Devouring the Sacred: How Moloch and Wendigo Feast on the Soul of Psychedelics

The Sacred at the Altar of Profit

The commercialization of psychedelics represents one of the most profound ethical crossroads in modern medicine. As companies race to develop, patent, and profit from substances traditionally held as sacred medicines, ancient mythological figures are revealing themselves in our collective unconscious, offering powerful warnings about the forces that threaten to corrupt their transformative potential.

As a fifteen-year veteran of the psychedelics movement, I am watching in real time as capitalism hollows out yet another sacred practice. This pattern plays out like a tragic script we've seen before: Something revolutionary emerges that threatens the status quo by awakening people to their interconnectedness, their capacity for radical love and awareness, their power to transform systems of oppression. Within moments, the machine of late-stage capitalism begins its relentless work of extraction and commodification.

Two mythological specters in particular haunt this transformation: Moloch and Wendigo.

Ancient Warnings for Modern Times

Moloch, the ancient Canaanite deity associated with child sacrifice, looms as a grim archetype of systemic destruction. Parents would throw their own children into Moloch's burning bronze furnace in exchange for prosperity and security—a horrific bargain that eerily mirrors modern sacrifices made for profit and power. Allen Ginsberg evoked this figure in his poem "Howl," portraying Moloch as the soul-crushing machinery of industrial civilization: "Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!" Later, Scott Alexander expanded this metaphor in "Meditations on Moloch," describing systems of runaway coordination failure where rational actors pursuing self-interest create collective suffering—the invisible hand that becomes a strangling fist.

Across cultural landscapes, the Wendigo (or Wetiko) emerges from Algonquian indigenous traditions as an equally terrifying but more intimate corruption. This cannibal spirit possesses humans during times of scarcity, transforming them into emaciated monsters with hearts of ice, insatiable appetites, and the horrific compulsion to consume their own kind. Unlike Moloch's mechanical, systemic nature, Wendigo represents a psychological and spiritual sickness—a contagious madness of consumption that grows rather than satisfies with each act of devouring. Indigenous elders describe it as a form of cultural psychosis that spreads when people believe they must consume others to survive, their humanity gradually replaced by a gnawing, endless hunger.

These mythological figures, though emerging from different cultural contexts, illuminate complementary aspects of how psychedelic companies can become corrupted by the very systems they operate within—one representing external pressures that sacrifice the future for immediate gain, the other the internal rot that transforms healers into predators of the very communities they claim to serve.

We've witnessed this corruption repeatedly. Yoga transformed from ancient practices for liberation into expensive leggings and Instagram-perfect poses in pristine studios, segregated by who can afford $30 classes. Meditation became stripped of its revolutionary potential and reduced to productivity tools for better corporate performance, packaged into apps and bespoke retreats. Each time, profound teachings about collective liberation disappear beneath messages about individual optimization and spiritual aesthetics.

Now we watch this happen with psychedelics, but with stakes that feel immeasurably higher. The medicines that show us our fundamental interconnectedness are being transformed into luxury commodities, their revolutionary potential redirected into individual consumption.

Moloch in the Boardroom

Moloch manifests in psychedelic companies through systemic pressures that prioritize profit and growth over healing and transformation. In the psychedelics sector, Moloch isn't limited to pharmaceutical companies but appears across the ecosystem of businesses forming around these substances.

In retreat centers, Moloch drives operators to maximize capacity and minimize costs, potentially compromising on key elements like proper screening, integration support, or adequate facilitator training. The sacred container of ceremonial space becomes commodified, with experiences designed for Instagram-worthy moments. Profound healing is secondary, and heavens forbid if something goes wrong, the investment into appropriate recourse to manage crisis can be missing.

Digital psychedelic companies face Moloch when they prioritize user engagement metrics over genuine therapeutic benefit, creating gamified psychedelic experiences or simplistic mental health apps that capture data but offer little substantive transformation.

Even psychedelic therapist training programs aren't immune—Moloch emerges when certification becomes a profit center rather than a rigorous ethical guardrail, with standards diluted to increase graduation rates and revenue.

