Welcome to Psychedelic Archives

A trip through psychedelic history 🍄

Carlos Santana performing at Woodstock, 1969. Photo by Jim Marshall.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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1. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, 1968.