Walter Pahnke was both a physician and a minister. He ran the Good Friday Experiment in 1962 for his Ph.D. in Religion and Society at Harvard, with Timothy Leary as his principal academic adviser (Doblin, 1991).
Because no questionnaire for mystical experience existed, he built his own. Drawing on scholars such as William James and W. T. Stace, he defined categories including unity, transcendence of time and space, sacredness, positive mood and ineffability (Doblin, 1991). A 2023 review calls his typology the first psychometric measure of mystical-type effects and the starting point of today’s Mystical Experience Questionnaire (Mosurinjohn et al., 2023). He and William Richards wrote on experimental mysticism in 1966 (Pahnke and Richards, 1966).
His reporting has been criticised. Rick Doblin found that Pahnke’s thesis did not report that one participant was sedated with an injected tranquilizer, and that participants’ fears and struggles were played down; Doblin called the silence perhaps good politics but bad science (Doblin, 1991). Pahnke died in 1971, before he could follow up his subjects (Doblin, 1991).
Sources
- Doblin, 1991: Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment, a long-term follow-up (MAPS copy)
- Mosurinjohn, Roseman and Girn, 2023
- Pahnke and Richards, 1966: Implications of LSD and experimental mysticism
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