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Burning Shore12 min
The Rise and Fall of Earthrise
Plus News and Notes
Read morePlus News and Notes
This last June, at the age of ninety, the pilot William Anders crashed into the waters around the San Juan Islands and left the earth forever. It was not his first planetary escape however. In December 1968, Anders joined Frank Borman and Jim Lovell in becoming the first humans to slip the grip of earth’s orbit, as the tiny cybernetic can that contained the Apollo 8 crew hurtled toward the moon they intended to orbit for a change. Though overshadowed... -
Burning Shore11 min
Sad Ear Worm
Plus News and Notes
Read morePlus News and Notes
I just got back from ten days of touring Blotter out East, where I did events in Chicago, Cambridge, and New York. I had a blast. All my other books have been sleepers, judged to be classics, if that, long after their debut, but Blotter is moving along right out of the gate. And though I love bookstores and am fine with old-school bookstore readings — thank you Powell’s! — I am happy to say that none of the Blotter... -
Burning Shore9 min
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
The New Archive, plus News and Notes
Read moreThe New Archive, plus News and Notes
This week I and my web-wizards Roberto Maiocchi and Peggy Nelson are releasing a major upgrade of Techgnosis.com, the action-packed (or at least packed) website that has collected my writings, podcasts, and recorded lectures since the late 1990s. I loved the feel and especially the look of the previous iteration, which was the creation of a fantastic coder named Phong (currently working on AI software with the artist Android Jones). But a deep WordPress rebuild was required, which gave me... -
Burning Shore13 min
Toad Tunes
Alan Bishop Psychs OutRead moreAlan Bishop Psychs Out
Agreeing on anything these days feels about as likely as getting a total solar eclipse over your head. But I think we can all pretty much agree that something like “psychedelic music” exists, even if no one can say what the hell it actually is. Is psychedelic music made on psychedelic drugs, or music that imitates psychedelic acoustic effects, or music that sounds good on psychedelics, or music that sounds like it’s supposed to sound good on psychedelics? If we... -
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Burning Shore15 min
PKD’s Divine Interference
One from the Archive
Read moreOne from the Archive
Today, February 20, 2024, is the (possible) fiftieth anniversary of that strange day when Philip K. Dick glimpsed a delivery woman’s Christian fish necklace and launched into the extraordinary series of bizarre experiences and events that the author referred to as “2/3/74.” Lawrence Sutin gives us this date in his bio, but I don’t know where it comes from. Today is also the last gathering of my Alembic lecture series on The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The date lies... -
Burning Shore5 min
On the Road
Spring 2024 appearancesRead moreSpring 2024 appearances
Let’s be clear: no LSD infuses the drug delivery devices so copiously and colorfully reproduced in my forthcoming book Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, which is illustrated with over one hundred images drawn from Mark McCloud’s epic blotter archive. That said, people are already turning on to the book. Paris Review is going to run an excerpt, Harvard asked me to lecture, and some big podcasters are knocking on the door. This pleases me, because while I... -
Burning Shore12 min
A Little Monkey Told Me
A Hanuman synchronicity, plus News and Notes
Read moreA Hanuman synchronicity, plus News and Notes
I had a delightful synchronicity go down recently, and I want to tell the tale. Last December, I went to a week-long meditation retreat hosted at the Mount Madonna Center, a spiritual yoga community I really should have included in my 2006 book The Visionary State, an architectural tour of California’s spiritual and religious landscape. Mount Madonna was founded in the early 1980s by Baba Hari Das, an Indian guru and proponent of Ayurveda and hatha yoga who had relocated... -
Offline Archive12 min
Goa Gil R.I.P.
From the Archives
Read moreFrom the Archives
On October 26 of this year, the psy-trance DJ Goa Gil passed from this earth. I got to meet Gil three decades ago, when I was writing a piece that, while it was an extraordinary blessing to research (especially on someone else’s dime), proved a mighty pain in the ass to get into print. I first heard about the psychedelic rave scene in the Indian state of Goa from the guys in the techno act Orbital, who were very nice... -
Burning Shore13 min
Monsters of Techno
From the Archives
Read moreFrom the Archives
With some excellent and kind help, I am currently in the midst of a massive revision of my Techgnosis archive site. This has sent me back to my own earlier work, much of which doesn’t appear on that site. One entertaining thirty-year old piece I just came across on an Aphex Twin fansite was the March 1994 feature I wrote for Spin about the “See the Light” tour that took place in the US in 1994. Featuring Orbital, Aphex Twin,... -
Offline Archive1 min
Three Stigmata of PKD addendum
PKD Event updateRead morePKD Event update
Hi folks. Sorry to stuff your mailbox, but readers have alerted me that I neglected to include any concrete information about my upcoming course on PKD’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Doh! (I blame the archons.) The five-session weekly class will begin on January 23, in person at the Berkeley Alembic and available for a limited time online. Here is the link. Here is the original announcement. (•) The Three Stigmata of Philip K. Dick I have been thinking and... -
Burning Shore12 min
You Are the Eyes of the World
The Dzogchen and The DeadRead moreThe Dzogchen and The Dead
On my dusty bookshelf of dharma, nestled between Spaciousness and Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness, two far-out Dzogchen texts translated and annotated by two far-out Western scholar-freaks (Keith Dowman and John Reynolds, respectively), stands a slim volume by the great 14th century sage Longchenpa, who also wrote Spaciousness. Translated by Kennard Lipman and Merrill Peterson, the book is entitled You Are the Eyes of the World. This is not the actual name of Longchenpa’s text, which Lipman and... -
Burning Shore13 min
AI and the Acid Western
Plus News and Notes
Read morePlus News and Notes
My old pal Scotto Moore—madcap sci-fi author, a cappella genius, and co-instigator of a 1990s Internet drug cult so secretive my brain automatically blocks out its name—is a music video and short animation obsessive. He tracks the art so assiduously that he looks at you blankly if you ask about the latest Marvel movie or Netflix cult doc, like you were talking about cattle inventories written in cuneiform. He publishes a newsletter called This Newsletter Cannot Save You, a biweekly... -
Books
The Pleasure
Animist Encounters with Poison OakRead moreAnimist Encounters with Poison Oak
As many a seasoned hiker can tell you, an incautious encounter with poison oak can turn a happy memory of a forest walk into a drawn-out ordeal of incapacitating anguish. The merest brush against the plant’s green and ruddy leaves—or even its bare stem—is apt to trigger a singular suffering perversely described by some as the pleasure. Despite centuries of hard-won wisdom among Native Americans and colonial settlers alike, many mysteries still surround the wily nature of Toxicodendron diversilobum. How... -
Burning Shore12 min
Techgnostic Times
Plus News and Notes
Read morePlus News and Notes
Recently a good friend asked me how I felt about the fact that my book Techgnosis, which came out twenty-five years ago, was one of nearly 200,000 texts in the Books3 data set, a collection of mostly pirated texts used to train generative AIs developed by Meta and others. I had heard about the leak of the data set, as authors like Sarah Silverman and Michael Chabon threw their newsworthy weight behind a number of lawsuits brought against Meta for... -
Burning Shore7 min
Spiritual Warfare
From the archive: Televangelists during the first Gulf WarRead moreFrom the archive: Televangelists during the first Gulf War
Over the past few months I have been working with some pals to remake the Techgnosis.com website, which has already gone through a few major iterations since first appearing online in the late 1990s. With Burning Shore now disseminating my fresher communiqués, Techgnosis.com now acts more than ever as an archive for my decades of work, and an impressively extensive one as well. The new site we are building will reflect this emphasis with more robust searching and cross-linking of... -
Burning Shore14 min
Doom Scroll
Plus News and Notes
Read morePlus News and Notes
As far as I can make out, the term “doomscrolling” started making the rounds in 2019, and became, for obvious reasons, far more infectious in 2020. We’ve had two more years of pandemic, and a yearish of whatever this next thing we are in is, and the term does not seem to be losing much luster. I still hear and use it, partly because, unlike many hashtag terms, it refers to an actual practice, or mode of behavior, or mind-wrecking... -
Burning Shore13 min
King of the Jinn
Esoteric Tourism in Morocco
Read moreEsoteric Tourism in Morocco
Sometime it really pays off to be a perpetual student of religion and the occult. Travel, especially, can be unexpectedly transfigured if you equip yourself with a well-honed sacred radar, especially one tuned to animist and esoteric frequencies. With this sort of spirit-tech in hand, or in mind, even banal and hyper-touristy environments can pack a spectral punch. I touched this truth again last June, when circumstances landed me in Morocco, with a few days on my own after the... -
Burning Shore13 min
Pinky Pat Layouts
Plus News and Notes
Read morePlus News and Notes
Tantric meditation is a rainbow-hued affair, but arguably the most essential colors are red and white. Tibetan Vajrayana traditions speak of two essences or “drops” in the subtle body, one white and one red, the white drop associated with the crown center and the red with the navel. In many Vajrayana meditations, the red drop ignites and rises and “melts” the white drop above, allowing the two essences to combine at the heart. Making, if you think about it, pink.... -
Offline Archive8 min
Cronies Write Books
A summer reading listRead moreA summer reading list
Sometimes I am overcome with the desire to have spent my twenties as a derelict vagabond, or a devoted monk, or an apprentice to an oud master or biodynamic vintner. But I mostly spent my time doing what I did, which involved a lot of freelance writing and lecturing and talking with people. I still sometimes yearn for a life richer with remarkable experiences, but what I definitely got was a life rich with remarkable people — with friends and... -
Burning Shore11 min
The Weird and the Banal
Plus News and Notes
Read morePlus News and Notes
The last post hereabouts was a doozy. “AI EEEEEE!!” was my somewhat feverish take on AI, and I am still working through feedback from the piece, most insistently from my own heart and mind. Perhaps the most pressing issue is the following paradox. Like a lot of observers, I am pretty dang sure that the explosion of AI and especially Large Language Models in our midst is going to make things much weirder. Not only will these sprightly non-human agents... -
Burning Shore17 min
“AI EEEEEEE!!!”
