SAN FRANCISCO — If the Bay Area’s Church of Ambrosia had a Christ-like icon, it would be a psychedelic mushroom, and if it had a promised land, it would be the “playa” at Burning Man — and you can find that story on the church’s walls in a sprawling mural by an artist who goes by “Free Rolando.”
The Zide Door Church of Entheogenic Plants identifies itself as an interfaith religious organization that celebrates psychedelic mushrooms as a sacrament to “connect people with their soul to help them understand why they’re here and what they’re supposed to do,” Pastor Dave Hodges, founder of the Church of Ambrosia religion, told Hyperallergic.
Zide Door, the name of the Oakland branch, was raided by police in 2020 with a “bad warrant” for marijuana felonies that didn’t exist after California legalized weed in 2016, Hodges claimed. In 2019, Oakland deprioritized investigating the distribution and consumption of magic mushrooms, setting the stage for the church’s membership to become the largest megachurch in America, as reported by Forbes, and keeping Hodges a free man (for now).
I sent and received 48 emails and visited the church’s Oakland and San Francisco locations before I finally met with the tech bro-turned-shrooms pastor, putting him at the top of my list for hardest-to-reach sources. I learned that Hodges had been at Burning Man — where he said he first came up with the idea for the church years ago — delaying our interview for weeks.
If authorities were to raid the Oakland church again, they would find a calming piece of art that documents the religion’s doctrine and is meant to “recreate a psychedelic trip,” as Hodges puts it. In the San Francisco location, Hodges said he brokered a deal with the art gallery that occupied the space before him, Arttitude, to leave the paintings on the walls.
Hodges commissioned his friend and early religious disciple, Rolando, to design a mural throughout the entire Oakland church, with a few stipulations.
“The instructions I gave them were, you know, to incorporate all religions because we’re a nondenominational interfaith church,” Hodges said. “And be as diverse as possible, and [add] mushrooms and apes throughout it.”
When I asked what Rolando’s last name was, Hodges replied, “I don’t know.” I tried to track down Rolando — who Hodges said is “notorious” for being difficult to reach — through the church’s publicist, Pastor Dave’s personal assistant, and Pastor Dave himself. He eventually replied.
“The mural, like most of my work, has been primarily free-hand,” Rolando, who still declined to disclose his full name, told Hyperallergic. “A large part of the process is watching paint dry, literally sitting in front of the mural and letting my mind and creativity figure out what’s next.”
Describing his vision for the interior of the church, Hodges said that he wants visitors to feel like they’re on a psychedelic trip as soon as they step inside.
“You can never predict the things that you see. There’s everything from ancient ruins to fairies and dragons and all sorts of different things that you come across when you’re really going deep into these places,” Hodges said.
Rolando started the mural 10 months ago and remains a work in progress. He said he comes at night to avoid disrupting the church’s operations, often for 12-hour shifts.
“I paint until exhaustion,” Rolando said.
Hodges met Rolando at Burning Man, where he started a religion as part of the festival called “The Church of More Pot,” the predecessor of the Church of Ambrosia.
“I was doing a kind of joke,” Hodges told Hyperallergic. “But it really became way too serious over the years.”
“I’ve spread the good word of smoking more pot out on the playa, and Rolando was one of my followers to that religion,” Hodges said.
In 2019, Hodges tried magic mushrooms for the first time and decided to incorporate the practice into the Church of Ambrosia, which had been founded on cannabis sacraments. The church outlines shrooms dosage amounts and their alleged spiritual outcomes, from microdoses up to the “breakthrough dose.”
“[Mushrooms] dissolve the border between this world and the next,” Hodges said. “Doing breakthrough doses, which is the stuff I specialize in, is like taking a sledgehammer and knocking down that wall, and the first thing on the other side is your soul.”
The apes and mushrooms painted on the wall reflect a core doctrine of the church, Hodges explained, called the “Religious Evolution Theory” or the “new stoned ape theory.” Coined by the Church of Ambrosia, it stipulates that “Magic Mushrooms catalyzed both the evolution of human communication and the emergence of religion itself” beginning with “our ancestral apes.”
When I visited the church, I was immediately terrified by the building’s security, including at least two buff men in what looked like bulletproof vests monitoring an intense surveillance system complete with mugshots of what I assumed were blacklisted individuals. I was asked not to photograph members out of respect for their privacy.
Rolando’s mural becomes more expansive as you enter the space, and in the waiting room, I saw shades of green I’d never seen before. What’s on the walls isn’t exactly what it appears to be: One segment depicts an octopus figure that, upon closer inspection, holds a tiny city in its head. It feels as though the artwork neither begins nor ends, and evidence of new, unfinished segments suggest that it might never be completed.
Observing the mural made my mind go so quiet I almost forgot that I was there to photograph the artwork and not just stare at it for hours.
When I asked Hodges if Rolando came in stoned to work on the art, he said, “More than likely.”
In what I was told was the “ceremony room” where Hodges delivers sermons, the images of mushrooms become concentrated, including small fungus sculptures at the base of a podium. His assistant told me they came from TJ Maxx.
“Prior to the pandemic, every Sunday at 4:20 pm I’d get up and we’d pass out joints,” Hodges said. “I’d talk about cannabis, mushrooms, other antigenic plants, and religion, but also my own experience with these high doses.”
Magic mushrooms can reveal whether you have an artist’s soul, Hodges said, comparing a psychedelic trip to the experience of viewing art.
“You see a lot of things that are beyond beautiful,” Hodges said.“It’s almost like an endless expanse of art,” Hodges said.
Rolando said he does not credit psychedelics to his creativity, but instead said he believes “mushrooms can be an accelerant and stimulant to human creativity, especially if your creative nature has been suppressed.”
Beyond founding a religion he once saw as a joke, Hodge said he believes he is helping people by providing access to magic mushrooms. Members of the church, he claims, have reported to him that they were able to get off fentanyl because they had legal access to shrooms. He also said he commonly hears that his followers have figured out what to do with their lives.
“To me, it’s some of the most important work that anybody can do,” Hodges said.
