Psychedelic Legacies of American Religion

Review of 'Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches' (2023) by Mike Marinacci

Psychedelic cults and churches have been relatively scarce in Britain. We explored one in an article a couple of years ago, Paul Pawlowski’s London Church of Aphrodite. Even then, what began as an investigation into the LCA’s history, quickly morphed into a biographical piece about its founder. Perhaps this isn’t that surprising. Although not universal, a cult of personality emerging around a strong-willed and motivated individual is a common feature.

Another point that emerged from the article was that Pawlowski’s LCA was not the only psychoactive-sacrament-using ‘Hellenic religion’ to take shape around that time. Inspiration, no doubt dispersed through the networks of the Underground Press Syndicate, came from the Psychedelic Venus Church in the United States. Unsurprisingly, it was the much more religiously fertile ground of North America that influenced events across the pond.

That this particular aspect of American culture had such a limited influence, however, at a time when many other cultural influences were increasingly adopted on Britain’s shores, says something about the British religious psyche at the time. Considering the preponderance of religious sects in American life—in some sense, it has been in a constant rebellion against the Elizabethan settlement since the fleeing Pilgrims landed—the national psyche of Britain’s ‘official’ religion was obviously in a very different space.

American religious diversity is a very different context. The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions, or Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions stand as vast testament to the thousands of new and sectarian religious groups that have been founded in America over centuries. And hidden away in these pages, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century and accelerating in the psychedelic era, is a small but eclectic group of organizations that employ psychoactive sacraments.

The story of peyote as a much older facet of Native American cultural and religious heritage is a fascinating one (beautifully described in Mescaline by Mike Jay). Yet, like the Elizabethan settlement, the story of psychoactive substances and religion in America is perhaps more precisely a legal one; especially in light of the First Amendment and the founding of the Native American Church (NAC) in 1918. These provide a kind of historical template for what followed.

The psychedelic era may have been conceived in the laboratory, but, in America, it was born into a religiously complex culture. ‘Many of the [psychedelic] sects’ writes Mike Marinacci, ‘cribbed from the Native American Church, and pursued forms of entheogenic spirituality that drew on indigenous symbology and teachings’. And while others aped Eastern spirituality, they all grappled with the same legal constructs.

In Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground America (2023), Marinacci has written a well overdue book detailing over 60 cults, sects and spiritual groups with various psychoactive plants and substances as their sacraments. While he gives due credit to the NAC and other early indigenous users of peyote, the book’s main focus is those that have appeared since the advent of psychedelia.

The first part of Psychedelic Cults is dedicated to 18 prominent organisations; beginning with peyote churches, followed by LSD, legally ambiguous substances, cannabis and finally ayahuasca ones. The second part is an alphabetical list of ‘minor’ organisations with short descriptions—a fascinating but necessarily limited (due to sources) excursion into the furthest fringes of this extraordinary religious landscape. A few points we’ve already touched upon stand out starkly in Marinacci’s exploration of the topic.

The centrality of the cult ‘leader’ is nearly ubiquitous. Often these are gregarious individuals, such as the more (in)famous likes of Timothy Leary or Art Kleps; sometimes explicitly nefarious such as Gridley Wright (Shivalila); or highly motivated like James Warren Mooney (The Oklevueha Native American Church). Yet, they were all strong-willed, for better or worse. They are charisma writ large, and this produces a very particular type of cult; yet the central charismatic personality was not the only way these churches manifested.

In keeping with the broad religious landscape, the story of John and Louisa Aitken’s Church of Awakening is qualitatively different. Coming from a Presbyterian background, but steeped in Christian mediumship and psychic healing, they exemplified the universalist fringes of Protestantism. They too had to navigate the American legal quandary of freedom of religion and prohibition, but quietly persisted with their religious life as something that encapsulated, but was not entirely hinged on, peyote.

Yet, regardless of affiliation, the American legal context predominates. With the exception of the NAC, plus some of its offshoots, and several ayahuasca churches, the legal battles fought by the majority of the groups described in Psychedelic Cults were unsuccessful—oftentimes leading to imprisonment. Of course, the extent to which they were more or less advocating a serious spirituality, or instead simply couching their drug or plant in terms that the American legal system could understand, is difficult to ascertain for some of the groups.

However, should that really matter? It’s still always puzzling to read the criticism, which is oft repeated by judges and prosecutors, that these groups were simply about getting ‘drug-kicks’ rather than being serious spiritualities. Why must religion be serious? Why can’t fun be sacred? The right to religion, therefore, is really geared around the question of what religion and spirituality is in the first place. In this sense it’s not about freedoms or rights per se, but permissibility though definitions and gatekeeping. In short, power.

One gets a vivid sense of this in a passage in Kleps’ Boo Hoo Bible: ‘We are, however, somewhat dismayed by the prevailing habit of “doing” (really not doing) things through institutional identification, and have, accordingly, injected massive doses of absurdity into our embryonic social fantasy.’ Religion is a kind of legal fiction in this context; so why not inject more absurdity in the social fantasy? It’s a rebellion against the settlement—and this, more than any right or liberty, stands firmly in the American tradition.

Marinacci’s Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches has done a more than admirable job at pulling out this curious and enlightening thread in the history of American religion. It’s packed full of surprising characters and events, and is a series of stories well told; often shocking, always intriguing. While descriptions about Leary and the NAC can be found more fully elsewhere, the breadth of Marinacci’s project correctly places them in one of the twentieth century’s liveliest religious tales—a legal tale that persists vigorously today.