was the kind of experiences that you knew that something great was happening. I started to go to the root of all being. And discovered that … you never quite get there. That was my discovery during that time … it’s a philosophy and a theology that I hold yet today. You can approach the fullness of all being in either prayer, or in the psilocybin experience. You can reach out, but you can’t dive down … and hit that root.

The discovery within that experience is that you could approach God by two different ways. You either get to the root, the ground of all being, or the fullness of all being. And in getting to the root, you’ll strive, you’ll come closer and closer, but it’s always half, and you’ll think another half step, another half step, and you’ll never quite get there. The fullness, to approach the fullness of God is the only way to approach God.

Subject H.R. tells of his largely positive experience in the following way:

It was a feeling of being … lifted out of your present state. I just stopped worrying about time and all that kind of stuff … there was one universal man, personhood, whatever you want to call it … a lot of connectedness with everybody and every thing. I don’t think Christ or other religious images that I can remember came into it. That’s the only reason I didn’t think it was religious. I don’t remember any religious images….

I was convinced after the experiment that I had had quite an experience but that it was really into my psychological depths, and it was not a religious experience…. It was really the sense that I was discovering the depths of my own self. It did not have a sacredness kind of element to it. I didn’t think I had experienced a God that was particularly outside of me. What I experienced was a God that was inside of me. And I think that made me say, I don’t think this is religious, I think this is psychological. But that was because of the way I was defining being … the way I thought God was being defined by other people at that point.

After the Good Friday experiment, two out of the ten placebo subjects experienced psychedelics. Placebo subject P.J. describes his first psychedelic experience, which took place in a chapel with psilocybin subject L.R. as his guide, as follows:

I laid on the front pew and watched myself; it seemed like eternity; pour through my navel and totally become nothing. And I felt that this would never stop. It seemed like an eternity of being in heaven and everything. One of the most beautiful experiences in my entire life.

It sure kicks the hell out of one being rigid with what could go on and what kind of experiences you could have. To take one of these drugs says a lot more can happen than what’s been happening in your total experience. And I think that’s good, and that’s why I would want my kids to take it.

Placebo subject L.G. received psilocybin in a hospital as a part of a subsequent experiment conducted by Pahnke (1966) in a fruitless search for a placebo substance which would permit a successful double-blind experiment. L.G. describes his experience as follows:

It was rather removed from the religious context. Certainly the environment we were in had no particular religious symbols. I recall they really stressed [the need to] be absolutely open and just relax and flow with the experience whatever comes. So, there was no context really to suggest a particular experience like there might have been with the Good Friday experiment. We didn’t talk about mysticism, as I recall, or religious symbols….

At one point I kind of felt like, “Well, maybe this is what it is like to be crazy.” I never really panicked but I was acutely aware of anxiety…. As time evolved I just had this incredible sense of joy and humor, too. I was laughing, real ecstasy…. The thing that struck me was how anybody could worry or not trust, that just struck me as an absurdity. It was very exciting.

There was an energy, it was almost a sexual thing, an intensity and a joy. The visual things that I experienced and the music, I think were aligned with the sense of unity, everything was unified. We were all part of the same thing. You didn’t sense a difference between the music or the physical objects….

I think that you can certainly have a religious experience without the religious symbols. Certainly the religious symbols can lead you to a mystical experience. Unfortunately, they can also be divisive. The sectarianism can flow from the different symbols and justify the differences rather than the commonality. I think the mystic experience as I understand it comes down more on the commons.

Contrasting with the desire of two of the control subjects to have their own psychedelic experience, several of the remaining control subjects decided during the course of the experiment that they had no desire to try psychedelics. The behavior of some of their fellow subjects who received psilocybin had frightened them. Placebo subject B.A. remarks:

I tend to look back on it as an historical curiosity, with intellectual interest to me, but you know, frankly not much else at this point. … The only change that I can think of that it brought about in my life was a conviction that I never wanted to go on a drug trip of any type ever. And I never have, except for booze. The sights I saw [during the experiment] were very disturbing to me, and I didn’t see myself wanting to be in that kind of position. It appeared to be hopelessly out of control and life threatening in several instances.

