If the Mysteries of Eleusis are to be resurrected, if we are to reestablish a living connection with our collective unconscious and with the natural planet that gives us life, then there must be new pathways opened to function like those ancient ones that linked people directly to such gnosis.
The late Terence McKenna wrote in Food of the Gods that the only religions amounting to anything more than traditionally sanctioned moral codes were those of trance, dance ecstasy and intoxication by psychedelics (entheogens). “The living fact of the mystery of being is there,” he said, “and it is an inalienable religious right to be able to approach it on one’s own terms.” A civilized society would respect the right to cognitive liberty, to freedom of consciousness.
This principle has been established in countries including Holland and Portugal, and we have seen hopeful beginnings in precedents within U.S. law.
Two groups that have established such rights are the Native American Church, with its use of peyote during services, and Santo Daime, the ayahuasca-using religion emerging from the jungles of Brazil. Both have set up branches across the United States and won court decisions under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 allowing them to use entheogens as sacraments. Another avenue through which Eleusis-like approaches are taking shape is that of recently authorized psychological research, after a lengthy hiatus in the aftermath of the ‘60s. Institutions including Johns Hopkins, Harvard, NYU, and UCLA are looking at psychedelic therapies to treat specific maladies, including end-of-life anxiety and depression, as well as traumatic stress. Others are exploring the enhancement of personal and spiritual development, which may provide the most significant and valuable long-term benefits.
One of those is Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education (ERIE), which was born out of discussions among classmates at a San Francisco graduate school of psychology–California Institute of Integral Studies–and has evolved in a few years into a growing, recognized nonprofit organization. It’s website carries the following self-description:
ERIE is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to the sharing of entheogenic and transpersonal knowledge in a non-hierarchical, community based format, located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The ERIE community envisions a gathering place – a supportive community and a growing body of knowledge – for all who have been touched by entheogenic experiences and wish to explore scholarship, education, and dialogue to integrate entheogenic wisdom into daily life.
This platform includes peer integration circles to facilitate meaning-making and community building. We also host monthly educational events including symposiums, forums, and conferences on varied topics surrounding entheogenic research and practice, including the social justice component.
ERIE’s website also notes that over the past four years it has hosted over 125 presentations to packed crowds drawn from across the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Many of these include talks by leading scholars such as Carl Ruck, Kathleen Harrison, Leopardo Yawabane, Stanley Krippner, Francoise Bourzat, and Kilindi Iyi and bear titles including:
• Wasson and the Psychedelic Revolution: The Accidental Tourist and Its Future
• The Psychedelic Eucharist: Towards a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion
• Psychedelics for the Enrichment of Life and Empowerment of Dying
• Healing with the Kaxinawa: A psyche the size of the Amazon
• Nogoni’i Izzada: The Story of Peyote in the American Voice
These and many others were recorded on video and are available for viewing on YouTube.
A co-founder of ERIE and its executive director, Larry Norris, spoke about the formation of the group, its direction and future:
Norris initially studied biopsychology and cognitive science at the University of Michigan, becoming interested in consciousness and the brain. He came across McKenna’s theory speculating that human ancestors in Africa consumed psilocybin mushrooms that sprouted abundantly across the grasslands, catalyzing the development of language and providing spiritual and creative insights that influenced our evolutionary progress.
Norris credits McKenna with “opening his world up” to further philosophical conversations on psychedelics and research into their properties.
Following the chaos of the ‘60s, however, there wasn’t much research available, so after graduation Norris visited the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), at that time located in a small office in Charlotte, North Carolina. Next, he set out on a “long cross-country road trip to find professors and people with whom to talk about psychedelic research.” He wanted to explore this fallow field in graduate school, and through his travels Norris encountered “many unique characters” to help guide his curiosity toward deeper questions relating to this work.
It was the late ‘90s, and most researchers, besides Strassman, were still in the closet about such interests. Shortly after the millennium, however, perhaps sparked in part by McKenna’s exploration and writing, the field began to blossom, with biomedical institutes once again seeing the possibilities of getting studies approved by the FDA.
Johns Hopkins was the first in this academic re-emergence to look at “healthy normals,” at “what happens to healthy people when we give them these substances,” said Norris, who is currently a doctoral candidate.
“It was the first modern research looking at healthy individuals for the betterment of life and well being, rather than people needing medical treatment. This was unusual because it suggested the benefits of these substances went far beyond their medicalization. In addition, it begged a fundamental question of what is health and wellness?”
