Historians on Drugs: Toward an Empirical Historiography of Global Psychedelic Cultures

Scholarship on the global history of psychedelics is divided between two rival approaches: pharmacological Calvinism, which stigmatizes mind-altering drugs and their users as degenerate or antisocial, and the entheogenic school, which presents psychedelics as the secret key behind religious traditions and mythology. Both are hindered by ideological biases. An empirical approach offers a corrective by drawing on granular primary-source research and situating psychedelics within the broader human story of ecstasy and transpersonal relationality, without claiming they are a key to any tradition.

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Abstract

Scholarship on the global history of psychedelics is divided into two rival approaches. This article analyzes these approaches, emphasizing the way in which ideological biases on both sides have stymied serious research on the use of psychedelic substances across space and time, before introducing the empirical approach as an alternative. The most prevalent view, “pharmacological Calvinism,” essentializes mind-altering drugs and their users as degenerate or antisocial. This reductive approach has defined the intellectual mainstream across academic disciplines to the present. In contrast to pharmacological Calvinism, the entheogenic school offers a maximalist interpretation of psychedelics’ impact on human culture and cognition, presenting consciousness-expanding drugs as the “secret key” behind the world's religious traditions, mythology, and folklore. This article proposes that the empirical approach offers a corrective to the overstatements of both schools, as it is defined by comparatively granular research that draws from a deep understanding of primary sources placed in conversation with the intellectual apparatuses of the secondary literature. Distinctly uninterested in unveiling psychedelics as the “key” to any tradition, this approach interprets the multiplicity of meanings and values associated with powerful psychotropics, alongside other modes of ecstasy and transpersonal relationality, as an integral dimension of the human story.