In Western societies there has been a resurgence of interest in non-ordinary states of consciousness. Self-styled ‘psychonauts’ – explorers of the mind – are growing in numbers, sharing experiments and engaging in practices ranging from the use of psychedelic drugs, to music and drumming, to dancing. Mainstream events focused on psychedelic experiences are becoming common for the first time since the 1970s. And yet, just like in the 60s and 70s, it’s largely a white, male demographic that’s revealed to use psychedelics, according to US population survey data.

Questions of cultural appropriation abound. But also questions of potential – the resurgence has prompted conversations about the role of such experiences in radical politics. As ‘expanded states of consciousness’, these experiences promise fresh energies for tired times. As ‘mystical experiences’, they promise access to something pure and unquestionably positive in a moment when we are becoming suspicious of how our very desires are complicit with systems that entrap us.

On a warm August evening, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, a trendy new venue in New York City, hosted the event, ‘Psychedelics and Race: Why is the Psychedelic Movement Whiter than the Tea Party?’ The venue is a hipster-chic storefront with expensive tonics and elixirs, and a downstairs space for events.

The moderator of the panel was Dimitri Mugianis, a New York-based drug policy activist, Bwiti N’ganga, musician, and poet, who held the space for a spirited conversation. While the survey data do not necessarily correspond to those who would count themselves as belonging to the ‘psychedelic movement’, the proliferation of events such as this one at The Alchemist’s Kitchen are consistent with white and male demographics, pointing also to a gentrifying population. As the evening unfolded, I wondered what could come of an event where experiences of transcendent consciousness and universal love would be made to speak to the history of a racialized privilege that has long-enjoyed patting itself on the back. I also wondered what would be required for these conversations to endure beyond the night.

For me, one moment took flight. Mugianis asked what hope psychonauts can offer for radical political action. He suggested – at once playfully and seriously – that psychonauts can keep the party going because they do it at festivals like Nevada’s annual Burning Man. They know that sustained collective activity requires organizing toilets, showers, and food. We could add to this: managing collective and individual mood, and embracing extreme experiences by channeling them, drawing on them, transmuting them.

Mugianis’ example was meant as an invitation to find the bridges between Western practices of psychonautics and the increasingly urgent need to invent and bolster anti-capitalist, anti-fascist politics. I would add something to this. Psychonautics is steeped in practices of closing and protecting spaces. Consider the most secular of psychedelic-using spaces: the current swathe of university-based clinical trials investigating the effects of psychedelic drugs, shut down at the end of the 1960s and only recently reinitiated.

In these settings, participants are asked to turn off their phones and remove their shoes. They cannot have visitors and are requested to keep their eye-masks on so that they can focus on ‘journeying inwards’. They don’t even have to worry about time, as a trusted nominee will come to pick them up at a prearranged hour. In effect, the guides’ protocols and drug effects produce temporalities anew.

Meanwhile, in underground settings, various objects are charged through ritual to act as gargoyles and protectors, delimiting spatial boundaries. Ensuring time off the next day, uninterrupted by the traffic of daily life, helps with the crucial integration of the experience. And again, in indigenous settings we find protection and closure – the holding of space through the warding off of interruptions. People give themselves entirely for the night into the hands of a curandero, who builds containers through the singing of songs, the recitation of prayers, and the sharing of food.

Problems of Inclusion

What might this protection and closing of containers have to add to the conversations about radical politics at The Alchemist’s Kitchen? One theme not touched upon enough at the event was that of inclusion.

The question was raised as to how to make these meet-up conversations more racially inclusive, with a widespread acknowledgement that this event was unusual in attracting an audience that wasn’t wholly or predominantly white. But other factors went without comment. For example, the cost of the event is inevitably relevant. Conversations about racial difference cannot be intelligently had without intersecting dialogue about class, and ultimately about capitalism’s great lodestone: scarcity. This event cost $25 at the door, $20 in advance. There was no sliding scale option, no prioritizing of inclusion over the bottom line. Other events advertised during the night’s conversations also cost similar amounts.

But whose problem is it, exactly, that these events are so white? We rally behind calls for inclusion as a necessary value, but why is it so? Do we think that only by coming to these events can non-white people also benefit from conversations about psychedelics, race and political struggle? Do we know that there are no non-white spaces where such conversations happen, even flourish under the catalyst afforded by double consciousnesses (DuBois, 1903)? And when we look to other examples where non-white people are brought into the fray of predominately white events, what inevitably happens? Who gets co-opted? Who gets misrepresented? Who gets forced to represent? Finally, why should the white event be the ‘original model’ that then adapts for sake of inclusion? We might wonder what white traces are left in the construction of the container.

