Franklin King, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology Franklin King draws from his experience as a Mass General Hospital psychiatrist to explore the hidden narratives often underlying conversations about psychedelics. King argues that revealing these narratives is necessary to understand disagreements about psychedelic treatment and the ways that psychedelics become metonyms for larger philosophical and…
“Toward a Psychedelic Theodicy: Psychedelic Biomedicine and the Concept of ‘Risk'”
Sharday Mosurinjohn, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology Sharday Mosurinjohn interrogates and critiques a biomedical approach to “bad trips.” From this critique, Mosurinjohn proposes a theodicy grounded in animist philosophy as an alternative approach to difficult psychedelic experiences and, specifically, difficult entity encounters….
“Psychedelic Atmospherics”
Alex Gearin, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology Alex Gearin provides an ethnographic account of “atmospherics,” the affective and perceptual elements of a setting, in Indigenous-led ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru and “neoshamanic” ceremonies in Australia. Gearin argues that “atmospherics” accounts for a far more active role of the environment in which one takes a psychedelic…
“The Soma Question: Interrogating the History of Psychedelics with Sanskrit Mantras”
Finnian Moore-Gerety, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology Finnian Moore Gerety traces the enduring interest in the authentic botanical identity of soma in the Vedic texts of the Hindu tradition. Moore Gerety argues that speculation on soma’s identity tracks with the drug fashions of the era in which thinkers speculated about soma’s botanical identity. He…
“God’s Pharmacy: On the Use of Entheogens in Jewish Mystical Traditions”
Anna Sierka, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology Anna Sierka analyzes medieval Kabbalistic texts that illuminate the role of a potentially psychedelic plant—the “marking nut”— in Jewish mysticism. Using the marking nut as a primary example, Sierka argues that these texts can be divided into an exoteric tradition and an esoteric tradition. Texts in the…
“From Messiah to Mushroom: A Brief History of John Marco Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross”
Geoffrey Smith, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology Geoffrey Smith tracks the research and correspondence of the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, John Marco Allegro, that led to his provocative conclusion that the New Testament gospel accounts are encoded texts disguising the truth that Jesus Christ and his apostles were not historical persons, but in fact…
“Religion of the Garden: An Interview with Luis Eduardo Luna”
Luis Eduardo Luna and Jeffrey Breau, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology Drawing from Luis Eduardo Luna’s keynote address at the 2024 “Psychedelic Intersections” conference, this interview essay explores Luna’s research on ayahuasca since the 1970s, his study of Indigenous cosmology and healing in South America, and his own spiritual development alongside these sacred plants….