Introduction: Varieties, Intersections, and the Human

Sixty years ago, a recently married couple, brimming with enthusiasm about both psychedelics and the human potential movement, published The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. The authors, Robert Masters and Jean Huston, wrote what they claimed was “the first comprehensive guide to the effects of LSD on the human personality.” The book is perhaps the first in what is now a bona fide literary trend of abundant riffs on the title of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Other works that now number among this trend are Daniel Goleman’s Varieties of the Meditative Experience (1977), the co-authored Varieties of Anomalous Experience (2000), Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience (2006), and David Yaden and Andrew Newberg’s Varieties of Spiritual Experience (2022). Varieties abound. 

James struck a chord with his title, and that chord is still ringing some 120 years later. James has received significant attention from scholars studying psychedelics, whether as a model for the study of mystical experience in laboratory settings,¹ a pioneer in the field of psychedelic science before the term psychedelic existed,² or demonstrative of Huston Smith’s argument that altering one’s neurochemistry should not discount the revelatory aspects of an experience.³ James’ Varieties, both in argument and in form, continues to resonate for two primary reasons—James privileges pluralism over reduction (they are varieties, after all), and he insists upon the central role of human experience as a neglected but necessary factor in what constitutes a religious life.  

Masters and Houston’s excitement about the promise of psychedelics is palpable, even if scant on references to William James himself. There are a grand total of three, none of which explicitly spell out their own play on his title. There are certainly areas that we are in agreement with Masters and Houston’s Varieties—for example, that research on psychedelics not “be confined to medical and psychotherapeutic areas of use,”⁴ and that psychedelic experience is defined by its sheer variety. No two experiences are quite alike, no matter how many controls are introduced. 

This volume, the one you are reading right now, is about a lot of things—most immediately, it is also about the varieties of the human use of psychedelics. It could certainly bear the subtitle, “the varieties of psychedelic experience.” These uses include, but are not limited to, religious, legal, clinical, artistic, medicinal, traumatic, and familial. This book makes no claim to be a comprehensive guide to anything. Rather, it is informed by a set of experiences at an intersection. The Intersections conference anthologies are a response to the diversity of where psychedelics have appeared, and continue to appear, in far-flung realms of human life.

For three years, this conference has collected the varieties of psychedelic experience, along with the varieties of psychedelic research. The intersections chosen at each conference are simply a practice of assembling the varietal cacophony. One needs only a quick glance at a few of the 40,000 experiences collected in Erowid’s “experience vault” to get a flavor for it.⁵  

In the introduction to the 2024 conference anthology, we saw intersections working in three ways—as a commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship, as an intersectional analysis in the classic sense of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and as an environment of interpersonal collaboration and camaraderie. This introduction revisits a crucial component of Crenshaw’s original concept to the conference’s method: the literal intersections one encounters when driving, walking, wheeling, or moving around.⁶ 

The intersections of our present volume—Indigenous plant medicine traditions, aesthetics, and spiritual care—are three junctions of the varieties of psychedelic experience, informed by a commitment to the necessity of the human in producing these varieties. If you attended the CSWR “Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference” in 2025, you may balk at the elision of plant sentience or agency in this formulation. Certainly, the plants may be sentient and agentic, communicating with one another and with us when we are given the privilege to do so. But does a mushroom think of itself as “psychedelic”? Does LSD imagine itself having a common cause with morning glory seeds, DMT, or the peyote cactus? It is unlikely. As the shared road through each of these three intersections, the term psychedelic is a human invention with a human point of origin. For anything to be “psychedelic,” a human must be in the equation somewhere.  

Some of these essays may act as on-ramps to the psychedelic. Perhaps your curiosity begins not with psychedelics, but with post-Soviet Ukrainian art, or the role of hope in psychotherapeutic care, or Brazilian tourism. This volume presents an opportunity to consider each of these with a new psychedelic curiosity. Perhaps more importantly, these essays also act as off-ramps from the psychedelic, and into the varieties of life where psychedelics have taken root—Indigenous belonging and the law, or recovery from religious trauma, or the Americans' "turn to the east" in the '60s and '70s.  

