Holy Roads: A Conversation on Pilgrimage

For this very special event, Erik Davis will be in conversation with Dr. Christian Greer (Stanford University) and Dr. Michelle Oing (Yale University), accomplished pilgrim guides & scholars of pilgrimage. Celebrating the re-release of their surrealist pilgrimage guidebook, , and the publication of , the discussion will focus on the concept of powerspots, sacred travel in a disenchanted world, neo-animism, "tripping," and processes of reintegration following otherworldly experiences on the road. Christian & Michelle will also share their experiences founding and developing their pilgrimage confraternity, The Order of St. George's Horse, which offers a provocative program for ecstatic pilgrimage. As will become clear, their confraternity insists on reciprocity with the spirits and gods, as opposed to their commodification and exploitation in today's spiritual marketplace. Forget Paulo Coelho, Shirley MacLaine, and the rest of those New Age pilgrimage hucksters; this event will offer real deal, street-level insights into walking with the gods. Do not miss it.

Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on alternative religion, media culture, the popular imagination, and the psychedelic underground. He is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Davis’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He writes the online publication the Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com), and his next book is Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024).www.techgnosis.com

J. Christian Greer, PhD, is a scholar of Religious Studies with a special focus on psychedelic culture. He holds a MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, as well as a MA and PhD (cum laude) in Western Esotericism from the University of Amsterdam. His latest books include, V is a collection of his esoteric artworks, and (co-authored with Dr. Michelle Oing) which analyzes the pilgrimage folklore associated with the rainforests of Japan's Kii Peninsula. His forthcoming book, Angelheaded Hipsters: Psychedelic Militancy in Nineteen Eighties North America (Oxford University Press), explores the expansion of psychedelic culture within fanzine networks in the late Cold War era. He has held teaching positions at Harvard University and Yale University, and is currently a lecturer at Stanford University. Each winter, he partners with the University of Amsterdam to offer an introduction to the study of occultism, hosted on ZOOM, entitled FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE: Intro to Esotericism. Similarly, each summer, he organizes an intensive summer school course on the University of Amsterdam's campus entitled, THE PSYCHEDELIC UNIVERSE: Global Perspectives on Higher Consciousness.

Michelle Oing, Ph.D., is an art historian with a special focus on performance, pilgrimage, and puppetry in medieval and early modern Europe. After receiving her Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Art History at Stanford University, and is currently a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Her forthcoming book, Puppet Potential: Late Medieval Sculpture and the Aesthetics of Play, uses the conceptual lens of puppetry (as well as her own experiences as a puppeteer) to explore the playful, interactive, and paradoxical demands of late medieval sculpture. With J. Christian Greer, she is the co-author of , a semi-autobiographical investigation into pilgrimage folklore in Japan, and the editor of Void Machines: the Paper Shrines of J. Christian Greer.

Event Venue

The Berkeley Alembic, 2820 Seventh Street, Berkeley, United States