Tripping with the Ghosts: P.D. Newman on Psychedelics, Psychopomps, and Living Texts

The Ladder: Journeys in Platonic Mysticism, Episode 24 In this episode, Danny welcomes P.D. Newman, author of Theory and Practice: Mysteries of Ascent to the Divine and Tripping with the Ghosts: Psychedelics and the Afterlife Journey in Native American Mound Cultures. Their conversation dissolves borders we’re trained to enforce: “Greek miracle” vs. indigenous wisdom, metaphysics vs. ritual, scholarship vs. vision. Newman traces how research on theurgy unexpectedly converged with the Mississippian “Path of Souls” tradition, where a shaman undergoes an initiatory itinerary in order to guide the dead, an uncanny parallel to the theurgist as psychopomp. From there the episode turns to the “sacred book” phenomenon: texts can become living guides, not “words on a screen,” but someone’s soul calling “like to like” in readers who can hear the hidden life in a dialogue, a poem, or a painted wall. The second movement goes into ensouled statues and pharmaka: Newman recounts finding instructions in the Chaldean Oracles for animating a Hecate statue with psychoactive correspondences, and argues that pharmakon is not a curiosity but a structural key wherever cultures treat matter as a conduit for spirit. The conversation ranges from foraging and divine “signatures” in plants, to theophagic participation (“eating the god”), to psychedelics as both medicine and magic, always insisting that ritual must frame the experience. It closes on a bracing claim: there is no secular, only the sacred; what matters is becoming conscious of the myth you’re already living. Against our modern fear of “possession,” Newman suggests a reversal: the highest grace is to be seized by something larger than the ego—an archetype, a form, a god—because that’s when we become most fully human. ‪@danniellelayne7166‬