The pharmaceutical sector perhaps faces the strongest pull of Moloch's force. Companies secure patents on naturally occurring compounds or obvious formulations, creating artificial scarcity around medicines that indigenous cultures have stewarded for millennia. The investor pressure for hyper-growth and fast exits fundamentally conflicts with the slow, intentional nature of psychedelic healing work. Early idealists get pushed out, replaced by executives who view psychedelics as merely another biotech trend rather than a paradigm shift in mental healthcare.

Wendigo: The Spirit of Insatiable Consumption

While Moloch represents external systemic forces, Wendigo illuminates the psychological and spiritual corruption that can infect individuals and organizations in the psychedelic space.

The Wendigo spirit in psychedelic companies manifests as an insatiable hunger that consumes everything in its path—traditional knowledge, spiritual practices, healing modalities, and even the vulnerable patients seeking help. It represents colonization not just of land and resources, but of consciousness itself.

When psychedelic companies appropriate indigenous ceremonies while cutting out original knowledge keepers, the Wendigo is at work. When executives who have never experienced the medicines make decisions about how they should be administered, the Wendigo grows stronger. When companies harvest vast amounts of sensitive psychological data from patients undergoing profound experiences, only to monetize this information, the Wendigo feasts.

The Wendigo psychosis has striking parallels to how some companies justify their exploitative practices: "If we don't commercialize and patent these medicines, someone worse will." This rationalization enables ethical compromises that slowly consume the company's original healing mission.

Just as the Wendigo is never satisfied no matter how much it consumes, profit-driven psychedelic companies often find that expansion and growth never bring fulfillment. Each market conquest only fuels hunger for the next, leading to a perpetual cycle of acquisition and exploitation that strays further from the medicines' true purpose.

The Narcissists Enter

These spectres reveal themselves most clearly through figures like Aubrey Marcus. A wealthy founder has a profound psychedelic experience that could inspire them to redirect their resources toward collective liberation. Instead, they create a luxury brand, packaging the insights into expensive supplements and retreats. They build exclusive communities of other privileged people, using spiritual language to market lifestyle products. They center themselves as fashionable gurus, convinced that what has worked for them will work for others, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the socio-economic circumstances, identities, or privileges that enabled their particular path to healing.

The fundamental trap reveals itself in a crucial pattern: they get the insight "I am god" but fail to realize so is everyone else. Instead of the experience softening their ego into a recognition of being part of a universal divine nature, they seize upon their own specialness while missing the essential teaching of radical equality. The medicine that could crack open the narcissistic shell instead gets used to polish it, creating ever more sophisticated forms of spiritual materialism and bypassing.

The Path to Corruption: How Moloch and Wendigo Manifest in Today's Market

Neither Moloch nor Wendigo emerges suddenly—they grow gradually in fertile conditions of fear, distrust, and fragmentation. These corrupting forces aren't merely theoretical—they're already visible in the emerging psychedelic industry.

Fear serves as the primary motivator, driving companies to rush patents, make unethical deals with investors, or suppress safety concerns. This reactivity optimizes for immediate survival rather than long-term integrity. Some companies promote microdosing products with minimal evidence, marketing them like wellness supplements rather than powerful medicines that deserve respect. Luxury psychedelic retreats cater to wealthy clients while the communities who stewarded these medicines for generations remain excluded from both economic benefits and access.

As distrust proliferates, cooperation erodes. Researchers keep data private rather than open-sourcing it. Companies aggressively land grab everything they can. Investors and executives treat therapists as expendable rather than essential collaborators in healing work. When psychedelic clinical trials emphasize statistical significance over meaningful healing, Moloch is present. When facilitator training programs rush students through certification to maximize revenue, the Wendigo grows stronger. When companies view indigenous collaborations as PR opportunities rather than authentic partnerships, both forces work in tandem.

The maximization imperative takes hold when companies view success solely through the lens of ownership and control rather than shared benefit. This manifests as intellectual property hoarding, shareholder primacy over patient outcomes, and the reduction of sacred traditions into marketable products. This co-option spreads like a virus. Companies like Field Trip create spa-like psychedelic clinics for the wealthy. Compass Pathways attempts to patent ancient medicines. Each iteration redirects these tools' potential for genuine social transformation into maintaining and enhancing privilege and power.

