# Video: Book Talk: Psychedelics: A Visual Odyssey, with Erika Dyck, PhD, University of Saskatchewan October 02, 2024 Psychedelics are pushing into the mainstream—whether through FDA decisions, court cases on religious freedom, visual and material culture, or commodified retreat centers and mushroom-infused chocolate bars—prompting a deeper understanding of the role of mind-altering plants in society. In conversation with Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith, CSWR's Program Leads for “Spirituality and Psychedelics,” Erika Dyck will share the knowledge and insight revealed in her new book, *Psychedelics: A Visual Odyssey* (The MIT Press, 2024). With captivating imagery, this book provides an introductory history of psychedelics that is global in scope and attendant to visual culture. Erika Dyck is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry and Facing Eugenics, coauthor of The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital, and coeditor of Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics. She is also a Board Member of Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. NARRATOR 1: Harvard Divinity School. NARRATOR 2: Psychedelics, a Visual Odyssey. September 17, 2024. JEFFREY BREAU: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first Psychedelics in the Future of Religion event for the Fall 2024 semester. For those of you who I have not had the chance to meet, my name is Jeffrey Breau, and I have the good fortune of serving as the program lead, along with Paul Gillis-Smith, for the Psychedelics and Spirituality program at the Center for the Study of World Religions. The Psychedelics and the Future of Religion series, which this talk is a part of, is now entering its fourth year. The series marks an important node in the larger psychedelics and spirituality, programming, and research happening at the center. And it's important to note that the Psychedelics and Spirituality program is itself embedded in the center's ongoing and evolving Initiative called Transcendence and Transformation, or TNT for short. For today's conversation, we are joined by Dr. Erika Dyck, who will be speaking about her new book, Psychedelics, a Visual Odyssey, which I am holding here, which is published by MIT Press. To give a sense for how today's conversation will unfold, in a moment, I will turn the floor over to Paul to introduce himself and Dr. Dyck. Then, we will both disappear and Erika will take center screen to share a bit about her text and her work. Following her presentation, the three of us will appear back on screen to continue a discussion of the book and address questions from the audience. With that introduction out of the way, I will pass things over to Paul to introduce himself and Erika Dyck. PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Thank you, Jeffrey, and hello, everyone. I'm Paul Gillis-Smith, also program lead for Psychedelics and Spirituality here at the center. Without further ado, I will introduce our speaker today. Erika Dyck is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan, and Canada Research Chair in the History of Health and Social Justice. She's the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry, LSD from Clinic to Campus and Facing Eugenics, Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice. She's co-author of The Acid Room, the Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital, and co-editor of Expanding Mindscapes, a Global History of Psychedelics, alongside many others. She's also a board member of Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. Professor Dyck, the floor is yours. ERIKA DYCK: Thank you so much, Paul and Jeffrey, for that very kind introduction, and for inviting me back to your series, which is just very exciting to be part of this. I'm going to share my screen here. And hopefully that's working OK. And if it isn't, somebody will let me know. I'm really delighted to be here this afternoon, or this evening where you are. And I just wanted to take a moment to thank you all for being here and engaging in this, and also to explain that, as Paul mentioned, I've been spending time in the archives and writing books about the history of psychedelics for over 20 years now. And this book, Psychedelics, a Visual Odyssey, was really a stretch for me in ways that both have introduced me to new people and new ways of thinking about this history, but have it's also been a really humbling experience, as I realized that sometimes, the illustrations that lie behind or sometimes adjacent to this history have helped to change some of my ideas around the history of psychedelics as well. So I put together a few slides here to give you a bit of a sample or a taste of the book itself. And I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge, I saw one of the questions already popped up about Richard Schultes' book, which I happen to have a Spanish copy of it here, a signed copy. So I decided it was OK to have it in Spanish, even though I'm still quite rudimentary in my Spanish. And I'm really pleased that this has made the front cover of the book. Just to start us off, this was a book that was illustrated by Elmer Smith. It was published in the Golden Guide to Hallucinogens or Hallucinogenics. And the image here is actually a compilation of some of the many kinds of images that you find as illustrations in that book. And so I was really pleased to get a copy from Kat Harrison at Botanical Dimensions Library, and really happy that that's on the front cover. And I wanted to emphasize that, because what I hope this book accomplishes, or what I hope it stimulates at least, is conversations about the many ways that psychedelics, and even precursors to psychedelics, different ideas about these concepts and these plants, these chemicals, have inspired different ways of imagining a different kind of diverse illustrations or diverse ways of thinking about these non-ordinary states of consciousness and our relationship with one another and our relationship to the planet. So I wanted to start by framing this up with two different images that you'll find very early in the book. On the right hand side of the screen is a Rick Griffin image from the San Francisco Oracle. I found it in black and white, and I prefer this one in color that I think is a really striking image of what is described, at least in the caption here in a 1967 post, as a Huichol man. And around him, you can see, maybe you can identify even some of the different psychedelic plants. There are perhaps peyote buttons at his feet. And you'll see different images there that may be reminiscent, or maybe remind you of some of these different psychedelic plants. And I can't decide what the expression is on his face specifically. But I like this image that both reminds us of that 1967 moment. Psychedelics have moved into the mainstream, there are shout outs or elements of reach back to Indigenous cultures that have come to play a large role in how we understand psychedelics in the 1960s. But there's also a, I don't know, maybe a bit of a forlorn expression on his face. And perhaps this is something that we should heed as well as maybe seeing psychedelics as coming to an end of a certain kind of era of psychedelics in the 1960s. If we flip over to the left hand side of the screen, this is an AI-generated image, so I cannot credit an author on this one. And this is an image that I think in many ways captures our imagination when we think about perhaps the future. Or maybe that's a scary image in and of itself, or maybe it's an exciting image to you, this idea that we can harness the power of, in this case, mushrooms, in this beaker, produced, of course, in an AI way as well. People are almost entirely removed from this situation. And I wanted to use that as ways of launching into this, what won't be a proper talk, but I'll give you a couple of ideas of things or themes that I tried to illustrate in the book. So what I wanted to do initially-- and the word psychedelic is in the title, and I hope you will forgive me for using the term. But really, the concept that I want to drive out here is different ways that people have sought out non-ordinary experiences across time and place. And to do so, I didn't want to have the book follow some of the narratives that I've followed in my own writings on this, which is clinical experimentation exclusively, or necessarily look at ceremonies exclusively or creativity. We might even think about recreational uses. But I really wanted to blend these ideas together and think about the diverse ways that people have encountered these experiences. And so although there's a chronology to this, I also want to shake some of our ideas loose on this, or maybe problematize that a little bit. And so these are some of the images. What I want to emphasize here as well is, some of these may be familiar to you. Maybe you've seen these before. Maybe you've even had your hands on some of that blotter acid here, the shout out to the Grateful Dead. And some of the images that I produce in the book and that I will share with you today are quite rare-- images that came out of a shoe box in someone's closet, something that had been kept on a roll of film, in the image on the top there, images that have been kept sometimes secret, or sometimes because there was nobody asking questions about where these images came from, and so they just stayed dormant for a while. And that's the other thing that was really exciting about working on this book, was trying to find that nice blend-- images that people are expecting to see, but also to challenge us in some ways in moving outside of the ordinary, as I hope this book would transcend the psychedelic bubble and even excite or inspire people who are less familiar with psychedelics. And so to give you a couple of examples of where I'm coming from, or the kind of work that went into this, I wrote the text for this. And then I was told