Lost Saints

Abstract

Mushrooms containing psilocybin have been used in Indigenous healing ceremonies in Mesoamerica since at least the sixteenth century. However, the sacramental use of mushrooms was only discovered by Westerners in the early to mid-twentieth century. Most notably, the meeting between amateur mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson and Mazatec curandera María Sabina in 1955 resulted in the widespread popularization of ingesting “magic mushrooms” in the West. To Sabina and the Mazatec people, psilocybin mushrooms were sacred and only to be used for healing. However, Western “hippies” viewed mushrooms as psychedelic drugs which they consumed with little regard for cultural sensitivities, rendering the mushrooms desacralized. This article argues that the desacralization of psilocybin mushrooms constitutes a form of spiritual abuse that has had far-reaching and long-lasting consequences at individual, local and global levels. Further, acknowledging and understanding the desacralization of psilocybin mushrooms as spiritual abuse has important implications for restorative justice and the understanding of psilocybin as a sacred medicine.

Ethics of Psychedelic Use in Psychiatry and Beyond—Drawing upon Legal, Social and Clinical Challenges

“…Patenting psychedelics raises ethical concerns as it can reduce availability to specific communities and introduce biases and conflicts of interest [48]. Patenting therapeutic procedures and protocols derived from Indigenous rituals is seen as ethically wrong as it might be a form of plagiarism [34,98,99] as well as contradicting communitarian social values [48,76]. Indeed, psychedelic use in Western society seems fuelled not by communitarian values but by neoliberal ideologies that wish for "individual freedom" to use psychedelics [100,101], which in its full-sized version was coined "McPsychedelics" [48,85].…”

Entheogens: Psychedelic religion in the United States, part two

“…Scholars influenced by intersectionality studies have also addressed psychedelics, sexuality, and gender (Belser, Cavnar, and Labate, 2022; Cavnar, 2014; Hartman, 2019). Additionally, scholars Anna Lutkajtis argued the PR is resulting in a “desacralization” that “constitutes a form of spiritual abuse that has had far‐reaching and long‐lasting consequences at individual, local and global levels” (2020, p. 118). This article echoes some of the ethical concerns one commonly encounters in the PR, concerns related to respect for Indigenous traditions, the legacies of colonialism, and the ongoing exploitation of Indigenous peoples and plants.…”