The Chalice: Academic Psychedelia

For this month’s Chalice, we will be joined by Graduate Theological Union (GTU) professor Sam Shonkoff, along with PhD students Alysiana Carter and Pablo Vazquez, to discuss cutting-edge investigations of psychedelics and religion bubbling up in Berkeley. While the field of psychedelic studies teems with talk of “mysticism,” “spirituality,” and “religious experience,” scholars of religion have been oddly absent from these conversations. In recent years, faculty and grad students at the GTU, in conversation with colleagues at UC Berkeley, have been investigating the weird, luminous, complex, and consequential insights that arise when you consider psychedelics through the lenses of religious studies. Alysiana and Pablo will share the fruits of their early doctoral work and the GTU-UCB Psychedelics, Science, and Spirituality Graduate Student Working Group that they co-coordinate. Devin and Sam will discuss what they’re cooking up in their own research, as well as how the GTU’s new MA program in Psychedelics and Religion seeks to change the landscape.

This first half of this event will be streamed online.

The Chalice is a recurring psychedelic salon held at the Berkeley Alembic the first Wednesday of every month. Instead of the mainstream focus on clinical trials, legal frameworks, and psychotherapy, the Chalice will draw from the deeper humanistic wells of history, poetry, the gods, ethnobotany, humor, and mystery. We are less interested in fetishizing psychedelic substances or psychedelic experiences than in cultivating psychedelic culture and exploring what it means to be psychedelic people.

The co-hosts for Chalice are Erik Davis, author and Alembic co-founder; Maria Mangini, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council and old-school head; and Christian Greer, currently a lecturer on counterculture at Stanford University. The first half of each gathering will feature a talk or special guest interview; the second half of the evening is designed to develop the community, sometimes with breakout groups, story hours, and peer-to-peer discussion, and always with more questions than answers.

J. Christian Greer, PhD, is a scholar of Religious Studies with a special focus on global psychedelic culture. He has held teaching positions at Harvard University, Yale University, and is currently a lecturer at Stanford's Medical School. He is the co-founder, and the co-chair of the Drugs and Religion program unit at the American Academy of Religion, and each June, he leads “The Psychedelic Universe: Global Perspectives on Higher Consciousness,” an intensive, 2-week seminar on the history of psychedelics, hosted on-location at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Alongside his research, he is an organizer for the Order of St. George's Horse, a pilgrimage confraternity & book publisher. His latest books include, is a collection of his artwork, and (co-authored with Dr. Michelle Oing) which analyzes the pilgrimage folklore associated with the rainforests of Japan's Kii Peninsula. Learn more about his work here: orderofstgeorgeshorse.com

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

Mariavittoria Mangini, PhD, FNP has written extensively on the impact of psychedelic experiences in shaping the lives of her contemporaries, and has worked closely with many of the most distinguished investigators in this field. She is one of the founders of the Women’s Visionary Council, a nonprofit organization that supports investigations into non-ordinary forms of consciousness and organizes gatherings of researchers, healers, artists, and activists whose work explores these states. She is a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, and Professor Emerita in the School of Science, Allied Health, and Nursing at Holy Names University. For the last 50 years, she has been a part of the Hog Farm, a well-known communal family based in Berkeley and in Laytonville, California.

Event Venue

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

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