Make Psychedelics Sacred Again

or, a requiem for a dream

Christianity must contain within itself all vocations without exception, since it is catholic; therefore the Church should be as well. But in my eyes, Christianity is catholic by right and not in fact. So many things are outside if it; so many things that I love and do not want to abandon; so may things that God loves, for otherwise they would not exist: All the immense expanse of centuries past, except the last twenty; all the nations inhabitated by races of colour; the whole secular life in the nations of the white race; in the history of these nations, all those traditions accused of heresy, like [the] traditions of the Manicheans and Albigenses; and all the things issuing from the Renaissance, too often degraded but not in fact without value.

— Simone Weil, Spiritual Autobiography (trans. Bradley Jersak)

The Lotus Eaters, Charles J. Staniland, 1883 (source)

Although I’ve tried to write even-handedly about the potential and pitfalls of psychedelic substances before¹, I have to admit that I was sent spiralling by the title of a recent-ish Substack post which simply said that psychedelics are not a shortcut to enlightenment.² From the title, I expected a long, painful reckoning with insights that seemed cosmically significant at the time but on reflection turned out to be at best near enemies of the truth³ . But no, when I actually read the post, I discovered that it only took a single disappointing acid trip to convince the author that the reason why psychedelics are not a shortcut to enlightenment is that enlightenment as such does not exist.

My first reaction was glib: it only took one dose! he’s a lucky one, isn’t he?

My second reaction was to reflect on what my first reaction revealed about my own much more circuitous journey to arrive at what on the surface may appear to be more-or-less the same place.

Would I have been better off if, in my twenties, I had discovered healthy human relationships instead of drugs?⁴ Most likely. But we don’t choose our path, at least not to start with. Ram Dass’s guru Maharajji used to say that God comes to the hungry in the form of food. Alan Watts liked to invoke Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: If the Fool Would Persist in His Folly He Would Become Wise.⁵

Although there’s no such a thing as a “typical” experience with psychedelics, something like the following scenario is not unheard of:

You’re smart, you’re curious, you’re probably a bit shy. You made it through childhood and adolescence relatively unscathed, but you still feel… a bit lost. You’re struggling with like a lot of existential angst. And reading French Existentialists isn’t cutting it anymore.

So you hear about psychedelics from Alan Watts/Terrence McKenna/Sam Harris/Joe Rogan, and you are intrigued. So you read a few books: How to Change Your Mind, The Doors of Perception, The Joyful Cosmology. Or maybe you read those books afterwards, it doesn't really matter, time is a flat circle.

So you have your first experience of an entheogen and…

IT BLOWS YOUR MIND!

You feel like you are reborn. You feel like a New Person. You feel that you have finally woken up. You realise that Everything Is a Miracle. You realise that God is all around you and inside you and Everywhere and Nowhere all at once. And you want to share this message of love and peace and hope with everyone!

But when you try to explain this to people, they look at you like you’re crazy.

So you wonder: am I crazy? Have the drugs made me crazy?

So you find an integration circle where you feel safe to be vulnerable and you bare your soul.

And everyone in the circle is so loving and affirmative — it’s like a little patch of heaven on earth.⁶

You might view the circle as an opportunity to make friends with like-minded people. You might decide to join a group chat. The group chat probably starts out with sweet little affirmations and weird memes⁷ and ends up, well, ends up where you can imagine an unmoderated forum for socially awkward people who all recently experienced being LITERALLY GOD!! might end up.

Maybe you stop trying to find like-minded people.

Maybe you stop trying to change the external world.

Maybe you stay focused on your own journey.

Maybe you get obsessed with how Big Business is poisoning us.

Maybe you decide to Leave Society.

Maybe you realise that although psychedelics have certainly made it more interesting to be lonely, they’ve not actually made you less lonely, and that maybe you need to get off your high horse and admit that au fond you are no better than those basic bitches huffing poppers and listening to Charli xcx - Guess featuring Billie Eilish.

