Erik Davis is an author and independent scholar based in San Francisco. His books include Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024), High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019), and the cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998). Davis's essays on psychedelics, spirituality, music, and technoculture have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages.

Mediating Drugs

Exploring contrary approaches to the sacramental use of psychedelics and how they may creatively interact in contemporary Western practice.  In ‘The Lineage’ plant teachers are used within strict ritual forms derived from indigenous traditions as part of a holistic time-honoured praxis.  ‘DIY shamanism’ works with Western paradigms shaped by individualism and the transgressive use of psychedelics to evolve new, syncretic, culturally sensitive practices.  This talk draws on extensive personal experience of both approaches, challenging assumptions that they are irreconcilable opposites, showing how one can inform the other, and how they can even lead to the same place.