midweek jollies vol. 11

surprise-not-surprise, god is feminine; also, my birthday

Happy Wednesday and welcome to midweek jollies, a paid subscriber perk here at The Rewilded Life. The horrors continue to persist in the world writ large, but for this little sliver of time all you have to think about are various and sundry pleasantries. Included this week: Psychedelics and religion, my 42nd birthday, the nostalgic oddity of adult jellies, and a poem by Tracy K. Smith. Let’s go.

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I love it when The New Yorker knows its my birthday week and delivers Grade A divine feminine content for the occasion. This week, Michael Pollan writes about a research study out of Johns Hopkins and NYU exploring psychedelics (specifically, psilocybin) and religious experience. For the study, they specifically recruited clergy: Episcopal, Catholic, Baptist, Jewish, Muslim, Zen Buddhist, etc. These are individuals who have devoted their entire lives to the pursuit of theology and the spiritual life — and a whopping 96% rated their encounter to be “among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.”

But what interests me is what was encountered, not how.

In an interview with Hannah Jocelyn for the daily email, Pollan said that “most of the people I interviewed felt that the divine they encountered was feminine.” Participants reported a “total deconstruction of patriarchal religion” and epiphanies like “[a] womb is the center of everything”

“Just about everybody had an encounter with the divine,” Pollan explained, “and for the most part it was a feminine, nurturing, sweet presence. We have such a patriarchal understanding of religion, and most stereotypes of God are gendered masculine. So I think it’s ironic, and somewhat humorous, that under the influence of psychedelics God turns out to be more female than male.”

How ‘bout them apples?

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