Psychedelics are More Hagrid Than Healthcare
Wizardry and the birth of a living psychedelic religion
Some stories are more than just entertainment — they’re myths. They’re cultural touchpoints we use to navigate reality together.
The Godzilla myth, for example, is clearly connected to the nuclear attacks on Japan — an unstoppable force that emerges from the ocean and destroys entire cities. It’s a way of making sense of a big, intractable issue.
For the last 75 years or so, our culture has been obsessed with the Myth of the Alienated Child. In this story, a child grows up surrounded by adults with strange, grotesque values. The child feels out of place, and often depressed. Then they find something that transports them out of their alienating predicament and into an enchanted world:
A tollbooth.
A giant peach.
A wardrobe.
A secret garden.
A train.
The new magical world isn’t safer or more comforting than the old one — in fact, it’s always more perilous. Before leaving for Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s life was very safe; it was just bleak. Yet despite the dangers of being a wizard, he preferred it to being a muggle. Why? Because life at Hogwarts was more meaningful.
Carl Jung said, “a tribe’s mythology is its living religion,” and the Alienated Child myth reflects our shared sense of alienation in the postmodern, late-stage-capitalist, nuclear-family nightmare into which we found ourselves born. We are all living under the stairs and desperate for something to whisk us into an enchanted realm.
We all yearn to be told, “you’re a wizard, Harry.”
Psychedelics can be that thing. They can be our giant peach, our Ms. Honey, our Hagrid1. They have the power, at sufficient doses and under appropriate conditions, to re-enchant our lives.
So the question is not whether they are magic, but whether we still have the courage to believe in them.
The Effects of Magical Wardrobes on Juvenile Depression
The Psychedelic Renaissance has been defined in our culture through the lens of science. These substances have been cast as psychiatric pharmaceuticals, no different from Prozac or Xanax, except by mechanism of action.
They’re just antidepressants with a wacky side effect.
MDMA, in this lens, isn’t a heart-opener or empathogen, it’s a chemical tool for repairing the brain damage associated with PTSD. There’s nothing magic about mushrooms — they just contain psilocybin, which increases important brain connectivity.
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with this approach. What science does is strip away subjective experience and reveal objective patterns. Yet peeling back the veneer of psychedelic science reveals how little it has actually managed to explain.
Take the Mystical Experience Questionnaire2, a research tool used by psychedelic studies to connect the “subjective” experience of participants with “objective” outcomes, such as reduction of depression symptoms. Many experiments have found a relationship between the intensity of mystical experience and positive mental health outcomes, regardless of dose. For example, one study on tobacco addiction found that participants who had more intense mystical experiences with psilocybin were more likely to abstain from tobacco after the session.
This all seems pretty scientific, right? I mean, check out that p-value.
But underneath this quantitative facade lies a bunch of psychedelic weirdness. For example, the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire asks participants whether they felt:
Experience of the insight that “all is One.”
Feeling that it would be difficult to communicate your own experience to others who have not had similar experiences.
Freedom from the limitations of your personal self and feeling a unity or bond with what was felt to be greater than your personal self.
Here’s the kicker:
Certainty of encounter with ultimate reality (in the sense of being able to “know” and “see” what is really real at some point during your experience).
In other words, the experiences themselves, which are correlated with the outcomes scientists are interested in, are by their nature unscientific. They are as woo-woo as a Dr. Bronner’s label. And the more participants agree with Dr. Bronner, the more likely they are to get better.
Even the design of the studies themselves are drawn on the intuitive wisdom of underground guides, not the scientific method. The songs played to participants in the Johns Hopkins trials were chosen because they’re meaningful and beautiful, not because they passed some objective test. The whole idea of putting participants in a “comfortable living room setting” rather than a hospital bed is based on vibes, not data.
In other words, just because psychedelic research uses scientific tools doesn’t mean the subject they are studying is scientific. You could rigorously study the effect of a magical wardrobe on the mental health of British children, but that doesn’t mean you understand the wardrobe.
Does the wardrobe reduce depression? Sure. Does it affect brain structure? Probably. But none of these outcomes, however precisely measured, explain Narnia.
We have it backwards. Psychedelics don’t cure depression. Our postmodern muggle lives cause it. Psychedelics just offer a glimpse outside.
So why have we, as a psychedelic culture, refused to take the “magic” of these substances seriously? Why are we still couching their effects in muggle terms?
Because, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re scared of donning wizard robes.
“This Machine Kills Hippies”
When LSD entered the cultural mainstream, it broke an entire generation out of a cultural trance. Young people suddenly realized that war was insane, sexuality was beautiful, and institutionalized systems of control were unacceptable. They burned their draft cards and bras, and threatened the status quo so directly that the status quo hit back, hard.
LSD was outlawed. The CIA infiltrated countercultural groups and discredited them. And the people who embraced this new religion of love and peace — hippies — were culturally castigated. It was a violent stamping-out by the global capitalist empire on par with the Roman Empire’s extermination of early Christians.
Sound overly dramatic? The other day I saw a truck3 with a bumper sticker that read, “This machine kills hippies.”
It was a bit jarring, and honestly kinda funny in its baldness. But it made me think: Imagine if the word “hippie” was replaced with any other cultural or religious group. Putting that bumper sticker on your car would be a hate crime, right? But “hippies” have been so successfully ostracized that threatening to kill them with your vehicle is a joke.
It’s a cultural backlash so ubiquitous we can’t actually see it.
Psychedelics are telling us the same things now as they did to the hippies in the 1960s: That we must elevate consciousness and break out of our cultural prison. But we’re so scared — consciously or unconscious — of what embodying that message actually means that we tuck these lessons into safe drawers labeled “mental health” and “wellness” rather than embracing the living religion they preach.
Why are we so scared? Because we know what this culture does to hippies, wizards, and witches — it burns them.
So we face a difficult choice when returning from chemically occasioned mystical experiences: Do we trust what we learned there, or do we trust the opposing cultural messages we receive as we integrate? Do we choose to believe in magic or return to our muggle lives under the staircase?
We can’t have it both ways.
A friend who read a draft of this newsletter reminded me that many people dislike J.K. Rowling now, which is a wonderful example of our shared cultural nightmare.
In Ojai, California, of all places.