Video: Psychedelics and the Future of Religion: Expanding Mindscapes with Erika Dyck and Christian Elcock

December 07, 2023

As part of the Psychedelics and the Future of Religion Series CSWR Research Assistants, Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith engage in conversation with Erika Dyck and Christian Elcock to discuss their new book, Expanding Mindscapes. In this conversation Elcock and Dyck discussed what it means to write a global history of psychedelics, and of psychedelic psychiatry. ERIKA DYCK is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan. CHRIS ELCOCK is an award-winning independent historian of psychedelics who has authored Psychedelic New York: A History of LSD in the City along with several articles on the history of the American psychedelic movement.

Psychedelics and the Future of Religion, Expanding Mindscapes, December 7th, 2023.

JEFF BREAU: Welcome, everyone. My name is Jeff Breau and I'm a graduate student here at Harvard Divinity School, and a researcher with the Center for the Study of World Religions, where, along with Paul Gillis-Smith, I convened the Psychedelics Sacred and Subversive Reading Group. Today's event is part of the popular series on Psychedelics and the Future of Religion, which is now in its third year.

This is the last event in this series before the winter break but stay tuned for the spring events to be listed shortly. Sometime probably in early to late January, we'll have the next set of Psychedelics in the Future of Religion talks posted. This series is part of the center's larger, ongoing and evolving initiative called Transcendence and Transformation, or TNT for short. If you're interested in TNT, we'll put a link to the TNT page in the chat function.

As always, the best way to stay abreast of what we're doing at the center and its programming is to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which you can do at the center's landing page. To give you a sense of how today's panel will unfold, in a minute, I will turn it over to Paul, who will introduce himself and Dr. Erika Dyck. After that introduction, we will both disappear and Dr. Dyck will appear to discuss the recently released volume, Expanding Mindscapes, which she co-edited with Dr. Chris Elcock.

Once she is done presenting, I will briefly return to introduce Chris, who will share more about Expanding Mindscapes and will also discuss his wonderful book, Psychedelic New York, A History Of LSD In The City. After both speakers have presented, the four of us will appear and we will spend the remainder of our time addressing questions from the audience. And with that, here is Paul Gillis-Smith.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Hello, everyone. Welcome again. I'm Paul Gillis-Smith, grad student at Harvard Divinity School and researcher here at the Center for the Study of World Religions. It's been a pleasure working with my comrade Jeffrey here on all things psychedelia at the center and beyond, and our semester long conversation on the psychedelic relay between clinic, Indigenous settings, underground churches, festivals, dorm rooms, industrial squats and boutique retreat centers has been absolutely crucial in how Jeff and I have approached these events.

These conversations have left us questioning the often US centric historiography of psychedelic science, religion and culture and pushed us towards an ever greater insistence on the role that alternative histories must play in the discourse on psychedelic medicine. With that being said, when we began planning our programming months ago for this fall, as soon as we saw that both Chris's book, Psychedelic New York here today, and Chris and Erika's edited volume were set to come out this year, it seemed to be the most natural way to conclude our series on Psychedelics and the Future of Religion for this fall.

Given these relays between scientific, recreational and religious contexts, it is ever more urgent to look to alternative histories to imagine psychedelic futures. We expect that today's conversation will push the audience to consider how alternative framings of psychedelic religious history could disrupt the power structures, disorient static assumptions and usher in a more nuanced future. So without further ado, let me introduce our first speaker for today.

Dr. Erika Dyck is professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan and a tier one Canada Research Chair in the History of Health and Social Justice. For our American listeners here, that is a big deal. Her interdisciplinary research brings social sciences and humanities perspectives to scientific and medical subjects. And relevant to our event today, the history of psychedelics and psychiatric and religious contexts.

Her work has been published in medical, legal, economic, literary, philosophical, anthropological and historical venues. She's the author or editor of several books, including Psychedelic Psychiatry, LSD From Clinic To Campus, Facing Eugenics, Reproduction, Sterilization and the Politics of Choice, Managing Madness, The Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada, and is also co-editor on a tremendous volume entitled Psychedelic Prophets, The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond, as well as Culture's Catalyst, The Historical Encounters with the Native American Church in Canada and Peyote.

And most recently, and one of the subjects of our event today, Expanding Mindscapes, A Global History of Psychedelics with Chris Alcock. I Would also be remiss if I did not mention her forthcoming book, which I think will be of great interest to our audience, entitled Psychedelics, A Visual Odyssey, coming on April 16th of next year. On bicycle day. She is also co-lead on the Remember Rebuild Saskatchewan project that documents the wider impacts of COVID-19. Today, Professor Dyck will share some remarks about the co-edited volume, Expanding Mindscapes. Erika, the virtual floor is yours.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: Thank you so much. I'm glad I kept my screen off for that embarrassing introduction. It's really humbling and wonderful to be here, and I'm really excited to share this new project with you. So as Paul mentioned, I've been working on the history of psychedelics for about 20 years, maybe a little more than 20 years now, and the conversation has really changed a lot over the last two decades.

And so I'm really excited to be part of this volume, which really, I think demonstrates where-- maybe even the tip of the iceberg, but it really demonstrates where the conversation might go with respect to revisiting the history of psychedelics and removing the sort of North American centric focus that has often dominated this space. So as I mentioned to my co-panelists here, let not only-- excuse me.

Only an hour ago, I received my copy. So I'm really excited that it arrived just on time to give me some strength to get through this presentation. Well, without further ado, I'm going to launch into a bit of some prepared comments here. So when Chris and I were thinking about this project, we had a number of conversations about the kind of standard narratives within the history of psychedelics and the ways in which they sometimes caricatured certain events and double down on some of the US and Canadian focus in this history.

But we knew that there were glimpses of other expressions of psychedelia, whether in the cultural realm or other clinical applications of psychedelics. And again, I'm going to use or I'm going to use the concept of psychedelics here, but mean it in an inclusive way that stems back to include a variety of psychoactive substances that may not have been considered psychedelic when the word wasn't coined. So sacred plants, different kinds of substances, chemical and synthetic.

And I just show this collage of images as a way to start us off and get us settled into what I think is a really interesting opportunity, a really exciting opportunity to be a historian in this moment amidst the resurgence or renaissance of psychedelics as we begin to grapple with what it is we are, in fact, trying to revive in this moment. And I think if we skim the surface of some of the media content, we might gravitate towards certain trends, whether those are biomedical trends or not.

But I think if we do a deeper dive into a more dynamic, rich and diverse history of psychedelics, what we see is that actually there's a lot more at stake in this renaissance than changing the regulatory status of MDMA or psilocybin or LSD or even mescaline for that matter, although I don't think mescaline is on trial at the moment. So use this collage just to set us off to problematize our understanding of what psychedelic history might even involve and where we might seek out those kinds of roots, and I'll walk us through a few examples here in a moment.

