For tonight’s Chalice, Maria Mangini will be in conversation with Jahanara Romney, one of the founders of the Hog Farm, which is often considered the longest-running hippie commune in the United States. The Hog Farm became internationally famous at Woodstock, where they organized the festival’s unorthodox security team, the “Please Force.” Together Jahanara and Maria will dive into Jahnanara’s fascinating tales of improvisation, circus arts, music, pranks, and communal creativity. Tonight will be an exceptionally rare opportunity to hear OG psychedelic women draw deep from the well of humor, art, and collective joy.If you are looking for the online version, you can find it here: https://momence.com/l/J1hJOwqv
Jahanara Romney is one of the original Hog Farm members and continues to anchor the Hog Farm community today. Born Bonnie Jean Boettcher, she grew up in Minnesota and became involved in the region’s emerging folk music and arts scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She attended the University of Minnesota, where she became part of the lively Dinkytown cultural environment—the same scene in which a young Bob Dylan was forging his early musical identity. Some of Dylan's earliest recordings in 1961 were recorded at her Minneapolis home and she is sometimes described as an early girlfriend.
Jahanara worked as an actress in Los Angeles in her twenties, appearing in Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. Jahanara met Wavy Gravy in LA in a diner where she worked called Fred C. Dobbs, frequented by Marlon Brando and other luminaries. It was love at first sight and they got married in 1965. In 1966, they and some other offshoots of the Merry Pranksters were offered a place to live on a mountain top in exchange for feeding the resident hogs. This was the beginning of the Hog Farm, which became a place where they could host big gatherings and people would just show up. They were gifted an old school bus and the community painted it psychedelically and took it out on the road. Traveling around the country, the Hog Farm would create “happenings” bringing people together, creating community through comedy, art and music, spreading social justice awareness. Jahanara, Wavy, and The Hog Farm were also key players in the anti-war movement attending protests and rallies around the country. In 1969, the Hog Farm was invited to be the “please force” at Woodstock where they also launched the free kitchen, provided first aid and staffed what was then called the “freakout tent.”
In the 1970’s Jahanara, Wavy and some of the Hog Farm family traveled in buses in Europe, and ended up spending many months traveling in the Himalayas. When they came home, Jahanara and Wavy along with Ram Dass and other friends, responded to Dr. Larry Brilliant's call to found the Seva Foundation, to help eradicate preventable and treatable causes of blindness in Nepal and around the world. They also founded Camp Winnarainbow, a circus and performing arts camp in northern California. Jahanara is still a deeply involved and cherished member of the Hog Farm, splitting her time between the ranch in Laytonville and their community home in Berkeley. She continues her work at Camp Winnarainbow and serves as an Honorary Lifetime Board Member of Seva Foundation.
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.
This first half of this event will be streamed online.
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, Void Machines: the Paper Shrines of J. Christian Greer is a collection of his artwork, and Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots (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 Alembic, 815 Heinz Ave, Berkeley, CA 94710-2754, United States
Tickets
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