quite bluntly and much to my horror and sadness, that very few people are going to actually read the text, really concentrate on the images. And this was a whole new adventure for me. This is not something I'd ever done before. Images, for me, were always illustrative-- it's a nice image, it's a nice picture, it's a nice depiction. But the words were something that I held very sacred and sacrosanct. But I had to change the way that I related to this history as I delved into these images and learned about some of the artists behind them, the stories behind them, the reason why, in this case, these two particular pieces of artwork that are kept in the Huicholes Art Center or the Eureka Art Center by Yvonne Negrin, why these yarn images have been kept, why they are sacred, why they are so important to understanding some of the peyote roads that have traveled through this territory. It's been a real honor to get to meet artists and also challenge some of the ways that I had come to learn this material in the past, or the ways that I had read about how other people had interpreted this past. So this is one example-- this belongs in a bit on Mescaline, the Native American church, and the way that peyote has been part of different not only ritual settings, but also folklore tales, different ways that people have used oral histories to remember different cosmologies, different connections with ancestors. And I'm using generic language here intentionally because the language changes even when translated into English, as you move across different borders from Mexico all the way up to parts of Saskatchewan and beyond now, but in a legal sense. I was also really fortunate-- and some of you may be in the audience here. I hope that Osiris Gonzalez is here. He could certainly say more about these images. But another humbling moment, or many humbling moments in this story, is trying to understand how different images have come to challenge our views of history. Now, the top image, this codex, was something that I didn't readily understand. But talking with Osiris and with archaeologists and linguists who he connected with, we came to appreciate, or he's already come to appreciate, how incredibly rich and meaningful these tapestries are. In this case, this codex, which scholars now believe is an example of pre-contact, pre-Hispanic mushroom ceremonies-- and I won't begin to try to unpack all of that, what's in that image for you. But what I was really excited about is the way that these images have survived all sorts of historical interventions. They've survived documentation, they've survived persecution. And we still have, although rare, some of these images to represent this importance of, in this case, mushroom ceremonies in pre-Hispanic era. The other two images might be more familiar to you. The mushroom statue on the left, which was found in Guatemala. It actually circulates in a number of books, including Gordon Wasson's book or Albert Hoffman's book with Richard Schultes. And so too, can you find the other image that has been colored there on the bottom of what ends up being page 27 there. So some of these are more familiar, or at least have been repeated across a variety of different publications, and some are quite rare, but perhaps challenge our understanding of where these mushroom ceremonies were first being recorded and the vibrancy with which they were recorded. And again, we see a concentration of this. And here might be a little bit of the remnants of Richard Schultes' work, as well as Albert Hofmann and Robert Gordon Wasson, as I mentioned, collecting, cataloging and showcasing some of these statues, some of these epitaphs in their own work. But also if we move outside of the North-South corridor of the Americas, we can also see other ways that these substances have been captured in a variety of different contexts. And although controversial, there is a whole history that is connected, of course, with Chinese herbalism and different Chinese legends. Now, depending on which historians you talk to-- and luckily, I'm in a history department with some great friends who helped me work through the Chinese history here-- there are deeply contested stories as to whether or not Chinese herbalism belongs in this tradition. Although if you go back about 60 years in the historiography, you can find moments where these stories change a little bit. And there's a deep reflection here of the way that the history has changed with respect to the contemporary attitudes towards drug laws in China specifically. And nonetheless, what I wanted to do is not to try to create a definitive explanation of what counts inside this framework, but to acknowledge that really, there are so many different ways that people have come to understand the relationship to these sacred plants, in some cases, or these non-ordinary states of consciousness or the way that plant-based teachers have helped people to think differently about their relationship to one another and the planet. I won't go on too much about Saint Anthony here, because I want to use that time to talk about Hieronymus Bosch, an 18th century Dutch painter, with this triptych of this different kind of scenarios that may unfold after ergot poisoning. And I really like this, not only because it's a beautiful painting in and of itself, or a beautiful series of paintings, but I was recently rereading some of Gordon Wasson's work, and it was an essay that he wrote right after his wife died. I believe it was 1961 that the article was published. And his wife, I believe, died in 1958. And what he described in an article was that he felt that there were two different ways that cultures around the world had taken to mushrooms. Now, of course, for those of you who are not familiar with Gordon Wasson, he's an amateur mycologist. He and his wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, travel to Mexico. He first met Maria Sabina, and he tried mushrooms. And this gets spilled over, splashed through the pages of Life Magazine, and gets memorialized as the moment when the West has its first mushroom trip. And his name becomes synonymous with introducing magic mushrooms to, at least English readers, through Life Magazine. But upon reflection, he's thinking, and he's been studying mushrooms alongside his wife for a long time. He had this idea that there were certain cultures that were microphilic and others that were microphobic. And I think this 18th century triptych helps us to think through those ideas a little bit more, this idea that some cultures embrace the idea of mushrooms. And you might see that. He certainly sees that in what he sees in Mexico and Guatemala and others. And he points to Europe in particular as being fearful, as associating the effects of the magic mushroom here, in this case, ergot, as being something that brings chaos and destruction. And in so doing, he describes this article where he really breaks up the world into pro and anti, or microcephalic and microphobic cultures. And I found that a very useful way to think through some of the images that I've come across over the course of this research. Here, this image of Gordon Wasson does not appear in the book. I just pulled that in just so we had to have a face associated with him. He's somebody who's had a bit of a rough ride, I think, in recent years, as his name overshadows two really prominent women-- his wife, as I mentioned, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and Maria Sabina, who was a Curandero or a Mazatec woman who introduced him to mushrooms in Mexico. And for a number of reasons, I think the women's names have faded from history. And I think it is important that we recognize them, of course. But I will say that poor Robert Gordon Wasson, that's my bias here. I appreciate what he did, in part because he spent the rest of his life continuing to build this incredible library of mushroom lore or mycological lore. And it's owing to him that we have a lot of the images that we do, including some of the ones that are here on this page. This is not to turn over the patriarchy or anything like that. But I do want to acknowledge that he spent a tremendous amount of time and his own personal wealth-- he was a banker-- collecting some of these images, some from French artists like the one see there on the right-- this is a fabré piece of art. I've got a couple of examples in the book-- and others that he found primarily through his contacts in Mexico. So he really tries to use those illustrations to carry forward the story, as well as some of the songs that are associated with the mushroom ceremonies. And it's one of the themes that I tried to thread throughout the book, that ritual is not something confined to a particular era, nor is it confined to a particular place. But we see ritual and ceremony really animating the story of-- and I'll use "psychedelics" here in quotation marks, even ideas that, of course predate the concept psychedelics. The image on the left is from an iboga ceremony. And interestingly, these particular images come from the Guardian Magazine. And the reason we have these ones is because we had copyright access for them. Many of the iboga ceremonies, we were unable to get copyright permission to reproduce those. So although these may be staged photos, I cannot verify that for certain, it was really important for us to be able to include the idea of these iboga transition ceremonies in the book, as really important rituals that represent a different part of the world than some of the other ceremonies that were perhaps more familiar with, or that we have many more illustrations of. In the center is, of course, Richard Schultes. Here he is in Colombia receiving tobacco. And this, of course, is, to me, a really important image. I think the editors would have said that I was using this in an illustrative way, to prove my historical point that this is a really important father of ethnobotany who traveled