So as Chris and I, and actually recall a number of walks we took, poor Chris arrived in Saskatoon as I had given birth to a very loud and crying baby. But he suffered through and we would go for walks because my daughter would be quiet sometimes and we would talk about the history of psychedelics and some of the exciting moments, but also some of the dominant figures who had carried the story or carried the narrative into the contemporary situation or into the renaissance period. And so these are just a few examples. You've got Haight-Ashbury and the kind of epicenter of psychedelia.

When we think of the counterculture in San Francisco, from that, we might imagine the emanating music scene, the drug scene, the poly drug use scene that takes place there, but also some of the art, the poster art and some of the other sort of technological changes that start to ricochet through Silicon Valley into the 1970s and 80s. I have this image of Timothy Leary here, closer to his final days as he himself is exploring different states of bringing together technology and psychedelics as he moved into a latter period in his life.

I have a shout out here to Ken Kesey and of course, the bus, Further, that toured America, allegedly full of merry pranksters in search of some alternate form of American living. And Allen Ginsberg, I wanted to represent here the sort of beat poets and poets and artists and literary figures who also fed into this psychedelic moment. And a lot of those stories and these names and these characters have become well known. You can find evidence of them on Netflix.

You can find them from the 1950s and 60s if you do a deeper dive on YouTube, but you can see those kind of ricocheting and resurging as well. Some of them are considered now kind of bogeymen of this period. You know, Larry maybe had ruined psychedelics for bona fide researchers, allegedly. But I think there's more to be done here as we problematize this. There are also other figures who may be less colorful as characters in this historic moment, but who are nonetheless really important within the history of psychedelia.

That have, again, sort of drawn together a variety of different themes and ideas around the Specter of ethnobotany and its relationship with psychedelia. So we think of Richard Schultes, the father of ethnobotany, of course, a Harvard professor who traveled through the Amazon and brought to the English-speaking world a number of, not only images, but stories and cultural contexts for understanding the ritualistic uses of a number of sacred plants, including many that were concentrated here in his very widely popular, The Hallucinogenic Plants Golden Guide, which came out in the 1960s.

And there are other stories that have sort of loomed large within this history. The discovery of the magic mushrooms. I put discovery perhaps in quotation marks here because, although it was discovered by American Banker, Gordon Wasson, in 19-- well, allegedly in 1957. It was published in 1957. Of course, the psilocybin mushrooms were well known to the Mazatec people of Mexico who had been using them both in healing and in religious ceremonies for a long time before that.

The correct or accurate origins of that are still debated, but certainly there's proof of pre-contact use of psilocybin mushrooms well back before the Spanish Inquisition codified that. And then, of course, as Paul mentioned too, the story of LSD, which is sort of caricatured here with Brian Blomerth's book. If some of you may have seen this really exciting cartoon that depicts the discovery of LSD and these sort of animalistic kind of characters, I'm not sure what he was going for there, but he's got a couple of different cartoon graphic novels like this.

So you can follow the story of Albert Hoffman and his trials and tribulations at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals when he takes his bicycle ride on the first intentional human use of LSD. And I'm not going to belabor those stories because I hope that those stories are at least somewhat familiar to you. And if they're not, you can watch a few different things readily available on Netflix. You can Google these terms. And these are the kind of stories that rise to the surface quite quickly.

The last one of what I'm going to unpack here as sort of a standard narrative or some of the narratives that are more well known are the clinical applications. We know that throughout the 1950s there were approximately 1,000 published reports about psychedelics in clinical settings. The stories have-- they do vary, though, in terms of how those clinical applications functioned.

We know that there's an evolving understanding of set and setting, which I'm trying to depict here, and this is actually a 1952 guide on how to design a room for optimizing the psychedelic effects. And of course, the sort of clinical spaces in which psychedelics are being studied, not only by participants themselves, that is staff, medical researchers, psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, but also how to safely apply these substances to patients and under what conditions.

And this brought out a whole variety of other kinds of stories, which I won't go into right now, but I'm happy to talk about in questions. What we wanted to do in this book, though, is get away from some of what we thought were more well-trodden stories about the history of psychedelics and try to understand where psychedelics traveled in the world. We know, for example, that psychedelics are naturally occurring in some parts of the world, but we didn't-- we had a dearth of stories or a dearth of narratives and evidence to draw from those other places.

And so one of the things that our reviewers encouraged us to do is map out some of the research that we were able to find, largely through digital repositories. And I love these maps because they're colorful and they're exciting. And I think there's work that we could do with them, but I'm also troubled by them because I feel that in some respects they represent the kind of research that we can now grasp through digital resources, through digital sources.

It's not necessarily an archivally based map. We didn't travel to archives all over the world to produce this, but I think it helps to set the tone for what the book offers, which is a deeper dive or a plunging into a psychedelic story that has been untold. And you can see this in, perhaps, in these maps. There's some familiar spaghetti straps here that you might see or spaghetti lines, and some others that you may wonder, why aren't these parts of the world included.

And part of the answer is just the reach of the internet. And also, I think, that helps us to appreciate just how little-- just how much psychedelic history is not online and perhaps won't be. So use that to just give you a bit of a sample of some of the things that you'll find in Expanding Mindscapes. And I apologize, this is not comprehensive. I've just chosen a few here that I thought might be of interest to the listeners here today.

So I really like that our authors took their cues from this idea that we wanted to take psychedelics outside of the North American context and also play with what we might even include in a context of psychedelics. So Ian Baker, as a religious historian who himself has sort of combined an anthropological or ethnographic study with a historical records to try to understand the Specter of Soma or the idea of Soma in India. And as he does this, he explores a variety of different ways of understanding, codifying and even talking about consciousness in West Bengal.

There are other authors who take us to parts of Africa. Again, a continent that was not well represented in some of those maps, but a place that we know is rich and has a diverse set of resources, both in terms of its religious history, but also in terms of the botanical history. So we have two different authors here, Julien Bonhomme and Timothy Vilgiate, who have both sort of helped to stretch our ideas about, not only misconceptions about in this case, we're talking about West Africa in both of these articles about Iboga, but also about how the Iboga rituals have come to be known to Western anthropologists.

It's timely and fitting that Hartogsohn and Itamar Zadoff have helped us to appreciate the context of psychedelics in Israel. They do this by drawing our attention to some of the ways that actors in Israel produce their own kind of cultural reaction to the birth of a new state, but also how they respond to American cues, American cultural cues about how to be psychedelic and how to be countercultural.

And be cognizant of time here, I don't want to take up too much time. And some of our authors move in different directions altogether. Beat Bachi uses agricultural history and comes-- sort of brings his studies of LSD in the fields to a greater understanding of how LSD production in Switzerland diverted attention and resources away from food production, even during a time of great need at the end of the Second World War, towards pharmaceutical production. And the image that you see here is a woman who was a psychiatric patient, who was actually sent out into the fields.