Grappling with global weirdingRead moreGrappling with global weirding
I have been aware of concerns about AI and existential risk for a long time — I am old techgnostic living in San Futurisco after all. But I avoided staring very deeply into the algorithmic abyss until late last year. Up til then, it still felt like a species of Silicon Valley hype, or the hyper-rationalist hallucinations of Effective Altruists. Deep down, I also feared that its rabbit holes might be tough to back out of. Here be dragons, I... -
Offline Archive10 min
Lot in Life
Consider The Parking LotRead moreConsider The Parking Lot
I recently joined up at my local gym one more time, though to my credit the last time I quit going it was because of the virus. The gym is attached to a UC medical center and mostly caters to med students, but locals can join as well. It is a decent place, nicer than many and not always crowded, but it can still be alienating, which is partly why it took me so long to rejoin. I don’t mind... -
Burning Shore9 min
Powerspotting
Establishing the AlembicRead moreEstablishing the Alembic
Last year two meditation nerds named Michael Taft and Kati Devaney invited me to help them start a new center in Berkeley. Michael is a popular no-bullshit meditation teacher and the host of the laser-sharp Deconstructing Yourself podcast, which I appeared on shortly before we became friends. Kati is a brilliant and friendly Phishhead who was rocketing up the professional neuroscience ladder before she abandoned academe to be boots on the ground for this crazy project. I am not much... -
Burning Shore10 min
Sounding Off and On
Plus News and Notes
Read morePlus News and Notes
I spent a weekend this November at the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver, attending the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion. The AAR is an immense and frazzling event, a professional nerdfest that also serves as a bleak and pitiless opportunity for broke postdocs and recently-minted PhDs to desperately scramble for an ever-shrinking slice of the moldering humanities pie. But I still had a lot of fun. Besides hobnobbing with pals in the tantric and esoteric zones... -
Burning Shore7 min
The Smoldering Shore
Back in Slack
Read moreBack in Slack
It’s been quite a spell since I last posted, which means you have all forgotten about me and I have nothing to say. Kidding. I just needed a break, which luckily included some chill time and nearly a month in the UK, one of my favorite places to visit. I participated in two fringe conferences, visited with friends and colleagues, did some magic, watched (part of) a nation mourn, and spent a week walking solo through the Welsh marches. Not... -
Offline Archive
Pause
Getting real hiatusRead moreGetting real hiatus
Nobody likes to read scribblers gripe about writing blocks and motivation and production anxieties, and lord knows I have already kvetched thusly in earlier posts. But you know things are getting bad when you get an email from Substack letting you know that you have a bunch of new subscribers and you haven’t done jackshit for a couple months and you might want to get off your lazy ass. They don’t actually say “jackshit” or “lazy ass” but the message... -
Burning Shore11 min
The Elephant LSD
Thoughts on a Euro-American Ally
Read moreThoughts on a Euro-American Ally
I am currently recovering from three very full days of the Chacruna Institute’s Religion and Psychedelics Forum. The event went amazingly well, with a high level of discourse from both panelists and chatting attendees, a diverse and ecumenical array of views unmarred by haters and trolls, and a lovely fusion of head and heart rare to find in such an abstract, draining thing as an online conference. I moderated a bunch of panels, interviewed Brian Muraresku, and, since I was... -
Burning Shore7 min
Burning Shore Redux
Plus News & Notes
Read morePlus News & Notes
It’s been a while since I posted, and longer since I posted anything substantial, but while there are definitely more interesting things to read and write about than a poor slob’s worries about their production of words, that’s what you are gonna get here. The good news is that I’ve finally emailed off my manuscript to MIT Press. Tentatively entitled Blotter: The Art and Design of an Acid Medium, the book came in at almost twice the length I had... -
Burning Shore7 min
A Nibble from the Dr.
More on the Beatles
Read moreMore on the Beatles
Almost two years into this Substack, and with a manuscript still to be finished, I have been burning less of the shore of late than I would prefer. Fear not: my little hamster hands are busy on a new post about horror and media, but to tide over readers who do not have a paid subscription, I wanted to share a bit from my only post last month: the eleventh edition of the subscribers-only letters column “Ask Dr. D.,” which... -
Burning Shore16 min
Ask Dr. D. 11
Schismogenesis, Subculture, and the Inevitable Discord ServerRead moreSchismogenesis, Subculture, and the Inevitable Discord Server
Welcome to the latest “Ask Dr. D.,” the Burning Shore’s subscriber-only Q&A column. (As always you may find it more pleasant to read on the web; just click the title above.) Thanks for subscribing, and for your patience—I have nearly completed my LSD blotter book, after which I hope to return to more regular Burning Shore essays. In the meantime, I have something tasty to offer: an invitation to a Discord server I just set up with some old cronies... -
Offline Archive10 min
Another Paper Airplane
Messages; BottlesRead moreMessages; Bottles
Back in the early ‘90s, when I was working full-time as a freelancer, a simple allegory of the writing life came to me that has never quit: writing feels like painstakingly preparing a single, extraordinarily challenging page—an illuminated manuscript or a space station blueprint or a breakup letter in ancient Sumerian—then folding up said page into a paper airplane and throwing it out the window. Even though my writing is not especially personal, a lot of it still feels like... -
Burning Shore12 min
Beatles and Blotters
Plus News & Notes
Read morePlus News & Notes
Earlier this week, I recorded a most satisfying Rebel Wisdom Digital Campfire chat with Anderson Todd and RW’s David Fuller. We waxed hard about Get Back, the epic three-part Peter Jackson documentary assemblage of the 1969 Beatles sessions and rooftop show that you and everyone has already heard about because the Beatles still manage to be Big News. After an hour-long ramble, we opened up to Q&A and got the inevitable question, that playground typology that presents a rock version... -
Media, Music1 min
The Psychospiritual Legacy of the Beatles
A Rebel Wisdom Digital Campfire GatheringRead moreA Rebel Wisdom Digital Campfire Gathering
From my pals at Rebel Wisdom: "Why are we still obsessed with The Beatles, and is it healthy? Fifty years after they broke up, it seems that the mark they made on our culture has not faded. Does this demonstrate the timeless genius of the band, or is it a sign of a culture that is stuck? A few days ago saw the release of an eight hour fly-on-the-wall documentary Get Back, made by Lord of the Rings director Peter... -
Expanding Mind Podcast1 min
Explore the Expanding Mind archive
A Decade's Worth of WeirdnessRead moreA Decade's Worth of Weirdness
I hosted the Expanding Mind podcast for about a decade, and over the years it developed a passionate following. We went high and low: drugs, media, magick, dharma, doom metal, dreams. I like to think the show helped inspire a host of intelligent podcasts devoted to the peculiar edges of consciousness and culture, like Weird Studies and Future Fossils, whose continuing excellence makes me feel OK about suspending my show. And for those who miss Expanding Mind: another Erik Davis... -
Esoterica, Scholarship29 min
Profane Illuminations
Robert Anton Wilson's Hedonic AscesisRead moreRobert Anton Wilson's Hedonic Ascesis
Here is the abstract: The writer Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) played a significant intellectual role in the American counterculture in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Drawing from a wide range of discourses, as well as his own occultural fictions and personal experiments in “hedonic engineering,” Wilson presented a pluralistic view of reality that combined a pragmatic skepticism with a creative and esoteric embrace of the “meta-program- ming” possibilities of altered states of consciousness. In his 1975 Illuminatus! trilogy, written... -
Media
Between Sacred & Profane
A 3.5-way conversation at HarvardRead moreA 3.5-way conversation at Harvard
In May, I had about as much fun as I have had on Zoom since the pando descended: a three-and-a-half-way conversation over at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. The rich discussion, which was just posted at the CSWR, was called “Between Sacred & Profane: Psychedelic Culture, Drug Spiritualities, and Contemporary America.” My interlocutors included my pal and colleague Dr. Christian Greer, the author of a mind-blowing dissertation called Angel-Headed Hipsters: Psychedelic Militancy in Nineteen-Eighties North America, a... -
Media
Arkonology
The Gnostic Mythologies of ConspiracyRead moreThe Gnostic Mythologies of Conspiracy
A few months ago, I was invited to give a lecture at the Philosophy & Religion Forum at the University of Southern Mississippi. I took advantage of the opportunity to synthesize a lot of the ideas about conspiracy theory, paranoid media, and visionary esoterica that kept me company during a whole year thinking and talking about QAnon and its relationship to alternative religion and psychedelics. I wanted to pursue my understanding of the gnostic dimensions of the new mythologies of... -
Offline Archive
Finding Meaning in the Weirdness
Talking with Aubrey Marcus on AMPRead moreTalking with Aubrey Marcus on AMP
A few months ago I was a guest on the podcast belonging to Aubrey Marcus, who is described on the Psychedelic Invest website as the 58th most influential person in psychedelics, as well as “an experimentalist, unconventional fitness junkie, and human optimizer.” Apparently Aubrey’s human performance company Onnit is also “one of the fastest growing companies in America.” I like to talk to people, and Aubrey is a thoughtful modern Stoic dude who has definitely forged his own path. I... -
Media
Ghostwriting at the Crossroads
The Self Portraits as Other People PodcastRead moreThe Self Portraits as Other People Podcast
I have a strange super-power. When I meet a bunch of random people, especially at parties or gigs, I sometimes am made instantly and overwhelmingly aware — I am talking seconds here — that someone in the crowd is very much worth my time. I have come to trust these intuitions, since many of these people have become important friends and colleagues, opening all manner of Doors to Fun. One of them is The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo, a multi-talented, psychedelicized, and... -
Media
Technology, Psychedelics, and the Future of Religion
The Open Div Summit interviewRead moreThe Open Div Summit interview
Open Div is a leading, NGOsih project devoted to tracking and translating divinity into secular society. Last month they staged the Open Div Summit, for which I contributed a podcast discussion on “Technology, Psychedelics, and the Future of Religion,” available on Spotify and Anchor. This was a fun conversation because I got to work out some of my Religious Studies chops: the question of religion in modernity, the peculiar identity of the “Spiritual But Not Religious,” the role of technology... -
Media
QAnon Shamanism
When Conspiracy and Spirituality CollideRead moreWhen Conspiracy and Spirituality Collide
In February, a month after the attack on the capital, I led a Chacruna Community Forum on the topic of New Age conspirituality and “QAnon Shamanism.” I was joined by two friends and peers, Jules Evans, author of Breaking Open and The Art of Losing Control and other books, and Erica Magill, co-founder of the Lost Angels Yoga Club. It was a great livecast conversation, which modeled the blend of compassion and critique I think we need right now, and... -
Media
The Rise of Psychedelic Capitalism
A Rebel Wisdom InvestigationRead moreA Rebel Wisdom Investigation
In this short documentary, Alexander Beiner speaks to shamans and philosophers and critics about the rise of psychedelic capitalism. Includes interviews with myself, crony Jamie Wheal, as well as Dr. Rosalind Watts (clinical lead of Imperial College's groundbreaking psilocybin for depression study), Kat Conour of the Auryn Project, Bill Linton (CEO of The Usona Institute) and Shipibo shaman Jose Lopez Sanchez. -
Media
RAW!
