Mike Jay: Mescaline – A Global History of the First Psychedelic | Webinar October 21st 2025

Mescaline can be considered the original psychedelic: Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley coined the term, meaning “mind (or soul) manifesting”, after Huxley’s celebrated experience with it in 1953. But it had many previous lives before the psychedelic era. It was first investigated by western scientists, anthropologists and artists as early as the nineteenth century. By the 1920s its visual hallucinations were being widely studied by psychologists, neurologists and philosophers. Before all this, its natural sources, the peyote and San Pedro cacti, had been used in medical and ritual contexts for millennia in the deserts of Mexico, the Andes mountains and the Pacific coast of South America.

In a webinar lecture organized on Tuesday October 21st, we’ll be led into the mysteries of mescaline by cultural historian Mike Jay. Using rarely seen images, Mike will follow mescaline’s journey from the ancient temple sites of Peru to prehispanic Mexico, the first European encounters to its adoption as a sacrament by the Plains tribes of the southern USA, its discovery by modern science and subsequent eclipse by LSD and other psychedelics in the 1960s, and the resurgence of the mescaline-containing cacti in the twenty-first century.

The webinar will take place on Tuesday October 7th at 6PM UTC+3. The event contains a Q&A section and the total length is 2 hours. 

We offer this webinar as a pay what you can event: you can participate without paying, but by paying, you can help us produce more events like this and ensure that we can keep offering them to people regardless of their financial circumstances.

0 € – register here
5–20 € – buy ticket here

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About the speaker:

Mike Jay is an author and cultural historian who has written widely on science, medicine and consciousness. His books on the history of psychoactive drugs include High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture (2010), Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (2019), and Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (2023).