The Martin Shaw Interview, Part II

On life in the Red, the White, and the Black

Self after a big night with Tom Holland (center) and Martin Shaw (right)

Here is the second half of my interview with the English mythologist and recent Christian convert Martin Shaw. When this conversation picks up, we have moved from the pub to comfy chairs in the club room of our lodging, and switched from Guinness to single-malt Scotch.

RD: We were talking about psychedelics, and the potential dangers with them. Do you think that psychedelics give the user false information, or true information that he is not prepared to handle – or some mixture of both?

MS: ‘Psychedelic’ is a big word. I think there’s a difference between chemicals on a piece of paper that can be given to anybody, and a visionary vine that is ingested in a jungle amongst a community that’s been living in breathless proximity to that deity for several thousand years. So it’s partially to do with circumstance. For example, I know teenagers who have had catastrophically powerful experiences with plants like ayahuasca, but who found it impossible to glean meaning from it, because they don’t have a root system yet to help them interpret the high-velocity experiences that came to them.

Sometimes you can have these moments, and they stay with you. But Lewis warns: don’t keep going to the back of the wardrobe, because one day, it’ll just be fur coats; it won’t be Narnia anymore. The problem with most of us is that once we’ve tried something that works, we want to go back to it. But one of the things that’s attractive to me about transformational religion is that the experience like the Divine Liturgy does not depend on what you think about it. You go not for your own benefit, but to bear witness to something greater than you. The danger of a psychedelic universe, once it’s removed from any kind of cultural and tribal understanding – well, it’s all sizzle and no steak. As an old Native American once said to me, “Can corn grow from this, or not?” In other words, if the experience ultimately can’t become a gift for other people, then it’s effectively fraudulent.