This panel examines the way in which the extraordinary experiences occasioned by psychedelics are being reframed by religious meanings, and similarly how mind-altering drugs are reshaping religious and medical institutions in the West, as well as Western spiritual enguagements with indigenous communities. The panel opens with a paper analyzing the shifts in indigenous practices following the commodification of ayahuasca in South America by Western “spiritual tourists.” Likewise, the second paper draws from primary research on the Mazatec “wise women,” María Sabina, to challenge the dichotomization of “religious”/“medical” use of psychedelics within the modern West. Attenton then turns to the problematics of psychedelic science, as the third paper interrogates the way psychedelic Buddhism in the US informed the "Psychedelic Renaissance," and the panel will conclude with interrogations of religious biases that structure the way scientists have quantified "mystical experience" as a means of measuring the efficacy of psychedelic therapy.
Recent scholarship on substance commodification in South America has focused almost exclusively on the appropriative aspects of spiritual tourism or on governmental and economic departments of thought. There is very little scholarship which addresses the profound religious impacts caused by this commodification. This paper explores the possibility that Western commodification of culturally significant substances in South America is actively altering indigenous ritual practices. I examine recent modes of ayahuasca commodification and hybrid ayahuasca-Christian practice in relation to traditional uses. I propose that spiritual tourism and Western influence is creating new forms of indigenous traditions, co-produced from Western values and beliefs. I conclude that Western influences on the ritually significant ayahuasca have sparked notable changes in indigenous practices and in some cases created hybrid systems of belief – outcomes which emphasize the changes happening to ayahuasca ritual practice.
This paper builds on notions of centripetality and centrifugality in the context of psychedelic ritual and selfhood found in Chris Partridge and Erik Davis respectively, applying these motional dynamics to the study of chemical and plant mysticism. As has been well attested, the privatisation of stress inherent in models of psycho-pharmacy is myopic in its neglect of the social. Contrasting this to indigenous and syncretic ethoses proves informative, critical, and potentially instructive. In an academic field where ‘culture’ has a fundamental impact on the ‘preparation, set, setting, dose, integration’ paradigm, Theology inevitably informs clinical practice. The flat curvature of the MEQ, quantifying qualities as it does, suffices only to correlate ‘intensity’ with ‘efficacy’ defined as so-many-months-long symptom cessation. But relapsing among participants indicates the need for a deeper psychedelic infrastructure which motivates and mitigates the integration of mystical revelations into the kind of world it is worth inhabiting.
Researchers have been splitting hairs over the “religious” versus “medical” use of psychedelics, either in preference to one paradigm over the other, or in proliferating paradigms for including “healing” in religious space and spiritual sense-making in medical space. This problematic has defined psychedelic use in the Global North since the first encounters with María Sabina, the Mazatec “wise woman” from Oaxaca, who brought psilocybin mushrooms to the attention of English speakers. By way of an archival investigation of the Gordon Wasson Ethnomycological Collection, I argue that translators and researchers have fundamentally misunderstood their encounter with psilocybin mushrooms, and with Sabina herself, from the very beginning, unnecessarily bifurcating the medical and religious import of psilocybin. Scientific researchers’ attempts to make legible the medical benefits of psilocybin ritualizes a foundational oversight of alternative and ongoing relational approaches to psilocybin-containing life, an oversight that may be fundamental to a medical dogmatism.
This paper will follow the tenuous relationship between Buddhism and psychedelics in their North American contexts before analyzing how psychedelics are being reconsidered by today’s Buddhist communities. It will first provide a survey of how Buddhists understood psychedelics in their initial cultural moment and unpack how practitioners navigated some of the ethical and practical problems of psychedelic Buddhism. It will then look at how scholarship on Buddhism and psychedelics began reemerging in the nineties alongside the first signs of the psychedelic renaissance and how this later literature reflected a more mature, nuanced, and critical approach to the incorporation of psychedelics in Buddhist practice. Finally, this paper will analyze two syncretic, innovative approaches to psychedelic Buddhism in Spring Washam’s “Lotus Vine Journeys” retreat centre and Mike Crowley’s recent work on the origins and practice of psychedelic Buddhism to identify contemporary trends and speculate about the future of this movement.