The Secret History of Western Esotericism OddcastRead moreThe Secret History of Western Esotericism Oddcast
I am really chuffed that I got to record a conversation with Earl Fontainelle, host of one of the most ambitious, focused, and engaging nerdcasts out there: the SHWEP, or Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast. Earl, who has a dry wit and a capacious noggin, has committed to tracing the literally enchanting currents of esoteric thought and practice carefully and more or less chronologically. Over a hundred episodes in, and the SHWEP has only just reached late antiquity. Occasionally,... -
Media
Magic and Ecology
Riffing on Animism for the Insurrection Interviews PodcastRead moreRiffing on Animism for the Insurrection Interviews Podcast
Animism is not fairy-tale dust bunny to me, but a philosophically and aesthetically valid framework for engaging the world, including the technological world. As such, I was incredibly honored to be interviewed by Simone Kotva for the fascinating Magic and Ecology project, an online symposium, podcast, and art exhibit that explores the myriad linkages between esoteric perception, political possibilities, and ecological thinking. (Other interviewees for the project include folks like Isabelle Stengers, David Abram and the witch and artist Charlotte... -
Media
Attics of My Life
Deadcast #50Read moreDeadcast #50
My pal Jesse Jarnow invited me to drop some words on the Grateful Dead podcast he has been cranking out this month. A fellow Psychedelic Sangha-bro, Jesse is also an WFMU jock and the author of the fab psychedelic history Heads. On the Deadcast, he and co-host Rich Mahan have been picking through the classic Dead albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty song-by-song. I spoke about “Attics of My Life,” which is about as close the astral pranksters ever got... -
Media
Born in the Kali Yuga
Sounds for the BardoRead moreSounds for the Bardo
The Psychedelic Sangha began with a series of performance happenings and community discourses stirred up by the groovy freak teacher Doc Kelley, who know runs the crew with the photographer and music writer Ethan Covey. Last month the PS kids put out Sounds from the Bardo, vol. 1. This hour-long multimedia release grew out of a series of live “Bardo Baths” the crew staged in Brooklyn back in Ye Olde Days — feral sound-baths, inspired by Leary and The Psychedelic... -
Media
Are We Trapped in Chapel Perilous?
Conspirinormal podcast #342Read moreConspirinormal podcast #342
Adam Sayne has been doing his Conspirinormal podcast for about eight years now, and recently hosted a Strange Realities conference in Nashville. Maybe it’s the magic of Tennessee, but his mellow, unhurried style around these tricksy matters is a testament to one fella’s ability to walk through the valley of the shadow of Weird without losing the plot. This conversation stuck close to High Weirdness material, and included further speculations on the parameters of the global Chapel Perilous we find... -
Media
Surf(ac)ing Interstices
War Machine podcast #8Read moreWar Machine podcast #8
I spoke with two renegade academic types, Preston Price and Matt Baker, for their newish War Machine podcast. These boys favor the dirt-bag edge of scholarship and religion, so I felt right at home as we talked theory—critical theory, systems theory, and, of course, conspiracy theory. I was off energetically that day, but that just made things more vulnerable and questing. They called the episode “Surf(ac)ing Interstices.” You also might want to check out their two-part conversation about divination and... -
Media
Building a Better Self
Demystifying Stoic AnthropotechnicsRead moreDemystifying Stoic Anthropotechnics
When I attended Rice University a decade ago, I whiled away the boozy hours with a number of unusually bright, funny, and forward-thinking grad students, whose inter-disciplinary interests and great good humor made Houston’s concrete swamp more than tolerable. Now two of them, Seth Morton and Alexander Adkins, carry on the conversation in their podcast Beautiful Losers, which explores the continued relevance of humanities discourse in an unravelling 21st century. I recently joined them for an episode called “Building a... -
Media
Nerd Immunity
Boom Festival Liminal Podquest #3Read moreBoom Festival Liminal Podquest #3
The monastic aspects of 2020 Covid life haven’t bothered me that much, and have been alchemically catalyzing in some ways. But I’m bummed out about the absence of feral outdoor music festivals, where I like to lecture (and dance) whenever I can. So I was very happy when Chiara Baldini and Ivan March, of Portugal’s mighty BOOM festival, invited me to participate in a “podquest” called “Nerd Immunity,” which addressed the conspiracy theories that are dividing a lot of freak... -
Media
A Sonospheric Corpse
Film Jive podcast #101Read moreFilm Jive podcast #101
On Halloween I contributed to a wonderful and bizarre idea: an audio equivalent of the exquisite corpse, a well-known Surrealist practice of collective art-making. The recording was sponsored by Zach Betonte of the Film Jive podcast, invited a number of folks, including Zombie expert John Cussans and horror writer Brian Evenson, to contribute macabre bits for his Sonospheric Corpse. I recorded a handful of creepy poems by the California weird writer Clark Ashton Smith, which make an appearance in both... -
Media
The Chaos Path
Escaping Samsara #18Read moreEscaping Samsara #18
I had a wonderful time talking with Nathan Thompson for his Escaping Samsara podcast, which presents a very concrete but also open-minded approach to spiritual practice. I’ve known Nathan for a while, and admire the life he has carved out for himself in Asia, teaching yoga, exploring the mystery, and keeping his brain sharp. His podcast asks folks about their personal spiritual and mind-hack journeys, from a nerdy but still transformative angle. For my episode, “The Chaos Path,” we left... -
Media
UFOs as Spiritual Objects
The Lex Files #16Read moreThe Lex Files #16
From Lex himself: "UFO sightings have captured the mind (and popular culture) for decades. But with the earliest recorded sighting occurring centuries ago or more, their potential influence on history demands questioning. Dr. Erik Davis investigates the connection between UFO visitation narratives and our encounters with spiritual beings throughout the past. With a PhD in religious studies focusing on Gnosticism, esotericism and mysticism, Dr. Davis explores the significance of supernatural phenomena across the human experience." -
Media
The Future of Psychedelic Spirituality
A Chacruna Community Forum gatheringRead moreA Chacruna Community Forum gathering
Sacred Plants, Religious Freedom and the Future of Psychedelic Spirituality: this taped Chacruna Community Forum features me in conversation with renowned ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and former Decrim Nature founding chairman Bob Otis Stanley. Our question: what is the psychedelic connection to the sacred? How do we understand and build psychedelic practices that go beyond personal psychological goals? Indigenous cultures typically use sacred plants in ceremonies, and its use are related to many spheres of life. But how do we relate with these if... -
Media
Weird and Wondrous
Mapping Minds #3Read moreMapping Minds #3
For the third episode of the new podcast Mapping Minds, I spoke with host Jimmy Sudekum about a rich range of the “Weird and Wondrous.” Especially these days, I really enjoy having focused conversations with stimulating new minds like Jimmy’s. Podcasts are also a good way to get my stuff out there—even to small audiences—and to continue to contribute to an important media format in the wake of Expanding Mind. I had a great time with Jimmy and got pretty... -
Media
Acid Communism and the Cosmic Right
The Microdose Podcast with Jeremy GilbertRead moreThe Microdose Podcast with Jeremy Gilbert
In this podcast, my pal Jeremy Gilbert — agitator, dance music freak, and early adopter of "acid communism" — interviews me. From gnostic revivals to conspiracy theories, the JFK assassination to QAnon – why does there seem to be a sudden resurgence in conspiracy theories, sometimes in the most unexpected corners? Is there a connection between conspiracy theory and the ‘California Ideology’? And does rationalism always triumph in politics? -
Media
Paranoia, Conspiracy, and Covid
The Deconstrucing Yourself podcast with Michael TaftRead moreThe Deconstrucing Yourself podcast with Michael Taft
I spoke with my pal Michael Taft on Deconstructing Yourself about QAnon as a new religion, Gnostic psychology and the power of the secret truth, new modes of narrative warfare that exploit human psychology, technologically-sophisticated divination techniques, the “disenchanted paranormal,” the angel of the library, Metal Hurlant, and more. -
Media
Our Pandemic Psychedelic Trip
My latest Rebel Wisdom interviewRead moreMy latest Rebel Wisdom interview
In June I spoke with David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom about “Our Pandemic Psychedelic Trip." Starting off with Grof’s notion of psychedelics as “non-specific amplifiers,” David dropped us into the deep end of the pool: how does our contemporary reality resemble tripping? Others have written wonderfully about this curiously pressing topic (at least for heads), and our conversation here just scratched the surface, even as we wrestled with conspiracies, paranoia, not-knowing, viruses, and the strange wonder of it all. -
