The Aesthetics of Psychedelic Orientalism and the Pedagogy of the Entheogenic Body

Abstract: This paper imagines a course on Psychedelic Orientalism. The term “psychedelic orientalism” first appears in a book by Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, Turning East: The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism (Simon and Schuster, 1977), published 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 until 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 Press, 2018). Beyond these works, the term has not been thoroughly analyzed in the literature on psychedelics or by Said’s disciples. Using the setting of an imagined course on psychedelic orientalism, this paper seeks to define what psychedelic orientalism is 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 specific imagery in the Western imagination. “Set and setting” is often referred to as where psychedelics are consumed. Caffeine, nicotine, and opium have a unique set and setting, often associated with Middle Eastern motifs, cafes, hookah cafés, and opium dens. These imaginative physical spaces in the Western imagination are illustrated in Romantic/Orientalist paintings from Europe and the United States and can be compared with contemporary metaphysical or immersive spaces, from Ernst Fuchs’ Wagner Villa in Vienna to “Illusionaries: Entheon,” Alex and Allyson Grey’s immersive art exhibit in London. While 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 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. 

Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, introduced the term “Orientalism” in Turning East: The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism,¹ published a year before Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism.² The work examines contemporary attraction to spirituality outside of the Global North, and his felt sense of spiritual crisis in the US. He uses psychedelic orientalism, for example, to refer to Richard Alpert’s change of identity to Baba Ram Dass.  Decades later, psychedelic orientalism reemerged in Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion³ and Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.⁴Beyond these works, the term has not been thoroughly analyzed in the literature on psychedelics or by Said’s disciples. From Harvard Divinity School in the 1970s, this paper takes us to the setting of an imagined course that illustrates psychedelic orientalism through a collection of primary sources.  

A proper semester-long course on “Psychedelics and the Middle East” would be interdisciplinary, beginning with the long history of mind-altering substances, or what I term “mind-alleviating substances,” in Middle East history, including those drugs that extend beyond our contemporary classification of drugs deemed “psychedelic,”  “…from the ritual vaporization of cannabis in Jewish temple sites in the Levant, to the henbane-spiked viticulture of classical cultures of the ancient Mediterranean.”⁵

From antiquity in the Levant to its tragic present, the acceptance of mind-altering substances for medical reasons has particular salience, considering the events that began in October 2023. This salience is quite explicit in the efforts of Leor Roseman, an Israeli psychedelic researcher from the University of Exeter, and Sami Awad, a Palestinian peace activist and founder of Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem, who seek to demonstrate how psychedelics can be used for socio-political endeavors beyond personal healing, using ayahuasca as a peace-making tool among Palestinians and Israelis. The work, which encompasses neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and conflict resolution, leverages psychedelics as a tool for recognizing and healing trauma.⁶   

For this imagined course, Psychedelic Orientalism is rooted in the ephemera of the past — such as cigarette boxes and posters — and extends to the digital ephemera of the present. This course deals with the imaginary, images often invoked of Middle Eastern mysticism that carry pejorative associations in the Victorian setting of the late 1800s but positive connotations for the twentieth-century counterculture. The effects of psychedelics are often understood through an analysis of “set and setting,” and caffeine, nicotine, and opium have a unique set and setting, usually associated with Middle Eastern motifs, hookah lounges, and opium dens. This imagined course offers a tour of these physical spaces in the Western imagination, illustrated in Romantic/Orientalist paintings from Europe and the US, in comparison to either physical or metaphysical spaces from Ernst Fuchs’ Villa Wagner in Vienna, to “Entheon: A Sanctuary of Visionary Art,” Alex and Allyson Grey’s immersive art exhibit at the Illusionaries gallery in London, along with a collection of texts and primary sources that reflect upon the material and imagined orientalism of the psychedelic.  

While 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 latter two settings of the Fuchs’ museum and the Greys’ exhibit are reflections of a celebratory 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.  

