Mysteries of the psychedelic divine feminine

Therapy

Both genders can embrace spontaneity, intuition, change, connection and acceptance

Heidi Taillefer, ‘Angels of our Nature’ there’s a print going here

Dr Luke’s diverse body of work includes a blast of goddess energy.

He co-edited of Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine: Creativity, Ecstasy, and Healing. To co-editor Maria Papaspyrou the psychedelic feminine represents self-expression, spontaneity, intuition, inclination towards change, mindfulness, connection, and acceptance. It isn’t gender-specific but archetypal: “The feminine is an elemental pattern we all carry within ourselves, whether we are men or women,” says Papaspyrou.

Papaspyrou cites Gareth Hill, a Jungian analyst who divided the feminine into ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ aspects. Static “serves the impersonal goals of life on Earth, species preservation and survival.” The dynamic “receives her wisdom by engaging with direct experience, and is receptive to knowledge that belongs to the deep inner worlds”.

“The realms beyond that space belong to the feminine. There we meet what is beyond words”

It is the dynamic in particular that we deny at our disservice and peril: “The dynamic feminine represents spaces that can be fascinating and ecstatic as well as terrifying and disorienting, that as a society we have learned to resist.” This is represented in myth by tantric goddess Kali who tramples men that gaze ecstatically up at her as a result, as she finally frees from the constraints of ego. We’ve all been there chaps.

The feminine is psychedelic in that it encompasses concepts like cosmic union, timelessness, rebirth, and ego death. “The realms beyond that space belong to the feminine, and there we meet what is beyond words and immediate perception,” says Papaspyrou. Never mind that many sectors of the psychedelic renaissance are, or will, be served by women from social work to psychotherapy and luxury tourism.

Healing with Laughter

Therapy

It’s okay to get the giggles says the space’s most storied therapist

David Shrigley, ‘You are Very Important’

It’s okay to have a chuckle, or a cry, ‘in ceremony’. We could all probably do with one.

“Some patients have an intuitive understanding of the transcendent. Some just giggle,” says Dr Richards.

“For many of us intellectualisation is our primary form of armouring,” continues the seasoned psychedelic therapist, “tell participants to appreciate their thinking minds, but let themselves go out and play. See your patient going through states of wisdom, vulnerability…” and be prepared for pranksterism. The voyager might not be feeling especially mystic today, and that’s their prerogative. “A playful experience may actually be what’s needed,” says Richards. The god of laughter deserves reverence also.

“We are primarily dealing with human consciousness, a meaningful process unfolding from within”

Reverence is appropriate to tradition, but welcome to the aeon where do what we wilt, not least out of necessity. Fortune favours the brave: the two-guide format, for example, began because researchers couldn’t hold their subject’s hand and change the record on the turntable at the same time. There’s an anecdote that might get you some laughs in over-intellectualising psychedelic circles.

‘Celebrating the mysteries’ is the new euphemism of choice

Therapy

The inner healer remains the preserve of the elite but its gatekeepers look ever more ridiculous

Above and below: kylix cup depicting Hades and Persephone from 430BC now in The British Museum

Accessibility is a hot topic in ‘the space’ right now. As ever.

At the inaugural Psych Symposium in London’s National Gallery earlier this May 2022, itself undeniably elitist at £400 for a basic one-day ticket and £1,000 for full access and the drinkies, MAPS spokesperson Natalie Lyla Ginsberg told suits that “PTSD is most common in the marginalised communities who cannot currently access these treatments.” Author Zoe Cormier eviscerated corpos with lines like, “So if it’s okay for somebody dying of bowel cancer to grow their own mushrooms, why is it not okay for normal folks?” (Answer: ‘because dosages’, to a lack of any audible groans). 

The Greeks famously all tripped together at the Eleusinian Mysteries, an invite-only annual bash held at the festival of Demeter for the best part of two thousand years. It’s heavily referenced in Shakespeare’s esoteric play The Tempest. Supposedly ‘The Mysteries’ was reserved only for the ‘invisible college’ wyrd and wonderful types, but high society were in on things too: “The beautiful people following the interesting people, and the rich people follow the beautiful people” as a wise lady once told me. Indeed, the use of psychedelics was only proven recently when a gruelling, decades-long investigation into the local availability of psychedelic ergot was trumped by legal records prosecuting a notorious socialite for ‘celebrating the mysteries’ at dinner parties back home in Athens (he got exiled to Sparta, by the way). Current podcast staple Brian Muraresku will tell you all about psychedelic use by the early Christians. And has been recently in great interviews like this around his book The Immortality Key.

The ancient greeks believed “Life can only be experienced in a truly terrifying, but transformational, encounter with death.”

Ritually, the Greeks supped from elaborate kylix cups (above). Medieval witches got rampant on datura, best taken internally via the mucus membrane, by inserting it vaginally – ‘riding the broomstick’. In 2022 ketamine bumps are delivered in £5,000 inhalers, and while no one is sticking DMT up their bum just yet, the common folk are hunted and persecuted by the agents of mediocrity still.

