Psychedelic, Messianic, & Revolutionary Consciousness

This event is supported by the Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative.

About the Event

This evening panel represents a truly interdisciplinary conversation on a series of difficult, crucial questions in the study of the relationship between politics and psychedelic consciousness: how can the psychedelic state inform understandings of messianic impulses and revolutionary political thought, and vice versa? Additionally, what is the relationship--historical, psychological, spiritual, social--between psychedelic (and/or "psychotic") states of consciousness and social and political change, and what are the challenges, opportunities, and pitfalls in searching for links between social change and the conscious state of individuals? By staging a dialogue on these questions between a cultural historian, a social psychologist, a human ecologist, and a religious studies scholar, we aim to model and to stimulate rigorous examination of what “psychedelic consciousness” means, and the relationship between such consciousness and political and social imagination.

Featured Papers

Micro-Messiahs: When Psychedelics and Politics Meet (Leor Roseman, University of Exeter)

Reluctant Psychedelic Messianism (Sharday Mosurinjohn, Queens University)

Messianic Impulses: A Psychedelic Model of Revolutionary Consciousness (Ari Brouwer, University of Wisconson-Madison:)

"When I Reflect that God Is Just": Specters and Visions of Slave-Revolt in Early-US Political Thought (Nicholas Bloom, Harvard University)

About the Panelists

Nicholas Bloom is Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University, and holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Broadly speaking, his work analyzes the function of historical and teleological narratives in constructing social reality. His first book project examines how slave revolt functioned in the development of various, competing strains of early-US political thought, and his talk will consider the crucial function of "visions" and "spectres" in the construction of dominant and normative political thought in the early-19th century, and how race and power functioned to make these irrational, arguably "psychotic" visions into commonsense.

Ari Brouwer is a PhD student in Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He helped develop a Pivotal Mental States theory to explain how stress facilitates spiritual and psychotic experiences by increasing psychedelic-like signaling in the brain. Drawing on this work, along with recent investigations on the temporal trajectory of psychedelic and spiritual experiences, Ari will address whether a similar process can help explain the emergence of messianic or revolutionary consciousness under conditions of stress and adversity.

Sharday Mosurinjohn is Associate Professor of Contemporary Religious Context at Queens University in Canada. Dr. Mosurinjohn studies the discursive construction of spirituality and religion as well as concepts of nonreligion and secularity. Specific interests include the study of "new religious movements" (NRMs), ritual, and religion and/as media. Her broad interest in the material turn touches on contexts of contemporary (especially conceptual) art; museums; everyday aesthetics; digital contexts (eg. social media; surveillance cultures), and affect. Her major line of research continues to be about boredom and spirituality—taking the modern concept of boredom as a spiritual crisis as a heuristic through the late modern context of choice and information overload.

Leor Roseman is Senior Lecturer and Psychedelic Researcher at the University of Exeter in England. His work examines how psychedelics modify consciousness from a biopsychological perspective, with particular attention paid to the communal and social use of psychedelics. His talk will explore the messianic/prophetic function within psychedelic phenomenology, practices, and movements. Drawing from both historical research and direct observations he has conducted over the last decade, Roseman draws attention to the presence of revelatory-prophetic-messianic states in many users of psychedelics. Such messianic and revelatory states are active, sociopolitical, historical, moral, and sometimes full of ego, a stark contract from the archetypal mystical-unitive ahistorical ego-dissolving state often associated with psychedelic use. The talk will examine this phenomenon in the messianic events of Alan Ginsberg, Master Irineu, and John Wilson (Moonhead) – which have contributed to the diffusion of LSD, Daime, and Peyote, respectively—alongside Roseman’s work with ayahuasca groups of Israelis and Palestinians. Ultimately, he will argue that the messianic/revelatory state is of crucial importance for thinking through the diverse and sometimes contradictory political & social implications of psychedelic use and diffusion.

About the Series & Funding

The Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture, an interdisciplinary effort across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Divinity School, seeks to transform the psychedelics research landscape by producing cutting-edge scholarship and convening faculty, students, and experts to engage in discussion around their far-reaching implications.

The Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative funds projects on psychedelics by Harvard undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. It aims to enrich our understanding of psychedelics, their implications for human experiences, multiple histories, cultural contexts and resonances, and significance for various societies. Applications for the 2025 funding cycle will open in late 2024. Full details on funding can be found here.