The Empire of Mind: From Renaissance to Resistance
Table of Contents
Amid the glossy promise of a so-called Psychedelic Renaissance, this essay introduces its necessary counterpart: the Psychedelic Resistance.
While much of today’s psychedelic discourse speaks of reawakening, healing, and innovation, the language it uses, and the history it invokes, deserve scrutiny. “Renaissance” evokes grandeur: an age of progress, beauty, and elevated consciousness. But beneath the halo of that term lies a history of conquest, hierarchy, and epistemicide. The original Renaissance (c. 1300–1600) was never a universal rebirth. It was a selective illusion—one that glorified certain kinds of knowledge while erasing others, centralizing power even as it claimed to liberate.
That this same word has now been co-opted to brand the return of psychedelics is no coincidence. It is perhaps the clearest signal yet of the forces at play: a familiar strategy of myth-making that cloaks extraction in transcendence and domination in enlightenment.
The Psychedelic Resistance challenges this narrative—not to reject psychedelics themselves, but to refuse the form they are increasingly taking: commodified, sanitized, sold back to us by the same systems that once outlawed them. This resistance is attuned to context, culture, history, and the recognition that not all medicine comes in a bottle, or belongs in one.
Media highlights of the “Psychedelic Renaissance”
The Myth of Rediscovery
The dominant narrative in Western psychedelic discourse tells a familiar story: that psychedelics were lost—buried, banned, or forgotten—and that we are now, at last, rediscovering them. Through clinical trials, retreat centers, and New Age spirituality, this tale claims a triumphant, scientifically-validated return to sacred knowledge once suppressed. But this story reveals more about the limits of Western perception than the reality of psychedelic history.
Psychedelic traditions were never lost or gone. They continued to exist and evolve in communities that the West did not see or understand. Ayahuasca was not hidden in the Amazon; it simply did not register within a worldview that equates visibility with validity. Psilocybin mushrooms did not vanish from the earth; they remained revered in Mazatec ritual and elsewhere, regardless of whether they appeared in journals or media spotlights.
To say that psychedelics “disappeared” is to confuse absence with illegibility. It overlooks the ontologies and epistemologies that rendered these traditions invisible in the first place.
What was threatening to colonial systems was not psychedelic emptiness but psychedelic persistence. The fact that Indigenous peoples continued to engage with these substances without permission or supervision was intolerable to imperial authority. Practices that remained beyond the grasp of European logic, taxonomy, and control were seen not just as foreign, but as dangerous. Not because they were chaotic, rather, because they were powerful.
Even restrictions that exist within traditional cultures are not necessarily remnants of colonial imposition. Many Indigenous communities have long exercised self-governance in matters of sacred medicine—setting boundaries around who may partake, when, how, and why. These rules are not always legible to outside observers. However, they are rooted in an ethic of responsibility, lineage, and relationship. To treat all such limitations as repression is to impose a colonial gaze.
The so-called psychedelic renaissance often amounts to a selective recognition of practices that never ceased. What’s framed as recovery is often just belated recognition. Western visibility is mistaken for global legitimacy. And the language of “rediscovery” subtly erases the countless generations who carried this knowledge forward, often under threat of violence, criminalization, and cultural annihilation.
To truly honor these traditions is not to glorify them uncritically. It begins with the humility to let go of the need to see or understand in order to believe. It is to recognize that sacred knowledge does not owe itself to Western consciousness. That what lies hidden may do so not out of shame or suppression, but out of protection. Out of reverence. And sometimes, refusal.
The False Legacy of the Renaissance
The word Renaissance, literally, “rebirth,” conjures a radiant image in the Western imagination: an age of beauty, genius, reason, and cultural flowering. We are told it was the moment when Europe reawakened from the darkness of the Middle Ages, casting off superstition to embrace science, humanism, and art. Leonardo, Galileo, and Shakespeare stand as icons of this narrative.
The world, we are told, was finally coming into the light.
But this framing is a myth.
And like all powerful myths, it reveals what a culture wants to believe about itself.
The so-called “Dark Ages” were not uniformly dark, nor were they devoid of art, philosophy, or scientific progress. This period saw the preservation and expansion of knowledge through Islamic, Jewish, African, and Byzantine scholars. Multicultural cities thrived. Monasteries preserved texts. Philosophical and mystical traditions flourished. The “darkness” was a rhetorical invention, a narrative constructed by the Renaissance itself to elevate its own cultural standing by diminishing what came before.