In my past public-facing scholarship and pedagogy, I examine how Orientalism has led to the erasure of the cultural complexity of the Middle East and Asia from the Victorian era to 2020. In reaction to the death of George Floyd during the COVID pandemic, I wrote about “Slavery, the ‘robot,’ and Orientalism in science fiction,”⁷ referring to HBO’s Watchmen and Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, and I examined the sub-genre of Techno-Orientalism in “‘Dune’: Techno-Orientalism, and Intergalactic Islam.”⁸ In my lecture on “Caffeinated Orientalism: The History and Politics of Coffee from Yemen to Italy,” I examine the history of caffeine and coffee cultures and how the Middle Eastern origins of this bean are imagined in Italian culture over the last two centuries, from advertisements to historic cafes, based on research at the Luigi Lavazza Foundation.⁹ However, the most popular subject among undergraduate and graduate students alike has been psychedelic orientalism, applied to the Opium Wars in China, to the psychedelic posters of the 1960s.  

On the first day of class, students would be asked to envision Said’s Orientalism as a system of communication—a pedagogical heuristic presented as a series of “E”s: Essentialism, Exoticism, Eroticism, the Enigmatic/Esoteric, Economy, Ecstatic/Euphoric/Entheogenic, Energy, and the Enemy. They should not worry about Exams, but rather Experience Edward’s critique of the West’s “Essentialization” of the “East” through acoustic, aesthetic, and semiotic uses of the “Exotic” via an array of categories, frames, and tropes. The “Exotic” ontology is communicated as the “Erotic” through the semiotics of harems and belly dancers, and as the “Enigmatic” or “Esoteric” through entities such as genies, one of the earliest references to Artificial Intelligence in literature. The “Economic” refers to the commodification of goods associated with the region. The “Ecstatic, Euphoric, Entheogenic” refers to coffee, tea, hashish, opium, and other mind-altering substances; “Energy” to the crude caricatures of oil shaykhs and crude oil that entered the American imagination during the 1970s oil embargo; “Epidemiologic” to the association of China with Covid;  and after 9/11, to the rise of Al-Qaida and ISIS, as the “Enemy.” These tropes are not mutually exclusive; they can function on a continuum and, collectively, contribute to the Erasure of the East’s diversity and difference. However, the counter-hegemonic element of later psychedelic orientalism during the 1960s counterculture does not conform to this pattern of erasure. Opposed to erasure, psychedelic orientalism embraces the polychrome opposed to monochrome, luxurious and indolent versus the spartan and modern, present moment versus the future, embellishment versus admonishment, the vivid versus the livid, swirling curves versus sharp lines, surreal versus the real, the feline/feminine over the masculine, vibrancy over banality, and ironically, the intoxicated Muslim world versus the sober West. It is alchemical, hypnotic, and psychedelic. 

Psychedelic orientalism invokes the East as the source of the “Ecstatic,” perhaps induced by mind-altering substances and psychedelics, which conjure certain imagery in the Western imagination. Caffeine, nicotine, and opium are often depicted within distinctly Middle Eastern contexts in Romantic and Orientalist paintings from Europe and the United States. This section presents an analysis of selected Orientalist paintings from Europe and the US, dated from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the portrayal of drugs as a prominent element in Western representations of the East. Subsequently, the discussion shifts to twentieth-century music, highlighting the ways in which elements of Orientalist imagery became emblematic within the psychedelic counterculture of the mid-twentieth century.  

The students’ journey into the orientalist genre begins with Giacomo Ceruti’s eighteenth-century portrait, Smoking Man in Oriental Habit (1740), with an elongated pipe. Another Italian orientalist painting, Amadeo Preziosi’s The Istanbul Café (1852), features two different sorts of smoking contraptions, an elongated pipe and shisha (also known as hookah or nargila), as well as the other mind-altering substance, caffeine. Gustavo Simoni’s painting, Smoking the hookah (1880), also features the smoking contraption and another symbol essential to the imagination of the Orient, the oriental carpet, as in the Spaniard Mariano Fortuny’s Seller of the Carpets (1870). A more illustrative example of the ecstatic is Fabio Fabbi’s The Dream (1880), in which the character pursues oblivion from either hashish or opium (Image A). Perhaps the man in the painting is dreaming of another subject from Fabbi’s oeuvre, the harem and shisha of Dancing in the Harem Courtyard, or Fortuny’s concubine and shisha of Odalisque (1861). These orientalist paintings invoke the ecstatic, often combined with the erotic. American orientalism was less erotic. In Bridgman’s 1878 The Siesta, we see a continuation of the themes of the lounging space as the antithesis of the modern West. While America is industrious, the (clothed) indolent woman lounges with a smoking contraption, an exotic wild animal in the background.  

