Psychedelic Entity Encounters Under Anesthesia in the Early Twentieth Century

One of the fundamental assumptions of contemporary psychedelic therapy is that a drug taker’s mindset and the environment around them (commonly called “set and setting”) significantly influence their experience.¹ When psychedelic therapists discuss set and setting, they typically focus on preparing patients and creating calm, supportive environments for drug sessions. The historian of twentieth-century psychedelia, Ido Hartogsohn, has argued that historical, political, and cultural context also shape the set and setting and how people experience drugs.² Following Hartogsohn, this chapter analyzes how the religious, cultural, and technological environment surrounding patients in the early twentieth century shaped their interpretations of terrifying encounters they had with God, angels, and other spiritual entities while under anesthesia.  

While anesthetics, like nitrous oxide and ether, are not usually thought of as psychedelics, they should be viewed as psychedelic or psychedelic adjacent, in much the same way that ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, is understood today. As with ketamine, nitrous oxide, and ether, these substances can produce the same sort of hallucinations and novel thought patterns as the so-called “classic” psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin.³ This chapter treats anesthetics as psychedelics and applies the concept of set and setting to analyze three sources where patients came to understand their anesthesia-occasioned encounters with spiritual entities by comparing them to the imposing, sensually overwhelming industrial machines that dominated the early twentieth century. Set and setting were not the ultimate determinants of the content and course of these psychedelic experiences, which patients clearly felt were beyond their control. Rather, set and setting provided a way for patients to interpret and make sense of surprising, terrifying experiences that they otherwise may have been unable to explain. 

The essay’s second section investigates how patients employed ideas from new religious movements that emerged in the nineteenth century, along with narratives about the necessity and goodness of progress, to find deep spiritual meaning in their experiences. Contemporary psychedelic therapy literature often defines drug-induced mystical experiences as pleasant and positive. Critics have pointed out this is not always the case, noting that spiritually-charged psychedelic experiences can be quite terrifying.⁴ The sources discussed here provide early examples of patients who saw challenging psychedelic mystical experiences as spiritually significant. This section also gives attention to how the process of psychedelic integration is historically situated. “Integration”—the process of interpreting psychedelic experiences and incorporating their lessons into one’s everyday life—is another key concept in contemporary psychedelic therapy. While historians have paid considerable attention to set and setting, they have not emphasized how historical context also influences the integration process. 

This section also contributes to the literature on religious mystical experience. Over the past few decades, historians and religious studies scholars have developed a new approach to studying religious mystical experience that focuses on how cultural and social contexts shape the role that mystical experiences have in the lives of historical actors. Alex Owen has discussed how occult movements in the late nineteenth century were self-consciously “modern” and thought of their reworking of Renaissance-era Western magic and Hinduism as a form of scientific investigation.⁵ In religious studies, Courtney Bender’s ethnographic work has explored how people who have visionary experiences deploy narratives from the culture around them to analyze and justify the validity of such experiences.⁶ Following these scholars, this chapter interrogates how historical actors functionally deployed narratives around modernity and spirituality to understand and integrate challenging mystical experiences. 

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new technologies of travel, such as railroads and steamships, proliferated, and the development and implementation of new industrial equipment increasingly mechanized labor. Industrial machines, notably locomotives, also deeply affected the collective psyche of the time. Historians such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Mark Aldrich have noted considerable anxiety about the dangers of railroad travel in the long nineteenth century. For example, Schivelbusch discussed how many of the passengers involved in nonfatal train crashes suffered from a psychosomatic condition called “railway spine” that left them feeling ill long after the accident occurred. Sensationalized media coverage of railway accidents also instilled fear in the public mind. Such coverage included accounts of engine explosions, collisions between locomotives, and horrific fires that engulfed entire trains, caused by coal dislodged from the stoves used to keep railcars warm.⁷

