In this section you will find materials that have been published in one of three collections between 1997 and 2008.
Introduction to Entheogens and the Future of Religion, originally began as a letter to Mircea Eliade asking for more time to complete an assignment I owed him for a class on Mythical Time, one of last classes he taught. A few years later it became the introduction to Entheogens and the Future of Religion, published in 1997, by The Council on Spiritual Practices.here, an anthology I produced after several years of gathering...
Psychedelic Experience and Spiritual Practice, A Buddhist Perspective. Conversation with Jack Kornfield at his home in October, 1986. After a three year immersion in psychedelic studies it became clear that many travelers of this path have different understanding of the process of awakening taught by the Buddha, though there was a lot of overlap of language, “enlightenment,” for example, so I sought out my vipassana meditation instructor Jack Kornfield, to discuss.
A Conversation with R. Gordon Wasson happened at his home on Long Ridge Road in Danbury. Connecticut, in October, 1985. I had first met Mr. Wasson the year before, in January, 1984. At the suggestion of Richard Shultes I invited him to a conference I organized at Harvard Divinity School. He respected the scholarly way I was going about the topic so he agreed to be interviewed, one of only two or three he gave in his career. This is a photocopy scan of the type script with Gordon’s corrections, and snooty comments, “an illiterate mistake!” Most people don’t know that one. Ha. At the time I felt extremely privileged and honored to be so welcomed by him, a recluse, private about his career and protective of his research being used to justify drug culture, as you can feel in the interview. As I discovered some hidden facts and factors in Wasson’s life was forced to take a different point of view about the psychedelic renaissance, then, and now. I say more about this here.
Introduction to Outside Looking In, a brief biography of Timothy Francis Leary, first published in 1998. In 1993, after a Sandoz conference on LSD in the Swiss Alps I came to a shocking awareness of Albert Hofmann’s anti-Semitism, that caused me to reexamine a lot of what I had previously thought about political consciousness and the history of psychedelics. When I returned to California I went down to Beverly Hills to meet with Leary. He was very gracious, invited me for the weekend. I met a wholly different character than I had come to know after several meetings at conferences or private gathering with him where he always seemed troubled, burned out, not a happy man. I held the view that his reckless egotistical behavior had caused an important field of study to be squandered. I don’t think that anymore. In fact, opposite. We dive deeply into why here. After that weekend I decided to compile a Festschrift for Leary. A Festschrift is a traditional European academic or artistic honor, a festival of writing by your colleagues and friends, honoring your career. This is the introduction to that fine but under appreciated book. I was right that Leary would be cast a villain in the media as psychedelics became popular again. Outside Looking In, Appreciations Castigations and Reminiscences was my first attempt to correct the record. And I hadn’t yet gotten into the CIA. Now I know how naïve I was.
Conversation with Ram Dass took place at his home in San Anselmo, when Tim was still alive, and before Ram Dass suffered his major stroke in ???. The relationship between Ram Dass and Tim at the Harvard Psilocybin project and beyond tells a story that although has been subject to a few books and documentary films, has not been fully exposed. I very appreciate the brilliant efforts of my friend Gay Dillingham in her film Dying to Know, a fascinating and illuminating dialogue between Tim and Ram Dass in the last few months of Tim’s life. Though the two of them are fused together in history for their exploits at Harvard, in fact they only associated with other for a 6 year period. Most of the last 30 years of their life they were somewhat estranged. That film ends with Tim stating clearly how different they are. These differences are key to understanding two of the different psychedelic movements in modern history which illustrate the different functions of religion as well.(link here to further discussion on this).
Huston Smith on Timothy Leary.. . It was always a precious time whenever I visited Huston and Kendra in their homes either high up in the Berkeley or down in the flats where they moved when being a cliff dweller, he called it, became too much for them. I feel immensely privileged to have been welcomed into his life, to learn from him directly. It was like a visit to the Buddha. They were married and together for more than 60 years. One of my favorite memories was sitting in a bar with Huston drinking Guinnesses on St Patrick Day after a talk he gave in New York City and I was his chaufffer. He suddenly remembered it was the anniversary of meeting her, more than 60 years ago and was afraid he would hurt her feelings if he didn’t call to tell her how he still loved her. Unaccustomed to cell phones, (this was 2002) he was astonished when I pulled mine out. He spoke to her with such a sweetness, the sweetness of a man kissed by the divine. The day of this interview was the day Huston received a letter from the Council on Spiritual Practices which offered to compile all his writings on psychedelics into a single book. He told me he would decline. He didn’t want to be known as an advocate. His feelings about the subject were nuanced and his writings spoke for themselves, scattered about though they were, in various journals and books. I told him his reputation was beyond reproach and his acknowledgement of the religious significance of entheogens could be a important book to move the subject into a field where it belonged. That book eventually was published as Cleansing the Doors of Perception. Photo or link.