Without a unified ethical vision, the industry fragments into competing factions, each claiming to represent the "correct" approach to psychedelics. The loudest voices—often those with the most funding—dictate the narrative, even when they don't embody the highest ethical standards. What makes this particularly painful is how psychedelics often specifically show people the hollowness of materialism and the illness of individualistic capitalism. Yet somehow, the machine proves so powerful that even these direct insights get co-opted and inverted - reinforcing the very systems they reveal as sources of suffering.

Just as Nike took the revolutionary spirit of early hip hop and converted it into shoes, just as Facebook took our longing for connection and turned it into surveillance capitalism that has bred a crisis of loneliness, we watch as powerful medicines for collective healing get transformed into tools for spiritual bypassing and status signaling.

How Co-option Works

The process begins in subtle, seductive moments that can be recognized only if we stay alert. It starts when someone offers to help "scale" your grassroots healing work, suggesting ways to make it more "professional" and "sustainable." The language sounds reasonable - who doesn't want to help more people? But watch how quickly conversations shift from accessibility to marketability, from community needs to target demographics.

The turning point often comes disguised as an opportunity - a wealthy donor offering funding with strings attached, a tech entrepreneur wanting to "optimize" your protocols, a marketing expert promising to help "elevate the brand." These moments require fierce discernment. Does this money or opportunity come with pressure to raise prices, standardize experiences, prioritize metrics over relationships, or cater to wealthier clients?

The corruption deepens through aesthetics. Your simple community space gets encouraged to look more "professional" or more like a hotel lobby in Tulum. Ceremonial items get purchased on Amazon, without being imbued with provenance. The raw, messy work of collective healing gets polished into marketable content. Stories of transformation get curated to appeal to wealthy clients rather than inspire community action.

You can spot the pattern in how language shifts. Words like "medicine" become "product," "ceremony" becomes "experience," "community" becomes "customer base," "healing" becomes "optimization." Sacred teachings get condensed into marketable programs. Complex traditions get simplified into branded protocols.

The Ketamine Crisis: A Side Effect of Co-option

Nowhere is this pattern more evident - or more deadly - than in the commercialization of ketamine therapy. Companies push ads on social media for at-home ketamine as a "miracle cure" for depression while conveniently ignoring its addictive potential. Clinics make more money from repeat customers than from people who genuinely heal and move on. Insurance rarely covers it, creating a perverse incentive to cater to wealthy clients who can afford frequent sessions.

The pattern often plays out like this: Someone starts ketamine therapy with genuine hopes for healing. The initial experiences provide profound relief from depression or other symptoms. But instead of this relief creating space for deeper therapeutic work, the capitalist model encourages them to chase that relief through increasingly frequent sessions. Integration support is minimal because it's not as profitable as administering more ketamine.

What's particularly insidious is how this gets wrapped in wellness language - people convince themselves they're doing deep healing work when they're actually developing dependency. Terms like "maintenance doses" and "booster sessions" normalize regular use. The spiritual bypassing combines with ketamine's dissociative properties to help people feel like they're addressing their issues while actually avoiding them.

The result? Real lives lost. Each person was someone's friend, family member, loved one who came seeking healing and instead encountered a system that enabled and profited from addiction under the guise of treatment.

The Lykos Case Study: When Even Strong Protections Fail

The acquisition of Lykos (formerly MAPS PBC) by Antonio Gracias and Chris Han through foundation funding represents a more sophisticated form of co-option that's harder to critique than crude commercialization. On the surface, it maintains key elements of the public benefit structure - profits ostensibly flowing to philanthropic purposes rather than private wealth accumulation. Yet this veneer of public benefit masks deeper concerns about control and influence.

The stakes feel particularly high in our current political climate. With democratic institutions under attack and figures like Musk dismantling regulatory protections, having MDMA therapy's future tied to a foundation controlled by Musk’s close associate feels dangerous. While foundation ownership might seem "better" than pure profit-seeking private ownership, foundations can become powerful vehicles for advancing political agendas and consolidating influence, especially in times of social upheaval.