throughout the Amazon and, along with Elmer Smith, the artist who illustrated his work, particularly for the Golden Guidebook, is really important for opening up our ideas in this anthropological and ethnobotanical journey through the Amazon, as he brings together different cultural ideas alongside images to really try to depict and open up our minds to different ways that people might come to plants and their meanings. And then, on the right-side of the screen, some of you may be familiar with these images. This is a Pablo Amaringo depiction of a particular ayahuasca journey. And he's perhaps the most prolific ayahuasca artist, and many of his images have been curated and made available from Eduardo Luis, who very graciously shared this image with us so that we could use it in the book. And this is a more recent interpretation of an ayahuasca ceremony, relative to some of the other earlier rituals and ceremonies that are depicted in the book from pre-Hispanic contact era of Mexico, for example. I also cannot get away from an enduring fascination with the medical history or the experimental history, or the desire to taxonomize, or to go out into the world in this quest for understanding and harnessing the power of plants, in something that, I might say, is part of an industrial complex, or part of a small pharmaceutical and later big pharmaceutical industry. And yet, what I was really struck by with some of the images that continue to flow through these spaces is questioning, who are the chemists? And here, I just choose a couple of images from the book. One is a Bayer stock image of aspirin, which was seen as a major blockbuster innovation, of course-- this new pill that was going to help with pain relief in many ways. But another image from an anthropologist, Wade Davis, on the right-hand side. And both, in terms of Wade Davis's writings, but also more broadly within the context of thinking about ayahuasca and its history, you think about the chemical composition that goes into the ayahuasca brew. And it should, I hope, trouble us when we think about, who has the upper hand on the rigors of chemistry here? And we think about the way that psychedelics and the way that those psychedelic experiences have been a blending of plants and chemistry and artistry that come together to produce different ways of knowing, different ways of seeing. On the top there, I love this image, although it is not specific to psychedelics per se, just another one of these depictions of the relationship between the West in this case, France, and in this case, the Global South, or I think this is Peru-- the way that has been depicted in 19th century imagery. Perhaps there's a power dynamic that we might want to unpack here. But this was something that I really wanted to showcase in the book, in images or the way that images have helped us to think about those narratives. I also really wanted to include images that piqued our curiosity about some of the people who have come to know psychedelics. Some of them are regular characters and others are lesser-known characters who took psychedelics specifically to stimulate curiosity. Now, they may not have taken psychedelics alone. I mean, absinthe was also a favorite drink of some French philosophers. But those who were bold explorers in a variety of different ways-- some to inspire different philosophical renderings on the world, others to write literature, and others perhaps we might see or maybe we might agree with Mike Jay are just psychonauts and in and of themselves. They're interested in these kind of consciousness voyages. And so, again, this is a theme that I try to weave throughout the book that is not confined to one particular place, but pops up in a few different ways. So of course, I have a few. I have some French philosophers, I have Fitz Hugh Ludlow here, who was not only a psychonaut in his own right, but also a great collector of imagery. And I believe the Harvard archives has his collection now. People like Aldous Huxley, who I've written about in the past. This image, I have to sadly say, is not included in the book, but I snuck it into my presentation because I really just adore this image. I'm allowed to use it in a presentation, but we couldn't get copyright permission for the distribution in the book. So this is just a thanks for coming to the presentation. You get to see him peeking through what appears to be a torn sheet. But I can't help but think about the Doors of Perception as I look at him peering through here. Huxley's legacy, of course, looms large in the history of psychedelics as one of the co-conspirators behind the name or co-creators of the name. And it's really important to me, as I've studied this particular conversation around psychedelic for two decades now. And to have included some of this information as well, that this is not something born of a particular discipline, this is not something that was isolated to a particular group of people. But actually, we have a philosopher, someone studying literature and contributing to literature, but who is the son and grandson of and brother of well-known biologists, who is meeting with a psychiatrist who had an earlier life as a playwright. And they fused together these different ideas as they try to find something capacious enough in the word "psychedelic" to inspire people to think outside of boxes, or through sheets or doors, if you will. One of the ways that Huxley, and to a slightly lesser extent, his colleague Humphry Osmond, one of the ways that they pushed these boundaries was by openly embracing some of the elements of spiritualism that they thought were really important within the context of studying consciousness. And although I found this perhaps one of the more difficult elements to depict through illustration, I did. Here is where I've got a couple of images here from a shoebox in someone's closet. The image on the top right-- it's not the best image in terms of a quality of a photo, but you may recognize Albert Hofmann there. He's also depicted behind me on this piece of art. And he is talking with Eileen Garrett. So here's my photographic proof that Albert Hofmann met with a woman who was, at the time, considered the foremost psychic in the world. She was hired at a number of times by different governments. She's seated here holding Tomorrow Magazine, a magazine that she co-founded. It existed before, but it had run dormant. She reinvigorated it, and it's the first place where Doors Of Perception, a review of it, was published. Tomorrow Magazine is a magazine of the occult. It is a magazine of spiritualism. And it's an interesting element of this history that I think is often overlooked. But I think is really important, and I've struggled to try to depict it, but I hope that these images point in that direction. I've talked about this in a previous talk when we looked at, psychedelics around the world. But this was something that really fed my enthusiasm for this topic, and trying to think, calling all of my friends in other parts of the world who are studying psychedelics. Some of these images, again, may be more familiar to you. The picture of Allen Ginsberg in India has certainly been published in a number of places. Ken Kesey's bus is perhaps well known to many people. But some of the other images were a little bit more buried. I tried to find access to a short-run Japanese magazine. You can see this, the bozoku or the tribes. And bozoku just simply means the tribes. And there was a short-run, what we might say today as a 'zine, but this relatively cheaply produced magazine. And I'm told, although I haven't seen a copy, haven't held one in my hands, I'm told by colleagues in Japan that this was a really important magazine for explaining not only where you might find supplies, but how to take psychedelics. In this case, LSD is featured quite prominently. But also different music you might want to listen to, or places you might go to appreciate music under certain influences. And so I wanted to just point to some of these other places that were also developing their own local cultures surrounding psychedelics, and have their own aesthetic history and aesthetic quality to that, which might not be readily comparable to an American aesthetic, for example. Or even, we might look to the Rolling Stones here on the left, who look a little bit like Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to me. But that's for another conversation. And finally, on the topic of curiosity and this using psychedelics to enhance as opposed to treat, I called this one the Eureka effect, or seeing the world differently. And I was really struck by some of the conversations and some of the biographies that came out more recently about tech giants. We might think about Steve Jobs, for example, Michelle Foucault, not a tech giant, but a change maker in many ways. In fact, my class was just talking about him today. Or Stewart Brand, who gets us to think about the environment and environmentalism in different ways. But these folks who attribute to some out of the ordinary thinking, to their relationships to LSD-- sometimes not upfront. Sometimes it takes a posthumous publication for that to come to the surface. And I don't know that Foucault ever claimed that LSD changed his way of thinking. But I think that, well, if you read the two books that are written about his LSD trips in California, it certainly amplified some of his critiques of power in the world. And I'll quickly add at the bottom there, Mad Pride. One of the things that I also found in finding these images was the striking-- there's some stuff that's really obviously anti-state or anti-establishment. And Mad Pride or anti-psychiatry are subtle themes that play out throughout some of the images. And I wanted to toss that out there as one example of another way that psychedelics have been infused with a different project of challenging the state or challenging authority. Now