Paschal Beverly Randolph was a nineteenth-century mystic who claimed hashish was the key to seeing dead spirits

A closer look

Why knock on wooden tables to talk to ghosts when you can just get incredibly high? Paschal Beverly Randolph was a free Black American mystic, a doctor, and one of the founders of Western sex magic. In the 1850s, he grew exhausted with the fraudulent theatrics of Spiritualism. Instead, he pioneered the use of 'magical mirrors' combined with massive doses of hashish, claiming the drug thinned the veil between the physical and spiritual planes. He argued it was a far more efficient, albeit profoundly intoxicating, way to commune with the afterlife. He was essentially doing psychedelic therapy a century before it was cool.