Psychedelic is a capacious category. Its narrowest definition is given by the neurochemists: they are psychoactive compounds that act primarily as agonists on 5HT_2A serotonin receptors. Yet psychedelic is used to describe an aesthetic, a type of psychotherapy, a subculture, or a general alteration of one’s senses. It was coined 70 years ago, specifically in reference to mescaline experiences shared by the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond and the novelist Aldous Huxley. Today, various Indigenous peoples across the Americas, artistic movements, and individuals seeking relief from psychological distress are now assumed to have something in common under the psychedelic banner. In 1967, just ten years after the word had been first spoken aloud, psychedelic advocate and Cambridge denizen Lisa Bieberman declared that the word psychedelic had been ruined—“it might as well be scrapped by those who still wish to speak earnestly about their experience.”⁷  We would not go so far as to say the word is ruined, but Bieberman’s call raises the question of just what the boundaries are of the varieties of psychedelic experience. What is included in these varieties and what is left out? More importantly, it is possible that holding the psychedelic together as varieties may flatten the divergent, even conflicting, accounts, and that they may vary a bit too widely to be meaningfully conceived as parts of a psychedelic whole. 

In line with these shifting borders and blurry demarcations, the intersection provides a helpful cartographic tool for scholarship about psychedelics and for the varieties of their use. Intersections are places of meeting—and diverging. An intersection may be a brief, singular encounter of otherwise distinct paths, or it may mark the moment where previously distinct paths become one. Permit us to strain this intersection metaphor to highlight the spatial and cartographic features of “psychedelic” as a category. People may find themselves intersecting comfortably with this category—the psychedelic road, as it were. Others may find the category of psychedelic thrust upon them, a foreign concept that now functions like a mega-highway bringing all manner of wanted and unwanted visitation. Still others may walk on the psychedelic road for a time, only to leave it behind, no longer useful. The varieties of encounters deemed psychedelic differ, and to reduce them to the category of “psychedelic” may obscure these distinctions. In this volume, we speak of intersections where disciplines, cultures, people, and ideas meet the capacious category of the psychedelic: willingly and unwillingly, helpfully and destructively, permanently and transiently. We hope this volume aids in your own navigation of the psychedelic, with its varieties of intersections, experiences, and fellow travelers. 

The “Psychedelic Intersections: Betwixt and Between Chaplaincy, Plant Medicine, and Aesthetics” conference was organized around three research tracks: Psychedelic Chaplaincy, Indigenous Plant Medicine Traditions, and Psychedelic Aesthetics and the Transcendent. We have maintained these categories for the anthology, with one exception. Here, we expanded the category of psychedelic chaplaincy to encompass “psychedelics, spirituality, and care.” The field of psychedelic chaplaincy—an extension of hospital chaplaincy that is tailored to support patients receiving psychedelic medicines—is still in its infancy. As we were organizing the 2025 Intersections conference, we became increasingly attuned to the ways that spiritual care is practiced in psychedelic settings beyond the scope of medicine and hospital chaplaincy. Psychedelic integration groups, churches, and even clinical trials all incorporate forms of spiritually attuned care that blur the boundaries between disciplines and expand the scope of what spiritual care is—and what it can be. The “psychedelics, spirituality, and care” heading is meant to capture this.  

We have left the other research tracks unaltered, but a similar process of expanding and blurring would have been possible. The papers and perspectives organized within the Indigenous Plant Medicine Traditions research track ask us to examine how history is constructed, how colonization continues to shape the world, how land and territory are woven into religious life, and how scholarship can, or should, advance the pursuit of justice. These questions come to the fore in chapters focused on Indigenous plant medicine traditions, but they are questions that also intersect with every aspect of the so-called psychedelic renaissance. Likewise, the questions emerging from the Psychedelics and Aesthetics research track—questions on the nature of beauty, the role of drugs and religion in art movements, the impact of technology on altered and “normal” consciousness—disrupt neat categorization and expand into unexpected sets and settings. Are questions of beauty and art not equally relevant to psychedelic care? To Indigenous plant medicine traditions? We hope these chapters will prompt readers to see that these topics are in dialogue with one another as part of an intersecting whole, and not siloed to narrow areas of research. With that in mind, we encourage readers to approach them out of order; to skip around; to take a long, strange trip through the volume. 

This Anthology opens with two interviews. The first is the morning keynote speaker, Elías García Méndez. García Méndez is the co-founder of Casa Adobe Galería in Huautla de Jiménez, Mexico, and is a member of the Mazatec community. In an interview with CSWR Postdoctoral Fellow Andrea Sánchez-Castañeda, García Méndez elaborates on his keynote and offers a nuanced view of the Mazatec culture, the importance of territory, and the mounting risks that climate change poses to the Mazatec people and the plants they hold sacred.  

