Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America by Morgan Shipley (review)

One of my favorite courses to teach at my university is titled “America in the 1960s.” For at least one week during this course, I ask my students to consider the role of LSD and other psychedelics in the religious awakening that seemed to occur during the decade. To my disappointment, however, I find most students unable or unwilling to entertain the idea that these substances could be used for anything more than simply getting high. Morgan Shipley’s new book, Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America, is going to prove quite helpful in my attempt to persuade my students to take seriously the connections between psychedelic drugs, religious awakenings, and countercultural ways of living during the 1960s. The goal of the book, according to Shipley, is “to expand how we understand the religious efficacy of psychedelics, specifically in terms of the perennial interpretations that emerged as a means for fundamentally reordering the makeup of modern society” (3). Viewing his work as part of a rescue mission to challenge both popular and scholarly understandings of psychedelic culture as sensational, hedonistic, or amoral, Shipley argues that “psychedelics helped spawn a religious awakening defined by an experience of oneness” (3).

Shipley achieves this goal and supports his argument masterfully. Beginning with a careful analysis of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Shipley weaves a compelling explanatory thread throughout the book from the “set and setting” mantra of Tim Leary to the humanitarian and social justice focus of Stephen Gaskin and the Farm. For Huxley, psychedelics opened possibilities for mystical awareness and therefore had the potential to change the way individuals related to others and to their natural environment. Leary and his colleagues, particularly Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, translated Huxley’s revelation into practical psychedelic guidebooks that, according to Shipley, established a religious and ethical basis for the use of psychedelics and outlined a “therapeutic heuristic” for living in the modern world. The whole point was to encourage a shared psychedelic experience that would lead to an ecstatic realization of mutual dependency. The book culminates in the psychedelic religious teachings of Gaskin and his communal project known as the Farm. Shipley shows how Gaskin and his followers put the insights gained from psychedelic experiences into practice by attempting to ease the suffering of others and to “reorganize life according to principles of care and responsibility, not competition and consumption” (28).

Most impressive about Shipley’s book is the author’s willingness to use his research to confront both historical and popular misconceptions about the 1960s. Shipley directly tackles the declension model that was dominant for at least two decades and, despite recent challenges, remains stubbornly persistent in the historiography. This way of understanding the 1960s, often referred to as the Good Sixties/Bad Sixties framework, posited that the decade began with altruistic self-sacrifice and a commitment to nonviolence and ended with hedonism, cynical self-indulgence, and violence. Among the many interpretive limitations of the declension model, Shipley rightly points out that it “obscures the religious orientations and spiritual experimentations that sought to transform and structure psychedelic consciousness into worldly projects of social justice” (6). In a related way, Shipley critiques the lengths to which some commentators on the 1960s go to separate the activist from the hippie, a false dichotomy that only serves to support the crumbling declension model. Shipley’s book is a testament to the importance of paying attention to psychedelic religion and offers an alternative way of understanding this pivotal decade in U.S. history.

Many readers will note that Shipley confined his analysis to male figures in the psychedelic religious movements of the 1960s. Missing, in fact, are the names of women psychedelic pioneers such as Maria Sabina, Thelma Moss, Diana di Prima, or even Margaret Mead, who wrote about the influence of psychedelics on the practice of...