On April 30, 2024,The CSWR hosted Dr. Erik Davis for a conversation on his new book, Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium. Blotter is the first account of its kind, centering the history, art, and design of the iconic drug delivery device for lysergic acid diethylamide-25, or LSD. Created in collaboration with Mark McCloud's Institute of Illegal Images, the world's largest archive of blotter art, Davis's boldly illustrated exhibition treats his outsider subject with the serious, art-historical respect it deserves, while also staying true to the sense of play, irreverence, and adventure inherent in psychedelic exploration.
Psychedelics and the Future of Religion: Book Talk: "Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium" with Erik Davis
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Psychedelics and the future of religion, Book Talk, "Blotter, The Untold Story of an Acid Medium" with Erik Davis. April 30th, 2024.
CHARLES STANG: Good evening, everyone. Good evening and welcome. My name is Charles Stang. I have the privilege of serving as the director here at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. We're fairly informal here, so please do get up and help yourself to something to eat and drink.
Be mindful, however, that we are recording the event. So if you can dodge the camera, that would be great. So before we begin, I want to thank my colleagues here at the CSWR for all their efforts to make this evening's event possible. So, Gosia, Laurie-- where are you, Laurie? All right. She's disappeared.
Isabel and Sarah, thank you for all that you do there. There's Laurie in the back. Thank you, Laurie. And Thank you to our friends in AV who are making this available to the over nearly 200 people, I think, who registered online. I don't know how many people are joining us right now, but however many you are, you're welcome. We're delighted to have you here.
It's my very great pleasure to welcome Erik Davis to the CSWR to share with us his latest book, Blotter, The Untold Story of an Acid Medium. I'll have more to say about Erik and his new book in just a moment. But first, a word about the series of which this evening's event is a part. We launched Psychedelics and the Future of Religion four years ago as a Zoom series. That was September of 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. And we launched it with a lecture by none other than Roland Griffiths titled Psilocybin and Mystical Experience.
Roland is sadly no longer with us, and we're honored to have had him inaugurate the series. Four years later, we're still here, trying to dig ever deeper into each of these topics-- psychedelics, entheogens or plant medicines. Their relevance for what we label, for better or for worse, the mystical. And how to responsibly and rigorously talk about experience in the humanities, especially extraordinary experiences.
The series on psychedelics in the future of religion and so much more that we do here at the CSWR is part of our broader initiative called transcendence and transformation, which is now rounding out its third year. Transcendence and transformation, or TNT for short, is an initiative devoted to the study of spiritual traditions and practices that aim to transcend our normal states of being, consciousness and embodiment, and thus to transform the individual, the community and society at large.
TNT has recently been given a strong tailwind by the Gracias Family Foundation's gift to the University to establish the Harvard Study of psychedelics in society and culture. Universities across the country and around the world, in fact, are investing in the study of psychedelics. But to my knowledge, Harvard's is the only one devoted to the humanistic study of psychedelics.
The CSWR is pleased to partner with the Mahindra Humanities Center and the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School to advance this study. We at the CSWR are marching under this banner of transcendence and transformation. And thus one of the questions I seek to ask in this series is this.
What might psychedelics have to teach us about the human being or what it means to be human, and what possibilities exist for transcending and transforming the presumed limits of human consciousness, being, perception and embodiment? And what might psychedelics have to teach us about the more than human world? Our communion and our communication with plants and animals, for example, or with the more elusive beings we call spirits, angels, demons and gods.
From this center here at 42 Francis Avenue, which is at the geographic and existential periphery of this University, I hope to prod and provoke the humanities, which seem to me to be slumbering on a sinking Titanic. Can the categories of transcendence and transformation help the humanities wake up to acknowledge and explore the further reaches of human being.
Erik Davis has been asking questions like this for many, many years, and he's no stranger to our peripheral Center. But this is, to my knowledge, the first time you have joined us in the flesh. He spoke in this series once before, back in 2021, and in 2022 in our gnosiology series. And after this evening, if you're interested to hear more, you can listen to the latest episode of the Center's podcast, Pop Apocalypse and hear our very own Matt Dillon-- who's in the back-- talk with Erik at length about psychedelics, California and the cultures of consciousness.
That episode dropped today, and again, you can find that episode and several more under the name Pop Apocalypse. We're delighted to welcome Erik in the flesh to have the digital descend into the analog, to have this techno-- techGnostic take shape in our midst. And it's only appropriate that he take flesh now to discuss this latest book, Blotter.
I'm told that the book was released just today, and you can buy a copy out in the lobby if you're interested. It's appearing with MIT press, as did his last book, High Weirdness. It's a book that you will want to hold in your hands, to feel with your fingers. It's a book, after all, about paper on paper. And paper is nothing if not flesh. Plant flesh pulped, pounded and pressed.
And the paper of this book describes-- the so-called blotter paper, which serves as a psychedelic medium-- this paper was flesh meant to be ingested, tasted, to dissolve on the tongue-- a kind of host, a communion and a communication with a wild spirit we have come to call acid. Erik has heard many stories of acid and can tell some of his own.
What aspect of our consciousness does this acid dissolve? And more importantly, what is revealed after this dissolution? This is largely a book about art, about the wild images that are printed on this ephemeral medium, about a form of art that is meant to be consumed, digested, and images that are meant to inaugurate a trip, a journey-- images that are meant to disappear so that others might appear.
In the opening pages of the book, Erik asks, "What if the medium is the message?" And he goes on to write, "When you print images onto a paper carrier medium, you're adding another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission, hence a meta medium. A liminal genre of print culture that dissolves the boundaries between a postage stamp, a ticket, a bubblegum card and the communion host. This makes blotter a central, if barely recognized, artifact of psychedelic print culture alongside rock posters and underground newspapers and comics, but with the extra ouroboric weirdness that it is designed to be ingested, to disappear. Blotter is the most ephemeral of all psychedelic ephemera. It is produced to be eaten, to blur the line between subject and object, dissolving material signs and molecules into a phenomenological upsurge of sensory, poetic and cognitive immediacy."
That's a taste of Erik's prose style for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of reading his words before. Erik Davis is a scholar, an award-winning journalist, and a speaker whose writing has ranged from rock criticism to media studies to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He received his PHD, like many others here at the Center, in religious studies from Rice University.
He wrote the libretto for and performed in How to Survive the Apocalypse a Burning Man inspired rock opera. He's the author, among other books of High Weirdness, Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the 70s-- that's also from MIT Press and is available in the lobby-- and the cult classic TechGnosis, Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. That's Erik's official biography.
To borrow from the subtitle of his new book, I would also describe him as an acid medium and one of our best storytellers. He's also a friend and a fellow traveler. Erik. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the CSWR.
ERIK DAVIS: Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for showing up on a Tuesday afternoon. It's really nice to see everybody here. I'm really happy to be here in the flesh as Charlie says. And, yeah, I mean, it's-- even though it's a relatively small amount of prose in this book, it has a lot of angles in it, which is fun for me because every time I give a presentation, I can do a little bit of a different thing.
Before I start, though, I'd like to just call out my editor at MIT press, Matt Brown. Thank you so much for supporting this book and High Weirdness before that. And of course, thanks to everybody at CSWR. This is really a lot of fun, and it's a big treat. So I'm just going to-- so because of our place, I'm going to focus in on some religious questions, read some parts of the book and wind things together.