Media
Talking with PKD Talks…
A recorded livestream on Phil DickRead moreA recorded livestream on Phil Dick
I really enjoyed this livestream interview with Dan Abella, who curates the Philip K. Dick Film Festival in NYC and also hosts these live PKD Talks. Our conversation was great fun for me, since for whatever reason, most HW chats end up being about psychedelics, McKenna, and RAW. Here we got to geek out hard on PKD, and I even fielded a couple of questions from Tessa Dick, who was on the line. -
Media
High Weirdness in the ’70s
More thoughts on Weirdness, the 70s, and Terence McKenna
Read moreMore thoughts on Weirdness, the 70s, and Terence McKenna
I spoke with The Melt about High Weirdness, the 70s, and particularly about the life and legacy of Terence McKenna. Some familiar ground but always new twists! -
Esoterica, Psychedelics, Scholarship30 min
Gnostic Psychedelia
And the Archetype of the ArchonsRead moreAnd the Archetype of the Archons
This article first draws out one particularly important feature of gnostic myth—the idea of the archons, or fallen "rulers" against whom the gnostic wages spiritual warfare. In contemporary conspiracy culture, the archons now hold a prominent place at the table, but they are also described in both orthodox and heterodox texts of antiquity. Since I am describing a type rather than analyzing a particular sect or text, some scholars will probably find my use of the term too loose to... -
Media
A Tribute to Terence McKenna
Talking with Dennis McKennaRead moreTalking with Dennis McKenna
Dennis McKenna hosted a Tribute to Terence McKenna during April 2020. On Friday, April 3, we watched a rare film of Terence at Esalen in the late 1980s (check out his son Finn!), and then Dennis and I had a wonderful chat. It was the first time I had the opportunity to talk to him formally since High Weirdness came out. Thousands showed up. Also, about 40 minutes into the conversation, when I was discussing the idea of a "pact"... -
Media
Embracing Mortality
Back on the Desert Oracle podcastRead moreBack on the Desert Oracle podcast
In celebration of the High Weirdness audiobook, I hopped back on the horn with Ken Layne over at the Desert Oracle podcast. It was the first public conversation I had had since Covideodrome, and so we talked about weirdness and...death. -
Offline Archive
Higher Planes
The art of Patrick TurkRead moreThe art of Patrick Turk
This is a brief catalog essay for the show Patrick Turk: Higher Planes, which wound up being held mostly virtually at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, February through September 2020 Over the last decade, a so-called “psychedelic renaissance” has taken hold of the developed world. Clinical research into drugs like LSD and psilocybin is booming, ayahuasca jungle tourism is mainstream, corporations are patenting psychoactive formulations, and efforts to legalize visionary plants are popping up faster than mushrooms after rain.... -
Media
Talking Zion 2.0
A fresh podcast chatRead moreA fresh podcast chat
I love doing podcasts because I get to meet new people, and I especially enjoy hanging out across the generations. I really enjoyed speaking with Collin Morris for his podcast Zion 2.0. I hadn't thought about the title of the podcast when we started talking, but it soon became clear that Collin had some experience and deep things to say about Mormonism, one of my favorite topics of religious history in America. So the first chunk of this chat was... -
Media
Curiouser and Curiouser…
Chatting for a Curious HourRead moreChatting for a Curious Hour
In this fine episode of the Curiousity Hour, I talked to the hosts Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund about everything under the sun. OK, not everything... -
Media
Keeping It Weird
Psychedelic Culture in the 70s and TodayRead morePsychedelic Culture in the 70s and Today
"Keeping It Weird" is a talk recorded late last year at a warm gathering of the SF Psychedelic Society. Here I take some of the rich weirdness of the psychedelic 70s and compare and contrast it with today's rapidly evolving but disheartening psychedelic culture(s). Unusually, I removed at least one glove in my critique of conspiracy, fatuous corporadelica, and entrepreneurial self-promotion. And it's only gotten worse in the months since... -
Media
New Future Fossils
Talking Wilder with Michael GarfieldRead moreTalking Wilder with Michael Garfield
I am happy to have appeared on the 132nd episode of Michael Garfield's always stimulating Future Fossils. "In this episode we peer into the intersection of psychedelics, madness, systems science, postmodernism, and religious studies to ask about the truly other that refuses to allow us a clean answer to the questions, 'What is the Real?' and 'Did that just really happen?'" -
Media
Dreamflesh Reviews High Weirdness
Reflections from GyrusRead moreReflections from Gyrus
I have known Gyrus for almost two decades and this kind and insightful critique is a continuation of our long conversation about philosophy and psyche in the contemporary world. Gyrus rightly sees me performing "A deconstruction of reality which refuses to cut loose into the bodiless abstractions of shallow postmodernism, and which keeps an eye on the realities of encountering the Other, and the realities of mediated society — ultimately finding weird loops deviously structuring the ineffable, shifting grounds beneath... -
Media
The Politics of High Weirdness
A Conversation with RU SiriusRead moreA Conversation with RU Sirius
For Litquake 2019, I spoke with RU Sirius about the politics of high weirdness, then and now. The conversation took place at the lovely E. M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore in Oakland. -
Media
Neohuman Gnosis
Talking with Agah BahariRead moreTalking with Agah Bahari
Transhumanists, like other Silicon Valley-flavored thinkers, get a bad rap today. But I always love talking with intellectually open futurists, especially when they have productive angles on the religious urge and the quest for meaning. Agah Bahari is a musician, podcaster, and all around sweet smart dude, and I enjoyed joining his NEOHUMAN podcast enormously. Agah is also only the latest of the long line of excellent Persians and Persian-Americans I have been blessed to hang out with. He also... -
Media
Psychedelic Press review
"A Pilgrimage into Weird Highness"Read more"A Pilgrimage into Weird Highness"
My pal William Rowlandson penned this impressionistic and playful review of High Weirdness for the ever-cool Psychedelic Press journal. He gave me a pre-release pdf, which he kindly encouraged me to pass on to you. A Pilgrimage into Weird Highness by Eris Davik (PDF) Here are the bibliographical deets: Rowlandson, William (2019) 'A Pilgrimage into Weird Highness by Eris Davik.' Psychedelic Press (London, UK) issue XXVIII, 47-61. -
Media
Desert Oracle Return
Finding Your Way in our Weird WorldRead moreFinding Your Way in our Weird World
Had another wonderful chat with Ken Layne, this time about post-High Weirdness. Somewhere in there I go on a "welcome to the weird" rant that Ken is convinced serves as a manifesto. He encouraged me to write it up, but I am on the slack right now so who knows long that might be. You be the judge! -
Media
The Occult Revival: Then and Now
October 2019, Philosophical Research SocietyRead moreOctober 2019, Philosophical Research Society
In this talk recorded at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, I expanded on the first chapter of High Weirdness to give a general picture of the occult revival of the early 1970s. Juicy clips abound. Then I and the audience, who furnished some great questions and comments, did some compare and contrast with today's occult revival. -
Media
Death / / Sentence
A podcast review of High WeirdnessRead moreA podcast review of High Weirdness
Death//Sentence is a podcast that bills itself as "A podcast about books for people who don't like books, podcasts or capitalism, but who like extreme metal." Right on. Here they review High Weirdness with the proper twists and turns. -
Media
Parallax Views
The podcast that opens with a Zizek quotationRead moreThe podcast that opens with a Zizek quotation
In this episode of Parallax Views, I talk to the smart-dude host J.G. Michael about High Weirdness, the pitfalls of counterculture in the 60s/70s, and Robert Anton Wilson's resonance with the ideas of postmodernism (which is another product of the 70s). Additionally, we delve into the concept of the Chapel Perilous, an experience which cause one to profoundly question his/her reality, and ask whether we, as a society, may be experiencing a collective moment of High Weirdness and the Chapel... -
Media
The Nostalgia Trap
I take over episode 161Read moreI take over episode 161
In this conversation with David Parsons, I discuss the origins of High Weirdness, his longer journey as a thinker and writer, and how the transcendent freakiness of California in the 70s produced eerie premonitions of the chaotic dystopias of the 21st century. -
Media
The Astral Hustle