I'll move on to the last section, then, which is something that gets a little bit meta for me. As I said, I move off the words from the page and start really trying to think about the way that images are making me think differently about this history. And so here I'm going to quote what has become attributed to Marshall McLuhan, this wonderful Canadian philosopher or a media studies expert. And there were a number of images that I thought, these are neat. Here's Jimi Hendrix with an exploding guitar, that's neat. Ken Kesey reading a comic book, that's also pretty cool. But the more I learned about those images, the more I fell in love with what they represented. And it's not just this interesting depiction of an exploding guitar, but this image actually comes from a photograph that was taken by someone named Linda Eastman, who later becomes Linda McCartney and is, of course, the heiress to the Kodak Company. And so I was thinking about the way that technology has fundamentally changed, the way that we can capture some of these images, and what that has come to represent as well. And this was a fun, playful way of trying to infuse different ideas about the art history and the technology history that lies behind this. And the story behind the Ken Kesey image, which was shared with me by Sunshine Kesey, his daughter, was how much he loved comic books. And as I went through his diary and some of his correspondence, which is at the archives in Eugene, Oregon, what I learned is that some of the ways that he was also trying to communicate ideas was through using this staccato style rhythm, or prankster language, or making these funny jokes and changing the sound of language itself. And although that's not conducive to an image, seeing him engrossed in this comic book to me was a nice illustration of some of the ways that folks like Ken Kesey were not just changing things by engaging in altered states of consciousness, but we're also really interested in changing the way that we communicate our ideas. So lastly, on this point, maybe all of you are familiar with this massive stage. I don't know, I haven't actually counted how many-- I'll run out of technical language here. But this could be a loud concert, is what I'm going with here. There are many, many speakers. This is quite an engineering feat in itself to produce this kind of soundstage that dwarfs, in fact, the performers. Of course, it's the Grateful Dead that's about to perform on this particular stage, a stage that was produced or created and envisioned by who, by all accounts, was a brilliant engineer. And that's, of course, Owsley Stanley. And interestingly, so we might Marvel at the wonders of this technical feat. But by the same token, many of you will know that Owsley Stanley was also an amateur chemist who was also distributing acid, not just behind the scenes, but right in the scene. So not only was he changing the way that a concertgoer might experience the sound by amplifying it to such a degree, but he was changing the synesthetic response to hearing that sound and participating in that environment by tampering or exposing people to, in this case, acid-soaked Kool-Aid, while also playing with the sort of technology behind the sound itself. So I found these examples of these meta moments, or meta to me at least, really fascinating within this history, and something that I hadn't really paid as close attention to when thinking through the narratives and the chronology behind this. But it really popped as I started thinking about the illustrations, the images, and the way that we might capture this history through that kind of imagery. So a couple other shout outs, and I could do a pop quiz maybe at the end. Some of these things are really common. And I was so thrilled that Carolyn Garcia, or Mountain Girl, very generously shared her backstage pass, which was tucked away in her closet. So again, there's an example of some stuff that you might find very obvious, or you would expect to find it in the book, and other stuff that I hope will be a bit interesting to people who've already quite familiar with this topic. The images behind the changeover in the psychedelic culture in the 1960s into an era that we moved towards prohibition, I think, are equally fascinating. Some of them are Pulitzer Prize-winning images, like the one on the bottom here, and others have been featured in a number of different magazines, articles, newsreels, documentaries. And it's a careful and cautious reminder of how these ideas were fused together, and how that was illustrated and even popularized through mainstream media. I won't dwell too long here, simply to say that during the rollover into a prohibition era, and merging with a war on drugs, there's this other proliferation of ephemeral materials of rather cheaply and sometimes crudely produced guides or recipe books that begin to play with desktop publishing, but also play with different ways of creating a gray and black market for different psychedelic distribution networks. Of course, Blotter Acid and Eric Davis has written brilliantly about this. If you haven't seen his book, you should check it out. But there are a number of different kind of underground guides, and I'm grateful to the many people who've shared this with me. Mark McLeod and Kat Harrison have been really key for helping me to identify and try to find out where these belong to. Of course, Sasha Shulgin is a key figure in this history as well. All right. I promise. I'm almost done. As I rolled into the more recent history, again, I wanted to not lose sight of some of the earlier themes, the themes of ritual, the themes that are part of the history, but also continue to, I think, change the way we think about psychedelics today, or should cause us to stop and think about that. I want to talk a little bit about psychedelic tourism and the imagery that comes from that. Both the one on the top, which, again, is a guardian image here, advertising what it might look like to go to a psychedelic retreat-- I cannot say for sure whether that's a real one because I don't have enough information about the image that was published in The Guardian newspaper-- and other ones that were shared with me by friends who had snapshots that they were willing to share. The last thing that I will talk about, I think-- I'm pretty sure this is near the end-- is the place of Indigenous-produced art that I try to pull all the way through this book. The image here comes from an artist, Rita Huni Kuin, who's pictured here on the right. And the images on the left come partially from her and from other, in this case, Brazilian artists who are using depictions of ayahuasca to revive language resiliency within their communities. So the proceeds from their art go into language acquisition, language reclamation, language schools for young people living in the Huni Kuin territory here. I find this a really fascinating part of the story, that this is also a story of resilience. It's also a story of psychedelics being connected with something that is very progressive, very generative, if you will, coming back to that themes of resilience. On the right-hand side of the screen is another example of that theme of Indigenous resilience. This is from an Indigenous artist in Mexico, René Alvarado, who uses pigment and clay and soil from Maria Sabina's homeland, and in the community that she grew up in, to produce images that represent her and what she has meant in that area, in that community. And juxtapose that here with another AI-produced image. So these are both from about the same time period. I think the René Alvarado-- \[INAUDIBLE\] is here. Perhaps he can tell me the exact date. I think it's 2022. The one on the left is from 2023. This is an AI-generated image that was associated with an article depicting the hope that psychedelics bring for PTSD amongst military veterans. So I see this as a really fascinating way of thinking about different ways of drawing in historical images, or producing new AI-generated images, in this case, to look at how psychedelics are invested into very different projects. And maybe I'll leave that for more commentary in the question period. So by conclusion, I just wanted to first thank you all for being here and use this as a point to-- thinking through the illustrations, the images, the way that those images were created and how they connect with me has really got me thinking about the psychedelic resurgence as an opportunity to reconcile some of these bigger themes, not simply to convince the FDA of a particular outcome. This is to say nothing of the recent hearings. But to use psychedelics in a broader frame to think about how psychedelics have given Western knowledge systems the opportunity, perhaps, to reconcile with Indigenous ways of thinking about cosmology when it comes to plants, healing, and spirituality. And does this cultural moment also provide us an opportunity to rethink our relationship with the natural world? This poster, by the way, is from a 1970s campaign, which is an anti-drug campaign, but it still uses the same aesthetic. So I just like that idea of flipping the narrative or flipping the script a little bit. I didn't have a photograph of everyone who helped me with this book. But I'm really grateful to the many people who have opened up their homes, their basements, their closets-- that sounds creepy, but it's not meant to-- their art galleries, their libraries, their hearts, and really helped me to drill down and find different images that have helped me to think through what it means to tell a story in images. And I'm happy to talk about any of these folks, if you like. I think Michael Horowitz and I are actually standing in his closet there, if you can see. It's in the bottom middle. And I will just point out the folks on the right, it's through this study of images that I have been connected to the Native American Church of Canada. I was seeking permission to