So I think this is some stuff that maybe Charlie was supposed to say, but he didn't. So I'll say-- I'll say it for him. I mean, hey, who doesn't want to see Thinking with Plants & Fungi? I mean, this is good stuff. So, you know, go for it. So this is Mark McLeod. This is a blotter piece that was done by an Argentine artist. And Mark McLeod started to collect LSD blotter in the early 1980s.
He was a freak, a punk, but also a sculptor and an art professor. And he recognized that there was something interesting about this medium, and so he started to squirrel it away. And he also put together the first public art show of blotter art-- this was all street blotter-- in 1987. And shortly thereafter, because of it, was introduced to the LSD blotter underground in San Francisco.
And through various ins and outs, wound up producing LSD blotter for the underground market. So he ended up being a part of the underground, which led to two arrests and luckily two acquittals and also allowed him to continue his collecting passion. So he is quite the collector. And really this book was a lot about just hanging out with Mark McLeod, who I had known for decades.
And I was like, Mark, how come nobody's ever done a book? I mean, he's open about it. He calls his collection, the institute of illegal images. And it's in his house. And it's kind of open door. You know, people come by and he loves to host folks. And he's been hosting. There have been newspapers, articles about him for decades.
And I was like, what's up, Mark. How come no one's done a book? And he goes, I don't know. Why don't you do it, dog? And I'm like, OK, I'll do it. And so a lot of my pandemic was hanging out with Mark McLeod, having him tell me the story one more time. And so what I'm going to do now is just give you a very brief overview of the medium and then talk about some of the religious imagery and issues that raises.
So here I'm going to start a reading. I'll tell you a little bit more about this image in a bit. The village of East Hagbourne lies not far from Oxford, England. And it is here, according to the town website at least, that proprietors of a local paper mill first discovered blotting paper. Stories and dates vary, but it seems that sometime in the closing years of the 18th century, an improperly sized batch of paper or possibly an accidental spill of sulfuric acid resulted in a highly absorbent product.
William Russell Slade, one of the clan who ran the mill, soon recognized the utility of such material in an era when ink and its inevitable spills and sweepings was king. By the early 19th century, blotting paper was found on writing desks around the world. Given its ubiquity, low cost and significant absorption rate, blotter paper presents an obvious distribution medium for a highly dose sensitive liquid drug.
One of the problems with LSD is that it's so powerful in such a small amount, you can't really take it just purely as the crystal. You need to put that crystal in water. And then usually you put that water onto something else, like a sugar cube or in a pill, or in this case, in blotting paper. In Albion Dreaming, his wonderful history of the British LSD scene, which is every bit as significant and interesting as the more well known US story, Andy Roberts reports that UK Jazz musicians were consuming small blotting papers dosed with LSD as early as the late 1950s.
By the mid-1960s, amidst the usual sugar cubes, the method had become well established. Evidence for this is provided by none other than the comedian Dudley Moore, who performing as Whispering Jim Narg quote, "Fresh from two years with the Ahuru Guru in the Himalayas," unquote, contributed the following verse to "Psychedelic Baby," a fruity pop song released on a Private Eye flexi disc in 1966. I don't remember the melody, so I won't try.
"Psychedelic baby, won't you take a trip with me. Dip your lump of sugar in the LSD. If you want a kinky caper, then suck the blotting paper. Psychedelic baby with me." A year later, just back from London, Bay Area music promoter and scene maker Chet Helms confirmed to the Berkeley Barb that blotter paper was the favored method of LSD distribution in the UK.
Now, one advantage to storing LSD on blotting paper is how easy and safe it becomes to transport, which is how the molecule made its way to the Amazon in 1966. As part of his research into healing and drugs, the Chilean psychiatrist and esotericist Claudio Naranjo, who had already cut his psychedelic teeth in California, traveled to the Putumayo region of Colombia to research plant medicines.
According to Peter Stafford, Naranjo brought along some blotter paper impregnated with drops of LSD, which he passed on to a few members of the Cofán tribe. The Cofán enjoyed the colonialist Medecino and in turn provided Naranjo with local plant preparations, including the ingredients for ayahuasca. Besides initiating a beautiful encounter between novel old world psychedelics and classic new world ones, Naranjo made another breakthrough.
In order to indicate the strength and location of the invisible drops, Naranjo drew images of stars, moons and suns on his blotter, producing the first illustrated acid blotter on record. No doubt other LSD users had already been doodling on their paper for similar reasons, especially among the creatives in swinging London. But though blotting paper was widespread in the UK, it took the United States to subject the process to the sort of mechanical reproduction required to level up to a properly commercial scale.
This is important. Unlike capsules or tablets, which belong to the pharmaceutical mainstream, the invention of blotter as a standardized drug delivery device takes place entirely within the freak underground. The innovator here was Erik Ghost, A.K.A. Erik Brown, a New Yorker who, after a peripatetic life of military service, armed robbery, and prison, took LSD for the first time in the Lower East Side around 1965.
He swallowed nearly 4,000 micrograms of sandoz smeared across a sugar cube. And the thermonuclear revelation occasioned by this enormous dose convinced him to co-found the psychedelicatessen-- a legendary, if short lived, headshop that opened on 164 Avenue A in 1966. Like most acid manufacturers at the time, Ghost was messianic about the molecule and its potential to improve people and the world.
"LSD is not about escape," he explained in a 1995 interview with a religious studies scholar. "It's about reality." This, amazingly, is one of those hits. This was passed on to Mark McCloud by an upper level LSD dealer who had kept it for decades. And already, even though I'm not really focusing here on religion as such, we see the currents and the elements, this kind of goofy pop song reference to gurus in the Himalayas, the relationship with other plant medicine traditions, and indeed, this question about LSD and revelation and the nature of reality.
So just to go over a little bit of the quick evolution, what Ghost innovated was a machine along with a fellow I think, who actually worked who came from MIT, who was an engineer, and they developed a device that had sort of 100 pins and enabled the blotter maker to dip the pins in the source at one time, bring it over and impress it on a small kind of business card sized piece of paper that then had 100 hits on it and that could be sold as such. And then people would cut them manually to find the dots.
Originally, he relied on litmus paper to colorize things, but it wasn't the best method. So soon after that, people started to lay out grids on the a paper. So this allowed you to identify where all the drops were happening-- usually with an eyedropper. And then people would use scissors and cut-- or whatever-- and cut along the lines. I include this image because it's one of the first examples of a figurative art. We're not sure exactly when this comes from, but sometimes sometime in the early 1970s.
And the comic book character element of it becomes a real major motif in LSD blotter. There's a lot of cartoon characters, a lot of superheroes and things like that. This is, of course, Captain L, which may actually refer to lavender, not LSD, because there were certain forms of the original crystal that were lavender colored. So then there's another technical development.
If you notice on this piece, there's a couple of things to say about, but one is this has perforations. So sometime in the mid-1970s, somebody said, hey, why have a grid on the paper. We can just perforate the paper, and then you can have an easier way of distributing it and allow people who may be a little fuzzy with the scissors to have a more controlled attempt to get these single hits.
The single hits themselves were still pretty powerful. Ghosts' original dots, each individual drop was 1,000 mics, so people were kind of expected to further subdivide that, maybe cut it into four, and it's still a pretty hefty 250 mic trip. Those were the back in the days modes. This will change. In fact, in the late 1970s and as a sign of the peculiar nature of LSD production, which is really different than other criminal drug operations in many, many ways, many of the leading families who were behind the production of the crystal got together and said, hey, guys, let's lower the dose of the hit.