She's certainly not alone. She's just one we have an image of. But hundreds of patients were sent into the fields that were relocated into the Emmental Valley to get a wetter crop to produce higher supplies of ergot to bolster the pharmaceutical production in the first place. And here she is sort of inoculatong or impregnating the rye with a substance that's going to help to facilitate ergot growth. If you can imagine this very labor intensive practice that is being used with essentially labor that is not being paid but is considered therapeutic.

And so I think an example like this draws our attention to some of the political economy of LSD production, but also the human cost. And of course, there are a number of articles that help to stretch our ideas about the clinical applications that move away from some of the standard narratives about the emergence of the psychedelic turn or the psychedelic turn. One using lower doses in combination with psychoanalysis. But people like Zoe Dubus and Magaly Tornay draw us right into different experimental cultures in France and in Switzerland to help to appreciate how psychedelics fit into different kinds of clinical applications.

And I put an image here of chlorpromazine, because in Zoe Dubus's article, right in the same hospital that chlorpromazine or the first antipsychotic drug released in a big pharma sense, right down the hall, LSD was being applied to some of the same patients. And so here we have a kind of direct comparison of some of the different pharmaceutical promises that were on display in the early 1950s.

I didn't want to leave any authors out. So I apologize for the text heavy slide here. But we have a number of authors who continue in that vein and pull us into other jurisdictions. And here, and think specific to this audience, what I find really fascinating is how some of the authors have blended together different kinds of traditions, some of which are expressly a religious tradition, others very much in a clinical sense, and some, like in the case of Communist Czechoslovakia, were necessarily devoid of any religious overtones or contexts as researchers in Communist Czechoslovakia were allowed to continue using LSD beyond the time that was allowed most [AUDIO OUT] primarily in the west, but had to do so on a strictly secular basis.

We also know that there's a cultural turn with psychedelics, of course, that move outside of the clinic. And I gesture to this with Ido Hartogsohn's article with Itamar Zadoff, but Henrique Carneiro and Julio Delmanto also do this in Brazil, and they draw our attention to, again, what happens with a large American imprint on the counterculture that's associated with psychedelics. But here they pull us southward and they show that Brazil produces its own countercultural moment.

One that takes cues perhaps from the Americans, but definitely distinguishes it with their own form of music, their own form of poetry and their own radical edge, which is constrained in some respects by the military dictatorship that is also in place at the time. So I'll come to an end here right away. I just want to draw your attention to a couple of other articles. Hallam Roffey and Peter Collopy, both bring our attention to some of the political consequences of psychedelics. I shouldn't say consequences, more applications.

Hallam Roffey talks about acid anarchism in the United kingdom, and Peter Collopy takes our attention and brings it right into Silicon Valley to look at the way that psychedelics are informing our ideas about video, about technology, and think in some respects is a bit of a precursor to how the internet begins to inform some of these communities of thinking as well. So really taking a look at the influence on technology, but also the feedback of that technology and how we come to know psychedelics.

So I'll end here with what I hope is a provocative ending. And think you may be interested to know that this is also-- Alex Gearin has his own book coming out on this topic. It should be out in the spring. Alex takes us from a shamanic setting in Brazil and moves us to a very urban and ostensibly secular setting in Shanghai, where he explores the way that Amazonian brews with ayahuasca are being imported into a very different context.

And he explores how the kinds of rituals change within that context, but also how some elements of those rituals are retained in a very urban, a very sort of economic setting. He talks about business leaders coming together in these somewhat ritualistic ways, but how the language necessarily has to change to fit into a Chinese society that is very anti-ayahuasca, anti-psychedelics altogether. So if you want to grab a screenshot of this, feel free. These are the table of contents. And I apologize to authors whose works I didn't mention by name here.

It's not because they aren't great, I was trying to find a few different flows here to give you a quick example. And I also would be remiss if I didn't thank Chris Alcock, who really had the idea behind this book in the first place. But of course, Amy Fletcher and Kali Carrigan for their brilliant translations. Without translators, we could not have done this book. MIT has provided great support and we had some funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. And I'm, of course, grateful for all of it.

I hope-- this is my final slide. I hope that this book helps to kickstart a conversation about some of the rich and dynamic roots of psychedelics that especially in this moment, that we are considering a kind of renaissance or resurgence moment, especially in this moment, help to really generate some nuanced conversations about what it is we are trying to revive or protect in this moment. And perhaps that gives us some guidance going forward. Thanks very much, and I will pass it back to Jeff now.

JEFF BREAU: Thank you so much, Erika. I have to say, Expanding Mindscapes is probably the most interesting history of psychedelics I've read in a very long time. And you probably could have had, I don't know, five or six hours to talk about it and not gotten through all of the material. So I highly encourage everybody in the audience to go out and buy a copy. You will absolutely not be disappointed. And another book you could go out and buy is Christian Elcock's Psychedelic New York. And I have the privilege of introducing him to speak a little bit about that work.

Dr. Chris Elcock is an award-winning historian of psychedelics and he is co-editor of Expanding Mindscapes that you just heard about. His monograph, Psychedelic New York, A History Of LSD In The City, was published by McGill-Queen's Press in 2023. This project emerged from his doctoral dissertation in medical history, which was done at the University of Saskatchewan. And that dissertation came out in 2015 under the advisement of Dr. Erika Dyck.

In addition to these texts, Dr. Elcock has been writing about psychedelic history with a focus on American psychedelic history since the early 2010s. His articles have explored a wide range of topics, from psychedelic philanthropy to psychedelic patriotism to psychedelic philosophy in the 1960s. Throughout his work, his eyes ever tuned to overlooked elements of psychedelic history and his writing pushes readers to reconsider and reframe the field's grand narratives and assumed histories. I'm excited for him to speak about his work here today, and we'll turn the floor over to Dr. Chris Elcock.

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: Thanks, Jeffrey, for this really nice introduction. And thanks, of course, for the invitation. So it's wonderful to be here and to be talking about the history of psychedelic spirituality, because this is something that I was really interested early on, although I was coming at this particular history from a number of angles as you rightly told us, Jeff. But the spiritual import of the psychedelic experience was something that has always really fascinated me.

And so over the past few years, it's something I've paid close attention to as I was studying the history of the American psychedelic movement and, of course, more recently, publication of my book on the history of LSD in New York City, where I don't have a single chapter dedicated to this particular angle. But nevertheless, the spiritual understanding of the psychedelic experience is something that is well present in this book.

And of course, in our edited collection, we do touch upon spirituality and global spirituality in some cases. What I'd like to do here is not something as quite as ambitious as what we've attempted to do in Expanding Landscapes, but rather to offer a discussion about the birth of what I would call, psychedelic syncretism and the circulation of Eastern spirituality in the United States. And with ultimately a particular emphasis on the role India has played in the rise and the birth of this psychedelic syncretism. And so as a very quick disclaimer, I will not be examining Western interest in plant based rituals.

