“We used to trip out on drugs, but now, we trip out on demons.”

I think everyone in the current generation has said that to their parents when young and feeling rebellious. A cry of independence and defiance that we were no longer dependent on problems of material supply that governments could shut down.

It’s not accurate, and I think it’s a bit dangerous to say, both to the speaker and everyone else. Daemon might be a closer match, but even that doesn’t fit.

The darknet drug markets were nice while they lasted. For a while, they were the best way to get the chemical you were paying for in a pure and clean form. Someone in the know could get a strip of LSD-impregnated blotter delivered to their door disguised as pH paper in a week or two. It didn’t last. The need to get material objects around was the weak link in the chain, and the opioid epidemic kindled a righteous fury in tracking down any black market. The psychedelic trade was a bonus victory they were willing to take along with it, and it was easier to shut down as that was never where the money was.

After that, what you could find offline was Alexander Shulgin’s table scraps. The odd research chemical so unpleasant or dangerous enough to use that nobody had bothered scheduling it, so you’d drop a hit and if you avoided having a bad trip, you’d spend the whole time with your muscles clenched so hard you felt like you’d been beaten up afterward, and put yourself at risk for a heart attack now or Parkinsonism later.

The feds had finally made the world square. Or so they thought. So most of us thought.

Some combination of folks practicing meditation, Neopagans, Chaotes, and neophiles generally got together virtually to see how far they could alter their consciousness without using drugs at all. ‘Enthusiasm without entheogen’ was the order of the day. They shared tips on meditation, sleep deprivation, foci to fill the mind with symbols, all had some success.

However, one day as a joke, some people tried to summon Mescalito, the green man, sometimes thought to be the spirit of the cactus who would appear in the vision of one tripper or another, into their minds. And that was the day that everything changed. A group of people all in a virtual circle, listening to the same sounds, focusing on the same image, called something into themselves. And suddenly their visual fields fractured into brightly colored geometric shapes, their minds opening up. The same feeling that some had known from peyote poured into them.

That’s how it started. People were conservative at first, sticking to entities that were thought to ‘exist’ in some sense. Rituals sprung up in person and on the Internet to invoke the mushroom queen and the DMT aliens (some folk call them elves, but I have more sense than to call elves into myself.) Under the moral panic that fueled the second War on Drugs, in person meetings got pretty risky, pretty fast. Any collection of young or unconventional people was likely to cause the police to barge in.

But it’s hard to break up purely textual communication by people who know each other. Or even people who only have a vague acquaintance. The weakness of every Dark Web drug emporium was the need to put money in and get products out. Once distributed cybernetic ritual magic was shown to work, there was little they could do to stop it. People needed only to set times, share images, share songs, write a script and synchronize their clocks to make sure everyone was on the same page in the same part of the working.

And so it grew. Each success seemed to potentiate the next. The skeptics thought it increased people’s faith in success, let them access the power to change their own minds. Others felt a wall was being broken down, each brick loosened a little more by the psychic change people called into themselves.

I don’t know what I believe. I get the sense the mystic view is on the ascendant, and I don’t blame people for that. It feels like contacting some realer reality, meeting entities of some sort, but I’m showing my age. One product of being into psychedelia when that had more to do with Alexander Shulgin than Peter Carroll, is just how much of a sense of every experience and feeling you have being an artifact of some impersonal process. The experience of spirits doesn’t make me doubt my skepticism, but the ease with which that experience is gained does.

With success came panic. No longer could they search for joints or blotter or airplane glue, the public schools threw poetry out of the curriculum. Mythology. Most music fell under suspicion. Anything with the slightest potential to inspire Enthusiasm.

Who would have guessed that Pentecostal Christians and psychedelic sorcerers would have become brothers in arms? But when mainstream Christianity joined itself with society as a whole in condemning the Ecstatic, those bearing Charismata were no longer the lovable kooks of the family of Christ, but an enemy nation in thrall to demons infiltrating the Kingdom of God.

Yea and verily, come to that, the folks who had been slain in the spirit, were caught up to heaven, or spoke in tongues for a century helped a lot more people break through. I have friends who couldn’t make any psychedelic ritual work for them until an old Pentecostal grandmother first got them to speak in tongues. They call it an initiation. A mental flame that burns all the time and flares up when working to change the way the mind flows and perceives. I call it learning to flex a new cognitive muscle.

Things didn’t get as dystopian as they could have. The schools became grinding arenas for career-focused skills with any pretense at developing students as persons and broadening their minds and experience less lost and more tried for subversion and shot. Any mathematics without an obvious and immediate commercial application was met with suspicion.

The public libraries, too, suffered, with their collections stripped of anything that could inspire the soul or spark a new perspective. It took years of crying “But, think of the children!” and firing any staff member who wasn’t an accountant or a Puritan, but they did it.

In practice, though, everything’s still there. Nothing was lost. The free speech absolutists and the champions of western civilization in the older generations weren’t about to countenance a book burning. Music and poetry and literature no longer had the imprimatur of acceptable society, but everything had been moving online anyway, and the big rights-holders found that associating themselves in big court-cases with the media parents claimed were teaching their children to mainline demons into their souls was far worse PR than the previous run of copyright driven bullying and censorship. Plus, most people, when it comes to it, won’t really try to kill the things that most inspire them.

Some people even say it’s a positive, having the notions of creativity and culture associated with us gives us more legitimacy, according to them, and inspires more people to cast a spell and take a trip. I can’t get over every curriculum becoming the worst possible version of itself, though.

Then the bad trips started.

Nobody knows why.

