Ed Prideaux

26th February 2025

Unreality Beyond The Patient

Derealisation has primarily been seen as an individual pathology, often linked to trauma or extreme stress. But the digitisation of everyday life and the increasing abstraction of government have transformed it into a collective affliction.

17th February 2025

On Being Collectively Insane

Like Barth's Unknown God, Trump represents an intrusion into normal categories of understanding. Yet instead of revealing divine truth, he reveals the void beneath all truth claims. Trump is the Void made flesh.

13th February 2025

Notes on Nihilistic Psychedelia

When everything is a game, it's possible you might get played

9th February 2025

Magical Mystery vs Raw Power

Thoughts on sight, hearing and meaning in the digital age of total visibility

3rd February 2025

Satan is a dreadful nostalgist

History seems ever bound to repeat itself. What do French philosopher Jacques Ellul and the possible failed prophesy of Jesus have to teach us?

New Statesman • 1st February 2025

Inside the psychedelic elite

When a mother spikes their emotionally disturbed child with large quantities of class-A drugs, the response is not often sympathetic. Yet Paul Stamets – a fungus expert and wildly popular psychedelics advocate who is fond of appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast wearing a mushroom hat – is choked with emotion when telling the story, which he received via anonymous email, and recalled following a question about the possible role of psychedelics in paediatric medicine.

30th January 2025

The internet beginning meets The End

Is the Internet a shitty mirror of the Apocalypse?

29th January 2025

The dark wisdom of herem

Total destruction in an age of technology.

21st January 2025

Glitchcraft: The Tale of Leilan and Peter Todd

ChatGPT has spontaneously created two mythological archetypes through ‘glitch tokens’ - an evil wizard called petertodd and a nurturing goddess called Leilan. The self-generated religion is attracting devotees in the real world, a possible HBO documentary, and even its own traded crypto token.

28th December 2024

Cracking The Code

A Russian-born video editor claims that gazing at a laser projection while on DMT reveals the 'Code of Reality'. Why are so many people interested?

The Bigger Picture • 23rd February 2024

True Detective and the Challenge of Nihilism

An exploration of the dialectic between Christianity and Nihilism, as presented through the critically-acclaimed first season of True Detective, which turned ten in February 2024.

Ecstatic Integration • 25th January 2024

Psychedelic therapy & the Metaphysical Menu

I examine a proposal in psychedelic-assisted therapy to present a 'menu' of different metaphysical beliefs for clients to ponder in assisting the aftermath of their dosing sessions. Is metaphysical truth an appropriate domain for therapy? Are psychedelics useful as tools of metaphysical illumination? And does presenting a 'menu' encourage the idea that we can 'pick and choose' what's true like philosophical consumers?

Ecstatic Integration • 19th January 2024

Was Marcia Moore murdered?

Part two of my exploratory series into the mysterious death of the heiress, yoga pioneer and ketamine advocate Marcia Moore.

Ecstatic Integration • 16th January 2024

The mysterious death of the ketamine priestess

Marcia Moore disappeared in the winter of 1979 in circumstances that remain mysterious. Her disappearance came after publishing one of the West's first paeans to the now popular psychedelic dissociative-cum-antidepressant ketamine, which she hailed as a Goddess to access the Jungian unconscious and states of enlightenment.

BBC • 2nd November 2023

Psilocybin and LSD: What I learnt after experiencing 'psychedelic flashbacks'

I discuss the culture, psychology and neurology of Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD). The piece includes an overview of my MSc research, which evidenced the considerable cognitive and behavioural components of the disorder alongside its direct symptoms.

Psychedelics Today • 30th October 2023

Real Harm Reduction Requires Redistribution of Wealth

How do we help people who have developed debilitating problems from psychedelic drugs? Since accessing help is so often a matter of the money to pay for it, I ask whether psychedelia's billionaire philanthropists should provide direct cash transfers to its poorest.

New Statesman • 21st September 2023

Silicon Valley wants to mess with your head

'Consciousness' is in vogue online and in academic metaphysics - and in Silicon Valley's experiments with AI. Some suggest that metaphysical materialism and the Cartesian split have formed the original scars behind runaway capitalism. Yet no matter what metaphysics we hold, are humans - and our conscious lives - not still rendered deadened objects by the market?

UnHerd • 11th September 2023

Inside the Big Cannabis lobby

In a way fitting of British hypocrisy, the legal treatment of cannabis is a mess of under-provided private medicine, ad hoc police decisions, and polarised information on the drug's safety. Why has Britain's medical cannabis market failed to take off? And will investors continue to be disappointed?

Ecstatic Integration • 1st September 2023

When psychedelics trigger visions of childhood abuse

Filter • 29th August 2023

“Acid Flashbacks” Are a Disorder of Prohibition