The remaining control subjects viewed psilocybin with some equanimity but were not motivated enough to seek out their own experience. If the circumstances were right and the substances were legal, several indicated that they might be willing to participate in another experiment.

A Significant Omission

Out of the seven psilocybin subjects formally interviewed, only two had had Good Friday experiences that they reported to be completely positive without significant psychic struggles. The others all felt moments in which they feared they were either going crazy, dying, or were too weak for the ordeal they were experiencing. These struggles were resolved during the course of the Good Friday service and according to the subjects contributed to their learning and growth.

It appears that these difficult moments were significantly underemphasized in Pahnke’s thesis and in the subsequent reporting on the experiment. Psilocybin subject H.R. states,

The other thing I found unique that wasn’t talked at all about in what I read, at least in the thesis, was that it was all on the positive up side. I don’t know whether other people have said this but I had a down side…. It was a roller coaster. I mean I had a very strong positive sense of the whole … one with humanity kind of positive glowing, unity kind of feeling and then I went down to the bottom where I was really just … guilt … that’s all I can say. It was a very, very profound sense of guilt.

Pahnke does mention that two of the subjects who received the psilocybin “had a little difficulty in readjusting to the ‘ordinary world’ and needed special reassurance by their group leaders until the drug effects subsided” (Pahnke, 1963, p. 219). Almost certainly, one of those subjects was L.R., who found the chapel to be like a prison and went outside for much of the service. The other subject is, almost certainly, the one who refused to participate in the follow-up study.

In one technical section of the thesis, and in none of his subsequent papers, Pahnke mentions that one of those two subjects later referred to his experience as “a psychotic episode” (Pahnke, 1963, p. 232). In another part of the thesis, Pahnke mentions that injectable thorazine was on hand for emergencies. What he does not report anywhere is that one subject was actually given a shot of thorazine as a tranquilizer during the course of the experiment. Several of the subjects and group leaders remembered this incident and reported in the long-term follow-up interviews that it involved the one psilocybin subject who refused to be interviewed by the author. Needless to say, this occurrence should surely have been mentioned in Pahnke’s thesis and, by those few who knew that such an event had actually transpired, in any subsequent reporting on the experiment.

Pahnke probably did not report his use of the tranquilizer because he was fearful of adding to the ammunition of the opponents of the research. Fears that negative aspects of the experiment would be taken out of context and exaggerated may have been justified. In an example of just such a critique, Zaehner asserts in his book, Zen, Drugs and Mysticism, that Pahnke, in an article Pahnke published several years after the Good Friday experiment, repudiated the results of his own study (Zaehner, 1972, p. 105). In that article, Pahnke does indeed say that mystical experiences were absent (Pahnke, 1967, p. 71). Pahnke was, however, referring to the control subjects. This misreading of Pahnke by Zaehner is an indication of how, even in an educated scholar, bias can overwhelm facts. This observation, of course, is also true of Pahnke. His silence about his administration of a tranquilizer may perhaps have been good politics; certainly it was bad science.

Although an interview with the subject who was tranquilized would be necessary to understand the subtleties of his experience and its consequences, several long-term follow-up interviews generated second-hand information which may be summarized as follows: This subject was reported to be deeply moved by a sermon delivered by the very dynamic preacher who emphasized that it was the obligation of all Christians to tell people that there was a man on the cross. This subject was reported to have gone outside of the chapel possibly intending to follow the exhortation.

A struggle ensued when the group leaders, worried for his safety, tried to bring him back inside. After a time during which he seemed fearful and was not settling down, Pahnke tranquilized him with a shot of thorazine. He was then brought back into the chapel and remained calm for the duration of the experiment. He participated in all further aspects of the experiment and in the six-month follow-up reported that he considered his fear-experience “slightly harmful” because “in a mob panic-situation I feel I would be less likely to maintain a calm objective position than I might have formerly” (Pahnke, 1963, p. 232).

Subsequent to the Good Friday experiment, the use of tranquilizers in controlled psychedelic psychotherapy research was largely abandoned in favor of simply providing a supportive environment and letting the drug run its course (Richard Yensen, personal communication, 1991).