Before Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass, before Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady, the Merry Pranksters and their acid test, before the Grateful Dead . . . there was Ernst Jünger, adventurer in mind expansion and psychedelic space.
Jünger stands out in this counterculture company with his thoroughly different background. As a teenager, he ran away from his German home to join the French Foreign Legion. In the First World War he was wounded multiple times and became a highly decorated officer in the Kaiser’s army. He would serve again on the German side in the Second World War—even though he published a famous anti-Hitler novel.
Yet alongside that military career, Jünger spent a lifetime with consciousness-enhancing experiments—hashish, cocaine, and morphine until he worked his way to LSD, psilocybin, and peyote. Jünger invites us to follow him on that mind-blowing path in an autobiography of his life with drugs: Approaches: Drugs and Altered States. This wide-ranging account documents an array of drug experiences, placing them in a richly intellectual context of cultural transformations and the literary history of drug use—Baudelaire, De Quincey, and Huxley—as well as art historical reflections on hallucinatory elements in Van Gogh, cubism, and surrealism. A great intellect meets psychedelics.
In Faith of The Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, Simon Critchley writes: “What is lacking is a theory and practice of the general will understood as the supreme fiction of final belief that would take place in the act by which a people becomes a people or by which a free association is formed” (92). Critchley’s work turns to poetics or “making” as a mode of engagement and resistance for dealing with democratic-liberal crises. I suggest that psychedelic aesthetics and religion can provide a discursive ground for Critchley’s “supreme fiction” in the United States, because the making of the sacrificial figure in the psychedelic experience presents itself as capable of more ethically aware citizenship. A brief historical look at religions founded in the 1960s gives insight into the instantiation of a certain citizenship. 
