Tripping Through the Gates

DMT and the portal inside

We have severed our connection to spirit. That’s what our society has done. It has sought to persuade us that the material realm is the only realm. And the only way we’re going to recover is to reconnect with spirit. And I truly believe we need the help of the plants in order to do that.
— Graham Hancock, DMT: The Spirit Molecule

The delusion of modernity in the Western world has mingled with the innate human desire to connect with something greater than oneself to produce a strange and dangerous phenomenon in recent years. There has been a growth in tourism from advanced nations to the Amazon to seek out shamans and drink a concoction called ayahuasca. The active ingredient, Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), produces brief but intense hallucinations. Because of the type of visions experienced while under the influence of the drug, DMT has been dubbed “The Spirit Molecule.” But are the experiences of users just chemical reactions inside the brain or journeys into a realm we’re not designed to inhabit?

Consumption of ayahuasca in South America goes back more than two thousand years. Hair analysis of twenty-two mummies from southern Peru found that the psychoactive plants that make up ayahuasca, a sludgy, bitter tea, were used as early as 100 BC by the Nazca culture.^[1] The practice of using mind-altering substances to break down barriers between the natural world and the spirit realm is practice found all over the world, and is millennia older than the Nazca mummies; archaeologists recently discovered that the Philistines of Gath, Goliath’s hometown, apparently used plant-based substances in ritual practices,^[2] and researchers at Göbekli Tepe, a site near Harran in southern Türkiye that’s been called the world’s oldest temple,^[3] discovered evidence of brewing—large limestone troughs capable of holding up to forty-two gallons of liquid with traces of oxalates, which are produced during fermentation.^[4] Given the ritualistic aspects of the site, it’s probable that the primitive brew produced at Göbekli Tepe had a role in festivals of some kind.

This is an excerpt from our 2024 book The Gates of Hell. Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish it here at no charge. If you want to own a copy, it’s available in paperback, as a Kindle e-book, and as an audiobook at Amazon and Audible.

Today, we in the West fancy ourselves enlightened, scientific, and modern. The ritual dances and sacrifices of ancient times are relics of a dim, dark past, long before the discovery of such things as biology, psychology, and the scientific method. Application of science to the search for gateways to the unseen realm led to the synthesis of DMT in 1931 by Canadian chemist Dr. Richard Manske, and the isolation and identification of the molecule in the 1950s by American researchers working with botanical samples from South America.

Minute amounts of DMT are found in the human brain, although not in high enough concentrations to produce the psychoactive effects reported by people during a DMT trip.^[5] Some claim that it’s produced by the pineal gland, which has a somewhat romanticized history as the “third eye” or seat of the soul, but scientific evidence for this is scant.^[6] What is certain is that those who smoke, drink, or inject DMT consistently report encountering non-human entities; at least half report experiencing their own deaths;^[7] and travel to South America to partake of the shamanic substance has been increasing ever since Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs published The Yage Letters in 1963, a novelized collection of correspondence between Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsburg about their experiences with the drug.^[8]

Ayahuasca has gained some prominent endorsements in recent years; best-selling author Graham Hancock has written and talked often about his “beautiful experience” with “Mother Ayahuasca” since 2003,^[9] former Police frontman Sting called it “the only genuine religious experience I’ve ever had,”^[10] and Prince Harry said the drug helped him accept and move on from the death of his mother, Princess Diana.^[11] Influential podcaster Joe Rogan’s interviews with others who have tripped on DMT have been described as “a psychedelic record of the 21st^st century.”^[12] Given that Rogan’s podcast generally draws millions of views per episode, he’s introduced the idea to many who’d never heard of ayahuasca or DMT before.

Those who’ve undertaken a journey on DMT almost without exception report powerful experiences that have changed the way they view reality. Those confronted with a sense of their own death during a trip came out of it with “an increased sense of transcending death…as well as the certainty in the continuation of consciousness after death.”^[13] Why this would be so is a mystery science can’t address. From a Christian perspective, we suggest that this is perhaps the intended “message” for experiencers from the entities who inhabit the realm they visited during their ayahuasca trips.

For that is the other experience consistently reported by those who’ve taken DMT: Encounters with discarnate—that is, disembodied—entities.