With Cory AllenRead moreWith Cory Allen
In this podcast, I go deep with the very sympatico Cory Allen about music and the 70s, which was a nice way to round out the conversation about HW. -
Media
Legalize Freedom podcast
More on High WeirdnessRead moreMore on High Weirdness
In this interview with UK writer Greg Moffitt, we ask ‘What is real?’, ‘What is normal?’, ‘What are facts?’, ‘What is truth?’ and find that reality is unstable and that the world is considerably more malleable than it at first appears. -
Offline Archive
Leonardo review
A review of High WeirdnessRead moreA review of High Weirdness
Leonardo magazine is not only a cool techno-arts journal that have long been been way ahead of the curve. The journal was also founded by Jack Parsons' CalTech partner Frank Malina. So Stephanie Moran's review was especially appreciated! "High Weirdness is an informative, flowing and fantastical read that compares, conceptually situates and historicises the three sets of synchronicitous psychobiographies." Read the rest of the review here. -
Media
Hermitix podcast
More on High WeirdnessRead moreMore on High Weirdness
I had a very interesting conversation over at Hermitix about High Weirdness. It might interest you as well! -
Offline Archive
The Varieties of Psychonautic Experience
We Are the Mutants reviews High WeirdnessRead moreWe Are the Mutants reviews High Weirdness
Essayist and cultural critic Michael Grasso just posted the first major blog review of High Weirdness on the Cold War pop culture website We Are the Mutants. I was very happy with the essay, not so much because he dug the book (which is obviously swell), but because his reactions to it—complex, personal, intellectual, initiatory—made me confident that, at least for some readers, I achieved my central goal as a writer: not to necessarily sell tons of books, or to "increase... -
Media
Talking with TANK
A conversation with Guy Mackinnon-LittleRead moreA conversation with Guy Mackinnon-Little
Last June I spent a very pleasant few hours in the London offices of TANK, definitely the smartest of the hep glossy art mags I know. Writer Guy Mackinnon-Little was a close reader of High Weirdness, and we had a fine chat, whose crisply edited version can be read here. -
Media
The Ultraculture Podcast
Talking with Jason LouvRead moreTalking with Jason Louv
In this podcast, one of the first I recorded about High Weirdness but only just posted, I talk to Jason Louv about weirdness, counterculture, integrity, and our bizarre current moment. I learned a lot from this conversation. -
Media
High Weirdness with Lorenzo
The Psychedelic Salon InterviewRead moreThe Psychedelic Salon Interview
It was great to talk with the wonderful Lorenzo Hagerty for Psychedelic Salon number 616. My 2003 Burning Man talk, recorded at the new Palenque Norte, was one of the first recordings on his venerable Psychedelic Salon, so it was great to continue the thread and meet a small slice of Lorenzo's really thriving community. -
Media
Technology, Practice, and the Weird
Ten Laws with East ForestRead moreTen Laws with East Forest
Here lies the conversation on Ten Laws with East Forest with Krishna about practice, spirituality, and the weird. -
Offline Archive
Chapel Perilous
The Occulture PodcastRead moreThe Occulture Podcast
I am really enjoying doing podcasts about High Weirdness and related topics. One nice thing is that so far they have mostly been pretty different. My July 11 conversation with Ryan Peverly for his Occulture show is a good 'un. -
Media
Paradigm Shifting
The Both/And PodcastRead moreThe Both/And Podcast
Here is an hour-plus conversation with Jared Janes and Jason Snyder, which drifts into some of the more harrowing dimensions of the weird and less about High Weirdness proper. We cover "a wide range of topics, including eclecticism, psychedelics, philosophy, spirituality, existential dread, esotericism, capitalism meditation & more." The part on existential dread is pretty great. -
Media
How the World Got Weird
I get in the groove with Rebel WisdomRead moreI get in the groove with Rebel Wisdom
During a recent trip to the UK, I was interviewed by Ali Beiner for the formidable Rebel Wisdom outfit. The chat went very well, and went beyond the book towards some larger themes of our weird times. Folks are watching this one! -
Media
PKD and High Weirdness
Aeon Byte podcast appearanceRead moreAeon Byte podcast appearance
Once again, I was an Astral Guest on Miguel Conner's long-running podcast Aeon Byte: "We explore the earthly and unearthly forces in the early 70s that shaped the minds of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. This leads to how these psychonauts went to both influence and foretell today’s fragmenting culture. We focus more on Dick, including his Gnosticism that was much earlier than most believe and his predictions of a Gnostic nightmare that has come true." -
Offline Archive
Summer Pause
A decade of podcastingRead moreA decade of podcasting
Expanding Mind is going on hiatus. In this solo show, Erik reflects on a decade of podcasting, the learning curves of the show, the work of conversation, the uncanniness of our moment, and the publication of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Liminal Mind
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with my wife Jennifer Dumpert about collaborative dreaming, iPad skrying, meditation, play, the problem with interpretation, and her new bookLiminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep (North Atlantic). -
Media
Desert Oracle Radio
Taking the Desert AirwavesRead moreTaking the Desert Airwaves
The wry and affable Ken Layne gave over the whole episode to talk to me about High Weirdness, deserts, and the static between the stars. And please don't hesitate to subscribe to Ken's amazing Desert Oracle zine, whose recent 8th edition features freaky matter on lost civilizations, cabin dolls, and Mojave desert tortoises. -
Media
Keep Psychedelics Weird
Life is a FestivalRead moreLife is a Festival
Host Eamon Armstrong and I range widely in this hefty podcast episode. (No. 23, natch.) Eamon is into vulnerability, and asks some refreshingly direct questions, so we went some interesting places beyond the usual cascade of concepts. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Deconstructing Yourself
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A discussion with meditation teacher and author Michael Taft host of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast, about hardcore dharma, Buddhist modernism, shop talk, the soup of the sangha, and the problem of the achievement self and the blind leading the blind. -
Media
A Brief History of Queer Psychedelia
Video Lecture, June 1, 2019Read moreVideo Lecture, June 1, 2019
The following is a talk I gave at the Queering Psychedelics conference, organized by Bia Labate and the Chacruna crew. The talk is an overview of some of the more influential queer men (mostly), including Aleister Crowley, Huxley's friend Gerald Heard, Ram Dass, and the fascinating David Mancuso. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Queering Psychedelics
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
An informative chat with clinical psychologist and psychedelic researcher Dr. Alexander Belser about qualitative research, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, the diversity of psychedelic trips, queer spiritualities, and the idea of “coming out of the psychedelic closet.” -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Sacred Matter
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with philosopher of religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein about wonder, horror, animism, the multiverse, Heidegger, Einstein, Hawaiian telescopes, and her book Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Patterns of Transformation
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with experience designer Ida Benedetto about transformative games, trespassing, rules for sex parties, active introversion, magic circles, funerals, and queer spirituality. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Decriminalize Nature
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Entheogenic and community activists Larry Norris and Kufikiri talk about the growing campaign to decriminalize entheogenic plant medicines within the city of Oakland. Topics include community access, education, reframing “psychedelics,” blind spots, changing the narrative, and resisting “the metronome of programming." https://www.decriminalizenature.org/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Feral Poetics
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Poet Janaka Stucky reads his work and talks about guerrilla poetry, burlesque horror, mystical language, shame, prophecy, and the strange DMT experiences that inspired his latest book, Ascend Ascend (Third Mind Books). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Meditation Apps
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Science and technology researcher Rebecca Jablonsky talks about consciousness hacking, tech ethnography, information ecosystems, media fasts, and the ups and downs of outsourcing awareness. -
Art and Design
Whispers of the Demon
Richard Grayson's "Possessions_Inc."Read moreRichard Grayson's "Possessions_Inc."
