What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. (Karl Marx may have gotten it backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.) This is not to diminish anyone’s religious beliefs; to the contrary, that certain plants summon spiritual knowledge is precisely what many religious people have believed, and who’s to say that belief is wrong? Psychoactive plants are bridges between the worlds of matter and spirit or, to update the vocabulary, chemistry and consciousness.
