PSYCHEDELIC GNOSIS: HISTORICAL AND ARCHETYPAL PERSPECTIVES
DR. HEREWARD TILTON
Summer 2024
The West is currently witnessing a “psychedelic Renaissance” as a rapidly growing body of academic research demonstrates the medical value of psychedelic compounds for the treatment of conditions such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and end-of-life anxiety. While this course offers students a grounding in recent developments in psychedelic neuroscience and psychotherapy, its primary aim is to place the contemporary resurgence of interest in psychedelics within a broader historical and mythic context.
Before the current “Renaissance,” the psychedelic counterculture of the 50s and 60s instigated a “revolution” with far-reaching social and political consequences. Moving beyond the narrowly scientific research, we will explore thematic continuities in the literature, music, and art of both psychedelic eras. Our reading list will include emerging voices in the contemporary scene, as well as classic works by authors including Leary, Grof, McKenna and others.
Widening our historical perspective still further to consider the employment of natural and synthetic entheogens in European alchemical, magical, and gnostic settings, we will find that a number of common themes in 20th and 21st century psychedelic literature have surprisingly archaic roots in the West, including the quest for a transmuting elixir, the awakening of the divine feminine, the discovery of an archetypal language, and more.
What can this wider perspective tell us about our current psychedelic Renaissance? Conversely, can contemporary psychedelic neuroscience shine an edifying light upon these archetypal dimensions of psychedelic experience? And what is their relationship with the indigenous shamanic traditions which have exercised such a decisive influence upon Western psychedelic culture? As we explore these questions, we will discover a new relevance for the age-old quest for gnosis, a form of self-knowledge which is simultaneously a knowledge of the foundations of the awe-inspiring cosmos around us.
Nine Saturdays Live on Zoom
2 PM — 3:30 PM PST
June 22 — August 24, 2024 (No Class July 6) *Recordings will be made available
$333
Hereward Tilton (BA Hons I, Ph.D., FHEA)is a religious studies scholar who has taught on the history of alchemy, magic, and Rosicrucianism at institutes dedicated to the study of Western esotericism within the University of Exeter and the University of Amsterdam. His interest in psychedelia was first kindled in his early teens, and he was inspired by experiments with LSD and lucid dreaming to study the work of Jung and Eliade as an undergraduate. Since receiving his doctorate he has conducted research on alchemical entheogens in early modern Germany under the auspices of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and he has translated and introduced an eighteenth-century Austrian black magical manuscript dealing with traditional psychoactive fumigations called Touch Me Not: A Most Rare Compendium of the Whole Magical Art (Fulgur Press, 2019). In his most recent books, The Path of the Serpent, Vol. 1: Psychedelics and the Neuropsychology of Gnosis (Rubedo Press, 2020) and its forthcoming sequel, he applies recent discoveries in psychedelic neuroscience to the symbolism and techniques of a European gnostic tradition with historical and phenomenological ties to Indo-Tibetan tantra. On occasion, Hereward has drunk ayahuasca with the Dutch neo-shaman Arno Adelaars, and he has translated Ayahuasca: Rituals, Potions, and Visionary Art from the Amazon (Divine Arts, 2016), a book co-written by Adelaars with Christian Rätsch and Claudia Müller-Ebeling.
Syllabus-At-A-Glance (In-depth syllabus and readings lists available for enrolled students).
Week 1. Introduction: The Tree of Gnosis
The Biblical account of the Fall was characterised by Huxley, Leary, and McKenna alike as the ‘first drug bust’. In this introductory class, we will examine the concept of psychedelic gnosis with recourse to the symbol of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Particular attention will be paid to the subversive reinterpretation of the Genesis account by the Sethian Gnostics, who cast the serpent as a liberating feminine agent of gnosis, while condemning Yahweh as the embodiment of egoic ignorance.
Week 2. Sunrise at the Cosmic Axis: The Peyote Pilgrimage of the Wixáritari
The mescaline-containing peyote cactus plays a central role in the lives and culture of the Wixáritari, an indigenous people of the Sierra Madre Occidental in north-western Mexico. Known for their long-standing resistance to Christianisation, the Wixáritari perform an annual 400-kilometre pilgrimage to gather and consume peyote at their ancestral hunting lands in the Chihuahuan desert. In this class we will explore the shamanic worldview expressed in nieríkate, the sacred designs granted to the Wixáritari in their visions; our purpose will be to contrast the modern Western use of psychedelics with the indigenous use of entheogens.