Orientalism does not merely apply to the Orient in terms of geographical setting. A few years later, in 1896, the same formula of The Siesta is depicted by Charles Marion Russell in Keeoma (1896) of a lounging Native American woman with both a pipe and the hide of a wild animal, the antithesis of the modern, industrious society of progress that produces this art. Just a few decades later, in the American context, the cover of music albums, such as Give Me the Sultan’s Harem (1919), combines erotic and ecstatic allusions, and is on display in the following lyrics:  

Give me the Harem, the old Sultan’s Harem,  

That’s the only thing I crave. 
The Sultan’s too old, for he’s past eighty-three,  
And his thousand wives need a fellow like me. 

In a similar vein, the cover of Cleopatra had a Jazz Band (1917), features a smoking contraption, a haremesque setting, and overtly racist imagery. Jumping to the present, Paul Avgerinos’ album, Garden of Delight (2007), features the same harem scene, with the shisha in the garden.  

In the era of psychedelic music, Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit” has not only a Middle Eastern drum beat to set the rhythm, but also the following lyrics: 

 
Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall 
And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you’re going to fall 
Tell ‘em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call 

The reference to the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) is no longer a symbol of British orientalism but becomes an icon of the psychedelic counterculture. 

As students learn to recognize the psychedelic semiotics of visual imagery, they will take their experience and apply it to physical artifacts in the history of cannabis cultivation and use. Among the numerous lithographs of “harems and hookahs,” students will see preserved ephemera such as the 1909 Hasheesh: The Herb Dangerous, High Writings of Aleister Crowley and Other Celebrated Haschischins of the Early Twentieth Century, Volume 1 (Level Press, 1974), which brings us to the next subject of our course.¹⁰ 

The next part of the course focuses on primary sources and ephemera that constitute the Islamic Ismaili Imaginary, the sect known in popular culture for allegedly giving rise to the so-called “cult of the Assassins.” The historical sect centered on its founding figure, Hasan Sabbah (1050-1154), an Ismaili Shi’a philosopher and spiritual leader who established a mountain-top retreat in Alamut and a network of sympathetic villages in rural northern Iran.¹¹ He later became known as the “Old Man of the Mountain” in popular folklore, beginning with the legend of the Assassins from Marco Polo’s apocryphal account, who passed through the area in either 1271 or 1272.¹²  The following excerpt demonstrates how the legend lives on as digital ephemera in cyberspace, a viral meme based on inserting the word “hashish” as part of the legend:  

The Old Man kept at his court such boys of twelve years old as seemed to him destined to become courageous men. When the Old Man sent them into the garden in groups of four, ten or twenty, he gave them hashish to drink. They slept for three days, then they were carried sleeping into the garden where he had them awakened. When these young men woke, and found themselves in the garden with all these marvelous things, they truly believed themselves to be in paradise. And these damsels were always with them in songs and great entertainments; they received everything they asked for, so that they would never have left that garden of their own will. When the Old Man wished to kill someone, he would take a young man and tell him they could return to Paradise if they entered his service and followed his instructions or died in his service.¹³ 

This website breaks down the etymology of the Assassins. In Arabic, someone who consumes hashish is a hashishi; in the plural, a hashishiin. According to legend, because Italians do not pronounce the letter “H,” Marco Polo, being a Venetian, would have rendered hashishiin as “assassin.” The connection between the Assassins and hashish is apocryphal, given that when Marco Polo traveled through Iran, the Mongols had ravaged it, several decades after the group in the mountaintop fortress known as Alamut had been destroyed by 1256, and no evidence of a garden has ever been found in archaeological studies. Yet the term persisted across time and space. The name of Les Club des Hachichins in 1840 Paris, a gathering of the French literati, including Hugo, Dumas, and Balzac, is a product of Orientalism that emerged in the wake of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, combined with the name derived from the apocryphal story noted above. The academic Philip Hitti’s essay “The Assassins” in The Book of Grass (Grove Press and Peter Owen Limited), the seminal 1967 collection of cannabis-related literature, quotes Marco Polo as describing them simply as consuming a “potion.”¹⁴ Even the Central Intelligence Agency training manual, A Study of Assassination, invokes the legends of Alamut:  