Far from being a universal awakening, the Renaissance was a selective celebration. It was a curated bloom of elite European culture that depended on widespread silencing. Even as art flourished in Florence and reason echoed in Paris salons, Spain and Portugal were launching colonial invasions, burning sacred sites, enslaving millions, and forcibly converting Indigenous peoples under banners of divine mandate. The flourishing of Europe was inseparable from the plundering of others.
What was framed as a rebirth was, in reality, a calculated rebranding of Western dominance.
Europe’s self-image as the cradle of progress required the erasure of non-European knowledge systems. Entire cosmologies were denounced as primitive, demonic, or unscientific. The inquisitions, the witch hunts, the forced conversions—all were part of a grand epistemic purge. Land was conquered, and so too were the ways of knowing that tied people to that land.
Maps as tools of conquest (1651 world map)
This is what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls epistemicide: the annihilation of knowledge systems. Not just the erasure of facts, but of entire ways of relating to reality—rituals, medicines, languages, stories, and ecological wisdom that had evolved over millennia.
And now, centuries later, we watch this same myth-making machinery at work in what is being called the Psychedelic Renaissance.
Once again, a small elite is heralding a cultural “rebirth.” Once again, a narrative of progress is being constructed. This time, around substances long held sacred by Indigenous peoples and once criminalized by the very institutions now praising them. Psychedelics are being sanitized, medicalized, and sold back under the banners of healing, optimization, and spiritual awakening.
But who gets to define what healing means? Who profits from this rebirth?
And what gets erased in the process?
The original Renaissance was not a universal flowering. It was a consolidation of power cloaked in a story of cultural, economic and philosophical development. Likewise, the modern psychedelic movement is often less a reawakening than a rebranding: trauma as premise, transformation as product, ancient medicine as intellectual property.
To invoke the Renaissance uncritically is to inherit its shadow.
And to replicate it in psychedelic culture is to repeat the logic of extraction.
This critique is not a dismissal of beauty, creativity, or potential. It is a refusal to accept myth as innocence. It is the beginning of remembering that true renewal does not come from dominance disguised as light, but from what was never lost to begin with.
Psychedelics as Product
As the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance gathers momentum, psychedelics are increasingly marketed not as sacraments, but as solutions. Solutions to trauma. To depression. To burnout. To the spiritual void left in the wake of late-stage capitalism. Substances once relegated to the shadows are now emerging in the polished language of clinical trials, curated retreats, and branded transformation. Psychedelics are no longer taboo, they are tools for high-functioning people seeking peak states, optimized healing, and curated breakthrough.
But what’s being sold is often not the medicine itself. It’s a story. A seductive, highly edited narrative of redemption through ingestion. The very substances once outlawed as dangerous are now being reintroduced through frameworks that mirror the very systems that exiled them: extractive, hierarchical, and market-driven.
It’s not that therapeutic use lacks merit. Clinical access has brought genuine relief to many. But relief alone does not justify erasure. The story being told is one of return to the sacred—but stripped of its context, stripped of its community, stripped of its cosmology. What is branded as "traditional" is often appropriated. What is presented as “ancient” is selectively remembered. And what is being offered as “healing” may replicate the very pathologies it claims to treat.
The irony is thick: Western medicine, having failed to address the very conditions it helped pathologize—PTSD, anxiety, depression—now turns to the medicines of other cultures for answers. But it does so without fully acknowledging the cultural, ethical, and ecological frameworks that have held those medicines for generations.
Diagnoses like “treatment-resistant depression” are not universal truths; they are culturally constructed categories, developed through Eurocentric lenses. And now these same frameworks reach outward, retrofitting Indigenous medicines to match problems of their own design.
Psychedelic retreat advertisement
This creates a surreal loop: invented disorders failing to respond to invented treatments, now being “solved” by appropriated substances from cultures that never separated healing from community, ecology, or ceremony. It's a rebranded consumption—one where "traditional" is trendy, but not respected. If traditional were universally better, we’d be trading in smartphones for smoke signals and buying horse carts instead of Teslas.
Layered on top of this is the rhetoric of exploration. Not of continents, but of consciousness. The modern psychedelic explorer is no longer a conquistador but a seeker of “inner space.” And yet, the language remains eerily familiar: frontiers, breakthroughs, the edge of experience. This is not coincidence. The psychedelic movement of the 1960s emerged alongside the Space Race. The conquest of outer space and the conquest of inner space are siblings in the same cosmology of endless expansion.