So that's when you start to see lower 100 mic, 80 mic hits, which is still roughly what you have today-- so-called disco hits. The other reason I brought up this piece, this is appropriated from a brand of firecrackers, but it's also an animal. I'm not going to talk too much about the phenomenology of LSD because this is really focused on the art and the materiality. But the most interesting discovery I made when looking at all of this archive, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces, most of which aren't in the book that Mark had collected-- and I just looked at everything-- is the predominance of animals.
Animals are the single most-- more than religious icons, more than goofy cartoons. Animals run through the whole thing. And there's interesting things to speculate about why that's the case. We can talk about that a little bit later. Here is an example of a perf board. Because you can go into a print shop and say, hey, I need some perforations, you know, like postage stamps or whatever. I mean, it's something they can create a die cut that will make it work. But it's a little obvious what you're doing. And so unless it's on the sly, you probably want to do it yourself.
And so they developed a lot of DIY kinds of ways of doing it. This is, as you can imagine, a fairly DIY device that I think was originally an old school laundry squeezer. I don't what you call it to dry clothes. But sometimes they would-- they'd take the teeth that are on aluminum foil boxes and just take a bunch of those and lay them out onto a square, and then you'd have a nice perf board. Sometimes they would use pizza cutters. There's all sorts of fun, little DIY elements.
Here's another-- and here's just some large categories of images. This is a hand stamped. So, you know, those sort of wooden hand stamps with a little rubber on the outside. And those were quite popular in the day. And a lot of the imagery, as you might imagine, would lend itself to blotter, which was printed on many different levels. Sometimes the high level producers who are making the crystal would develop their own paper. Sometimes they would just pass it on to lower street dealers, and they would have their own image that they would put on their particular paper.
So there's a lot of different sources for the blotting image. There's a lot of abstraction, some of which is directly taken from op art and some of which just elaborates the kind of visual abstraction that's associated with LSD, which is a fascinating thing to think about in terms of the history of art and the relationship of abstraction to phenomenology and to perception and is clearly part of the LSD experience, along with the kind of iconic dimension of it.
There's also a lot of appropriation, as you might imagine. And this is everything from more highbrow art images or at least upper middlebrow and-- No, I'm an Escher fan, but you know what I mean. It's a little it's a little dorm room poster, but that's OK. I love it. And then more coarse, lower elements of the pop zone was were often brought into the fore. And you see a lot of that kind of silly stuff as well.
So now I'm going to start talking a little bit about the esoteric dimension. It's a little hard to see with this, but this is Mr Natural. And probably the first printed, offset printed blotter that had an image on it was Mr Natural. It wasn't this piece. It was a different image. But there were many Mr Naturals. There was a lot of copying in this obviously copy driven kind of medium.
So people would-- something would come out and they'd do another version of it. They'd do a different angle of it. So Mr Natural has been-- there's like eight or 10 different versions of it in the DEA record. But Mr Natural, I think, is a very fit figure for this iconic turn in blotter art. Because on the one hand, he is a sort of mystic, right. He's associated with the Haight Street.
He's got the long, white beard. He's sort of a guru character. And so it kind of references the spiritual dimension of acid. But he's also a satiric character that was designed by R. Crumb to precisely make fun of these kinds of aspirations in the more doe-eyed hippie zone that he was very much on the side of.
And so in a way, it captures a really important tension in the sacred aspect of this blotter art of LSD art. And just to give you the reveal is the-- my basic way of thinking about it is that the sacred in LSD culture in general, LSD consciousness in general, but also in the blotter art, is that the sacred is always in relationship with the profane. And indeed the real sacred unit in psychedelic consciousness-- or at least acid consciousness. I'll just say acid consciousness-- is precisely the pivot of the sacred and the profane and the way they keep undermining each other in a sometimes humorous and sometimes kind of alarming manner.
Some of the early images that we see from the 1970s are patterned and abstract in a sacred geometric way. There's an early figure that I might read a little bit about later, known as the electric Buddha. And he, like a lot of people in the Haight, were very interested in numerology, and pattern, and magic squares-- a lot of stuff that's kind of like, in a way, the low rent side of esoterica, I would argue. But it was a very important part of the Haight Street ideas and manifested itself on the blotter art.
So more specifically occult elements-- and now we're going to talk about occultism-- start to appear. This is from a Levy's book on magic, which came out in 1856 or something like that, tetragrammaton. And this one was kind of interestingly printed because the reverse of the hit, which I don't have an image of, was the reverse colors. So black white on black, black on white. And the ink itself had the acid in it, which is not usually what they did.
Usually they print it and then dip it later. And this one was actually infused with it, so it gives it a kind of extra punch. And part of the question behind all this that I'm just going to pose as a question is, what are these images? Like, how do they function? What are they? Are they brands? Are they sigils? Are they prayers? Are they jokes? Are they symbols of tribal identity?
There are all of these things and more. And so keep that kind of question in mind. Here's another esoteric image, and this is going to boot up some more reading. I've got to find it. So I'm talking about a variety of pieces that came out of San Francisco. And then there is the matter of the pyramid. A number of blotters coming out of Haight Street in the early years featured flat cut-along triangles, pyramids that you would instantly recognize as such because they were decorated with eyes.
The most haunting of these was Horus, which featured an Egyptian eye of Horus inside a triangle. Initially, gold and in a later edition, this one-- black on beige, acting like a kind of hyperlink hidden in the institute's archive. Horus, in turn, evokes another enigmatic character from those years. So this is some of the individuals I was able to learn a little bit more about. I wasn't able to interview this fellow because he didn't want to deal with it.
And I call him a pseudonymous name, Manny Vogel, who was a whip smart gay man from New Jersey who lived for a time in a converted car cab dispatch garage near Polk street, which was San Francisco's original Queer neighborhood before the Castro. A generous fellow fond of disguises, the owner of numerous hippie crash pads. Manny was an acid lord who sold a lot of loaded blanks but also contributed to the Haight Street publishing effort.
Manny was also a serious occultist. He studied Aleister Crowley and collected books on metaphysics, Rosicrucianism and Kabbalistic lore, as well as many a tome on actual chemistry. He claimed to use occult methods and maybe even sex magic to enchant the chocolate pyramid confections he made and sold, which were so heavily dosed with cannabis that it probably didn't matter much one way or the other.
Manny also served as master of the pyramid club, an underground gathering of heads, mystics and pansexuals that likely gave Manny the opportunity to break out the Masonic robes and props he also collected. For a while the Pyramid Club met at an occult bookshop Manny ran in the lower Haight before he decided he didn't want it anymore and just simply gave it back to its original owner.
Despite all this pyramid power, though, the actual image that inspired Horus may have far more quotidian origins. Another blotter maker insists that the icon was whipped up by an artist who specialized in commercial logos. On the other hand, another friend of Manny's points to the retail sign of pyramid liquor, a store frequented by Manny out on Geary Avenue. That's the thing about some acid mysteries. They reverberate all the way through to the banal.
OK, I'll stop right there. So one of the things that I discovered in doing this kind of work is how closely knit the connections were between the blotter underground and indeed the general acid underground and the esoteric occult scene in San Francisco. With ties with the O.T.O. And ties with a lot of gay mysticism as well. And the forum-- I'm not going to read about-- the electric Buddha is a fascinating character. Well, I'll just read a little bit about him just because it's just too good.
We're not really sure exactly how he fit in the story, but he clearly was instrumental in the early 70s. We never were able to pin it down, but he was definitely part of the trade and part of the blotter makers. Born Richard Duran. The Buddha was from a small town in Idaho where his father worked as a pharmacist. He was an awkward young man and fled home to join the army.