DEFINITION - Assassination is a term thought to be derived from “Hashish”, a drug similar to marijuana, said to have been used by Hassan ibn al-Sabbah to induce motivation in his followers, who were assigned to carry out political and other murders, usually at the cost of their lives.¹⁵ 

Then they see how the legend evolves from print ephemera to digital ephemera. For example, Ben Thompson’s viral article about “Hassan al-Sabbah” on his popular history website, Badass of the Week, writes: 

They stayed there for a while, studying shit and learning, until one day a servant arrived with a magical potion for the initiate to drink. The guy would fucking chug this potion (the key ingredients of which were hashish, LSD, and dirty bong water) and pass out.  When the initiate awoke he found himself stoned off his ass in the most beautiful garden this side of Babylon – a glorious place full of wine, honey, fountains, palm trees, daiquiris, and super mega hot topless belly dancing virgins fucking gyrating around like crazy all over the place. The guy basked in this Earthly Paradise for several hours, at the end of which Hassan appeared to him and said something to the effect of, “This is what I have to offer you.  Follow my teaching and submit to my will and I shall show you the way to Heaven.” Then the fucker was drugged again and thrown back into his shitty studio apartment.¹⁶  

In the twenty-first century, the legend served as the basis for the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise, which invariably brings a smile to students in the classroom and might awaken them from their stupors.  The Assassins’ legend has proven to be one of the most enduring examples of psychedelic orientalism across time and space, from the Venetian traveler Marco Polo and the mountains of Iran to the living rooms of many gamers. This legend has persisted, perhaps due to the Western orientalist gaze and fascination with how this apocryphal tale involves sex, drugs, and violence. Nevertheless, if one compares Assassin’s Creed to another video game series, the first-person shooter Call of Duty, which features many Middle Eastern settings, the differences are stark. The former is a video game devoted to psychedelic orientalism, while the latter is dedicated to geopolitical orientalism, basically allowing anyone with a console to take part in the projection of American geopolitical violence in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan.  

Back in the classroom, students will take virtual field trips to two museum spaces to examine how psychedelic orientalist tropes travel over time and space. In Vienna, the psychedelic orientalist aesthetic is celebrated at the Ernst Fuchs Museum in the Wagner Villa, where psychedelic orientalist motifs adorned with esoteric Hebrew letters depict turbaned figures. Born in 1930, Fuchs was the premier figure in the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism, transforming a derelict Art Nouveau home into a studio and, later, a museum. The course would travel across the Atlantic to upstate New York’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, an abandoned former interfaith center, and now home to the works of Alex and Allyson Grey. The Greys respect the Perennial Tradition and pay homage to the Quran and Sufism. In Net of Being (Inner Traditions, 2012), Alex Grey writes, “Those who know not God carry the sadness of the unrivaled. This is why the soul yearns to know God, why we seek to know our deeper selves, and why the Koran states, ‘To know oneself is to know Allah’.”¹⁷ He quotes the Sufi mystic from Murcia in today’s Spain, Ibn Arabi: “The great Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi said that the imagination is our angel where ‘God meets God.’”¹⁸ In this vein, I begin with Grey’s 1984 painting Praying, which appears on the cover of his book Sacred Mirrors (Inner Traditions, 1990). The halo in this painting resembles the Renaissance tropes of using halos and pseudo-Kufic script to suggest an Oriental atmosphere, but in Grey’s case, the Arabic is accurate. Grey writes:  

Praying is a portrait revealing a sun in the heart and mind from the inner light in the center of brain. A halo emanates and surrounds the head. The halo is inscribed with signs of contemplation from six different paths. The symbols of Yin and Yang from Taoism, its description of the magnitude of Brahman from Hinduism, the watchword of the Jewish faith, “hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” The Tibetan, Buddhist mantra, Om Mane Padme Hum, a prayer for the unfolding of the mind of enlightenment, Christ, the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, and a description of Allah along with the Islamic prayer, “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger.” I have attempted to present the spiritual core of light which transcends, unites, and manifests in various religious paths.¹⁹  

