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MushroomTrip said:
I'm sure if I look well enough I'll see the point to this thread.

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blackdogs said:
In Wikipedia someone said, “The word cult in current popular usage usually refers to a new religious movement or other group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre.”  I was once taught that a cult requires you to pay for membership or spiritual information.

In my opinion it’s a pop culture social group but the dangers are still there.  There is a hierarchy of social power, nonsensical religious symbols, and themes of depersonalization.  I wouldn’t consider it to be anything more than one artist’s ideas and perspectives if it didn’t seem to have so much prevalence in modern psychedelic culture.     

Psychedelic culture is often associated with peaceful ideals and kind intentions but many psychedelic substances are illegal and come from the black market.  While there might not be direct threat of harm from the group members the danger from outside forces can create a similar unhealthy bonding social dynamic.  A group that exalts psychedelic substances as “alchemical angels” is sure to have no shortage of organized crime members nearby ready to profit from that ideology.

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Alex and Allison Grey are evil cult leaders apparently.  My friend Linda, a registered art therapist, didn't report anything like this when she returned from a week-long retreat at their place in New York State a couple of months ago. Nice attempt at profiling, but did you happen to notice any paranoid ideation in your own perception? Symbols, as opposed to signs, are living psychic realities. They emerge from the Archetypal Unconscious and have profound effects upon other human beings because they mirror contents of the mind that everyone partakes of in the deep psyche. Symbols may be "nonsensical" to you, but that is due to your failure to understand them cognitively, affectively, or intuitively. They may be a hybridization of well-established symbols, or mutations of the same. They may also be a hybridization of well-established and idiosyncratic symbols, such as in the case of William Blake's art. Alchemical symbols are representative of alchemical (Hermetic) philosophical ideas. Alchemy does not operate by the same assumptions that chemistry does. Alchemy operates by the Law of Correspondences, and Synchronicity ("An Acausal Connecting Principle"), and the results are dependent upon the warp & woof of local space-time, hence the pronounced astrological component. Chemistry operates by molecular arrangements that are replicable at the same temperature and pressure, and by the law of cause-effect. Chemistry is strictly physical phenomena, alchemy is psycho-physical in nature.

A group that exalts psychedelic substances as “alchemical angels” is sure to have no shortage of organized crime members nearby ready to profit from that ideology.

This may make sense to you, but being pretty familiar with the complexities of alchemy, as a spiritual discipline (which I participate in), as well as from a Jungian perspective (in which I have decades of experience), your criminal connection is utterly absurd to me. "Alchemical angels" refers to 'planetary spirits' which are types of consciousness that correspond to metals, plants, stones, colors, chakras (inner planets), etc. There is nothing criminal in the honest alchemical idiom, only with 'puffers' and quacks making claims about realities that can only be known privately, subjectively, and inter-subjectively rather than 'objective' chemical claims.