Amid the glossy promise of a new Psychedelic Renaissance, this essay introduces the Psychedelic Resistance. This resistance is proposed as a grounded movement to challenge the commodification of consciousness and the corrupt rebranding of psychedelics. The original Renaissance (c. 1300–1600) was never a universal awakening but rather a selective illusion that concealed power, conquest, hierarchy, and epistemicide. That this same term has been co-opted to sell psychedelic transcendence is not coincidental; it is the clearest signal yet of the tactics and theft at play.

The Persistence of the Hidden: Visibility ≠ Absence

The story often told in Western psychedelic discourse is one of tragic loss and triumphant rediscovery. According to this narrative, psychedelic knowledge was suppressed, forgotten, or destroyed, and only now, through clinical trials, guided retreats, and New Age mysticism, is it being brought back into the light.

But this framing reflects more about the limits of Western perception than the actual history of psychedelic culture.

Psychedelic traditions were not lost. They were simply not seen, or rather, not recognized, by the epistemologies of empire. Ayahuasca was never hidden in the Amazon; it merely wasn't legible to a worldview that equates visibility with validity. Psilocybin mushrooms did not vanish from the earth; they continued to be revered and consumed in Mazatec communities and elsewhere, regardless of whether they appeared in peer-reviewed journals or policy debates.

To claim that psychedelics "disappeared" is to confuse invisibility with absence and to overlook the very cultural and ontological frameworks that made that invisibility possible in the first place.

Indeed, what provoked repression was not psychedelic emptiness but psychedelic persistence. The fact that Indigenous peoples continued to engage with these substances, without Western permission or supervision, was an affront to colonial authority. A mind-altering practice that remained beyond the grasp of European logic, taxonomy, and control was seen as dangerous precisely because it refused to be owned.

And where restrictions on psychedelic use did emerge, even within traditional cultures, these were not always the result of colonial interference. Many communities exercised, and continue to exercise, self-regulation, setting boundaries around who may use these substances, when, how, and why. These forms of governance, although sometimes strict or opaque to outsiders, are integral to the ethical and relational fabric of those communities. To cast all limitations as oppression is to repeat the colonial gesture of judging from afar.

What is often framed today as a renaissance is, in many cases, a selective recognition of practices that never ended. Western visibility is mistaken for global legitimacy. Rebranding something as "rediscovered" erases the countless generations that kept it alive, often in the face of enormous pressure and violence from the very cultures now claiming to revive it.

To honor these traditions is not to glorify them uncritically. It begins by letting go of the need to see to believe. It is to understand that sacred knowledge does not owe itself to Western consciousness and that what lies hidden may be hidden for good reason.

The Psychedelic Resistance

There's a strange irony in calling this moment a Renaissance, a golden age of psychedelic reawakening. A new dawn of healing, innovation, and spiritual return. But the historical Renaissance itself, for all its art and invention, was also a time of brutal colonial expansion, rigid hierarchies, and the systemic silencing of indigenous and feminine knowledge systems. It was not, as is often claimed, a period of universal enlightenment.

So when this term is used to frame the rebranding of psychedelics as medicine, as an industry, as a spiritual fast-track, we should ask: Whose story is being sold? And to what end?

This essay is not a rejection of psychedelics themselves. Instead, it is a resistance to their misuse. Resistance to the mythologizing, the commodification, the guru culture, the psychedelic bypassing, and the selective storytelling obscures the real histories and real harms unfolding right now.

We resist:

• The overuse of psychedelics as a panacea for complex social and psychological issues.

• The rise of shamanic grifters, techno-mystics, and neo-colonial therapists charging for ceremonies wrapped in half-digested tradition.

• The outsourcing of inner work to molecules.

• The pathologizing of sobriety and the spiritual hierarchy of "those who have seen."

This is The Psychedelic Resistance.

This is a call not to abandon the psychedelic path but to walk it attuned to the dark undercurrents that so often accompany the pursuit of transformation, power, and transcendence.

History Misremembered: Deconstructing the Myth of the Renaissance

The word "Renaissance" means "rebirth." In the popular imagination, it evokes a golden age of human creativity, scientific progress, and spiritual flowering. We're told it was a time when reason triumphed over superstition, when art and beauty reawakened after the supposed "darkness" of the Middle Ages, a period often dated from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE to around 1300 CE.

