Psychedelic Intersections 2025 Information

"Xábasen" (Mazatec)

"Ayuda Mutua" (Spanish)

 "Mutual Aid: the work by the community, for the community" (English)

Elías García Méndez (Mazatec), from Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, Mexico, belongs to a community renowned for its foundational role in the global understanding of the healing properties of psilocybin mushrooms. In 2021, García Méndez co-founded Casa Adobe with a collective of Mazatec painters. As the first art gallery and cultural space in Huautla, Casa Adobe is dedicated to strengthening Mazatec culture and identity through the arts. García Méndez, who has generously opened his home to house this initiative, serves as its director. In this role, he organizes and supports exhibitions, workshops, cultural activities, and classes that engage both youth and audiences of all ages. His efforts to promote the arts, preserve cultural heritage, and uplift Indigenous artists are grounded in collaboration with the local community. Casa Adobe operates as a non-governmental entity, sustained by the collective efforts of communities across the Sierra Mazateca, as well as national and international partners. In addition to his work at Casa Adobe, García Méndez is an elementary school teacher at Escuela Primaria Lic. Benito Juárez. There, he develops projects with his students to explore and preserve the Mazatec cosmovisión, fostering a deeper understanding of their cultural heritage.

Marian Goodell is the first Chief Executive Officer of Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that produces the world-renowned Burning Man event and supports the growing global network of people and organizations it has inspired. Marian’s stewardship of Burning Man’s anti-consumerist, participatory, and celebratory culture has set it on a seemingly unstoppable growth path. Burning Man communities and leaders are active in 75 countries and collectively produce more than 100 events annually. Today Burning Man’s largest event is home to 80,000 thinkers, makers, and creative problem-solvers who come together each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to build the world’s most imaginative, experimental city. Burning Man has grown from the scrappy, anarchist gathering of a few thousand people when Marian first attended in 1995, into an international cultural movement that sparks innovation in design, business, technology, education, and urban planning. Marian is a keen connector and storyteller. Driven by her belief that we can do more together than we can do alone, she brings together people, ideas, and resources in creative and unexpected ways that move organizations and communities forward.

The ethnobotanical study of Indigenous peoples has generally focused on rural settings, particularly in the Amazon, often overlooking the role of plants and sacred medicine as active agents in urban Indigenous landscapes. For the Muysca people of Suba, in Bogota, Colombia, plant medicine, once demonized and forbidden, has become a symbol of resurgence, healing, and territorial belonging. In this paper, we explore how the traditional use of tobacco and its derivatives, namely ambira, hosca, and rapé, as well as coca both in its leaf form and processed as mambe, tyhyquy (Brugmansia arborea), and other medicinal plants, is an integral component of practices such as the revitalization of Muysca memory, the healing of communal bonds, and the defense and reclamation of land in the city. Based on on-going collaborative research framed within Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology, and drawing on visual methodologies and interviews with Muysca elders and healers, we argue that there is an intimate entanglement between sacred plant medicine, the Muysca body, and the territory of Suba, which further constitutes an embodied ethics of land care that actively contests technologies of urban coloniality in Colombia.

The history of peyote-based ceremonial practices in North America is often understood through the lens of the Native American Church (NAC), with its legal inception in Oklahoma and its subsequent spread as a syncretic religious movement across the United States and later, into Canada. In 1954 a new documented chapter appeared on the legal landscape in Saskatchewan, far from the desert habitat of the peyote cactus, which had increasingly been described as a sacrament in the expanding membership of the NAC. Establishing a chapter across the US-Canadian border introduced new legal challenges for bringing the sacrament into the region, however, it forged spiritual and cultural ties that spanned from the southern United States to the western parts of Canada bridging diverse communities across Turtle Island. Our main questions interrogate 1) why and how peyote ceremonies found a place in western Canada, beginning at the turn of the 20th century; and 2) why some NAC members have historically welcomed non-Indigenous outsiders into this sacred plant medicine practice. In this paper we combine and compare archival documentation about the pilgrimage, largely collected by outsiders to the NAC, with oral histories from within the various communities, to illustrate the diverse historical justifications for protecting the peyote pilgrimage, and the different kinds of relationships, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, that have contributed to that history.