Historians have shown that these new intellectual and material circumstances shaped how Westerners saw themselves and the world around them. Michael Adas has shown that Europeans believed their technological prowess justified their domination of the peoples they sought to colonize. Emilie Taylor-Pirie and Laura Otis have explored how Victorians used telegraph lines as metaphors for understanding the digestive system and the connections between nerves in the human body. Jon Agar has shown that British political philosophers conceptualized government as a sort of machine. Tamara Ketabgian has explored how some nineteenth-century thinkers saw factories as sites where humans were literally caught up in machines, either becoming soulless, fleshy appendages, according to writers like Karl Marx, or enabling them to transcend the limits of their flesh and develop superhuman skills, according to writers like Harriet Martineau.⁸ 

Some patients used the discourse of terror around mechanization to understand difficult experiences they had while under anesthesia, just as their contemporaries used the language of industrialization to describe their bodies, governments, and relations to colonized peoples. The psychologist and philosopher William James’ 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience contains one example in a footnote in the chapter on mysticism. In this note, James quotes from a manuscript where an unnamed woman recounted a visionary experience she had while under the effects of ether during a surgical operation: 

A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain.⁹ 

This experience was terrifying and sensually overwhelming. There were flashes of lightning, and the patient was confronted with the looming presence of God, who inflicted pain on her that she described as “hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life.”¹⁰ She couched her experience in the language of industrial modernity to make it comprehensible, comparing God to a giant locomotive and herself, lying helpless before Him, to a railroad tie. She does this through a simile, saying God’s “foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail.”¹¹ The cultural set and setting surrounding the woman, which was suffused with locomotives and accounts of their dangers, provided the imagery and figurative language for understanding and articulating her intense, terrifying encounter with God. 

This woman was not the only person to connect their encounters with spiritual entities while under anesthesia to industrial machines. In 1924, Edwin Mortimer Standing, an educator who served as the longtime assistant to Maria Montessori, the founder of the educational method still used in some primary schools today, published an article in Psyche detailing an entity encounter he had at the dentist’s office while under anesthesia. After the anesthetic took hold, Standing found himself floating in a void full of “a chaos of incandescent avalanches” which he described as a “divine storm of elemental energies.” ¹² Suddenly, he became aware that there was an intelligence there with him in the void: 

A tremendous purpose ran through this staggering and apparent confusion, as through the vast and complicated machinery of an ocean liner, a purpose all embracing, all pervading, all sustaining, so that no part, however small, could detach itself from the whole. 

I knew myself to be a part of this Whole, and I soon became vividly aware that this purpose was working on me. I strove to avoid it, for it was intensely painful; but I struggled as might a cog-wheel to escape from the machine of which it forms a part… Someone or Something was deliberately “getting at” me through this machine, and, though I did not seem any longer to possess a body, was causing me the most intense pain. I writhed under this torment and longed to escape; but there was no escape, and I knew it. ¹³  

Like the woman quoted above, Standing felt the vision he had under anesthesia was alien and overwhelming. He said the experience made him realize that normal perception, “our ordinary human life,” does not allow us to apprehend most of reality, but is rather “on the edge of things, the mere periphery of the universe.”¹⁴ He used the language of industrial technology to process his experience. Standing compared the noisy chaotic void where he found himself to the monolithic inscrutable chugging of an ocean liner’s engine. When he felt he had no control over what was happening around him, he described himself as a cog caught in a machine. However, these descriptions were not meant to imply that what he was perceiving was literally some kind of mechanical device. He wrote that he “was vividly aware that this whole to which I was bound was emphatically not a machine; it was something intensely personal, and seemed to have a personal relationship to me.” ¹⁵ As was the case with the woman discussed above, the industrialized world in which Standing lived provided him with a palette of figurative language for describing and comprehending a sensuous experience unlike any he had ever had. 

