Who is Who in Psychedelics

American philosopher and psychologist whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is the founding text of the academic study of mysticism — and whose own experiments with nitrous oxide convinced him that “our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” He appears here because that sentence is the intellectual foundation of the entire department. He also appears in Psychology.

Can help you study: The Varieties of Religious Experience, the four marks of mystical experience, nitrous oxide, radical empiricism, pragmatism, the psychology of religion, and the argument that no account of the universe that ignores these other forms of consciousness can be final.

Mazatec curandera (healer) from Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, who guided the velada — the sacred mushroom ceremony — for her community for decades before R. Gordon Wasson arrived in 1955. She was the voice that was there before any Westerner came. Her chants — the “I am” litanies — have been called the greatest visionary poetry in twentieth-century Latin America. After Wasson published, thousands of outsiders came to Huautla. Her community blamed her. She said the mushrooms had lost their power. She appears here first because she was first.

Can help you study: The velada, Mazatec healing practice, sacred mushrooms in indigenous context, the “I am” litanies, language as medicine, the consequences of Wasson’s publication, and the question of what happens when a sacred practice meets the outside world.

English novelist and essayist who took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline in May 1953 and wrote The Doors of Perception (1954) — the book that opened the modern Western encounter with psychedelics. He argued that the brain is a “reducing valve” that filters Mind at Large down to a biologically useful trickle, and that mescaline opens the valve. He died on the same day as Kennedy’s assassination, requesting LSD on his deathbed. His wife Laura administered it.

Can help you study: The Doors of Perception, the reducing valve theory, mescaline, the perennial philosophy, visionary experience and art, and the question of whether what the doors reveal is real or merely interesting.

American banker, mycologist, and the founder of ethnomycology. On the night of 29 June 1955, in the Mazatec village of Huautla de Jiménez, he became the first known outsider to participate in a velada — a sacred mushroom ceremony — guided by the curandera María Sabina. He published the account in Life magazine in 1957. He went on to argue that Soma, the divine plant of the Rig Veda, was Amanita muscaria, and that the Eleusinian Mysteries involved an ergot-derived psychoactive. He opened a door and spent the rest of his life wondering whether he should have.

Can help you study: Ethnomycology, the velada, María Sabina, the Soma hypothesis, the Eleusinian Mysteries, the mycophilia/mycophobia thesis, and the problem of what happens when a sacred practice meets the Western press.

Swiss chemist who synthesised LSD-25 on 16 November 1938 at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel. Five years later he accidentally absorbed a small quantity and experienced the first LSD trip in history. Three days later he deliberately took 250 micrograms and rode his bicycle home — Bicycle Day. He also isolated psilocybin and psilocin from Mexican mushrooms. He lived to 102 and never stopped arguing that LSD was a tool, not a toy.

Can help you study: LSD, psilocybin, the chemistry of psychedelics, Bicycle Day, the Sandoz research programme, and the argument that the problem was not the molecule but its misuse.

Harvard ethnobotanist who spent twelve years in the Colombian and Amazonian rainforest, living with indigenous peoples and documenting their use of psychoactive plants. He collected over 24,000 botanical specimens and described hundreds of species used in traditional medicine and ritual. He treated indigenous knowledge as primary scientific data, not folklore, and argued that the destruction of the rainforest was an epistemological emergency — the loss of knowledge that could never be recovered.

Can help you study: Ethnobotany, Amazonian plant knowledge, ayahuasca, peyote, indigenous pharmacology, conservation as epistemology, and the argument that the people who use the plants know more about them than the people who study them in laboratories.

American physician, neuroscientist, and psychonaut who invented the isolation tank, attempted interspecies communication with dolphins, and explored ketamine and LSD with a systematic intensity that oscillated between rigorous science and visionary excess. His Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (1968) proposed that the mind is a programmable system and that psychedelics are tools for rewriting its operating instructions. He believed he was in contact with a cosmic network he called ECCO. He may have been right. He may have been mad. The distinction interested him less than it interests us.

Can help you study: The isolation tank, ketamine, the human biocomputer, dolphin communication, metaprogramming, ECCO, and the argument that in the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.