Following Nagel’s reasoning on the Absurd, such a trip can only be considered a letdown when measured against the irrational exuberance of some of the psychedelic pioneers. So let’s briefly rehash the high hopes⁸ of three stands of psychedelic optimism: the materialist, the spiritualist and the non-dual.

Timothy Leary exemplified material optimism, as is clearly articulated in this seven-point list from his 1977 book Neuropolitique:

I believe that a new philosophy will be created by those who were born after Hiroshima which will dramatically change the human condition. It will have these characteristics:

1. It will be scientific in essence and science-fiction in style.

2. It will be based on the expansion of consciousness, understanding and control of the nervous system, producing a quantum leap in intellectual efficiency and emotional equilibrium.

3. Politically it will stress individualism, decentralization of authority, a live-and-let-live tolerance of difference, local option and a mind-your-own-business libertarianism.

4. It will continue the trend towards open sexual expression and a more honest, realistic acceptance of both the equality of and the magnetic difference between the sexes. The mythic religious symbol will not be a man on a cross but a man-woman pair united in higher love communion.

5. It will seek revelation and Higher Intelligence not in formal rituals addressed to an anthropomorphic deity, but within natural processes, the nervous system, the genetic code, and without, in attempts to effect extra-planetary communication.

6. It will include practical, technical neurological psychological procedures for understanding and managing the intimations of union-immortality implicit in the dying process.

7. The emotional tone of the new philosophy will be hedonic, aesthetic, fearless, optimistic, humorous, practical, skeptical, hip. We are now experiencing a quiescent preparatory waiting period. Everyone knows something is going to happen. The seeds of the Sixties have taken root underground. The blossoming is to come.

Let’s see how each of these points of prophecy has turned out:

1. Science, the study of matter, has proven to be a poor guide to mind. Science fiction, too beholden to the fantasies of nerds and geeks (creatures that have little first-hand experience with the fullness of life), has proven to be bad style.⁹

2. The equation of an expansion in consciousness with an increase in control has proven to be a Luciferian illusion.

3. A mixed bag. Individualism has become more entrenched, but so has the centralisation of authority. The peer-to-peer surveillance state created by social media makes a mockery of “live-and-let-live” and “mind-your-own-business”.

4. The open expression of male heterosexuality has been spurned (often for good reason) and an open celebration of the “magnetic difference between the sexes” will come across as a tad fascistic in fashionable circles (but might also earn you a decent following on Substack). The mythical religious symbol of the new age is a sexy (but solitary) Mother.

5. Alas, the sequencing of the genome has not revealed any Higher Intelligence and attempts at extra-planetary communication have thus far been met with cosmic indifference.

6. Tao Lin is interested in near-death experiences; the rest of the culture persists in its denial of death.

7. The emotional tone of our era is hedonistic (when it isn’t anhedonic), philistine, fearful, “cynicism masquerading as optimism”, humourless apart from a few lols, (queer) theoretical, credulous and brat. So overall, I’d say we’re are not doing too badly on this one.

The terminus of Leary’s techno-optimist vision is perhaps best summed up by this meme:

In contrast, Leary’s erstwhile Harvard colleague Richard Alpert, who changed his name to Ram Dass, exemplified a more spiritual vision. In Ram Dass, Going Home, filmed towards the end of his incarnation at his home in Maui, Ram Dass recounts how Maharajji taught him that psychedelics can offer us a glimpse into the room in which Christ and the Buddha dwell, but only for a moment. The aim is to permanently reside there. Ram Dass was a bit hazy on how exactly this aim could be achieved: it had something to do with the mantra I am loving awareness. “The real work that you have to do is in the privacy of your own heart,” he said in a moving talk that Jon Hopkins incorporated into the final track of his 2021 album Music for Psychedelic Therapy:

Straddling the material/spiritual division was the advaita branch of psychedelic optimism, inspired by the Zen philosophy of D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts: Tat tvam asi... Enlightenment happens instantaneously… Nirvana and Samsara are the same thing... There is nothing but the Eternal Now (so you might as well buy that car)…

---

Nowadays, we all live in therapy culture, as we seem to need to remind ourselves on an almost weekly basis.¹⁰ So it is no surprise that psychedelics are now mainly marketed as a therapeutic aid for getting in touch with your exiled child parts on your journey of healing from intergenerational trauma.

