Mysticism, Mushrooms, and the Fantasy of Disembodiment

Abstract: My essay examines one of the big questions within mainstream psychedelic science, namely, whether psychedelic experience gives access to a transcendent metaphysical reality or whether that reality is only a neurochemical reaction. I call this the “Is it spiritual or chemical?” question. What interests me is how both sides of the divide—both Team Spiritual and Team Chemical—are united in the belief that the question can be answered by research on the brain, in other words, that consciousness or mind resides in the brain. Despite the body’s engagement by various constituents in the world of psychedelics—Indigenous communities who use psychoactive plants for healing, for instance, or psychedelic therapists who practice with a somatic “body-mind” framework—the body remains largely untheorized in contemporary scientific research on psychedelics, in favor of explicit theorization about the mind-brain. My paper unpacks this investment in the mind-brain as a fantasy of disembodiment. I trace this fantasy through various iterations of secular science and philosophy that emerged from the European Enlightenment and divide the human into an elevated, thinking mind and a lowly, mortal body. I end by reflecting on other ways to engage the psychedelic body.  

Many United States-based psychedelic enthusiasts have embraced the scientization of psychedelics as the path to legitimization. But scientization—the identification of specific molecules and compounds acting on specific parts of the brain, indeed, the conflation of mind and brain—has produced a tension between those who see psychedelics as giving access to a metaphysical reality that is otherwise inaccessible, and those who see that sense of altered consciousness as the effect of a neurochemical reaction. This tension is apparent in the different names—psychedelics, hallucinogens, entheogens, psychotomimetics—used to describe the same substance. Early proponents Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond used the term psychedelics, meaning “mind-manifesting substances,” rather than more medicalized terms. Entheogen, meaning “generating God within,” likewise underscores the metaphysical dimension of psychedelics. By contrast, hallucinogen emphasizes the non-reality of whatever is taking place, marking the reaction as a strictly neurochemical one, and psychotomimetic similarly pathologizes the neurochemical experience as akin to psychosis.¹   

Most neuroscientists in the U.S. have come to use psychedelics rather than hallucinogens or psychotomimetics. But the basic issue of whether psychedelics give access to a spiritual reality or whether that reality is just a neurochemical reaction—the “Is it spiritual or chemical?” question—continues to animate, and divide, the psychedelic revival. That question is essentially one about how to understand reality and our relationship to it. At the same time, the two sides of the “Is it spiritual or chemical?” question are united in their belief that this question can be answered by attending to the brain.  

On one side of the “Is it spiritual or chemical?” question are psychedelic pioneers like the late Roland Griffiths, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry and lead author of a 2006 article in Psychopharmacology called “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” Based on a double-blind, placebo-controlled study on the effects of psilocybin—the first such scientifically recognized study in nearly four decades—and using mysticism-measuring questionnaires based on the work of Walter Terence Stace, a mid-twentieth-century philosopher of religion, Griffiths and his team concluded that “psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.”² Although Griffiths’ experiment was premised on the idea that scientists can investigate the nature of a mystical experience by controlling for it in a lab, he remained uncertain about what, exactly, happens when psychedelics produce an intensely altered state of consciousness: “the phenomenology of these experiences is so profoundly reorganizing and profoundly compelling,” Griffiths tells Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind, “that I’m willing to hold there’s a mystery here we can’t understand.” Griffiths seemed particularly intrigued by the possibility of what comes after death. “Western materialism says the switch gets turned off and that’s it,” he says, but there may be more to it: “It could be a beginning! Wouldn’t that be amazing?”³ Griffiths thereby echoes early advocates like Huxley, who saw psychedelics as giving the mind (via the brain) access to a metaphysical reality that exists beyond the mind-brain, what Huxley called Mind at Large.⁴   

