Psychedelics, Eleusis, and the Invention of Religious Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: (2020), and popularized by social media heavyweights such as Joe Rogan. Methods: It begins by exposing critical methodological flaws in the arguments, namely, a pattern of presenting claims, followed by mild circumstantial evidence, rhetorically solidifying the interpretation of this evidence into a "fact," on which is built each subsequent round of conjecture. Analysis: We then explore how the dogged pursuit of evidentiary mirages contributes to the project of establishing a western civilizational pedigree to dignify the use of stigmatized drugs and revitalize experiential religion. Discussion: Although the desire for legitimacy and meaning is understandable, the strategies used by the writers of this pseudo-history constitute a kind of religious fundamentalism. Their writing attempts to show that a relatively new practice is the old, true religion, in this case, the "religion with no name" that underlies every religious tradition. In doing so, they miss seriously relating to the many well-documented historical and living Indigenous histories of psychedelics, or seeing contemporary psychedelic practice in continuity with other, and maybe even older, nonpharmacological methods of changing consciousness. Overall, the "psychedelic Eleusis" discourse focuses on the purported Eleusynian drug and its phenomenology rather than focusing on practices for taking up the spiritual injunctions of those psychedelic experiences. Conclusions: We conclude that, given how the psychedelic hypothesis is fundamentally flawed in its study of antiquity, it is a shaky foundation on which to build an argument for modern psychedelic use for therapeutic and spiritual practice. Since scholarly research is key to moving forward decriminalization, legalization, medical regulation, and other roles for psychedelics in society, it is crucial that scholars and popular audiences communicate effectively around psychedelic history and culture. Instead of committing to a specific (and erroneous) view of history, psychedelic scholarship must commit to academic discussion and debate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".