Having relied initially on the authority of other observers, let me turn to my own analysis and specify precisely what characteristics of psychedelia are also, in my judgment as a sociologist, characteristics of religious behavior. Psychedelia enables rational industrial man and his children to pull out of themselves, to back from and over against ordinary experience and judge it in the quality of new insight or from the perspective of new unity. Such have been the goals of ecstatic and mystics down through the ages, though they have sought their ecstasy much less consciously and in most cases much less artificially than does the psychedelic ecstatic. Psychedelia is primordial , that is to say, prerational when not explicitly anti-rational. It seeks to put aside the hang-ups of organized society and its conventions in order that it might get in touch with the profound underlying natural forces in which we are all immersed, even though the conventions of society cause us to forget this immersion.
Psychedelia is, or at least attempts to be, contemplative.
Psychedelia is also ceremonial. Psychedelia is ritualistic. By this I mean not that it has an elaborate system of rubrics that specify in great detail the protocol of behavior, but rather that it achieves its effects through the stylized repetition of sound and action that simultaneously releases the individual from old unions and immerses him in new unities. The whirling of the dervishes, the twisting of the Holy Rollers, the measured cadence of the Gregorian chant, the repetitive dances of black Africans and American Indians, are all ritualistic. Psychedelia is repulsed about artificiality, the phoniness, and dishonesty of the stylized relationships of bourgeois, industrial, secular society, and tries to create communities of its own motivated by common faith and common love, in which true believers may relate to one another as authentic human beings.