And so to begin with, I'm going to begin with a figure, an absolutely towering figure, I think, in the history of Western psychedelic spirituality, which is, of course Aldous Huxley. And so I won't go into his classic essays, The Doors Of Perception And Heaven And Hell, which were tremendously influenced and were the first attempts to articulate the psychedelic experience along spiritual lines. And what I think is worth noting is that Huxley explicitly framed this experience along the lines of Eastern spirituality as well as Christian mysticism as well.

And to me, this approach would stem from a book that he had published a few years prior to those influential essays, of course, The Perennial Philosophy in which he was trying to look for the universal core of the mystical experience. And so in his writings, we see a pretty explicit connection with psychedelics and Hinduism. I'll be getting back to Hinduism a bit later in this talk and to show how Hinduism became gradually the main point of reference to frame the spiritual psychedelic experience.

But first, I would like to stay in the 1950s. And of course, here the context, I think, is really important. And so with the rise of Zen Buddhism in the 1950s, which went back to the early 20th century, thanks to Sokei-an and Sasaki, the first Zen teacher to reach America and New York City. And by the 1950s, there's an even greater popularization of Zen Buddhism, thanks to Allan Watts, D.T. Suzuki, and of course, the Beats who quite freely borrowed from Zen Buddhism in their writings.

Now, insist on using the word borrowing because I think what I'd like to discuss today is the syncretic nature of this Western psychedelic spirituality. Because of the psychedelic drug experience was fundamentally quite different to the drugs that were previously available to people living in New York City, for instance, there was this greatness need for several points of reference.

And so in this way, it wasn't entirely surprising that some of them may have turned to Zen Buddhism. Of course, the Beats and others were quite selective in what they borrowed. And by the 1950s, there's this greater presence of Zen Buddhism in New York City can be embodied by the first Zen institute of America located in Greenwich Village where it was all happening. And so I have a pretty telling quote from the secretary of this first Zen Institute.

Generally, I quote, the crowd, the Beats and hips and others have just found out about Zen. Can't take the tremendous discipline Zen imposes, they turn around and run. So it was certainly a-- like I said, selective borrowings from Zen spirituality. Nevertheless, it was an early indication, I think, of what these psychedelic experimenters were going to borrow throughout the next few years. Another important aspect of the time is the religious awakening of the 1960s, and I think that is also another crucial aspect.

What the historian of religion, Robert Elwood, has called the move towards a more postmodern form of religion whereby God could be found within the individual and without the help of scriptures. And so I think this gradually as psychedelics became more popular, not just in New York but in other places, there is indeed this quest to reach God outside established religion and in some cases, through new syncretic churches.

And so I came across quite a bit of evidence of people in New York getting together. Have, for example, in my book mentioned the story of a group, including a Jesuit priest, who were carefully structuring their sessions with the Book of Tao, for instance. And as well, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Ed Rosenfeld, who passed away three years ago, unfortunately. And he was the founder of what was probably the first ever Western psychedelic church in the form of the natural church.

And so Ed Rosenfeld simply ordered a box of peyote through mail order. It was that simple at the time, and he would guide sessions using the I-ching. He was also influenced by Daoism and Confucianism. So here we also see a kind of a willingness to experiment spirituality. And so that is, I think, a cornerstone of these new forms of syncretic, psychedelic spirituality. And Ed was also friends with Arthur Kleps, who you may have known for setting up his highly idiosyncratic and highly iconoclastic church, the Neo-American Church on the Millbrook Estate.

So he was cohabitating with Leary and his crew in the 1960s. And so on the surface, when you look at this particular syncretic church, as you can see, you've got all these, frankly, provocative or downright silly elements like the motto of the church, victory over horseshit. The stated goals of the Neo-American Church were money and power. The hymns were puff the magic dragon and row, row, row your boat. And so here you get a pretty good-- you can look at it as part of this longer tradition of American iconoclasm.

If you dig a little deeper, what I find interesting you see, this is one of the-- so Kleps authored a Boo Hoo Bible. So he gave himself the title of Chief Boo Hoo and ordained, by the way, Ed Rosenfeld Boo Hoo At Large. Not really ever knowing what that meant. But here's the kind of cartoons that you'd find in the Boo Hoo Bible. And so on the surface, it looks zany and provocative. So Kleps had this visceral-- he was extremely suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church, which he saw as a racket.

And nevertheless, as you can see in these strips, you do see continuous references to Eastern spirituality, which would indicate that, regardless of the intentions of Kleps and his Neo-American Church, the Hinduism and Eastern spirituality had become really central to this new Western syncretic form of spirituality. And by the way, Kleps and-- both Kleps and Rosenfeld had also set up their religions hoping to be able to invoke the principle of religious freedom.

And in fact, Rosenfeld had done this before Timothy Leary used that strategy after his 1965 arrest for possession of cannabis. Now to move back into India and Hinduism, which, I think, became the dominant framework to understand the psychedelic experience in New York City In the 1960s. Here you have a picture of the Beatles in India where they had joined the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who taught them transcendental meditation if they relinquish their use of drugs, which they did not quite do. But that's beside the point.

Nevertheless, by then India had become this main focal point for psychedelic drug users looking for spiritual guidelines, beginning with Allen Ginsberg and his then partner, Peter Orlovsky, later, of course, Timothy Leary. And of course, Richard Alpert, who came back as a changed man and as Baba Ram Dass. And interestingly, Ram Dass mentioned his new heightened state of awareness, following his conversion to Eastern spirituality as I quote, being under the constant and mild influence of Hashish.

So here we see how Eastern spirituality could be framed as, in a sense, as being in conversation with drug use. And so the reason why then, in the second part of the 1960s, we see an influx of spiritual teachers reach New York City is that by then the Federal government has lifted restrictions on immigrants from Africa and Asia with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

And so you get all these Indian teachers flocking to New York City and to promise LSD users to move beyond drugs. In a nutshell, their message was, stay high without drugs. And so what is interesting in here to build on what was just saying about Richard Alpert or Ram Dass is that, if we look a little closer, we see that these new spiritual teachers are actually engaging with psychedelia.

They are appealing to psychedelic drug users through language and codes. And so they are borrowing the codes of psychedelia to appeal to these LSD users who they are trying to convince to graduate from acid. Now, another major form of what I have called in my book, post-psychedelic religions, all these religions that came after the initial psychedelic wave in order to guide these former LSD users into drug free religions.

There's, of course, the Hare Krishna movement and his leader who you can see here, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who arrived in New York in 1966 and began chanting Hare Krishna under a tree in Tompkins Square Park. Excuse me. Now, the choice of that was is not incidental because Tompkins Square Park around that time was the heartbeat of the psychedelic counterculture. And it so happened that it was that a major underground news press, the East Village Other was located in that area.

So they immediately sent somebody to cover this event, which was the beginning of the Hare Krishna movement. And so interestingly, the East Village Other reporter who wrote the article learned years later that it had been reproduced in Hare Khrishna's main temple over in India. So again here, I think, another hint that these new religious movements were taking psychedelia quite seriously.