The second interview is with Marian Goodell, the event’s closing keynote speaker. Goodell is the CEO of the Burning Man Project, which organizes the annual Burning Man event in Nevada. In an interview with Jeffrey Breau, CSWR Program Lead for Psychedelics and Spirituality, Goodell offers an insider’s view of the Burning Man community, its approach to transformational experience, and its complex relationship to psychedelics. 

These five essays explore the history, present, and future of diverse Indigenous plant medicine traditions across the Americas. Far from static or isolated, the chapters reveal communities innovating and transforming over time, often in response to intense colonial pressures. The anthology’s opening chapter, “The Peyote Road: Rebalancing the History of a Sacred Journey,” builds from a simple question: how and why did peyote ceremonies move thousands of kilometers north into western Canada? Authors Reanna Daniels, Kelly Daniels, and Erika Dyck provide a rich picture of the factors that influenced the expansion of the Native American Church (NAC) from Oklahoma into Canada. Blending archival research, oral storytelling, and the diverse academic and cultural knowledge of the three authors, they argue that the history of peyote use in Canada is older and more complex than previously thought.  

In “From the Book of Language to Self-Help Memes: Shifts in Huautla’s Role Mediating Mushroom Encounters,” Ben Feinberg brings us down from Canada to the Mazatec people in the Sierra Mazateca mountains of Mexico. The chapter opens with Mazatec healer María Sabina, who became internationally known after Gordon Wasson’s essay “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” was published in Life magazine in 1957. Drawing from his fieldwork in the Sierra Mazateca over the last 38 years, Feinberg shows how the influx of foreigners and outside attention following Wasson’s essay has sparked an evolving process of mediation within the Mazatec community as its members have responded to the changing psychedelic landscape.  

Gonzalez Romero’s chapter, “The Healing of the Thunderbolt: Nahua Medicine and Psilocybe Mushroom Rituals,” keeps us rooted in Central America. He examines a variety of historical and contemporary sources—including codices, colonial accounts, and ethnographic data—to elucidate the role of sacred plants in Nahua/Aztec culture. The chapter focuses on healing rituals and the complex interplay between healing and divinity, notably the connection between psilocybin healing rituals and the rain deity, Tlaloc. 

“Re-existence in the Ancestral and the Inherited: Sacred Plant Medicine and Urban Muysca Indigenous Revitalization” moves us from Central America into South America to explore the role of sacred plants in the Muysca of Suba, an urban Indigenous community in Bogotá, Colombia. Using Participatory Action Research, co-authors Andrea Sanchez-Castañeda and Nicolle Torres-Sierra explore the variegated role of sacred plants in the Muysca community. Here, plant medicines represent more than individual healing; they are critical for the health and preservation of the community and the planet.  

Finally, Ligia Platero’s chapter, “Indigenous Reciprocity Amid Contemporary International Shamanic Networks,” shifts our focus to Brazil to discuss the limits and possibilities of “Indigenous reciprocity” in our contemporary moment. As the so-called psychedelic renaissance has advanced, there have been growing calls for reciprocity with the Indigenous communities who have stewarded these medicines for generations. Yet, a Platero’s chapter reveals that what is meant by reciprocity is often poorly defined and its limits underexamined. 

In “Sacred Substances, Sacred Wounds: The Intersection of Psychedelics, Adverse Religious Experiences, and Spiritual Healing,” Liza Gezon builds from her ethnographic fieldwork with two psychedelic communities to highlight the ways that these substances help people heal from religious trauma. Deploying Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “second naïveté,” Gezon argues that psychedelics can catalyze this healing by helping transition people into a more symbolic relationship with religious community and ideals.  

The next chapter, “Psychedelic Churches and Secular Biomedical Forces,” presents preliminary findings from two ethnographic research projects that examine how secular forces intersect with psychedelic churches in the United States. Co-authors Maha Mian and Aidan Seale-Feldman show how distinct psychedelic religions are both adopting and challenging secular frames, forcing into question the very boundary between the sacred and the secular.  

The chapter “Expectancy and Hope in MDMA-Assisted Therapy” shares insights from the authors’ experience as research clinicians for a Phase III MDMA trial. The three authors—Jamie Beachy, Francis Guerriero, and Wael Garas—offer a window into the complex relationship between expectation and hope in clinical research settings. Such studies require expectancy bias to be managed, tracked, and minimized, but as this chapter argues, that should not come at the expense of hope: a key component of healing that often takes on a spiritual dimension.  

