Psychedelics are enjoying a popular and scientific resurgence of interest due to rigorous documentation of their therapeutic potential and experiences perceived to be profoundly spiritual. In this Special Issue, authors examine the role of psychedelics across a range of religious contexts and reflect on broad philosophical and interpretive frameworks utilized in research and practice. Articles contribute measured, nuanced, and accurate accounts of psychoactive substances in religion and contemplative practice. As a whole, the issue provides foundations for thinking critically and strategically about how scholarship on psychedelics can contribute to understandings of religious, therapeutic, and recreational applications of such substances in contemporary contexts.
Editors
Daniel A. Hirshberg, University of Colorado-Boulder
Stuart Ray Sarbacker, Oregon State University
The purpose of this essay is to introduce the reader to the tradition of Hesychasm—a form of monastic asceticism rooted in the tradition of the Desert Fathers and given a systematic articulation by the Byzantine author Gregory Palamas (1296–1359)—and to consider how the mystical experiences described in Palamas’s Triads compare to the altered states at the center of contemporary psychedelic research. After reviewing the chief claims of the hesychastic tradition about the nature and purpose of ascetic practice, the essay will consider the methodological challenges psychedelic researchers face when assessing experiences induced by psychedelic substances. The last section will turn to the discipline of Comparative Theology as a helpful framework to bring into dialogue the hesychastic understanding of deification as a trajectory grounded in the reception of the sacraments and the therapeutic impact of psychedelic experiences. The essay will uncover different points of contact between hesychastic and psychedelic experience but will also foreground a number of irreducible differences between the two, reflecting the specific anthropological and soteriological claims of the hesychastic tradition. The conclusion will advocate for greater epistemic modesty—warning from overhasty identification of mystical states and psychedelic experiences—but also invite theologians and psychedelic researchers to greater reciprocal openness to each other’s insights.
The psychoactive plant Datura metel appears across a range of traditions in premodern South Asia preserved in texts. Among those traditions is the form of tantric Buddhism (Vajrayāna) located in the yoginī tantras. In Vajrayāna works, the plant is most prominently used in instructions for bringing about one or more of the magical acts (ṣaṭkarman). This paper explores the possibility that datura was consumed for its hallucination-inducing potential by considering how the plant was viewed and used in premodern South Asia through an ethnobotanical approach to relevant texts. I argue that the material potency of the plant as a dangerous poison, well established in Sanskrit medical literature from an early period, gave it a magical potency that made it a favored ingredient in several hostile magic rites (abhicāra) found in the yoginī tantras. I suggest that the line between material and magical is an inappropriate distinction to draw when examining these tantras, and that the most responsible way to approach the use of psychotropic plants in a premodern culture is by examining what actors from that culture said about the plant rather than relying on our existing knowledge of the effect of that plant.
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