To begin to respect the complex depths of racial histories we have to problematize the knee-jerk impulse to move forward through inclusion. And we know this from psychonautic practices – to charge a space, we have to close the circle. To have certain conversations and build certain resonances, again we have to close the circle. To be vulnerable and powerful at the same time, close the circle.

Meanwhile, back in the nineteenth century Karl Marx cautioned against the intrinsic goodness of connection. In describing the ‘proletarianization of the masses’ he demonstrated that an interconnected population is an exploitable population: the emergence of a uniform population of laborers who are ready to sell their labor power as commodities in markets is not a universal condition, but peculiar to the early history of capitalism.

The drive to interconnectedness today takes another turn. Now, it’s ‘good to talk’. We are all encouraged to ‘get connected’, and so much of our spare time and attention is captured by the impulse to connect through social media. We might ask, in an age when our social and political interconnectedness is not a given but a labor that makes demands upon our time and money (Dean, 2012), what hope is left for revolution through connection? Connection and inclusion have become hallmarks of neoliberalism, and money is the greatest connector. Events drawing people together at spaces such as The Alchemist’s Kitchen are said to only be possible when their organizers can weather the currents of capital. This is not to say that inclusion and connection are not important values. But who we connect with matters, as does how we do the labor of connection, and whether we can respect – or even hear – calls for reshaping the containers that connect us.

Intersecting Struggles

What do these questions around inclusion mean for continuing the hopeful conversations started that evening at The Alchemist’s Kitchen? In seeking radical political engagement, we might resist the temptation to swiftly move from recognizing how spaces are too white to calls for inclusion, with all the traps and disappointments the latter continues to entail.

So let us pause for a moment instead. Once we have recognized that the bodies in a space are so very stratified, what other options become available to us? What inspiration is there in black and feminist theories of separatist politics, and how do these intersect with our own knowledges of the importance of closure, exclusion, and protection in psychonautic sorcery?

There are not one but several ways for academics such as myself to build this bridge. An incomplete list of where we might find inspiration includes theorists exploring the possibilities of an alliance between separatist politics and psychedelics through decolonial, postcolonial, and feminist theory; historians excavating relevant antecedents, such as November 1970 in Algiers, asking what exactly went wrong when countercultural icons Timothy and Rosemary Leary met with Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers; and anthropologists focusing on the constitutive inclusions and exclusions demanded in the ‘sciencing’ of indigenous traditions today, when researchers pack the clinical trial model off to the Amazon or the Atlantic coast of Equatorial Africa.

And what about the role for psychonauts? When stubborn drives for inclusion and connection in the present betray a racially divided past, psychonauts may be able to attend to histories of exclusion, separation and disconnection in order to deepen our understanding and engagement in the present. In other words, we might see an awareness of the lack of inclusiveness at the intersections of psychedelic experiences and radical politics as something to be entered and explored. Not quickly ‘resolved’.

The felt absence of non-white bodies can be unpacked. Often in the name of individualized therapy or liberation, psychonauts journey through psychedelic states where they can engage ancestors and spirit guides in order to bring back to the present various insights that seed and feed hope. However, psychedelic practices go further than this, both by delivering justice to figures of the past, and by changing the past itself in ways that have knock-on effects on the present. It is therefore incorrect to say that among psychonauts, in relation to events in the past, “hope expresses a relation of care and concern rather than its being a stimulus to action” (Waterworth, 2003: 34). Temporality here is configured as an ever-repeating present, whose horizon is a radical openness to a future no longer conditioned by intergenerational tendencies that predate, and fully expect to outlive, us. While the broader embrace of epigenetics lends legitimacy to conceptions of identity that are radically intergenerational, seasoned psychonauts have long been aware that habits can, but need not, live longer than people.

So, what if these techniques for entering the past can be put in the service of a deepened understanding of the role of intergenerational trauma and the histories of racialized division, offering insights, tactics, and hope for the felt whiteness of psychonautic spaces? Perhaps this promises to open up the circle into a spiral that comes round again, only this time including the constitutively excluded, in another attempt to understand the legacies of exclusion that haunted the closing of the circle in the first place.

Read part 5: Psychedelics and Social Justice

Co-production refers to processes in which a range of experts and non-experts are enrolled as researchers and attempt to generate knowledge together. Embracing an ethos of co-production requires a fundamental rethinking of the relations between researchers, and the differential capacities within the research team to act and to listen.

Habitual thought patterns need questioning. For one, certain kinds of expertise are more readily recognized than others. For two, certain actors are granted agency more quickly than others.

Ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies of co-production have prompted new attempts at approaching old research questions.

For instance, how can we conduct research in ethical and useful ways that respect the agency of those we study? How can we listen in creative ways to the voices of the disempowered, who are too-often silenced as the putative ‘objects’ of our research? How might we incorporate their own understandings, expertise and modes of representation into new processes of inquiry?

What about where the objects of our research are not even humans, but a host of non-human entities – whether objects, animals, plants or gods? What is capable of having a ‘voice’ in the first place?

It might not be surprising to note the roles of psychedelic mushrooms as ‘teachers’ and ‘tools’ for accessing a world beyond standard humanist framings and prerogatives – a world full of non-human agencies. Plants contain 90 percent of the biomass of the planet, while fungi pre-date plants, appearing over 100 million years beforehand – the first to lay claim to the land.

The world’s biggest organism is a honey fungus in Oregon, USA, spread across nearly four square miles and estimated at over eight thousand years old.

Meshwork of fungal networks hold soil and subterraneously connect tree and plant species, drawing nutrients from them while transferring nutrients between them, acting as the immune system and underground recycler of the Earth’s body. Upwards of 90% of all plants have mycorrhizal associations. It begins to sound absurd that we ever presumed that they belong to our world.

Mushrooms have enweaved the rest of us humans and non-humans into their webs of life. To them we are perhaps more than a little clueless, oblivious to their stroboscopic appearances, haunted and inspired by their absent presences across the seasons, subject to their mind-bending and body-altering effects. It’s not just us either.

The thousands of types of cordyceps mushrooms target one species each, using the bodies of host insects to feed and spread. One variety drops its spores onto Bullet ants (Paraponera clavata). Upon landing on the ant’s body, a spore will infect it, causing the ant to deliriously travel upwards, as far as it is able. For many ants this means to the top of the anthill. Worker ants learn to recognize such delirium, pick up infected ants and carry them far away from the colony. But those infected ants that make it, unobstructed, to the top of the anthill threaten to wipe out all the rest: once sufficiently burrowed, the fungus will grow out of its victim’s head and drop its deadly spores all over the anthill, killing the whole colony. ¹

So much for the Bullet ants – what of us?

How do mushrooms alter our mindscapes and pattern our practices? Certain varieties of mushrooms that produce powerful effects upon humans are variously termed psychedelic, psychotomimetic, hallucinogenic and entheogenic.

Speculating into the deeper history of humans, ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson’s early investigations placed psychedelic mushroom-facilitated experiences at the origin of religion and notions of the supernatural.

More recently, esoteric philosopher Terence McKenna suggested in his ‘Stoned Ape’ theory that the visual-auditory synesthesia (mixing of the senses) produced by psychedelic mushrooms is responsible for the invention of language, when primates descended from the trees onto the mushroom-laden plains and discovered the capacity to elicit images through vocal sounds. These wonderful theories continue to inspire and conspire.

Today, mycologist Paul Stamets suggests that there might be as many as one hundred different species of mushrooms that are psychoactive for humans, mostly in the genus Psilocybe.

Yet quite unattuned to their vital flows, we remain ill-equipped to regulate their presence.

Areas filled with psychedelic mushroom spores are inadvertently logged for their timber, the trees are skinned and the bark is turned into woodchip and mixed into much larger batches used in landscaping services. In this way, Psilocybe baeocystis came to carpet the outdoor spaces of university campus grounds, police stations and courthouses in downtown Vancouver for several years in the early 1970s. The mushrooms sprung up across these institutions of discipline and regulation, to the consternation and sometimes great joy of unsuspecting passersby.

Psychedelic mushrooms induce a kind of toxic fever that Western psychopharmacology understands little of. The experiences of the bemushroomed brim with spirits, deities, demons and aliens, an entire cast of non-human and non-living figures and encounters. The fever produces clarity and insight, animates consciousness, dilates time and enchants our fields of awareness, even as it drains us.

Studies during the recent ‘second wave’ of research are mostly designed to explore the psychotherapeutic potential of the psilocybin that the mushrooms contain, for treating the deep distress found in end-of-life anxiety, depression, addiction and traumatic shock.

