Church of the Sacred Synthesis

Church of the Sacred Synthesis
FormationNovember 2021 (2021-11)[1]
FoundersGreg Lake; Ian Benouis
TypePsychedelic church[1]
Location
Websitethesacredsynthesis.com
Formerly called
Church of Psilomethoxin

The Church of the Sacred Synthesis, also formerly known as the Church of Psilomethoxin, is a psychedelic church based in Austin, Texas.[2][1][3][4][5] However, it operates nationwide and has been described as a so-called "mail-order mushroom church".[4]

The church's sacrament is cultivated psilocybin mushrooms with substrate enriched with 5-MeO-DMT, which they claim results in the artificial biosynthesis of a novel psychedelic drug known as psilomethoxin (5-methoxypsilocin or 4-HO-5-MeO-DMT), as well as psilomethoxin's putative prodrug 5-methoxypsilocybin (4-PO-5-MeO-DMT).[1][2][6][7] In addition, the church claims that psilomethoxin has effects that are a blend of or intermediate between those of 5-MeO-DMT and psilocybin, for instance having reduced psychedelic visuals compared to psilocybin.[1][2][8] The church says that these ideas were inspired by a 2005 article on the topic by the psychedelic chemist Alexander Shulgin, who referenced the work of the German mycologist and chemist Jochen Gartz.[9][6][7][8][2][10][11]

Contradicting the church's claims however, a 2023 chemical analysis preprint by Samuel Williamson and Alexander Sherwood of the Usona Institute detected no psilomethoxin and instead only psilocybin, psilocin, and baeocystin in their mushrooms, suggesting that the its sacrament is simply normal psilocybin-containing mushrooms.[2][1][7][6][4][12] The church's own initially undisclosed analyses also failed to detect psilomethoxin.[8][2] Similarly, Hamilton Morris failed to detect psilomethoxin, but found psilocin and on another occasion only ketamine, suggesting that the church may have mishandled the sacrament.[13] The church has contested the methodology of the analyses and has said that they take the presence of psilomethoxin in the mushrooms based on faith and their personal experiences with it.[8][2] Critics have dismissed said experiences as being due to the placebo effect.[2][9][13][8] As a result of the preceding findings, the church is highly controversial and has been referred to as a "scam" and its founders as "charlatans".[1][2][3] According to psychedelic chemist David E. Nichols, "The church has a completely nonsensical and nonscientific position".[2] Others such as Andrew Gallimore, Zeus Tipado, and Psymposia have also criticized the church.[2][13] In addition, certain tryptamines with chemical structures similar to that of psilomethoxin such as 4,5-dihydroxytryptamine (4,5-DHT) and 4-hydroxy-5-methoxytryptamine (4-HO-5-MeO-T) have been found to cause serotonergic neurotoxicity, which has raised separate concerns.[2][14][15]

The Church of the Sacred Synthesis was founded by the attorneys Greg Lake and Ian Benouis in November 2021.[1][4][7] Originally set up as a non-profit, the church launched a for-profit arm called PsiloSynth in January 2023.[1][2] The church has trademarked the term "psilomethoxin".[2] It experienced a wave of media attention in April 2023 due to its claims of using psilomethoxin as a novel psychedelic drug being contradicted.[9][6][7][2][16] The church renamed itself from the Church of Psilomethoxin to the Church of the Sacred Synthesis in 2023 following this controversy and criticism.[1][3][4] By mid-2023, the church had more than 1,750 members.[2][1][5] It was said to send out 20 to 40 orders per day and was making $125,000 per month in sales and donations.[2][13][5] However, the church soon lost 80% of its monthly revenue following the controversy.[5][2]

