Historians on Drugs: Toward an Empirical Historiography of Global Psychedelic Cultures
South Atlantic Quarterly April 1, 2025 Joseph Christian Greer 10 citations
Scholarship on the global history of psychedelics is divided between two rival approaches: pharmacological Calvinism, which stigmatizes mind-altering drugs and their users as degenerate or antisocial, and the entheogenic school, which presents psychedelics as the secret key behind religious traditions and mythology. Both are hindered by ideological biases. An empirical approach offers a corrective by drawing on granular primary-source research and situating psychedelics within the broader human story of ecstasy and transpersonal relationality, without claiming they are a key to any tradition.