He lived in Germany, then New York in the late 1950s and ran a bookstore in Portland before moving to San Francisco. The Buddha was already on the scene during the Summer of Love when he was listed on the masthead of vanguard, the monthly magazine of a local gay liberation youth organization. His role at the publication according to the masthead-- phallic symbol.
In Amazing Dope Tales and Haight Street Flashbacks, Stephen Gaskin describes the Buddha as a mind power guru and methedrine freak who vowed to shoot speed until he either attained enlightenment or destroyed his soul. A good friend of Manny's, Duran ran crash pads and performed as a sage and guiding light, especially to the unmoored young men he often wound up sheltering and loving. One of the main blotter makers that I interview at great length was one of these young men, and he became enamored with the Buddha's vibe-- part esoteric hierophant and part mother hen.
One of the interesting things about this-- there was a lot of books, kind of research synchronicities, as we call them, that happened with this. And one of them is that I realized in doing research on the Buddha and finding out more about his-- the stuff that he would do in alternative newspapers. I was like, god, this is really familiar. And I realized I had picked up this incredibly rare zine that he had made in 1970, just sort of on a whim from a bookstore and suddenly all this stuff fit together. It was really kind of remarkable.
So some of the work that I'm doing here is kind of ethnographic in that sense. Here's another occult blotter. This one was associated with the Church of Satan. We're not really sure what that basis is, but we can see the stars and set and a kind of piratical twist on the eye and the pyramid. So it kind of makes sense. Another example of the kind of egyptomania that runs through a lot of blotter. This is actually lifted from a Stanley mouse album cover that he did. So there's a lot of traffic between some of the artists who worked on album covers and posters and these images.
And here's another appropriated bit of egyptomania. This is from a Rick Griffin comic book that appeared in Zap. Zap Number Three in the late 1960s. And I emphasize these connections again to make the point that Charlie made in the quote, which is that there's this needs to be seen as part of countercultural print culture. It's part of the same ethos and attitude and sort of DIY experimentalism that went into underground comics and alternative newspapers.
Here's another couple examples. This is a pretty interesting piece. This was made by a guy who was fairly high up in the trade in the late, late 1980s or early 1990s. And it was made on with a very small number of print run. And these were old school hits. So they were really powerful. They were not the contemporary 100 mic hits. And they were designed to be four ways. And as Mark puts it, you can tell they were designed to be four ways because they have that dot in the center.
I don't know if I would figure that out. I would hope so. But again, you have the kind of Masonic imagery mixed in this case, which came out from the same guy with some esoteric, for the hippies, esoteric notions of triangles and Aums. Somehow it all fits together. Here's another really wonderful one. I doubt anybody can recognize this image, but it's actually from The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Manly P. Hall's very rich, visually rich collection of esoterica from Los Angeles in the late 1920s.
Rick Griffin, who I'd earlier mentioned, one of the great poster artists and underground comics writers, was obsessed with this book, and this image has suddenly been altered. You notice that one of the fingers is missing, and it's a reference to Jerry Garcia, who of course, famously did not have all 10 fingers. Some of the references to religion are, I think probably safer to say, are simply because of the iconic power of these images.
You know, you have a star and crescent, you have a yin yang symbol, you have a cross, they're just nice, juicy-- like, religions are good at logos. They need that nice, compressed icon to gather around. So you see that kind of iconic play-- blue lotuses. Here's an example of a rune showing up in the midst of a pretty hippie design.
You can kind get involved in all the sort of elements here-- the star, the crescent moon, and the interesting sort of play of numbers here between the 7 points and the 3, and all that stuff was very representative of the kind of number play that was going on among the artists as well as the blotter makers because they're always thinking about numbers. This is one from the symbol for the Jing. That's the change glyph. And, of course, good old Aum.
And more to the point, this beautiful piece. This was lifted-- does anybody know where this comes from? Anybody recognize this?
AUDIENCE: Be Here Now.
CHARLES STANG: Be Here Now. That's right. Give a Tab to the man in the front row. The-- So, yeah. And I just love this image because it's just so-- it's just so perfectly captures that sort of countercultural fusion of dance, and long hair, and Shiva, and surfboard. And the reason just for technical fun when you see-- if you saw this paper, you would know a couple of things about it.
One is that it's a 900 block, which means that it's got-- it's 900, so it's nine 100 squares. So if you subdivided this into the nine images, each one would be a 10 by 10 square. So it sort of lends itself to breaking down for further distribution. And there's a whole rather arcane play around number and dose and how the grids are laid out. That's sort of interesting if you like that kind of nerdy stuff.
Obviously, you know, we're going to have some God forms. We're going to have some myths. This was apparently laid out. The ink is actually chlorophyll. It's a really beautiful image. And of course, in general, there's a lot of gestures towards mythic thinking, and this kind of starts to spill into the general pop culture exuberance of a lot of these pieces.
This is a really lovely one that was found on the street of Amsterdam by the underground art historian and critic Carlo McCormick. And again, it features that rich play where this is-- you can't quite tell. This is Hermes or the Silver Surfer, and he's got the yin yang on the hat. It's like-- it's these fusions of images, which is, of course, so representative of the kind of bricolage that's going on inside the esoteric underground.
I don't know why exactly I included this one, except that it's one of my favorite pieces. There is a little bit more to say about them. One, it's just so beautifully done. It's so simple, and it's just like got this nice kind of graphic punch to it. But the lightning bolt here-- a reference to Shazam, but the lightning bolt itself is kind of a wink wink sign of LSD. And you've already seen a couple of lightning bolts. Captain L had a lightning bolt on him.
And it goes back to the 1960s and Owsley Stanley's famous formulation, white lightning. So you have a lot of these in-jokes and references to the sort of history of the production of LSD within a lot of the iconography. But it's not all just esoteric and the expected Eastern stuff. I think this is a very beautiful image. And it helps set up this communion wafer connection that we'll be talking about a little bit in the talk.
Sometimes they would do things like-- they would do-- because this is silkscreened and you can vary silkscreens very easily. That's like why Andy Warhol liked them. Because you could do a really fast silkscreen and then just change it-- change the color, change elements of the stencil. And so they would take that and make variations that they would only follow. So you might have fewer leafs on some other batches, and that would enable them actually to track where different pieces were going as it went down the distribution chain.
So again, there's a lot of internal reasons for the imagery. And now one of the outstanding blotter issues of the 1990s. This was a piece by Alex Gray. It was purple Jesus is one of the names that it had on the street. And Alex did it for the album cover for a kind of parody religion, the Church of the Little Green Man that was centered by another artist who took over a church in upstate New York and kind of had this play.
And this play is something interesting to talk about. It has to do with the sacred and profane, with the role of humor and parody. But it's more than that. I have another image here that just reminds you once again that this is a 900 block. And I like the way that Mark McCloud, who just lifted this image from Alex without asking him and went ahead and made a blotter out of it, included the frame. There's something about that that seems really quite, quite lovely.
And at first Alex was kind of annoyed by it, but then it was like it turned out it was pretty good publicity. It got into the hands of the Deadheads and everybody started to love Alex Gray. So this actually-- Mark bought this painting when Alex was a known-- a no-name and paid like three times what he was asking for because he thought it was so cool. And then Mark turned around and gave it to his mom.
And so now we're going to find out. Now, why would Mark McLeod give it to his mom. So we're going to have a little bit more about Mark McLeod, but first a little bit about this image. I'm going to go back. So we can see the full one. Who is this Jesus? How should we frame the figure when the frame itself literally forms the cross he bears-- which is a beautiful part of about this piece? Is Gray's depiction part Matthias Gruenwald and part Robert Williams religious?