In March 2024, the church announced that they had successfully isolated and identified psilomethoxin in their sacrament with new analyses.[13] In addition, they sued several of their previous critics for defamation.[13][17] These critics included the Usona Institute, the Promega Corporation (Bill Linton being the co-founder of both Usona and Promega), Psymposia, and an X (Twitter) user, among others.[13][17][18] However, Gallimore and others disputed the church's new analytic methodology and dismissed their findings as "meaningless", noting that no quantitative data had been released and the results were not definitive.[17] Later that year, all of the church's legal claims were dismissed in court.[18][5] In May 2026, the church announced further positive analytic results and initiated new lawsuits, including against the Usona Institute and Hamilton Morris.[5][19]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Busby, Mattha (4 October 2023). "This Veteran-Founded Church Wants to Sell Psychedelics At Your Local Drug Store". DoubleBlind Mag. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Busby, Mattha (8 June 2023). "This New Church Wants to Get You High on Synthetic Toad Venom". VICE. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  3. 1 2 3 Brownlee, Jamie; Walby, Kevin (6 May 2025). Psychedelic Capitalism. Fernwood Publishing. ISBN 978-1-77363-781-5. Retrieved 26 June 2026. While some churches are established in good faith, others have been called out as scams. A good example is the Church of Psilomethoxin, rebranded as the Church of the Sacred Synthesis in 2023, which has been laden with suspicion and controversy (Busby 2023b; Nickles 2023).
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Stoddard, Brad (31 July 2024). The Production of Entheogenic Communities in the United States. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009429412. ISBN 978-1-009-42941-2. Retrieved 26 June 2026. By almost any metric, attorneys Greg Lake and Ian Benouis are among the more influential attorneys in this corner of the entheogenic ecosystem. [...] Lake and Benouis met and bonded over their shared interest in entheogens and entheogenic-assisted healing. Today, they are among the nation's leading entheogenic attorneys who have helped hundreds of people draft and file the paperwork to create entheogenic churches. [...] The two men also started their own entheogenic church, the Church of Psilomethoxin, later renamed the Church of the Sacred Synthesis, a community that consumes psychoactive mushrooms.27 [...] 27 Lake and Benouis formed this church in 2022 and it was quickly embroiled in controversy. [...] The findings were quite damning, putting Lake and Benouis on the defensive and ultimately prompting them to change the church's name to Church of the Sacred Synthesis. Lake himself responded publicly to the controversy on the Plus Three podcast in May 2023 (Lake 2023).
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Flahive, Paul (4 May 2026). "Austin church: Our psychedelic 'sacrament' is real". Austin American-Statesman. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Holyanova, Maria (26 April 2023). "Investigating Psilomethoxin: A "Novel" Psychedelic Drug Used as a Sacrament: Fact or Fiction?". Psychedelic Spotlight. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Firtina, Nergis (19 April 2023). "Psilomethoxin: Newly developed psychedelic drug is the sacrament of religion members". Interesting Engineering. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 Taub, Benjamin (18 April 2023). "Religion Claims To Have Created A New Psychedelic Drug As Its Sacrament". IFLScience. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  9. 1 2 3 Farah, Troy (20 April 2023). "Church claims to have made a super-drug that combines shrooms and toad venom". Salon.com. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  10. ↑ "4-Hydroxy-5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, Psilocybe mushrooms, Psilocin". Ask Dr. Shulgin Online. 7 December 2005. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  11. ↑ Gartz J (1989). "Biotransformation of tryptamine derivatives in mycelial cultures of Psilocybe". J Basic Microbiol. 29 (6): 347–352. doi:10.1002/jobm.3620290608. PMID 2614674.
  12. ↑ Williamson, Samuel; Sherwood, Alexander (11 April 2023). "Fungi Fiction: Analytical Investigation into the Church Of Psilomethoxin's Alleged Novel Compound Using UPLC-HRMS". ChemRxiv. doi:10.26434/chemrxiv-2023-bxxtl. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Busby, Mattha (3 April 2024). "Psychedelic Church Sues for Defamation After Lab Test Raises Hope for Presence of Novel Drug". DoubleBlind Mag. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  14. ↑ Mario de la Fuente (17 April 2023). "The Church of Psilomethoxin: Fantasy Chemistry Gets Fact Checked". Psychedelic Alpha. Retrieved 10 February 2025. In that case, we could have graduated a potential fraud to a full-blown crime against public health. Psilomethoxin is the perfect candidate for a metabolic path capable of wiping out every serotonergic neuron in the brain. Very much like the chemically-induced parkinsonism by MPTP and hydroxydopamine, and lesions resulting from dihydroxytryptamine exposure. We are not talking about a transient inconvenience: it is irreversible brain damage that is at stake. Fortunately, we are aware of anonymous watch dogs notifying this unconfirmed, but well-founded, concern to the DEA even before either chemical content analyses were published.