publish an image that I found in the archives. And in order to get that permission, they said, well, you should ask, the community. And of course I said, sure. And what I found was so much more than permission. But what I found were the ancestors, the grandchildren of the people who'd been featured in those photographs. And we've since launched a new project, where we're going back, looking at all of those photographs, naming people, not "Indian woman", "Indian man", as they were named in the newspaper, but actually giving them their names back. And we've been taking those photographs to the community and working to build a project where we can start to work together to reclaim some of this history and bring that history back into the community. So I want to give a special shout-out to Kelly Daniels, who's the man with no sleeves in blue there, who is the sort of pinnacle person who invited me into that project. So thanks. JEFFREY BREAU: Thank you so much, Erika. It's a delight to have you here and sharing your work. And we're just so thrilled that you are joining us again in the Psychedelics in the Future of Religion series. Before we turn to discussion, I just want to note to everybody out there and there are many of you, I highly recommend and implore you to go out and buy Erika's book. It is truly a sweeping history, and also just so much fun to sit with and get a chance to look at all these images and really digest them in a new level, in a new way in your body. So we now are going to turn over to discussion. Throughout the discussion, we will weave in audience questions. So to everybody out there, please add more questions to the Q&A. We have a few in there that will start us off, but please don't hold back. Maybe as a way, actually, of starting the discussion period, Erika I'm picking up on your final, or one of your final slides there, about the way that this moment can not just be a renaissance, but actually a reconciliation. And I'm curious to hear about how you see art and aesthetics feeding into this larger project of reconciliation. You mentioned reclaiming names and giving people names. But do you see art as a vehicle for this larger project? ERIKA DYCK: Yeah. I think if you'd asked me that question a few years ago, I would struggle more than I'm struggling right now to answer it. But it's really striking. And going through some of these images and just realizing the embedded stories, the embedded reasons why. There are so many reasons why people have kept and hung on to these images, in ways that have transcended some of the other ways that people have been pushing the stories underground. Treasured pieces of art, fans-- or different kind of ephemera or material culture around this is really a way in to recognizing some of the deep ways that psychedelics have been embedded, and again, I'll use that in quotation marks, but psychedelics or sacred plants have been embedded in different cultural histories. And for good reason, a lot of people didn't want to share that history for a long time, and yet they were able to maintain these elements of material, culture or illustrated culture. So it is a bit of a touch point. The photographs that we found that-- now I'm talking to the grandson of the woman who's featured in these images. His family wasn't able to talk about it for generations. And so there's just a quick example of one of the ways that those photographs have survived because they seemed rather benign and the stories had to go underground. But we're able to reconnect that now. And I think it is an invitation to take that opportunity to work on some reconciliation. PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: I'm curious, along those same lines, where you might see that sort of reconciliation in medicine. I mean, as a historian of medicine, you've noted these points of departure, and of, perhaps-- I don't know, bastardization of Indigenous knowledge. How might you see the future of reconciliation along the lines of medicine? Are there cases that seem to point us in the right direction? ERIKA DYCK: Yeah. Ask me in a few years. But one of the things that I've been puzzling over for a few years now, and I still don't have a clear answer, but the way that we use clinical trials to measure efficacy. And I know this is a bit maybe fresh as many of us probably paid attention to what went on in the United States recently with the FDA decision, and understanding how to measure quality control, if you will, safety risk profiles, harm reduction, whatever language we want to attach to that. And when we look at some of the images and open ourselves up to some of the different ways that people have stayed safe in other contexts, free from the clinical language, there's a lot to be learned there for how we measure efficacy, how we think about benefits, or how we privilege or prioritize different forms of evidence when it comes to thinking about someone's physical and spiritual health. And there are lots of examples, and I will stick to where I'm more familiar with some of the communities I've worked with directly. But certainly, in the secondary literature, there's lots of examples that stretch this into other contexts as well. And I think, more than that salutary gesture that, yes, we need to pay attention to Indigenous people too, but actually importing or allowing for those conversations to include something that go beyond doses, or, I don't something that's quite specific. But opening ourselves up to thinking about this at a cosmological level, it's quite scary. It's quite humbling. It's, I think, something that makes people quite nervous. I was on a call with some representatives from Health Canada not too long ago. That's not where the conversation starts. You can't say, what you need to do is, flip the script, or completely open your mind to this. And yet, I think there are opportunities to weave in these different ways of knowing that could be really positive and respectful and reciprocal. It doesn't need to be extractive. I think there has to be a different mechanism for relating to one another in that way. PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Yeah. There's a question in the chat here on a publishing decision to place sculptures or stone objects against a white page background, and then, in a parenthetical, instead of in place, when in an archive or where they were taken from, as if they're floating in a non-marked white space. The question is, is it just the reality that these objects are forever detached from their cultural context now that they are in circulation? ERIKA DYCK: It's a brilliant question that I'm sure I won't have a satisfying answer to. Because part of this-- this is my first foray into doing this. And so part of this was designers would suggest something, and they had different justifications for some of this. But that's not really an excuse. That is one piece of it. One of the things, I think, that struck me as I try to think around these objects is, a number of these objects have already been removed from their cultural context, and they're sometimes found on shelves or in cabinets or in museums. And I almost would rather have them suspended in space than as part of-- choose your favorite national museum here. I won't pick on anyone in particular. And I guess I struggle with that a little bit too, how best to position these. And I will say that aesthetically, which-- again, historian of words here, usually. But seeing them suspended was actually quite striking. And that 3D effect that they have was a way to capture the sculpture that avoided a two-dimensional flattening effect. And there are trade-offs in all of these decisions, certainly. And I'm not a designer, but I appreciated that three-dimensional piece, something that is really difficult. And I've seen, in Plants of the Gods, for example, Hoffmann et al, they include some of the same statues, and they're set on a black background and they kind of melt into the background a little bit. I would say, maybe others would disagree. So I don't know. I love the question. Thank you. I don't know how to answer it in a way that-- but going forward, I think there are ways to enplace or keep those artifacts in place. The artifacts that I featured have already been removed. So that was a tricky piece, too. PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: And of course, the hope is that the text on the page, which I do also implore people to read as well as looking at the images, hopefully does a lot of that. Or it does do a lot of that contextualization work. JEFFREY BREAU: Staying on the theme of contextualizing and ways of knowing and thinking, I'm going to combine two questions from the audience. One is a question, I'll just read it. Are we being led? Are we still being led by Western frames of curiosity, prohibition, resurgence, and even art? And what might other frames for thinking about psychedelics teach us about different conceptions of existence and happiness? So that's part one, and I want to put that in conversation with another question, which is around theorists, art historians, or other theorists of art who could help us rethink the role of psychedelics, the importance of psychedelics, and look at these ideas through maybe a non-western frame. ERIKA DYCK: To the second question, absolutely, yes. And I'm not claiming to have done that and to have deeply engaged in art history theory. I haven't. And I would love to do that more in the future. But I think you're absolutely right. There are certain Western frameworks that run through this. I tried to acknowledge that where possible. And there's more material, or my access to the material was also limited Rolodex friends and access to archives and whatnot, as you try this. But I really wanted to draw attention, even in cases where sometimes the designers, who are not necessarily experts on psychedelics, they're interested in design. They're like, no, no. This picture