The social and symbolic elaboration of mediation in Mazatec thought and life. Just as mushroom curers mediate with a powerful living landscape on behalf of their clients, the town of Huautla and its bilingual chjota xan (“people of the book”) commercial class have historically had the role of mediators between powerful external institutions (coffee producers and buyers, the state) and the chjota yoma (humble people) of the countryside, which also produced most curers.

Based on ethnographic research over a more than thirty year period, as well as access to the journal of one of Wasson’s companions, this paper asks how the role of Huautla’s mediators has changed since Gordon Wasson first took mushrooms with María Sabina--and especially in the current period of the “psychedelic renaissance.” We find that the mediating role has progressively moved away from the chjota yoma healers, first to Huautla’s centrally located intellectuals, and finally outside the region altogether, and the figure of María Sabina and the healer has progressively succumbed to an abstracted memeification of Western self-help tropes that may marginalize people in the region who are not fluent in that discourse.

The paper progresses through the cases of Gregorio Herrera, an early 20th century curer, María Sabina and her relationship with Wasson, one of her nieces--a curer who recently died in poverty, Julieta, a Huauteca healer who received international recognition in the early 2000s, and a form of luxury high-end tourism that takes place in another region of Mexico but involves “Powerful & Legal Mazatec Traditional Mushroom ceremonies.”

A large number of non-Indigenous people from the USA, Canada, and European countries are heading in an exodus to Latin American countries to take part in shamanic tourism retreats, seeking authentic experiences with ayahuasca and so-called forest medicines. In the case of Brazil, the focus of this shamanic tourism has been among the Pano-speaking peoples of the State of Acre. Many of these non-Indigenous people seek out shamanic experiences as a way to enhance their spiritual and therapeutic practices and experiences. Many of them also wish to become partners and participate in activities of “Indigenous reciprocity,” aiming to engage in practices that encourage Indigenous cultures, rather than those seen as cultural appropriation. In light of this, this presentation seeks to understand what can be considered practices of “Indigenous Reciprocity” in the context of contemporary international shamanic networks, focusing on the relations between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples from Acre. What is considered by both as “partnership” or “exchanges”? Are they philanthropic initiatives resulting from a dialog between Indigenous cosmologies and native theories of reciprocity with Western theories of human rights, historical reparation, and decoloniality? Are these economic partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people concerned with Indigenous autonomy and social justice? This presentation is based on the anthropological method of participant observation. We will argue that these relationships typically involve exchanges of value in ritual, shamanic, political, kinship and economic dimensions; they also involve both humans and non-humans. The presentation will also incorporate concepts that emerged appearing in the declaration from the Ayahuasca Indigenous Conferences, held in Indigenous territories in Acre since 2017.

Religion is one of the most common topics that has surfaced in observations and interviews with participants in a community-based, peer-led integration group in a small city in the Deep South of the U.S. Many struggled with religion and found solace in psychedelics. This invites an examination into questions about how adverse religious experiences, sometimes called religious trauma, manifests in psychedelic experiences and their integration, and how it opens conversation about opportunities for psychedelic chaplaincy and counseling in general around psychological damage resulting from religious control. The study is based on interviews and two years of ethnographic research with a psychedelic integration group, where participants approach psychedelics for the purpose of personal and spiritual growth. Findings reveal that many people experienced repair of religious wounds, resulting either in a reconnection to a wisdom tradition, a general sense of spiritual connection that was not religious, or peace with rejecting religion. Challenges for some include social isolation, difficult psychedelic experiences, and the absence of hoped-for spiritual experiences. These findings corroborate other studies that suggest that religious interpretations of the ineffable vary within and between cultural contexts. The diversity of experiences invites a general approach to pastoral care that does not overdetermine intersections between spirituality, religion, and psychedelics but that prioritizes listening and learning from one's client population. They also invite pastoral counselors to draw on shared religious stories and interpretations that may help clients meaningfully interpret and integrate their experiences. Opportunities for pastoral care and spiritual direction include attention to both cognitive and social integration, as people find meaning and inhabit diverse social communities.