Team Chemical, on the other hand, wants to ground this metaphysics in material reality. It is best represented by Robin Carhart-Harris, a cognitive neuroscientist and lead author of the ground-breaking article “The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs,” published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in 2014. Carhart-Harris provides a neuroscientific theory of what happens to the brain on psilocybin, namely, that psilocybin “alter[s] consciousness by disorganizing brain activity.”⁵ Essentially, psilocybin breaks down connectivity between regions of the brain known as the default-mode network (DMN) and other regions known as the medial temporal lobe (MTL), provoking the brain into a state of greater entropy. Carhart-Harris calls this a state of “primary consciousness” associated with infants and archaic humans, one that makes us prone to “magical thinking” and is the hallmark of psychosis, dreaming, and beliefs in the supernatural.⁶ Carhart-Harris often interchanges “brain” with “mind,” and this is purposeful, given his interest in psychoanalytic theory and his desire to locate Freud’s psychic structure in the human brain to offer a more credible “model of the mind.”⁷ For Carhart-Harris, the ego of psychoanalysis is the DMN, and the sense of ego-dissolution that is the hallmark of the psychedelic experience is produced by decreased connectivity between the DMN and MTL. As he puts it, “psychedelics induce a primitive state of consciousness … by relinquishing the ego’s usual hold on reality (DMN control on MTL activity),” allowing for new patterns of cognition to be formed.⁸ 

What is striking about the “Is it spiritual or chemical?” question is how both sides believe that it can be answered through research on the brain. In some ways, this is unsurprising: we live in a “neuromatic” paradigm, in which the “explanatory allure of the brain” drives understandings of human behavior in science, bio-medicine, and public culture—hence the dominance of neuroscience in research on psychedelics.⁹ But the “Is it spiritual or chemical?” question also replays an older tension between rationalism and materialism (one alluded to by Griffiths in his reflections about death) that emerged with secularity in Enlightenment Europe. I turn now to that older tension to make sense of both the merging of mind and brain in psychedelic neuroscience and the implicit corollary that mind-brain is separate and distinct from body.

Medical anthropologist Abou Farman writes that rationalism and materialism were both ways of making sense of the loss of the Christian soul as the basis for personhood. Eighteenth-century rationalist philosophy introduced a cluster of related concepts like self, person, personality, consciousness, and mind, separating personhood from its physical container. A little later, in the nineteenth century, materialist science “committed itself to a determination of personhood based on physical laws, rather than transcendent, idealist, or nonmaterial ones,” and materialized “the space left by the elimination of the soul” in the brain.¹⁰ Farman’s point is that the tension between rationalism and materialism is foundational to Western secularity’s grappling with how self and personhood are constituted. His account helps to locate the “Is it spiritual or chemical?” question of psychedelic science in a longer Christian-qua-secular genealogy. It is also helpful to understand how mind-brain—complicated as may be the relationship represented by that hyphen—has become co-constitutive of consciousness, personhood, self, and so on, and has done so at the expense of the body and the senses. 

After all, and rather curiously, the brain, although it is matter, is understood as somehow more than matter in Western science and biomedicine, unlike the body, which is mere matter. Historian Sylvia Federici traces this distinction between a higher-order mind-brain and lower-order body to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments in European philosophy and political theory. Over the course of those centuries, the body, heretofore understood as animate, agentive, and imbricated in a network of cosmic forces, came to be seen as an inanimate material container for emerging notions of mind, reason, will, and consciousness. The body also became a site of animality, passion, and instinct. For many Enlightenment philosophers, only by transcending the body—associated now with women, peasants, the enslaved, and other “lower” forms of humanity, could the rational self be free. As Federici points out, René Descartes’ famous declaration that “I think, therefore I am” was accompanied by another, less well-known one: “I am not this body,” as Descartes insisted in his Meditations.¹¹ 

European philosophy’s mind/body hierarchy and its relegation of the body to the space of the primitive, feminine, and animal were also linked to the Protestant Reformation’s ideas about immanence and transcendence and to its disdain for rituals that conscripted the body to access the divine.¹² In the early Protestant imagination, God was an abstract, transcendent figure, inaccessible in material form, and humans were supposed to access the divine through inward contemplation that engaged the mind, not through outward rituals that engaged the body and the senses. As historian Robert Orsi has argued, those whose relationships to the divine were material, sensual, and embodied were cast by Protestant theologians and Enlightenment philosophers as evolutionarily backward, mired in superstitious ritual and in their fleshly bodies.