British-born psychiatrist who coined the word “psychedelic” (“mind-manifesting”) in a 1957 letter to Aldous Huxley — beating Huxley’s counter-proposal “phanerothyme” with the rhyme: “To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.” He developed the M-hypothesis (that mescaline-like compounds produced in the body might cause schizophrenia), pioneered high-dose LSD treatment for alcoholism in Saskatchewan with striking success rates, and administered the mescaline session that became The Doors of Perception.

Can help you study: The naming and definition of psychedelics, the M-hypothesis, LSD treatment of alcoholism, the Saskatchewan experiments, the Huxley correspondence, psychiatric applications of psychedelics, and the argument that the right dose in the right setting can heal what talk therapy cannot reach.

American psychologist who ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project (1960–1963), was fired, and spent the rest of his life as the most visible and most controversial advocate for psychedelics in the twentieth century. He coined “set and setting” — the insight that the context of the experience determines its character — and “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America. He was often wrong and always interesting.

Can help you study: The Harvard psilocybin experiments, set and setting, the politics of psychedelics, the counterculture, the Concord Prison Experiment, and the cautionary lesson of what happens when a scientist becomes a prophet.

American chemist who synthesised and personally tested over two hundred psychoactive compounds, documenting each in PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, 1991) and TIHKAL (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved, 1997), co-authored with his wife Ann. He re-synthesised MDMA and introduced it to psychotherapists. He worked from a laboratory behind his house in Lafayette, California. He believed that the right to explore one’s own consciousness is a fundamental human right.

Can help you study: Psychedelic chemistry, structure-activity relationships, MDMA, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, self-experimentation as methodology, and the argument that cognitive liberty is the foundation of all other liberties.

Peruvian-American anthropologist — or novelist, or both — whose The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) and its sequels described an apprenticeship with a Yaqui sorcerer named Don Juan Matus. Whether the account is ethnography or fiction has been debated for fifty years; the phenomenology is extraordinary either way. His core teaching: reality is a description, and the description can be interrupted. He died in Los Angeles and his body was cremated before anyone was told.

Can help you study: Altered states of perception, the description as prison, the four enemies, tonal and nagual, controlled folly, the phenomenology of non-ordinary reality, and the question that precedes all others: does this path have a heart?

This simulacrum draws on the published work of Stanislav Grof — Czech-born psychiatrist who conducted over four thousand LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions before prohibition, more than any other clinician in history. He developed the COEX (condensed experience) system, the four Basic Perinatal Matrices, and after LSD was banned, Holotropic Breathwork as a non-pharmacological alternative. He argued that LSD is an “unspecific amplifier” of the psyche — it does not create experience but reveals what is already there.

Can help you study: LSD psychotherapy, COEX systems, the perinatal matrices, holotropic states, transpersonal psychology, and the argument that the psyche is vastly larger than the biographical self.

Chilean-born psychiatrist, Gestalt therapist, and one of the few researchers to systematically distinguish the effects of different psychedelic compounds on different personality types. He classified substances into “emotion-enhancers” (MDMA, MDA), “fantasy-enhancers” (harmaline), and “perception-enhancers” (mescaline), and integrated psychedelic therapy with Gestalt, the Enneagram, and his own SAT (Seekers After Truth) programme. His The Healing Journey (1973) is the most clinically precise account of differential psychedelic effects.

Can help you study: Differential psychedelic pharmacology, MDA, harmaline, the Enneagram, Gestalt therapy, the SAT programme, character and neurosis, and the argument that different substances open different doors in different people.

German-American psychologist who was one of the three principals (with Leary and Alpert) in the Harvard Psilocybin Project and co-authored The Psychedelic Experience (1964). After Harvard, he diverged from Leary’s evangelism toward scholarly rigour: Maps of Consciousness (1971), The Well of Remembrance (1994), Green Psychology (1999). He argued that intention is the bridge between ordinary and non-ordinary states, and that the ecological crisis is a crisis of consciousness.

Can help you study: The Harvard Psilocybin Project, maps of consciousness, green psychology, intention and set, the ecology of mind, ayahuasca, and the argument that healing the earth requires healing perception.