And so here we're beginning to see the beginning of what I think is a really interesting transnational cultural exchange based on this psychedelic culture. And unsurprisingly, one of the essential messages of Hare Krishna, and here again quoting his leader, Krishna Consciousness, I quote, you stay high because you go to Krishna, don't have to come down. You stay high forever. So here, words that would be likely to appeal to these tired LSD users.

And so if you look also at this publication from the Hare Krishna movement and zoom in, you can't really see well so I've kind of zoomed in on the corner. This Hare Krishna publication offers a discussion on drugs and ecstasy. So again, I think we hear another sign of this conversation between psychedelia and Eastern spirituality. And I'm going to finish on-- I'm going to try-- I'm going to finish my brief talk to put things in even greater perspective by briefly discussing the role of Nick Sands.

So now some of you may have heard of Nick Sand, who was, of course, a legendary underground chemist known for manufacturing literally millions and millions of LSD doses, including his signature brand of Acid Orange Sunshine, which many users came to understand as inherently divine or holy, if you will. Now, Sand is less known for probably setting up the first ever clandestine DMT lab in his mother's attic in Brooklyn.

And he was one of the many members of this psychedelic culture, this early psychedelic culture in New York City to also have traveled to Mazatec country to meet with Maria Sabina. By the early 1970s, however, Sand had been sentenced to 15 years for his involvement in a large-scale conspiracy to manufacture millions of doses of LSD.

And he fled-- he jumped bail and fled to Canada in 1976, where he began to grow magic mushrooms for a living. Simultaneously, he discovered the mystic teachings of Shree Rajneesh and then joined his Ashram in Pune in India in 1978. And so there he set up a hydroponic garden for the Ashram. But soon he located vast quantities of the raw ingredients required to manufacture LSD.

So we're going to unfortunately conclude here on a bit of a downer in a sense, by asking what happened to all that acid. And that is where, I think, to build on what Erika was saying moments ago. This is where we need to carry on, I think, decentering North America as the main focal point of the global history of psychedelia and I think that a very good starting point would be India. Thank you.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Thank you both so much for these rich presentations and a lot here to work with, for sure, for our questions and responses. One question that your presentation, Chris, immediately prompted in me was the parallels between this act of borrowing and syncretic interaction with Eastern spirituality along the use of drugs that you speak of, and along the adoption of postural yoga, both in Britain and in the US.

The little reading that I've done on this, these histories sound very similar. I'm curious if you have encountered this sort of parallel history of postural yoga at all or see any of these sort of parallels and how the translation and syncretism around the adoption of postural yoga, that history can teach anything about the history of this adoption and syncretism in drug culture.

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: Well, unfortunately, not beyond the pretty well documented history of Timothy Leary's adoption of such techniques, I'm afraid. I'm trying to-- I've had a very long day, actually. So I'll make a note of it and get back to you if can think of something. But right now, it's not coming back at this moment.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Yeah. Specifically thinking of some of the history that Anya Foxen has written on the history of postural yoga and how Paramahansa Yogananda specifically gets-- biographies within a lot of American sort of Eastern spirituality literature. But yeah, definitely something that I will continue to reflect on these parallel paths.

JEFF BREAU: In addition, thinking about maybe a way, a thread that I'm seeing between these two works. And I mean, obviously you're both involved in them, so it makes sense. But really, it's how can we think about expanding, moving past these histories that we all sort of know and have a sense of and really complicating them. And I see that complicating happening in a place like New York, sort of so central to the United States' narrative and yet undertold in psychedelic history.

And then, of course, Expanding Mindscapes' choice to really move beyond the US and Canada. And one question, just a really general question that I had and that actually came up in our reading group is around the choice and how the choice came about to intentionally move beyond the US story and whether or not you were both considering maybe having a place for alternate US or Canada sort of narratives to be in there, and how you made the choice to really say, actually, let's move further afield? I'd love to hear about how that came about.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: Yeah, Chris. You want me to start?

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: Yeah, so--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

DR. ERIKA DYCK: --first time we're going to answer.

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: Yeah, so very briefly. I think at my end, part of the motivation would have been to move away from Timothy Leary. Though, I say this having written quite extensively on Leary. And so I think that he-- very often when you look at the American history of psychedelics, you just cannot avoid his name in a sense.

So I think that by purposefully moving away from the United States, we're going to get-- we're bound to get less of Leary in this edited collection. And I'm pretty sure that his name pops up only a few times. I'd have to check in the index, but I think we are very economical on Leary references.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: Yeah. You know, he pops up a little bit in our introduction and conclusion, and that's intentional on our part because, I guess, in one respects, both Chris and I are-- our focus is on North America. So we use that to frame the book about, you know, this is what we've come to know, but here's where there are these frayed edges of that history.

And I think one of the things that struck me and Chris as well, I think, meeting students who are working in other jurisdictions who are outside of those contexts and they're writing about psychedelics and they're kind of coming up against these blocks of like, well, how does it compare to the US? And you know what?

If you treated those histories on their own without having to find the Swiss version of Timothy Leary or the Sheffield version of it, or whatever it was. And instead of having to always sort of like bounce off of those stories, it was clear that there were really interesting stories that could be told and perhaps deserved to be told outside of that comparative context.

And so this isn't meant to bash North Americans or anything like that, but just to create a platform for breathing some life into those other stories so that they have their own space and can start that conversation on their own terms instead of responding to, this is what happened in the US and this is how it affected Czechoslovakians, for example. And that was our attempted starting point. And I think, and Chris can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think we started off with like a Twitter call.

You know, something on Twitter, like does anybody-- and it's-- there was room for more essays in this collection as well. But, of course, at some point, you have to finish and send it to the printer. And so, I really hope that it's a starting point instead of, this isn't a definitive collection. But this, hopefully, just creates a bit of a platform for those other conversations.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Yeah, I was super curious how the book came together because it is pulling together all these very divergent threads. And you mentioned the Twitter call. Is that-- that's so-- it is both surprising and not surprising, I suppose, given my own Twitter as I scroll through it.

I could see where such a call would be really fruitful and encountering a diverse set of scholars. But yeah, could each of you speak a little bit more to how this book came together and then how at some point you decide, we got to work with what we've got here. I know we could continue to assemble, you know, 500, 1000, 1,500 more pages. Yeah.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: Yeah. I don't know. Chris, do you mind if I go first? You know, I think partly through our own networks, drawing people in as well, because not everyone is on Twitter, and that is not the most effective way perhaps to get out there. But it also-- we recognize that we needed to go beyond our own networks while still relying on our networks.

And of course, there were language issues as well. And I couldn't have done this without Chris and his multi linguistic skills, and friends with multi linguistic skills in the translations that occurred. So there was a lot of work in that respect. Also trying to coax some authors and encourage them to write in whatever language they were comfortable with and then us scramble to find ways of translating that and trying to bring something into harmony.