One recent study found that 94% of those surveyed encountered other “beings” during their DMT experiences, while 100% reported emerging into other “worlds.”^[14] Other studies, conducted under more controlled conditions with volunteers taking consistent doses of DMT, resulted in fewer encounters with entities, but they were striking nonetheless:

Among the most vivid, intriguing, memorable, and sometimes disconcerting experiences that people report after taking a high dose of inhaled or intravenous DMT are those of encountering seemingly autonomous entities or beings. Although description of the nature of the entities, details of the experiences, and meaning attributed to the experiences vary widely, such experiences are apparently not infrequent. Strassman (2008) estimated that at least half of the participants in his studies of high doses of intravenous DMT reported experiences of journeys to invisible or alternative worlds, and that contact with alien beings or entities were a variant of this category.

Dr. Rick Strassman, author of the 2001 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, was the first to conduct clinical research on psychedelics in the United States in twenty years. Between 1990 and 1995, sixty volunteers were dosed with intravenous DMT in a study conducted at the University of New Mexico. Their reactions to the experiment led Strassman to conclude that his volunteers had received information from outside themselves rather than generating hallucinations from within.

In other words, DMT apparently unlocked portals to the spirit realm inside those volunteers. This means the gates of hell are not only physical locations, but biological—within each one of us.

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^[1] Zach Zorich, “Earliest Ayahuasca Trip.” Archaeology, March/April 2023. https://www.archaeology.org/issues/503-2303/digs/11212-digs-peru-nazca-ayahuasca, retrieved 3/7/24.

^[2] Suembikya Frumin; Aren M. Maeir;, Maria Eniukhina; Amit Dagan; Ehud Weiss, “Plant‐related Philistine ritual practices at biblical Gath.” Scientific Reports 14:3513 (2024).

^[3] Andrew Curry, “Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?” Smithsonian Magazine, Nov. 2008. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/, retrieved 3/7/24.

^[4] Tia Ghose, “Alcohol: Social Lubricant for 10,000 Years.” LiveScience, Dec. 31, 2012. https://www.livescience.com/25855-stone-age-beer-brewery-discovered.html, retrieved 3/7/24.

^[5] David E. Nichols, “N,N-dimethyltryptamine and the pineal gland: Separating fact from myth.” J Psychopharmacol (2018) Jan;32(1), pp. 30–36.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Jonathan David; José Carlos Bouso; Maja Kohek; Genís Ona; Nir Tadmor; Tal Arnon; Yair Dor-Ziderman; Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, “Ayahuasca-induced personal death experiences: prevalence, characteristics, and impact on attitudes toward death, life, and the environment.” Frontiers in Psychiatry 14:1287961 (2023).

^[8] James Draven, “Hot topic: Is ayahuasca tourism a bad trip?” National Geographic, Apr. 8, 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2017/03/hot-topic-is-ayahuasca-tourism-a-bad-trip, retrieved 3/7/24.

^[9] Graham Hancock, “Returning to Ayahuasca after three years away.” GrahamHancock.com, Nov. 27, 2018. https://grahamhancock.com/returning-to-ayahuasca-after-three-years-away/, retrieved 3/7/24.

^[10] Draven, op. cit.

^[11] Amber Raiken, “Prince Harry says that doing ayahuasca helped him accept Diana’s death: ‘She wants me to be happy’.” The Independent, Jan. 13, 2023. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/royal-family/prince-harry-spare-diana-death-b2261955.html, retrieved 3/15/24.

^[12] David E. Carpenter, “Podcast Host Joe Rogan Is Steadily Documenting A Psychedelic Record Of The 21st Century.” Forbes, Feb. 26, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcarpenter/2020/02/26/podcast-host-joe-rogan-is-steadily-documenting-a-psychedelic-record-of-the-21st-century/, retrieved 3/7/24.

^[13] David et al., op. cit.

^[14] Pascal Michael; David Luke; Oliver Robinson, “An Encounter With the Other: A Thematic and Content Analysis of DMT Experiences From a Naturalistic Field Study.” Frontiers in Psychology, 12: 720717 (2021), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.720717.