This framing itself is a myth.

The so-called Dark Ages were not uniformly dark. In fact, the term was coined during the Renaissance to elevate its own cultural identity by diminishing what came before. During this period, there were profound philosophical developments, scientific preservation in Islamic and Byzantine worlds, and rich artistic and intellectual traditions flourishing in monasteries and multicultural trade cities across Europe and beyond. Far from being a cultural void, it was a complex, transitional era full of innovation, just not the kind that fit Renaissance self-congratulation.

This is not the whole story. In fact, the popular Renaissance narrative is a deeply selective myth constructed by the victors to glorify themselves.

The Renaissance, typically dated from the 14th to the 17th century (c. 1300–1600 CE), was not simply an age of enlightenment. It was also the era of colonial conquest, forced conversions, witch burnings, extractive empires, and the systemic erasure of non-European knowledge systems. Art bloomed in Florence, and scientific curiosity spread through the salons of Paris and London.

Meanwhile, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and later England were violently expanding across the globe and enslaving people, plundering lands, and proclaiming divine justification for domination. This so-called "rebirth" depended on the destruction of others.

As Europe rebranded itself as the epicenter of reason, progress, and culture, it exported genocide and epistemicide. The flourishing of European identity was inseparable from the silencing of indigenous cosmologies and the imposition of extractive worldviews, including the erasure of its own local cosmologies, beliefs, practices, and deep knowledge. 

It was not a universal awakening. It was a strategic consolidation of power, wrapped in aesthetics and justified through a narrative of superiority. And now, centuries later, we see the exact myth-making mechanisms at work in what is being called the Psychedelic Renaissance.

Once again, a small elite is framing a particular cultural moment as a universal awakening. Psychedelics, long held sacred by Indigenous peoples, often criminalized and demonized by the same Western institutions now praising them, are being sanitized, commodified, and sold back to us under the banner of healing and progress.

But who gets to define what "healing" is? Who profits from this rebirth? And what gets forgotten or erased in the process?

The Renaissance was not a rebirth of humanity; it was a rebranding of Western dominance. Likewise, the current psychedelic narrative often masks deeper forms of harm:

• The extraction of Indigenous medicines without proper consent or reciprocity

• The rise of for-profit "shamans," therapists, and platforms selling trauma as transformation

• The psychospiritual bypassing of systemic issues under the guise of personal enlightenment

History, when misremembered, becomes a tool of control. And when we invoke the Renaissance without acknowledging its shadow, we repeat its patterns. Dressing them up in technicolor visuals and symbolic geometry doesn't sanitize them of their tyranny.

This is not a denial of psychedelics' potential. It is a refusal to accept their co-opted form as benevolence by default. It is to see through the narrative fog and ask: Whose story is this? And at what cost is it being told?

The Empire of Mind (Psychedelics and the Neo-Colonial Commodification of Consciousness)

If the Renaissance expanded its power across continents and bodies, then the Psychedelic Renaissance expands that same logic inward, mapping, claiming, and commercializing the terrain of consciousness itself.

This is the Empire of Mind: a subtle, lucrative, and largely unexamined form of neo-colonialism, where consciousness itself becomes a territory to be conquered, extracted, and repackaged for sale.

Today, psychedelics are increasingly being promoted as solutions while still sometimes framed as sacraments or mysteries. Solutions to trauma, to depression, to disconnection, to late-stage capitalism's spiritual vacuum. Psychedelics now circulate through polished clinics, curated retreats, and the language of tech-world ambition. The same substances once buried under prohibition are reemerging as high-end solutions, folded neatly into wellness brands and therapeutic protocols. Transcendence is marketed with clinical precision; healing comes at a price.

Some clinical applications have indeed brought relief and insight. For many, these interventions offer a doorway where none previously existed. But relief does not justify erasure. What is being called 'natural' is often a repackaging, stripped of its original context. What is sold as ancient is often selectively remembered. And what is being offered as healing may not be all that different from the systems it claims to transcend.

This phenomenon is often justified by the failure of Western medicine to address conditions like PTSD, anxiety, and depression adequately. The promise of "natural" or "ancient" remedies is seductive and not without merit. Many are turning to traditional substances because the industrialized pharmaceutical machine has failed them. However, there's something uneasy about this turn: a new narrative that claims "traditional is better" yet selectively applies this logic without honoring the full cultural, spiritual, and ethical contexts in which these substances originated.

