The Dragon and Abortion
How a psychedelic trailblazer helped establish the modern abortion industry
The thesis of ‘The Return of the Dragon’ is that when people do drugs for spiritual purposes (whether as part of a shamanistic ritual or simply a ‘mind expanding’ ayahuasca trip), the spirits and entities that they encounter are real entities (not just in their heads) and that those entities are not good. I noted that throughout the ancient world, people took drugs for spiritual purposes, saw serpent deities while on those drugs, and those deities then demanded human sacrifice.
I noted that wherever the use of drugs and religion mixed, a thirst for blood developed. This is seen clearly in many ancient societies. But it can also be seen in our own society. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the use of LSD, pot, mushrooms, and other drugs became popular. At the same time, the movement to allow the killing of the unborn through abortion in the USA took hold. The feminist movement, which had once opposed abortion, started to change during this era and the 1960s saw a major shift in attitudes toward abortion. State after state liberalized abortion laws. And then, in 1973, the Supreme Court established the legal right to access abortion nationwide. And the changes came from the same counter-culturalists who were using pharmakeia.
Interestingly, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood (that has become the largest abortion provider in the United States) is said to have mapped out her strategy for the foundation of the institution with her mentor, Havelock Ellis, who is known to have been a pioneer in the use of psychedelics (as well as an occultist).[1]
When Margaret Sanger was in the process of founding Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States, she consulted her mentor and lover Havelock Ellis.
Ellis was the iconoclastic grandfather of the Bohemian sexual revolution and the author of nearly fifty books detailing various forms of eroticism. It has been written that he provided the free love movement with much of its intellectual foundation. After Sanger began her love affair with him, she laid out her goals for Planned Parenthood and her desire to implement abortion and birth control as part of a way of reducing the rate of reproduction among the lower classes. Ellis argued for political expediency. He insisted that Sanger would have to tone down her pro-abortion rhetoric and focus first on birth control. Abortion, afterall was broadly illegal and there was little point in the beginning to push that message. The toned down approach worked. It allowed Planned Parenthood to become established and to grow with broad acceptance. They set up offices in poor communities throughout the united states. And in this way, when abortion finally was legalized in the 1970s, Planned Parenthood was well positioned financially and geographically to become the abortion leader they are today. It could be argued that none of this was possible without the crafty messaging of Sanger’s mentor and lover Havelock Ellis.
But here is the interesting thing about Havelock Ellis: he was a pioneer in the psychedelic drug movement. He wrote a paper detailing his mescaline experiences in 1898 (a half century before the beginning of the broader psychedelic movement).
In his paper detailing his experience and the experience of friends, Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise, Ellis describes much of what we have reviewed in this book including heavenly geometries, strange entities, and a feeling of esctatic wonder. It is a paper that foreshadows later psychedelics works such as Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.
Throughout history, people used psychedelic drugs to meet gods who in turn asked for the blood of innocents. What are the odds that a pioneer of reintroducing psychedelics into Western Civilization (that had given up psychedelics when Christianity spread) happens to be there at the foundation of the largest abortion provider in the United States?
Did the dragon still have a hunger for babies?
[1]Grant, 1988, 57-58.