Exorbitant attention has been paid to the nature of gods, whose character it is to be inacessible to examination, but relatively less attention has been paid to the impresarios of gods, viz. prophets and shamans and priests—the de facto sources of all our religious information—who are available for study. It is our contention that the nature of deities is to be sought in the psychic disposition of their exponents and, more than this, that the ancestor of the god is the shaman himself. The vatic personality is often known to be psychologically abnormal, or perhaps only temporarily in such a state as the dream or the vision, and doubtless often in response to the pressure of some current crisis, personal or social or both. But the conditions for hallucinatory contact with spirits and gods may easily be gained by psychically quite ungifted persons, through the use of psychotropic drugs. It is this second situation we would wish to examine in the present study.