is just not-- it's grainy, it's this or that. I said no, but it's the only one we have. For example, the bozoku tribes. This was something that I really fought for, because it's important that we recognize that there's a different aesthetic tradition that comes around the same time. It draws on some things that, the text would be familiar. Here's where to find, here's a good show to go to, these sorts of things. You can find that in the San Francisco Oracle too. But the aesthetic is quite different. And the fact that it exists, and there's a short run, and there's the one artist who's particularly associated with it. I think that is just, I hope, just a of morsel of inspiration. And I am not in a position to do the full research on Japan, but maybe somebody will see that and say, hey, there's something else here, and I have the language skills to do this. And I really, really hope that happens. I tried to do that as much as possible with some of the options that I had. So working with Rita Huni Kuin, for example, was something I was really, really excited when that relationship-- we were working through a translator on WhatsApp during COVID. It was not ideal circumstances. But we were able to make a nice donation to their community as well, and to hopefully honor that, and showcase this work that's happening that you're not going to find, if you like, Google psychedelics. And yet, it is part of that story of reconciliation that's not really in the frame of psychedelics. It's not part of the psychedelic renaissance or anything. But this is a different way of thinking about what does it mean to grow up in this community with a shrinking language base, as she has explained. What does it mean to be an artist reclaiming that? So again, it doesn't give it full treatment. But I hope that by including her work, it opens up those possibilities. Or maybe, it turned out that one of the people working on the production line is Brazilian. And he recognized that I was struggling to describe some things. So he called some friends, and it was exactly what I was hoping for, not knowing who he would be. But we were able to draw in some other examples that I otherwise wouldn't have had access to. So I hope it serves in that way, that this is definitely not the end. It is merely one attempt. PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: The book as a whole, I think, the opening pages defining what is psychedelic. It's in big letters here, what is psychedelic? I think it's a more ambitious question to respond to than the words on the page imply. And this also comes up in the edited volume, Expanding Mindscapes, around iboga and ibogaine specifically. What does it mean to pull ibogaine or iboga into what we're calling psychedelics? And I think this will be a really important-- it is a live, important question, as the psychedelic humanities comes into its own, that I think there is much to learn from in I don't know, history of sexuality. There's a book from the '90s, I think. I cannot remember the title, but it's something about sexuality in medieval Europe, where she talks about, what does it mean to call a person queer in the past? They didn't have that word. They had a different set of categories and taxonomy to describe sexual difference. And yet, as a historian in the present, I have a connection to what this person is describing in 13th century Europe. So how do I work with queerness across time or something like that? I think in the psychedelic studies world, we're dealing with very similar questions around what is it that we can include under the banner of what is sufficiently psychedelic or what sort of has the quality of psychedelic. And so I'm curious how you are engaged in the ongoing wrestling in that question, specifically in the context of this book, and then perhaps Expanding Mindscapes as well. And what does that work look like as we're incorporating historical phenomena or cultural phenomena that don't necessarily work along the terms of psychedelic, but seem to have a resonating quality? Foucault called it an intensive vibration through time, or something like this, as he's reading second century records of gymnasiums or something like that. How do you see this question in the history of psychedelics? ERIKA DYCK: Maybe you could see me squirming sometimes when I was saying the word psychedelic, and I'm trying to do this, and it's this awkward thing. And yet, it's this shorthand that allows us to grasp a certain concept as we travel through time, and even into other places where that word wouldn't resonate even today, even if it were translated. So yeah, I take that question, I struggle with it. And yet, not to put this on to editors and publishers, but to not have psychedelics in the title also-- you're like, a thing that is not that. They're like, just use the word, right? Get your keyword in there. But again with that blaming others. One thing that, talking to anthropologists and ethnobotanists about this is, again, really trying to think about, well, how do we understand these frameworks in another language, in another culture, and another way of understanding and thinking about our relationship to the planet and have repeated that phrase? But it's been helpful. The cautionary tale has always been, don't call it psychedelic. Don't start with psychedelics. I shouldn't show up in a Indigenous community and say like, got any psychedelics? Or what does psychedelic mean to you? Because it it's a dead end. And it cuts off that conversation. And so with deference to that idea, I don't want that to be the-- it is a container that I'm using in this book. But I try to poke holes in that a little bit and show that there are also ways of understanding things like transition, transition as a concept. Although, of course, psychedelics are not associated with all transitions. But the way of thinking about transition in the iboga ceremonies is a really good example of that. These transition moments are punctuated by, sometimes, these ceremonial contexts. And if we think about transition, we think about different stages of life, there are ways that ceremonies, and the ceremonies themselves are not, except to those of us who are looking for psychedelics, they are not psychedelic ceremonies. These are ceremonies of many things. And there may be something in that ceremony that somebody isolated at some point and later classified as a psychedelic. But in those ceremonial contexts, they're not psychedelic, or psychedelic is the wrong frame to put on that ceremony. Otherwise, it's just a way of classifying them and sending information to RCMP officers or police officers, depending on your jurisdiction. But it isn't really a true capturing of what that moment entails or the meaning of that moment. So I try to embrace that as much as I can with the limits of language to acknowledge that it's my rough shout out as well to Chinese herbalism, which is not psychedelic. And they're not claiming to be psychedelic. And yet there's a way of thinking about using plants in relation to different ways of stimulating consciousness that we might think of as, we could learn something from that within this larger context. So it's rough and ready in places, and unfortunately, more superficial than it should be in some places. But I hope that it plants those seeds of inspiration for thinking about, where does the frame fray, or where are the edges of that frame, and what might we think of that goes outside of the psychedelic bubble that actually is really helpful for imagining where the edges are, if that makes sense. PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Absolutely, yeah. And the title of the book that was escaping me earlier is Getting Medieval, Sexualities and Communities Pre and Postmodern by Carolyn Dinshaw. So if anybody is looking for a method for their next transhistorical psychedelic project, a place to start. JEFFREY BREAU: I want to pick up on this poking holes. I mean, I love the poking holes in the category of psychedelic and recognizing that, in so many contexts, it's really a flattening of what's happening, and also a flattening of the unique substances. That's one of the things I think the book did really well, was recognize that we're talking about a large class here. And ketamine works very differently from MDMA, which works very differently from LSD, and set and setting all of these things. And so acknowledging that project and really being a supporter of it, I'm going to ask a question that completely flattens all sorts of these categories, which is, as I was reading the book, I was very curious about the way in which you were conceptualizing and arguing a psychedelic aesthetic. What is a psychedelic aesthetic? You talk a little bit in chapter 6 about the synesthetic nature of psychedelic aesthetics, at least in this particular 1960s context. But I'm curious if you came to any other, maybe not a grand theory, but a sense of what is the family resemblance across art and aesthetics with these diverse class of chemicals? ERIKA DYCK: Gosh, yeah. I did a bit of a deep dive thinking about San Francisco streetscapes and soundscapes and the smells. And I was really trying to think about embracing that synesthetic quality. Because you hear that word and that phrasing used quite a lot. And it's a place where I found the most purchase with that concept, thinking about mixing all of these senses in whether or not you're actually on psychedelics, but at some of those concerts, at some of these festival spaces. You see it in the posters, you can smell it in the pungent, acrid air of the streets. And I can only imagine, I mean, I wasn't alive in the 1960s to experience that. But cannabis is legal in Canada now, too. But just thinking about the way that all of the senses are present in some of these moments. And so that's a place that I found it worked and it had purchase. I'm not sure I don't think there is a psychedelic aesthetic, like a