So I wouldn't say it wasn't without some hiccups and bumps along the way, but I think the end product is-- I'm very proud of the end product. And it's unfortunate that there are some gaps there. There were some authors-- the pandemic also hit as we started. there were some authors who were more deeply affected than others or some potential contributors, I would say.

Archives closed. And so I think there were some projects that had to get shelved, not due to our lack of interest or support, but for a whole variety of other circumstances. And reviewers, I think Chris and I were maybe both a little nervous. It was a little long at first, and we thought reviewers are going to recommend cutting some and instead they said, add some, which I think was daunting but encouraging at the same time. And like I said, I'm really pleased with the result.

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: Yeah, I don't have much to add to this other than, I think, yeah, you're right. There comes a point where you just have to stop just for the sake of managing the project and possibly also, you can't wait forever for that particular perspective to just mysteriously arrive in your mailbox on Monday morning and somebody saying, hey, I'm doing a history of psychedelics in Japan or in Australia or New Zealand. And yeah, so there comes a point where you just have to, I guess, use all the material that you have on hand, which is already a lot, certainly.

JEFF BREAU: Yeah, and yeah. I'm sure that these histories need to be told and it could be told in so many ways, but it felt really cohesive and, not comprehensive in the sense that it covered everything, but there was so much diversity. And actually, this is one of the questions from the audience, from Veronica, who's asking specifically about images and the use of images and the use of aesthetics in the book, and how that showed up in psychedelia and how you were treating that in the Expanding Mindscapes history.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: Yeah, unfortunately, we didn't have a huge budget for-- we spent our budget on translations on this one and we didn't have a lot of space financially or with the way that the press had envisioned this book to include a lot of images. I think that some of the essays that more naturally lent themselves to an image heavy or an image analysis, unfortunately, we can't get them in color.

And so we had to make some choices and authors had to make some choices then about, you know, to what extent do you describe the kind of visual imagery that was put on at light shows, for example. And you kind of lose something in trying to describe the technology. There's the technology piece, but then also like, what are the effects of sitting in a sort of trance state in surrounded by a light show? And so, yeah, those were some difficult conversations.

And I think if anything, and I quickly read the question there, if anything, I think it helped us-- helped me at least to appreciate just how desperately we need a different kind of alternative format for understanding this. That these visual-- a visual understanding or how people have tried to mimic experiences through visual arts or all of that, it almost deserves its own space. And I hope, again, I hope that inspires some.

Maybe [INAUDIBLE] will follow up with a book on this topic. He did the article for us, but I think he's got lots more to say there, and others as well. Often our historians use images as more of a kind of piece of evidence, so a little bit more static. But some certainly leaned into more of a cultural expression.

And even, you know, once we get to images, and here I'll tag to Chris perhaps, but the music, the music and the sound of this period of those experiences, whether choreographing with certain-- whether it's clinical trials or counter cultural expressions, is also something that you can't really accomplish in a book in terms of giving people that kind of immersive experience of the sonic expressions. And yet it's something that sort of threads through a number of our chapters just how important songs are.

And songs in Brazil used like big band sounds and soap opera lyrics, very different from Grateful Dead, but they produce their own kind of tropicalismo, their own kind of psychedelic expression. And I really wish we made 3D books in-- I don't know. Maybe this is why we do these talks.

[CHUCKLES]

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: I had-- it's funny you mention this because I had planned to play a bit of music myself for my talk but I had to keep it to a manageable format. But certainly to go back to India, there was just-- I think there's just so much that needs to be done in that particular area. And so, we think about-- when we think about music in the 60s and India, well, you know, we think about a number of Beatles song.

But if we look at it from the other side, Beatlemania also reached India. Psychedelic rock, fuzz, delay, reverb, all that reached India. There's an absolutely colossal history of psychedelic rock and funk. And then in the conclusion of the book, I go through a bit of the history of the Roland and Bass sequencer, the TB 303, which is asynonymous with acid house and psytrance.

There's good reason to believe that one of the very, very first musicians to use this, not as a way of having bass sequences to practice the guitar, but to use it as coordinated with a beat. It goes back to 1982 and it was an Indian musician, right. And so you get this really characteristic baseline of the acid house and psytrance scene.

And that's kind of what was hinting at when I finished my presentation, which is, well, Nick Sands was in India around '78 distributed-- making a whole lot of acid. What happened to it? Did it reach the Indian music of circles? Who knows.

[CHUCKLES]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Yeah, that is a good question. And it seems only likely. We have a number of questions about the ancient history of psychedelics here from Thomas. An interest in ancient history of Soma from Pierre and Elusis. From anonymous on the immortality key. From Brian Maiorescu and John Allegro's controversial and delightful sacred mushroom in the cross. I'm curious to bring all these questions together.

How you might imagine a follow up book that would pull on these sort of ancient threads that have sort of always existed in a highly contested space. We have some very grand and questionable, I think, is the best way to say it. Theories on these sort of ancient roots of psychedelic use.

And then, you know, in any way that might also speak to our present use of psychedelics. What is our investment in looking to the past, looking to the ancient, ancient past to say, oh, we've been doing this all along. Is it for justification? What is our investment in an ancient psychedelic history?

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: I'll let Erika answer this. Oh, thanks, Chris.

[CHUCKLES]

He gives me hard questions. Yeah, I don't know how many of you are familiar with Manvir Singh's work that touches on this topic as well. He's a medical anthropologist and has been working-- and has a book coming out, I think, in a year's time or so, where he is exploring some of these questions very much so in a diverse ritualistic context, but also sort of playing with different Western ideas about spirituality and sort of questions, you know, what is the obsession with ancients, or why is it important for us to pull psychedelics, anachronistically, perhaps, but pulling back these ideas into an ancient period? And recently saw him give a talk on this so it's fresh in my mind.

I think it's a really fascinating question. And I do think that some of that is driven by the desire today to legitimize psychedelic practices without necessarily pigeonholing them in a particular category, to say, this is good for PTSD and that's it. But to really kind of anchor us in what might actually be a kind of troubling or I'll be more optimistic in a way of really problematizing what it is that we are trying to heal. So it challenges Western orthodoxy, both in spiritual terms as well as in clinical terms.

Are we healing something that is spiritual? And I think that is useful. Where I fall down a little bit, partly from my own ignorance, and I see Thomas Roberts out there, so perhaps he can weigh in on this as well. But I think where we get into some troubles is trying to verify, validate and authenticate those practices with empirical evidence. And we know as historians and as scholars working in this field that a lot of this evidence is really problematic.

It was produced under different conditions. It was produced in a way to verify other kinds of practices and to tarnish others. So I think maybe that's my modernist historian perspective, that ancient history is hard, but I think it's really-- it's intellectually useful to think about what those relationships are to the past, and which kinds of pasts, whose pasts. I'm not sure that we're going to find a satisfactory answer on, were the Aleutian mysteries actually psychedelic?

