What Ceremony Does to Psychedelics: On the Importance of Applying Integrated Theories of Ritual Value Generation to Psychedelic Studies

Background: This paper brings ethnographic and cultural studies into dialogue with ritual and value theory. It is based on the tripartite premise psychedelics can fundamentally effect humans’ involuntary reactions to beauty and goodness (sensorium), ways of being and acting in the world (habitus), and what we think can(not) be the case about the world ((super-)plausibility). Structure: Firstly, I look at a historic comparative ethnography of ex-counter-culture-members. This ethnography uncovers the meaning crisis which many faced. The solution to this crisis for people who left the movement was to join ethically or ritually stringent religious communities. This prompted me to examine the theories of ritual and ethical enhancement. The former can be a method of generating valence for individuals and communities through defining group commitments and values. The latter discourse so far lacks a social dimension. Without the explicit inclusion of the decorated portal of a ritual, Western psychedelic praxis has often tended towards the ‘centripetal’ (inwards) rather than ‘centrifugal’ (outwards), terms developed by Chris Partridge, leading to detraditionalization and retraditionalisation respectively. This can lead to a different relationship between the culture and the individual – one of rebellion and rejection on the one hand, or of integration and acceptance on the other. Aim: I hope to establish that understanding and including an account of the surrounding rituals is central to the ‘preparation, set, setting, and integration’ paradigm – and thus to any account of psychedelic phenomenology. We conclude in consonsance with Frederico Campagna’s recent work that the development of new syncretic traditions is inevitable. Careful thought must be given to this for, in the words of Donna Harraway, it “matters what worlds world worlds”.