The Arabic script spells “creator of the heavens and of the earth” (badi’a al-samat wal-ard) and “Knower of the unseen and the witnessed” (‘alim al-ghayb wal-shahada). The text comes from a variety of phrases in the Quran. This is sacred scripture, but it is also the language often associated with the spiritual experience of a psychedelic trip. “Prayer” conveys the complexity, yet frailty and ephemerality of the human body, the interconnected systems culminating in the third eye, and emanating from the third eye is a glowing, illuminated halo with the sacred words travelling from within the bounds of the body to the outer realms. 

The paintings from the Greys’ upstate New York museum serve as the basis for the students’ next trip, to the immersive “Entheon” exhibition in Canary Wharf, London, where a series of high-rise buildings that give the Techno-Orientalist vibe of the 1982 Bladerunner provide the perfect setting for the exhibit, which invites you to “Venture within, where time stops, and the infinite expanse of space unfolds. Immerse yourself in the imagery and ethereal sensations, allowing yourself to dissolve into the very fabric of the experience.”²⁰ The website for the immersive experience promises “Mystical themes merged throughout each motif, teasing spectators a seductive dance between matter, mind, and the metaphysical.”²¹ In the middle of the foyer of the “Entheon” immersive exhibit is a televised interview with the Greys, in which they discuss how LSD transformed what I term their “Ways of Being,” a play on Berger’s Ways of Seeing. I juxtapose Ernst Fuch’s “Jesus in the Wings of the Cherub” (image B) with Alex Grey’s “Holy Fire” (image C), both featuring figures with the hands raised in a position of supplication to the divine.  

Alex Grey’s 2018 (Image D) painting of Richard Alpert/Baba Ram Dass captures the fever pitch of psychedelic orientalism in the 1960s, illustrating Alpert as both an Ivy League psychologist and a guru figure in Vedic stylings. Pollan states that Aldous Huxley introduced “Psychedelic Orientalism” to Leary, which he “greatly amplified.”²² Kripal traces Leary’s voyage into orientalism through two steps—his correspondence with Huxley and his encounters at a Vedanta ashram in Cambridge. Kripal writes, “What is particularly striking from a comparative perspective is the degree to which such a psychedelic vision, very much like Huxley’s, turns to Asian philosophies to express these metaphysical realizations.”²³ When questioning whether their turn to Asian philosophies to express these metaphysical realizations was “nothing more than Western projection and post-colonial gazing,” he argues more about the reception history of Asian philosophy in the Anglophone world:  

No, America’s psychedelic orientalism may have been naïve at times, but it was definitely not simply pure projection. It was much more a combination of partial observation, an intuitive sympathy for Asian countercultures, selective borrowing, and almost perfect timing. 

In Turning East, Harvey Cox arrived at a similar conclusion to Kripal:   

What did my visit with the Huicholes do to answer my original question about a possible link between psychedelic states and Oriental mysticism? It led me to suspect that the peculiar sociology of the “drug culture” of the 1960’s gave it a predictable countercultural flavor, and that its “setting,” not the chemical catalysts themselves, pushed its religious language in such an “Oriental” direction. The “set” of the people who used these substances was already upper bohemian, romantic and anti-Western, and this stance led them to use the most esoteric symbols available to codify their experiences. I doubt that there is anything essentially Oriental about the psychedelics. My experience with peyote was not “Oriental” in any sense, and may not even have been mystical. Rather, my vision involved creation stories, second births, and a star in the east signaling grace to people on earth—all very biblical, perhaps even “Christian.”²⁴  

During the psychedelic orientalism identified by Kripal and Cox in the 1960s, references to it flourished in literature. Frank Herbert’s Dune (Chilton Books, 1965) features spice, which can only be found on the desert planet Arrakis. Spice has a psychedelic quality, allowing the user to travel across space without moving. It is described in the novel in the following terms: 