The final example I will discuss is drawn from Laughing Gas, a play the novelist and literary critic Theodore Dreiser published in 1916. The play’s main character, Jason Vatabeel, finds himself in an otherworldly realm populated by ethereal entities after being anesthetized during an operation to remove a tumor from his neck. Throughout the play, a character called “The Rhythm of the Universe,” presumably an actor off stage, repeatedly chants “Om! Om! Om! Om!”¹⁶ This sound, constant and unrelenting, is akin to the rhythmic sounds of factory equipment. Vatabeel encounters a spiritual entity named Demyaphon, which, according to Dreiser’s character notes, was meant to be a personification of the anesthetic drug nitrous oxide. Demyaphon taunts Vatabeel, comparing him to a machine that has no ability to understand its purpose or design: 

You puzzle over the phenomena of man. In a vain, critical, cynical ambitious way you dream. It will all be wiped out and forgotten. To that which you seek there is no solution. A tool, a machine, you spin and spin on a given course through new worlds and old. Vain, vain! For you there is no great end.¹⁷

Later in the play, Demyaphon drives home his taunting about the imponderable nature of the meaning of life, saying Vatabeel is “a mere machine run by forces which you cannot understand.”¹⁸ It is unclear whether Dreiser based the play on his own experiences under anesthesia or on ones he heard about secondhand. Either way, the play interpolates the language of industrial machines into its description of visionary anesthetic experiences. Just as the woman in Varieties and Standing used industrial language to immediately apprehend their experiences, Dreiser used such discourses to convey the nihilistic message he found in anesthetically induced psychedelic experiences to the audience watching his play. However, as the next section shows, while these historical actors all conceptualized their experiences using the language of industry, their differing attitudes toward technological development, combined with their religious beliefs, led them to draw different lessons from these frightening anesthetic encounters. 

The patients discussed in the last section found their experiences under anesthesia quite painful and terrifying—at least at first. At the end of their accounts, however, the woman from Varieties and Standing said that their experiences under anesthesia were inspiring and helped them understand the nature of the universe. Both deployed the language of progress, combined with ideas from religious doctrines that were emerging at the time, to recontextualize and integrate their experiences in productive ways. 

For the unnamed woman in Varieties, her experience helped explain the spiritual necessity of suffering. As the train-like God was running her over, she said she realized that he was “turning his corner by means of my hurt.^”19 After God managed to change the direction he was going and sped away, she suddenly realized he was not merely torturing her for the sake of it. His change in direction represented the enactment of some part of his ultimate plan. He had been using her pain to bring that change in the world to fruition. “I was the means of his achieving and revealing something, I know not what or to whom,” the woman wrote. “I realized that in that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before.”²⁰ In addition to the satisfaction she felt from having just directly rendered some service to God, she was also gifted with a divine message about the nature of suffering. As she was regaining consciousness, she wondered why she had not experienced God’s love during the encounter, only his “relentlessness.” A message appeared in her mind: “Knowledge and Love are One, and the measure is suffering.” She said this was meant to make her understand that everything in the world must be earned through suffering and turmoil.²¹ At the end of the account, the woman notes that the reader may see what she experienced as “delusions, or truisms,” but for her, they were “dark truths” about the nature of the world.²²   

While she does not directly say why she chose to embrace what was essentially a negative experience, rather than simply rejecting it as a painful hallucination, I suggest that the religious environment around her may have contributed to her integrating her experience in this way. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of great religious change. Attendance at old-line churches fell dramatically in Britain, and some people on both sides of the Atlantic embraced new forms of Christianity, such as Christian Science, which claimed that people living in the present could directly communicate with God.²³ The woman’s experience, while horrifying, was a direct encounter with divinity akin to those that were prominent in her religious milieu.  

However, this by itself is not enough to explain why the woman found her experience so meaningful. Since her encounter with God involved so much pain, it is conceivable that she might have rejected it as an illusion that did not align with the true nature of God, which she seemed to assume was primarily comprised of love. Her use of progress as a lens for understanding this experience helped her accept it and recognize its value. Many of the woman’s contemporaries in the West strongly believed in progress—the idea that Western technology, culture, and society were on a path towards indefinite improvement and advancement. They used their supposedly “advanced” status relative to non-Western peoples to justify practices that inflicted suffering, such as their domination and exploitation of the peoples they colonized.²⁴ Like these other Westerners, the woman seemed to think that progress was a good and important thing. This primed her to accept the lessons about the necessity of suffering for the improvement of the world she received during her encounter, which included “the impossibility of discovery without its price” and that “the suffering ‘seer’ or genius” necessarily experiences pain and anguish in their quest to help their generation achieve new things.²⁵  

