Religion & Psychedelics

Catalog description

This course looks to the complex of relationships that has historically emerged between religious traditions and psychoactive substances classified as “psychedelic.” We will survey numerous ways in which religious traditions interpreted, ritually assimilated, and envisioned the nature and use of these substances. A key element of this course will be the study of premodern religious communities that worked with psychedelic sacraments, including Indigenous traditions, the Greek mysteries, early Christianity, and Western Esotericism. In each case we will consider how these communities embraced—ethically, metaphysically, and in practice—psychedelic forms of worship and communion, and contrast this with colonial and post-colonial engagements with these substances, particularly the experimental explorations of European romantics, modern perennialists, and various counter-cultural movements. Throughout, attention will be paid to the myriad values attributed to these substances and the mental states they produce, and how that value is inextricably bound up with ritual structures, lineages of authority, and conceptual presuppositions about mind, human life, and human flourishing.