Of course! Almost all religions use psychoactive substances of some kind or another.
- For Christianity, and almost all European traditions, alcohol plays a significant role in spirituality. Long before most of the trappings of Christianity you would recognize today, the ritual of the Eucharist ("grace-giving") was the center of Christian communal life, and many of the earliest references to the faith mention the cerermony. In the Eucharist, wine is used to symbolize the blood of the sacrificed Christ, and is ritually consumed. While modern Christianity usually involves only a token finger-glass of the wine (and huffy Puritans are known to substitute non-alcoholic grape juice), through much of Christian history much more alcohol was consumed in the ritual meal.
- This custom was borrowed from Christianity's predecessor faith, Judaism, and alcohol plays a similarly important role in that tradition, being an element of very significant rituals such as the Passover seder meal, wedding ceremonies, and many others.
- Alcohol plays a role in many other religious customs around the world as well. For instance, in Peru, an alcoholic beverage called chicha has been brewed from ancient times, and before Christianity, a libation of chicha was the start of nearly every ritual activity, followed by a shared round of drinking. This practice has been incorporated into the syncretic Christianity of the modern Andes.
- In a similar note, visitors to the South Pacific will be familiar with the drink known as kava, a psychoactive fermented beverage that has likewise been the entry to all rituals religious or civic from ancient times and still today, despite missionaries and various foreign empires unsucessfully trying to end the practice in places like Fiji, Pohnpei, Yap, and many other archipelago communities.
- In pre-Christian Europe, alcohol is known to have played various roles in spiritual contexts, and modern Pagan revivalists follow suit with a ritual called "Cakes and Ale" that ends most magical gatherings. The "ale" may be any number of drinks in practice, from actual ales, to wine, to honeyed mead. Mead is especially important to practitioners of the Northern Tradition, and a mead libation is component of almost every blot, or worship service. Pagans also have a much more relaxed attitude toward other psychoactive drugs, considering them a valid if not optimal way to reach the divine.
- It's not just alcohol, even in Europe. In ancient times, it's thought that Hellenistic temple priestesses used various psychoatives to help them produce oracular pronouncements, and opium seeds played a role in many magical-medical healing rites; revivalist groups have attempted to resurrect both customs on occasion. Some here may recognize the name of Aleister Crowley, founder of the Thelema religion, who highly encouraged the use of opiates among his followers.
- The New Age Movement, a disparate collection of apocalyptic faiths and practices from the early 20th c onward, is well-known for its embrace of various psychoactive drugs as a tool to help new followers release their minds from material confinement. After the discovery of LSD, many New Age groups were early adopters.
- Tobacco played a role in many religious ceremonies of the US Northeast and Canadian southeast in the pre-Colonial period, and was part of the usual herbarium to be found in any medicine-worker's bundle.
- Advocates for cannabis usage will be quick to tell you about the vast array of religious uses of the substance, starting from ancient times in the Indian subcontinent where the plant was first cultivated and spreading to many other places. Cannabis usage in religious settings was especially popular in the Americas when the plant began to be imported, and is today used by the Native American Church in the US and in the Rastafarian movement of the Caribbean, in which tradition it is called ganja and is used in a context similar to that of the Eucharist.
- Sacred Datura is a common weed throughout Central and North America, and its seeds and flowers can be processed into a psychoactive agent; the name of the plant should be a hint as to its religious context in pre-Columbian times. The side effects of the drug are severe enough to make it unpopular as a recreational drug, so unlike most of the others mentioned above, its primary use in the modern world is spiritual rather than secular. It creates full-blown hallucinations, and is used by medicine-workers to take extended "journeys" into the spiritual realm to retrieve lost souls and witness events happening far away or at other points in time.
- In the Amazon basin, shamans have used any number of different psychoactive drugs to initiate similar trips into the spiritual realm, the most well-known being the Ayahuasca herb around which a modern medical tourism craze has been building over the last few decades. There are many others, though. For instance, Yanomami-speaking peoples use a drug called yakoana, which is said to make normally invisible spirits visible to the person who imbibes it.
-The Huichol-speaking peoples of the Sierra Madre of Mexico make an annual pilgrimage to the location where the psychoactive Peyote plant was said to have first been granted to humanity by the Gods as a way to allow temporary transit to their realm. Famously, the Peyote plant left the region and became the central practice of a widespread apocalyptic religious movement in the 19th century, spreading rapidly throughout much of the territory still autonomous from European rule during that era - what later became the Plains region of Canada and the US, throughout the Caribbean coastal regions, down into Southern Mexico, and many other places. Of the many syncretic influences that combined to create the Native American Church, the Peyote movement was the most influential, and the substance still plays a sacramental role for members of the church. The NAC strongly advocates against the legalization of peyote itself for recreational use, for fear that popularization and industrialization could easily lead to the extinction of the wild plant, which only grows in a handful of regions.
The above is not an exhaustive list, just what came to mind. Humanity's relationship with the spirit realm has been aided by various psychoactive agents since long before the historical record begins, and on every continent.