And so the inner world becomes the next wilderness to be mapped, optimized, and mastered. Psychedelics become the fuel. Transcendence becomes a goal. You are not simply invited to be—you are urged to go higher, farther, deeper. More awakened. More healed. More integrated.
Always more.
This obsession with becoming more attuned, more evolved, more “whole,” masks a deeper continuity with capitalist logic. The machinery of commodification simply switches targets: from land to mind, from resource to revelation.
In this model, transformation becomes transactional. Healing becomes a product.
But traditional use has never been about consumption. It has been about relationship—between people, plants, place, and spirit. These practices are rooted in reciprocity, lineage, and accountability. They are not plug-and-play upgrades. They are not scalable solutions.
And yet, in today’s psychedelic industry, these relationships are severed. The medicine is extracted from its meaning. The vine is reduced to a vial. The mushroom becomes microdose protocol. Ayahuasca becomes tourism. And with every step, the sacred becomes saleable.
This is not appreciation. It is appropriation. It is pharmacological colonization, deterritorialization: the stripping of a substance from its story, of a practice from its people, of medicine from memory.
What’s being sold is not just experience. It’s narrative control. It’s the power to define what healing looks like, what counts as tradition, and who gets to speak. In the hands of wellness startups and for-profit companies, the ineffable becomes intellectual property to be packaged and sold.
And once again, the center of gravity shifts—from ceremony to service model, from elder to influencer, from lineage to brand.
Retreat marketing services
The Neo-Colonialism of Consciousness
If the original Renaissance expanded European power across continents and bodies, the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance extends that same logic inward: toward the uncharted territories of the mind. What was once mapped with ships and swords is now explored with molecules and marketing. The conquest continues, only now, the frontier is consciousness itself.
This is the Empire of Mind.
Here, psychedelics are framed not just as tools of healing but as instruments of mastery—of insight, optimization, transformation. They are deployed through the language of productivity and self-improvement, folded into tech-world ambition and therapeutic branding. Once suppressed as dangerous, these substances are now repackaged for the high-functioning consumer as gateways to wellness, performance, and elite spiritual attainment.
But beneath this glossy surface lies a more insidious dynamic: consciousness as commodity, healing as market logic, transcendence as product tier.
In this model, the inner world becomes a colonizable terrain. A wilderness to be mapped, measured, optimized, and sold. The rhetoric echoes the colonial playbook of exploration, breakthrough, frontier, mastery. It is no coincidence that the psychedelic counterculture rose alongside the Space Race. The conquest of outer space and the conquest of inner space are psychically entangled. Both are fuelled by a restless drive to dominate and control.
Even the language of healing is entangled in this logic. We speak of “doing the work,” “shadow integration,” “ego death” as if they are stages in a pipeline. We valorize breakdowns as breakthroughs. We exalt purification and purge. The desire for transformation—valid, human, beautiful—is too often captured by the very pathology it seeks to escape. Psychedelics promise liberation, but in many cases, the ritual of becoming is flattened into a cycle of endless becoming.
Meanwhile, Indigenous traditions have long held psychedelics within relational, ecological, and ceremonial frameworks. These are not technologies to be extracted. They are living intelligences bound by lineage, story, and place. They are not here to serve us. We are here to enter into relationship with them, if we are invited.
In the Empire of Mind, this relationality is severed. Substances are isolated, synthesized, rebranded. Ceremony becomes product. Communion becomes content. Ayahuasca is scheduled by the hour. Iboga is dosed in protocols. The mushroom becomes a bullet point in a coaching curriculum.
Beneath the language of spiritual growth lies a deeper pattern of pharmacological gentrification.
Even more troubling is the psychic displacement it creates. The very substances that once revealed our inter-being are now used to reinforce the illusion that meaning lies elsewhere—outside ourselves, in the expert, the facilitator, the molecule. Sovereignty is lost under the guise of awakening. The truth is no longer within—it’s something to be purchased, prescribed, or performed.
And still, the narrative justifies itself. “We need healing.” “Western medicine has failed.” “People are suffering.” All of this is true. However, stripped of context and sold as product, healing loses its depth and turns into seduction.
This is how empire evolves: it adapts, it mystifies. It no longer takes by force; it takes by offering transcendence. It no longer erases; it rebrands. And in doing so, it invites us to participate in our own disempowerment without even recognizing it.
To resist this empire is not to reject the psychedelics. It is to approach them with discernment. To remember that these experiences were never meant to be scaled and profited from and that their power lies not in access, but in relation. Not in novelty, but in collective responsibility and care.
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