Psychedelics and the Solstice

At After the Rains, we orient our events, when possible, in relation to significant astronomical events. We would like to take this opportunity to explain why we do this and, along the way, to explore the relationship between psychedelics and archaic festivals such as the solstice.

The psychedelic experience is different for everyone, but one of the commonalities that people tend to highlight is that it reveals the lack of orientation at the heart of the human experience as it is currently lived. At its most extreme this can be expressed through the conviction that we have been mistaken about absolutely everything. A milder version might point to our fixation on such things as individual attainment, personal ambition and accumulation of wealth. Either way, in the afterglow of a psychedelic experience one often feels one has touched a state of simplicity and coherence which demands that we re-evaluate the priorities and values that we have been operating with hitherto. But is there a more appropriate... a more human... orientation?

There are plenty in this day and age who would gleefully insist that no, each and every way of orienting oneself, either individually or collectively, is a social construction embedded in the dominant culture. In a sense this is the easy option: there is nothing apart from the games we play and therefore there is really no demand upon us to do anything other than continue playing our games until they exhaust themselves.

And yet...

… in the afterglow of the psychedelic experience, did we not feel reverence? didn't we feel brushed by the sacred? and did not these feelings find expression in our dumbfoundment at the star-strewn night sky, at our reverie before the rising sun, that star which nourishes the Earth... our Earth! The planet which shapes us and clothes us and feeds us and to which we owe absolutely everything? Didn't we see the threads which connect the unfurling leaf of a seedling to the return of the sunlight after the chill of winter? Did we not feel the rising vitality that comes with the arrival of spring and didn't we feel emboldened to embark upon that project that seemed, during the dark evenings of the winter, nothing but a pipe-dream? Did we not, if only for a period that perhaps extended into the following day, fully understand why our ancestors, pretty much all our ancestors in all places at all times, celebrated the spring equinox and oriented themselves and their cultural practices with respect to it? With respect to it and with respect to the summer solstice and the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, each bearing a specific significance for the emotional life of people, plants and planet. And didn't we understand, albeit fleetingly, that months as they are currently constituted are but pale shadows of the true month, the only month; the lunar cycle, which can neither be reduced to a tidy number of days nor fitted neatly into the solar year on account of it being its own cycle of time exercising a complementary but distinct influence on the life of the planet.

And isn't it reasonable, in response to the bereft feeling that rises from our stomach and swells into our chest, to ask how on earth we became so disconnected, so dispossessed of an inheritance that stretches back from time immemorial and reaches forward to limits of our imagination, far beyond our own terrestrial existence? How did we become oblivious to a birth right that was cherished and cultivated by our ancestors? The birthright that came to us by virtue of our being born of the planet, born of the solar system, born beneath the influence of the moon, born of nature.

The psychedelic experience helps to remind us of all this, to remind us of that which we had forgotten. But as the effects start to wear off, as we start to pull ourselves together, we are claimed by a different remembering… that we need to get back to the city, that tomorrow is Monday (moon-day, remember?) and we need to be at work at 9am sharp, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, for the start of another week, another cycle untethered from any cycle of nature.

But today, as we stand on the cusp of another Winter Solstice, that great festival of our ancestors reinvented by christianity as Christmas, we are invited to remember. It is the darkest point of midwinter, the shortest day and the longest night. The trees have shed their leaves, growth has all but stopped and many plants have died back completely, leaving no more than a seed awaiting favourable astronomical and meteorological conditions. The sun will rise tomorrow morning, but unlike the preceding six months the place where it rises will be no further to the south than the day before, for the arc of its daily journey across the sky has contracted to its narrowest point and from this day onwards it will rise incrementally further to the east and set further to the west. Each day there will be a little more light and, by the time we reach the Spring Equinox, the leaves will be returning to the trees, there will be new growth and the seed will have produced a shoot that will be pushing up through the soil in search of the light. The Winter Solstice represents a promise, the promise that in the depth of winter, at the time of the longest night and the shortest day, life and light will return and that death will be seen as just one moment in a larger cycle.

As it is for the plant so it is for us, and the Winter Solstice represents an opportunity to remember this. How do we remember this? First of all by remembering and acknowledging the day- Friday the 22nd of December this year. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too much to take a moment at dawn to see where exactly the sun is rising and to make a note of how from this day onwards it will rise progressively further east. Perhaps you could organise a gathering or even a little ceremony to mark the day. And perhaps too, that ceremony could be a pretext to consider the potentialities that you contain within yourself and that might be realised over the coming year, as light and life returns.

As a culture and as a species we are lost. We cling to ways of doing things that we intuitively know are destructive both of ourselves and of the natural environment. And yet we continue to do these things because it seems that everything in the world supports and normalises this way of behaving. And yet there is an alternative orientation which can gently decondition us from the alienating effects of our cultural inheritance and reconnect us with nature, with the cosmos and with our fellow human beings, irrespective of their culture or nationality.

There has never been deep-seated cultural change without a change of calendar, without a transformation in people’s orientation towards time. Rome adopted a calendar which started from the founding of the city of Rome. Christianity adopted a calendar that commenced with the birth of Jesus. Islam chose as their starting point the flight of Mohammed to Medina. All vainly supporting an unsustainable and unidirectional cultural bias. But throughout these and all other epochs of man, the seasons have changed, the moon has passed through its phases and the stars have turned in the night sky, precessing imperceptibly to all but the keenest of eyes. Plants have grown and died back, empires have risen and fallen and everywhere breathing chests have expanded and contracted. And all of this is the stuff that our consciousness is made of.

It is not easy to make a space in the clutter of our lives to honour this ancient orientation. However, there is no mystery about how to do it. Cultural change can be created simply by starting to orient ourselves differently and we can take a small step towards doing this by remembering some of the subtle teachings of the psychedelic experience and honouring the Winter Solstice tomorrow.