The Chalice: Phurst Church of Phun
Schedule
Wed, 07 Jan, 2026 at 04:00 pm
UTC-08:00Location
2820 7th St, Berkeley, CA, United States, California 94710 | Berkeley, CA
Tonight’s special guest is Johnny Dwork, a multimedia artist and well-regarded producer of psychedelic music and art festivals. In 1984, the legendary Merry Prankster Wavy Gravy ordained Johnny as The Rabbi of the Phurst Church of Phun, an underground society of comics and clowns that first emerged from the protest movements of the 1960s. Through a wide variety of theatrical and comedic modalities, Johnny has since helped thousands of people embrace good-hearted humor as a vehicle for health, healing, and more playful approaches to psychedelic experience. Tonight Johnny and the crew will discuss sacred foolery, mystical mirth, and the role of clowning in activism, as seen recently in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. In the second half of the evening, initiations into the Phurst Church of Phun will be on offer. If you are looking for the online version, you can find it here: https://momence.com/l/ymh0wQWV
Johnny Dwork credits psychedelics for his success as a world champion athlete, award-winning author, visionary multimedia artist, and the producer of large, mythic-themed events, including the String Cheese Incidents’ legendary fetes at Hornings Hideout. Johnny is also a life coach, Universal Life Minister, and Sacred Fire Circle facilitator. After helping get the law changed in Oregon, Johnny became one of the first state-licensed psychedelic facilitators in the US, and now guides psilocybin experiences at InnerTrek in Portland, OR. Learn more here: www.mushroomilluminations.com
The Chalice is a recurring psychedelic salon held at the Berkeley Alembic the first Wednesday of every month. Instead of the mainstream focus on clinical trials, legal frameworks, and psychotherapy, the Chalice will draw from the deeper humanistic wells of history, poetry, the gods, ethnobotany, humor, and mystery. We are less interested in fetishizing psychedelic substances or psychedelic experiences than in cultivating psychedelic culture and exploring what it means to be psychedelic people.
This first half of this event will be streamed online.
The co-hosts for Chalice are Erik Davis, author and Alembic co-founder; Maria Mangini, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council and old-school head; and Christian Greer, currently a lecturer on counterculture at Stanford University. The first half of each gathering will feature a talk or special guest interview; the second half of the evening is designed to develop the community, sometimes with breakout groups, story hours, and peer-to-peer discussion, and always with more questions than answers.
J. Christian Greer, PhD, is a scholar of Religious Studies with a special focus on global psychedelic culture. He has held teaching positions at Harvard University, Yale University, and is currently a lecturer at Stanford's Medical School. He is the co-founder, and the co-chair of the Drugs and Religion program unit at the American Academy of Religion, and each June, he leads “The Psychedelic Universe: Global Perspectives on Higher Consciousness,” an intensive, 2-week seminar on the history of psychedelics, hosted on-location at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Alongside his research, he is an organizer for the Order of St. George's Horse, a pilgrimage confraternity & book publisher. His latest books include, Void Machines: the Paper Shrines of J. Christian Greer is a collection of his artwork, and Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots (co-authored with Dr. Michelle Oing) which analyzes the pilgrimage folklore associated with the rainforests of Japan's Kii Peninsula. Learn more about his work here: orderofstgeorgeshorse.com
Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on alternative religion, media culture, the popular imagination, and the psychedelic underground. He is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Davis’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He writes the online publication the Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com), and his next book is Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024).www.techgnosis.com
Mariavittoria Mangini, PhD, FNP has written extensively on the impact of psychedelic experiences in shaping the lives of her contemporaries, and has worked closely with many of the most distinguished investigators in this field. She is one of the founders of the Women’s Visionary Council, a nonprofit organization that supports investigations into non-ordinary forms of consciousness and organizes gatherings of researchers, healers, artists, and activists whose work explores these states. She is a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, and Professor Emerita in the School of Science, Allied Health, and Nursing at Holy Names University. For the last 50 years, she has been a part of the Hog Farm, a well-known communal family based in Berkeley and in Laytonville, California.
Where is it happening?
2820 7th St, Berkeley, CA, United States, California 94710
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
