The Chalice: Rave New World

The Chalice is a recurring psychedelic salon held at the Berkeley Alembic the first Wednesday of every month. Instead of the mainstream focus on clinical trials, legal frameworks, and psychotherapy, the Chalice will draw from the deeper humanistic wells of history, poetry, the gods, ethnobotany, humor, and mystery. We are less interested in fetishizing psychedelic substances or psychedelic experiences than in cultivating psychedelic culture and exploring what it means to be psychedelic people.

For this month's Chalice, we will be joined by Michelle Lhooq, the visionary writer and researcher behind the critically acclaimed Substack newsletter RAVE NEW WORLD. Featured in Art Forum, GQ, Guardian, and VICE, Lhooq's street-level journalism charts the cutting edge of global drug culture, harm reduction, and pharma-delia, shooting the the gap between counterculture and mainstream discourses. Redefining the "gonzo" approach to journalism, her reporting has offered readers front-line coverage of the Burning Man protests of 2024, explored the weird world of blackmarket shrooms, and uncovered the ways drug testing at raves have reshaped mainstream discourses around harm reduction. Her firsthand experimentation and rigorous analysis of psychedelic subcultures offers an unblinking vision of where psychedelics are at today, emphasizing the need for equitable access, community-driven care, and opposition to corporate co-optation -- a perspective that has cemented her as one of the most vital and original voices in the field.

The night will feature a four-way conversation between Lhooq, Christian, Erik, and Maria. The topics under discussion will include the state of the art of psychedelic reportage, the state of rave, cannabis culture, the anomalous and extraordinary dimension of expanded consciousness, and what to do when discorporate entities show up in your psychedelic headspace.

This first half of this event will be streamed online.

Interested in volunteering for this event? Please fill out this form.

The co-hosts for Chalice are Erik Davis, author and Alembic co-founder; Maria Mangini, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council and old-school head; and Christian Greer, currently a lecturer on counterculture at Stanford University. The first half of each gathering will feature a talk or special guest interview; the second half of the evening is designed to develop the community, sometimes with breakout groups, story hours, and peer-to-peer discussion, and always with more questions than answers.

J. Christian Greer, PhD, is a scholar of Religious Studies with a special focus on global psychedelic culture. He has held teaching positions at Harvard University, Yale University, and is currently a lecturer at Stanford's Medical School. He is the co-founder, and the co-chair of the Drugs and Religion program unit at the American Academy of Religion, and each June, he leads “The Psychedelic Universe: Global Perspectives on Higher Consciousness,” an intensive, 2-week seminar on the history of psychedelics, hosted on-location at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Alongside his research, he is an organizer for the Order of St. George's Horse, a pilgrimage confraternity & book publisher. His latest books include, Void Machines: the Paper Shrines of J. Christian Greer is a collection of his artwork, and Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots (co-authored with Dr. Michelle Oing) which analyzes the pilgrimage folklore associated with the rainforests of Japan's Kii Peninsula. Learn more about his work here: orderofstgeorgeshorse.com

Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on alternative religion, media culture, the popular imagination, and the psychedelic underground. He is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Davis’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He writes the online publication the Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com), and his next book is Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024).www.techgnosis.com

Mariavittoria Mangini, PhD, FNP has written extensively on the impact of psychedelic experiences in shaping the lives of her contemporaries, and has worked closely with many of the most distinguished investigators in this field. She is one of the founders of the Women’s Visionary Council, a nonprofit organization that supports investigations into non-ordinary forms of consciousness and organizes gatherings of researchers, healers, artists, and activists whose work explores these states. She is a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, and Professor Emerita in the School of Science, Allied Health, and Nursing at Holy Names University. For the last 50 years, she has been a part of the Hog Farm, a well-known communal family based in Berkeley and in Laytonville, California.