Does this go-- where we can find those and anchor those stories, I'm less confident that we're going to find anything satisfying even in pursuing those goals. Not to say we shouldn't write about them, but. I still think that looking more broadly in the past is really valuable for thinking about what the renaissance has to hold or what it has to offer us.

I think it will be, maybe this is outrageous to say, but I think it will kind of be a fail if we just pharmaceuticalized psychedelics and put them into another modern marketplace in that respect. So I think it behooves us to think about those spiritual paths and the spiritual connection as a way of problematizing this moment. Sorry for my rant.

[CHUCKLES]

JEFF BREAU: That's great, and actually also starts to lead into another group of questions that a few audience members have, which is around really the connection between psychedelics and Christianity in these histories that are being talked about. And maybe, Chris, if there's pieces from Psychedelic New York that you could speak to around the psychedelics and Christianity in that book. And then, Erika, if you wanted to talk about how that shows up in Expanding Mindscapes.

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: So I already mentioned the case of the Neo-American Church, which was openly deriding the Roman Catholic Church. So in New York you get-- it's so interesting because you don't necessarily get a single pattern. I mean, I've-- so in the book, there are cases-- there's a case of a young woman who walks into a church with having ingested, a quite a big, big dose.

And as she walks in, she sees people kneeling before the altar. And she immediately sees all these rituals as outdated and all about suffering and just so contrasting with her own ecstasy of the moment. And at the same time, quite a few cases of religious figures or even atheists, either completely developing a new Christian understanding of the world. And in other cases, having their faith rekindled.

There are a number of religious figures who appear in the book who were in conversation with Timothy Leary and his psychedelic celebrations, which in one of the celebrations, there's this actor who plays Jesus. And so ends up nailed on the cross. It's this light show. And he ends up on this cross and Leary goes up to him and says, come down and have a few beers and let's go and see some women, you know, typical lady-- Leary, sorry. Typical Leary and some clergy people being really offended by it, although they themselves had experimented very favorably with a number of psychedelic substances.

So you really get a very wide set of responses to the psychedelic experience. And likewise, some religious, some Christians in New York just totally opposed to the use of LSD. And just finding the idea that you could attain God through chemical means offensive. So there's really a bit of everything which I found quite surprising. So it's not just the-- there's more than just the Eastern frames of references. And so I think there would certainly be room, I think, to write a history of-- it's like expirituality from a Christian perspective. That would be most interesting, I think.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: I'll just add super quickly that, I don't think a lot of our authors really delved into this question really deeply. Although Andrew Jones's article looks at a Christian missionary who goes to India. And it's interesting because she's a woman, also a single woman who goes to India. So there's a lot of things going on there. But I think it's more on the encounters. She comes as a Christian and then she encounters these different ways of thinking. And this is where he gets into that a little bit. Interestingly, she ends up in India.

Some of the papers that we weren't able to include, I think, may have drawn that out a little bit more, in part because they were looking specifically, and here I hope that they will get published someday, at Christian missionaries who were recording certain rituals or behaviors or activities as they were recorded at the time. And that's another place where you begin to see some of the tensions, I think, between different kinds of worldviews as they are. And those are the texts that we have to work with sometimes.

JEFF BREAU: I really loved the Andrew Jones piece. And one of the questions about that, which I think Expanding Mindscapes does in so many places so wonderfully is, what happens if we take a different framing and a different history, or a different-- in that case, what happens if we go-- we're in a different country and get exposed to a whole different sort of vernacular and way of seeing the world? How does that then change what these substances do? And in that article, if I remember correctly, it's the approach to psychotherapy becomes very different.

And there's, I mean, actually quite a problematic sort of way in which the mother is sort of used that comes out of this-- use psychoanalytically. And it's just, I think one of the things that these texts do and these articles do is push us to question, how are we seeing the world and why are we seeing the world this way? And what happens if we take a completely different framework?

And I wanted to ask sort of on that, the two chapters on Iboga that you mentioned in your presentation, Erika, I thought were also really critical essays and were histories that I wasn't super familiar with beforehand. And there's a question from the audience around the role of Gordon Wasson and specifically, Soma. But in one of the Iboga essays, there's a discussion about how-- it was really an argument that it was really Wasson's work that sort of made this Voacanga africana, this particular iboga containing plant, turn that into a ceremonial idea concept.

And was really-- it was Wasson wanting to use that to make this long argument about the history of psychedelics. And I'm curious if maybe you could both speak to whether it's Watson or other sort of figures in this grand narrative, how they were trying to construct-- how you see them constructing their history, and how Expanding Mindscapes is really actively trying to intervene in that or do something different.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: Yeah, I'll say that one of the-- I'm kind of answering two questions at once here. One of the things that surprised me in doing this was how it changed my perspectives of some of these well-trodden figures as well. And Wasson was one of those surprises for me. And, you know, going through-- I should first say that Gordon Wasson's wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, had done tremendous amount of work on ethnomycology in eastern parts of Russia, collecting folkloric traditions and whatnot.

And I think, partially because of her, I would argue premature death from cancer in 1958, she's sort of written out of the story. We could also say it's the patriarchy and all that. Anyway, she sort of disappears from the narrative, but her work really sort of sets him off on a path. And I think also kind of starts off by looking in Eastern Russia, but then moves into Mexico and kind of nourishes them with these ideas, and he meets these other people.

Partially, it was through her connections. And I think the gendered connections that she had with Maria Sabina. Anyway, that's one of the things I came around, though, instead of seeing this like American Banker finds magic mushrooms. Like, come on. It's made for me to not like this guy, but going through his papers and looking at the kind of work he did and the amount of investment, financial investment he put into recording Mazatec songs, giving them back to the community, creating these really kind of works of art, I've had to admit that I had to soften my appreciation for him. And he collected this massive library and there's a lot of correspondence that he does with people like Roger Heim at the National Museum of History, if I have that correct, Chris, in France.

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: In Paris, yeah.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: And in Paris, right, and it's probably in French. And, you know, he's corresponding with a variety of people that I think perhaps he does deserve to have that kind of place, perhaps with some nuance. You know, guy discovers magic mushrooms maybe isn't the full story, but I think there's something to be said about the ways in which he invests in those cultural encounters. And kind of, in a sense, draws on experts from around the globe.

Maybe not around the globe entirely, but at least from places outside of the United States, in order to verify and understand, and then ultimately, recultivate mushrooms in places like Paris. So I think that's a really fascinating part of the story that gets sort of clipped when we think about him just in that one connection with Maria Sabina. But their relationship, their friendship, carried on for decades as well, which often gets kind of curtailed in the telling of a story that often looks like someone who came in and kind of usurped this knowledge and left her in a bad way. It's part of the story, but I think there's more to it.

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: And just to add to add to this, going back to Valentina, there's, I think, a terrific book on the media history of LSD written by Stephen Siff, which I think is-- well, I think is a bit underrated, if anything. And one of the very simple-- one of the things that I really like in this book is that whenever Siff mentions an article, you always get the circulation. If you go back to the publication of Gordon and Valentina Wasson's articles, Valentina published her piece in this week, which had a much, much greater circulation than that life article that gets mentioned all the time.