Well, no. The switch from the chemical to the ritual hadn’t ended bad trips. It had made them less common. Back in the new ’10s you could buy LSD, but you seldom got LSD. They’d sell some quasi-legal research chemical often with a heavy body-load, dangerous side effects at lower doses, a different feel. A ritual might work. It might not. You might spend weeks wondering whether it /kind of/ worked or you’re just fooling yourself. But the ritual you did was the ritual you intended to do.

Obviously some people were going to have bad trips. Completely sober people have panic attacks and freak-outs and nightmares without the benefit of drugs or magic all the time. People brought psychological baggage or were in a bad head-space that day, and even if the ritual went off without a hitch, the voyage of self-discovery they embarked upon took a dark path.

Some spirits, some rituals, started to get a reputation for going bad. Maybe it was just a memetic contagion. Folks would have a bad trip expect to have one next time and make their expectation come true. They warn their friends who’d be worried themselves and have bad trip of their own, and there you go.

That’s what I lean toward, but I’m not so sure. I had my own share of waking nightmares, even when I completely rejected the idea of spirits going ‘bad’. Maybe I got a touch of the fantods from everyone else talking about it. They say the placebo effect works even if you’re aware of it.

Other people thought it was just a product of everyone tracking in their psychic baggage. A shared spirit. A shared ritual, whether done alone or together, was shared. We were the body of Mescalito as sure as the Charismatics were the body of Christ. Who we were when we tripped changed the trip for everyone, at least a little.

According to them, too many of the wrong kind of people were tracking their mind-prints all over their invoked spirit.

Perhaps too many people period.

And so, one of the worst parts of classical occultism came back. Secrecy. Having to prove your worthiness to be initiated into the mystery.

To some of us, the fact that magic worked, or seemed to, made some folks keeping it their personal possession even more heinous.

So of course there was a fight. Teenagers trying to curse each other and send each other into bad trips, yes. But mostly ideological, between those who viewed the altered state of mind as the right and heritage of every living person that should be shared and open to all, and those who viewed it as belonging to them and their community, not to be sullied by the rest. There were some people also who argued that it was for people’s own good, to keep them away from things that might psychically harm them if they weren’t ready.

You might guess, I’m on the open side. There aren’t that many of us. A lot of people feel seriously burned from the sense that the folks of a more initiatory bent feel free to call upon the spirits we contact (name? Create? Develop? Embody?), while sharing none of their own and decide to join up with them and do likewise.

Plus, there are the sorcerers of the DEA.

At least, some people think there are. No government official will admit it. Officially it’s a myth. Unofficially politicians and officials have hinted at it, to make concerned parents feel like Serious Actions are being taken against a Serious Problem.

The rumors are that the DEA takes any spirit they hear about an tries to turn it bad. Performs the ritual and brings people into the circle to torture, beat up, harass. Maybe dredges up trauma and abuse, who knows what. Anything they can to dump as much negative energy as possible onto our patrons.

With worries like that, it’s not too surprising so few Enthusiasts will name the spirit they call into themselves where anyone can hear.

That’s how the proliferation started. Sure, at first people tried experiments with conjuring new spirits, new names, new symbols, new effects to see what they would get. The concept of an egregore is as old as the occult, and some folks leaned into it hard. A lot more did when the old, well-known spirits people thought of as ‘real’ started getting reputations for being unfriendly.

If the Mushroom Queen was going to impersonate the Queen of Hearts, we’d make a new spirit to conjure. With enough people behind it, it started to work. It wasn’t precise, each person had their own idea of what they were aiming for, brought their own minds with them, and dreaming things into reality was never an exact science.

But.

People aimed for a quality of trip and more often than not got something close to it.

To start an initiatory tradition you’d gather a like-minded group of people and conjure something into being that you could all strengthen and reinforce with each use.

Open sorcery works the same, except you have no control over who joins in after it gets well known enough.

My taste has always been weird. Whether drugs or spirits, I liked to blast my mind hard and dog paddle around in strange seas of thought alone. Back in the olden days, ecstasy was always easier to find than acid. Nowadays, especially if you refuse to swear yourself to secrecy, the spirits you can hear about are patron deities of fun time with friends, not the long, interesting, but possibly unpleasant guide to a wandering mind.

So here I am, trying out an old friend.

I’ve had more trips on this spirit than I ever did on the chemical from which she took her name.

An easy enough spell to perform. You need enough artistic ability to draw her, though. I can’t really draw to save my life but I can smudge color around and get something that looks the part to me.

Eyes alight with glowing hair, all that fancy paints as fair

There revealed in flowing robes was Lucy in the sky

if I’m honest it looks like something out of a kindergarten art fair since I did the background on black construction paper and drew pentagrams with a glue stick and silver glitter for the stars, and did the rest in neon chalk. But, you know, the Venus of Willendorf doesn’t have a face, so I think I’m fine.

Lucy in the Sky was always more cerebral, intellectual than the rest. It only makes sense that the ritual to call her would have all the trappings of a laboratory.

Nothing complicated, a small card table can serve as your altar. All you need do is drop some zinc in hydrochloric acid, put on a stopper with a glass tube pulled to a point, test it by filling and igniting a couple tubes until it burns up with a soft pop, then light a flame at the point of the tube.

Hakim Bey said that the sorcerer could become intoxicated on a drop of water, after all. So put something over the flame to catch the newly created water, all you need is a few drops.

Prepare yourself, and drink it down.

Some people like to chant a mantra.

I just like to set my mind on something beyond myself. Tonight, the stars. Far away. Impersonal. Burning out their lives to no end and making the stuff of life whenever they die.

We’ll see what happens.