These longer histories of the body and secularity—of secularity as an ideology of disembodiment—help to explain not just the explanatory allure of the brain in psychedelic neuroscience, but also the notion that the brain is somehow not the body, that it is matter, yet also more than matter. This notion configures sensual bodies as secondary, even epiphenomenal, to consciousness, located in/as brains. Yet, in both the spiritual discourse of brain-as-mind-as-Mind and the neurochemical discourse of brain-as-neural-network, human brains (or mind-brains) have to receive their input through, and are therefore dependent on, human bodies—on skin, ears, eyes, mouth, fingers, kidneys, lungs, blood, gut, muscle, flesh. As feminist philosopher Elizabeth Wilson writes, “the constitutive paradox here is evident: the autonomy of cognition is compromised by an irreducible and perpetual debt to the body.”¹³ This is why the secular ideology of disembodiment is, ultimately, a fantasy of disembodiment, fantasy being a wish that is impossible to fulfill. And to be clear: I am not arguing that neuroscientific research on the effects of psychedelics on the brain is wrong. Rather, I am interested in the desires that animate this work. As historian John Modern insists, we need to take technological advancements in cognitive science as historical objects and as objects of desire. Thus, claims about the brain “may well be true, but that truth … is not unrelated to the desire for [those claims] to be true.”¹⁴ I therefore want to repurpose Carhart-Harris’s interest in Freud to turn the psychoanalytic gaze back onto his and other psychedelic neuroscientists’ investment in bodiless mind-brains. 

The fantasy of disembodiment underpins the notion of mysticism at work in mainstream psychedelic science, which draws heavily on the work of Walter Stace for its ideas about mysticism, including the Mystical Experience Questionnaire and other questionnaires used to measure mysticism. In Mysticism and Philosophy, published in 1960, Stace proposed a “universal core” to mysticism, identifying the “universal common characteristics of mysticism in all cultures, ages, religions, and civilizations of the world,” namely: “Sense of objective reality; Blessedness, peace, etc.; Feeling of the holy, sacred, or divine; Paradoxicality; Alleged by mystics to be ineffable.”¹⁵ Mysticism and Philosophy has been criticized for its lack of methodological and scholarly rigor by many scholars of religion, and I, too, think Stace’s unified theory of mysticism is a specious one.¹⁶ I am nonetheless interested in why Stace’s definition of mysticism has been compelling to psychedelic science. I suspect it has to do with Stace’s notion of mystical experience as a stand-alone phenomenon of the mind, abstracted from its embodied conditions of possibility, which fits easily with scientific ideas about the bodyless mind-brain.  

In Mysticism and Philosophy, Stace differentiates higher-order “introvertive” mystical experiences (what he calls “the genuine mystical state”) from lower-order “extrovertive” mystical experiences, “the essential difference between them [being] that the extrovertive experience looks outward through the senses, while the introvertive looks inward into the mind … by deliberately shutting off the senses.”¹⁷ Stace thereby distinguishes between the senses—the eyes, the ears, and other sense organs that engage the external world—and the mind. To access ultimate Unity, the self must disembody itself entirely and go “inward into the mind.”  

Interestingly, Stace takes up the claim that mescaline and LSD can induce mystical experiences. “[T]hose who have achieved mystical states as a result of long and arduous spiritual exercises, fasting and prayer, or great moral efforts, possibly spread over many years, are inclined to deny that a drug can induce a ‘genuine’ mystical experience,” he writes, but “Our principle says that if the phenomenological descriptions of the two experiences are indistinguishable, so far as can be ascertained, then it cannot be denied that if one is a genuine mystical experience, the other is also.”¹⁸ In other words, the kind of meticulous bodily discipline common to mystics across multiple traditions is, for Stace, epiphenomenal. Indeed, mysticism as an experience is separate from its conditions of possibility (for instance, specific forms of bodily discipline), its preceding or subsequent telos (say, divine union), and its effects (a more ethical life). For Stace, mystical experience can stand alone, abstracted from these other elements.¹⁹ 

