Maria Papaspyrou - 30 Apr

This book is dedicated to those young girls and boys (and all genders inbetween) growing up in these difficult times. May you find inspiration in these words and bring their seeds into the future, so that a better worldmore just, more balanced, more psychedelic, and more feministcan emerge from the ashes of this one.

PSYCHEDELIC MYSTERIES OF THE FEMININE

Words like essential knowledge and provocative somehow fail to do justice to the content between these covers. These are contemporary, controversial issues in psychedelics that arent adequately being addressed elsewhere: abuses of power and the ethical behavior of psychedelic guides and shamans and the role of psychedelics not only in women reclaiming their power but in deconstructing the gender binary. There is mystery and potential in the feminine, the yin shadow. That darkness is an important piece of the power and glory that is woman. I applaud this project and recommend it heartfully. It is crucial information that needs to be integrated into the psychedelic community and the larger tribe of humanity. Also, the artwork is gorgeous and inspiring.

JULIE HOLLAND, M.D., EDITOR OF ECSTASY: THE COMPLETE GUIDE AND THE POT BOOK

This edited volume presents a wide-ranging history of the roots of the current psychedelic renaissance. From the ancient rites of Dionysus, scholars and practitioners explore how the Sacred Feminine opens a doorway into the Divine via both ecstatic trance and an embodied connection to nature. Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine is a valuable addition to all collections of psychedelic mysticism.

RACHEL HARRIS, PH.D., AUTHOR OF LISTENING TO AYAHUASCA

This impressive volume weaves together an evolving understanding of the psychedelic feminine through essays and art. The call for all people to embrace the Divine Feminine in its many forms is loud and clear in this celebration of the feminine voice and historical perspective. We have the power to transform our culture and our world. This anthology is a wonderful aid in discovering a path toward love, healing, and balance.

RICK DOBLIN, PH.D., FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHEDELIC STUDIES

This book is packed with ideas, information, and analysis on the importance of the feminine in psychedelic, ecstatic, and shamanic practicetopics I find utterly fascinating and sorely needed in this time of crisis, with our longing for transition and with our need for inspiration and magic beyond our current paradigm.

GAIL BRADBROOK, PH.D., COFOUNDER OF EXTINCTION REBELLION

From this groundbreaking collection there emerges a specific feminine approach to mind-altering substances, a phenomenon that has been breaking through and doing its part in driving the psychedelic renaissance. The multicultural contributors speak from their personal experiences with entheogens. The female perspective amplifies the yin component at the heart of the visionary plant experience. There is authenticity and activism here, along with a wide-ranging body of tremendously useful information enhanced with mind-bending shamanic art.

MICHAEL HOROWITZ, COEDITOR OF SISTERS OF THE EXTREME: WOMEN WRITING ON THE DRUG EXPERIENCE

Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine is an essential addition to the worlds psychedelic library. A superbly conceived, edited, and visually stimulating anthology in which a chorus of activists, researchers, visionaries, and fourth-wave feminist voices offer remedies to the challenges of our time.

GRAHAM ST JOHN, AUTHOR OF MYSTERY SCHOOL IN HYPERSPACE: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DMT

Acknowledgments

We the editors wish to express our enormous gratitude to all the writers and artists that have generously contributed their work and energy for this volume with great enthusiasm, knowledge, and passion. They are all listed in the pages that follow and have been a great team to collaborate with over the course of three years.

We would like to thank Inner Traditions for expertly supporting and housing this project throughout its journey, especially Jon Graham for opening the doors to this book by trusting its message and integrity, Kelly Bowen and Manzanita Carpenter Sanz for guiding us through the intricate publishing process, and Patricia Rydle and Kayla Toher for carefully and meticulously metabolizing this anthology to its final form and structure with incredible editing expertise. There were many others behind the scenes who fine-tuned the production of this book, and we are thankful for their efforts toward the end result.

We thank William Montgomery for his skillful, precious editing help in service of the goddess while staying in Portugal, and to all those who have crossed our paths and have inspired our work, either directly or indirectly. We are lucky to be part of a vibrant web of soulful and inquisitive hearts and minds.

We would like to express our respect and gratefulness for collective spaces like Boom Festival and Breaking Convention that have offered us transformative initiations and have supported the emergence and expansion of consciousness and collaborations.

We pay homage to Maria Sabina, the first woman shaman to be recognized as such in modern culture, to Kai Wingo, who was planning to participate but crossed over to the other side while this book was in the making, and to all our allies and guides from the otherworlds.

Most importantly, we would like to thank our families and our partners, Stuart, Diogo, Anna, as well as Bridget, the starry little future seed, and friends who have nourished and sustained us along this winding path.

We are truly grateful and moved to witness how much human energy and potency can gather around ideas that really matter! Without all of you, this book would not exist.

FOREWORD

Psysterhood

Allyson Grey

The voices and cries of our psychedelic sisters, from Sappho to Maria Sabina, are connected through a secret language that transcends time. We carry the mysterious womb of creation within us. We birth new realities. We are Maya, the divine veil of materiality. We are spider women, spinning stories of connection. We are the Earth Mother now desecrated. This impressive volume demonstrates the generous genius of the Goddess. Our spiritual sisterhood unites us with an often-silenced majority. Now it is our turn to tell our story.

At age seventeen in 1969, I moved to college and began tripping fairly often: journeying with psychedelic friends, camping around a fire in the Rocky Mountains, a daylong bicycle ride, dancing to Led Zeppelin at an art school party, and even alone, observing in the quad. This ritual of socially interactive self-medicating healed me, opened me, deepened me. Every experience, both enlightening and terrifying, enriched my consciousness and offered great learning.

In 1971, influenced by Ram Dasss essential book Be Here Now, two friends joined me in my tiny college bedroom intending to witness the white light. With only that aim and a dark, quiet space, after three years of psychedelic journeys, I saw the infinite, interconnected glowing light. It was the glue of the universe, like white neon, defining edges and permeating every being and thing. Secret writing, an untranslatable symbol system, appeared to me as the language of the Almighty force of the universe. The sacred language washed over all surfaces in the room and floated through the air like moving ribbons. This inexplicable vision lifted the veil on material reality and revealed a divine intelligence, speaking in a visionary language of the spiritual nature of all things.