Incarnating a battered and blue version of the luminous biological bodies that are Gray's trademark. Here, the crucified God-man seems to dangle between the holy and the weird suspended at a criss-crossroads that, like the Church of the little green man or the earlier church of the subgenius, finds it sacred in the profane or rather in the bizarre and incandescent coupling of the sacred and the profane.
As Jason Sexton writes in Boom, Gray's acid icon represents, quote, "The humanity of Jesus, juxtaposed with astral glory, radiating from his body and shining through his heart, along with the explicit connection of Jesus to LSD and the psychedelic community," unquote. Far from a blasphemous transgression, then this blotter Christ memorializes the original Jesus freak who remains as central to the acid pantheon as Shiva or Buddha.
As McLeod told Sexton, "If you take acid long enough, you got to deal with Jesus." And it's actually really interesting. The whole Jesus psychedelic culture thing is super rich and very, very unstudied because people don't really want to deal with. It doesn't fit into our ideas of what hippie religiosity was like. The Christians don't want to deal with it, but it's really deep. Having a Jesus trip was very common in the 1960s. Anecdotal reports at the time-- people often talk about this experience, Christ on the cross. Et cetera. Et cetera.
And then, of course, there's the relationship of psychedelics to the spark of the early Jesus movement in the 1970s, would go on to be really transformative across American Christianity. And some of the people who turned on to Jesus in that Jesus movement mode were not just rejecting drugs and then finding Jesus. They found Jesus on drugs and then they moved on. And so there's a really fascinating play there, and McLeod is definitely up for talking about it.
McLeod was raised Catholic. His father was knighted by the Pope into the Order of Saint Gregory, and his mother remained devout until her end, which is why she got the gray painting in the first place. When McLeod first took communion as a youth in Argentina, he fully expected a transformative experience, a quote, "One on one with the maker." He gave a complete confession beforehand and sincerely consumed the sacrament. But after swallowing the host, nothing happened.
One of his friends even got in line twice just to make sure their disappointment wasn't a fluke. "We got burned," McLeod says. "No magic. So I said, well, I'm going to find where they hid this, you know. I'm on a quest for the host." In McLeod spiritual narrative, he got what he wanted with the tab of orange sunshine he swallowed back in Santa Clara. This was the sort of epic trip that defined his life, which introduced him to God and Satan and the vibrating eons in between.
Though he came to reject organized religion, except maybe the Church of the Little Green Man. McLeod believes that tripping is sacred, or at least a, quote, "healthy, spiritually emancipating act." But in another way, McLeod holds fast to his boyhood faith because his core personal metaphor for blotter is not food or numismatics, but the communion host. Leaving the mystery of transubstantiation aside, the host already presents a powerful media metaphor that illuminates some of the subtle spiritual connections that acid blotter makes between object, experience and image.
While some communion confections feature blank surfaces, in many Christian communities, the wafer is stamped with the emblem of the local church or dioceses and sometimes with a dove. At the same time, the manufacturing and imprinting of the edible object is not sufficient to lend its sacred power, which requires a separate operation. Consecration doses the wafer with the Holy Spirit, and its consumers eat it in the expectation of grace.
In this way, the host differs from the magical and healing spells that in traditions around the world are inscribed on small pieces of paper that are rolled up and consumed. Tibetan popular medicine, for example, includes many such edible mantras-- some of which are printed with wooden blocks. While these spells are sometimes blessed by tantric Lamas, impregnating them with something like the priests consecrating power, the inscribed spell itself is considered efficacious.
So at first when I was thinking about how far can we go with the religious nature of these material pieces of paper. I was like, OK, they're kind of like sigils, like the tetragrammaton. They're like magical, inscribed pieces of paper. And then I was-- and then I was talking about it with Claire Fanger, who I quote in a moment, and she was like, no. It's the communion wafer.
With the Catholic sacrament, the symbolic inscription is only incidental. The power and effect lie in the actions and words of the priest and through him the Holy Spirit. Quote, "by themselves, wafer and paper have the status of liturgical implements or paraphernalia," says Claire Fanger, a history of religion in magic. "You might want them to be attractive and appropriately decorated, but they aren't Holy in themselves."
This distinction raises the central question of illustrated blotter. Do the images make a difference or not? Do they phenomenologically inflect the spirit of the psychedelic or do they remain empty packaging. If these icons do make a difference, how do we characterize this effect? Is it a spell, a prayer, a costume?
As Stanley Owsley proved when he stained the same crystal with different food coloring dyes, I'll tell you that. So this is one of the great experiments in acid media is that Owsley Stanley made a batch of crystal and then he subdivided the batch of crystal into different piles, and he colored them with different food coloring. So he had greens, red, blue. And then he put those into pills and put them on the street and watched as the stories of these different substances came back.
So the green ones were really peaceful and the red ones were really mystical. And there was like this whole lore developed around something that was the same crystal. And so there's clearly something involved about the associations with the packaging that informs people's experiences. This is the same way that placebos work. It's not just that any placebo will work as a placebo. But if you make the placebo, so a big pink pill, it's going to work better than a placebo that's a little round white pill.
So even the form of the pills have an effect on the placebo marker. So there's some role here, which in a psychedelic sense, we call set and setting. The pill form is part of the setting. So therefore it has some kind of role to play. So as Owsley proved when he stained the same crystal with different food coloring dyes, the look and feel of the carrier meter does shape the lore and thus the set and setting that informs the experience of LSD. In that sense, if all other conditions are the same, it does make a difference whether you eat a flying saucer or a dove or Bart Simpson's slingshot.
At the same time, though, there's a limit to such influence, just as there is a limit to set and setting or the placebo effect. Images can only take you so far into the invisible or the infinitesimal. Given Mark McCloud's investment in the art of blotter, you might think that he would insist on the talismanic significance of its imagery. And he does, but only to a point. "The trip is about the beanstalk, not the magic beans," he says. The aesthetics of blotter cannot be confined to the material object.
"It is completed," he says, "by personally turning on. An act that is ultimately more iconoclastic than iconofilic. You don't want to make them into the golden calf," he says. Instead, he invites students of the art to note that if you place a well made and properly perf'd sheet of blotter before a lamp, you can see the light through the perforations.
Quote, "Speaking as a blotter artist, no matter how involved you are with the supremacy of your vision, you can hold that sheet up to the light and see through it absolutely. You can see the transparency of the shadow on the wall that is the image itself. And you can see through to the other side," unquote.
So now I'm going to contrast this zone here. This is some-- now we're going to move into fun and goofy zone. Just real briefly and I'll read one more part and then we'll be done. So here are some example of how silly and goofy and bizarre and pop cultural these images can become. And, of course, classic heroes like Zippy the Pinhead and the earlier mentioned SubGenius church of Bob Dobbs.
So the Church of the SubGenius being one of the great kind of parody religions. So this raises this again, this interesting point as well. If the same genre is featuring things that subvert and mock religion and revel in pop cultural goofiness, and in this example cartoon humor. This was done by another gay blotter artist named Grampa.
And you can notice the leather daddy effect there. It's a little bit Village People. And the playfulness, the humor, the hedonistic exuberance or silly references to pop figures like Mickey Mouse. But it raises this question then. How do how do we deal with the fact that we're have these sacred images and then these aggressively goofy, silly images? And I think this will be my final reading here that raises this problem.