Upon consuming it, it tasted like cinnamon. It’s like life. It presents a different face each time you take it, some hold it that the spice produces a learned flavor reaction. The body learning a thing is good, for it interprets the flavor as pleasurable, slightly euphoric, and, like life, never to be truly synthesized.²⁵ 

From the dunes of Arrakis to the dunes of the Sahara, from Bowles to the Beatles, this period was associated with travelers to Morocco and with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The man best known for his “trips,” Rick Steves, also went to Afghanistan for a different sort of trip. Just as Said published Orientalism in 1978, Steves was a 23-year-old backpacker on the “Hippie Trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. In a journal entry from Herat in western Afghanistan, he writes:  

Back at the hotel, Gene pulled out the hunk of hashish that he bought and this, I decided, would be the time and place that’s I’d lose my “marijuana virginity.” I’ve never even smoked a cigarette and smoking pot has always turned me off, so to speak, because it’s always an object of social pressure and I would never feel comfortable doing it because everyone at a party was doing it and I was the only “square” one. That kind of pressure and the usual scene surrounding pot smoking reinforced my determination to stay away from the evil weed. But this was different.  

In the above passage, Steves juxtaposes his reserved conservative character in the US, while in Asia, he can embrace a libertine act in a liberal “East”: 

In Afghanistan, hashish is an integral part of the culture. It’s as innocent as wine with dinner is in America. If ever I was to experience this high, it wouldn’t be in a dark dorm room at the UW with a bunch of people I didn’t respect. I could never feel good about that. ²⁶  

Steve describes the banality of hashish consumption as a juxtaposition between the US and Afghanistan at that time. But in 2021, Steves highlighted this reflection in response to the fall of Kabul to the puritanical Taliban. His reference to the banality of hashish in Afghanistan, and the reference to “theocracy” and entheogens, are not only a critique of the Taliban regime, but seem to harken back to a counterculture of the 1960s that perhaps had begun to wane by 1978, at the time Steves went to Afghanistan.  

It is not uncommon for a course to have a textbook to supplement a rich selection of primary sources. The 13^th edition of A Concise History of the Middle East (Routledge, 2024) would be a sensible choice, as it covers this history up to the quite recent past, and I am its co-author and could thus answer students’ most specific questions about its contents. I finished this textbook on the morning of October 7, 2023, only to turn on the news and ask the editor for an extension, as I knew the region’s future history would begin on that day. Close to a year after those events, I concluded by referring to Edward Said’s reflection on the event that inspired him to write Orientalism, published in 1978: 

My interest in Orientalism began for two reasons, one it was an immediate thing, that is to say, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, which had been preceded by a lot of images and discussions in the media in the popular press about how the Arabs are cowardly and they don't know how to fight and they are always going to be beaten because they are not modern. And then everybody was very surprised when the Egyptian army crossed the canal in early October of 1973 and demonstrated that like anybody else they could fight. That was one immediate impulse.²⁷ 

As I elaborate in the textbook’s conclusion, the events of October 7, 2023, happened on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 war. What Said described then is relevant for how the West underestimated Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen, depicted in an Orientalist prism as mountain tribesmen with curved daggers, colorful skirts, and chewing the mild narcotic, qat. (In fact, I had lived in Yemen from 1998 to 1999, studying and experiencing qat, my first foray into set and setting in a Middle Eastern context.)   

The focus on their use of qat would constitute psychedelic orientalism, yet the media’s underestimating the technological prowess would constitute geopolitical orientalism.²⁸ Despite these depictions, the Houthis launched both drones and ballistic missiles towards Israel’s southern port of Eilat, in solidarity with Hamas. The Houthi ballistic missiles reached outer space on their way to Eilat, when Israel’s Arrow defense system intercepted them in the stratosphere, marking the first instance of space combat ever in the history of humanity, a far cry from the primitive orientalist depictions in the mass media.  