But seeing as the technocrats are getting cold feet about labelling MDMA science-based medicine and the war on the war on drugs seems to be running out of momentum, it might be time to change tack. Maybe it’s time to re-conceptualise psychedelics as a religious sacrament (like in Huxley’s utopian Island¹¹).

Such a proposal may sound a bit far out, but it is not without precedent. Mike Jay tells a compelling story about the non-Western use of mescaline in this episode of Ethan Nadelman’s podcast Psychoactive, a treasure trove for drug nerds.¹² Mescaline occurs naturally in two forms: in the abundant San Pedro cacti across South America and in the much rarer peyote in Mexico and the South-Western United States. The conquistadors considered the ecstatic communal San Pedro ceremonies celebrated by the indigenous inhabitants of Peru to be a form of devil worship. The native people of North America traditionally used peyote as a medicine rather than a ceremonial catalyst, but after European settlers confined the Native Americans to reservations, they started holding secret ceremonies inside their tipis to try and recapture some of their ancient traditions. These practices were eventually formalised by the institution of the pan-tribal Native American Church which blends Christianity with native traditions, including the ceremonial use of peyote.

In my more Spenglerian deliriums, I wonder whether we Westerners find ourselves in a situation of spiritual deracination that is in some ways analogous to that of Native Americans at the end of the nineteenth century (without the material deprivation of course). It is widely acknowledged¹³ that we are living through a time of spiritual crisis and that neoliberalism, neoconservatism, globalism, nationalism, wokeism, anti-wokeism and cults of personality from Swiftieism to Trumpism to the even more cringe-worthy (but probably more wholesome) Kamala-ism¹⁴ are all piss poor substitutes for that Old Time Religion. But does such an acknowledgement require us to either accept this grim reality or to go back into the fold of spiritual institutions which have barely begun to acknowledge how they have failed in their claims to moral authority? Is there no other way?

Where is that legendary American start-up mentality when you need it?

So this is why, borrowing some Sixties-style psychedelic hope — if not optimism — I propose the founding of The Church of Jesus Christ and Mushrooms.

I will do a separate post on theological minutiae such as the ecumenical significance of the “and” in the Church's name, but for now, here are some fun “facts” about the Church:

• The Church recognises no founder¹⁵ and no saints.

• The Church traces its theological lineage through Murdoch and Weil to Plato and the mystery religions of Ancient Egypt.¹⁶

• The Church has no liturgy, but its guiding ethos is the Perennial Philosophy as described by Huxley:

The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. Why should this be so? We do not know. It is just one of those facts which we have to accept, whether we like them or not and however implausible and unlikely they may seem.

• The Church has no beliefs, but its teachings flow from knowing the following:

The World of Forms exists, if only in our minds. Nature is the manner in which the Forms manifest in material reality. Art is Nature by other means. We are Nature.

I don’t think The Church of Jesus Christ and Mushrooms will ever occupy a central position in the spiritual landscape, nor do I think it should. I’d be satisfied with a small little island of lotus eaters, where the recommended sojourn for most will be brief. Many will choose not to set foot on these fair isles at all, but we will still wave at them cheerfully as they sail past towards different shores (I promise we’ll have a better sense of humour than the other Benedict options¹⁷). The true vision is much greater than The Church of Jesus Christ and Mushrooms, you see, for it is a Grand Vision for the Cultivation of Myriads of Spiritual Gardens! Let one hundred metaphysical flowers bloom! We need

John Pistelli

’s Joycean religion¹⁸ and

Sam Kahn

‘s Pagan-Mormonism¹⁹ and

Alice Gribbin

’s mean girl aestheticism. We need

Blake Smith

to evangelise the gays and

Naomi Kanakia

to convince us that we’re not animals. We need White Dudes for Krishna and Queers for Jesus and Buber’s Gesammtkunstwerk. We need ninety-two other metaphysical movements!