Philip Slater, Lets Save Democracy, a conversation between Phil and I in Lulu Carpenter’s, a cafe in Santa Cruz where we met regularly for more than twenty years. I was intrigued by his sociological research and especially by his 1970 bestselling critique of American culture, The Pursuit of Loneliness when I was a college senior so I asked my professor where he was teaching, thinking I might want to study with him. “At the cafe downtown,” was the answer. He took his own advise and dropped out of an academic and social world he found false and oppressive, even though he held an esteemed position -Chairman of the Department of Sociology- at Brandeise University, to write plays and novels and occasional non fiction, that barely, if ever paid the rent. He took odd jobs like riding his bike around campus delivering cookies. Students a had no idea he was an prominent sociologist and political philosopher of the last half of the twentieth century. I adopted him as a wise man teacher and we became friends, I joined a writing group he started and shared a few scenes from a screenplay I had written about the Harvard days of Timothy Leary. That’s when Phil learned that he was paid by the CIA when a Harvard graduate student to give out LSD. We all know about Timothy Leary. Not so well known is that the CIA paid for LSD to be administered to Harvard people in 1947, 10 years before Leary arrived. As Phil describes, they handed it out like candy to anyone, including undergraduates, who signed up for the 20 dollar inducement to experience the new, untested drug. “The point was to make people crazy.”
Republishing The Road To Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries in 1998 was one of my most ambitious projects, but one that appeared to gather no traction until quite recently, in 2020, when Brian Muraresku published his immediate best seller, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, which revived the subject and brought it to millions of readers throughout the world. The project was to draw attention to the formative role of entheogens in western religion and philosophy. Decades of research made it clear that entheogens are central to many indigenous societies but very little on how they figured in “ours.” The Road to Eleusis could change that. I first saw the republication effort to mount a challenge to a 1974 Federal Court Ruling that denied the Church of the Awakening an exemption to the Controlled Substance Act like the Native American Church has, to use peyote as a religious practice. The Church was comprised of a small group of mostly white, Christian, up standing citizens, who had used peyote sacramentally before the ban. They petitioned the Court, claimed they were being discriminated against because they were not “native Americans, and were denied, with the explanation that the Native American Church has a long history and in the western white culture there is none. They ruled this in 1974. The Road to Eleusis was published in 1978, undermines the Court’s opinion. Actually it presents a powerful argument that psychedelics were central to our history of religion too. The Road to Eleusis was published at a time when psychedelics had started to become passe, diminishing in the media, in scholarship, research. It quickly sold out of a very small print run, was never republished and became an expensive thing to find on the rare book market, fetching 100s of dollars for a paperback copy. So what a great idea, obviously, to bring it back into print, with new material to advance the thesis, in a finely printed in Italy at the famed Stamperia Valdonega, where Wasson had all his first editions published. Everyone, Albert, Carl, Masha Britten (Gordon’s daughter and executor of the Wasson Estate), agreed and gave me the copyright.
I asked Huston Smith, who had been the Buddha to me for 15 years, if he’d write a preface to the new edition. I knew Huston’s opinion about drugs and religion pro and con and thought he’d be delighted. I knew he had great respect for Wasson and the way he approached the topic. But to my surprise he declined. “Robert I don’t want to be too identified as a drug advocate. I have written all I want about them, and as you know, my position is nuanced.”
I’d really wanted Huston because he was so widely respected his words would help re-legitimize the topic and I told him so. But since he declined I rethought my plan. Next, I asked Terence McKenna, who felt honored and immediately jumped to the task. He produced this essay the next day, published here for the first time:
Afterword
1998 marks the Twentieth Anniversary of the first publication of The Road to Eleusis. Twenty years is long enough for a child or an idea to reach the threshold of maturity. The ideas which the authors — the banker, the chemist and the classicist — brought forth have been largely unchallenged and ignored by specialists in the culture of ancient and Classical Greece. The situation seems to fulfill the rule of thumb that when ideas are controversial they are discussed, when they are revolutionary, they are ignored.
And without contest the ideas put forth by this unlikely threesome are revolutionary indeed. But why? Of what possible import could the methods and materials of a dead mystery cult hold for this world of the third millennium? The answer is simply this: that how we understand and explain to ourselves what transpired at Eleusis determines in large measure our spiritual values and our relationship to the dark uncharted vastness of the entheogenically illuminated mind. The extinction of the cult at Eleusis was a small part of the tumult and turmoil that gripped the Ancient World as its syncretic and celebratory polytheism was harried and hunted to extinction by hate-crazed mobs acting in the name of their Prince of Peace. Let us not pass over the fact that Aleric the Visigoth, the destroyer of Eleusis and much else of the Ancient World, was as thoroughly Christian as he was barbarian.