  15. ↑ Horn AS, Baumgarten HG, Schlosserberger HG (July 1973). "Inhibition of the uptake of 5-hydroxytryptamine, noradrenaline and dopamine into rat brain homogenates by various hydroxylated tryptamines". J Neurochem. 21 (1): 233–236. doi:10.1111/j.1471-4159.1973.tb04242.x. PMID 4720899. The monohydroxytryptamines, 6-HT and 7-HT when administered intraventricularly to rats in doses of 100 or 200 μg of free base, caused only a temporary lowering of brain 5-HT and NA (BAUMGARTEN et al., in preparation) In contrast, 5,7-DHT, 4,5-DHT and 4-hydroxy-5-methoxytryptamine produced a long-lasting depletion of brain and spinal cord 5-HT and NA (BAUMGARTEN et al., in preparation). The descending order of potency for this effect was 5,7-DHT 4,5-DHT and 4-hydroxy-5-methoxytryptamine, the compounds being administered via the lateral ventricle in doses of 50 or 100 μg of free base. All three compounds exerted a much greater effect on CNS 5-HT than on NA levels. The differential potency of 5,7-DHT, 4,5-DHT and 4-hydroxy-5-methoxytryptamine in depleting endogenous 5-HT was also reflected in morphological studies of the extent of damage caused to central 5-HT neurons. The severe disintegration of terminals containing 5-HT, in contrast to those having NA, and the lesioning of non-terminal axons following 5,7-DHT has been reported earlier (BAUMGARTEN and LACHENSAYER, 1972b) and was shown to be similar to that induced by 5,6-DHT (BAUMGARTEN and LACHENMAYER, 1972a). The above order of potency of 5,7-DHT, 4,5-DHT and 4-hydroxy-5-methoxytryptamine in causing toxic damage to CNS serotonin neurons does not strictly correspond to their relative affinity for the 5-HT uptake site but rather reflects the chemical lability of the drugs. It is possible, that the high degree of susceptibility to auto-oxidation of the 4-hydroxylated compounds may impede their effective penetration into brain tissue. This might be responsible for their limited effects on CNS monoaminergic neurons compared to 5,6-DHT and 5,7-DHT.
  16. ↑ Psychedelics Today (21 April 2023). "Psychedelics Weekly – The Church of Psilomethoxin Controversy, Psychedelics for Long COVID, and The Growth of Bicycle Day". Psychedelics Today. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  17. 1 2 3 Hu JC (12 April 2024). "DEA announces hearing on obscure hallucinogenic compounds; Petitioning the FDA for a public meeting on Lykos and MDMA; Psychedelic church sues for defamation". The Microdose. Substack. Retrieved 9 February 2025. 'Psychedelic' Church sues detractors for defamation: The Church of Sacred Synthesis, formerly known as the Church of Psilomethoxin, is suing its critics for defamation, libel and slander in a Texas district court, according to a new piece published in DoubleBlind. The church formerly claimed that its "sacrament", a supposedly novel psychedelic drug called psilomethoxin, was created by feeding 5-MeO-DMT to psilocybin-producing fungi. In April 2023, two chemists working at the non-profit medical research organization Usona Institute, tested a sample they claim came from an anonymous member of the church and concluded that there was no evidence it was psilomethoxin. Shortly after, the psychedelics publication Psymposia published a four-part series investigating the church and its claims. Journalist Mattha Busby reports in DoubleBlind that the civil suit names Usona, the Promega Corporation, whose founder Bill Linton also co-founded Usona, Psymposia, and a user on the social media site X.
  18. 1 2 Busby, Mattha (15 August 2024). "Texas Judge Dismisses Church of Sacred Synthesis's Defamation Case". DoubleBlind Mag. Retrieved 26 June 2026.
  19. ↑ Double Blind Magazine (1 June 2026). "How to Tell a Safe Psychedelic Facilitator From a Predator". DoubleBlind Mag. In 2023, the Church of Sacred Synthesis (formerly the Church of Psilomethoxin) made a bold claim: that by feeding 5-MeO-DMT to psilocybin mushrooms, they had biosynthesized an entirely novel psychedelic compound called psilomethoxin. (Maybe you've heard of it?) Independent lab tests said the compound wasn't there. Scientists called the process nonsensical. The church got sued, rebranded, and kept it pushing. Now, a physicist with a $1.4 million mass spectrometer says he's found it — and the church is taking its detractors to court. On Friday, journalist Jack Gorsline breaks down the new test results, the trade secrets lawsuit targeting Hamilton Morris and the Usona Institute, [...]
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