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Pharmako / Poeia
Plant Powers, Poisons and Herbcraft
Rating :
rating
Author(s) :
Dale Pendell
Pages :
302
Pub Date :
1995
Edition(s) at Erowid :
1995(pb,s)
Foreword : Gary Snyder
Publisher :
Mercury House
ISBN :
1562790692
BACK COVER #
In Pharmako/Poeia, Dale Pendell offers a mesmerizing guide to psychoactive plants, from their pharmacological roots to the literary offshoots. "This is a book," writes Gary Snyder, "about danger: dangerous knowledge, even more dangerous ignorance." Against the greater danger, ignorance, Pendell strikes a formidable blow, as he proves himself a wise and witty guide to our plant teachers, their powers and their poisons.

BLURBS #
"Dale Pendell reactivates the ancient connection between the bardic poet and the shaman. His Pharmako/Poeia is a litany to the secret plant allies that have always accompanied us along the alchemical trajectory that leads to a new and yet authentically archaic future."
-- Terence McKenna, author of True Hallucinations

"Much of our life-force calls upon the plant world for support, in medicines and in foods, as both allies and teachers. Pendell provides a beautifully crafted bridge between these two worlds. The magic he shares is that the voices are spoken and heard both ways; we communicate with plants and they with us. This book is a moving and poetic presentation of this dialogue."
-- Dr. Alexander T. Shulgin, U of California at Berkeley, Department of Public Health, author of PIHKAL

"Pharmako/Poeia is an epic poem on plant humours, an abstruse alchemic treatise, an experiential narrative jigsaw puzzle, a hip and learned wild-nature reference text, a comic paean to cosmic consciousness, an ecolgical handbook, a dried-herb pastiche, a countercultural encyclopedia of ancient fact and lore that cuts through the present 'conservative' war-on-drugs psychobabble."
-- Allen Ginsberg, poet

"Dale Pendell's remarkable book will make it impossible to ever again underestimate the most unprepossessing plant. This compendium of how-to-get-high-by-eating-your-lawn ethnological data is mind-boggling, useful, and serves as a fine end run around the guradians of 'official' consciousness."
-- Peter Coyote, actor