Psychedelic cults: a new chapter and an event
Psychedelic organisations are prone to cultic social dynamics - at what point do they become unhealthy?
This month Joseph Holcomb Adams and I finished a chapter on ‘gurism and cultic social dynamics in psychedelic organisations’, for a forthcoming Springer volume on psychedelic harm reduction.
Our argument is that psychedelics can amplify three tendencies:
Psychedelics can inspire devotion, transference, hyper-suggestibility and projection in those ingesting the drugs
Psychedelics can amplify counter-transference and ego-inflation in those dispensing the drugs
Psychedelics can amplify cultic social dynamics in organisations
On the third point, we write:
Psychedelic plants have been used for millennia as “catalysts” for “enculturation” and as means to “build or reinforce social connectedness and cohesion” (Dupuis 2021). They can enhance “collective effervescence” which solidifies social bonds in organisations and communities (Carls 2024; Durkheim 1912; Xygalatas et al. 2011), potentially amplifying cultic dynamics.
Psychedelic drugs can amplify cult dynamics in a number of ways - above all, providing communities with shared mystical or extraordinary experiences, and shared rituals, language and cultic identities emerging out of and reinforced by these experiences. The shared mystical experiences dissolve ego-boundaries, leading to an increased sense of collective identity and also identification with and devotion to the group and its leader. Psychedelic experiences can enhance a group’s sense of its own specialness and access to secret knowledge, leading to a sense of in-group superiority to the out-group. And they can give people an exalted sense of their destiny and utopian mission, and a willingness to sacrifice everything (Pace and Devenot 2021).
Psychiatrist Marc Galanter noted the centrality of altered states (including drug-induced states) in many cults, writing:
People are more vulnerable to social influence when they are made to think, sense, and feel differently than usual, when someone or something disrupts their emotional balance. Such changes in subjective experience (or alterations in consciousness) can undermine the psychological matrix in which our views are rooted, so that we lose track of customary internal signposts. They may also introduce a feeling of mystery, or a sense that forces beyond our control are operating. Thus, they can prime us to accept unaccustomed explanations for our experiences and adopt new attitudes implied in these explanations. In this respect altered consciousness can help shape members' attitudes in a charismatic group. (Galanter 1999, 60)
Cultic dynamics can emerge in many sorts of psychedelic organisations - churches or new religious movements, retreat centres, training schools, NGOs, psychedelic research groups, clinics, festivals like Burning Man, or communities that surround psychedelic rock bands, like the “Deadhead” followers of the Grateful Dead (Sylvan 2002). To be clear, cultic social dynamics are not always unhealthy and it can be very fulfilling to belong to a cultic community, psychedelic or non-psychedelic….
Then we give some examples where psychedelic organisations developed cultic social dynamics in a clearly unhealthy and criminal direction - the Manson Family, Aum Shinrikyo, Centrepoint in New Zealand, the Family in Australia, Osho’s ashrams in Oregon and Pune, and so on. We write:
It’s interesting to consider how the organisations listed above used psychedelic drugs to recruit, initiate and coerce members, taking advantage of drug-induced suggestibility to imprint ideas that make people easy to control - above all, that the cult leader is the source of the sacred psychedelic experience, and this proves the cult leader is sacred and worthy of total obedience.
Here for example is a description of the psychedelic initiation of one member of Aum Shinrikyo, the apocalyptic and murderous Japanese cult. Note how his experience of LSD amplified his intense devotion to and identification with the guru-leader, Asahara:
The connections I had to Asahara - in Aum we call it a spiritual pipeline - became concrete in this vision. There were various other individuals and at the center was Asahara, who was shining brightly…I was at the bottom but the people at the bottom were being pulled up, and then I was pulled up. It was a force that could not be resisted. As I was pulled up, the surroundings slowly got brighter…As I was pulled up, I became one with Asahara (Lifton 2000).
While destructive psychedelic cults like Aum Shinrikyo or the Manson Family are extreme and thankfully rare examples, many psychedelic organisations might illustrate some aspects of unhealthy cultic dynamics, such as the use of psychedelic drugs to recruit new members or financial donors, an excessive and uncritical veneration of the leader, an exaggerated sense of their world-saving utopian mission, end-justifying-means and us-versus-them thinking, cherry-picking evidence to support their ‘sacred science,’ and a tendency to deny harms or abuses in their movement and to attack anyone who criticizes it. That’s the risk when psychedelic healing becomes what Harvard’s David McLelland called “a quasi-religious sect”.
If like me you’re fascinated by this topic, come to this event on April 17, where I’ll be talking and interviewing leading cult expert Steve Hassan on the topic of psychedelics and cultic dynamics. And paid subscribers get an early copy of Joseph and my chapter on psychedelic cults after the paywall. Let me know what you think and if you have any comments or suggestions, get in touch!
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