A few weeks ago, I sat down with researcher Alex Criddle, a Mormon historian who believes that psychedelics played a direct role in the founding of the LDS Church. Our conversation moves from Joseph Smith’s early life in the “burned-over district” of New York, where ecstatic visions and folk magic were everywhere, to the possibility that the sacraments of early Mormonism were laced with psychoactive substances like datura or psilocybin.
Criddle argues that Mormonism began as a radically visionary faith, steeped in Christian occultism, Freemasonry, and a fascination with Native American spirituality. He outlines how Joseph Smith’s family was already experimenting with herbal medicine and mystical traditions long before the Book of Mormon was written, and how these practices may have shaped its theology of direct revelation.
What emerges is a very different portrait of the American prophet. Alex places him in a long line of mystics and alchemists trying to restore “the ancient religion.” Whether or not you believe the psychedelic connection, it’s a window into how spiritual experience, chemistry, and myth collide to form something entirely new.