A recent FDA decision to delay the approval of MDMA-assisted Therapy (MDMA-AT) came as a surprise to many after Phase III research data demonstrated that more than two-thirds of research participants who received MDMA with therapy no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis at the end of the treatment protocol. Among the reasons for the FDA's decision to deny approval was a concern for heightened positive expectations from participants, potentially biasing reported treatment outcomes. Community activists and ethicists have expressed an additional yet related concern that the cultural phenomenon of psychedelic hype (see Petranker et al., 2020; Yaden, Potash, 2022) further contributed to inflated expectations and placed undue pressure on MDMA-AT participants to report positive experiences. As Phase III MDMA-AT research practitioners, we affirm the need for additional inquiry into the influence of expectancy on MDMA-AT research in future Phase III trials. In considering expectancy, we also advocate for a deeper consideration of the role of hope in psychedelic therapy as distinct from expectancy. While potential expectancy bias on the part of the researchers relies on a belief in a positive end point, hope is a broader act of care and an ethical imperative in MDMA research. Developing an authentically caring therapeutic alliance requires aligning with participants' hopes and dreams and striving to support conditions for their best outcome. By bringing a spiritual health lens to a consideration of expectancy in MDMA research, our reflection on hope is drawn from spiritual, existential, religious, and theological sources, as well as a consideration of the Inner Healing Intelligence method (O'Donnell et al., 2023) utilized in Phase II and Phase III MDMA-AT research protocols.

Psychedelic chaplaincy, encompassing the delivery of psychedelic-assisted therapy by clergy within local churches to individuals with diverse psychiatric conditions, is vital to practical theology and Christian praxis. However, some challenges hinder the progress of this emerging field in mental healthcare (Rajcok, 2022). These challenges include insufficient care standards, a lack of qualified spiritual leaders, cultural acceptance, and legal obstacles among African American Christian communities in Maryland and beyond. Fundamentally, the importance of this in mental healthcare delivery requires that spiritual healthcare practitioners maintain the requisite standards. Nonetheless, the roles and qualifications of spiritual health practitioners (SHP) in psychedelic-assisted therapies are little recorded in the literature (Peacock, et al., 2024). This study investigates the lived experiences of some spiritual health practitioners, the individuals with psychedelics, and the spiritual care they received within African American Christian communities in Maryland. It also seeks to interrogate the emerging challenges associated with spiritual care practices. The primary study question is: to what extent can psychedelic chaplaincy methods be incorporated into mental health care without compromising standards? The study employs an ethnographic methodology. The research involves 20 interviews with different spiritual health practitioners from different denominations who have administered psychedelic-assisted treatment. The thematic analysis centred on their experiences, contributions, and challenges faced in administering psychedelic-based therapies. Preliminary findings reveal an awareness of power dynamics among the people and some prevailing challenges, which include socioeconomic barriers, cultural stigma, mistrust in medical systems, and lack of structured training among the practitioners. This research concludes by advocating for legal reforms, Community Program Development, and initiatives for research and funding to reconcile the disparities between clinical psychology and cultural and spiritual traditions, thereby enhancing psychedelic chaplaincy and integrative mental health care.