Here you will find my essay on the artist-curator Richard Grayson's amazing and deeply worthwhile online video essay "Possessions_Inc.", commissioned by Matt's Gallery. Using the variably concocted esoteric mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau as a central thread, Grayson mixes his own critical and fictional texts with audio samples of TV, film, podcasts, and obscure archives to create a tentacled meditation on art objects, truth-fictions, forgeries, specters, techno-animism, perverse capitalism, and the sad loss of the Real. Appropriately, all of this audio is... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Ouija Board Poetics
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Poet and literary scholar Stephen Yenser talks about James Merrill and his poetic epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), based on decades of Ouija board communications. Topics include: devotion, Maya Deren, duplicity, friendship, the alchemy of language, and Yenser’s recent annotation of the first part of Merrill’s masterpiece, The Book of Ephraim (PenguinRandomHouse). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Yoga Tales
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Yogi, psychonaut, and dear old pal Spiros Antonopoulos returns to talk about the Ashtanga lineage, Crowley’s yoga chops, the gifts of rigorous practice, NYC punk yoga, psychedelic Patanjali, and the ups and downs of opening his new Los Angeles Yoga Club amid the Instagram storms of LA body culture. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Higher Intelligence
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
In this second wide-ranging talk with Anthony Blake, author of A Gymnasium of Higher Intelligence, we discuss J.G Bennett’s ideas of higher intelligence, the active vs. the receptive will, unconditioned nature, living language, and the trouble with the metaphor of “tool." -
Psychedelics, Scholarship33 min
The Psychedelic Book of the Dead (Paper)
Timothy Leary and the BardoRead moreTimothy Leary and the Bardo
ABSTRACT: In 1964, Timothy Leary and a few colleagues published The Psychedelic Experience, a manual for "tripping" explicitly based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. At the core of the Tibetan materials lies the concept of the bardo, the "in between" realm of the afterlife. While acknowledging the problematic nature of Leary’s radical appropriation, this essay argues that his application of these materials to the orchestration and regulation of psychedelic experience reflected a productive reframing of the phantasmagoria common... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Psychedelic Dharma
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Host Erik Davis does a solo show on Beat Zen, the Fifth precept, tantric heresy, headless dharma collectives, capitalist subjectivity, and the Psychedelic Sangha meetups popping up in a few cities around North America. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Tarot Artistry
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Author and renowned Tarot expert Mary Greer discusses the amazing Pamela Colman Smith (the illustrator of the famous Rider-Waite-Smith deck). We touch on the Golden Dawn, the art of illustration, Jung’s active imagination, Smith’s musical visions, and the new, marvelous, and heavily-illustrated book, Pamela Colman Smith: the Untold Story (U.S. Games System). For more on my thoughts on Smith and the Tarot deck she revolutionized, please see my article "The Comic Book of Thoth." -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Reality Physics
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Historian and astrophysicist Adam Becker—author of the elegant and clarifying book What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics—talks about Schrödinger’s Cat, quantum philosophy, his beef with the Copenhagen interpretation, his fascination with Bell’s Theorem, and the difference between weirdness and nonsense. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Beatnik Boyhood
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Writer and avant-garde publisher Tosh Berman discusses growing up in postwar California, hipster sexism, the hippie horrors of Topanga Canyon, his impressions of family friends like Cameron and Brian Jones, and his charming new memoir Tosh, about growing up with his father, the remarkable underground California artist Wallace Berman. -
Books
High Weirdness
Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the SeventiesRead moreDrugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
"A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? "In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America’s leading scholar of... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Daimonic Conversations
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Writer and Ultraculture wizard Jason Louv talks about occult history, reality tunnels, his John Dee and the Empire of Angels book, Aleister Crowley’s secret Christianity, and the apocalyptic RPG the West can’t seem to escape. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Visionary Permaculture
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Culture-crafter and plant poet Delvin Solkinson discusses permaculture principles, OS Gaia, cartomancy, visionary art, design activation, and the Galactic Trading Card Oracle. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Queer LA
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Professor and queer historian Heather Lukes talks about Silver Lake riots, gay bikers, house ball scenes, the nostalgia for repression, and the joys and challenges of working on the online archive "The Grit and Glamour of Queer LA Subculture." -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Find the Others
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Author and media scholar Douglas Rushkoff talks about collaborative technologies, silicon transhumanism, analog aura, the problem of the soul, and his new and timely manifesto Team Human. Join the team! -
Expanding Mind Podcast
"Meditation"
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
In the first of my regular solo shows, I explore my personal history of “meditation"—including teenage stoner trances, voices in the head, and Zen anti-authoritarianism—with particular attention paid to the role of concentration practices in producing blissful and occasionally visionary states. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
American Cosmic, Part Two
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Religious scholar Diana Pasulka talks about anomalous cognition, 2001 monoliths, disclosure, future truths, absurd Christianity, and her book American Cosmic (Oxford). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
American Cosmic, Part One
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
This is the first part of my conversation with religious scholar Diana Pasulka. We talk about UFOs, scientific believers, book encounters, elite cabals, studying weirdness, and her new book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Speaking With Plants
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Author and plant behavior researcher Monica Gagliano talks about courage, scientific blindness, plant spirits, cannonball trees, cosmic glitches, and her fascinating new book Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries & Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic). -
Media
True Detective
Scary Thoughts podcastRead moreScary Thoughts podcast
Tis the season of tons of podcast interviews. This one, with Chad Lott and Marc Kate of the awesome horror-philosophy podcast Scary Thoughts, departs from the usual High Weirdness concerns of late. In it, we dive into the first season of True Detective, from 2014, still one of my favorite TV series of the millennium. Chad and Marc are both great conversationalists, and in our discussion, we covered philosophical pessimism, cosmic horror, police procedurals, serial killers, gnostic notions, and the... -
Media
Deconstructing Yourself RAW
A conversation with Michael TaftRead moreA conversation with Michael Taft
In this podcast with the very sympatico Michael Taft, author of The Mindful Geek, we talk Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, PKD, ontological anarchism, psychedelics, cultures of awakening now and then, Zen practice, and more. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Gorey Details
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Culture critic Mark Dery talks about Surrealism, the gay voice, penny dreadfuls, and the occult and Taoist influences examined in his fascinating new biography of Edward Gorey, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (Little Brown). -
Media1 min
Shooting the Shit with Styxxoplix the Sorcerer
Comic Books, 70s childhoods, Stranger Things, chaos magickRead moreComic Books, 70s childhoods, Stranger Things, chaos magick
Crawling out of the sewers of Fort Wayne, Indiana, slinking onto the airwaves of radio station WELT (ow!), the Styxxoplix Show ranges through the liminal zones of pop arcana. Last week, the Sorcerer brought me into the mix for a wild and woolly hour plus. As the Sorcerer puts it on his Soundcloud page, "There is no such thing as no such thing. We're all getting further away from each other but we're all getting closer to ourselves." True dat. -
Media
Adventures through the Mind
A podcast with James JessoRead moreA podcast with James Jesso
I did this podcast interview with the very cool James Jesso last August, when we hung out at the Ozora festival. I was very impressed with James, both his talks–clear, grounded, critical, compassionate–and his conversation. I quite enjoyed this interview, which continued to work ideas I presented in my talk "Reality Liquified." Here is what James had to say about the conversation on his website: "Balance is needed between order and chaos for life as we know it to survive. This... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Superheroic Dose
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Martial artist and psilocybin explorer Kilindi Iyi talks about African martial arts, high dose psilocybin work, African-American psychedelia, Dr. Strange, and the metaphysics of darkness. -
Media
Future Fossilizing
Erik Davis on How to Navigate High WeirdnessRead moreErik Davis on How to Navigate High Weirdness
Michael Garfield is one of my very favorite millennial thinkers. His thoughts are a rich and fun blend of science (fiction) and mystery, skepticism and amazement. In this episode of his podcast Future Fossils, we go deep into weird figments, cybernetic consciousness, and "re-animism.". Here is how Michael described the show: "This week’s guest is Erik Davis – one of my great inspirations, someone who has influenced me and this podcast in immeasurable ways since I first encountered his amazing... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Memetic Tribes
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Canadian cultural observer Peter Limberg talks about Stoicism, philosophical sandboxes, the Intellectual Explorers Club, making uncertainty sexy, and navigating the conflicts between today's memetic tribes. A particularly good one! peterlimberg.com -
Media
Reality Liquified
Ozora Talk, August 2018Read moreOzora Talk, August 2018
In this talk from the Ozora festival, I discuss the technologically-driven breakdown of consensus reality, and outline how a marriage of neo-shamanic animism and dharmic skepticism might help us navigate the turbulence. Features Keiichi Matsuda's remarkable Hyper-Reality video. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Integrating Psychedelics
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Nurse practitioner and psychedelic therapist Julie Megler talks about integration circles, hierarchy vs. community, ketamine, somatic work, and the philosophy behind her new East Bay clinic Sage Integrative Health. -
Music
Now Let Us Praise Dopesmoker
A Hilobrow reviewRead moreA Hilobrow review
I’m, like, totally baked right now, at least in spirit, which is where you want your head to be when said head gets slapped upside with Dopesmoker, a master arcanum of frankincense-fried stoner rock released by the San Jose metal trio Sleep in 2003. The album is mostly taken up with a single eponymous song, an hour-long, arguably eternal track that rears up like the monolith in 2001: cosmic, hieratic, a monster of obsidian minimalism. With “Dopesmoker,” Sleep sealed the... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Rainbow Bodies
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Poet, journalist, and professor Nicholas Powers talks about festival politics, race and psychedelia, dreads, tokenism, and his book The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street (UpSet Press). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Arts of Dying
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Bay Area conceptual artist Lindsay Tunkl talks about confronting death, therapy as art, pre-apocalypse counseling, humor, and her book When You Die You Will Not Be Scared to Die (Parallax Press). -
Media
Tricksters, Dharma, and Tech
The Side View podcastRead moreThe Side View podcast
Philosopher and writer Adam Robbert has a great thing cooking at The Side View, a journal/blog/podcast devoted to large eco thoughts and intimate contemplations. Recently I sat down at CIIS with Adam and a brilliant new friend named Aaron Weiss and recorded this hour and a half chat about sacraments, tricksters, dharma, and technological control. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Strange Angels
