Some mind-altering substances can leave lasting marks on entire cultures that ripple far beyond a single trip.

In his book, The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley described his experience with psychedelics as transformative, something you can never return from. “The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out,” he wrote in 1954.

The sentiment persists among many psychedelics users, and it’s perhaps because, for many, trips are more than just visual hallucinations. Psychedelics are often associated with feelings of transcendence and higher consciousness.

But there’s another part of the mythology of psychedelics that is often understated. Some psychedelics are so potent that they induce strange hallucinations that make some people feel connected to God—and these effects can be expansive.

Simply put: the following psychedelics—from a species of mushroom in China to ancient Egyptian draughts to 5-MeO-DMT—don’t just shape the casual user’s mind, but the lives of entire groups and even societies, perhaps shaping human consciousness itself.

Wild Hallucinations and Hospitalizations

In Yunnan, China, Lanmaoa asiatica, a species of mushroom, is sold in markets, served in restaurants, and cooked at home during peak mushroom season between June and August. But if you’re not careful, you may feel like you’re living a real-life version of Gulliver’s Travels, in which the adventurer Gulliver is astonished by his encounter with a community of tiny people, whom the author coins the Lilliputians.

Local hospitals treat hundreds of these cases per year, caused by eating raw or undercooked L. asiatica, with the main symptoms being hallucinations in over 90 percent of people, as well as some delirium, dizziness, and mania. These symptoms can last one to three days or longer. A majority of the patients reported seeing “little people” or “elves” dancing and jumping around in their environment and interacting with them after eating this magic mushroom.

Since the trips from L. asiatica can last from hours to days, the hallucinations seem to be an unintended side effect of an undercooked mushroom, rather than something people seek out, Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate studying the mushroom at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, told the BBC. There’s no evidence of lasting damage, and most importantly, there have been no deaths caused by L. asiatica poisoning.

Connecting With the Gods

Two-thousand years ago, ancient Egyptians were sipping mugs of a potion that caused them to enter an altered state of consciousness, in hopes of divine connection and healing. A 2024 study found that the substance contained bodily fluids and alcohol, mixed with particular psychoactive substances: harmaline, found in the seeds of Peganum harmala, commonly known as Syrian rue, and aporphine, from Nymphaea nouchali var. caerulea, called the Egyptian Lotus or Blue Water Lily.

The participants of this practice were “very likely ordinary Egyptian women in need of a miracle from Bes,” says lead researcher, archaeologist and University of South Florida Professor Davide Tanasi, PhD, in an email. They may have wanted to get pregnant or to speed up a risky pregnancy. The women gathered and imbibed the psychotropic concoction out of a mug carved with the likeness of the deity Bes. Then they went to sleep, hoping for revelations the deity might send to them through dreams.

Depicted as a merry-faced, dwarf-like figure wearing a lion headdress, Bes drove away evil spirits and helped mothers and children, believers thought. The ancient Egyptians associated Bes with joy and fertility, as well as “mystical transformation,” says Tanasi. The psychotropic formula’s creators calibrated it carefully, he says. “At its core, this practice allowed individuals to transcend their everyday reality and connect with the divine,” while strengthening the group’s bonds and shared faith, Tanasi says.

Experiencing Rebirth and “Raw” Consciousness

Colloquially known as “Bufo” or the God molecule, 5-MeO-DMT might elicit even more profound experiences than other psychedelics. The substance comes from a species of toad called Bufo alvarius, which is native to the Sonoran Desert in the southwestern United States. Some psychonauts would lick the toad’s back where the venomous secretion glands lie. However, extraction methods have become more advanced, and now people have learned to milk the venom out of the glands, refining the hallucinogen into a smokable powder for more potent results, making it several times stronger than its more popular psychedelic cousin, DMT.

Effects of the toad venom typically include feelings of awe, audio and visual hallucinations, and a sense of universal connection typically associated with psychedelic trips. One user even stated feeling a “total fusion with God,” according to a report from Addiction Center, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation and education center based in the United States. Even those who have admitted experimenting with drugs previously, such as former professional boxer Mike Tyson, found the psychedelic substance transformative. “It’s almost like you die and you’re reborn,” he said, referring to the experience in a 2019 interview with GQ.

More recently, 5-MeO-DMT has also emerged in entrepreneur and futurist Brian Johnson’s ongoing hunt for immortality. On a March episode of the podcast All-In, Johnson recalled his experience taking 5-MeO-DMT—something that he described as “impossible” to explain.

“You basically experience raw consciousness and raw intelligence,” he says. “Take that idea, multiply it by a thousand, then move out infinite depth, infinite width, and infinite dimensions, and that gives you an idea of the size and space you deal with” during the psychedelic experience.

Hallucinogenics Started a Witch Hunt

The 17th century was a time of witch hunts in both Europe and the Thirteen Colonies. Salem, Massachusetts, was home to the largest of them—but it doesn’t seem evil forces were truly to blame.

In 1976, a researcher named Linnda Caporael, PhD, published a journal article in Science suggesting that the bizarre illnesses that had townspeople pointing their fingers at “witches” were actually hallucinations caused by toxic fungus on rye. Known as ergot, the disease is caused when the fungus Claviceps purpurea forms in rye, typically after cold winters and during a wet growing season, likely similar to the weather before the Salem Witch Trials started, infecting the spring’s crops. Colonists probably didn’t recognize the dark fungus as anything suspicious, so they used the grain to bake bread, which contained toxic lysergic acid and ergotamine, according to Britannica.

Ingesting the substance, which the townspeople may have done when they ate the rye bread, causes two different toxic reactions, according to a study published in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. One is gangrene, which presents with swelling of the limbs, a violent, burning pain, and loss of sensation or potential limb loss in extremities like the toes or feet, also known as “holy fire” or “St. Anthony’s Fire.” The other is a convulsive reaction, with people experiencing hallucinations, painful flexed limbs, muscle spasms, convulsions, and diarrhea.

The witchcraft accusations initially started when 9-year-old Betty Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams accused two social outcasts and a servant of causing violent fits, strange visions, and burning sensations in their bodies—afflictions that are suspiciously similar to those caused by ergotism poisoning.

Editor’s note: Emma Frederickson, Jordan Smith, and Manasee Wagh contributed reporting to this story.