Elf and Safety

Plus ten other stories I'm following

“How will you go back?" said the woman.

"Nay, that I do not know. Because I have heard, that for those who enter Fairy Land, there is no going back. They must go on, and go through it."

R. Macdonald Robertson, Selected Highland Tales

It’s possible indigenous people are correct, and psychedelics connect us to a level of reality in which we interact with various Non-Human Intelligences (NHI, to use the term from Ufology). Call this the NHI hypothesis of psychedelics. If that is the case, one needs a theology or zoology of these NHI. How do they behave and how should we behave towards them? How helpful are they? How reliable? What is their morality or moralities? What are their messages for us?

There are various possible theologies of psychedelic NHI, and perhaps one needs different theologies for different psychedelics, as Castaneda’s Don Juan suggested. But people have also put forward over-arching theologies for all psychedelics.

Much of psychedelic culture holds the benevolent NHI hypothesis: psychedelics connect us to a healing intelligence (possibility within us, possibly also beyond us) which is essentially benevolent and therefore should be trusted and surrendered to, for our healing and evolution. This is the central dogma of psychedelic religion.

But that doesn’t really fit with all the facts, or those occasions when psychedelics fuck people up, and it feels to them like the psychedelic NHI is not benevolent at all. Every theology faces this Problem of Evil and Problem of Suffering - If your god is omnipotent and benevolent, why is there evil and suffering in the world? Why are there bad trips? The answer from psychedelic true believers is ‘there aren’t bad trips, this will turn out to be good for you in the end’. Keep the faith.

A Christian theologian might propose another psychedelic NHI hypothesis - psychedelics are a form of magic which connect you to demons. They will ultimately imperil your soul. This is the psychedelic theology put forward by Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson in their recent interview. But that doesn’t really fit with the facts either, which is that many people experience extraordinary healing and spiritual growth through psychedelic experiences.

Let me propose a third variant of the NHI hypothesis: psychedelics connect us to morally ambivalent or trickster NHI, and the best way to learn about them and their morality and behaviour is through folk tales.

We have centuries of folk theology about this realm - stories about human interactions with fairies, genies, kami, duende and so on. And that literature tells us that this nature-spirit NHI is morally ambivalent, or rather, it has a different morality to humans - it can be mischievous and very funny, it can be highly erotic and even sexually predatory, it can lead to a heightened reverence for nature and sense of the spirit in all things, it can bring tremendous gifts like healing and inspiration and it can fuck you up for no obvious reason other than it feels like it.

Illustration from Robin Goodfellow, his mad prankes and merry jests (1628). Mad prankes.

And when people get fucked up in Fairyland they come back like a ghost, not really here, because their spirit is still in fairyland. They’re like Lady Pole in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell who wakes up every morning exhausted and walks like a ghost through everyday reality because her soul spends the entire night being forced to dance in Fairyland.

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James is a 70-year-old retired systems engineer. He got into psychedelics as a teenager in the 1960s, and had some wonderful experiences on LSD. He carried on tripping beyond adolescence and became part of the psychedelic underground, attending events like Palenque in Mexico in the 1990s, rubbing shoulders with Terence McKenna, Alexander Shulgin and Jonathan Ott. Psychedelics were a big part of James’ identity, part of what made him special. He must have tripped several hundred times - not always pleasant experiences by any means, but nothing that ever left him with extended psychological problems, until an ayahuasca trip in San Francisco in the early Noughties.

He wasn’t feeling well before the ceremony, so his ‘set’ was a little off, but he decided to go ahead. He had a truly awful trip:

I was experiencing the very darkest side of human nature, where history was directed by these controlling agents, and if you weren't cooperating with society, you would be taken out back and shot. Basically, it was a brutal look at the way human culture had developed over the centuries. And after that, it just completely went out of control, where I felt like I was being ripped apart, sort of a psychological rape, so to speak. I do not like to use a term like ‘rape’ loosely, because it's an act of sexual violence. This was not really sexual violence. It was just a psychological violence where I was being abused and felt violated to the nth degree. This was something that I never experienced before. This was not just another bad trip. This was really overwhelming, and I had to surrender to it, because I had no control over it. It was just horrific to go through. And I had to endure this for a couple more hours or so before I came down.