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Occultist and Aleister Crowley biographer Richard Kaczynski talks about Jack Parsons, the "method of science,” the Agape Lodge, the women of Thelema, and the pluses and minuses of the Strange Angel TV series. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Dialogue Mind
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
The Gurdjieffean writer and DuVersity director Anthony Blake talks about dialogue, synergy, mind between brains, the trouble with teachers, and the gymnasium of beliefs in higher intelligence. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Time Loops, Part 2
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
In part two of our conversation, author and blogger Eric Wargo talks about dreams, self-fulfilling prophecies, unconscious trauma, the banality of true spirituality, and his book Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Time Loops
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
In part one of our conversation, author, blogger, and dreamer Eric Wargo talks about uncertainty, determinism, Zen, the evidence for “feeling the future," and his brilliant and head-spinning book Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. -
Psychedelics
Capitalism on Psychedelics
The Mainstreaming of an UndergroundRead moreThe Mainstreaming of an Underground
Everyone gets worked up about a showdown, especially when the conflict involves colorful characters and positions you really care about. Like many attendees to the conference Cultural and Political Perspectives on Psychedelic Science, I was familiar with the Statement on Open Science and Open Praxis with Psilocybin, MDMA, and Similar Substances, which had been posted earlier this year on Chacruna and elsewhere. The effort was spearheaded by Bob Jesse, a long-time member of the West Coast psychedelic intelligentsia, and a figure... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Terraforming Earth
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with eco-literary scholar Derek Woods about science fiction, terrariums, geo-engineering, eco-modernism, and the wild science of designing technologies that exceed our control. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Black Rock City 2018
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Host Erik Davis reflects on Burning Man in light of his first return to the event in nearly a decade. Topics include: the Burning Opera, Instagram, poetic terrorism, remembering dead people, chaos, and the unfolding paradigm of the city. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cali Ma
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with devotees Usha Harding and Swami Bhajanananda about the unique Kali temple they help run in Laguna Beach, and about the recovery of magic, the perfume of practice, Western pujaris, religious diversity, and the challenge of commercial yoga. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Citizen Science Trips
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with activist and writer David Nickles about the DMT Nexus, psychedelic militancy, extraction tek, the Statement on Open Science for Psychedelic Medicines, MAPS, and the trouble with for-profit psilocybin companies. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Voyages into Ethnobotany
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with South African ethnobotanist Dale Millard about sangoma healers, animist science, beta carbolines, ayahuasca, and the broad-spectrum healing properties of harmine. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Playa Tricksters
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with writer, editor, and performer Mitch Mignano—aka Raven—about existential humor, the Cacophony Society and the origins of Burning Man, pranking your fears, nihilism, and the sacred clowns of the Sun Dance ceremony. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Practice of Skepticism
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with philosopher and religious studies professor Dustin Atlas about ancient skepticism, Madhyamaka Buddhism, the taste of honey, Montaigne, Robert Anton Wilson, and the path of doubt. -
Media
Psychedelics and Spiritual Practice
Medicine Path Yoga chatRead moreMedicine Path Yoga chat
I talk to the yogi Brian James of the Medicine Path Yoga podcast. We discuss practice, amrita, transformations in psychedelic culture, marketing spirituality, and secular mysticism. Brian also produced a wonderful film called The Shamanic Roots of Yoga. If he was in my hood, I'd take yoga from him! -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Archons Are Back
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with gnostic scholar Matthew Dillon about religious mourning, the Nag Hammadi library, sex magick Jesus, the gnostic Eden, David Icke’s lizards, and the power of the archons as an allegory of contemporary technological and political power. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Silicon Valley Fever
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with journalist Adam Fisher about virtual reality, fumbling the future, the cyberculture underground, human augmentation, libertarianism, and his rich oral history Valley Of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley, as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom (Twelve). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Mind Change
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with bestselling author Michael Pollan about psychedelic awe, trip reports, the mental health crisis, underground therapists and the reception of his book How to Change your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Penguin). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Drone Metal Mysticism
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with music scholar and ethnographer Owen Coggins about amplifier worship, sonic pilgrimage, “as if” listening, metal humor, and his new book Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
None of This is Real
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A wide-ranging conversation with writer and teacher Miranda Mellis about uncanny climates, thinking with fables, empathic fictions, “don’t know” politics, Buddhist meditation, and the entanglement with the nonhuman. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Fungal Alliance
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A discussion with anthropologist Joanna Steinhardt about her study of DIY mycology, psilocybe politics, PF Tek, and psychedelic naturalism. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Trump and Magick
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with esoteric writer Gary Lachman about postmodernism, Positive Thinking, chaos magic, Putin's esoteric tricksters, and Gary's hot new book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (Tarcher). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Guru’s Child
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with artist and man-about-town Naropa Sabine about Shakti, self-formation, rural ashrams, and growing up with a Tantric guru for a dad. -
Media
The Next Billion Seconds
The Next Billion Seconds podcastRead moreThe Next Billion Seconds podcast
I appeared on my old friend Mark Pesce's popular Australian podcast on technology and the future. Here is what Mark had to say about "our wide-ranging conversation about faith, reason, utopia, and why we seem to make the same mistakes over and over again": The ‘Next Big Thing’ always promises to be the cure for all our ails – but inevitably the high promises tarnish and all our best efforts fall back to earth. For as long as we’ve had... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Being Anarchist
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside about Henry Miller, the flight from society, sexual braggadocio, folk ballads, Taoism, and his arresting book On Henry Miller: or How to Be an Anarchist (Princeton). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Tao Lin Trips
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with alt-lit novelist, poet, and artist Tao Lin, about Terence McKenna, feeling happy (or not), degenerate humans, writing trip reports, and his refreshing new non-fiction book Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change (Vintage). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Desert Oracle
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with Ken Layne, the maestro of the Desert Oracle podcast and field guide, about Joshua trees, desert Christianity, Edward Abbey, military secrecy, and the mysterious (and smelly) Yucca Man of local legend. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Psychedelic Bridges
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with Brazilian anthropologist, conference programmer, and Chacruna.net editor Bia Labate. We cover peyote politics, the bureaucratization of psychedelics, the legalization of ayahuasca circles in the United States, and working with indigenous leaders on the “Sacred Plants in America” conference she recently convened. -
Media
Talking PKD
The Imaginary Worlds podcastRead moreThe Imaginary Worlds podcast
I enjoyed this chat with Imaginary Worlds podcast host Eric Molinsky. From the podcast home page: "Philip K. Dick wrote about multiple realities and fantastic worlds beyond the scope of our mundane everyday lives. But he also believed that he experienced one of those alternate realities in the winter of 1974. The problem is, he couldn't figure out which one it was. PKD experts professor Richard Doyle, author Erik Davis, and playwright Victoria Stewart explain how one of the most... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Reverie of the Ordinary
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A sprawling conversation with my interlocutor and old pal Ed Phillips (aka @Faustroll on Twitter) about reverie, misery, irony, and the ethics of being real. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Chaos Magic Flashbacks
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A juicy chat with occultist Joe Max about punk-rock sorcery, Cthulhu invocations, intensity and fear, and the power of chaos magic in rave-era San Francisco. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
They Shimmer Within
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with artist and independent scholar Bruce Rimell about psychedelic entities, evolutionary module of cognition, Visionary Humanism, and his meaty new book They Shimmer Within: Cognitive-Evolutionary Perspectives on Visionary Beings. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
How to Die
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with classics professor James Romm about mortality, Stoicism, the ambivalent freedom offered by suicide, and his new book of Seneca translations, How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life (Princeton). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Out There
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with Burt Shonberg biographer Spencer Kansa about LA bohemia, psychedelic art, Marjorie Cameron, gumshoe biography, and his new book Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Schonberg. http://burtshonberg.com/ -
Media
Exploring the Weird
The Weird Studies PodcastRead moreThe Weird Studies Podcast
Recently I was interviewed by Phil Ford and J.F. Martel for an episode of their terrific new podcast Weird Studies. I couldn't have been happier to have joined these two fellows, whose work I greatly respect, so early in their exploration of the Weird as a concept, an aesthetic, a metaphysics, and (possibly) a field of study. We discuss everything from Burning Man to Mark Fisher to Bergson and PKD. We didn't even get to Machen or Clark Ashton Smith,... -
Offline Archive
Talking Jack Parsons
The Occulture PodcastRead moreThe Occulture Podcast
I totally loved this conversation for the Occulture podcast about Jack Parsons, contemporary esotericism, and twenty years of Techgnosis. I never thought four folks on a podcast would work, but host Ryan Peverly did a great job of herding the cool cats, who also included Jeff Wolfe from Secret Transmissions and my old pal Miguel Connor, from Aeon Byte/Gnostic Radio. Not only did we cover a lot of ground, but the conversation moved and shifted into some fertile "where are... -
Media
Hacking the Self
Talking Peterson, Harris, and ReligionRead moreTalking Peterson, Harris, and Religion
I had a very pleasant and intellectually engaging time talking to podcaster Adrian Baker for his wonderful Hacking the Self podcast. Baker represents the best tendencies in consciousness hacking as a field that crosses the exploration of mind and spirit with a strong concern for rationality, clarity, and the clear statement of positions. In talking about fascinating and often polarizing figures like Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, both of whom I admire a great deal while frequently disagreeing with, Baker... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Goodbye Reality
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with futurist, inventor, educator and old pal Mark Pesce about Faustian bargains, Facebook mind control, surveillance capitalism, and his bracing recent article “The Last Days of Reality.” -