The result was that within the right set and setting, many people given entheogens reported having “one of the most important experiences of their lives.”
This offered some credence for people to once again begin talking about “powerful, mystical-type experiences,” but this time decades of underground anecdotal evidence had some serious biomedical backing, Norris said.
Still, he acknowledges spirit and mysticism are not often researched or taught in depth, and such notions are rarely accepted in mainstream biomedical communities. “But now we are at a unique moment when access to the internet allows diverse communities of individuals outside of academia to connect and share their experiences. Another advantage is that the current cultural zeitgeist is slowly allowing for an emergence from the psychedelic closet, and people no longer feel like they’re alone.”
In addition, Norris said, the way for a “third wave” of Western psychedelic inquiry was blazed by McKenna, an intellectual of the academy as well as a respected underground figure who conducted serious explorations of the use of psychoactive plants by indigenous cultures and their shamans reaching back into human prehistory. McKenna coined the term “archaic revival” as a prescription needed by our culture to reestablish a healthy connection to the collective unconscious and to our ecosystems.
“That concept highlights ancient practices informed by years of lineage, years of tradition, years of doing things in a certain way, a model that’s more eco-friendly, a model that’s aware of community and relationship, all these things that we’ve misplaced in modernity, including a sense of what is sacred,” Norris said.
He went on: “What are aspects of the spiritual? I see it as a sense of wonder and awe about the divine mystery that permeates every aspect of oneself and one’s community. Much as McKenna emphasized the need for community, I find it crucial for an entheogenically mature culture to have space to offer reflections and discernment around each of our experiences.”
And how does the organization that Norris helms, ERIE, figure into such a cultural blossoming?
At first, he and his colleagues imagined it as a place where people with common interests in spiritual learning through psychedelics could come together to discuss and eventually facilitate the integration of the collective unconscious, or the “divine presence,” into normal, waking consciousness.
“We began holding peer integration and educational events, and gradually realized how important community was for people working with profound psychedelic experiences. The events actually became secondary; the primary value was engaging a space for networking and community. The real event was happening in the audience,” he said.
Norris and his group of consciousness researchers, mental health professionals, body-workers, philosophers and artists ultimately arrived at a decision to design a community-based institution to educate people to the risks, benefits and challenges of the psychedelic experience, as well as their creative potentials, and to provide assistance and tools to help them afterward.
They would like to build a reputation of excellence in the area, and down the road, should decriminalization occur, they would already be prepared to work within that paradigm.
Norris envisions a future that includes not just lectures and forums, but also a physical hub for creativity, teaching, events and roundtable discussions, a collaborative future for which ERIE is now raising money and planning. The group recently located a space in San Francisco to begin designing its vision. ERIE will be hosting a fundraiser and silent auction on June 9th in Oakland to celebrate this movement.
“How do we provide people and guides with additional tools and practices? We can look at shamanic cultures for insight, but we need more practice in gathering details about what works and what doesn’t work in the Western mind,” he said. “In addition, we hope to offer a space or hub for people to bring their visions into creation, to materialize their insights, including a place where people can discover their own processes of integration amid supportive community techniques.”
It might be instructive at this point to note that the creative genius of Steve Jobs, Ken Kesey’s literary achievements, Aldous Huxley’s explorations, the careers of Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Kary Mullis, and Andrew Weil were all linked to psychedelics
Which also means, Norris said, that ERIE’s developmental plan is really not a new model, but a reimagining of one that was utilized by Western philosophers and artists including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Cicero among others of their time and place. Which serves to illustrate that there is a gap of about 2,000 years in need of closure.
In Classical Greece, for example, not only was Eleusis a primary source of divine wonder and awe, but there were also opportunities for people in public places, such as the agora of Athens, to discuss philosophy, art and politics the day long, while modern Western culture seldom provides such forums. “The cultural shift is such that we need to be recreating spaces where it’s OK for people to talk about these sacred and profane topics, or to sift through the mind of ideas, where the act of thinking, discussing, or creating is deemed beneficial and worthy of pursuit,” Norris said, because powerful psychedelic experiences create a need for further understanding, to be worked through until a sense of integration and wholeness is achieved.
Mike Millard is a veteran journalist who spent more than two decades in Asia and the author of two books. This piece was excerpted from his work-in-progress, The Fool: Resurrecting the Secret Psychedelic Heart of the ‘60s.