The author tracks the experiences of twelve people, including himself, who have had the San Pedro experience. Carefully researched, this book is as much on spirituality and psychology as it is on the history and science of the enigmatic San Pedro cactus. The fact that this book works on so many different levels makes it a true pleasure to read and reread. [ read more ]
This fascinating and illuminating essay was one of four articles devoted to “The Herb Dangerous” that ran in the first volume of The Equinox, a review devoted to “Scientific Illuminism” that was edited by the notorious Aleister Crowley early in the 20th century. Arguing that hashish helps “roll away the stone” from the deeper dimensions of both ceremonial magic and Buddhist meditation, Crowley identifies three main effects of the drug. [ read more ]
Despite some issues with the nitty-gritty details, DeKorne’s book belongs alongside Terence McKenna’s i>True Hallucinations and D.M. Turner’s The Essential Psychedelic Guide as one of the best books to emerge from the psychedelic florescence of the early 1990s. [ read more ]
By the time the poet, plant alchemist, and sometimes computer programmer Dale Pendell published his mammoth three-volume Pharmako trilogy this last decade, the world had seen at least a century of texts attempting to squeeze spiritual insight and religious correlates out of psychoactive experience. Pendell, however, managed to write a work of erudition and imagination that was not only strikingly original, but also wise. Whipper-snappers would do well to study the content of these great books, along with their form—a patchwork of citations and lore and lyric flights that express the multidimensional quality of psychoactives themselves. [ read more ]
Chemical Cowboys helps elucidate some of the hidden commodity chain that ends with that serotonin kick flowing through you. Not much here on the production side, and virtually nothing on consumption; the book focuses on distribution. And the distributors described appear, with some exceptions, to be working for amoral and even psychopathological criminals. [ read more ]
Though The Spirit Molecule struggles to clearly define its overall message, the director is to be applauded for his bravery and persistence in reporting on this controversial topic. For readers of Dr. Strassman’s book, the film brings the characters to life and provides an intimate insight into the deep personal nature of their experiences. [ read more ]
Characterized simultaneously as a Fantastic Realist, a Surrealist, and a Psychedelic artist, Mati Klarwein’s art is difficult to pigeonhole. [ read more ]
Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) produced his prose, poetry, musical compositions, and drawings while living as a patient at the Waldau Sanitarium, near Bern, Switzerland. Walter Morgenthaler, Wölfli’s physician, produced a unique look at Wölfli in Madness & Art; it is one of the first books to focus on the art of a mentally ill person, treating him as an artist of merit, rather than viewing his work solely as a symptom of disease. [ read more ]
So what’s all the fuss about? The Codex appears to have time-travelled from some future human world or parallel dimension. It is written in an impenetrable “language”, which may well be imaginary and untranslatable. Still, the more one looks at it, the more it seems to have a logical structure; the numbering system, for example, seems internally coherent. Read full text of review in original context… [ read more ]
In Part I, “Psychedelic Information Theory”, Kent lays out the multidisciplinary neuroscience that informs his Control Interrupt/Non-Linear Destabilization premise. This premise suggests that the primary action of psychedelics (mostly around 5-HT receptors, since that’s where research exists) is to destabilize neural network switching related to serotonergic and cholinergic visual processing, as well as the auditory, olfactory, and tactile senses. Part II, “Shamanism in the Age of Reason” extends the conversation into how tates of “neuroplasticity” are driven, by wave form mechanics, to internal, communal, and universal states of transpersonal consciousness, always with the question of how the information is valued. [ read more ]