Finally, Mayanthi Fernando takes aim at the question of whether psychedelic experiences should be understood as spiritual or chemical in her chapter, “Mushrooms, Mysticism, and the Fantasy of Disembodiment.” To shed light on this, she seeks common ground between these two positions, arguing that both camps tend to view the answer as residing in the brain. This, Fernando believes, is a mistake. And her chapter urges readers to consider the body’s role, in fact, its centrality, to the nature of psychedelic experiences.

Insofar as a psychedelic experience changes the way we sense the world, it is an aesthetic experience. Yet the aesthetic quality of these substances is rarely a focus of psychedelic scholarship. These essays offer a corrective by placing the philosophical, artistic, cultural, and embodied modes of psychedelic aesthetics front and center. “Beauty and Immanence in Magic Mushroom Trip Reports” offers a rich meditation on the nature of beauty in the psychedelic experiences. Author Joshua Falcon weaves historical accounts, interview data, online trip reports, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to articulate a theory of the perception of beauty that is both immanent and affective. 

Natalie Bloch provides an in-depth look at the role of the Jerusalem temple(s) in the shaping of Jewish psychedelic literature and experience in her chapter: “The Psychedelic Temple: Re-imagining Ancient Jewish Temple Space through Psychedelic Aesthetics.” Using three figures in Jewish psychedelic discourse—Yoseph Needleman, Rabbi Joel David Bakst, and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—Bloch argues that the temple provides an interpretive framework for altered states, one that connects contemporary psychedelic users to a long history of Jewish temple imaginaries. 

In “From Iron Curtain to Inner Vision: Psychedelics, Spiritual Awakening, and Political Imagination in Ukrainian Art after the Fall of Communism,” author Alisa Lozhkina, a PhD candidate in Comparative History at Central European University, uncovers the largely forgotten role that psychedelics played in post-Soviet Ukraine’s art scene. Not simply a peripheral habit, Lozhkina argues that psychedelic drugs and altered states were at the heart of the Ukrainian New Wave movement, to both brilliant and tragic effects.  

The next chapter, by Ibrahim Al-Marashi, considers the past and present of psychedelic orientalism through an imagined university course. “The Aesthetics of Psychedelic Orientalism and the Pedagogy of the Entheogenic Body” charts a course—literal and figurative—from the origins of the term “psychedelic orientalism” with Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox in 1977 through to the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. Psychedelic orientalism, the chapter argues, essentializes the “East” and reduces it to a superficial series of E’s: exotic, esoteric/enigmatic, erotic, and enemy—thereby stripping diverse, living traditions of their nuance and autonomy.  

Finally, Jacob Green examines the way that changing technology and narratives of progress shape anesthetic states. The chapter, “Psychedelic Entity Encounters Under Anesthesia in the Early Twentieth Century,” draws from turn-of-the-century literature and art to show how anesthesia patients interpreted altered states through the industrial technology of the time. Green articulates how this period of technological change framed patients’ drug experience and shaped their religious lives and understandings of God. Analysis that rings forward today, as we live through another moment of social and technological change, one that is both shaped by and shaping the intersection of psychedelics and religion.  

¹ Walter Pahnke, “Drugs and Mysticism,” PhD Dissertation, Harvard... Griffiths et al 2006, “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences...”  [Return to Section]

² Jodie Nicotra, “William James in the Borderlands: Psychedelic Science and the ‘Accidental Fences’ of Self,” Configurations 16, no. 2 (2008): 201; Mike Jay, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale University Press, 2023), 12. [Return to Section]

³ Huston Smith, “Do Drugs Have Religious Import?” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 18 (1964): 525-528. [Return to Section]

⁴ R.E.L. Masters and Jean Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 35. [Return to Section]

⁵ Tristan Angieri, who led the Psychedelics and Aesthetics reading group at the CSWR, had the group read experience reports as part of each week’s assigned texts. It was both an incredible teaching tool, and a quick nod to James each week. [Return to Section]

⁶ Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1981, 1 (1989): 149. [Return to Section]

⁷ Lisa Bieberman, “The Psychedelic Experience,” The New Republic (August 5, 1967), 17.  [Return to Section]

Breau, Jeffrey and Paul Gillis-Smith. “Introduction: Varieties, Intersections, and the Human.” In Psychedelic Intersections: 2025 Conference Anthology, edited by Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026. © License: CC BY-NC. https://doi.org/10.70423/0004.10