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.
South Atlantic Quarterly
April 1, 2025
Erika Dyck
2 citations
This historical survey traces the long human engagement with substances, plants, and fungi later classified as psychedelics, drawing on archaeological, anthropological, botanical, and clinical evidence. It emphasizes the diverse ways societies have made sense of mind-altering experiences, from early ceremonial and clinical uses to the dramatic shift brought by the war on drugs in the late twentieth century, which recast psychedelic exploration and its seekers in a negative light.
South Atlantic Quarterly
April 1, 2025
Lana Cook
1 citation
Psychedelic experiences expressed in literature and art provide affective maps that guide readers through imaginal landscapes of sensation and feeling, opening moments of cognitive alterity and inviting alternative ontologies. The essay connects psychedelic aesthetics with affect theory, cognitive science, and systems thinking, drawing on writings from the 1960s and 1970s by Anishinaabeg elder Keewaydinoquay Peschel and health figure Adelle Davis, read through contemporary Indigenous thinkers Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. These psychedelic stories and performances invite readers to imagine new possibilities for navigating life with greater awareness of interconnection within wider ecological and metaphysical systems.
South Atlantic Quarterly
April 1, 2025
Ramzi Fawaz
The beneficial effects of psychedelic medicines such as LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA—including reduced anxiety and depression and feelings of interconnectedness—are linked to how individuals interpret their affective and visceral experiences during use. This special issue argues that the transformative potential of the current psychedelic renaissance lies in cultural analysis of these experiences. While cautioning against viewing psychedelics as cure-alls, the collected essays explore how psychedelic experience, as a lived and embodied event shaped by personal context, can cultivate cognitive skills and affective orientations needed to reframe responses to global crises like climate change and mental health. The term “imaginaries” captures the diverse perspectives on psychedelic experience beyond the laboratory.
South Atlantic Quarterly
April 1, 2025
Patricia Dailey
Literary experience and psychedelic experience share a common structure of displacing, suspending, and refiguring reality. Medieval literary forms such as the dream-vision, the journey, and the psychomachia offer transformative spaces akin to those produced by psychedelics. Understanding this filiation helps explain why narrative plays a crucial role in psychedelic therapy as an integrative practice. The essay argues that affiliating psychedelics with literary and poetic language provides a richer critical vocabulary for describing psychedelic therapy and its mechanisms.