Blotter acid is postwar paraphernalia, and as such reflects some crucial features of modernist design. Pattern and repetition undergird the form. Crisp execution is key, and many sheets are decorated with abstract and minimalist motifs. But the heart and soul of blotter imagery is, well, imagery. Those symbols, characters and figures that the German psychedelic writer and wild man Christian Ratsch calls iconographia psychedelia.
In a short essay for the journal Entheogen, Ratsch argues that these pictures reflect the, quote, "cognitive structures of LSD culture," unquote, and therefore suggest a deep mysticism that must be ferreted out through the proper exegesis. Many of the blotter symbols that Ratsch discusses from the Tai Chi yin yang symbol to UFOs are somewhat obvious references to the sublimities of acid experience. But Ratsch sees such enchanted symbols everywhere.
According to him, the acorn that graces one popular sheet recalls the sacred pagan oak groves of yore. While the strawberries that ruled Europe for a spell refer to the enigmatic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, where they supposedly signify the fruit of the tree of knowledge or possibly the magical mandrake. The octopus, in turn, reflects, quote, "a decentralized, expanded consciousness that extends its arms into all realms of being," unquote.
Ratsch's interpretations probably tell us more about the hermeneutical excesses of psychedelic perception than about its supposed cognitive structures. Even from a metaphysical perspective, he overweighs the sacred side of the sacred, profane dialectic that lies at the heart of the acid mystery, a dialectic that also characterizes the motives of many blotter makers who were as interested in expedient appropriation and in-jokes as they were in esoteric symbols.
As one blotter maker commented in an interview, while samurai crests and Hindu yantras may be exotic and suggestive, they were also easily swiped from Dover books. And while some blotter images did reflect the archetypal punch of acid consciousness, others functioned more like badges of tribal identity, like the VW emblem or the Rolling Stones lips or the Starship Enterprise.
Juxtaposing mainstream icons with a powerful and illegal psychoactive drug could also spark an easy countercultural frisson, which at its most extreme, gave a sneering punk rock edge to blotters featuring the FBI seal or McDonald's golden arches. Once on blotter, even banal icons can be magically transformed into winking double entendres as with the RX symbol or the Procter & Gamble mascot Mr Clean offering the ironic but not promise of clean LSD.
Mr Clean also-- well, I talk a little bit about comic artists here, but-- and the role of all the cartoons that appear in a lot of blotters, but here's the chunky part. All these funny folk compel a crucial question unasked by Ratsch. What does this edgy, sometimes aggressively profane humor say about LSD culture, at least in the years dominated by blotter? From one perspective, the appearance of Zippy the Pinhead on the sacrament confirms the Golden age narrative that I talked about earlier.
Acid trips were spiritually transformative in the 60s, but they degenerated into hedonic larks by the end of the 1970s. But this view profoundly misunderstands the role of humor and satire in countercultural consciousness and spirituality. As Christian Greer explains, humor is an essential source and feature of freak culture, at once dialectical, situational and metaphysical. Laughter builds community for those hipsters who get it, while also serving to deflate the pretensions of fellow travelers, whether naive hippies or arrogant self-serious radicals.
Humor also makes space for transcendental surprise, for the cosmic giggle, or for what Jack Kerouac called the holy goof. LSD experiences can be pretty funny in a way not always shared by other major psychedelics. Ayahuasca may be sublime, but it is rarely amusing. The oblique spirituality of the merry pranksters was all about the cosmic giggle. I mean, that's really core. If you go back over the prankster stuff, it's all about humor as a way.
It's almost like a way of disenchanting any move you might make on articulating the mystery. Calling it god, calling it cosmic consciousness, it's like, no, no, no, no, get that crap out of the way. We want the pure slate. And it's, in a way, it's a gesture. It's like a Unitarian Universalist gesture. And indeed, Kesey was influen-- was basically Unitarian. He was a Christian in some ways.
So Greer argues that his postwar Bohemia changed and commercial society became more-- absorbed more and more of its features. The humor necessarily grew edgier and darker, which helps explain the kind of sardonic Dada of many blotters from the 1980s. But the play of the negative only takes you so far. By the end of the 1990s, even crude and satiric nihilism had found its way into mainstream TV animation.
Similarly, the appearance of a Cartman or Homer Simpson on blotter barely raised an eyebrow. The edge was now everywhere. But I think I'll stop there. This is pretty interesting stuff, but in general I've had a lot of fun with the Q&A portion of the presentation, so it went on a little longer than I would do ideally, but thanks for your attention. And we can do some Q&A, right, right, Charles-- No, no, no were you going to come out here and talk to me?
CHARLES STANG: No, no, no. Random Q&A.
ERIK DAVIS: OK.
[APPLAUSE]
But you're going to ask a question.
CHARLES STANG: I may ask a question.
ERIK DAVIS: Good.
CHARLES STANG: But I imagine there are many questions to be asked here, so we're going to give the floor to the floor-- we're going to give the mic to the floor. Because of our guests joining online, we're going to ask that you speak into the mic. So if you have a question for Erik, please raise your hand. I'll give you the mic.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. That was so fascinating. I absolutely love this talk. I was just wondering about-- I wanted to know a little bit more about how you went about sourcing these images and these blotter papers. I was wondering, was that hard to do. How much, like, looking did you have to, you know, what sort of an expedition do you have to go on?
ERIK DAVIS: Well, you know, I wish I could say I was like I was an intrepid Indiana Jones digging through basem*nts across the land. But basically I just hung out with Mark McCloud, who'd done all the work. These are all from his archive, and he even scanned a lot of these images, high res scans. So we didn't even have to do a lot of that. And so that part of it was really easy. The other source, though, that was really just as almost as important in terms of understanding the arc of things was access to the DEA newsletter-- DEA newsletter called Microgram.
And Microgram was an in-house publication distributed to all the labs in police departments in the DEA that were testing things. And it's just so happened that the front of the book of the journal included a lot of information about new street drugs and new street formulations. So there was a wealth of information that allowed us to get a sense of like, when does blotter take off. When do we start seeing certain kinds of images. And so a lot of things were able to be kind of charted historically because of that source because all of this stuff isn't dated.
It isn't-- it's not named. We don't know who made it. There's a lot of unknowns in this material, so it's still pretty unorganized as, like, an archive. You know, there's some people who collect this stuff. And they want like a really crisp booklet with everything tagged. And this is the first example of this and this and that. And it's incredibly complicated. And we only did a little bit of that hard, hard work. Yeah. Anything else?
AUDIENCE: Thanks, Erik, for the talk. It was great. What do you think is lost with this medium, sort of, going away, drying out and replaced with more of a clinical setting for this?
ERIK DAVIS: Well, yeah, there's one whole story that I didn't even talk about that's part of the story in the book, which is that-- I won't go into the details, but partly because of Mark's second acquittal turn-- the argument in court turned on the question of whether or not blotter paper was art. Like, literally. So it's one of those great stories that a lot of people have discovered.
You learn a lot by following the legal organization of these squirrelly topics. And- because he was busted with a tremendous amount of paper, but it wasn't dipped. So they were trying to pin him with oh, you're the Acid Lord. And he was like, it's just art. And they managed to convince a jury in Kansas in 1999 that it was art. And so once that happened, then people who were aware of the scene and were already starting to trade street blotters or some of them were undipped. And sometimes they get people to sign them like Albert Hofmann or Tim Leary.