Violated by what or who, I asked James.

I don't really know. It felt like the ayahuasca itself, like there was a spirit within the ayahuasca that was doing this to me.

In the weeks and months afterwards, James went through the motions of his external life but ‘inside I was crying, I was so upset by what had happened’.

The biggest symptom was feeling I was in a different place. I mean, I'd always felt like when I came out of a trip, I was a slightly different person than when I went in, but here I was in a completely different place, and I was not sure how I'd ever get back home again…I had horrible insomnia. One of the craziest things I can describe to you is the feeling I had that I would never die. That meant I would never get any peace of mind, because where I was at was horrible. It was hell. I was hoping to return to a less exciting universe.

James did finally return to this reality, but it took some years. He says the thing that helped him most was making art, which helped him focus outside of himself. A decade on, he occasionally trips with MDMA, but psychedelics are no longer a central part of his identity and he occasionally speaks up against those in psychedelic culture who disregard the risks.

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I come across stories like James’ quite a lot, of people who have put their faith in psychedelic religion, and then suddenly feel turned on and viciously attacked by the Shroom or Mama Ayahuasca. This happened to Terence McKenna, by the by, near the end of his life. People are left bewildered that their spirit-ally could turn on them, and they grieve the loss of their faith and religious identity. But I don’t think we should be surprised by this unreliability, if we study folk-lore.

If centuries of folk-lore are to be believed, one of the characteristics of Fairyland is it is morally ambivalent, trickster, unreliable. In folk-tales, nature-spirits may grant wishes or curses, or wishes that turn out to be curses, or curses that turn out to be boons. There may be rules of engagement with Fairyland, certain ways of doing business with it (this is basically what shamanism teaches, I guess - the polite art of doing business with nature-spirits). Is the correct mode worshipful reverence, blind faith, or what? In folk-tales one usually has to stay on one’s toes in Fairyland, not always trust the messenger and sometimes trick the trickster as in the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. The one thing that Fairyland is not is straightforwardly benevolent, or safe.

I wonder if any of the 300 or so psychedelic training courses have discussions not just about entities but about the nature of the NHI one can encounter, the different ways they can interact with humans - benevolent, mischievous, predatory - and the correct modes of doing business with Fairyland, according to western folk-lore? Maybe Exeter University does - Andy Letcher and David Luke can tell us more. I honestly think this would make for a fun module, as long as it was taught with the proviso that it might all be complete bollocks.

You do for me, I do for you

I suspect humans moved on from Fairyland not simply because we became more detached from nature, more materialistic and so forth. Perhaps we also simply found fairies too unreliable. Well, if you accept the trickster-NHI hypothesis, we now have an entire industry based on doing business with Fairyland. Boomtime for fairies! Fairies at scale! Fairy-focused VC funds! Big Fairy!

Today, some psychedelic scientists are travelling to DC to meet with senators and congress-people to discuss the potential and pitfalls of psychedelic medicine. Apparently, some members of the House want to know why the State Department has issued a warning about ayahuasca, why American citizens have been dying at psychedelic retreats. We can talk about harm reduction and risk monitoring and all the rest of it. But is anyone planning to mention Fairyland? Didn’t think so!

Here’s Exeter’s Andy Letcher on folklore and British magic mushrooms (pay-walled)

Folklore and the British Magic Mushroom

After the paywall, theologian David Bentley Hart on fairies, NS Lyons on strong gods, Elon Musk keeps ketamine trending on X, and more on Peter Thiel’s links to Opus Dei. I will email all Founding Members about Founders Club which will be this Sunday at 5pm UK time, 1pm NY time. Send in your questions before if you like. And don’t forget the free Psychedelic Safety Seminar on Australia’s legal PAT programme, this Thursday in the evening US time.