As Stace himself admits, this is not a definition of mysticism recognized by those who have achieved mystical union through spiritual exercise and bodily discipline.²⁰ In many traditions, mystical union with the divine is accompanied by, even premised on, engagements with the body and senses (fasting, inhaling, purging, singing, dancing, sweating, bleeding, whirling, etc.). For Sufis, for instance, union with the divine—what Sufis refer to as the “passing away” (fana’) of the ego-self—is achieved through ritual devotions of meditation, vigils, fasting, rhythmic repetition (dhikr), and bodily movements that unbind the heart and move it toward the divine.²¹ Even Christian history is full of saints and mystics who found union with the divine through lactation and bleeding.²² And the notion of mystical experience as a standalone occurrence, abstracted from any moorings in either physical discipline or ethical goals, would be unfamiliar to many we now call mystics. I therefore read Stace (and the psychedelic science that draws on him) as telling us something not about some general category of mysticism, but rather about a secular fantasy of disembodiment. And that fantasy is, ultimately, a disavowal of the vulnerability—the finitude—of being human that our bodies don’t allow us to forget. 

This fantasy courses very clearly through Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name, which has become popular in psychedelic circles.²³ Muraresku, an amateur historian and archaeologist, traces the birth of Christianity—and with it, Western civilization—to “a psychedelic sacrament” used in Dionysian rituals by secret networks of Hellenic Greeks to achieve union with their gods. I do not have the space here to go into depth about the book, but I want to focus on two key themes. The first is Muraresku’s framing of psychedelics as a “chemical shortcut to enlightenment,” which signals a notion of—and desire for—mystical union without the disciplinary work on the self that characterizes many mystical traditions.²⁴ Muraresku glosses Griffiths as proposing that “we are essentially wired for mystical experience,” which Muraresku takes to mean that “any curious soul can be instantly converted into a religious savant” by taking psychedelics.²⁵  

Second, I am struck by Muraresku’s excitement about the possibility of immortality. One of Muraresku’s key claims is that the Greeks used psychedelics in their rituals to enter the underworld and commune “with the immortals, whether gods, goddesses, or ancestors,” and that these rituals were ways of “becoming immortals themselves.”²⁶ Muraresku never explains how communing with immortal gods entailed becoming immortal oneself. (One could argue that these rituals provided access to a Beyond in which gods remained gods and humans remained less-than-gods.) I read that lacuna not as a hole in Muraresku’s story; rather, it signifies a desire for immortality that drives the story—a desire for a kind of godlike superhumanity. There is a telling moment in the book when Muraresku quotes a homily Pope Francis gave in 2015. Francis identifies as the objective of Jesus’s Eucharistic ceremony as “that we might become one with him.” Here is Muraresku’s interpretation of Francis’s line: “Eating the god to become the god. Drinking the god to become the god.”²⁷ Notice that Francis’s become one with god has turned into become god. Mystical union has turned into equivalence. Through psychedelics, Muraresku contends, humans have the potential to become gods. And the key to becoming god hinges on overcoming one’s mortality, in other words, transcending the biological limitations of the body.   

As with Stace, I am not interested in the veracity of Muraresku’s claims but rather in the desires that animate them. And while Muraresku is a popular writer and not a scientist, and his claims are sometimes outlandish, I think he is representative of an affect—a feeling—that is present in elements of both psychedelic science and the mainstream psychedelic revival, a feeling that I have been calling the fantasy of disembodiment. That fantasy exists on a continuum. At one end, we find sober neuroscientists for whom the mind-brain is the seat of consciousness and the body the locus of background metabolic reactions, hence untheorized in exploring psychedelics’ mechanism of action. At the other end, we find movements like cryonics, which seeks to decouple brain from body and leave the latter behind, or transhumanism, which eagerly predicts The Singularity, when bodyless brains will merge with artificial intelligence and the resulting person-as-neural-network will potentially live on forever. 

Again, I recognize that psychedelic neuroscientists are different from transhumanists and cryonicists, but I think that difference is one of degree, not kind. Indeed, thinking about the fantasy of disembodiment as a continuum explains Silicon Valley’s fascination with both psychedelic science and cryonics.²⁸ The throughline across this continuum is, of course, the equating of consciousness with mind-brain, such that the body is, at best, a material container for that mind-brain, at worst, a drag on its infinite and possibly immortal potential. In this scientific-cultural-technological continuum, the body is a reminder of our vulnerability to sickness, debility, and death. In fact, I would argue that the fantasy of disembodiment reveals a discomfort with and disavowal of vulnerability, both the vulnerability of union with the divine to which many mystics submit and the vulnerability—the finitude—of being human.

