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Book titled "Ordinary Mystics" by Matt Zemon with a dark cover featuring fairy-like mushrooms and intricate plant illustrations in pinkish tones.


Ordinary Mystics

AVAILABLE OCTOBER 1, 2026

Psychedelics, Faith, and The Reclaiming of Direct Spiritual Experience.

THE SACRED SHOULD NOT BE FORBIDDEN

Something has been pulling at you. Maybe it is depression, anxiety, or grief that medicine and therapy have not reached. Maybe it is the longing to feel more alive. Maybe it is the persistent suspicion that the Sacred is real, and that you can meet it.

Right now, in churches, living rooms, and medical centers across America, ordinary people are gathering, eating sacred mushrooms, and coming home changed. Researchers at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and a growing number of other institutions have documented these as among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of participants' lives, ranking them alongside the birth of a child and the death of a parent.

Humans have met God through sacred mushrooms for thousands of years. Much of modern America forgot that history. Today, in a nation founded on religious freedom, a minister may be prosecuted for offering the same sacrament that a scientist in a white coat may legally administer in a laboratory.

Matt Zemon writes as a scholar who serves a psychedelic church, bridging the clinical lab and the candlelit ceremony. Weaving his own encounters with the Sacred into the history of how this practice was driven underground, Ordinary Mystics takes readers behind the scenes of one sacred community and explores what happens when ordinary people encounter the Sacred directly. This is a book for anyone who senses there is more to spiritual life than belief alone.

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reviews

What readers and reviewers have said.

Ordinary Mystics Reviews

"Ordinary Mystics makes a level-headed case for religious freedom, for the right of ordinary people to practice in community without being treated as criminals. The freedom to seek the Sacred directly belongs to all of us."

Rick Doblin
Founder & President, MAPS

"Matt Zemon does something wondrous in this book: he makes the ineffable, effable… Ordinary Mystics is a helpful new gospel, beautifully written. Let it take you to church."

Rev. Molly Phinney Baskette
UCC minister and author

"In Ordinary Mystics Matt Zemon, reasonably and without rancor, points the way to the normalization of sincere religious practices that merit respect and the law's protection. I did not expect to see a book like this in my lifetime, and I am grateful that I have."

William A. (Bill) Richards, STEM, PhD
Clinical Psychologist & Author of Sacred Knowledge

"I cannot recommend this book on the sacred use of psilocybin mushrooms too highly. It is the richest, most comprehensive, and wisest discussion I have encountered on the safe use of this important medicine in spiritual communities… A treasure for all present and future practitioners."

Christopher Bache, PhD
Professor emeritus and author of LSD and the Mind of the Universe

"My fellow veterans need to know this kind of healing is real. They need to know they are not broken beyond repair. And they should not have to leave the country to find it. Ordinary Mystics needs to reach every veteran it can, before it is too late."

Juliana Mercer
USMC Veteran, Executive Director, Healing Breakthrough

"Staying changed long after the glow has worn off is a discipline, and we have spent centuries learning it… Ordinary Mystics gives these experiences a tradition patient enough to turn them into lasting change." 

Rabbi Zac Kamenetz
Founder of Shefa