I concluded my textbook with the prospect that the next Edward Said or “Eduarda Said” might very well transform the literature in response to the events of 2023, just as Said’s work became a seminal text in decolonial studies following the events of 1973. In “Historians on Drugs: Toward an Empirical Historiography of Global Psychedelic Cultures,” J. Christian Greer concludes with the need for “the psychedelicist decolonization of clinical therapy.”²⁹ Parallel to Greer’s ethical demand, the pedagogical approach presented in this paper would also teach the decolonization of psychedelic orientalism. While benign psychedelic orientalism reflects the counterculture’s repudiation of this modernity, it pays homage to a transcendental, with a fixed set of aesthetic motifs. The best illustration of how Orientalism persists is the underestimation of the Houthis. Their depiction demonstrates the symbiosis of geopolitical orientalism and psychedelic orientalism, which in the twenty-first century could merge to become part and parcel of the same project after October 7, 2023. Decolonizing the psychedelic aids the decolonization of the geopolitical. Said witnessed as much in 1973, and we would do well to attend to this fifty years later in the shadow of another round of regional conflict. 

¹ See Harvey Cox, Turning East: The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism (Simon and Schuster, 1977), 32.[Return to Section]

² Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1978). [Return to Section]

³ Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2007). [Return to Section] 

⁴ Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Penguin, 2018). [Return to Section]

⁵ See J.C. Greer, “Historians on drugs: Toward an empirical historiography of global psychedelic cultures,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2025, 265. [Return to Section]

⁶ “Psychedelics as a Tool for Peacebuilding & Collective Healing, with Sami Awad & Leor Roseman, Ph.D.,” recorded for Psychedelics Today episode 512, posted May 15, 2024, by Psychedelics Today episode 512, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4nQwKGJz9Q. [Return to Section] 

⁷ Ibrahim Al-Marashi, “Slavery, the ‘robot,’ and Orientalism in science fiction”, TRT World, June 26, 2020, https://www.trtworld.com/article/12745371. [Return to Section]

⁸ Ibrahim Al-Marashi, “The film ‘Dune’, techno-Orientalism, and Intergalactic Islam”, TRT World, December 3, 2021, https://www.trtworld.com/article/13117739. [Return to Section]

⁹ Ibrahim Al-Marashi, “Caffeinated Orientalism: The History and Politics of Coffee from Yemen to Italy,” recorded lecture for the USD Humanities Center, posted September 26, 2024, by USD Humanities Center, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGFvAIXrG4g. [Return to Section]

¹⁰ Aleister Crowley and David Hoye, Hasheesh: The Herb Dangerous, High Writings of Alistair Crowley, and Other Celebrated Haschischins of the Early Twentieth Century (Level, San Francisco, 1974). [Return to Section]

¹¹ Farhad Daftary, Hasan Sabbah, The Ismaili Institute, 2002 https://www.iis.ac.uk/scholarly-contributions/hasan-sabbah/ [Return to Section]

¹² Philip K. Hitti, “The Assassins,” in George Andrews (ed.), The Book of Grass: An Anthology on Indian Hemp (Grove, 1968), 22. [Return to Section]

¹³ “The Etymology of the Assassins,” in Alamut: Bastion of Peace and Information, https://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/alamut/etymolAss.html [Return to Section]

¹⁴ Philip K. Hitti, “The Assassins,” in George Andrews (ed.), The Book of Grass: An Anthology on Indian Hemp (Grove, 1967), 22. [Return to Section]

¹⁵ See “A Study of Assassination”, (date n/a) National Security Archive, The George Washington University, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/ciaguat2.html. [Return to Section]

¹⁶ “Hassan ibn al-Sabbah,” Badassoftheweek.com, https://www.badassoftheweek.com/alsabbah [Return to Section]

¹⁷ See Alex Grey, Net of Being (Inner Traditions, 2012), 205. [Return to Section]

¹⁸ Grey, Net of Being, 151. [Return to Section]

¹⁹ Alex Grey, Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey (Inner Traditions, 1990), 72. [Return to Section]

²⁰ “About: An Artist-Led Experiential Art Hub,” Illusionaries, accessed November 15, 2025, https://www.illusionaries.com/about. [Return to Section]

²¹ Demond Cureton “One Word, One Breath: A Review of Illusionaries’ Entheon XR Exhibit,” Sep 24 2024 https://deusxmachina.uk/2024/09/24/one-word-one-breath-a-review-of-illusionaries-entheon/. [Return to Section]

²² Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Penguin, 2018), 143. [Return to Section]

²³ Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, 125-6. [Return to Section]