I want to end by reflecting on other ways to imagine and engage the psychedelic body. As Tehseen Noorani underscores, the American psychedelic revival is heterogeneous, encompassing not just scientific researchers but also “shamans, indigenous healers, festival goers, therapists, drug policy and criminal justice reformers, psychonauts, recreational users, seekers, and artists.”²⁹ And in many of those communities, bodies are actively recognized as integral to psychedelic action. When I worked for a psychedelic support line, our guidance often involved the body, whether through diet, hydration, and the ingestion of other substances in conjunction with a psychedelic journey, or by engaging body-mind consciousness through movement, touch, smell, and sound. Many psychedelic therapists use a somatic approach, especially those who work with trauma. Even recreational users know that what you have eaten and how long ago plays a major role in how your encounter with psychedelics will proceed. 

Moreover, among Amerindian and mestizo communities who use psychoactive plants for divination, communion, and curative medicine, and whose knowledge of psychedelic medicine is being appropriated now by Western bio-medicine, the body and its elements (gut, blood, heart, lungs, etc.) are important sites and agents of engagement—something that non-mainstream institutions like the Chacruna Institute recognize and prioritize.³⁰ Even within Western science and bio-medicine, nascent research has begun to trace psychedelics’ mechanisms of action beyond the brain, focusing on molecular and gut-microbial pathways.³¹  

All this is to say that the fantasy of disembodiment, though dominant in scientific and popular techno-scientific discourse, is a minoritarian approach within the vernacular psychedelic revival. Indeed, at the end of his life, Griffiths recognized the body’s agency, its power, and fragility. In a moving interview with The New York Times a few months before passing on, Griffiths discussed how he has come to live with, even embrace, his terminal cancer diagnosis: “what I recognized is that the best way to be with this diagnosis was to practice gratitude for the preciousness of our lives. Grasping for the cure wasn’t useful.” And he explicitly linked his own finitude with that of an animal, his dog, who was also living with a possibly terminal diagnosis of kidney failure. “We might both be on a parallel course of expiry,” Griffiths said, calling it a “beautiful synergy.”³² Griffiths’ final reflections interrupt the frothy desire for bodyless transcendence and even immortality that have come to suffuse dominant elements of the psychedelic revival. Taken together with other body-engaged approaches, they open a way to study psychedelics premised on both the body’s profound potential and its finitude.  