This is especially painful because MAPS PBC was built specifically to resist these forces. Years spent raising $140+ million in philanthropic funding originally proved that ethical drug development was possible outside the venture capital model. Every protocol, every training program, every ethical guideline was crafted with immense care to protect MDMA's therapeutic potential while preventing exploitation. The research wasn't funded by profit-seeking investors but by thousands of donors who believed in creating accessible mental healthcare.

Having this careful work now sitting within a foundation controlled by polarizing figures during a period of intense political instability raises haunting questions about whether it's truly possible to protect healing work from capitalism's corrupting influence, even when explicit structures are built to resist it. Without genuine transparency and community oversight of how any resources flowing back into these foundations will be deployed, we're left hoping that the stewards of this vital medicine will prioritize genuine public benefit over other interests, a hope that feels increasingly precarious given the current political climate and the track records of the figures involved.

Building Better Protections

The Lykos sale reveals how previous protective mechanisms—in this case the non-profit MAPS retaining notable oversight of select activities through ten-to-one voting power and appointing six of the eight members of the Lykos Board of Directors during Lykos’ Series A— were insufficient. Future safeguards must be far more comprehensive and legally binding. Perpetual Purpose Trusts need real teeth - not just oversight but genuine control, with explicit veto power over major decisions including pricing, protocols, partnerships, and ownership transitions. The board composition must be protected through detailed qualification requirements that prevent capture by wealthy interests, with seats held by representatives from indigenous communities, civil rights organizations, public health advocates, and people with lived experience.

Legal structures must go beyond standard public benefit requirements to include specific, enforceable obligations: maintaining sliding scale access with explicit minimum percentages of clients served at each price point, caps on price increases tied to inflation or median income metrics, required profit allocation to accessibility programs, and transparency requirements about foundation activities. These commitments need automatic clawback provisions that activate if violated, personal liability for directors who approve violations, and standing for community members to bring enforcement actions.

At the time of the Series A, Lykos CEO Amy Emerson said in her January 2024 Letter “As we get closer to success, approval, we’re also all feeling fear […] Because we’re going to put something […] ‘sacred’ into a broken medical system, and we can’t fix that system at the same time”. The same brokeness is true of the economic system this company exists within.

Reclaiming Our Revolutionary Roots

This moment of crisis gains deeper meaning when we understand our movement's history. The deep entanglement of the anti-war, environmental, and psychedelic movements emerged from a shared recognition that consciousness expansion naturally leads to questioning systems of oppression and ecological destruction. In the 1960s and early 70s, the same people who were taking LSD and questioning reality were also laying their bodies down at nuclear test sites, protesting the Vietnam War, and launching the environmental movement.

This wasn't coincidental - psychedelic experiences often revealed the profound entanglement with all life, making the violence of war and environmental devastation feel personally painful and impossible to ignore. Figures like Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Joan Baez, and Stewart Brand moved fluidly between these movements because they understood them as different expressions of the same essential insight: that the dominant culture's paradigm of separation, exploitation, and control was driving us toward collective destruction.

This history makes the current co-option by tech-libertarian billionaires and their political allies particularly tragic. The very medicines that once fueled movements for peace and ecological harmony are now being captured by figures aligned with military contractors, anti-environmental policies, and authoritarian politics. What began as tools for awakening collective consciousness and inspiring action against systemic violence are being transformed into products that reinforce individual separation and political apathy. At worst, these tools could be utilized to manipulate populations into disassociated complacency.

Enter Elua: The Counterforce

Amid these destructive forces, Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" also introduces Elua, a fictional goddess born "from the love of Aphrodite and Dionysus" who represents the opposite possibility. Where Moloch demands sacrifice, Elua embodies generosity and flourishing. Where Wendigo consumes insatiably, Elua creates abundantly. She is the embodiment of values that transcend mere survival and competition: beauty, joy, love, cooperation, and the genuine fulfillment of human potential.

