Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, independent scholar, and popular speaker based in San Francisco.

Davis was born during the Summer of Love within a stone’s throw of San Francisco. He grew up in San Diego’s North County, and spent a decade on the East Coast, where he studied literature and philosophy at Yale and spent six years in the freelance trenches of Brooklyn and Manhattan before moving to San Francisco, where he currently resides. He is the author of six books: Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (MIT Press, 2023); High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s (MIT Press/Strange Attractor Press, 2019); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Yeti, 2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle, 2006), with photographs by Michael Rauner; and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2005). His first and probably best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown, 1998), a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been in print for over a quarter century, translated into six languages, and most recently republished by North Atlantic Press. He has contributed chapters on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality to a few dozen books, including Suzanne Treister’s HFT: The Gardener; A New Gnosis: Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology; Future Matters: the Persistence of Philip K. Dick; Sound Unbound: Writings on Contemporary Multimedia and Music Culture (MIT, 2008), and the classic Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics. In addition to his many forewords and introductions, Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of periodicals over the decades, including Rolling Stone, the LA Weekly, Spin, Wired, Bookforum, Arthur, Artforum, Slate, Salon, Gnosis, and the Village Voice. He currently writes the newsletter Burning Shore.

A fascinating and engaging speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught seminars at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Integral Studies, the Pacifica Graduate Institute, and Rice University, as well as leading workshops at the New York Open Center, Esalen, and the Berkeley Alembic. He has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the BBC, and appeared in numerous documentaries, as well as in Craig Baldwin’s underground film Specters of the Spectrum (1999). He wrote the libretto for and performed in “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” a Burning Man-inspired rock opera. He hosted the podcast Expanding Mind for a decade, and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015. Recently he served as a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. He co-founded the Berkeley Alembic, a center for “consciousness culture” where he co-hosts the Chalice, a monthly psychedelia salon.