psychedelic aesthetic. And I know this will sound silly, perhaps, but set and setting really matters. So the set and setting of this psychedelic expression really changes when you are in a ceremonial context. And there are many different kinds of ceremonial contexts. Those ceremonies also have their own aesthetic quality, their own acoustic qualities, and to say nothing of the spiritual and emotional context of those ceremonial settings. But looking at artwork from, for example, an ayahuasca ceremony, compare that with a peyote ceremony, with an iboga ceremony, the tradition of artwork that is produced in those contexts is quite different. The fact that those pieces of art help us to understand stories and connect with ancestors is something common. But I wouldn't say that's an aesthetic quality. So actually, I'll disagree with whatever I said in the book that there is an aesthetic. I think there are moments where we see this, and it has sometimes, I think, been used to undermine-- let me put that differently. I think that the idea of a psychedelic aesthetic was used to create anti-drug literature. I'm going to use the last image that I showed in my conclusions. They're like, it's an anti-drug thing, but it's meant to look kind of groovy. It's meant to be recognizable as something psychedelic. So there's a way of caricaturing this particular kind, this particular version of a psychedelic aesthetic, in order to also twist and undermine it. But I don't think it captures the diversity of the things that I'm hoping to capture in this book, which I think are a much more expansive set of ideas that connect with ways of engaging with things that we later call psychedelic. JEFFREY BREAU: Yeah. Great. So we so often in this series, come back to the political project that is always surrounding psychedelics. And in some ways, art too has become part of this larger prohibition, or just a political project of othering. So that's a phenomenal answer. Sticking actually with philosophy and theory and historicization for a second, Osiris Gonzalez Romero is on the call and did put in a question here, and says it's wonderful to see you again. But his question was actually about something you mentioned on page 12, which is you state that, \[CHUCKLES\] to direct us to the text, you state that, quote, "psychedelics history has often been explained as a history of ideas", end quote. Osiris is wondering if you could explain a little bit more about what you were thinking when you wrote that, and what it means to think about the history of psychedelics as a history of ideas? ERIKA DYCK: Yeah. Thanks, Osiris. Tough question. I know I should always know exactly what I meant when I wrote something. I should be able to answer that. I guess part of what drew me to psychedelics in the first place was the idea-- many, many people have asked me throughout my career, what was my favorite psychedelic or what was the first one I took, or these questions around my own consumption And of course, that question is fraught. And when I was defending my PhD in 2005, I absolutely lied and said I didn't inhale, which seemed to satisfy my examiners, which just tells you how much has changed in the past few years, that no one would get away with that today. I was drawn to the question not of what's my favorite psychedelic, but why were people invested in a project where they thought psychedelics were going to change the way we deliver medicine, the way we think about this? It's the politics of it, I suppose, in some respects, that drew me to that project in the very first instance. And it has sustained me throughout. So maybe it's more a reflection of my own attachment to psychedelics as an idea, not something that is necessarily measurable or exact or precise, but something that, hopefully, as I see from the way that Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley talked about it, something that is-- and I want to say ephemeral. That's what Osiris and I talked about that for a long time before. But something that allows you to project different kinds of hope into a psychedelic project. What if? Think outside the box. What if we used our acid trip to develop the mouse, as apparently Steve Jobs did. Or what if? It's not whether it's ketamine or MDMA or LSD, it's the idea that, somehow, this inspiration or this way of thinking differently, changing our consciousness, would allow us to think differently. And it might not be good different. I know there's a lot of debate about that in the literature right now, too. Does it make us less capitalist? Does it make us more capitalist? Does it reinforce ideas? I don't know. But I do think that investing in the ideas behind psychedelics, the idea that psychedelics can potentially help us to think differently, or think about a problem differently-- that to me is what has always sustained me in the study of psychedelics. What if thinking about psychedelics makes us imagine a different way of measuring health outcomes? Maybe the clinical trial isn't a good way to measure success. It's not because of psychedelics, but it's thinking with psychedelics, if you will. Or what if psychedelics help us to think differently about disease categories? If I can put myself into this state, does that state is does that state require treatment? And that's something I'm borrowing a little bit here from, I saw someone talked about Duncan Blewitt. That's something that Duncan Blewitt had also mentioned, that these ideas of tampering with our sense of what is real or what is rational, and maybe opening up the possibility that we need to rethink some boundaries or rigid categories that we've placed on things-- whether that's a pathological state or condition on the psychiatry side of things, or whether it's how we measure success. And when I think about clinical trials-- I don't know if that's a good example, or a couple of examples of what I mean when I say, psychedelic ideas or thinking with psychedelics, as opposed to thinking on psychedelics. JEFFREY BREAU: Sorry, Paul. Did you want to jump in? I was just going to pick up a thread that you tossed out here, which was really beguiling me a little bit, or just catching me also while I was reading. And you mentioned this a little bit when you mentioned the zines, and the Japanese zines in particular. But there is a way in which psychedelic art seems to be calling people into the psychedelic experience in some way, and oftentimes, very literally, where art is paired with a guide or a seller or this community that is then going to usher you into the experience. And having sat with this archive, I'm curious if you have a sense of-- first of all, do you think that's unique to psychedelic art, that it has this-- off the top of my head, I don't look at most paintings and think, oh, I have to go do this thing. But maybe that's just my perception. So I'm curious if you think that's unique to psychedelics? And if so, what do you think exactly is going on there? Why is the act of taking psychedelics so tightly married to the art that comes and surrounds the substances? ERIKA DYCK: Can I cheat in answering my question with a-- can I show my screen again? JEFFREY BREAU: Yeah, please. ERIKA DYCK: Sorry. Let's see. Oh, I may have closed my tab here. Nope. I think it'll still work. OK. I'm going to cheat. So if we look at this, my Thank You page. In the top left-hand corner, this is a bookstore owner in Paris, France, whose name is escaping me at the moment. We spent a lovely afternoon together. This is in the basement of his bookstore. And what he has done is collected what we probably would quickly recognize as psychedelic art. It's like poster art, primarily, which was produced in the San Francisco area. He's tracked down which artists, and there's a handful of them. And then what he does, and you won't be able to appreciate from this particular quick image, is he traces its origins. And he finds so much of it in French modern art. So some of them are 50 years-- he takes these different images that just get a groovy font and whatnot. So in doing so-- and I'll stop sharing there because the image isn't the best, other than to gesture towards that-- in doing so, what he shows us is that this whole thing is a mirage. He does it from a theoretical art perspective. He did an exhibit on this in Paris. There's no book about it that I know of. He said he's working on it. And if anybody's interested and wants to email me, I will look up his name. It is just not going to come to me at the moment. In any event, what he does is he pulls it all apart. And he said this poster art that we think is like hyper-psychedelic is actually French modernism with these six fonts and these wavy letters and these colors that altered the aesthetic, so that it tricks us almost into thinking that is something new, and that it is something specific. And it's such a fascinating corrective. And his research on this is incredible. He just has these little snapshots, and he's like, you can read about it. If you go to his store, you talk nicely to him, he'll show you into the basement where you can go. And he's got QR codes for several of them, where you can find this Italian art from the 16th century that is popularized and funkified, if you will-- or groovy-ied, I don't know, grooved-up-- so that it looks like something that came out of the minds of someone who just came out of a Grateful Dead concert, or Jefferson Airplane if you will. It doesn't have to be them. So it really got me thinking about how flimsy that aesthetic might be, or how specific regionally in time and temporally specific it is. And perhaps, myself too have been tricked into thinking this is quintessentially psychedelic, but it isn't. It really collapses in time and place into a particular thing that is, of course, influenced. Who knew? It was influenced by other artists along the way, many not credited, but then some of them aren't credited later on either. So that's my