Elua represents sophisticated coordination mechanisms that make genuine cooperation possible—institutions and governance structures that successfully align individual and collective interests rather than placing them in opposition. Under her influence, social structures expand the possibility space rather than constrain it, enabling emergence instead of control. Her economy is one of cultivated abundance rather than manufactured scarcity, recognizing that many resources—particularly those of knowledge, wisdom, and healing—grow rather than diminish when shared. In the psychedelic context, Elua appears wherever organizations prioritize healing over profit, wherever indigenous wisdom is honored rather than exploited, and wherever the medicines themselves are treated as teachers rather than commodities. She represents the possibility that we might design economic and social systems aligned with life's intrinsic tendency toward creative expression and mutual flourishing. Unlike the sacrifice-demanding gods of consumption and competition, Elua asks only that we recognize the inherent value in all life and organize our efforts accordingly. Her presence reminds us that another way is possible—one that harnesses the transformative potential of these medicines for collective liberation rather than individual gain.

Models of Contemporary Resistance

Pockets of resistance show us that the way of Elua is possible. Doorway Therapeutics, Alchemy Community Therapy Center and Sage Integrative Health demonstrate that sliding scale ketamine treatment is viable, challenging the dominant narrative that psychedelic therapy must be expensive to be sustainable. They prove that clinics can operate while genuinely serving economic diversity, creating real accessibility rather than just token scholarships.

The Brooklyn Psychedelic Society's co-op model represents a radical reimagining of power and ownership in psychedelic spaces. By developing a "trellis" model for decentralized ownership of training and retreats, they're creating a framework for growth that distributes rather than concentrates power. This stands in direct opposition to the franchise/brand expansion model favored by the privileged guru approach.

Journey Collab's perpetual purpose trust with indigenous governance shows how organizations can build genuine accountability to traditional wisdom keepers into their very structure, not just as advisory boards or cultural consultants. This model creates legal and financial obligations to maintain ethical principles and indigenous reciprocity, making it harder for future pressure to erode these commitments.

Resisting Destruction: Building Alternatives

The fate of psychedelic medicine isn't predetermined. Alternatives exist for those willing to design different systems and cultivate deep relationships with these powerful tools.

Structural safeguards offer one path of resistance. Stewardship models, benefit corporations, and community ownership can protect against extractive incentives. Alternative funding sources that prioritize patient outcomes over quick exits help companies maintain their integrity across market pressures.

Building cultures of trust represents another vital strategy. Open-source research, knowledge sharing, and ethical coalitions can align stakeholders around common principles rather than competitive advantage. Transparency mechanisms prevent corporate influence from diluting standards over time.

Indigenous leadership and reciprocity must be central, not peripheral. Meaningful collaboration with traditional knowledge keepers isn't just ethical, it's essential for understanding the full healing potential of these medicines. Companies can establish benefit-sharing agreements, ensuring that profits flow back to source communities and support cultural preservation.

Community represents a powerful antidote to both Moloch and Wendigo. While Moloch thrives on individualistic competition and Wendigo feeds on isolation, strong communities create accountability systems that can check destructive tendencies before they take root. By establishing circles of care around psychedelic work, involving diverse stakeholders including therapists, facilitators, patients, researchers, and wisdom-keepers, companies can distribute power rather than concentrate it. These communities can serve as ethical anchors, questioning practices that prioritize profit over people and holding leaders accountable when they drift from their stated values. Regular community councils and feedback mechanisms ensure that decisions aren't made in boardrooms detached from those most affected by them. Most importantly, community creates the conditions for reciprocity rather than extraction, reminding all participants that true value in the psychedelic space comes not from what can be taken but what can be given back.

Perhaps most importantly, psychedelic companies need leaders grounded in the wisdom these medicines offer: interconnection, humility, and service rather than domination. Those who are oriented towards a deep respect for these medicines and hold a profound sense of responsibility in skillfully working with them may be better equipped to resist the individualistic, competitive mindset that feeds both Moloch and Wendigo. They may embody Elua in all her grace and shepherd in more life-giving possibilities.