²⁴ See Harvey Cox, Turning East: The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism (Simon and Schuster, 1977), 50. [Return to Section]

²⁵ Frank Herbert, Dune (Chilton Books, 1965), 41. [Return to Section]

²⁶ Rick Steves, “My 1978 ‘Hippie Trail’ Journal: Herat, Afghanistan,” Rick Steves’ Europe, August 18, 2021, https://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/my-1978-hippie-trail-journal-herat-afghanistan/ . [Return to Section]

²⁷ See Ibrahim Al-Marashi and Arthur Goldschmidt, A Concise History of the Middle East (Routledge, 2024), 461, citing Edward Said: On ‘Orientalism,’ dir. Sut Jhally, Media Education Foundation, 03:34-04:14. [Return to Section]

²⁸ An example is Yossi Melman, “The Khat Warfare Option: How Israel Can Hit the Houthis Where It Truly Hurts,” Haaretz, June 5, 2025, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-05/ty-article-magazine/.premium/the-khat-warfare-option-how-israel-can-hit-the-houthis-where-it-truly-hurts/00000197-4048-de48-a1f7-f5de30690000 [Return to Section]

²⁹ J.C. Greer, “Historians on drugs: Toward an empirical historiography of global psychedelic cultures,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2025, 289. [Return to Section]

Al-Marashi, Ibrahim, and A. Goldschmidt, A Concise History of the Middle East. Routledge, 2024. 

Al-Marashi, Ibrahim, “Slavery, the “robot,” and Orientalism in science fiction,” TRT World, June 26, 2020, https://www.trtworld.com/article/12745371. 

Al-Marashi, Ibrahim, “The film ‘Dune’, techno-Orientalism, and Intergalactic Islam”, TRT World, December 3, 2021, https://www.trtworld.com/article/13117739. 

Andrews, George, The Book of Grass: An Anthology on Indian Hemp. Grove, 1968. 

Cox, Harvey, Turning East: The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism. Simon and Schuster, 1978. 

Crowley, Aleister and David Hoye, Hasheesh: The Herb Dangerous, High Writings of Alistair Crowley, and Other Celebrated Haschischins of the Early Twentieth Century. Level, San Francisco, 1974. 

Demond Cureton “One Word, One Breath: A Review of Illusionaries’ Entheon XR Exhibit,” Deus x Machina, Sep 24 2024 https://deusxmachina.uk/2024/09/24/one-word-one-breath-a-review-of-illusionaries-entheon/. 

Greer, J.C., “Historians on drugs: Toward an empirical historiography of global psychedelic cultures.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2025. 

Grey, Alex, Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey. Inner Traditions, 1990. 

Grey, Alex, The Net of Being. Inner Traditions, 2012. 

Herbert Frank, Dune. Chilton Books, 1965. 

Philip K. Hitti, “The Assassins,” in George Andrews (ed.), The Book of Grass: An Anthology on Indian Hemp (Grove, 1968), 

Illusionaries, “About: An Artist-Led Experiential Art Hub,” Illusionaries, accessed November 15, 2025, https://www.illusionaries.com/about. 

Kripal, Jeffrey J., Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. University of Chicago Press, 2007. 

National Security Archive, “A Study of Assassination”, The George Washington University, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/ciaguat2.html . 

Melman, Yossi, “The Khat Warfare Option: How Israel Can Hit the Houthis Where It Truly Hurts,” Haaretz, June 5, 2025, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-05/ty-article-magazine/.premium/the-khat-warfare-option-how-israel-can-hit-the-houthis-where-it-truly-hurts/00000197-4048-de48-a1f7-f5de30690000 

Pollan, Michael, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Penguin, 2018.  

Said, Edward, Orientalism. Vintage, 1978. 

Steves, Rick, “My 1978 ‘Hippie Trail’ Journal: Herat, Afghanistan”, Rick Steve’s’ Europe, August 18, 2021, https://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/my-1978-hippie-trail-journal-herat-afghanistan/ . 

Al-Marashi, Ibrahim. “The Aesthetics of Psychedelic Orientalism and the Pedagogy of the Entheogenic Body ” 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/10.70423/0004.15