answer. PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: I have a question about audience and who you saw this book as intended for. As I was first opening it up and flipping through, I was reminded of a introductory history textbooks that I once encountered, especially with the single-page spreads on a particular moment or a particular figure. I was imagining, this book may be finding its way or precipitating intro to psychedelic history courses. So I'm curious, who the audience you imagined for this text was. ERIKA DYCK: I think that for me changed over time. And perhaps the overarching editors really had, from Quarto Press and later MIT Press, had a clear vision for that. But I certainly did not initially. I was, like I'm writing a history of psychedelics, and it's going to have some nice illustrations, and it's going to try to show that these ideas have traveled around. But as I got more into the images, like, this is different. This is changing what I think. So I was like, OK, I want it to be familiar to people like you who already a lot about psychedelics. And I hope there's something in there for you as well. You can skip over the parts, the beginning parts. But I also wanted to be a little bit provocative. So what they said is for each chapter, I could choose a kind of pull-out section, if you will. And those are the ones on slightly colored pages. And so I thought, hmm, OK. So I wanted to profile people or places that you might expect less of. So the specter of women. Instead of choosing Jerry Garcia, I decided to go with Grace Slick as an icon of acid activism, but also as a way to-- or that kind of aesthetic. But also, she writes about this in her own work as this being a bit of a tricky time for women that it wasn't all glory and this wonderful "White Rabbit" song, which was great, but also there was a lot of sexism. And so it was a way that I could also play with some of those-- not play with, but to introduce some of those ideas that again, you might expect. But just to trouble that narrative a little bit. And some of them, I will just fully confess that I've spent way too much time transcribing letters that were handwritten by Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond to let that go and just pretend I hadn't. So I'm like, no, no, this is going in again. It was just my own personal bias. But instead of focusing on the things, some of which we know, like the word psychedelic, I wanted to use that as a bit of a launching point to think about his wife, Maria, his next wife Laura, who not only helped him through different phases of his life, but really pushed him, Maria, in particular, into these directions towards spiritualism. And so Huxley's there because we might expect it. But then I wanted to use that to elongate that and say, other than his famous biologist and eugenicist family, he also is connected to his wife, who introduces him to these amazing women who really challenge him in his thinking about, how can we write about and articulate forms of consciousness that we can't grasp, or that we can't grasp in the empirical model? We don't have the science behind it, again, to go from his family. And I wanted to use that to venture, veer towards that as a way of showing he's also nourished by these other things. PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Along those same lines with spiritualism as a, I don't know, secret current in psychedelic history, namely in Huxley, Mad Pride was another one of those sort of, I don't know, tangential elements to the stronger history of psychedelics throughline. And so I'm curious what that process was in inviting these other forces to be conversant with psychedelic history. You see the role of psychedelics playing in generating momentum around similar movements like Mad Pride, or psychedelics as part of a deeper frustration with social norms and institutions in a similar way that Mad Pride was. What is that process in inviting new forces that perhaps were not directly conversant with the psychedelics into this history? ERIKA DYCK: Yeah. Part of this might be my antipathy towards thinking that we will have won some kind of war, just to use that metaphor. If psychedelics get legalized, we're all good. And I'm very circumspect or cautious or even quite nervous about that prospect. Because I think that would almost be a loss. There are all of these other things that psychedelics allow us to think about and talk about that are not the regulatory state of their position in society. The Mad Pride piece is another element of that. And I never had the fortune to meet Humphry Osmond in person, but I spoke with him on the phone. And this was, gosh, it probably was 2002. I think I was a naive doctoral student. I didn't know anything. And this guy, who I came to study for the next two decades, he'd had a fall. So his daughter was quite cautious about talking to somebody who was probably going to tell all sorts of things about his psychedelic past. And I think there's some protection there. Anyway, it didn't end up that way at all. But one of the things he said to me really has stuck with me ever since is, the thing he was most proud of was helping to co-found Schizophrenics Anonymous. And here I was, expecting him to tell me about psychedelics. And psychedelics were there, but it was like going into a ceremonial context and saying, where are the psychedelics? It was sort of a non-starter. So rather than starting with psychedelics-- and this is, again, 2002. Conversation was quite different. But even that, we didn't start by talking about psychedelics. We started by talking about schizophrenia, and how important it was to him that he still had people who connected with him, who felt that they were able to love a part of themselves that they never could before. And I'm summarizing a few different things that people have shared with me, including one more recently. A woman who worked with Osmond, who had also been diagnosed with manic depressive disorder, with psychosis, said that it was through Osmond and her LSD experience that she was able to see herself as whole, that she wasn't this broken part and this sometimes good part or sometimes broken. But she was a whole person. And these were parts of her that were all her. And reading letters from patients to him, or former patients, and reading some of the tracks-- so there's one guy who wrote his biography or autobiography, rather, about Schizophrenics Anonymous. I came to appreciate just how powerful that was. And for them, for some of these patients, some who I met, some who I've only read about, the idea that some psychiatrist would take a substance that, at that time, he really didn't know that much about-- I mean, I don't know how much he was talking to Hoffman-- and in their minds, go out of his mind to know what we go through, was something incredibly powerful. And some people wept as they talked to me about the brave doctor who took them seriously. And when he, in a very simplistic way, just said, that's the thing he's most proud of, like I said, it stuck with me. It resonated with me. And it's one of those pieces that I'm like, Mad Pride, or this idea that you could be proud of yourself and have a diagnosis or resist that diagnosis, perhaps, is something really important that psychedelics also have something to teach us about, or even just the study of psychedelics. Again, don't have to take it. You could think with it. Thinking about pathology and psychosis, in this case, is really important. So that's why I put it there. PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Yeah. That is, I think, a beautiful place that we can conclude our conversation here. Thank you, Professor Dyck, again, for sharing your work with us today. And thank you to everyone in the audience for your wonderful questions. We're grateful to the center's director, Dr. Charles Stang, Laurie Sedgwick, our events coordinator, and the rest of the CSWR staff for their support. And as mentioned at the start, we have many more psychedelics related events this semester. Our next event in the Psychedelics and Ethics series will be on October 10 at 5:30 in the Cader room at the Divinity School, also accessible via Zoom, where an expert panel of chaplains and scholars will discuss the state of psychedelic chaplaincy and imagine possible futures for the field. The discussion will feature Dr. Bonnie Glass-Coffin, a professor of Anthropology at Utah State and co-convener of the Transforming Chaplaincy Psychedelic Care Network, Dr. Caroline Peacock, a director of spiritual health for Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University, and Dr. Jamie Beachy, a field scholar at Emory and co-founder of Naropa University's Center for Psychedelic Studies. Registration is required, which you can find on the CSWR calendar. And our next Psychedelics in the Future of Religion event for this semester will be in the same online format as this event on October 22. We'll be in conversation with visual artist, Karen Lofgren, on her book emBRUJADA, charms for the living and the larger project series that this book fits into on cures and curses. Registration is required and you can find that also on the CSWR calendar. And with that, we will bid you all adieu for the evening. Thank you for your attention, for your thoughtful questions. And we wish you a lovely rest of your evening, or beginning of your evening, or whatever other time it may be where you are. NARRATOR 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions. NARRATOR 1: Copyright 2024, The President and Fellows of Harvard College. See also:- [ psychedelics ](/topic-tags/psychedelics) - [ Video ](/news-classification/video) - [ Transcendence and Transformation ](/programming-threads/transcendence-and-transformation) - [ Spirituality and Psychedelics ](/programming-threads/spirituality-and-psychedelics) - [ Psychedelics and the Future of Religion ](/programming-threads/psychedelics-and-future-religion)