<p>Reports of psychedelic experience often include encounters with gods, spirits, or ineffable presences that appear authoritative yet resist stable theological identification. This article argues that such figures are best understood neither as authentic revelations nor as mere hallucinations, but as placeholders: formal positions within recursive processes of experience that organize coherence, surrender, and awe without requiring a determinate referent. Drawing on a prior account of recursive identity and ego dissolution together with phenomenological approaches to religion, the paper traces the problem of reference across ethnographic, theological, and clinical contexts, reconceives psychedelic figures as products of saturated self-referential loops, and develops the placeholder concept through Otto, Marion, Nancy, and Caputo. It argues that psychedelic religion does not primarily disclose metaphysical truths about divine beings but clarifies the structural condition under which the Divine appears. The placeholder god thus names divinity as a formal position: authority without referent, coherence without ground.</p>