We are all waiting for God — we might as well serve each other in the meantime.²⁰

1. See here, here and here.

2. I would normally link to the post in question, but the author seems to have deleted not only that post but their entire profile from Substack, which is also why I’m not referring to the author by name.

3. See footnote 3 here.

4. In Trip, Tao Lin distinguishes between psychedelics (psilocybin, LSD, THC), which he considers good, and drugs (meth, coke, heroin), which he considers bad. I think this is a useful heuristic (having done both mushrooms and meth, I have little doubt about which is more likely to harm both body and soul), but one needn’t be quite so categorical.

5. But of course they would say that, wouldn’t they?

6. Curtis Yarvin of all people has nimbly deconstructed the New Age practice of circling (or as he calls it, a Platonic orgy).

7. Luckily Substack now offers weird memes without the petty interpersonal drama of a group chat or the impersonal toxicity of X.com:

An alternative title for this post was Make Psychedelics Weird Again as a nod to the already tedious discourse on weird and the fact that someone’s sacred is someone else’s weird.

8. The jokes really wrote themselves in this one.

9. The increasing prominence of queer nerds and geeks has not solved the fundamental problem.

10. I’ve only partly read Arts Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, but I don't think her philosophical gloss adds much to the basic thrust of her father’s argument in his 1979 classic The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (it’s the subtitle that’s the crux of the matter). Her “expanded definition of the therapeutic” reads like a litany of gripes against modernity:

a view of the self as top priority and end point; interpersonal relations as instrumental toward that end; the self’s pursuit of projects of self-interest; mandated self-expression without structure and inhibition; enlistment of emotion and reason in furtherance of those projects; manipulative relations with others and with the self; an externalist vantage point on the self, as if seeing the self through the eyes of others; the dominance of the health paradigm as the basis for self-assessment; a functionalist physical and psychological model of health (health as the ability to function within an unquestioned social order); pop psychology as explanatory apparatus; a process orientation and programmatic solutions; social engineering; the monopoly of professional expertise over life skills; a seesaw between dependence and independence in place of interdependence; moral nonjudgmentalism; deprivatization of personal life; a rarified level of self-consciousness; and the absence of a transcendent commitment beyond the individual.

It we accept that our economic, technological and social infrastructure increasingly incentivises us to act as if we have a personality disorder (and I find this quite easy to accept), what does this analogy tell us about the practical benefit of an incremental diagnosis? Isn’t it like repeatedly telling a pathological narcissist that they are a pathological narcissist and expecting them to change their ways?

11. Island is a rather poor novel qua novel, but not without philosophical insight.

12. It is of course a synthetic form of mescaline which inspired Huxley to write The Doors of Perception, although as Jay mentions later in the conversation, it was already at the time being overtaken by LSD, mainly because the latter is much more potent and therefore much easier to produce and distribute en masse. I’m sure the full truth about the Native American Church is more complicated, but you see darling, I’m more of a gonzo mystic than a gonzo journalist.

13. Is it widely acknowledged, though? It certainly seems to be among those I pay attention to online. But in my daily life people rarely talk to me about their existential angst — or know what to say when I talk about mine. Perhaps, in the words of Paul Franz, I am merely “projecting a personal failing as a societal one”.

I sometimes wonder whether the Machine has the moral high ground after all. The putative followers of the crucified God enjoyed centuries of hegemony across large swathes of the planet — how did they score on the human development index compared to the reign of international capital? The Machine’s ability to fulfil our animal needs is unparalleled in human history. Am I really confident that we should be willing to sacrifice that security for a life that might be more “spiritually” fulfilling, whatever that may mean?

14. Oh for the Halcyon days of Bernie socialism!

15. I guess technically Mary Jane Eyre is the founder, but she has renounced any founding privileges and also disclaims any legal liability for any acts perpetrated by others in the name of the Church.

16. I thank

Sam J

for his recommendation of The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy which has strengthened my hunch that Weil’s vision for Christianity is closer to the Hermetic tradition than to most extant forms of Christianity.

