Jonathan Ott

1949 — 2025

With great sadness, late last week I learned of the untimely passing of an esteemed colleague and friend – Jonathan Ott. Members of the psychedelic community will be well familiar with Jonathan’s work. 

Jonathan was an ethnopharmacologist, natural products chemist, psychonaut, teacher, and scholar of all things psychedelic. He cultivated a warm personal relationship with R.Gordon Wasson, who was his mentor in many respects. He was also close to Albert Hofmann, and was the translator for Hofmann’s book, LSD: My Problem Child (1979). He also was a colleague of Richard Evans Schultes and published numerous papers  in the Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets. His work was widely published in other venues, including the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, the Entheogen Review, High Times, Lloydia, and elsewhere.

Jonathan wrote extensively about psychedelic plants, and fungi and his contributions to the published literature in the field are notable. The books published by Ott as sole author include Ayahuasca Analogs: Pangaean Entheogens (1995), The Age of Entheogens and the Angel’s Dictionary (1995), Pharmacophilia: The Natural Paradise (1997) and Shamanic Snuffs or Entheogeneic Errhines (2001) and many others. His most widely known contribution to the field is his massive and comprehensive compendium, Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs: Their Plant Sources and History (1993) which has stood the test of time as a major reference on this topic. 

He was also an enthusiastic collaborator, and shared co-authorship on many notable publications, such as the Road to Eleusis with R. Gordon Wasson, Carl A. P. Ruck, and Hustom Smith (2008 edition) and Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion (1986), co-authored with R. Gordon Wasson, Carl A.P. Ruck and Stella Kramrisch. Ott is credited with proposing the term ‘entheogen’ as a more appropriate alternative to ‘psychedelic’ as a descriptor of these plants and fungi. 

Ott was anything but an armchair ethnopharmacologist. In the spirit of Sasha Shulgin, Ott actively investigated the properties of  obscure psychedelic (or entheogenic as he would prefer) plants and preparations, carefully documenting the results of his sojourns to the outer fringes of entheogenic psychopharmacology, using his own body as the testing laboratory. Many of his investigations pointed the direction to novel entheogenic formulations such as those documented in his book Ayahuasca Analogs, While this work provided a roadmap for many an aspiring psychonaut, it also provided useful cautionary notes for those tempted to replicate his work. 

Jonathan Ott has now  left this corporeal plane and taken his rightful place in the pantheon of psychedelic luminaries. He and his work will be long remembered. And he will be missed. 

Dennis McKenna
Abbotsford, BC