Often in my mind’s eye, I have visited that evil day when the dark smoke of rape and pillage defiled the blue of the Attic sky, and the ominous standard of the crow, insignia of this barbarian chieftain, fluttered and snapped in the sullied air, a mute witness to history-shaping atrocity. It was a day of unthinkable acts; the Telesterion breached, the priesthood shattered, the sacred lineage terminated by murder and diaspora. If there are truly pivotal moments in human history, then this surely was one of them. For as the authors of The Road to Eleusis make clear, the day before that day of rampage was the last sane moment that Western man was to know for nearly 1500 years. The destruction of Eleusis cut the umbilical cord of the developing Western mind, severed its connection to the great mysteries of the earth mother/Great Goddess and the still more ancient cults of Crete with its connections further south and deeper into time, to the bedrock of the African genesis of consciousness and ecstasy in our newly evolved species.
And one can wonder: What if the fates had seen fit to allow another ending? What if the horrifying cult of the Gallilean had not insinuated its way into dominance of Roman civilization? What if late Roman Christianity had not been allowed to hunt its critics into extinction and to infect the whole polity of Europe with its necrophilia and self-hate? The true poignancy of the situation can only be felt by those who agree with the premise of this book, that Eleusis was the last redoubt of entheogen-based religious spirituality in the West. With the destruction of Eleusis the connection to the Earth mother Ge, the Gaian Logos was severed and the stage was set for the descent into mass pathology that reached its Apocalyptic crescendo in the rise of the modern industrial state and its use of propaganda and the threat of nuclear annihilation to pursue its agenda.
On a particular weekend some several decades ago, as the Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto were being systematically murdered like rats in a sewer by a particularly virulent expression of the Western mind; the Wermacht acting at the behest of the German National Socialism, a Swiss pharmaceutical chemist made a remarkable discovery. Unaware that just a few hundred miles away from his quiet laboratory was unfolding a situation whose horror would come to epitomize the mindless self devouring psychosis of Twentieth Century politics, Albert Hofmann self-administered lysergic acid diethyamide and began his famously unsteady bicycle ride through the streets of Basel.
Hofmann himself, would doubtless, in that moment, have been amazed if anyone had suggested to him that his lysergic epiphany had any relationship at all to the horror then unfolding in Poland, or to the extinction of a nearly forgotten Greek mystery cult centuries ago.
However now, and with the superior wisdom of hindsight, we see that these disparate events in time and space were all part of the unfolding drama of the evolution of he human soul and its struggle with the primal darkness that attended its birth like a placenta.
For we have been lost for some time, Monotheism, scientific reductionism, materialism and mass marketing have built a world unfit for fools, let alone the rest of us. Our culture which denies spirit, femininity, ambiguity, Eros and fun and offers in its place debt, alienation, and debauchery is daily perceived as more and more inadequate by more and more people. And the answer to this dilemma is clear; we require a radical reintegration with the living mystery, both individually and collectively. This encounter is the sine qua non for setting a new course toward sanity, balance with the earth and true community. These values are only to be recovered through a rebirth of the mysteries and a reconnection with the numinous. This is most effectively and easily achieved through the use of entheogens, those same sacraments that flourished at Eleusis and that today excite the agendas of pharmaphobes and crypto fascists.
Quite simply we need to change our minds. Quickly. And nothing is capable of changing our minds as gently and effectively and rapidly as the entheogens have been shown to do. They are the medicine we need, they are our ancient birthright, denied us by the thin-lipped heresy hunters ever on the lookout for competitors to their own miserably eviscerated Eucharist. The discoveries described by the authors of this book hint at a return to a world of experience that is authentically human. For this alone we owe these authors a debt of enormous gratitude. Their lives and work have rekindled the entheogenic light so brutally extinguished at Eleusis. Because of their scholarship and discoveries there is an iota more of hope in this troubled world. This cannot be a bad thing.
Terence McKenna
Opihihale, Hawaii
May, 1998
About a week later Huston calls me to say he’s thought it over, agreed with me, and changed his mind. He would like to write the new preface. I was stoked. A few days later Huston sent me a draft. We tinkered back and forth a few days and finally settled on this perfectly elegant and right on preface expressing exactly what I’d hoped he would. I thought all was well. Now the new edition has the wise elder prefacing the book, and the more radical, and popular with youth, McKenna’s essay as an afterword, to finish on a lively modern note. Except all was not well. Huston, after reading Terence’s essay, called to say he must withdraw his piece. He didn’t want to be published in the same book with him. “Oh I love Terence, and never have meet anyone with such an