So there was already a little bit of a market developing. And suddenly it was like, well, it's art. Let's go. And so you started to see blotter paper at festivals and dead shows, no longer dead shows, but at shows where people were buying posters and such. And that then led to a market that Mark describes as vanity blotter, which is blotter that is made-- In fact, I have some examples, so I'll just throw-- We're going to go ahead. Here's a piece of vanity blotter.
So these are made by artists that are named that will sign the piece and sold as a collectible. So there's a whole arc of the blotter story where it kind of gets disaggregated from LSD and kind of floats free as this weird street art medium that's never really takes off but exists in its weird little pocket. So that's a whole answer to your question is that now it's become this strange kind of collectible, which, of course, can still be used to-- to do the do.
Here, I'll give you another kind of fun example. A little bit more of that Dada humor. And then here's another nice, sort of, esoteric element. This is from a really great lowbrow artist named Daniel Diaz. So, yes, so you have this whole kind of history and iconography. And even that, though, in a way is being lost in the contemporary psychedelic frame, although a little bit less with LSD because LSD hasn't quite made the full transformation into a, sort of-- they do a lot of research on it and they are studying it for potential psychological healing effects.
But it's not going to become part of the psychedelic Renaissance in the way that psilocybin is, just for the fact that it just takes too long. It's too squirrely. It's too long. So it's still a little bit on the edge there. But yeah, we miss a whole lot of the richness of popular culture, of the contradictory forces that are coming up from people's attempt to map and play with that kind of experience. And you miss a lot of the humor.
The psychedelic Renaissance is exceptionally humorless and--
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
ERIK DAVIS: --and that humorlessness is a problem. And then part of my telling of this story and to tell it in a funny way and to emphasize some of the humor is because the humor is intrinsic to the consciousness. It's part of the download. The cosmic giggle is part of the picture. It's not everything, but it's a part of it. And including and part of that cosmic giggle is recognizing the complicity that we have with material substances in a modern capitalist economy.
That some of the humor of these images has to do with-- it's a form of commerce. So putting the golden arches on it is like, OK, like, you know, over a billion sold. Like, have one of the billion. There's a way in which there's an acknowledgment of the complicity as well as the attempt to escape and to create a kind of alternative world within that framework. And you're not going to get there, unless you have some humor on board.
And so I think that the loss of humor as well as a kind of honoring of the First World counterculture. That, too, has been put to the side by most of the narratives that now are attempting to reframe psychedelics, either by saying, well, we the researchers, now we can research again. That was a dark ages, and we've returned to psychological research. Or, alternatively, within the kind of wellness world, you have substances that are-- because they're connected with Indigenous traditions, does have more kind of charisma to them, which raises all sorts of problems.
But here is a material that has no Indigenous connection that we can take without any sense of appropriation and the people who did that, in a way, are the ancestors. They're the lore holders. They're the ones who know the rituals. And even if they didn't do a great job of communicating it, they're kind of like, that's the ones we've got.
So part of my interest in psychedelic history is not just, oh, it was cool back then, but because this lore is really important as people try to make sense and make meaning out of these experiences, particularly outside of this narrow medical frame. So thanks for that question.
CHARLES STANG: I'm going to take-- I'm going to ask you a question now, Erik. So the humorless psychedelic Renaissance has occasioned investment in the study of psychedelics at universities. Again, for better or worse, whether the so-called dark ages needed this new enlightenment or not. My question for you is, given that, as I said, this seems that Harvard study seems to be, if not unique, a rare instance of humanistic inquiry into psychedelics, what do you think is the most exciting edge of the humanities dealing with psychedelics?
Or if you prefer to answer, what is the most exciting edge of psychedelics influencing the humanities?
ERIK DAVIS: Right, right, right. Well, I hope there's more of the latter. I don't know if I can speak to it too much outside of just the narrow worlds I know and the people we know who are interested in esotericism and contemporary religious experience who see the value of this as-- I can think here of, like, Wouter Hanegraaff's vision of an entheogenic humanities. In which entheogenic doesn't just mean psychedelic, but it means a variety of different altered states practices.
And that we, by paying attention to that, we have an opportunity to really revitalize what we mean by the humanities. We see the humanities not as just a bunch of signs that are transcribing relations of power and oppression, but actually, sort of, expressions of edge experiences that take a lot of different forms, including psychedelics. But to my mind, you can't-- for me, these things are a fundamentally enigmatic and necessarily interdisciplinary in an intense sense.
And what first drew me to-- I started to go to psychedelic conferences in the late 1990s and early 2000. And back in those days, nobody cared other than the people who would go, right. So these were-- but one of the things you learned right away is that it's like super interdisciplinary. Like, botanists, chemists, historians, poets, completely freaked out mystics, artists, you name it, musicians. Everybody is there and they're all got a piece of the pie. And there's no, like, no leader. No, there's no ethnobotanist was saying, no, no, no. You have to understand it in terms of the chemicals and the history of the plant or you're missing.
It's like, no, that's just part of the multi-dimensional reality that is manifested not just in psychedelic experience, but in the cultures that organically grow up around it. So part of my beef of what's happening now is that it's just getting narrowed and narrowed to more predictable experts. So I would hope that the way that the humanities approach issues of multiplicity, of ambiguity, of relationships, of material to experiential consciousness elements. It's just the perfect framework to make more sense out of these things.
I would like to think that as we integrate psychedelics more into the mainstream, that the current frameworks, psychological frameworks, practice frameworks, you know, the sitter, the integration circle, et cetera, et cetera, they're only going to work so well. And they're going to leave a lot of people going, what, like, what's next. Like, I can't go back to that, but I don't know where I am. And to my mind, humanities and science and botany and chemistry, but brought together with that, that spirit of inclusion and pluralism is the way to build a meaningful matrix around these experiences more than a narrow psychological frame.
And I'm afraid that framework is only going to go so far. And when it doesn't work, it's actually going to alienate and confuse a lot of people. So I see it very much a kind of both ways. Like I would hope, as we've talked about, that the need to make sense of these experiences as well as other extraordinary experiences will revitalize what it means to study the humanities, and to look in history, and to look in texts, to look into poetry, to look into people's accounts. I'm not sure because-- for a lot of other reasons.
But I do really hope and believe that the kind of tools of the humanities, the approach of humanities, the attention to the sensitivity and issues around interpretation and the encounters of different cultures is going to become part of the dialogue, the picture, almost of a necessity as people wrestle with these things in ways that take them beyond the frameworks we're getting now. That's my hope.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. I've always heard and so do the esoteric circles that Grady McMurtry of the O.T.O.-- the second O.T.O. patriarch-- the O.T.O. is Aleister Crowley's inspired or the inspired by Aleister Crowley fraternal and religious organization. I've heard from several people that he was dealing LSD at a big level and that allowed him to get the money together to get the Thoth tarot deck published in the 70s. Heard it from several people.
My question to you was, one, have you heard that and is it true? I take it with a grain of salt, but also, what instances do you see of the economics of this LSD distribution driving cultural moves and countercultural moves?
ERIK DAVIS: Absolutely, you know, that's a great question. I had not heard get the money for the Thoth deck part, but Grady McMurtry was part of that scene that I was talking about with Manny Vogel and that zone. And there was a chapter house-- what do they call them, cabal houses-- out in the Richmond in that period of time that was just acid drenched. And a lot of these characters were around that then.
And he had a really-- he broke his brain like he had one of these experiences you don't come back from for months. And it kind of altered-- altered him for a spell at least. But that wouldn't surprise me at all that that was part of it, and that he was part of the scene, and that people were certainly doing that. So Jerry Garcia has this idea that he mentioned, I think in an interview in maybe the late 60s-- I think in the late 60s still-- of the hip economy.
