Location :
Online only
Zoom : https://ucl.zoom.us/j/99342982623

Bio:

Dr. J. Christian Greer is a scholar of Religious Studies with a special focus on psychedelic culture. His latest book, Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots (co-authored with Dr. Michelle Oing) analyzes the pilgrimage folklore associated with the rainforests of Japan's Kii Peninsula. His forthcoming book, Angelheaded Hipsters: Psychedelic Militancy in Nineteen Eighties North America (Oxford University Press), explores the expansion of psychedelic culture within fanzine networks in the late Cold War era. He is the co-founder, and currently the co-chair of the Drugs and Religion program unit at the American Academy of Religion. Also, he has held teaching positions at Harvard University, Yale University, and is currently a lecturer at Stanford University. He has recently launched “The Psychedelic Universe: Global Perspectives on Higher Consciousness,” an intensive summer school seminar hosted by the University of Amsterdam’s Graduate School of Social Sciences.

Abstract:

The connections between psychedelic drugs and religion have deep historical roots in human history, and can be found across a wide spectrum of human cultures. The most famous connection is perhaps the Indo-Aryan hymns to “soma” of the Rg Veda (c.1500–700 BCE), which has fascinated and confounded scholars for more than a century. Antiquity is rich in psychedelic ceremonialism, from the ritual use of the San Pedro cactus within the Chavín civilization (900–200 BCE) in the Peruvian highlands, to the spiked viticulture of Greco-Roman society. While the religious use of drugs is widespread and complicated, it is definitely not simply a thing of the past, nor are they only found in non-Western cultural settings.

In this lecture, I will underscore the ways in which religious meanings have been associated with psychedelics across time and space. This historical survey will then be brought to bear on today’s “Psychedelic Renaissance,” as we will pay special attention to the ways in which unspoken religious biases informed the ways neuroscientists and research clinicians use terms such as “mystical,” “spiritual,” and “religious.” As will become clear, the usage of these terms within psychedelic clinical trials is far from value-neutral, and belies a problematic naiveté with respect to their complex (and often contradictory) meanings of religious terminology.