R. Gordon Wasson, who documented the use of psilocybin mushrooms among indigenous people in Mexico, employed a two-part strategy in his writings on psychedelics. He first worked to open scientific research beyond institutional boundaries, creating deinstitutionalized knowledge networks. Recognizing that such openness makes knowledge communities vulnerable to exploitation, he then drew on ancient mystery cults, especially the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, to establish protective silences within these open networks. This interplay of openness and mystery offers a model for thinking about information flows that can enrich current intellectual property debates.
Two first-person accounts of psychedelic therapy from the early 1960s, written by women under pseudonyms, show how female authors navigated access to authoritative discourse in mid-twentieth-century life-writing. Constance Newland's My Self and I and Jane Dunlap's Exploring Inner Space use realistic description to connect readers to their drug experiences while employing metaphor to make familiar worldviews seem strange. By alternating between reader recognition and estrangement, the authors cultivate empathy as a tool for reform, challenging conventional literary and scientific narratives and creating new representational space for altered states of consciousness.
The discourse around psychedelics is fraught with problems: their effects on humans are mostly illegal, yet exploration persisted after their prohibition in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The article examines this issue through the perspectives of four prominent psychedelic outlaws—Terence McKenna, Philip K. Dick, Timothy Leary, and John Lilly—who continued their explorations and wrote extensively. A key paradox is the prolixity of writing about experiences often described as ineffable. The author also incorporates her own encounters with a language from the psychedelic realm, responding to the call for new language to communicate about and with the spheres of experience accessed through psychedelic self-exploration.