1. Nicolas Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia (University of California Press, 2013). [Return to Section]
2. Roland Griffiths et al., “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” Psychopharmacology 187, no. 3 (2006): 268. [Return to Section]
3. Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind (Penguin, 2018), 79. [Return to Section]
4. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell (Harper Perennial, 2009). [Return to Section]
5. Robin Carhart-Harris et al., “The Entropic Brain,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 6, original emphasis. [Return to Section]
6. Carhart-Harris et al., “The Entropic Brain,” 7. [Return to Section]
7. Carhart-Harris et al., “The Entropic Brain,” 3. [Return to Section]
8. Carhart-Harris et al., “The Entropic Brain,” 9. [Return to Section]
9. John Lardas Modern, Neuromatic (University of Chicago Press, 2021), 39. See also Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia; Alex Gearin and Neşe Devenot, “Psychedelic Medicalization, Public Discourse, and the Morality of Ego Dissolution,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 6 (2021): 917-935. [Return to Section]
10. Abou Farman, “Speculative Matter,” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2013): 748. [Return to Section]
11. Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia, 2014), 140. [Return to Section]
12. Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Belknap Press, 2016). [Return to Section]
13. Elizabeth Wilson, “‘Loving the Computer’: Cognition, Embodiment, and the Influencing Machine,” Theory & Psychology 6, no. 4 (1996): 583. [Return to Section]
14. Modern, Neuromatic, 124. [Return to Section]
15. Walter Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (Macmillan and Company, 1960), 131-132. [Return to Section]
16. Ann Taves, “Mystical and Other Alterations in Sense of Self,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 15, no. 3 (2020): 669-690; Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith, “Psychometric Brahman, Psychedelic Science,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 48, no. 5 (2023): 788-806. [Return to Section]
17. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, 50, 61-62. [Return to Section]
18. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, 30, original emphasis. [Return to Section]
19. In fact, Stace’s typology of mysticism was itself abstracted from its mooring in the neo-Hindu Vedanta movement and the ideas of scholars like Swami Prabhavananda and Sri Aurobindo. See Breau and Gillis-Smith, “Psychometric Brahman, Psychedelic Science.” [Return to Section]
20. Mystics also do not usually use the language of experience, which requires a grammatical subject, whereas mystical union dissolves the subject. In fact, Michael Sells argues that the notion of “mystical experience” is a modern construct. Mystics like Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Meister Eckhart speak of “the birth of the son in the soul, of annihilation, of an awakening without an awakening,” not of “‘the experience’ of such a birth, annihilation, or awakening.” Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 214. [Return to Section]
21. Scott Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies (Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2009); Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying. [Return to Section]
22. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Zone, 1992); Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (University of California Press, 1987). [Return to Section]
23. The book has been promoted by a diverse contingent of scholars and public figures, from Jeffrey Kripal to Joe Rogan to Michael Pollan. [Return to Section]
24. Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key (St. Martin’s Press, 2020), 332. [Return to Section]
25. Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 3. [Return to Section]
26. Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 71. [Return to Section]
27. Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 232, original emphasis. [Return to Section]
28. On cryonics and Silicon Valley, see Abou Farman, On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). [Return to Section]
29. Tehseen Noorani, “Making Psychedelics into Medicines: The Politics and Paradoxes of Medicalization,” Journal of Psychedelic Studies 5, no. 1 (2019): 34.  [Return to Section]
30. Piera Talin and Emilia Sanabria, “Ayahuasca’s Entwined Efficacy,” International Journal of Drug Policy 44 (2017): 23–30; Sanabria, “(Psychedelics) Beyond the ‘Neuro’,” Hot Spots, Fieldsights, July 21, 2020; Evgenia Fotiou and Alex Gearin, “Purging and the Body in the Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca,” Social Science & Medicine 239, no. 112532 (2019): 1–9; Fotiou, “Technologies of the Body in Contemporary Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Peruvian Amazon,” Social Science & Medicine 239, no. 112532 (2019): 1–9; Bia Labate and Clancy Cavnar, Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science (Springer, 2018); Labate and Cavnar, Ayahuasca Healing and Science (Springer, 2021). [Return to Section]
31. Michael Pollan and Gül Dölen, “The Future of Psychedelics,” event recording, June 5, 2025, City Arts & Lectures and UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics; Robert Kargbo, “Microbiome,” Journal of Xenobiotics 13 (2023): 386–401. [Return to Section]
32. David Marchese, “A Psychedelic Pioneer Takes the Ultimate Trip,” New York Times Magazine, April 7, 2023. [Return to Section]

Breau, Jeffrey A., and Paul Gillis-Smith. “Psychometric Brahman, Psychedelic Science: Walter Stace, Transnational Vedanta, and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 48, no. 5 (2023): 788–806. 

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. Zone, 1992. 

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. University of California Press, 1987. 

Farman, Abou. “SPECULATIVE MATTER: Secular Bodies, Minds, and Persons: SPECULATIVE MATTER.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2013): 737–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12035. 

Federici, Sylvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2014. 

Fotiou, Evgenia. “Technologies of the Body in Contemporary Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Peruvian Amazon: Implications for Future Research.” Human Ecology 47 (2019): 145–51. 

Fotiou, Evgenia, and Alex K. Gearin. “Purging and the Body in the Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca.” Social Science & Medicine 239, no. 112532 (2019): 1–9. 

Gearin, Alex K., and Neşe Devenot. “Psychedelic Medicalization, Public Discourse, and the Morality of Ego Dissolution.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 6 (2021): 917–35. 

Griffiths, R.R., W.A. Richards, R. McCann, and R. Jess. “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” Psychopharmacology 187, no. 3 (2006): 268–83. 

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell. Harper Perennial, 2009. 

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