KOSHMAR

Reliquaries — repositories for sacred items, for secular items — are scarce. Through my own experience with spirituality and substances, I wanted to create an item to honor Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin’s work and highlight the visual language of psychedelics. The other main inspiration for this piece is the scintillating, neon art of the Wixárika (Huichol) people indigenous to Mexico, who revere the peyote cactus as a divine tool. Much of their mythos is centered around this little button of ecstasy and revelations. Just the same, peyote is imbued with mescaline, a psychoactive substance Shulgin synthesized in his lab and had grown around openly at the Farm as well.

While Shulgin and his cohorts didn’t exactly aim to commune with the divine specifically, Sasha noted in his seemingly boundless lab notebooks that “…our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.” Shulgin passed before he could see just how many therapies utilizing psychedelic and entactogenic compounds have come to a more mainstream audience. With your purchase, you bolster two fantastic organizations that endorse and support this continued research, as well as the destigmatization of substances.