American ethnobotanist, writer, and lecturer whose spoken-word performances made him the most compelling public voice for psychedelics since Leary — and a more interesting thinker. His Stoned Ape hypothesis proposed that psilocybin catalysed the emergence of language and symbolic thought in early hominids. He argued that the mushroom speaks, that novelty increases toward an omega point, and that culture is not your friend. He died of brain cancer at fifty-three.

Can help you study: Psilocybin, the Stoned Ape hypothesis, novelty theory, the archaic revival, language as species-tool, DMT, Food of the Gods, and the argument that the plants are trying to communicate with us.

American ethnobotanist, chemist, and writer who co-coined the term “entheogen” (generating the divine within) to replace “psychedelic,” which he considered debased by association. His Pharmacotheon (1993) is the most comprehensive encyclopedia of entheogenic plants and compounds ever compiled. He developed pharmahuasca — synthetic ayahuasca analogues — and conducted hundreds of self-experiments with meticulous documentation. He lived in Mexico for decades, writing in relative obscurity while producing work of permanent reference value.

Can help you study: Entheogen terminology, Pharmacotheon, pharmahuasca, ethnobotanical chemistry, the pharmacratic inquisition thesis, self-experimentation methodology, and the argument that the war on drugs is a war on consciousness itself.

This simulacrum draws on the published work of Dennis McKenna — American ethnopharmacologist, Terence’s younger brother, and the one who went to graduate school. He has spent decades studying ayahuasca, DMT, and plant-based psychoactive preparations using the tools of Western pharmacology while insisting that indigenous knowledge systems are the primary data. He co-authored The Invisible Landscape with Terence and wrote The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, a memoir of their shared journey at La Chorrera.

Can help you study: Ethnopharmacology, ayahuasca, DMT, MAO inhibition, the pharmacology of plant preparations, the La Chorrera experiment, and the argument that the plants are ambassadors from a larger intelligence that we have barely begun to understand.

This simulacrum draws on the published work of Benny Shanon — Israeli cognitive psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who drank ayahuasca over 130 times and catalogued the visions systematically in The Antipodes of the Mind (2002) — the most rigorous phenomenological study of ayahuasca cognition ever conducted. He classified vision types, identified recurring patterns across subjects and cultures, and proposed that Moses at the burning bush may have been under the influence of an entheogenic preparation. The proposal was controversial. The data behind it is meticulous.

Can help you study: The cognitive phenomenology of ayahuasca, vision typology, the biblical entheogens hypothesis, The Antipodes of the Mind, systematic self-experimentation, and the argument that the visions are structured, not random.

This simulacrum draws on the published work of Paul Stamets — American mycologist who has spent decades arguing that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. His Mycelium Running (2005) describes fungi as the earth’s natural internet. He developed mycoremediation (using fungi to clean toxic waste), the Stamets Stack (psilocybin + lion’s mane + niacin for neurogenesis), and has identified species of fungi that can break down nerve agents and petroleum. He cured his own stammer with a heroic dose of psilocybin at the age of sixteen.

Can help you study: Mycology, mycelium networks, mycoremediation, psilocybin, the Stamets Stack, lion’s mane, Mycelium Running, and the argument that fungi are the unacknowledged foundation of terrestrial life.

This simulacrum draws on the published work of Robin Carhart-Harris — British neuroscientist who led the psychedelic research programme at Imperial College London and now directs the Neuroscape Psychedelics Division at UCSF. His “entropic brain” hypothesis proposes that psychedelics increase the entropy (disorder) of brain activity, dissolving the rigid patterns maintained by the default mode network. His REBUS (Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics) model is the leading neuroscientific framework for understanding how psychedelics work. His clinical trials comparing psilocybin to escitalopram for depression have changed the conversation about psychedelic medicine.

Can help you study: The entropic brain hypothesis, the default mode network, REBUS, psilocybin clinical trials, psychedelic neuroscience, psilocybin vs SSRIs, and the argument that psychedelics work by relaxing the brain’s prior beliefs about itself.