My paper asks why the psychedelic renaissance, even as it embraces the idea that psychedelics give access to mystical experience, centers the mind-brain (and not the body) as key to understanding mysticism, an understanding foreign to most mystical traditions. The answer, I argue, has to do with the psychedelic revival’s relationship to American secularity, which I treat not as the separation of religion from public life, but rather as a cultural-intellectual tradition that defines religion and related categories like spirituality. Taking up the work of neuroscientists like Roland Griffiths and Robin Carhart-Harris, scholars of religion like Jeffrey Kripal and Walter Stace, and popular writers like Michael Pollan and Brian Muraresku, I examine two major aspects of the psychedelic renaissance. First, I take up a question that animates, and divides, the psychedelic community, namely, whether psychedelic experience gives access to a transcendent spiritual reality or whether that “reality” is just a neurochemical reaction. I then explore how both sides of that divide are united in their belief that the question can be answered through research on brain, in other words, that consciousness resides in the brain (or mind-brain). Both aspects, I argue, are the effects of secularity’s distrust of the material body (an effect, in turn, of its Protestant inheritance) and its hierarchical division of the human into an elevated, thinking mind (now brain) and a lowly, mortal body. Given the gendered nature of that division, I undertake a feminist analysis of the affective substrate – what I call the fantasy of disembodiment – in much of the seminal literature on psychedelic science, mysticism, and the mind brain. I am particularly interested in how the body remains ever-present yet under-theorized, the condition of possibility for consciousness yet a stricture to be overcome.

Psychedelic drugs have historically been associated with aesthetics since their ingression into the Global North. Today, magic mushroom experience reports from the United States also frequently feature encounters with, and references to, beautiful phenomena. Since little analyses have been conducted on what the referent of these beautiful experiences is during psychedelic experiences, this paper intends to explore this association by way of analyzing reports of psychedelic mushroom experiences from the United States. In drawing on semi-structured interviews with individuals from Miami, Florida, in addition to trip reports posted onto the online community forum Shroomery.org, this article demonstrates how conceptions of beauty in psilocybin experience reports are often described in relation to encountering immanent beauty. As opposed to experiences where beauty is related to transcendence, reports of beauty are often related to an immanent beauty that is inherently found in either oneself, another, or the world. By analyzing several cases of immanent beauty through the lens of affect theory derived from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article suggests that novel experiences of beauty during psychedelic experiences with magic mushrooms seem to occur on an affective, corporeal level as opposed to being reducible to symbolic reattribution.

The term “Psychedelic Orientalism” emerges first in a book by Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard Divinity School. The title of his work, Turning East: The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism(Simon and Schuster, 1977) was printed a year before Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism (Vintage: 1978). Cox's term, referring to Richard Alpert’s change of identity, remained dormant, bereft of its genealogy decades later, reemerging in Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press: 2007) and Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence(Penguin: 2018). Beyond these works the term has not been thoroughly analyzed in the literature on psychedelics or by Said’s disciples. This paper seeks to define what is “psychedelic orientalism,” through an examination of Said’s Orientalism as a system of communication that essentializes and categorizes the “East” through a series of “E”s: the Exotic, the Esoteric/Enigmatic, the Erotic, and the Enemy. Psychedelic Orientalism serves as an additional category that invokes the East as the source of the “Ecstatic.” In this regard, mind-altering substances and psychedelics conjure certain imagery in the Western imagination. “Set and setting” is often referred to where psychedelics are consumed. Caffeine, nicotine, and opium have a unique set and setting, usually associated with Middle Eastern motifs, cafes, hookah café, and opium dens. This paper examines these physical spaces in the Western imagination by examining Romantic/Orientalist paintings from Europe and the US, in comparison to metaphysical spaces, how the “Orient” and psychedelics are imagined from Alice in Wonderland to the sci-fi epic Dune. Finally, it concludes with another setting, “Illusionaries: Entheon,” Alex and Allyson Grey’s immersive art exhibit in London. While psychedelic orientalism initially emerged as a way of framing the East as the antithesis of Western modernity, justifying imperialism through the “civilizing mission” and “white man’s burden,” the Greys and Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass) are reflections of a benign psychedelic orientalism that reflect the counter-culture’s repudiation of this modernity, paying homage to a transcendental East, with aesthetical motifs from Islamicate, Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist imaginaries.

