The word "entheogen" was first coined in 1979 by a group of ethnobotanists and academics including Carl A. P. Ruck, Richard Evans Schultes, Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson. The term was devised to describe a variety of substances that had previously been referred to as "hallucinogens" (a term popularised by Aldous Huxley), "psychedelics" (a term first used by the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond) or 'psychotomimetics' that were being used as religious sacraments. They proposed it as a new term that would be appropriate for describing states of shamanic and ecstatic possession induced by the ingestion of mind-altering drugs. In Greek, the word entheos means literally "god (theos) within," and was used to describe the condition that followed when a person was inspired and possessed by the feeling that god had entered their body. In combination with the Greek root gen-, which denotes the action of "becoming," this word resulted in them devising the term 'entheogen'.

Although the literal meaning of the word is "that which causes God to be within an individual", it should be noted that the word 'entheogen' is not meant to imply that something is created; they aid the user in perceiving something that is already there;

"the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as the chemical key - it opens the mind and frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures … its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions and of the ego or identity."¹

Or as Baudelaire observed
"drugs can add nothing new to a man, but can only raise to a higher power what is already within him"

  1 LEARY, T., METZNER, R., ALPERT, R., 1995. The Psychedelic Experience. New York : Citadel