A Vision of Community Care

Imagine walking into a converted Victorian in West Oakland, where the smell of sage mingles with sounds of gentle laughter from the community kitchen. On any given morning, you might find elders teaching youth how to prepare traditional medicines in the garden, while inside a grief support circle holds space in the front room, its participants later helping sort through clothing donations in the basement. The medicine ceremonies happen monthly, carefully held by a rotating council of experienced community members, but the real magic happens in the weeks between - the daily weaving of mutual care and support.

A woman who had a powerful journey last month now coordinates meal deliveries for new mothers in the community. Two people who met in integration circle started a rideshare system for medical appointments. The clinical terminology of "preparation" and "integration" dissolves into the natural rhythm of community life: shared meals, childcare exchanges, crisis response networks, housing advocacy meetings. When someone needs medicine work, they've already built deep relationships of trust through giving and receiving care in dozens of other ways.

This model succeeds because it's rooted in locality and consistency. Rather than flying across the country for high-production retreats, people work with medicines in their own communities, building lasting relationships that span years rather than days. Integration moves far beyond individual processing - participants connect to concrete opportunities for community service that match their skills and capacity. The power structure looks radically different from the guru-centered model, with authority intentionally distributed among many wisdom holders rather than concentrated in charismatic individuals.

The Crucial Moment

The psychedelic industry stands at a crossroads. The forces of Moloch and Wendigo are already visible, but they aren't inevitable. Elua is also present. This moment calls for intentional design of companies and coalitions that can resist these corrupting influences.

The transformation we need goes beyond individual protections to reimagining how care itself is structured. At the regulatory level, this means creating legal frameworks that recognize and protect community healing centers, not just medical clinics. Building licensure pathways for community care workers and peer support specialists, not just individual therapists. Developing insurance codes that cover group work and integration circles, not just one-on-one sessions.

The economic model must be revolutionized, moving beyond individual sliding scale to community-held resources and collective care funds. Creating sustainable compensation for community care workers without driving up costs for participants. Building cooperative ownership structures where profits flow back into expanding access.

But perhaps most fundamentally, we need cultural transformation around how we understand healing itself. The medicines consistently show us that true healing happens in community, that our individual wellness is inseparable from collective wellbeing, that sustainable transformation requires changing systems, not just individuals.

There's a delicate balance in creating containers that allow for genuine awakening to systemic awareness without imposing any particular framework for understanding it. The medicines themselves, when held in authentic containers of care, naturally tend to reveal our profound interconnectedness and often spark questioning of systemic harm. This awareness must emerge organically from each person's direct experience, not from facilitators suggesting how people should interpret or integrate their journeys.

The key distinction lies between creating conditions that allow for political awareness to emerge organically versus trying to engineer specific political outcomes. The deeper trust is that genuine healing, when properly supported, naturally leads toward greater awareness of our interconnection and responsibility to the whole. This requires tremendous restraint from facilitators who might see clear connections between personal and systemic healing. Their role is to create safe containers for whatever emerges, to support people in following their own genuine calls to action, and to trust the medicines themselves to reveal what each person needs to see.

If we fail, psychedelics risk becoming another tool for profit extraction and consciousness colonization, their transformative potential diluted into products that maintain rather than heal our disconnection from each other and the living world.

If we succeed, these powerful medicines might help us envision and create systems for healing not just individual trauma but our collective relationship with commerce, medicine, and the sacred. They offer potential pathways toward addressing deep societal wounds, from structural inequality and ecological devastation to cultural disconnection and spiritual alienation, catalyzing new ways of organizing our communities, economies, and institutions that honor the wholeness of life rather than its fragmentation.

Most fundamentally, it means refusing to let psychedelic healing be reduced to individual wellness. Every protocol, every training, every ceremony should carry the understanding that personal transformation without collective action is incomplete. The medicines themselves seem to demand this - they show us our interdependence with all of life and then ask what we'll do about it.

The question before us now is whether we'll answer that call by building models of care that honor this wisdom, or watch as these powerful tools for collective liberation get transformed into luxury products for individual consumption.

The choice, and the responsibility, belongs to all of us.

“Light Work” by Autumn Skye