Walter Pahnke
Walter Norman Pahnke (Jan 18, 1931 – July 10, 1971) was a minister, physician, and psychiatrist most famous for the "Good Friday Experiment", also referred to as the Marsh Chapel Experiment or the "Miracle of Marsh Chapel".
Pahnke attended Harvard in the early 1960s. He earned an MD from
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
, and a Harvard psychiatric residency.
He was a psychedelic researcher at Harvard University.
In 1967, Pahnke joined the
lysergic acid diethylamide and dipropyltryptamine, with terminal cancer patients as well as people suffering from alcoholism and severe neurosis. There he worked with therapists Stanislav Grof, Bill Richards, and Richard Yensen
, among others. Pahnke served as director of the project from 1967 until 1971, when he died in a scuba diving accident in Maine.
Good Friday Experiment
On April 20, 1962, Pahnke conducted the "Good Friday Experiment" as part of his Ph.D. thesis in Religion and Society under his thesis advisors
MIT and respected religious scholar.[1]
Later follow-up studies confirmed the results and the thesis that primary religious experiences could be occasioned by using psychedelic drugs in a religious setting.
Notes
- ^ a b Pahnke, Walter Norman, Drugs and Mysticism: An Analysis of the Relationship between Psychedelic Drugs and the Mystical Consciousness. A thesis presented to the Committee on Higher Degrees in History and Philosophy of Religion, Harvard University, June 1963. See also MAPS collected commentary, reviews, and recordings of the sermon.
Publications
- Drugs and Mysticism [PhD thesis] (1966)
- Drugs and Mysticism (1966)
- Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism (1966)
- LSD and Religious Experience (1967)
- The Psychedelic Mystical Experience in the Human Encounter With Death (1971)
- The Use of Music in Psychedelic (LSD) Psychotherapy (1972), with Helen Bonny
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