17. In case you haven’t noticed, the Olympics Opening Ceremony’s cheeky little celebration of laïcité did not go down well among certain types of Christians:

The Bacchanal and the Communion Table

My Biblical knowledge aint what it used to be, but I can’t recall the bit where Jesus told his followers: Be ye maximally offended by the slightest provocation.

One doesn’t have to hearken back to Roman lions for a time when good, upstanding Christians were subjected to more active hostility than today. In this rather chilling investigation of the shadow side of Flower Power, Andrew Ferguson recounts the antics of the Diggers, which he describes as “a swashbuckling group of crypto-anarchists who moved among the hippies and tried to anchor their behavior in a larger revolutionary theory”. A striking illustration of the Diggers’ revolutionary praxis is provided by a happening called “The Invisible Circus” which they organised in 1967 after convincing “the board of Glide Memorial Church, a middle-class black congregation with countercultural sympathies, to lend their building for what the church board thought would be a political event.” Ferguson lifts some salacious details from the memoirs of a Digger called Emmett Grogan:

The party planners, Grogan explained, had turned the church kitchen into a “recreation room,” the centerpiece being a punch bowl filled with Tang, “spiked with salutary doses of acid.” The church offices upstairs were subdivided, hung with sheets, outfitted with mattresses and lubricants, and labeled “love-making salons.” The makeshift rooms were quickly occupied; a queue formed.

As a nod to the original cover story, a group of straights — a lawyer, a clergyman, a cop from community relations — was invited to join a panel discussion on the “Meaning of Obscenity.” As they made their presentations, a Digger crept into the glass case behind them and, as planned, displayed his genitals, clowning all the while. The audience, Grogan wrote, went wild with delight, but the clueless straights droned on. As the discussion wound down, a mattress was brought in, carrying a naked man and woman. The mattress was laid on the table in front of the panelists, and the couple had sex. There the discussion ended.

Back in the sanctuary, a vast, cathedral-like space, the large altar was covered with copulating couples, along with “a naked weight lifter standing on top of some sort of tabernacle in a beam of light, masturbating and panting himself into a trance.” A group of “teeny boppers” watched a circle of drag queens fellating one another; the girls giggled, reported Grogan. And so on. “Some Frisco Hells Angels in the back pews,” Grogan continued, “were being entertained by a beautiful woman in a Carmelite nun habit who kept shouting for ‘More!’ ‘More!’ and they were giving it to her.” Those crazy kids.

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think a self-indulgent denigration of what other people believe to be sacred is a serve. Blasphemy shouldn’t be a crime, but that doesn’t mean it is morally neutral. In an attempt to go beyond good and evil, I fear that the Western esoteric/avant-garde/countercultural/hypercultural traditions have too often got stuck in a pantomime of evil. I believe some sort of rapprochement with the Cross, if not the Church, is called for.

Yes, this is Christ/Nietzsche again, but as ever, the devil is in the details.

18. It remains a personal ambition, either in this lifetime, or (more likely) in a parallel lifetime in a part of the multiverse where I haven’t sacrificed so much executive function for “mystical insight”, both to read Joyce’s Ulysses and to listen to John’s six-part lecture on it. Since I have in fact read Middlemarch (I’m only half illiterate), this may be a good time to slink back into the pews of the Invisible College…

19. I stole the idea of making my own religion from Sam.

20. I recently spent a fair amount of time in St Thomas’ Hospital in South West London on account of my (this time literally) long-suffering gen z boyfriend’s status migrainosus. It was my first in-depth encounter with “socialised medicine”. And what did I see? I saw the greatest concentration of angels of mercy that I’ve come across in England’s green and pleasant land. Pity has a human face indeed. If we can recognise that there is more spirituality in the average hospital than there is in the average church, synagogue, mosque, temple or coven, that would be a step in the right direction.

(I was strengthened in this belief by the synchronicity of reading in a London hospital about Jake’s decision to become a porter in a London hospital in my first encounter with Murdoch’s delightful first novel.)

Also, the view from the hospital grounds is rather beautiful: