Colin Pugh, founder of the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society, has spent years working at the intersection of psychedelic culture and community care.

In this essay, he turns our attention away from the clinical spotlight and toward something more elusive, yet arguably more essential: the social infrastructure that actually makes psychedelic experiences meaningful, safe, and sustainable.

He highlights a core tension in the modern psychedelic movement: we are investing heavily in clinical systems, while most psychedelic experiences continue to happen outside of them.

That tension sits at the heart of Psychedelic Archives.

Our aim is not just to document the history of psychedelics, but to help cultivate a modern culture where their benefits can fully unfold.

Colin makes a compelling case that community is not peripheral to this process. It is central.

Community Is the Medicine We’re Failing to Fund

Science has made psychedelics respectable, but not yet accessible. The real work now is building the communities where their benefits can safely take root.

By Colin Pugh

Imagine if we lived in a world where basketball was illegal. Then, after 50 years of tireless research and advocacy, the scientific community accepted the benefits of basketball, acknowledging that it is replete with physical, mental, and social benefits. But there’s a major problem: All of the funding and momentum that went into making basketball legitimate in the eyes of the scientific and medical communities is now being funneled into the creation of the NBA rather than local basketball courts in playgrounds and gyms.

While the NBA is great and will make a lot of people appreciate basketball (and also make some people a lot of money), it’s still not where the vast majority of people are going to play the sport. And, because there’s relatively little to no support for local community courts, people try to start playing basketball in their living room, on busy streets, or on the roof of their homes or apartment buildings.

Meanwhile, local courts are either not popping up or languishing because they rely on volunteers who can’t dedicate the time needed to run a functional, safe, and consistent basketball court. Nothing changes until there’s a shift in the field that realizes we need to fund local courts alongside the NBA — otherwise it’s just going to be a spectator sport at best, or a cruel system where people who want to play are barred from doing so altogether, or getting unnecessarily hurt.

This metaphor largely reflects the current state of the psychedelic field. The local basketball court equivalents are psychedelic societies and adjacent communities. These communities are often where people seeking the therapeutic use of psychedelics in non-clinical environments go first to get acquainted with them. And these communities, if properly funded, are where the norms of healthy, safe, and supportive psychedelic culture are going to be incubated. This is how safety and norms have evolved throughout most of human history: in and through community.

What’s happening currently is not based on evolution but instead based on modern clinical practice: we are funding a state-of-the-art version of psychedelic healing through clinical settings, while the places where people can realistically access and experience psychedelics — like psychedelics societies and adjacent communities — remain severely underfunded. In fact, it’s estimated that almost 95% of psychedelic use in the U.S. has taken place outside of clinical settings. Much like the NBA, clinical settings are where only a small percentage of people (most likely from the upper-middle-class and upper-class) are going to enjoy the benefits and transformational potential of psychedelic medicines. But as these compounds become more widely known and subsequently less taboo, thanks to research from organizations like MAPS and leading universities, people will increasingly use them, regardless of FDA approval or whether local clinics offer them.

How Should We Incorporate Psychedelics Into Society?

I like to think about integrating psychedelics into society using the If? versus How? distinction. The “if” question asks if psychedelics should be a part of our society. Thanks to the pioneering work of MAPS and other institutions, that question has been mostly answered. I don’t think we need another paper showing that psychedelics have beneficial effects on depression, addiction, or PTSD. Not that we shouldn’t be researching those things, but we’ve largely already succeeded on the “If” question.

So, then, how are psychedelics going to be integrated into our culture? We need to approach this question with as much creativity, boldness, and tenacity as Rick Doblin displayed 40 years ago when he founded MAPS. Right now, while I’m of course hopeful of the clinical approach to psychedelics passing FDA muster, I can’t help but sense that so much of the field’s momentum has gone toward proving that psychedelics work and how to study them. It’s to the extent that we’ve lost some imagination when it comes to pioneering visions for how the psychedelic field could be built. Maybe the real task now is to integrate that success before we discern how to move forward.

The answer to the “how” question is community. By that, I mean community-based approaches involving structured, non-clinical settings that provide preparation, peer support, harm reduction, and integration outside the formal medical model to create access for all people who want to explore these medicines and reduce harm. This includes psychedelic societies, peer-support networks, harm reduction services, and other organized community care environments.

Let’s Look at History

How do we know this will work? One place to look is history. Anthropological evidence shows that humans have been consuming psychedelics for thousands of years and almost always in communal settings.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean this container is superior. But it does suggest that these experiences have traditionally been held, processed, and integrated in relationship to others, not in isolation.

That matters because psychedelic experiences are not just pharmacological events; they are deeply contextual experiences, shaped by the environment and the people around us. And if research continues to show this is true, it makes little sense to design modern systems for psychedelic use in isolated settings. If anything, the historical record points to an exact opposite format. If humans have consistently engaged with these substances in communal settings, we should take that knowledge seriously by designing institutions that reflect it from the outset.

“But It Could Ruin the Movement”

A common reason I hear for why the community-based side of the psychedelic ecosystem remains underfunded and largely unsupported is the fear that one mishap with psychedelics — a death, an abuse scandal, or something just as serious — could “set the psychedelic field back” or “ruin the movement.” But that way of thinking feels like a relic from the “if” era, when public opinion towards psychedelics was far more fragile.

There have already been highly publicized mishaps, deaths, and scandals. And guess what? The psychedelic field hasn’t been brought to a draconic, Nixon-era standstill. In fact, I would argue that having safe community spaces and healthy community networks would make these tragic situations less likely to occur because a community resourced enough to have a robust staff and volunteer team that can demonstrate a working ethical protocol massively mitigates the risks associated with the underground.

Imagine having a nonprofit-supported basketball court to play in rather than going to a court on a rooftop or in the middle of a busy street. Supporting psychedelic communities will allow the norms and protocols of non-clinical psychedelic use to evolve much more quickly, reflecting how the vast majority of people actually experience psychedelics, rather than relying on the slow drip of clinical progress.

The Community Model Is Far More Scalable

The cost of legalizing psychedelics — federally or state by state — and building out the necessary infrastructure is enormous. You have to create regulatory bodies, train therapists, and secure investment to open up clinics, all of which cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

That process will take years, if not decades, to complete. And all of this is happening without sufficiently validating whether there will be a sustained market for clinical use of psychedelics. Meanwhile, people can grow mushrooms at home with relative ease (despite it being illegal in most regions), and there are a growing number of resources, such as Zendo and Fireside Project, supporting people by sitting for them during psychedelic experiences.

None of this is to say that the clinical model isn’t worthwhile or important. But isn’t it more likely that clinical settings will serve acute cases rather than become the default? And even if most people do have their first experiences in a clinical environment, what happens after that? Once someone realizes they can grow mushrooms for a fraction of the cost — 1/100th of the price of a clinical journey — most people are probably not going to be repeat customers.

Imagine if you had to pay $3,000 to get the nutritional benefits of broccoli (I hope you aren’t tired of my metaphors yet). After your first clinically-guided broccoli feast, you’d probably be wondering if you could just grow them yourself or ask your friend who knows how to cook it well. Or, better yet, maybe that friend could cook for you and six other people at the same time. This is what the community-based model for psychedelics offers.

Of course, there will still be training. It will just look different because it will be designed for a community-based approach to psychedelic care rather than a clinical one. So, instead of one-on-one therapy, it might involve peer-led training and group support, where an experienced sitter works alongside trained facilitators to support multiple people at once.

Community-based approaches to psychedelics are inherently more scalable because they can support many people at once without the cost and constraints of clinical infrastructure, and, as I’ll argue in the next section, are more impactful.

Community Models Leave a Deeper Impact

I’m going to make a controversial claim: The real energy driving the psychedelic movement isn’t coming from institutions. It’s coming from people who have experienced profound healing and insight from these substances and want others to experience the same.

For those of us who have benefited from psychedelics, the change doesn’t come from some kind of chemical reset that magically erases depression or anxiety or addiction. It comes from the depth of the psychedelic experience. Sometimes it really is the experience itself, an encounter with something deeply authentic or something beyond ourselves. The ways we’ve been living out of alignment, or the ways our behaviors have been shaped by unresolved trauma, become visible.

Therapy can help guide that process. But it’s through community and relationships that those insights actually take root and become integrated. We need other people to be part of this healing process. Traditional therapeutic models center the individual as the primary unit of care. In community, the kaleidoscopic, multi-faceted nature of being a living, breathing person comes into view. Not just for oneself but also in relation to others: cooking together, sharing stories, making art, caring for someone during a crisis, or helping someone move into or out of a home. These activities are what actually facilitate people’s healing and growth.

So the question isn’t whether psychedelics work. It’s how do we ensure that most people can access these experiences safely and affordably? And while the clinical model has a role to play, we could certainly be more imaginative around the models we’re building around healing and access.

If we take seriously that community-based approaches aren’t just a nice-to-have accessory to the clinical approach, but are central to how most people will actually experience psychedelics, then the way we’re allocating resources is fundamentally misaligned. Much of the funding, company-building, and momentum currently directed toward clinical approaches fails to reflect how these substances are used in the real world, and will only reach a fraction of the people who could benefit.

Of course, the clinical model will help people. But it will likely always be the secondary approach for delivering psychedelics due to the inherent financial barriers to access.

Just as in our basketball analogy, the NBA may be the most visible expression of the sport, but it supports only a fraction of the people who actually play it. The real impact happens in high schools, colleges, churches, parks, YMCAs, or in backyards. If, after decades of research, nearly all resources were directed toward the NBA while local courts were neglected — or worse, suddenly made illegal — we would immediately recognize that as a massive, multi-pronged failure.

The same thing is happening with psychedelics right now.

We are modifying psychedelics to fit into our current, very broken, healthcare system, rather than building a new one around these plants and compounds, and the people who want to use them. We have an increasingly narrow window of opportunity here in this little psychedelic ecosystem of ours, one that could be a transformative step in the right direction for at least one sector of society. It’s time to get to work. We have to create the community pathways for integrating psychedelics into our culture. If we don’t, we will miss out on decades of building effective, cultural infrastructure, much like we lost 50 years of psychedelic research thanks to them becoming illegal.

I’m envisioning a world where psychedelic communities are legal, well-funded, and thriving. They would have rigorous screening, clear escalation protocols, trained staff and volunteers, and strong referral networks for cases beyond their scope. And as we continue to contemplate how to integrate psychedelics into our society accessibly, I hope everyone can begin to give a second look at what humans have known all along: community is the real medicine.

This article was written by Colin Pugh and published by Psychedelic Archives. It originally appeared in the Drop In by Doubleblind.

On a foggy Good Friday in 1962, something unusual happened inside Boston University’s Marsh Chapel.

Upstairs in the sanctuary, Rev. Howard Thurman delivered a powerful Good Friday sermon to a packed congregation.

Downstairs in the chapel basement, twenty Christian divinity students swallowed a small white capsule.

Half of the capsules contained psilocybin — the active compound in magic mushrooms. The other half contained a placebo.

The students sat quietly in pews as the three-hour Good Friday service was piped down through speakers from the sanctuary above them. Candles flickered. Light filtered through the stained-glass windows.

What followed would become one of the most famous and controversial studies in the history of psychedelic research.

It came to be known as the Good Friday Experiment, or the Marsh Chapel Experiment.

The study sought to answer two ambitious questions:1

1. Could psychedelics facilitate a genuine mystical experience?

2. And if so, would that experience lead to lasting changes in a person’s life?

At the time, these questions lived at the cutting edge of theology and psychology. But for the man who designed the study, they felt like the most natural questions in the world.

The Man Behind the Experiment

Walter Pahnke was not a typical graduate student.

Before beginning his Ph.D. in Religion and Society at Harvard, he had already earned a medical degree. His interests lived in a space few scholars were comfortable occupying — the intersection of medicine and spiritual experience.

In 1957, shortly before arriving at Harvard, Pahnke wrote Howard Thurman a letter revealing how deeply he cared about this line of inquiry:

“I have been feeling deep down… that, at last, I am on the right track in my search for God’s will for my life. When I think of the new horizons that may open up as I explore the interrelationships between medicine and religion, I can feel my enthusiasm and excitement growing.”2

At Harvard, Pahnke immersed himself in the writings of mystics across cultures. Again and again, he noticed a striking pattern.

Christian contemplatives, Sufi poets, Hindu yogis, and Buddhist meditators all described life-changing experiences with similar qualities — unity, timelessness, sacredness, ineffability, and a deep sense of joy.

The psychologist William James had written about such experiences decades earlier in The Varieties of Religious Experience. James observed that these states tend to arise unexpectedly during moments of prayer, meditation, crisis, or solitude.3

Because they arise spontaneously and cannot easily be summoned at will, mystical experiences had long resisted systematic scientific study.

Which raised a provocative question for Pahnke:

What if they could be properly studied under controlled conditions?

Around the same time, a new line of research was emerging at Harvard. Psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert had begun studying a little-known compound called psilocybin. Early reports suggested it could produce profound alterations of consciousness.

Pahnke had never taken psychedelics himself, but their potential intrigued him. If psilocybin could reliably evoke mystical states, it might offer a way to study religious experience scientifically for the first time.

So Pahnke enlisted Timothy Leary as his graduate advisor and proposed an ambitious project: a randomized, double-blind experiment that would administer psilocybin to volunteers and carefully measure the results.

But the study required something more than a laboratory.

It required the right setting.

Howard Thurman and the Ritual Setting

The experiment would never have happened without Howard Thurman.

Thurman was one of the most important religious figures of his era: a theologian, mystic, and civil rights thinker who had studied nonviolent resistance with Gandhi and later mentored Martin Luther King Jr. He also served as dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, becoming the first Black dean at a predominantly white university.

Thurman believed deeply in the transformative power of spiritual experience. He was interested in how religious encounters shape a person’s vocation, moral commitments, and sense of meaning.

He also happened to be personally close to Walter Pahnke. Thurman had even officiated Pahnke’s wedding.²

When Pahnke proposed conducting the experiment during the Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel, Thurman immediately understood the significance of the setting.

Good Friday commemorates the crucifixion — one of the most solemn and emotionally charged days in the Christian calendar. The service itself would already guide participants into a contemplative state.

If mystical experience were going to emerge anywhere, a Good Friday service seemed like exactly the kind of environment for it.

Thurman gave his permission.

Inside the Experiment

The experiment took place on April 20, 1962.

The participants were twenty Christian divinity students from Andover Newton Theological School. All were white. All were male. None had previously taken psilocybin or other psychedelics.¹

Half received 30 milligrams of psilocybin.

The other half received nicotinic acid, an active placebo that produces bodily sensations such as tingling and flushing.

Before the service began, the students spent time with research assistants who prepared them for the experience.

They were encouraged to remain open to whatever arose. If the experience became strange or frightening, they were advised not to resist it.

“Go into the unexplored realms of experience,” the instructions read.¹

Then the service began.

As Thurman preached upstairs, the participants sat below in a small chapel decorated with stained glass, pews, candles, and an altar.

At first, it must have felt like a quiet and reverent Good Friday service.

Then the psilocybin began to take hold.

What Happened in the Chapel

Some participants were flooded with awe. Others with terror. Some felt both.

One participant, S.J., later described a profound spiritual experience:

“Something extraordinary had taken place... All of a sudden, I felt drawn out into infinity, and I had lost touch with my mind. I felt that I was caught up in the vastness of Creation... [Rev. Howard Thurman] would say things about Jesus and you would have this overwhelming feeling of Jesus. It was like you totally penetrated what was being said and it penetrated you… We took such an infinitesimal amount of psilocybin, and yet it connected me to infinity.”4

Another participant, L.J., underwent a powerful confrontation with death:

“The more that I let go and sort of died, the more I felt this eternal life, saying to myself… ‘it has always been this way, it has always been this way.... O, isn’t it wonderful, there’s nothing to fear, this is what it means to die, or to taste of eternal life…’ And the more I died the more I appropriated this sense of eternal life.... Just in that one session I think I gained experience I didn’t have before and probably could never have gotten from a hundred hours of reading or a thousand hours of reading.”⁴

Others had more difficult experiences. One subject, L.R., recalled a wave of paranoia and fear:

“Shortly after receiving the capsule, all of a sudden I just wanted to laugh. I began to go into a very strong paranoid experience. And I found it to be scary. The chapel was dark and I hated it in there, just absolutely hated it in there… One of the things that was probably happening to me was a reluctance to just flow. I tried to resist that and as soon as resistance sets in there’s likely to be conflict and there’s likely, I think, for there to be anxiety.”⁴

Yet even he later said the experience involved a profound sense of “singleness, oneness,” and concluded that the state it produced was “very similar, parallel to, perhaps the same as a classical mystical experience.”⁴

The Moment the Experiment Broke Open

At one point in the sermon, Thurman proclaimed in his deep baritone voice:

“Go about the world! Tell everyone you meet that there’s a man on the cross!”5

One of the students on psilocybin took the instructions quite literally.

He stood up, stormed out of the chapel, and headed toward Commonwealth Avenue, determined to spread the word of Christ to strangers outside.

Huston Smith — the renowned scholar of religion who was serving as one of the study’s guides — chased after him.

But the student was outside, tripping, and on a mission. There was no chance he was going back willingly.

Smith later recalled that when he tried to restrain him, the student brushed off his grip “as if it were cobwebs.”6

The runaway subject soon encountered an unsuspecting postman delivering a letter to the dean of the theology school. He snatched the envelope and crumpled it in his hand.

At that point Smith and another guide physically subdued him and brought him back to the chapel, where Pahnke administered a tranquilizing injection of Thorazine.

Curiously, this episode never appeared in Pahnke’s original thesis. That omission would matter later.

What the Study Found

The day after the Good Friday service, each participant completed an extensive questionnaire designed to determine whether they had undergone a genuine mystical experience.

After reviewing the mystical literature, Pahnke identified nine core features of mystical experience that he believed could be measured.

These included unity, transcendence of time and space, deeply felt positive mood, sacredness, objectivity and reality, paradoxicality, ineffability, transiency, and persisting positive changes in attitude or behavior.¹

Participants were asked to rate a series of items on a scale from 0 to 4, where: 0 meant “Did not experience at all,” and 4 meant “Experienced strongly”.

Some of the items included:

• “Feeling of unity with your group”

• “Sense of having known the universe in its wholeness”

• “Sense of presence of what was felt to be holy, sacred, or divine”

• “Seeing a light which appeared to have no naturally explainable source”

Once the responses were compiled, the results were striking.

Eight of the ten psilocybin subjects scored high enough to qualify as having had mystical experiences. Only one of the participants in the control group did.¹

In every category and in every specific question, the average score of the psilocybin subjects exceeded that of the control subjects.¹

Pahnke concluded that psilocybin could induce states of consciousness “apparently indistinguishable from, if not identical with, those experienced by the mystics.”¹

Six months later, the participants did a follow-up questionnaire. The psilocybin subjects reported more enduring positive changes in attitude and behavior than the control group.

According to Pahnke, the students that had taken psilocybin “felt that this experience had motivated them to appreciate more deeply the meaning of their lives, to gain more depth and authenticity in ordinary living, and to rethink their philosophies of life and values.”¹

Timothy Leary later joked:

“It was probably the greatest Good Friday in two thousand years — or it was for half of the subjects.”7

How the World Reacted

The study appeared at a volatile cultural moment.

To supporters, it seemed to offer something remarkable: a serious scientific attempt to study mystical experience.

Walter Houston Clark, one of the major psychologists of religion of the time, wrote, “there are no experiments known to me in the history of the scientific study of religion better designed or clearer in their conclusions than this one.”8

The press took notice as well. Time magazine ran a story titled “Mysticism in the Lab.”9 But the media often exaggerated the results.

Headlines suggested that all participants had experienced breezy, mystical enlightenment — a far cleaner story than the messy reality of awe, fear, confusion, and transformation reported by the subjects themselves.

Meanwhile, the American establishment was beginning to turn against psychedelics.

Despite the promising results of the experiment, Leary recalled how difficult it was for Pahnke to get permission and funding for follow-up research:

“We remembered Huxley’s observation that the original sin was the ingestion of a brain-change fruit in the Garden… There was not much chance that the bureaucrats of Christian America were going to accept our research results, no matter how objective. We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days.”10

Before Pahnke could conduct follow-up studies, he died tragically in a scuba diving accident in 1971.

Without its original steward, the Good Friday Experiment slowly faded into a curious historical relic.

Rick Doblin Reopens the Case

More than two decades later, an undergraduate named Rick Doblin was trying to decide what to study for his senior thesis.

What he really wanted to do was psychedelic research. But by the 1980s, that line of work had been completely shut down. Obtaining approval to administer psychedelics in new experiments was essentially impossible.

So instead of trying to run a new study, he decided to revisit an old one.

William James had argued that the real test of a mystical experience was its fruits — the lasting changes it produced in a person’s life.

Doblin wanted to know what had happened to the Good Friday participants decades later. His plan was to ask the long-term follow-up questions that Walter Pahnke had never been able to.

Tracking down the participants, however, proved difficult.

No records seemed to exist. Doblin visited Andover Newton, where the original student volunteers had studied, and asked if he could place a note in the alumni newsletter. To his surprise, the school refused.11

He tried every official channel and got nowhere. So he became a detective.

While searching the Andover Newton library, Doblin eventually discovered a dusty alumni directory listing hundreds of students from 1962. He photocopied the entire list and mailed postcards to every name.

Three wrote back saying they had been part of the study.

Over the next several years, Doblin managed to track down nineteen of the twenty original participants.

That alone is an incredible part of the story. The most important follow-up to one of the most famous psychedelic studies ever conducted was not carried out by some well-funded institution. It was accomplished by sheer persistence.

What Happened to the Participants

What Doblin found was remarkable.

Even after twenty-five years, the psilocybin subjects vividly remembered their Good Friday experience. Many described it as one of the most meaningful events of their lives.⁴

The control subjects, by contrast, remembered little about the service.

One participant, K.B., described how the psilocybin experience permanently altered his sense of reality:

“It left me with a completely unquestioned certainty that there is an environment bigger than the one I’m conscious of. I have my own interpretation of what that is, but it went from a theoretical proposition to an experiential one… What I had thought on the basis of reading and teaching was there. I knew it. Somehow it was much more real to me... I expect things from meditation and prayer and so forth that I might have been a bit more skeptical about before... I have gotten help with problems, and at times, I think direction and guidance in problem-solving. Somehow my life has been different knowing that there is something out there... What I saw wasn’t anything entirely surprising and yet there was a powerful impact from having seen it.”⁴

Another participant, T.B., reflected on how his experience of death during the session reshaped his political courage:

“When you get a clear vision of what [death] is and have sort of been there, and have left the self, left the body… you would also know that marching in the Civil Rights Movement or against the Vietnam War in Washington [is less fearful].... In a sense [it takes away the fear of dying]... because you’ve already been there.”⁴

For S.J., the experience of unity translated directly into social engagement:

“I got very involved with civil rights after that [his psychedelic experience] and spent some time in the South. I remember this unity business, I thought there was some link there.... There could have been. People certainly don’t write about it. They write about it the opposite way, that drugs are an escape from social obligations. That is the popular view....”⁴

Across the interviews, a consistent pattern emerged.

Participants spoke about a deepened appreciation of life and nature, a renewed sense of joy, and a stronger commitment to their religious or professional vocations. Many described becoming more open to other religious traditions and more resilient during periods of personal crisis. Several reported feeling a greater sense of solidarity with marginalized groups and with humanity more broadly.

Only one of the control subjects reported meaningful personal growth from the Good Friday service. Ironically, he felt the most important thing he took away from the experience was the decision to try psychedelics at the earliest opportunity.

Doblin ultimately concluded that “each of the psilocybin subjects felt that the experience had significantly affected his life in a positive way and expressed appreciation for having participated in the experiment.”⁴

However, that wasn’t the entire story.

What the Original Study Left Out

Doblin’s research did more than confirm the original findings. It also complicated the myth.

In Pahnke’s original thesis, the Good Friday Experiment appeared overwhelmingly positive. But when Doblin interviewed the participants decades later, a more nuanced picture emerged.

Only two psilocybin subjects described their experience as entirely positive from beginning to end. Most reported moments when they “feared they were either going crazy, dying, or were too weak for the ordeal they were experiencing.”⁴

Yet these struggles were often part of the mystical experience itself. Many participants said that moving through these difficult moments ultimately contributed to the insight and personal growth they later described.

Still, these darker aspects of the experience had been largely underemphasized in Pahnke’s original account.

One participant, H.R., remarked during Doblin’s interview:

“The other thing I found unique that wasn’t talked at all about in what I read, at least in the thesis, was that it was all on the positive up side. I don’t know whether other people have said this but I had a down side.... It was a roller coaster.... I mean I had a very strong positive sense of the whole... one with humanity kind of positive glowing, unity kind of feeling and then I went down to the bottom where I was really just guilt... that’s all I can say. It was a very, very profound sense of guilt.”⁴

Doblin’s interviews also revealed another detail absent from the original thesis.

In his report, Pahnke noted that injectable Thorazine was available in case of emergency. What he did not mention was that it had actually been used. That incident only came to light decades later through Doblin’s follow-up.

Doblin speculated that Pahnke may have omitted the episode because he feared it would provide ammunition to critics of psychedelic research, which was already under growing public scrutiny.⁴

Ironically, minimizing the difficult aspects of the psychedelic experiences may have had unintended consequences. By emphasizing only the positive outcomes, the study may have left readers less prepared for the intense and sometimes frightening psychological states psychedelics can produce.

In that sense, Doblin’s follow-up did something important. It preserved the experiment’s remarkable findings while restoring a more realistic picture of what actually happened inside the chapel that day.

The Legacy of the Experiment

Decades later, modern research returned to the same question.

In 2006, a landmark study led by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University found that psilocybin could reliably produce mystical-type experiences that participants described as among the most meaningful events of their lives. The researchers also found that the depth of the mystical experience strongly predicted long-term positive psychological change, suggesting that these states themselves may play a central role in lasting transformation.12

Nearly twenty years after that, the question was extended into a broader interfaith setting. In 2025, a study led by Anthony Bossis and Stephen Ross at New York University invited clergy from several major world religions to undergo guided psilocybin sessions. The results suggested that carefully supported psychedelic experiences could deepen spiritual life across traditions, not just within a single Christian setting.13

In this sense, modern science has quietly picked up the thread that Walter Pahnke began.

The Door the Experiment Opened

The Good Friday Experiment sits at an unusual intersection between science and religion.

It suggests that the kinds of experiences described in scripture, mystical literature, and spiritual traditions may not belong solely to saints or ascetics.

Under the right conditions, they may be part of the ordinary possibilities of human consciousness.

But the experiment also reminds us that mystical experience is not always gentle.

It can involve panic, surrender, confrontation with death, and the unsettling feeling that one’s ordinary understanding of reality is dissolving.

Yet those very struggles may be part of what makes the experience transformative.

As Walter Pahnke later observed, “perhaps the hardest work comes after the experience, which itself may only provide the motivation for future efforts to integrate and appreciate what has been learned.”¹

The real task is bringing whatever insight emerged back into ordinary life.

More than sixty years later, the Good Friday Experiment still raises a lingering question:

What do we do with our mystical experiences?

Because if such moments truly have the power to reshape how we understand life, death, and meaning, they may deserve far more attention than modern life typically gives them.

In 1972, Alan Watts sat before a Buddhist altar and delivered an iconic lecture with a delightfully odd title: Do You Smell?

The philosopher and comparative religion scholar demonstrated the use of incense and pointed out something peculiar about how we talk about spiritual life:

“When people talk about very deep things, they never talk about the sense of smell. They talk about touch, vision, taste, and hearing… We hear about the ‘vision of God.’ The prophets hear ‘the word of the Lord.’ The psalms say, ‘Oh taste and see how excellent the Lord is.’ But no one ever had the idea of smelling God—of having not just the beatific vision, but the beatific smell.”1

Despite its transformative power, Watts lamented, “the sense of smell is our repressed sense.”

Years earlier, Helen Keller noticed the same phenomenon:

“Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived… [And yet] for some inexplicable reason, the sense of smell does not hold the high position it deserves among its sisters. There is something of the fallen angel about it.”2

For thousands of years, scent has not only been powerful in its own right — it has also been used alongside psychedelic substances and spiritual practices to shape altered states of consciousness.

Yet in modern Western culture, both smell and psychedelics have been marginalized: one dismissed as primitive or decorative, the other feared as destabilizing or dangerous.

In this essay, we uncover the historical relationship between scent and altered states, explore why smell so powerfully shapes memory and emotion, and consider how scent can support psychedelic experiences and integration today.

The Repression of Smell—and Altered States

At the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud offered one explanation for why smell fell from philosophical grace.

He argued that olfaction was repressed because of its primal, sexual, and emotional power, which threatened the detachment and decorum that civilization depends on.3^,4

Freud observed fragrance’s power intuitively, but neuroscience now helps explain it biologically. Smell is not just another sense — it’s an anomaly.

Every other sense routes through the thalamus — a kind of sensory mixing board that filters, prioritizes, and dampens information before it reaches conscious awareness. The thalamus is why you stop noticing the feel of your clothes or the hum of a room.5

Smell bypasses this system entirely.

Olfactory signals travel straight to the limbic system, the brain’s memory and emotional center. This means scents act directly on memory, mood, and meaning before the intellect can intervene.⁵

This unmediated power may be precisely why smell has been culturally sidelined. As Freud suggested, civilization requires that we mute forms of experience that are too immediate, too intimate, too capable of dissolving social restraint.³

Psychedelics produce a similar effect and have met a similar response. Throughout Western history, individuals who accessed altered states were tolerated at best and persecuted at worst. Watts described this dynamic bluntly:

“The Catholic Church in particular, and other churches in lesser ways, have ignored, excluded, or actively persecuted people that we call mystics — those who have had a change of consciousness which in effect induces the realization that you yourself… are a direct manifestation of the ultimate reality, or what Paul Tillich called ‘The Ground of Being,’ his decontaminated phrase for the word ‘God.’”6

Institutional religion, especially in Europe, excluded mystics because direct experience of the divine leaves little room for hierarchy or mediation.

Terence McKenna articulated the same tension in modern terms:

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”7

Smell and psychedelics share this dissolving quality. Both bypass the intellect and engage the body directly. Both loosen conceptual frameworks. Both make meaning visceral rather than theoretical.

When these two repressed forces are brought together, their impact is amplified.

For this reason, as we fight back against the war on psychedelics, it may also be time to dissent against the de-scenting of society.

Holy Smokes: Incense & Entheogens

The use of scent alongside psychoactive substances is not a modern innovation. It is a recurring feature of religious, spiritual, and medicinal traditions across cultures.

Consider the Eleusinian Mysteries, which began around 1600 BCE and took place annually for nearly two thousand years. Initiates drank kykeon, a potion widely believed to have contained ergot — a psychoactive precursor to LSD.⁸ The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which inspired the mythic structure of the Mysteries, speaks of “the stronghold of fragrant Eleusis.”8 Although the rituals were sworn to secrecy, scholars widely believe they involved incense — likely storax and frankincense — to purify the space and help shift consciousness.9

Frankincense itself, derived from Boswellia species, appears across Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ritual contexts. The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras was said to use frankincense to enable him to prophesy. Other Greek mystery traditions — including the Dionysian and Orphic cults — combined scent, music, fasting, and entheogens to induce altered states oriented toward transformation and rebirth.⁹

In these traditions, incense was not symbolic decoration. It was a functional element of altered-state technology. Ancient medical papyri refer to “magical smokes,” reflecting a period when medicine, religion, and psychology were not yet separate disciplines but overlapping ways of understanding consciousness.⁹

The prophet Muhammad prescribed incense for worship that included harmal and frankincense.⁹ Early Christian theologians such as St. Ephrem the Syrian described paradise in explicitly olfactory terms, calling it a “treasure of perfumes” and a “storehouse of scents.” For St. Ephrem, fragrance was not merely a metaphor — it was a way of knowing, a “non-cognitive yet revelatory” experience of the divine.⁹

Across cultures, scent has functioned as a bridge between perception and meaning, between the body and the sacred.

Modern Day: Follow Your Nose

Contemporary research is beginning to confirm what ancient traditions seemed to understand intuitively: scent and altered states are natural allies.

In Fragrance and Wellbeing (2013), Dr. Jennifer Peace Rhind described how scents contribute to quality of life:

“They can stabilise, enhance and modify our moods, decrease anxiety and tension, evoke autobiographical memories and give us a benchmark of our somatic selves, and aid us on a spiritual journey.

However, it is their complex relationship with our emotional world, their relationship with trance states, and their ability to bring about altered states of consciousness that is perhaps the real key to their role in enhancing wellbeing.”⁹

Rhind’s insight — that scent’s power lies in its relationship to altered states — sets the stage for its emerging role in psychedelic therapy.

In a 2024 review, psychiatrist Dr. Florian Birkmayer explored the synergistic potential of essential oils in psychedelic-assisted therapy. He proposed that scent can offer a bottom-up, body-first signal of safety within the often disorienting, boundary-dissolving states psychedelics induce.⁵

Oils such as vetiver, cedarwood, and sandalwood, he suggests, may help journeyers stay tethered to the body when dissociation or overwhelm threatens to pull them into cognitive loops or freeze states.

Birkmayer emphasizes that scent can support neuroception of safety — that primal, pre-verbal sense that it’s okay to be in your body, right here, right now. This echoes Gabor Maté’s observation:

“Healing doesn’t just happen through insights — it happens through the body feeling safe enough to stay present to them.”10

Seen this way, scent is not a decorative add-on. It is a subtle co-regulator, well suited to the tender terrain of psychedelic work.

Hanifa Nayo Washington, co-founder of the Fireside Project, a psychedelic risk-reduction organization, has emphasized scent’s ability to mitigate distress during journeys, noting that “often, when we are in challenging experiences, we can change what’s happening in our setting… we could light a candle and change the scent.”11

Beyond promoting safety and grounding, scent may also amplify the perceptual richness of psychedelic experience.

Dr. Birkmayer suggests that working with aroma in altered states should involve “smelling an oil as if in meditation and opening our awareness to their effects on our psyche, being attuned to shifts in physical sensations, emotions, and mental and spiritual patterns.”

In other words, scent becomes not just a background feature, but an object of attention in its own right.

Both psychedelics and meditation are known to evoke synesthesia — a neurological phenomenon in which the senses begin to overlap, so that sounds may appear as colors or smells may take on visual form. Introducing scent into these states may also deepen this cross-sensory dialogue.

As Dr. Jennifer Peace Rhind suggests:

“If scent is used as the perceptual experience, perhaps there will be much greater opportunity for synaesthetic experiences.”⁹

She goes on to speculate that meditation with scent “might just promote more vivid and spontaneous imagery, sounds, music and tactile sensations than meditation without scent.”⁹

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that scent does more than just smell nice. It can help ground the body, signal safety, invite depth, and actively enrich the sensory field of the psychedelic experience.

Scents, Rituals & Integration

If scent has always played a role in shaping inner states, it has rarely appeared alone. Across traditions, fragrance is usually paired with simple ritual objects that help anchor attention in the body and the present moment. One of the most common of these is incense — and, alongside it, the candle.

The spiritual teacher Ram Dass encouraged practitioners to create what he called an “Om Home” — a dedicated space for reflection and practice that makes use of these fragrant tools.

In Be Here Now (1971), he writes:

“Create a quiet corner in your home… a launching pad to the infinite… a shrine… Bring to it that which is simple and pure: a mat, perhaps a candle… possibly some incense.”12

Within this kind of container, aroma and flame work together — scent shaping the atmosphere, light steadying the gaze.

One of the practices Ram Dass frequently recommended within this setting was candle-focused meditation as a way to train attention and observe attachment.

In Journey of Awakening (1978), he writes:

“Place a candle in front of you a foot or so away and focus on the flame… In each case you notice the thought, let it go, and merely come back to an awareness of the candle flame.”13

This practice of returning is profoundly useful in psychedelic integration. We often have meaningful experiences, yet struggle to carry them into everyday life. Simple daily rituals like this one, especially when paired with scent, may offer a surprisingly practical bridge.

Consider what’s often called the Proustian phenomenon — the observation, named after Marcel Proust, that smells have a unique ability to bring up vivid, emotionally charged memories.

In the field of olfactory conditioning, it’s been demonstrated that a smell paired with a positive emotional state could later reproduce that same state — even without conscious awareness of the conditioning.14

This suggests a powerful possibility: if a particular scent accompanies a meaningful psychedelic experience, that same scent may later help evoke the emotional and somatic memory of insight, calm, or openness — without needing to re-enter the full altered state.

At a time when psychedelic integration remains one of the field’s greatest challenges, scent may offer a gentle, embodied way to recall what was learned and bring it back into daily life.

In practice, this might look as simple as returning each day to Ram Dass’s candle meditation — lighting a scented candle or a stick of incense, and letting smell and flame quietly reinforce the habits of attention, calm, and presence.

A Return to the Senses

Psychedelics and scent share a long, intertwined history. Both operate beneath language. Both engage memory, emotion, and embodiment directly. And both have been marginalized for challenging dominant ways of organizing experience.

Reintegrating scent into psychedelic practice is, in many ways, a return to historical ritual, to the body, and to the understanding that insight is not purely cognitive, but sensory, relational, and situated.

In a culture that increasingly recognizes the importance of set, setting, preparation, and integration, fragrance deserves careful consideration. Whether through incense, essential oils, or candles, scent offers a subtle but powerful way to shape consciousness and carry insights with us.

If psychedelics invite us into new ways of seeing, scent may help us stay there.

At 1 p.m. on January 14, 1967, on the Polo Fields of Golden Gate Park, the countercultural poet Gary Snyder lifted a conch shell and sounded it into the air.

Thirty thousand people — artists, activists, musicians, mystics — settled onto the grass. What followed was an unprecedented experiment in communal joy and the prelude to the Summer of Love.

It was called The Human Be-In: A Gathering of the Tribes.

Author Helen Perry, who attended the event, described it this way:

“It was a religious rite in which nothing particular happened. And yet it was a day that marked the end of something and the beginning of something else. There was clearly a renewal of the spirit of man.”1

Writer Hunter S. Thompson sensed the revolutionary charge of the moment:

“There was a… sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”2

But that wave would eventually break. The promised victory never arrived.

Allen Ginsberg would later call the Human Be-In “the last purely idealistic hippie event.”3

On the anniversary of the Be-In, it’s worth asking:

What happened that day? What did it spark? And what deeper lesson does it offer now, as we try to shape the next chapter of the psychedelic counterculture?

A Movement Comes Together

The Be-In was organized by artist Michael Bowen and poet Allen Cohen to mend a growing rift between two strands of the counterculture: the politically charged Berkeley New Left and the inward-looking, free-spirited world of Haight-Ashbury.

Cohen put it plainly:

“The anti-war and free speech movement in Berkeley thought the Hippies were too disengaged and spaced out… The Hippies thought the anti-war movement was doomed to endless confrontations with the establishment which would recoil with violence and fascism. We decided that to strengthen the youth culture, we had to bring the two poles together.”4

The event was framed as a reunion, uniting disparate currents with shared roots: “Beats, LSD, anti-materialist, idealistic, anarchistic, surreal, Dionysian and transcendental.”5

Michael Rossman, one of the Berkeley radicals, sensed the Be-In’s deeper potential:

“The Movement had expanded beyond all political bounds and recognition, and was on some verge — perhaps premature, but real enough — of carrying us through deep transformation into a new human culture.”⁵

The Be-In was also a response to the recent criminalization of LSD in California. Rather than stage a traditional protest, the organizers invited people to gather and just be, demonstrating the communal ethos that the law threatened.

And lastly, it was meant as a prototype — a glimpse of what a psychedelic society might look like: non-hierarchical, communal, playful, free.

The Day Itself

Helen Perry captured the day’s improbable harmony:

“It was a medieval scene, with banners flying, bright and uncommitted; the day was miraculous, as days can be in San Francisco at their best, and the world was new and clean and pastoral.

People sat on the grass with nothing to do, sometimes moving up near to the small platform where a poetry-reading might be going on, or where a band might be playing. There was no program; it was a happening… Dogs and children pranced around in blissful abandon, and I became aware of a phenomenon that still piques my curiosity: The dogs did not get into fights, and the children did not cry.”¹

Poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Lenore Kandel read aloud.

Jerry Rubin spoke against the Vietnam War. Timothy Leary unveiled his now-iconic slogan: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

The Diggers — a Haight-Ashbury anarchist collective — handed out thousands of hits of White Lightning LSD and free turkey sandwiches. A parachutist landed on the field, inspiring one onlooker to remark it was “clearly a fairytale happening… Those of us who were there when it happened were children again.”¹

Some believe the parachutist was Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the legendary LSD chemist.6

Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Quicksilver Messenger Service played. Two aspiring actors in attendance, Gerome Ragni and James Rado, would later channel the day into the musical Hair.

Despite the size of the crowd, the scene remained peaceful. “No fights. No drunks. No troubles,” journalist Ralph Gleason noted.⁵

As the sun set, Ginsberg urged everyone to “practice kitchen yoga”⁵ and clean the field. They did. The lawn was spotless.

Michael McClure later said:

“The Be-in was a blossom. It was a flower... It didn’t have all of its petals. There were worms in the rose. It was perfect in its imperfections. It was what it was — and there had never been anything like it before.”7

But beneath the beauty, a question was already forming.

After the Ecstasy, What?

If the Be-In was a flowering, it was also a provocation. It showed what was possible — thousands of strangers coexisting in playful, reverent harmony.

But it didn’t answer the harder question underneath: What do you do the next day?

Leary’s slogan — “Turn on, tune in, drop out” — became the movement’s anthem, and its biggest dilemma. While it captured the imagination, it also sowed confusion.

What did “drop out” mean? Was it liberation or abdication? Drop out from what, and into what?

These unanswered questions threatened to undercut the momentum sparked by the Be-In.

One month later, in February 1967, the San Francisco Oracle convened a summit to explore these questions more seriously. On Alan Watts’s houseboat in Sausalito, four countercultural elders gathered: Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder.8

The “Houseboat Summit” marked a tonal shift from ecstatic to strategic. In many ways, it was the psychedelic movement’s first real moment of self-critique, and its initial attempt to translate the ecstasy of the Human Be-In into a blueprint for living.

Two Visions of the Exit

At the center of their conversation was a still-relevant tension: what does it mean to “drop out”?

Leary spoke in grand arcs. He believed psychedelics would trigger a planetary awakening. The details could come later. Just turn on, and the rest would follow.

But Ginsberg, Watts, and Snyder pushed back.

Ginsberg warned that the public feared a counterculture of “freak-out hippies goofing around and throwing bottles through windows.”9

Watts raised the pragmatic concern on people’s minds: “Where’s the bread going to come from if everybody drops out?”⁹

Snyder declared “it’s agreed we’re dropping out, and there are techniques to do it.”⁹

More grounded than rhetorical, he insisted that dropping out meant re-learning how to live — frugally, skillfully, and communally.

It meant “cutting down on your needs to an absolute minimum… Don’t be a bit fussy about how you work or what you do for a living” — strawberry picking, carpentry, labor. It meant patience: “sticking with a shitty job long enough to win the bread that you needed,” and mastering “all kinds of techniques of living really cheap.”⁹ It also meant studying local ecology, honoring Indigenous histories, and understanding the land beneath your feet.

Snyder had already dropped out years earlier. He argued it came down to endurance, self-sufficiency, and simplifying your life.

The Garden of Eden

The debate wasn’t about whether consciousness should change. All four men agreed on that.

Watts articulated the shared premise:

“The absolutely primary thing is that there be a change of consciousness in the individual: that he escape from the hallucination that he is a separate ego in an alien universe, and that we all come to realize, primarily, that each one of us is the whole works.”⁹

The real question was how to translate that insight into practice.

Leary envisioned psychedelics awakening the youth to “the garden of Eden, which is this planet.”

Snyder agreed but grounded the vision with a dose of realism: “That garden of Eden is full of old rubber tires and tin cans right now, you know?”

Vision alone wasn’t enough. The world was messy and demanded practical skills. Snyder put it succinctly:

“You just can’t go out and grow vegetables, man. You’ve got to learn how to do it.”⁹

No Boss, No Problem

Leadership posed another challenge.

Watts argued that the counterculture’s strength was its decentralization. “The genius of this kind of underground,” he said, “is that it has no leadership.”

Snyder pointed to tribal structures and Indigenous rites of passage as models for dropping into community rather than simply dropping out of society.

He emphasized extended families, shared labor, and periodic gatherings — ways of living that distribute responsibility rather than centralize it.

He also cited ritualized vision quests from tribes such as the Comanche and the Sioux, where individuals leave society, encounter their deeper selves, and return with clarity and responsibility.⁹

What if that were the model? Drop out not to abandon life, but to return to it with new eyes.

Integration, Not Escape

Perhaps the most important moment of the summit came when Watts challenged Leary on integration. It was an awesome, psychedelic battle of wits.

Watts recalled Leary once saying:

“You can’t stay high all the time, because when you finally come down from the high, you realize that the ordinary state of consciousness is one with the higher state.”⁹

Watts called this moment — the come down — “the critical moment of the whole experience.”

“This, to me, has been the most fantastic thing in all my LSD experiences… I suddenly realize that this everyday world around me is exactly the same thing as the world of the beatific vision.”⁹

So, he asked Leary, “how do you integrate that realization with the drop-out?”

Leary admitted that his slogan had flattened the truth. It needed nuance. His mission had required provocation, but now, maybe it needed direction. He conceded:

“I would agree to change the slogan to: “Drop Out, Turn On, Drop In.”⁹

Leary laid his cards on the table, acknowledging the challenge of leading a fledgling movement: “I’m competing with Marshall McLuhan. Everything I say is just a probe.”

Why This Still Matters

It’s easy to treat the Human Be-In as a relic — the last great gathering before commercialization, repression, and excess squashed the counterculture.

But that misses the point.

The Be-In was never the answer. It was an opening.

It showed that thousands of strangers could gather peacefully, without fear or hierarchy, and experience something real together. It showed that cultural transformation — even briefly — is possible.

It also exposed how quickly bliss gives rise to responsibility.

Today, in a new psychedelic renaissance, we face similar questions. We have better science, clearer language, and growing institutional support. But the core dilemma remains:

How do we integrate what psychedelics reveal? How do we reshape our lives — and our systems — in light of those truths?

The Houseboat Summit offered a compass:

Balance vision with discipline. Seek altered states, but return with altered practices. Learn to live simply. Share what you have. Gather. Reflect. Repeat.

The Human Be-In was a blossom, as McClure said — brief, imperfect, and alive. But blossoms point toward fruit.

Nearly sixty years later, the question it raised is still ours.

We’ve seen what’s possible. We’ve felt the opening.

Now, where do we go from here?

Every December, a strange little theory pops up like a red-and-white toadstool after snowfall.

It goes something like this:

Many of our most beloved Christmas traditions — Santa Claus, flying reindeer, red-and-white suits, evergreen trees, chimneys, elves, gifts, ornaments — all trace back to Arctic shamanic rituals involving the psychoactive Amanita muscaria mushroom.

Is it provable? No.
Is it fun? Extremely.
Is it weirdly coherent once you hear it? Absolutely.

Welcome to the infamous Magic Mushroom Christmas Theory, a delightfully unhinged idea that suggests the origins of Christmas are much stranger and much deeper than you ever imagined.

The Big Reveal

As kids, everyone experiences the same devastating discovery: Santa Claus does not really exist.

But what if — stay with me — he actually does exist? And secretly, he’s been a psychoactive mushroom this whole time?

Ethnomycologist James Arthur, one of the theory’s most enthusiastic proponents, puts it this way:

“The traditional day of reckoning wherein it is revealed Santa Claus is not real, reindeer do not fly, there is no present under the tree (unless placed there by a deceiver), is a disinformation campaign geared towards conditioning the young mind to be unable to accept the [Magic Mushroom Christmas Theory].”1

Classic stuff.

Professor Carl Ruck of Boston University, a scholar of ancient religions and entheogenic traditions, puts it more dryly:

“It’s surprising that it’s taken so long for the popular imagination to encompass who Santa Claus is.”2

Let’s get into it.

The Mushroom at the Center of It All

Amanita muscaria, also called the fly agaric, is the iconic fairytale mushroom: bright red cap, scattered white dots, straight out of a children’s book or a Mario level.

It grows naturally under evergreen trees — especially birch and pine — across Arctic and subarctic regions.

For centuries, it reportedly played a role in shamanic rituals among Indigenous peoples of northern Europe and Siberia.3

To these cultures, the mushroom was considered a sacred substance, used for spiritual visions, out-of-body travel to spirit realms, and as a plant-spirit guide in teaching and healing.¹

Already, we’re off to a promising start.

Santa as a Shaman

Long ago, Siberian shamans, including Sámi practitioners in Lapland, would harvest Amanita muscaria around the winter solstice, when darkness was deepest and spiritual intervention was most needed.³

Traveling from yurt to yurt, they conducted rituals with the mushroom, reportedly seeing the future, shapeshifting into animals, and flying toward the North Star in search of knowledge.4

Writer and mycologist Lawrence Millman explains “the Sámi people believed that the shaman who ate an Amanita muscaria ended up looking like an Amanita muscaria.”5

Other scholars corroborate that these shamans dressed to honor the mushroom itself, wearing red-and-white ceremonial garments.¹

Millman joked that they looked like “a big fat person with red splotches.”

Sound like anyone you know?

Over time, this red-and-white figure becomes mythologized: a wise, otherworldly visitor who arrives once a year, brings precious gifts, and seems to operate outside normal rules of time and space.

Ho. Ho. Ho.

Chimneys & Very Inconvenient Front Doors

In Arctic winters, snow doesn’t politely accumulate — it buries.

To travel across the frozen landscape, shamans relied on reindeer-drawn sleds. Reindeer were central to Arctic Siberian life, both practically and spiritually.³

Homes were often inaccessible through doors, which meant visitors entered through the roof or smoke hole. In other words: down the chimney.

So picture it:

A red-and-white-clad shaman drops in from above, carrying sacred mushrooms, performing rituals, restoring balance, and then departing by reindeer-drawn sled, just as they arrived.

Strange Gifts, Big Sacks, & Ornaments

Santa brings toys. Shamans brought gifts too, though usually less material.

Millman explains that what shamans brought “were not physical gifts but usually healing and problem-solving, which would be a kind of gift.”⁵

After the shamans ingested the mushroom, traveled through spirit realms, and delivered insight or guidance, Millman says, “they were rewarded with lots of food.”

Siberian milk and cookies, perhaps?

Anthropologist John Rush, author of Mushrooms in Christian Art, argued that the gifts were the mushrooms themselves. He wrote that shamans “would collect Amanita muscaria (the Holy Mushroom), and then give them as gifts on the winter solstice.”6

Naturally, these shamans used a big sack to carry around the goods.

Raw Amanita muscaria can be toxic, but drying it reduces its toxicity while preserving the psychoactive effects. According to Rush, once the shaman has finished their rounds of delivering mushrooms, the villagers would hang them near the fire to dry. (Yes, like stockings.)

Additionally, mushroom gatherers sometimes placed the fly agaric on tree branches in the forest to dry in the sun. (Yep, like ornaments.)

Flying Reindeer, Or ‘Flying’ Reindeer?

Now for the part that really sends the theory into orbit.

Reindeer love Amanita muscaria. Like, really love it. They actively seek it out.

Andrew Haynes, deputy editor of The Pharmaceutical Journal, has observed reindeer consuming the mushroom, noting they appear to “have a desire to experience altered states of consciousness.”7

Haynes also wrote, “for humans, a common side-effect of mushrooms is the feeling of flying, so it’s interesting the legend about Santa’s reindeer is they can fly.”8

Several accounts describe both shamans and reindeer consuming the mushroom. One method used to reduce toxicity involved drinking the urine of reindeer that had eaten it — strange as it sounds, this preserved psychoactive compounds while filtering out much of the toxins.9

Harvard biologist Donald Pfister explains the idea this way: reindeer appear to “go berserk because they’re eating Amanita muscaria… Reindeer flying — are they flying, or do they only seem to be because you are hallucinating?”10

So imagine watching reindeer — already mythic animals — prance, leap, and behave strangely while you’re deep in an altered state.

Flying reindeer suddenly doesn’t sound so far-fetched.

As for Rudolph’s glowing red nose? Picture a reindeer with a face full of bright red mushrooms. Let’s just say, it’s pretty on the nose.

Under the Tree

Remember where Amanita muscaria grows: beneath evergreen trees.

In his book Mushrooms and Mankind, James Arthur reflected:

“So why do people bring pine trees into their houses at the winter solstice, placing brightly colored (red and white) packages under their boughs as gifts to show their love for each other and as representations of the love of God and the gift of his Son’s life? It is because underneath the pine bough is the exact location where one would find this ‘most sacred’ substance, the Amanita muscaria, in the wild.”¹

In the Arctic winter, snow gives way to mushrooms beneath the pines. “Then and there,” Arthur declares, “you will find the gifts that unlock the key mysteries of the universe.”¹

The mushroom-induced gnosis — the felt union of the individual mind with a larger, cosmic intelligence — may be what early mystics attempted to encode symbolically through trees, ornaments, and red-and-white gifts.

Over time, the symbolism remained even as the original meaning faded.

And the Elves?

Small, mischievous, semi-invisible forest beings who assist with magical labor?

That one practically explains itself.

So… Is Christmas a Mushroom Holiday?

Probably not. At least not officially.

The Magic Mushroom Christmas Theory has critics, skeptics, and plenty of eye-rolls from historians — and fairly so.11 Cultural myths rarely have single origins, and Christmas is a sprawling blend of pagan ritual, Christian theology, folklore, capitalism, and Coca-Cola branding.

So what do we make of this theory?

Lawrence Millman suggests that because the original Santa-shaman functioned as a spiritual healer, Christmas might be better understood “not as a capitalistic holiday, but as a time when one should think more spiritually about life.”⁵

Carl Ruck says simply that learning more about folklore traditions surrounding Christmas “makes it more fun.”²

At the very least, the theory reminds us that midwinter was never meant to be about forced cheer or frantic consumption. It was about surviving darkness, seeking meaning, and letting a little magic soften the edges of a hard season.

Whether Santa came from mushrooms, shamans, or marketing departments, the deeper pattern remains the same:

Something strange and magical arrives in the dark of winter, bringing gifts we didn’t know we needed.

And honestly, that’s a pretty great story to keep around.

Have yourself a very merry, psychedelic Christmas!

Much love,

Kyle

🍄🎅🌲

The first time I watched the Woodstock documentary, I wasn’t expecting it to change my life. But then Santana came on.

The festival’s breakout star, Carlos Santana, was 22, lost in the music, and tripping on LSD.

His face contorted in wild expressions as he wrestled with his guitar, which he later said had turned into a writhing snake he had to tame in real time. Far from falling apart, Santana channeled the trip into musical transcendence, catapulting his band and career into stardom.

That performance captured a fascinating paradox of psychedelics: their potential for both chaos and creation. The image of Santana’s wailing guitar-snake planted a seed that’s been growing in me ever since.

This Substack, Psychedelic Archives, is an exploration of that lineage: the history, culture, and transformative potential of psychedelics.

It’s a continuation of the journey I began on Instagram, where I’ve spent the past few years unearthing the most fascinating stories and artifacts from psychedelic history. That page has somehow grown to over 800,000 followers and reached more than 100 million people.

We’ve built the world’s largest psychedelic community, full of scientists, artists, musicians, athletes, and fellow psychonauts all drawn to the strange, beautiful history of psychedelics.

But this space is meant to go deeper.

Remembering the Lost Story

Something is missing in the modern psychedelic landscape.

Today, psychedelics are being reintroduced through the doors of medicine — psilocybin for depression, MDMA for PTSD, LSD for anxiety. This work is extraordinary and urgently necessary. Yet when psychedelics are reduced to just pharmaceuticals, we risk forgetting their deeper potential.

Across history, from indigenous rituals to the countercultural explosion of the 1960s, psychedelics were used for much larger aims: spiritual awakening, creative vision, rites of passage. And sometimes, for simpler but no less sacred reasons: to mend a broken heart, commune with nature, or reconnect with a sense of awe.

This archive exists to keep that deeper story alive.

The Journey So Far

When I started Psychedelic Archives on Instagram in April 2023, it was simply an experiment — a place to share the coolest stories, forgotten films, and wild characters that shaped psychedelic history. Growing that account has been its own trip — surreal, humbling, and deeply rewarding. (If you’re curious about that story, you can read about it here.)

But the limits of social media are real. Algorithms compress everything into bite-sized moments; nuance gets lost in the scroll. This Substack is my antidote to that — a place where I can slow down, tell stories fully, and think in paragraphs rather than captions.

What You’ll Find Here

Expect deep dives into psychedelic history, art, and philosophy — brief book-report-style essays on iconic films, albums, and events that shaped the culture, and reflections on the future of the movement.

Some of the questions I’ll be exploring:

• What can we learn from the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s?

• How do we honor the indigenous roots of these medicines?

• Are psychedelics a valid tool for spiritual inquiry and growth?

• Will commercialization undermine their deeper potential?

• What does a truly psychedelic way of life look like?

• And, of course: did the CIA accidentally start the psychedelic sixties?

These questions fascinate me not only as a researcher but as a seeker — someone still integrating the shock and wonder of his own first trip.

Integration as a Practice

When I first took psychedelics, my mind was blown open. Ever since, I’ve been trying to make sense of that rupture — to understand what it revealed, if anything, about consciousness, culture, and the nature of reality itself.

This writing is part of my integration. A way of staying in conversation with the mystery. And maybe, along the way, helping others who’ve glimpsed something infinite and are still learning how to carry that awareness back into the everyday.

Whether your doorway was LSD or meditation, breathwork or music, this is a space for exploring the larger question that unites them all: how to live with more meaning, connection, and presence in a world that so often forgets its own depth.

To support that journey, I’ll dive into the art, philosophy, and history that illuminate how psychedelics might reshape the world we share.

As author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey once said, “You’re either on the bus, or you’re off the bus.”1

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

— Kyle

Founder, Psychedelic Archives

IG: @psychedelicarchives

Some decisions only make sense in hindsight. At the time, they seem like tiny, almost silly impulses. Starting an Instagram account in April 2023 definitely felt like one of those.

There was no master plan — just me sharing a few psychedelic history posts because I thought they were interesting, and maybe someone else might too.

I didn’t expect anyone to actually care, let alone that it would grow into a community of hundreds of thousands.

Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t just starting a page — I was quietly trying to find my way back to myself.

This is the story of how an idea chose me, and how long it took before I finally chose it back.

The Greatest Hazard of All

The story doesn’t begin with psychedelics or Instagram. It begins much earlier, in the years when I was living on autopilot.

Through most of college, I drifted along the path in front of me, guided less by conviction than by momentum. I could sense other possibilities, but I didn’t yet have the courage to step beyond the familiar. So I took the expected route — the “right” classes, the “right” internships, the well-lit road into finance — all the while feeling slightly distant from myself.

Frankly, I was in a state of despair, as Kierkegaard would call it — not dramatic sorrow, but the subtle suffocation of becoming someone you’re not. He warned that “the greatest hazard of all — losing oneself — can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.”1 By conventional metrics I was succeeding, yet I could feel myself disappearing.

A Door Opens

Even before psychedelics, I knew something had to change. So I tried mindfulness meditation to find some answers.

I read the books, studied the theory, and willed myself to hit the cushion. But when I sat down to practice, my mind resisted every attempt to quiet it. I felt like someone pressing their face against glass — close to something meaningful, but unable to break through.

Then I took psychedelics. And the glass shattered.

It’s hard to describe that first psychedelic experience without defaulting to clichés, but the shock of it was real: my inner chatter subsided, the boundary between me and the world dissolved, and everything pulsed with a sense of significance.

It wasn’t just mystical — it was disarmingly practical. I saw, clearly and for the first time, that another mode of consciousness was possible, one that felt more honest and meaningful than the one I’d been living in.

Meditation, once impenetrable, suddenly clicked. Life began to feel less like a performance and more like a participation.

Permission to Want More

Around that time, during my senior year of college, I took a class where the final project was to pitch a startup in an emerging industry. Secretly captivated by this new frontier of consciousness, I chose the most exciting field I could think of: psychedelics.

I learned that we were living through a “psychedelic renaissance,” a period when clinical and cultural interest in psychedelics were exploding.

I poured myself into the research, and for the first time in my academic life, my work felt charged with genuine curiosity. Psychedelics weren’t just medicines; they were a powerful lens for understanding consciousness, culture, healing, and meaning.

When my professor told me my presentation was his favorite of the semester, something inside me flickered awake. It felt like permission — not from him, but from myself — to pursue something that actually lit me up. I told myself that after college I’d find a way to work in psychedelics.

A False Start

And yet, after graduation, I found myself sitting in the fluorescent cubicles of investment banking — about the least psychedelic place imaginable. I told myself it was temporary. I devoured books about psychedelic history and listened to podcasts on my commute. I even reached out to Business Trip, one of my favorite shows about psychedelic entrepreneurship. To my surprise, one of the hosts, Greg Kubin, actually agreed to speak with me.

We talked about his journey — from the same numbing world of banking into the far more enlivening world of psychedelics. At the end of the call, I asked him the question that had been burning a hole in me: How do I break into this field?

His answer was almost disappointingly simple: “Create something.”

A blog, a newsletter, anything. Just start. The path wouldn’t reveal itself until I took the first step.

I loved the idea. Truly, I did. But at that point in my life, loving an idea and acting on it were still two different worlds. I returned to work, clinging to the illusion that I had more time.

A Small Rebellion

Eventually, the tension between the life I was living and the one I wanted became unbearable, and I left banking for a healthcare startup working in the psychedelic clinical trial space.

It felt closer to the path, but not quite the path. The work was noble, but it felt constricted, bureaucratic, and incomplete. Patients searching for healing often didn’t qualify for clinical trials or were simply wary of new medicines.

I wanted to help people access not just psychedelic medicine, but the deeper cultural and philosophical context around them. I wanted to explore the bigger questions: What do psychedelics teach us about living a good life?

And so, the idea resurfaced: create something.

One night in bed, I opened Instagram and made an account: @psychedelicarchives.

It felt like a small rebellion. I told myself I’d share stories that fascinated me, the ones I was already reading and watching on my own.

On April 2, 2023, I hit “post” for the first time. I chose one of my favorite stories from psychedelic history: the time Carlos Santana played Woodstock while fully tripping on LSD. Instead of falling apart, he channeled the experience into one of the most iconic performances of all time, catapulting his career into stardom.

That was the kind of story I wanted to tell — ones that complicate the narrative around psychedelics and invite curiosity instead of judgment.

Giving Up Too Soon

Despite my enthusiasm, the early days of the account were humbling. I poured hours into research and writing. And though I’m embarrassed to admit it, I even paid to “boost” posts — essentially paying Instagram to show them as ads. And still, I reached almost no one.

After two months, I had just 1,000 followers. Each person genuinely meant the world to me, but it still felt small compared to other pages.

Then came the dagger: Instagram flagged my account for “drug content” and removed my ability to boost posts. The wind rushed out of my sails. I figured the only reason people had seen my posts at all was because I had paid for it. Without that crutch, I decided the project was doomed. So I abandoned it.

For eighteen months, the account lay dormant — a small symbol of an unlived life sitting quietly on my phone. I drifted back into habit and routine, letting distractions take the place of meaning.

I tried to lose myself in work, but a quiet, persistent feeling kept tugging at me: I was avoiding my true passion. I wanted to study psychedelic history, explore the questions it raises about consciousness and meaning, and help reintroduce its wisdom into contemporary life.

The Mushrooms Told Me So

Then, one day on a mushroom trip, the truth hit me with uncomfortable clarity: the Instagram account hadn’t failed — I had walked away.

The obstacle was never the algorithm or the boosting restriction. It was my dependence on external validation and shortcuts.

When the views disappeared, I disappeared too.

I wanted to create something authentic, but I was still feeding the part of me that cared more about being seen — and about taking the path of least resistance — than about doing the work.

I claimed I stopped posting because I couldn’t “boost” anymore. But boosting was only a shield — a way to protect myself from the possibility of being ignored. If I could pay for attention, I never had to face what the work was actually worth.

Back then, I wasn’t ready to rely on myself alone, or to risk creating something that might not be noticed.

Beginning Again

The realization felt like a confession: If this was truly a calling, was I willing to pursue it even if no one watched? To work quietly, with care, for its own sake? To commit to the process rather than cling to the outcome?

Something in me shifted. For the first time, I felt ready — not just willing, but eager — to take responsibility for what I wanted.

I didn’t want to shrink back into the safe, boring path. I wanted to devote myself to a larger mission: to explore psychedelic history and help guide these ideas into modern society.

That night, I reconnected with the reasons I had started the account in the first place:

• Because this mattered to me.

• Because it might matter to others.

• Because ignoring it had become more painful than pursuing it.

So, on December 9th, 2024, after a year and a half hiatus, I began again.

Quietly. Consistently. Without expectation.

I resolved to post every day, even if the posts were seen by ten people. I wrote what genuinely fascinated me. I refused to use cheap hooks or manipulative tactics. I cited my sources. I posted long videos and wrote nuanced descriptions because I cared more about the story than the algorithm. I let the work be what it wanted to be.

I was still working at the startup, but I carved out time before and after work — making space for the thing that finally felt like mine.

The Spark Catches Fire

And then, in the way life sometimes rewards sincerity, the page began to grow. This time entirely organically.

My first viral post landed on Christmas Day. (It was a Christmas miracle, truly.) A week later, another. Within a month, 30,000 people were reading along. Within two months, 100,000 people.

Strangers sent messages saying the posts meant something to them. Artists and researchers I admired followed. I found collaborators, friends, and mentors — often through synchronicities too uncanny to ignore.

It felt like the universe saying: Keep going.

Still, I didn’t immediately own this new identity. I kept the project quiet, afraid my friends would think I was posturing — a wannabe influencer. But every time I let someone in, they surprised me. They were curious, supportive, proud. And slowly, I let myself feel proud too.

Today, Psychedelic Archives is the world’s largest psychedelic community. But more importantly, it’s the most honest expression of my curiosity and values. It’s the first thing I’ve ever built that truly feels like me. It has also allowed me to offer real value to people, the kind of value you can only give when you’re working from genuine passion.

Walking the Path

Looking back, I can see the real story: a long, uneven journey from unconsciousness to responsibility. From drifting to choosing. From living a life handed to me to building a life I actually believe in.

Joseph Campbell famously encouraged people to “follow your bliss,”2 trusting that the path meant for you only appears once you begin walking it.

For years, I waited for clarity before taking a step. Psychedelic Archives flipped that equation. By following what fascinated me, the path began to reveal itself. And slowly, I found the courage to walk it.

Psychedelic Archives is far from finished. In many ways, it feels like just the beginning.

Thank you, sincerely, to everyone who has been part of this journey. Your curiosity, enthusiasm, and generosity have made this far more meaningful than I ever could have imagined.

I can’t wait to see where we go from here.

— Kyle

Founder, Psychedelic Archives

IG: @psychedelicarchives