The great pharmacologist Louis Lewin (1850-1929) notes that the uses of drugs for psychological control and for ritual use need not be distinct: datura and other psychotropic drugs have long been used “by religious fanatics, clairvoyants, miracle- workers, magicians, priests, and impostors” in the course of religious ceremonies. We already know of at least one cult leader who has used LSD as a tool of psychological control over their followers (Shoko Asahara, responsible for the 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system). The very characteristics of the psychedelic drugs that have led to their mystical veneration — the power to disrupt cognition and attention, to warp perception, to leave the subject wide open for new ideas and beliefs, to flood consciousness with imagery of stultifying beauty — make them and more purpose-specific substances (such as the chemical weapon Agent BZ) potent incapacitating agents. The idea that involuntary ingestion of such a substance could lead to union with a benevolent and omniscient God is absurd, yet the psychedelic doctrine cannot rule this possibility out. How to account for the attribution of divinity with something so potentially dangerous? It may be that the drug simply triggers a deep intuition that the very beautiful must be divine. If so, the irony is profound. As some researchers have suggested, the intense aesthetic experience created by psychedelic drugs is perhaps brought about by their ability to disclose to consciousness the mind’s normally occulted machinery of perception, hence the geometric patterns and fantastic architectural forms that are often reported by psychedelics users (temporal lobe epilepsy and delirium tremens can cause similar visions). According to this view, a feedback loop of sorts is established between the conscious mind and mental processes: the very evolved machinery of perception that makes aesthetic pleasure possible breaks through into the theatre of consciousness, creating seemingly preternatural visions. To borrow Charles Baudelaire’s metaphor of hashish as being a mirror of the natural, rather than the divine, the ‘psychedelic mystic’ is like an unwittingly resplendent peacock that mistakes its own reflection in the mirror for something else.