Across the research studies, a common definition of their action upon experience has been as ‘non-specific amplifiers of awareness’.² This implies that psychedelic mushrooms have somewhat ghostly powers, themselves invisible while catalyzing our awareness of the spaces we consume them in, the mindsets we carry with us, and the cultural, historical and geographical conditions we inhabit while bemushroomed.

Where for other psychoactive substances, scientific research holds situational, cultural and personal factors still to isolate on the effects of the drug, psychedelics are singular in ways betrayed by their name – psyche for mind and delic for manifesting.

Those taking psychedelic mushrooms in clinical contexts rarely report learning something totally new, but rather realizing once again, or more deeply, something that they already knew.

Suddenly the encounter with the non-human becomes again all-too-human, as we never quite meet entities that are not of our own making. It suggests the spirits, deities, demons and aliens of our trips were there all along, and we were not quite receptive enough to identify their presences. Psychedelic mushrooms acting as just so many more-than-human mirrors. Deep down, did those bullet ants yearn to get high?

Psychedelic mushrooms pattern human lives in other ways than simply our experiences of consuming them. Foragers learn a craft of searching out not the mushrooms themselves, but the kinds of spaces where mushrooms would want to grow: follow the water trails; notice the hill angles and the seasonally-changing arcs of the sun; remember the previous year’s spread. Pay attention to the world as a psychedelic mushroom would, and you’re far more likely to cross paths. Meanwhile when we try to cultivate them in laboratories, we do so by recreating conditions of the forest.

And in becoming aware of our mindsets, and social and geographic settings, we shape our encounters with the mushrooms through preparing ourselves and our spaces in ways that optimize safe, productive experiences.

Whether in clinical research, underground psychonautic use ³ or traditional healing and visioning ceremonies, rituals provide powerful containers for psychedelic experiences. The naïve question of whether rituals ‘actually’ work or whether they are ‘just’ producing a kind of grand placebo response only serves to erode their power.

The current clinical research practice involving psilocybin has been one of borrowing and inventing rituals, refining whatever works.

At its core, the psychedelic experience demands a time commitment and protection from interruption, in a safe and comfortable space. In itself, this excludes so many from access to it, given so many busy, over-demanding lives.

For psychonauts, spaces for eating psychedelic mushrooms are cleaned, cleared and organized, special objects charged with promise and potential are gathered, and people often lie or sit in sharing circles. Guides for underground use suggest that trust between people should be renewed, and any interpersonal tensions relieved so that they cannot fester during trips.

In university research, individuals spend many hours getting to know their study guides and environments, before taking psilocybin capsules in specially designed ‘living room-type spaces’. In some traditional healing ceremonies those seeking help gather around a candle while spirits are invoked through song and chanting. In all cases, preparation involves clarifying intentions and questions in ways that are themselves invested with meaning and connection. And integrating the psychedelic experiences is a crucial part of drawing on their value, done through so many practices of expression and sharing. ⁴

And so, psychedelic mushrooms enroll us into making spaces and mindsets capable of benefiting from their use. Much as Michael Pollan has documented with corn, apples, tulips and marijuana, in ways highly sensitized to the experiences they facilitate, psychedelic mushrooms insist on patterning our use of them. ⁵

However these patterns are not simple, for there are breaks in the intimacy of our connections with the mushrooms. Their consumption is illegal across most of the world, leading legal systems to stumble in this latest round of scientific research, as entire university buildings are restructured with heightened security access and procedures for storing psychedelic compounds securely and accountably, in safes that are weighed daily to record alterations in their contents.

The little scientific research that is being done on mushrooms’ psychedelic properties focuses on their most psychoactive compounds – drawing them out, making them the object of science’s affections. This compromises the ecological validity of scientific research, as research is no longer directed at understanding the effects of the whole mushroom. Industries of manufacture and distribution grow around synthetic variants and isolated compounds, failing to grasp the lesson that the compounds were found in a shared ecology that birthed our species and has much left to teach us about our well-being and mortality.

Western researchers, intellectuals and psychonauts since the 1950s, and non-Western traditions extending back beyond written record, have suggested that the seeds of individual and collective self-understanding and self-transformation lie in psychedelic experiences. If this continues to ring true, as we renew and deepen our encounters with psychedelic mushrooms, the careful creating of social and physical spaces for their use must be seen as a crucial step in our revolutionary capacities to imagine and be differently.

Only this time, we might recognize that these capacities will be co-produced, evidenced in the many practices we have built to service our encounters with psychedelic mushrooms.