Standing used a similar interpretative lens to integrate his experience. He wrote that as he floated in the void, the machine-like entity that had hold of him would cause him great pain, and then for a while, it would ease off, and he would feel a surge of intense ecstasy. This oscillation between pain and pleasure cycled a few times before he finally understood it was meant to convey a message: the purpose of suffering is to allow people to access greater joy and higher levels of spiritual perfection. “The rack must come before the release; those upper levels cannot be reached by any primrose-path, nor any spiritual short cut,” Standing wrote. Suffering and pain are not inherently bad; they are merely necessary steps towards achieving the joy-filled higher states of being, which are the ultimate goal of creation. “Joy is greater than suffering; love is stronger than hate; life victorious over death,” Standing declared. “In the end joy wins over suffering every time.”²⁶ Like the woman in Varieties, the message Standing received from his encounter was that progress is driven by suffering. While we may experience pain along the road towards spiritual perfection, in the end, it’s all worth it because humanity will ultimately achieve a greater, joyful existence in this world. 

Religious ideas also facilitated Standing’s acceptance of the lessons he received. An editorial in the journal where Standing published his article noted that he had recently been reading Theosophical texts, which likely shaped how he interpreted his experience.²⁷ Theosophy is a spiritual movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century, incorporating ideas from Western Occultism with Buddhism and Hinduism. Theosophists believe that humans can attain higher states of being through a process of spiritual purification, a vision of spiritual evolution that Alex Owen has argued is closely tied to broader cultural notions about the inherent goodness and necessity of progress.²⁸ They also believe that divine entities occasionally contact certain spiritually pure humans and reveal great truths to them.²⁹ These concepts may have allowed Standing to shift the feeling of being helplessly enthralled to the whims of some malevolent, machine-like entity into a message from the Divinity that highlighted the fraught but ultimately rewarding path humans are destined to follow as they struggle towards spiritual perfection.³⁰ Here again, a historical actor used a mixture of ideas from new religious movements and the concept of progress to transpose a difficult psychedelic experience into a message communicating truths about the universe. 

Dreiser’s work provides a converse example. His agnosticism and skepticism about industrial progress could not provide the interpretative tools to positively reframe and integrate the difficult visionary experiences he described in his play. There is a somewhat sour tone to the machine-infused language in Dreiser’s work. Demyaphon tells Vatabeel that he is a machine to denigrate him and his ability to understand and influence the universe.³¹ In another section, a group of shadow doctors, who exist on the anesthetic plane Vatabeel travels to, appear and begin an operation they say is necessary to save Vatabeel’s life. One of these shadow doctors says, “indifferently” (according to the stage notes), that he has done enough for Vatabeel because a machine he has with him shows that Vatabeel is “two periods this side the danger mark on this plane” even though his assistant insists that Vatabeel clearly looks like he is going to die and that his pulse is weak.³² Here, the shadow doctor ties Vatabeel’s fate to the dubious wisdom of an impersonal machine rather than to a more traditional, embodied approach to medicine that relies on doctors’ personal observations of patients’ bodily signs. 

Moreover, unlike the woman in Varieties and Standing, Vatabeel does not come to view his experience under anesthesia as spiritually meaningful after he returns to consciousness. Instead, he is left with the feeling that the universe is mechanistic, uncaring, and ultimately meaningless. When he awakes from the anesthesia, he starts a gibbering monologue punctuated by nitrous oxide-induced fits of laughter: “I see it all now! Oh, what a joke! Oh, what a trick! Over and over! And I can’t help myself! Oh, ho! ho! ho! Oh, ha! ha! ha!” At the close of the play, he stumbles off stage, still confused.³³  

