The Man Who Coined the Term ‘Entheogen’ Has Died

“First, I want to say I'm not a psychedelic person. I haven't taken psychedelics since 1971, and I'm not a part of a psychedelic movement, or any movement except the movement of history.”

Jonathan Ott began the last public lecture of his illustrious, five-decades-long career by reaffirming his disdain for the term “psychedelic” and the supposed “renaissance” that its cultural adoption in the West has sparked. Ott was a wordsmith of the highest order — he was a polyglot, speaking English, German, Spanish, French, and Latin. He was also an inventor of words, evidenced by his role in coining the term “Entheogen” in 1979 as a more respectful term than “hallucinogen” or “psychedelic” to refer to shamanic plants. 

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We were in Sayulita, Mexico, together in April of 2024 for a small retreat of academics, writers, and weirdos who congregated around the subject of visionary plants and mind-altering molecules. Even in a group chock-full of internationally renowned public figures tied to what is colloquially known as the “psychedelic renaissance,” Ott commanded reverence and fascination beyond the ordinary thanks to his intense aura and encyclopedic knowledge of shamanic plants. If you asked him a question about psychoactive Rhododendron honey, you were liable to get a 10-minute deep dive reply covering the history, science, and culture around the substance, complete with academic references. 

None of us knew that it would be his last public appearance. He passed away just over a year later in July of 2025 at his home in Veracruz, Mexico, where he had quietly devoted himself to the study of ethnobotany and shamanic rites for the final 40 years of his life. I happened to be sitting five feet away from him with my trusty iPhone camera positioned to capture his sentiments, knowing full well that his public appearances were growing increasingly rare and that whatever he had to say on the occasion was worth recording for posterity. 

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Jonathan Ott first came to the public eye in 1976 when he began publishing work that meticulously researched and analyzed the science, culture, and history of shamanic plants across the world. He was a contemporary of major historical figures in the psychedelic world. Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna were among his peers. Had he opted for a different route with his life, he surely could have been sitting on the board of one of the multimillion-dollar psychedelic biotech companies in a similar fashion to Rick Doblin, another one of his contemporaries. His Magnum Opus came in 1993 with the publishing of the seminal “Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History.”

To date, it is the most exhaustively researched and comprehensive text on shamanic plants ever written, covering over 1,000 visionary and divinatory plants and the cultural frameworks in which their use is embedded. Ott’s ability to draw from obscure, rare texts from around the world and translate between languages and traditions was a key aspect of his brilliance. He served as a bridge between archaic and nearly lost knowledge from remote cultures and the modern West, aggregating and compiling the fractured legacy of humanity’s relationship with visionary plants across time and space. 

Ott spent his last few public appearances railing against the “psychedelic renaissance” by unpacking the faulty etymology behind the term “psychedelic” while challenging the notion that there was anything novel happening in the course of Western psychedelic mainstreaming. 

“In the first place, it's not a renaissance because something has to die to be reborn. It literally means rebirth, and this has never died. It's been with humankind for at least 10,000 years, and it's still going strong,” he clarified during his talk about the history of shamanic plant use in humanity. 

“I'll give you a brief history of the various words, but just to jump in, ‘psychedelic’ should be spelled ‘psychodelic,’ as Aldous Huxley always spelled it. ‘Psycho’ and ‘psyche’ are Greek for ‘breath.’ And ‘breathing.’ And they believed that the consciousness resided in the breath, in the lungs, and was related to breathing - And ‘psycho’ is used as a prefix in dozens, maybe hundreds of words. But ‘psyche’ is only used in one: ‘Psychedelic.’”

Though deadpan in his delivery and often wearing a scowl of sorts, Ott’s wit and irreverence often evoked uproarious laughter in the audiences he spoke to at universities and lecture halls around the world. 

“Terence McKenna dismissed ‘Entheogen’ as a word 'freighted with theological baggage' in a book titled Food of The Gods I might add,” he punctuated his reverie to the humorous delight of everyone present. 

Jonathan Ott moved to Mexico in the 1980s to study ethnobotany and compile extensive research on ‘shamanic inebriates’ as he sometimes referred to his beloved entheogens. He became a hermit of sorts, difficult to get a hold of and detached from the type of high-profile public advocacy that people like Rick Doblin and the late Amanda Feilding devoted themselves to. Sightings of Ott were comparable to a reported sighting of a UFO or Bigfoot in the psychonaut community; people reported catching a glimpse of him backstage at Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday party in Switzerland or at a hostel in the Peruvian jungle.

It’s not entirely shocking that he would want to remain private and outside the scrutiny of the public eye or the authorities; In 2010, Ott’s home in Mexico was destroyed by a mysterious act of arson. Books that were given to him and personalized with writings by Albert Hofmann himself were used as fuel in the fire. 

Back in Sayulita, Ott continued to grind his axe against the psychedelic renaissance. 

“People in this scene have a fond connotation to ‘psychedelic,’ he waxed poetically while gesturing to the audience of 15 or so people in front of him. 

“But the term is decidedly pejorative outside the scene. Here in Mexico, not in a tourist zone, the word ‘psychedelic’ evokes images of Charles Manson and hippies. In no way does it relate to Maria Sabina, which is in a completely different box from psychedelics. Psychedelic is something ‘Gringo,’ which is generally at once envied, despised, and pitied in about equal parts. I've lived here in Mexico for 40 years being a Gringo. And so why prejudice yourself from the outset with a word that is defined as ‘hallucinatory,’  and people that are not familiar with the experience think that that’s what it does —  produce hallucinations — seeing things that aren’t there, which is rightly so a symptom that something has gone wrong in the brain and you’re not fully integrating reality?”

During our time together in Sayulita last year, I experienced the most remarkable download of information in my life. —  and it had nothing to do with Jonathan Ott. I was packing up to leave the shared house where a bunch of us were staying when I FaceTimed my wife. We had very recently started trying to get pregnant, and I half-jokingly asked, “So are you pregnant yet?” 

The look she returned made me freeze, as she unblinkingly, slowly began nodding — “I wasn’t going to tell you on the phone, but since you asked…”

On the last day of our time together in Sayulita, I found out that I was going to become a father. I hung up the phone and went out to have one final chat with Jonathon Ott. I took a photo with him — one of us looks jubilant and ecstatic, the other looks like someone shit in his Cheerios. That was Jonathon Ott. 

As his criticisms of the “psychedelic renaissance” percolated in my mind — mingling with the shock and ecstacy of learning I was about to become a father — , a phenomenon unfolded before me in the sky: a ‘Sun Halo’ emerged sudden and perfect , encircling the blazing midday sun. 

It’s hard to put a face value or assign a logical explanation to a series of unusual events when they occur, but in that moment, I felt like something profoundly important had happened to me — or through me, rather. Perhaps all of us are conduits to a reality much stranger and more profound than we are willing to admit. And some of us, like Jonathon Ott, have the uncanny ability to contextualize and connect the phenomena of the world in linguistic frameworks for future generations to inherit and make sense of themselves. 

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