Psychedelicism

Discussion questions:

• Nomenclature: psychedelic versus entheogen. What are the common and divergent implications of these terms?
• Psychedelicism is defined by Greer in the chapter The Psychedelic Church Movement as “the broad system of beliefs that disassociates the brain from the mind, and likewise posits that the mind can be ‘expanded’ to perceive higher knowledge through the use of psychedelic drugs.”
  • How satisfying/sufficiently descriptive is this twofold definition?
  • How unique is this twofold definition to 20th-century Western psychedelicism?
• To what degree is it appropriate to conceptualize “The Psychedelic Church” as a unified abstraction analogous to the way one might speak about the totality of Christianity as “The Church”?
• Greer says regarding persecution of psychedelicists by the United States government: “their (the U.S. government’s) actual motivation (for persecuting psychedelicists) was social control.”
  • Can we speak of a complex entity like the U.S. government as having a singular vector of “actual” motivation?
  • To what degree is “motivation” of complex entities historically knowable?
• The histories of psychedelicist fellowships such as Brotherhood of the Common Life were gripping and compelling to me. Thank you for illuminating these fascinating narratives! Given that psychedelicist fellowships like BCL seemed to have a positive social vision and ambition (as opposed to an exclusively anarchistic or annihilistic ambition), are there categories other than “counter-culture” that might well-describe various psychedelicist efforts, e.g., subculture or alternative culture projects?
• Political note: my understanding is that the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) exists as an independent entity from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) specifically because the alcohol lobby shells massive money into the National Institutes of Health for the purpose of categorically differentiating “alcohol” and “drugs” at the level of federal institutional consciousness. I would be very curious to “follow the money” of alcohol companies as it relates to campaigns to disrepute psychedelic substances; including keeping an eye to present-day political battles over the scheduling of psychedelic substances in research and therapy.
• It’s a fascinating paradox to me that psychedelicists like Hubbard and Huxley were instrumental in Bill Wilson’s articulation of addiction recovery and sobriety fellowship. Are there additional historical paradoxes at the intersections of psychedelics and sobriety that come to mind? How open might you be to a speculative argument that these social paradoxes are in some way recapitulating (or organizing) lower-level neuropsychological paradoxes between psychedelics and sobriety?
• In the 1960s, you note that the explicitly-named Harvard Psilocybin Project was organized. What pros and cons do you see to organizing a similarly explicit psychedelics coalition at Harvard today versus operating more discretely to conduct interdisciplinary examinations of psychedelia?
• You note that the Harvard Psilocybin Project was driven by a messianic vision: was this key to its successes? Central to its downfall? Both? Neither?
• You also note that the Harvard Psilocybin Project abandoned the objective scientific model of patient observation. What possibilities, if any, do you see for truly interdisciplinary and mixed-methods studies of psychedelics at Harvard that include–but are not limited to–objective scientific methodology?
• Why aren’t there more biopics about Timothy Leary??
• It’s both striking and intriguing to me how much religious fervor is infused in the psychedelicist movement. What do you make of this? In particular, to what degree do you see these expressions of religious fervor as authentic and essential to psychedelia versus strategic and political maneuvers designed to navigate the U.S. Constitutional machine?
• How do you qualify the following as terms of art in the history of psychedelics?
  • spiritual
  • sacred
  • ritual
  • sacrament
  • religious
  • religion
• I love the section on Midwest Psychedelicism. A major peeve of mine (and my husband’s, who is an academic historian) is the ways in which coastal histories can suck all the oxygen out of history’s lungs. Please lean further into these tellings and analyses.
• Renaissance versus revolution: what is the tinder and what are the sparks that ignite the latter from the former? When, if ever, is it ethical for the former to become the latter? Where are present-day currents of psychedelicisms positioned on this gradient landscape of renaissance and revolution?
• Commercialization and commodification: what is gained and what is lost when counter/sub/alternative cultures cross this Rubicon? (And is it a Rubicon of no return?)
  • Similarly, what are gains and losses associated with popularization and mainstream acceptance?
  • Even more specifically, what gains and losses are associated with popularization of Ayahuasca religions? (Spoiler alert: I have feelings.)
• How is the internet fundamentally changing the game for “Psychedelicism 2.0” compared to version 1.0?
• Evelyn Underhill, among others, heuristically distinguishes magic and mysticism on the basis of self-assertion (magic) versus self-emptying (mysticism), ref. Practical Mysticism. Playing in the sandbox of these distinctions, how are psychedelics variously used for “magic” versus “mysticism”?
• Drawing largely from my husband’s work on 20th-century gay history, there are arguments that the Stonewall uprising (1969) was more epiphenomenal than causal, i.e., that social change in the dimension of acceptances and affordances for homosexuals was the slow work of decades-long antecedents to the events at Stonewall. In other words, the popular concept of Stonewall as the apex of gay activism is not historically tenable. By way of rough analogy, to what extent might the perception of 1960s hippies as the apex of psychedelic culture be an artifact of something far more basic such as the novelty of color television, i.e., the ability to visualize the agents of counter/sub/alternative cultures in new and broader ways?
• What significance does material versus digital distribution of zines carry, and vice versa?
  • Relatedly, what differences descriptively and evaluatively emerge from the temporal and editorial variables of material versus digital zines and their like?
  • Lastly on this theme, how might the material-to-digital transition of Psychedelicism 1.0 to Psychedelicism 2.0 change the demographics of zine and zine-like consumers, and what sociocultural impacts might these demographic changes have?
• Any musings or reflections on the “critical mass” that is necessary to impact social and cultural change?
• You mention future work on “post-anarchism”. Can you give us a sneak preview of what this work might examine?
• Any other musings or reflections?