Scholars have argued that this play reflects Dreiser’s larger spiritual and intellectual concerns. Lynda Boren has asserted that the play embodies the tension between Dreiser’s longing for spirituality and his attraction to the idea that human behavior is controlled mechanistically through brain chemistry. Dreiser expresses this conflict in the play when characters like Demyaphon use the language of industrial machines to taunt Vatabeel about the automated and inscrutable nature of his existence.³⁴ Louis Zanine has argued that the play is more reflective of Dreiser’s theological ideas. Around the time he wrote Laughing Gas, Dreiser had become enamored with the idea that the universe is controlled by forces that use all living things in service of some great unknowable purpose. These forces do not care about the individual fate of human beings or respond to their prayers as would the personal God of Christianity.³⁵ While Boren claims that Vatabeel resists the dehumanizing messages he received while in the anesthetic world and asserts his humanity at the end of the play, his stunned demeanor suggests otherwise. The stage direction says that the actor playing Vatabeel is supposed to retain “a look of deep, amazed abstraction” as the curtain falls, indicating that he is unable to understand or fully integrate his experience.³⁶  With no recourse to the aid of a personal God or narratives of progress that can be intermixed with the mechanized picture of life he encountered on his trip, Vatabeel and presumably Dreiser are unable to make sense of Vatabeel’s journey to the anesthetic realm, which remained a wholly terrifying, negative experience that left him dumbfounded. 

This chapter has shown how three historical actors deployed the cultural resources around them to interpret and integrate difficult psychedelic mystical experiences. Beyond providing an example of how to analyze challenging psychedelic experiences through a historical lens, I hope that looking at how patients processed and integrated their experiences in the past may help stimulate thinking amongst researchers today. Much of the discussion around set and setting in psychedelic medicine is concerned with techniques for shaping patients’ mindsets and crafting the environment around them as they take a drug. Integration also tends to be localized, focusing on practices such as journaling and psychotherapy rather than how interpretative frames drawn from culture and religion influence how patients come to understand the significance of their psychedelic experiences.³⁷ This work amplifies calls in the psychedelic humanities for psychedelic therapists to consider how psychedelic experiences are embedded in cultural contexts that shape both set and setting, and integration. It suggests such attention is especially important for researchers who seek to understand how patients cope with challenging experiences during psychedelic therapy.³⁸  

¹ For a history of set and setting see Ido Hartogsohn, “Constructing Drug Effects: A History of Set and Setting,” Drug Science, Policy and Law 3 (January 2017): 1–17. [Return to Section]

² Ido Hartogsohn, American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2020). See also Erika Dyck et al., Psychedelic Humanities (Frontiers Media SA, 2024). [Return to Section]

³ Some people define “psychedelics” as drugs which act on 5-HT2A receptors such as LSD, mescaline and psilocybin. While this approach to defining psychedelics may be useful in the sciences since it focuses research on a particular cellular structure, from a historian’s perspective it is unsatisfactory. When the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond defined the term “psychedelic” in the 1956, the 5-HT2A receptor had not been discovered. The novelist and pioneering Western psychonaut Aldous Huxley, the recipient of the letter where Osmond coined “psychedelic,” thought that the consciousness-altering effects of anesthetics were in the same class as mescaline and LSD. From a contemporary perspective, excluding anesthetics from “psychedelics” also does not make sense. Most aboveground therapists operating under the paradigm of psychedelic therapy today use ketamine, an anesthetic, since it can be legally prescribed. Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1-2; Philip B. Smith, Chemical Glimpses of Paradise (Charles C Thomas, 1972), 86. I am also not the first person to relate the history of anesthetics to psychedelics. See Christopher Hugh Partridge, High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2018), 60-87. [Return to Section]

⁴ Psychedelic researchers generally based their concept of mystical experience on Walter Terrance Stace’s theory that asserts mystical experiences always involve joyful feelings of “blessedness.” W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (Macmillan, 1960), 131-132; Roland R Griffiths et al., “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” Psychopharmacology 187, no. 3 (2006): 268–83. For a criticism of this formulation see Ann Taves, “Mystical and Other Alterations in Sense of Self: An Expanded Framework for Studying Nonordinary Experiences,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 15, no. 3 (2020): 669–90.  [Return to Section]

⁵ Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004). [Return to Section]