Psychedelic therapy is an art first and a science second

Therapy

You can train as a shaman with Dr Joe! But there’s a catch. You actually have to go and do it

Anderson Debernardi, ‘Ayahuasqueros Healing’ available here

“It’s living in the jungle for four months, eating right,” says Tafur, “You can’t read it and write it.”

You can train to be a shaman with Dr Joe! But there’s what would be considered, in this modern world, a catch: you actually have to go and do it.

Even for psychotherapists practicing MDMA therapy at MAPS, Dr Tafur points out, “There’s no running away when you’re in there with people who have these issues for eight hours.”

Whether delivering the icaros in that delightful yet dread-laden way, or deftly reaching out with your neuroceptive aura, Dr Tafur is keen to stress, “this is an art.”

A powerful combination of the sacred, the empathic, and experience in healing epigentic-related conditions is central to his hypothesis (see Medical below). It’s why the clinical sector is fascinated; even in this 1950s archive footage a researcher asks his test subject “how does your soul feel right now?” Plus it’s also why ravers aren’t cured of mental health issues after a big weekend - context and other important characteristics are key to the drug experience having a self-healing element. The spiritual factor prompts an ever deeper form of self-healing when combined with the therapeutic. “Current medical science cannot match the transpersonal, or the moving,” says Dr Tafur.

‘Psyche’ in classical greek means ‘soul’. Dr Tafur explained that indigenous perspectives consider spirituality and healing to be one and the same. Music, prayer, ceremony, connection and affirmation: all augment the ‘spiritual experience’ that research shows is key to healing with psychedelics.

Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill W’s LSD use inspired 12-Step and cured his depression

Therapy

LSD treatment is most effective against the demon drink, says a 2020 report. But AA founder Bill ‘W’ was ahead of the curve back in the 1950s

Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson was forced to stand down from his pro-LSD stance

Hospitalised three times already in less than two years during the mid-30s, Bill ‘W’ Wilson checked himself into hospital for rehab bearing a copy of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience.

He was given the Towns-Lambert treatment for detoxification made using deadly nightshade, henbane (both lively natural psychedelics) and morphine over a period of days.

A close converted christian friend and recovery fellow, Ebby, visited, and pressed the conversation towards Wilson’s atrocious treatment of his wife Lois. Wilson hit ‘rock bottom’ – ego death – and, as he writes in autobiography Pass it On:

“Then came the blazing thought, ‘you are a free man!’ A great peace stole over me, and this was accompanied by a sensation difficult to describe. I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. ‘This’, I thought, ‘must be the great reality.”

“LSD therapy has contributed not a little to this happier state of affairs”

Wilson also experienced visions of “a chain of drunks” extending around the globe, assisting each others’ recovery. This would become Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Wilson also came to value spirituality, and etched its practice into The Twelve Steps. According to his I am Bill biographer Francis Hartigan, Wilson thought depression grew from a “lack of faith” and a dearth of “spiritual achievement.”

Vitally, he “did not see any conflict between science and medicine and religion.”

Thanks to Osmond’s work, church and community leaders were (at this stage) pro-LSD, having seen Osmond’s patients rejoin functional society. Wilson met Osmond and Hoffer in his role as an abstinence thought leader to discuss addiction in 1954. At this stage our favourite post-war sub-arctic boffins were blundering around believing LSD would prompt delerium tremens attacks that might shock drinkers out of their rut. Osmond: "We found, in fact, that this wasn't quite how it worked… not unlike Bill's experience. It gave us pause for thought. Not on the grounds of how terrifying it was, but how illuminating it was."

In 1955 Wilson took LSD under supervision from consciousness pioneer Gerald Heard and psychiatrist Sidney Cohen (who also provided Aldous Huxley’s deathbed LSD).

He wrote to Betty Eisner, one of his therapy team plus an especially innovative researcher into addiction and LSD, reporting:

“Since returning home I have felt — and hope have acted! — exceedingly well. I can make no doubt that the Eisner-Cohen-Powers-LSD therapy has contributed not a little to this happier state of affairs.”

AA's narrative was that it healed through a combination of complete sobriety and the ‘higher power’ (the latter Wilson considered contactable via LSD). Psychedelics and even psychology didn’t fit with that. To fervent AA members, “Bill’s seeking outside help was tantamount to saying the program didn’t work” writes Hardigan. 

“This,” 12-step founder Wilson thought, “must be the great reality”

In 2020, a systematic review published by Frontiers in Psychology compiling figures from alcoholism LSD treatments over many decades said, “LSD is revealed as a potential therapeutic agent in psychiatry; the evidence to date is strongest for the use of LSD in the treatment of alcoholism.”

John Hopkins stand-out Matthew Johnson began trials on psilocybin for smoking cessation in 2014, and has since racked up an 80% success rate that dwarfs other approaches. His team are also starting or planning studies using psilocybin therapy for a wide range of other conditions, including opioid addiction and alcoholism. 

Bill ‘W’ Wilson caved into pressure and stopped LSD therapy in the mid-60s. Neither his depression nor drinking returned.