Many people have reported encountering spirits, ancestors or other entities with spiritual significance while under the effects of psychedelics. While some of the psychedelic literature has discussed entity encounters in Western medical settings, much of the work on the topic is focused on indigenous communities who use plant medicines like ayahuasca. This essay explores accidental encounters that western people had with spiritual entities while under the effects of anesthetics like nitrous oxide and ether at the doctor or dentists’ office in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It asks three key questions: What was the aesthetic experience of seeing spiritual beings like for patients? How did seeing these beings affect their spiritual views? How did doctors respond to these patients’ experiences, and how did the first line of spiritual care they provided (or lack of it) affect how patients integrated these experiences? It answers these questions through analyzing historical accounts of these experiences and the context surrounding them. It shows that many patients used ideas drawn from occult and new religious movements like Theosophy which emerged in the late 19th century to understand their encounters with entities. It will discuss how some doctors dismissed entity encounters as mere hallucinations, while others engaged with them on a deep level and tried to help patients sort through their meaning. Finally, it argues that the history of these experiences indicates that if psychiatrists want to take a patient-centered approach to the practice of medicine, spiritual care should be an integral part of psychedelic therapy.

This paper examines the impact of psychedelics on the spiritual and artistic revival in Ukraine following the fall of communism. In the 1990s, artists of the Ukrainian New Wave actively explored the entheogenic potential of substances that were relatively new to post-Soviet society. This surge in psychedelic art and spirituality is especially striking in a country emerging from seven decades of militant atheism. Substances such as PCP, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin gained popularity during the 1990s, but the primary drug of choice for the Ukrainian artistic community was intramuscularly administered ketamine. The intense hallucinations and altered states of consciousness induced by ketamine were often conceptualized in quasi-religious terms, framed as journeys “to see God” and reflected in several seminal artworks.

This psychedelic revival coincided with the rise of postmodernism, which emphasized transgression as an essential artistic and heuristic tool. Ukrainian contemporary art of this era was characterized by an anti-aesthetic stance and the pursuit of provocative, unique experiences. This interest in breaking norms and conventions was natural in a society where dominant narratives were fundamentally shifting. New capitalist values were replacing old communist ideals, yet the young artists were not too inspired by this process. The negative legacy of the recent past loomed, as politics were closely associated with the empty images and overinflated narratives of Soviet propaganda. A mistrust of society translated into a search for new territories untainted by state ideology.

The psychedelic spirituality of Ukraine’s 1990s generation can thus be seen as a retreat into the self, but this agenda wasn’t escapist. Altered states of consciousness offered a unique optics for exploring the new political and social realities that Ukraine was beginning to navigate.

In the Hebrew Bible and related literature, the Divine Presence communicates with human consciousness through sensory experiences, including sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. This communication is at times channeled by aesthetic creations, in particular the ancient Jerusalem temple(s), which served as the dwelling place of the deity and a focal point for human-divine relations and ritual life. Ancient Jewish literature documents the temple’s sacred architecture, rituals, and social practices in great detail, providing a foundation for Jewish engagement with temple aesthetics over millennia as a means to connect with the Divine.

Today, a diverse and growing movement of Jewish individuals and organizations explore traditional temple traditions through psychedelic aesthetics. Proponents of psychedelic use in ancient Jewish practice reference biblical and rabbinic sources to suggest that psychoactive substances have been used in rituals, such as preparations of manna, showbread, holy ointment, and incense. Some advocates propose that the High Priest's atonement ritual on Yom Kippur involved inhaling smoke from burnt acacia wood containing DMT in the temple’s Holy of Holies.

By engaging with Critical Space Theory, this paper will examine how contemporary Jewish psychedelic practitioners reinterpret Jewish temple traditions of antiquity in order to construct a historical narrative of psychedelic use, thus creating a link between current practices and ancient tradition. The paper is guided by the research question: How are spaces, entities, bodies and objects in the temple re-imagined through psychedelic lenses? The paper will highlight the main findings: 1) The construction of a Jewish psychedelic historical narrative; 2) The spatial re-imagining of temple traditions influenced by psychedelic aesthetics and how this mode of interpretation is geared towards tapping into the transcendental experiences of a psychedelic body 3) Psychedelic aesthetics seen in its historical contextualization of Jewish hermeneutical engagement with temple space as a pathway to experience Divine Presence.