Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Colin H. Simonds
1 citation
Some approaches to psychedelic Buddhism borrow from Indigenous plant medicine traditions without proper respect, while others collaborate and honor those roots. By examining these approaches through Indigenous concepts of authority and Buddhist tradition, the work shows how to understand new blended psychedelic practices and develop more ethical relationships with Indigenous cultures in psychedelic spirituality.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Jeffrey Breau
1 citation
At Burning Man 2023, the Cloud-9 Camp's night-long ceremony with the psychedelic 2C-B began with an intention-setting ritual, a common practice among psychedelic users. This chapter analyzes the form and function of that ritual, drawing from ethnographic observation and interviews with the 14 camp members who participated. The ritual served as an entry into the altered state of consciousness, and the analysis explores why intention setting is ubiquitous in clinical, spiritual, and personal psychedelic use.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Alex Gearin
The spaces where psychedelic experiences occur are not neutral; environments like forests, urban retreats, or clinics actively shape the affective and perceptual dimensions of the experience. The concept of "psychedelic atmospherics" is introduced to examine how materialities, spaces, and environments intertwine with cosmological and cultural realities to influence psychedelic sessions. Atmospheric elements can guide, amplify, or challenge the visionary and affective qualities that emerge. Recognizing this opens new avenues for ethnographic study and practical considerations in therapy, spirituality, and research.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Jeffrey Breau, Paul Gillis-Smith
Since the 1960s, Harvard Divinity School has been a central hub for research on psychedelics and religion, yet building a rich scholarly community around this field is still in its early stages. The Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology, drawn from the 'Psychedelic Intersections: Cross-cultural Manifestations of the Sacred' conference, presents original interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of psychedelics, religion, medicine, race, Indigeneity, law, the underground, history, and anthropology. The volume frames psychedelics as intersections where unlikely groups meet and as intersectional forces that challenge existing conceptions of power, law, and spirituality. It invites readers to imagine multidisciplinary, collaborative, self-critical scholarship that is attuned to complexity and diversity.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Osiris González Romero
Understanding the Aztec deity Xochipilli—associated with songs, flowers, joy, games, and fertility—demands a combination of historical, iconographic, and philological methods. This analysis offers new interpretations of rituals involving psychedelic plants linked to Xochipilli, which have often been neglected. These rituals reveal a deeper understanding of the Aztec worldview, showing how psychedelic plants gained cultural and spiritual significance within their mental landscape.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Michelle Lhooq
Cringe, the uncomfortable feeling of embarrassment or awkwardness, can be used to diagnose what has become stale in the rave scene and to argue for reclaiming a transcendent spirit. Although cringe may never be fully escaped, the strong emotions it signals act as a shock collar, alerting participants to behaviors and beliefs that were once radical but have since become outdated and cliché. The essay argues for instrumentalizing cringe to advance the psychedelic music scene beyond its current cringe and capitalist phase. Change cannot happen without cringe.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
J. Christian Greer
The concept of 'counterculture' is too vague to describe the rapidly evolving communities, scenes, and networks that emerged from the religious awakening sparked by psychedelics in the mid-1960s. An alternative framework called 'psychedelicism' is proposed to better capture the nuances and complexity of both historical and contemporary psychedelic groups.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Victoria Litman
In the United States, regulated access to psychedelic substances currently exists only through a "facilitated use model," where a person takes the substance in a controlled setting under a trained facilitator or clinician. Two states, Oregon and Colorado, have passed laws allowing access without a doctor's prescription, while pharmaceutical companies pursue FDA approval for psychedelic medicines. Federally permitted religious use also occurs in certain churches. No other models for regulated psychedelic access exist in the U.S. at this time.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Brad Stoddard
Across the United States, people are increasingly using illegal psychedelics and cannabis—substances they call entheogens—in religious or spiritual ceremonies to commune with creators, ancestors, or the spirit world. While the U.S. government has granted some groups exemptions from drug prohibition, most practitioners operate without such exemptions, confining them to what scholars call the underground. This essay argues that the state is not absent from these underground communities; rather, it is the primary curator of them. The state's influence pervades these spaces, as demonstrated by examining the legal structures and case law affecting entheogenic churches, especially the role of attorneys who advise them.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Franklin King Iv
Psychedelics are not just molecules but also a concept onto which people project biases, agendas, and beliefs, leading to polarized and often poorly defined debates. The author, a psychiatrist studying psychedelics, argues that exploring these hidden meanings—the idealistic and unacknowledged aspirations projected onto these substances—can clarify charged discussions in media, academia, and public discourse. By bringing these projections to light, the field can be better navigated and potentially rescued from internal conflicts.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Julián Sánchez González
Annie Dillard's 1974 book A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, reflects a personal spirituality Dillard later called 'spiritual promiscuity'—a blend of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Sufism. This mixing of traditions was part of a broader countercultural reaction in the 1970s against monolithic religious systems, where individuals asserted autonomy by building innovative, personal spiritual systems. The psychedelic movement and psychedelic experiences of the era fostered perceptions of interdependence between humans and non-human entities, heightening curiosity about non-hegemonic spiritualities and making interdenominational exploration a cultural zeitgeist.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Candace Oglesby, Yvan Beaussant
BIPOC therapists face unique challenges and barriers to entering the psychedelic therapy field, according to a qualitative study. The research was sparked when a therapist of color was the only non-white clinician on a psilocybin-assisted therapy trial for depression in cancer patients, which also had few patients of color. The study aimed to fill a research gap by examining these experiences, potentially supporting BIPOC clinicians in the field.