Week 3. The Heart and the Higher Soul: Entheogens in Western Magic
With the rise of Christianity in Europe, the pagan mysteries were prohibited and practitioners of ecstatic religion were marginalised. Nevertheless, the use of entheogens persisted in esoteric and folk magical traditions. The most commonly employed psychoactive plants were nightshades such as mandrake, henbane, and devil’s trumpets; however, flora rich in DMT were also utilised in Western magic. In this class we will examine the diverse purposes of natural and alchemical entheogen use in pre-modern Europe, and we will identify important historical precursors to modern psychedelic gnosis.
Week 4. The Serpent on the Cross: Proto-Psychedelic Gnosis in Fin-de-siècle Occultism
The extraordinary psychoactive properties of peyote first came to the attention of extractivist Western pharmacology in 1887. In the following decade, peyote use began to spread within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an esoteric society dedicated to the study of Western magical and gnostic traditions; members who partook of the sacred plant included the poet William Butler Yeats, the actress Maud Gonne, and the self-proclaimed prophet of Thelema, Aleister Crowley. In this class we will consider the extent to which entheogen use among fin-de-siècle occultists prefigured the psychedelic gnosis of the Psychedelic Era.
Week 5. “Moloch Whose Name is the Mind”: MKUltra and the Origins of the Psychedelic Era
Faced with a burgeoning Cold War and inspired by Nazi experiments with mescaline at Auschwitz and Dachau, the US military and the nascent CIA began a decades-long search for psychoactive agents which might prove useful for interrogations, mind control, and behaviour modification. Infamously, the ghouls of MKUltra worked to weaponize ‘psychotomimetics’ through covert experimentation on children, soldiers, prisoners, and other ‘expendables’. Using Allen Ginsberg’s peyote vision of Moloch as our interpretative key, in this class we will explore the role of powerful economic, military, and industrial forces in the genesis of the psychedelic era.
Week 6. Return to Eden: Aldous Huxley and the Birth of the Psychedelic Paradigm
On 4 May 1953, the English psychiatrist Humphry Osmond administered 400mg of mescaline to Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles. Huxley’s account of his experience in The Doors of Perception (1954) exerted a decisive influence on the emergent psychedelic counterculture. In this class we will examine Huxley’s role in the transition from the psychotomimetic to the psychedelic paradigm, focusing in particular on the inspiration he found in Advaita Vedanta and the Behmenism of William Blake.
Week 7. Surrender to the Void: Leary, Lennon, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Shortly after their expulsion from academia for controversial conduct at the Harvard Psilocybin Project, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert founded a psychedelic community at Millbrook, New York. There they collaborated with Ralph Metzner on The Psychedelic Experience (1964), a guide to psychedelic sessions based upon The Tibetan Book of the Dead. John Lennon used this guide on his own LSD trips, and in this class we will examine the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows – widely regarded as one of the most important songs of the sixties – as both a conduit for Leary’s ideas and a musical evocation of psychedelic gnosis.
Week 8. Alien Gnosis: Terence McKenna and the Message from the Overmind
In the early 1990’s, a new popular advocate of psychedelics rose to prominence via the electronic music of the psychedelic rave scene. Steeped in the work of Jung, Eliade, and the texts of gnosis East and West, Terence McKenna had undertaken a bizarre quasi-alchemical experiment with his brother Dennis in the Amazon, and in the post-Cold War era he gave voice to a distinctive neo-shamanic paradigm which revived the central Romantic themes of the sixties psychedelic counterculture: namely, the liberation of women, nature, and sexuality from an evolutionarily maladaptive ‘dominator culture’.
Week 9. The Fractal Tree of Life: Near-Criticality and Gnosis as an Archetypal Phenomenon
In this class we will review the diverse experiences and interpretative frameworks we have studied, and we will assess psychedelic gnosis as a phenomenological correlate of the restructuring neurological events identified by contemporary psychedelic neuroscientists in neuroimaging experiments. Adopting a holistic, non-reductive perspective, we will examine these events as neurobiological markers of the individuation process described by Jung – a process which can be catalysed by a number of gnostic technologies of consciousness beyond psychedelics.