And it was kind of like a trickledown theory. Like, you have certain figures in the scene, musicians and drug dealers who are making a ton of money and then they just distribute that to maintain the health of the underground or to maintain the health of the Haight Street. And it sounds a little bit lovey dovey, and you should definitely take it with a grain of salt. But in other ways, it was very true.
So there were ways that people were supported in all sorts of manners out of this largesse. And a more concrete recent example with another drug is that until the legalization of cannabis in California, everyone knew people who in October would go up to the Emerald Triangle, to Humboldt or Mendocino and trim bud for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, working absurd amounts of time in a grueling and tedious task and making enough money to fund the rest of their year, whether they were artists or they were seekers or they were layabouts.
But it was a very active and noticeable way that the scene manifested itself. It also supported people at festivals who-- and this is also true of acid dealings-- where all the artists who are making the clothes, and making the posters, and making the objects. And that whole sort of handicraft dimension of festival culture, the money that supports a lot of that stuff is coming from that sort of overflow. So it's definitely a part of the picture. At the same time, one of the questions I'm asking is, like, again, why blotter images?
Because especially when you start thinking about some of the packaging that they came in. So you wouldn't just buy a sheet of Mickey, you'd buy 10 sheets of Mickey wrapped up in a beautiful golden foil and with a stamp. And inside of a gold box, there was all of this excessive packaging, some of which was quite elaborate. There was one package that Mark doesn't have but saw once of origami. So you'd get all your sheets wrapped up in this beautiful origami. That's not economically viable.
So one of the interesting things about the project-- I didn't read those parts-- is to think about the economics of blotter itself. Like, in what way is it a brand that actually helps sell, and in what ways is it kind of superfluous and therefore more like art, more like the free play and the kind of purposelessness of art. And they're both going on. So thanks for that question. Good.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious if you could speak a little bit to the relationship between land and acid, the sort of interest in so many other psychedelics as the terroir of, you know, Northeast Oaxaca, so specific to developing a mushroom tradition in the Sierra mazateca or like iboga in Central Africa. Acid being a sort of de-territorialized product, like, how, you know, what is-- how does acid reterritorialized SF or New York. Or what's the-- how do you-- how would you describe that relationship?
ERIK DAVIS: That's an interesting question. I hadn't really-- I hadn't really thought of it. I'm not-- how would I see it. I mean, one is that it is enchanting the urban landscape, which we think of as being, sort of, anti-natural and the place that you don't go in order to have these experiences. And that, but that can be transformed.
Here's a good example. So really neat story-- the origin-- one origin story, and there's multiple stories, there's multiple origins, but one of the main origins of New York City gay club culture that we see in the disco 1970s is the loft, and which was run by a guy named David Mancusa who spent-- Mancuso, who spent time at Millbrook with Leary, was a big acid head. And he started to throw these all night parties where he played DJ.
He wasn't like a great mixer. He wasn't doing, like, DJ tricks, but he was a great selector. And a lot of the tracks he, the kind of music he liked, went on to become the bones of disco. And these parties were advertised as love saves the day. And he had the disco ball. There was like fresh fruit and punch bowls. Things were spiked.
And so he saw acid as a way of enchanting and carving out a very urban environment that then in a way kickstarts and opens up this whole set of this rhizomatic spread of club culture where different drugs came to predominate and the acid element of it kind of waned or was more on the margins for a lot of it. But to my mind, that's a great example of the way that the urban landscape gets transformed.
Another way I would say that is that to the extent that as modern people we live in media. That media as a landscape that we explore, that that's the place that LSD kind of plays as much as physical space. That's a really great question. I haven't really thought about that. Thank you.
CHARLES STANG: All right. One more question.
AUDIENCE: All right. I'm going to try to consolidate this thought. Piggybacking, kind of, off that last idea. Terence McKenna had that kind of thought about there was no iconography that was ever created with the landscape of LSD. So within that space, we're kind of trying to figure out how to utilize it in the way that we want to.
So to the idea of play and harmonizing that with the humanities and the sciences, do you think there's a space where maybe in the therapeutic sense, you can utilize the play in order to manifest art, musics in conjunction with not-- and silliness to also deal with your traumas, as opposed to just the strict kind of forward going research?
ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, that's a great question. I was just talking to somebody who was kind of a carrier of some of that prankster spirit, and he's a member of what is called the First Church of Fun, which was associated with Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm, and then it has taken other forms where there's a strong emphasis on that playful, prankster, clownish element.
And this guy was talking about events that he throws that were all night, low dose, but still activated experiences where they were all just about humor and play. And he was-- and he's also a therapist, understands the importance of one on one working through trauma and is interested in other kinds of rituals that are much heavier, as he put it, where you get the lead on, where you bring out the heavy stuff that needs to be transformed through grief and weeping and, you know, that kind of ecstasy.
So it's not about denying that side, but it's about underscoring that possibility. And yeah, I think there are a lot of things that can happen, particularly in groups. Like the silliness, you're just by yourself with a therapist taking notes and you're getting silly is like, OK. But it's like when you get the group vibe going, that's a whole other thing. And I think that's part of what I'm hoping will begin to happen. And there's actually economic reasons for it to happen.
If you want to have effective therapy for people who don't have a lot of money and aren't going to pay the big prices, well, you're probably going to do it collectively. So it raises a lot of issues, difficult, safety, blah, blah, blah. But there's also the possibility of finding new ways for communion to happen, for people to come together in a spirit of play and celebration, as well as wrestling with the deep stuff.
And I do think that that's one of the core messages of LSD is a certain way of skirting the abyss with a laugh and that that can be applied to very concrete problems in our lives. And I think we can all agree that for all the attention to the kind of historical and personal suffering that we all carry and that some people carry enormously, we've gone a little too far over into a kind of victim identification and a way of identifying with your wound as kind of the consistency of identity, which is, of course, precisely what gets blown apart in a large psychedelic experience.
So I think there's some corrective in that humorous and celebratory dimension and recreational side of things that is often downplayed in the serious register of therapy. So I would like to think that will be part of it. And I suspect it will be, as well as the continuing of festival culture, which needs a lot of work at this point. I think there's a lot of problems with it, but at least on smaller scales, it still can provide very much that kind of, you know, communitas. So thank you for that.
CHARLES STANG: I think with that, we need to conclude the formal Q&A. We will be whisking you away in about 15 or 20 minutes.
ERIK DAVIS: Oh, OK.
CHARLES STANG: But what that means is--
ERIK DAVIS: I'm going to be whisked.
CHARLES STANG: It's not ominous, don't worry.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
ERIK DAVIS: I'm going to be whisked.
CHARLES STANG: Got a van that's now pulling up to take you away. But what that means is if you have questions you'd like to put to Erik, you can linger and take those.
ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, and also, if you want anything signed, I'm going to sit there--
CHARLES STANG: Oh, beautiful.
ERIK DAVIS: -- on that table. And so it's going to be a little awkward. Maybe we can pull this back, but there's another table over there. I think it'll be easier to do it here. So that's what I would-- so we can come up, do a brief chat.
CHARLES STANG: Yeah, maybe. Maybe then-- I didn't realize that. So maybe not Q&A, but just quick signings. But Erik, thank you so much.
CHARLES STANG: Absolutely.
[APPLAUSE]
CHARLES STANG: Thank you so much.
ERIK DAVIS: Thank you.
CHARLES STANG: It was wonderful.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