So then after the publication of-- after those publications, you get a kind of mini exodus from the Bohemian folks from Greenwich Village over to Mazatec Country. And I think we mistakenly think that-- we mistakenly, I think, attribute it to the life article where it was probably Valentina's article that was behind this. And the other thing about Gordon Wasson, which is from an interview that he gave a few years before his death, was that he-- another thing is that he's this towering figure in psychedelic folklore.

He never saw himself as such. He was just this very, very serious and very, very, you know, passionate about ethnomycology. And I remember him saying that after the publication of those articles, people at JP Morgan would be asking him about mushrooms, and he was just not interested. He was just-- that was his day job. And then back home, he'd be corresponding with people and building on his research. So again, I think it's a bit useful to take a step back and temper this image of this psychedelic superstar in a sense.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Yeah, your account of Wasson and Leary's interaction in your book, Chris, I think really gets to the heart of the matter there as far as where Leary finds his roots versus where Wasson finds his own. Yeah, Sabina and Wasson's relationship is so, I think, a place that can be turned over for many decades and scholarship. At least in her own account of Wasson and Estrada's biography and Juan Garcia Carrera's biography.

It's a really ambivalent relationship. There seems to be a sort of tender remembrance of him, while also an understanding that, like, this guy changed my life in a way that I did not anticipate or necessarily want in a lot of ways. And Wasson's own understanding of what it was that he let loose in that there was a reflection in the-- I think both in English and in Spanish versions of Estrada's biography of Sabina, where he is expressing deep, deep apologetic sentiments towards the cat that he let out of the bag in the late 50s.

One question that Tehseen Noorani brings to us that I think connects really well with some thinking that I was also having on both of your works together. If there are any theoretical questions for the discipline of history itself that these projects raised for you. And I think more specifically, what do we do with the psychedelic renaissance periodization?

It seems both of your work kind of push on this idea that there was a dark ages which a renaissance sort of entails, that there was a dark ages that preceded it. So both more generally, what are the theoretical questions for the discipline of history? And specifically, what do we make of the psychedelic renaissance now?

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: About the psychedelic-- Sorry, sorry, Erika.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: No, go ahead. You go ahead.

DR. CHRIS ELCOCK: Yeah, I know. About the psychedelic renaissance. I think that there's-- I think we wrongly see this kind of Dark Age after the 1960s and suddenly, boom, 1990s, decade of the brain. a new perspectives. There's much greater continuity both in research and in, well, obviously in non-medical use. But Erika and I have also published elsewhere on the work of Salvador Roquette and Jan Bastiaanse as well.

And Bastiaanse carried on treating concentration camp survivors into the 1980s in the Netherlands. In New York, you get research well into the 1970s in spite of the very, very tight regulations. And again, there's a whole book about this by Matthew Orum, who, showing that the controversies surrounding LSD, well, the non-medical use of LSD is often believed to be the turning point and the ban of psychedelics. But that was not the case.

Even in the US, there were still a few authorized clinical trials and notably in Maryland, and that were extremely important in terms, for example, focusing on end of life anxiety. And then we discussed ibogaine early on. And so there's the whole-- if you move away from so-called classic psychedelics and the stories we hear a lot about the clinical trials and we focus on completely different drugs like including ibogaine, then you see much, much, much greater historical continuity.

And then when you start to broaden it, such as what Julian Burnham has done, then you see this really fascinating intercontinental history of the circulation of this psychedelic knowledge. So my own take, again, I don't like to really say much about the presence and the psychedelic renaissance, I don't have that much of an opinion about it. But it seems to me that part of the history has been deliberately put aside, and, oh, there's Leary. He's the big bad guy. He ended all this and we're going to get it right sort of thing. Again, if you do-- if you look at it, if you dig a bit deeper, there's much greater historical continuity.

DR. ERIKA DYCK: I'll just try to weigh in quickly. Hi, Tehseen I think methodologically, one of the things that's really got me going lately is the things that we can find that are digitally available. And maybe this is, you know, end of term and I'm frustrated with students who are also skimming the surface of, you know, like I don't know how many of them go to the library.

But not only are some things still in archives, but when it comes to the history of psychedelics, some things never made it to the archive. You know, those underground cultivation guides and those distribution networks that Nick Sands was part of, to give an example, aren't necessarily part of our arsenal of evidence that we can use to really understand this history.

And so I think we're stuck in a space where we're reliant on those things that we can access. And yet, we're also at a really interesting, I think, opportunistic moment when there are people who have collected some of those things, at least from the recent past, let's say the last 75 years, who may be willing and maybe it's even advantageous to now bring those into the Harvard library, into the Ludlow collection or into the Berkeley collection or various other collections around the world, because the conversations are changing.

So I think as historians, we have a public relations opportunity to make it easier for people to donate some of that material if it exists, but also to try to capture some of this because much of that psychedelic history exists in the kind of mythical spaces, you know, the larger than life stories of how many hits of acid did this person make. And one quick anecdote, I interviewed kids of the Grateful Dead who, did you know were in a daycare together behind the stage?

I did not know that until-- so that's not written down anywhere. But they have pretty good memories being, you know, some of the sober people at these concerts of what was actually going on and who was doing what. And I think there's an opportunity to capture some of these stories now, while there seems to be a moment where there's some capital, like cultural capital, in sharing those stories rather than waiting for things to go dark, if they will.

JEFF BREAU: Well, that's a perfect place to end on. And just want to thank you both, Erika and Chris, for speaking with us today and for this extremely important work. And I think as we think about what the future of religion and psychedelics is going to be, understanding and having a nuanced perspective of the past is a critical, critical place to start. So thank you so much.

Thank you also to all of the people in the audience today and all of the wonderful questions. We got many, many more questions than we could have possibly asked, but we will pass those along to both of our speakers. I also want to thank Professor Stang, who's the center's director, and Lori and the rest of the CSWR staff for all their help in making this event possible today. And of course, thanks to Paul for everything.

This is, as I mentioned at the start, this is our last psychedelics in the future of religion talk before Harvard enters its holiday break. We are currently in the process of scheduling events for the spring semester, so please do subscribe to the CSWR's newsletter or check out the CSWR's website for details on those upcoming events. I also want to briefly mention that the second annual psychedelic intersections conference will be held at Harvard Divinity School on February 17th.

This is a free one-day conference that is open to the public. It will include over 20 speakers and two special keynote speakers who will discuss topics, including psychedelic spirituality and the underground, psychedelic spirituality and race, psychedelic spirituality and Indigenous traditions, and psychedelic spirituality and medicine.

So a really sort of expansive conference that we'll touch on a lot of the themes that were discussed here today. Registration details will be coming out shortly and we hope to see many of you in Cambridge for that event. In the meantime, we wish everyone a safe and restful, and perhaps even transcendent holiday season. And thank you so much.