⁶ Courtney J. Bender, “Touching the Transcendent: Rethinking Religious Experience in the Sociological Study of Religion,” in Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives, ed. Nancy T. Ammerman (Oxford University Press, 2006), 201-18. For other historical works which take a similar approach as Owen and Bender see Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) Courtenay Grean Raia, The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (University of Chicago Press: 2019) and Alicia Puglionesi, Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (Stanford University Press, 2020). For works in religious studies which look at mystical experience in context see Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (University of California Press, 1985); Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton University Press, 1999); Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, Princeton Paperbacks. (Princeton University Press, 2005). [Return to Section] 

⁷ Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century: With a New Preface (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2014), 135-44. Mark Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 79-82. For examples of contemporary accounts of these accidents see “Fatal Locomotive Explosion at Lafayette, Indiana. Other Railroad Disasters with Loss of Life.,” Republican Banner, December 20, 1872; “The Terrible Car Stove,” New York Times, October 30, 1886. [Return to Section]

⁸ Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 1989); Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (University of Michigan Press, 2001); Emilie Taylor-Pirie, “The Telegraphic Body: Dyspepsia, Modern Life, and ‘Gastric Time’ in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Culture,” Journal of Medical Humanities, September 16, 2024; Jon Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer, History of Computing (MIT Press, 2003); Tamara Siroone Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines : The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2011). [Return to Section] 

⁹ This woman was quoted anonymously in Varieties, and I have unable to identify her. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Modern library, 1902), 383-84. [Return to Section]  

¹⁰ Ibid., 383-84. [Return to Section]  

¹¹ Ibid., 383-84. [Return to Section] 

¹² E.M. Standing, “The Uplifted Veil: A Study in Anaesthetic Psychology,” Psyche 4 (March 1924): 227. [Return to Section]

¹³ Ibid., 228. [Return to Section] 

¹⁴ Ibid., 228. [Return to Section] 

¹⁵ Ibid., 228. [Return to Section] 

¹⁶ Theodore Dreiser, Laughing Gas, in Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural (John Lane Company, 1916). [Return to Section]

¹⁷ Ibid., 100. [Return to Section] 

¹⁸ Ibid., 103. [Return to Section] 

¹⁹ James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 383-384. [Return to Section]

²⁰ Ibid., 384. [Return to Section] 

²¹ Ibid., 384. [Return to Section]

²² Ibid., 384. [Return to Section]

²³ Richard J Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman, eds., Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief (Macmillan, 1990), 9-11; Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions, 119-250. [Return to Section] 

²⁴ Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men. [Return to Section] 

²⁵ James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 384. [Return to Section]

²⁶ Standing, “The Uplifted Veil,” 233. [Return to Section]

²⁷ “Editorial,” Psyche 4 (January 1924): 191–95. [Return to Section] 

²⁸ Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 34-35. [Return to Section]

²⁹ H.P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy: Being a Clear Exposition, in the Form of Question and Answer, of the Ethics, Science, and Philosophy for the Study of Which the Theosophical Society Has Been Founded (Theosophical Publishing Company, 1889), 193. [Return to Section]

³⁰ “Editorial,” Psyche 4 (January 1924): 191–95. [Return to Section] 

³¹ Dreiser, Laughing Gas, 100. [Return to Section] 

³² Ibid., 101-2. [Return to Section] 

³³ Ibid., 115. [Return to Section] 

³⁴ Lynda Boren, “William James Theodore Dreiser and the "Anaesthetic Revelation",” American Studies 24, no. 1 (1983): 5–17. [Return to Section] 

³⁵ Louis J Zanine, Mechanism and Mysticism: The Influence of Science on the Thought and Work of Theodore Dreiser (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 133-137. [Return to Section] 

³⁶ Boren, “William James,” 13; Dreiser, Laughing Gas, 118. [Return to Section] 

³⁷ See, for example, Michael C. Mithoefer, “A Manual for MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy in the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Version 7,” August 19, 2015, https://maps.org/research-archive/mdma/MDMA-Assisted-Psychotherapy-Treatment-Manual-Version7-19Aug15-FINAL.pdf. [Return to Section] 

³⁸ Erika Dyck et al., Psychedelic Humanities. [Return to Section] 

Green, Jacob. “Psychedelic Entity Encounters Under Anesthesia in the Early Twentieth Century .” 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/10.70423/0004.16