Worse still, many of the very disorders being treated with psychedelics were invented within the same Western psychological frameworks, now turning to these ancient substances. Diagnoses like "treatment-resistant depression" or "complex trauma" are not universal truths. They are culturally constructed categories, often developed through Eurocentric lenses. What we are witnessing, then, is a strange ouroboros: invented disorders failing to respond to invented treatments, now being "solved" by medicines drawn from cultures that never used them for such pathologies in the first place.

This creates a surreal narrative loop: the illusion of returning to tradition while, in fact, projecting modern Western pathologies onto plant spirits that were never asked. It's a romanticized inversion that seductively and selectively coopts an incredibly tiny sliver of "traditional" practices and signals these as preferable - it's still just consumption rebranded. If traditional was universally better, we should be witnessing a massive boom in horse and cart dealerships.

Layered on top of this is a familiar obsession with exploration, but in this cycle, not of land but of the mind, of "inner space." This language of frontiers, initiation, and the edge of consciousness echoes the rhetoric of the colonial and space-age imagination. It is no coincidence that the psychedelic culture of the 1960s and '70s emerged alongside the Space Race. The conquest of outer space and the conquest of inner space are psychically linked; both are driven by a restless desire to escape earth's gravity, whether political, biological, or emotional, in pursuit of transcendence.

In this quest, psychedelics become new fuel, rocketing the soul into the stratosphere. Not just to be but to go higher, transcend further, be more. More awake. More healed. More aligned. More attuned. Always more. Or for some, to party better.

We now have an almost hyperbolic appetite for shadow work, ego dissolution, self-improvement, and "knowing thyself." While the desire for inner clarity is valid, the tools of transformation are often deployed with the same compulsive, extractive intensity as any corporate growth strategy. The "medicine" becomes entangled in the same pathology it set out to dissolve.

Traditional indigenous use of psychedelic plants, such as ayahuasca, peyote, iboga, and psilocybin mushrooms, has always been embedded in ecological, communal, and ceremonial frameworks. These practices are not designed for extraction; they are bound by lineage, responsibility, and reciprocity. But in the Empire of Mind, these relationships are severed. The substances are isolated, synthesized, dosed, and sold, divorced from the cosmologies that once held them in a state of ethereal balance.

This is not cultural appreciation. It is pharmacological appropriation, the stripping of substance from a story, of medicine from meaning. Ayahuasca tourism, for instance, is now well known for having created new pressures in Peru and Brazil, distorting traditions and making supply chains more responsive to foreigners than local communities.

Even more insidious is the psychological mapping that follows: the therapeutic-industrial complex now employs language once reserved for colonized lands. Exploration, breakthrough, and frontiers are deployed to describe journeys through the human psyche. Inner space is treated as a new wilderness to be mapped, optimized, and mastered. The mind becomes a new frontier of control. The entities that one may encounter on such journeys are now being cataloged, tagged, and sold.

And in this colonization of consciousness, sovereignty is lost.

Not only is the cultural sovereignty of those whose traditions are mined, but individual sovereignty is also being relinquished. This is ironic, given that psychedelics are often paraded as validation of such sovereignty. And so, the promise of healing is at times accompanied by a subtle disempowerment: one must look outside oneself to an expert, a guru, or a molecule to find the truth. The ordinary, grounded self is insufficient without enhancement. Or even more insidiously, the emphasis on individual truth-seeking.

This is the logic of empire: displace the native knowing, then sell it back at a premium.

To resist this, we must acknowledge it and view it through the lens of collective Psychedelic Resistance. To resist is not to reject experience. It is to re-contextualize it and return to the straightforward yet complex truth: these experiences are gifts and were never meant to be scaled as products.

End Part One…

Coming Soon

Part Two - Foraged Resistance and the Slow Work of Remembering

The first half of this essay has been an exercise in peeling back the polished layers of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance to reveal the colonial echoes, commercial shadows, and seductive myths beneath. However, resistance does not reside solely in critique. It also grows in quiet places, in personal acts of refusal, in the fertile soil of relationship, humility, and reimagining.