Esoterica, Scholarship, Technoculture
Babalon Launching
Jack Parsons, Rocketry, and the "Method of Science"Read moreJack Parsons, Rocketry, and the "Method of Science"
Here you can download a scholarly essay I wrote at Rice University about the relationship between magick and science in the rocketry and sorcery of Jack Parsons (1914-1952): California iconoclast, co-founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and legendary practitioner of Thelema. Babalon Launching: Jack Parsons, Rocketry, and the "Method of Science" (PDF) The piece appeared in Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization, edited by Edward Bever and Randall Styers, and published by Pennsylvania State University Press in... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Gnostic New Age
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with historian of religion April DeConick about altered states, religious conspiracy theory, emerging cognitive structures, and her new book The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Getting Higher
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A chat with occult writer and drug geek Julian Vayne about Baphomet, the (sur)reality of spirits, evolution, ritualizing entheogens, and his new book Getting Higher: The Manual of Psychedelic Ceremony. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Consciousness Explorer
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A lively discussion with "meditation MacGyver" Jeff Warren about polyspirituality, Buddhist hedonism, the X-factor of awareness, and how he contributed to Dan Harris's new book Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics (Spiegel & Grau). http://jeffwarren.org/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Booting Up Life
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A fascinating conversation with computer scientist and freak-geek extraordinaire Dr. Bruce Damer about innovation pools, realm-bending, Terence McKenna, and a powerful new scientific vision about the origins of life. http://www.damer.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Zen of OBEs
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Psychologist and consciousness researcher Susan Blackmore talks about astral cords, brain regions, Zen koans, and her recent book Seeing Myself: The New Science of Out-of-Body Experiences (Robinson). https://www.susanblackmore.uk/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Theorizing Conspiracy Theory
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A wide-ranging conversation about conspiracy theory with historian of religion Dustin Atlas. We talk about certainty, skepticism, antisemitism, gnosis, and the politics of knowledge. Read Dustin’s blog thoughts on this and other matters at https://blogblawgblog.wordpress.com/. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Insect Surfing
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Guitarist and artist David Arnson talks about his long-running psychedelic surf band Insect Surfers, along with comments on rare dolphins, reverb units, pictures in your mind, and his eye-boggling new coloring book Insect Surfers & Alien Allies. Visit David's world here. -
Esoterica
Babalon Rising
Jack Parsons' Witchcraft ProphecyRead moreJack Parsons' Witchcraft Prophecy
Follow the link below to download a copy of my essay "Babalon Rising: Jack Parsons' Witchcraft Prophecy." The essay, based on a talk originally delivered at Pantheacon in 2015, appeared in the 2017 collection A Rose Veiled in Black: Arcana and Art of Our Lady Babalon (Three Hands Press), a collection of Babalonia edited by Robert Fitzgerald and Daniel A. Schulke. The essay explores the notorious California rocket scientist's vision of the goddess Babalon, and explores some of the influences--from... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
For the Wild
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Religious scholar Sarah M. Pike talks about wilderness conversion, Hare Krishna hardcore, feral wonder, and her illuminating new book For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism (University of California). https://www.csuchico.edu/corh/people/faculty/sarah-pike.shtml -
Music
Pauline Anna Strom: Profile
Pauline Anna StromRead morePauline Anna Strom
The broad genre of New Age music draws from many times and places: Berlin, London, even Pune, India. But California, and especially the San Francisco Bay Area, plays an outsized role in the tale, particularly during the music’s golden age in the seventies and eighties. In those years, the Bay represented the confluence of a number of powerful cultural currents: a restless quest for new spiritualities, a DIY enthusiasm for technological experiment, and a predilection for making—and packaging—art that satisfied... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Trans-Millennia Consort
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Legendary electronic musician Pauline Anna Strom talks about space music, intuition and imagination, being blind, and her new compilation Trans-Millennia Music (Rvng Intl.) -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Morbid Anatomist
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Writer, photographer, and curator Joanna Ebenstein talks about Goth obsessions, memento mori, Santa Muerta, and her extraordinary new illustrated collection Death: A Graveside Companion (Thames & Hudson). https://www.morbidanatomy.org/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Marc Kate’s Horror Music
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Electronic musician and podcaster Marc Kate talks about nihilism, horror movies, New Age music, and transmuting Nazi black metal into the ambient soundscapes of his latest album, Deface. http://www.marckate.com -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Coyote Poetics
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Poet and wilderness writer Andrew Schelling talks about his new biography Tracks Along the Left Coast (Counterpoint), which tells the story of Jaime De Angulo (1887-1950): Big Sur bohemian, California Indian anthropologist, and great Coyote poet. -
Media
Was Jerry a Bodhisattva?
I join the Buddhist GeeksRead moreI join the Buddhist Geeks
The Buddhist Geeks podcast has resurfaced with a bang. In recent months, able host Vincent Horn has been focusing on one of the more sprightly and controversial engagements in contemporary spiritual life: the deepening encounter of Buddhism and psychedelia. Can you meditate on ayahuasca? Are visions just more maya? And what about all those crazy Tibetan tangkas? Here I weigh in: Was Jerry Garcia a Bodhisattva? -
Music
Daydream Nation
My 1989 Sonic Youth FeatureRead moreMy 1989 Sonic Youth Feature
It’s 1971, and sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick’s tooth hurts like a bitch. He calls the pharmacy, and when he answers the door to receive his medicine, he notices the woman’s golden necklace, the familiar Christian fish sign used by the persecuted members of the early churches to secretly identify themselves to one another. He is transfixed by the necklace, and his reality implodes. He finds himself in Roman times, communicating clandestinely with the woman, in deadly fear. The impression... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Mindlessness
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Academic psychologist Thomas Joiner talks about the mindfulness craze, stoicism, the trouble with “trauma,” and his trenchant new book Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism (Oxford). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Imaginal Landscapes
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Scholar, writer, and mythographer William Rowlandson talks about Jorge Luis Borges, magical trees, Yankee mysticism, and the power of the weird and murky. https://williamrowlandson.wordpress.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Voyager Golden Record
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Futurist, science journalist, and Boing Boing co-editor David Pescovitz discusses space exploration, world music, Carl Sagan the stoner, and his participation in the recent release of the Voyager Golden Record, forty years after the original Voyager probes were launched. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Mentored by a Madman
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Neurologist and world-class Parkinson’s expert Professor A.J. Lees talks about William S. Burroughs, self-experimentation, ayahuasca, and his terrific medical memoir Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Into the Muck
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Israeli therapist, spiritual teacher, and psychedelic activist Galia Tanay talks about deep dharma practice, the problems with mindfulness, acceptance and commitment therapy, and how psychedelics shape the self. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Robot Multiplicity
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Computer scientist, artist, and UC Berkeley robotics professor Ken Goldberg talks about autonomous vehicles, tele-gardens, free speech on campus, and the Singularity myth. https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Radical Technologies
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Designer and technology critic Adam Greenfield talks about magic bullets, the melancholy of machines, Tesla’s Autopilot, and his must-read new book Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life(Verso). https://speedbird.wordpress.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Divination in Troubled Times
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Professional “psycho-diviner" (and former Expanding Mind co-host) Maja D’Aoust talks about solstice magic, liquid archetypes, artificial intelligence, and her hypnogogic new Tarot deck White Witch Tarot. http://www.witchofthedawn.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Studying the Dead
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Grateful Dead scholar and professor Ulf Olsson talks about improvisation, self-organization, pirate ships, and his new book Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation (University of California Press). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Marvelous Moments
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Performer, writer, and MC Mark Petrakis, aka Spoonman, gives some inspirational throw-downs about San Francisco Dada, avant-vaudeville, spontaneous spirituality, and the importance of disregarding precision. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Zombie Complex
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Artist, author, and educator John Cussans talks about zombie cinema, revolutionary transgression, the politics of race, and his new book Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Fifth Wall
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Novelist, poet and conceptual artist Rachel Nagelberg talks about trauma, technology, ayahuasca, and her intense and resonant debut novel The Fifth Wall. http://www.rachelnagelberg.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cosmic Triggerer
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Performer, director and playwright Daisy Campbell talks about Robert Anton Wilson, the dangers of synchronicity, her father Ken's 1976 production of Illuminatus!, and her resoundingly successful recent staging of Cosmic Trigger: the Play. -
Media
The Weirdness of Being
Breaking Convention 2017Read moreBreaking Convention 2017
To understand psychoanalysis, you have to understand the uncanny. But to understand psychedelics, you have to understand the weird. The weird is more than the uncanny’s low-brow country cousin. Nor is it simply a domain or style of cultural production. The weird is a mode and category of being. We may enjoy weird tales, but the world is telling us one all the time–and we can respond in kind. There are many reasons to heed Alan Watts’ advice to “follow... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Psychedelic Pedagogy
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Research scientist and UK sociologist Tehseen Noorani talks about hearing voices, pharmacological biases, studying psilocybin studies, and the importance of trickster teachers. His talk at Psychedelic Science is available here. -
Psychedelics, Scholarship
The Weird Naturalism of the Brothers McKenna
Esoteric Media and the Experiment at La ChorreraRead moreEsoteric Media and the Experiment at La Chorrera
I recently published a reworked portion of my dissertation in the International Journal for the Study of New Religions. It looks in depth at the wild conceptual matrix and practical protocols that Terence and Dennis brought to their notorious and legendary experience in the Columbian jungle. Here is the abstract (in academese, natch!): When Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis performed the so-called “Experiment at La Chorrera” in Columbia in 1971, they staged what became one of the most legendary... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Indian Talking Machine
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Musician, sound artist, and 78 collector Robert Millis talks about hunting for records in India, the spectral mysteries of 78 records, Sublime Frequencies, and the sacred universe of Indian classical music. https://robertmillis.net/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Enlightened Resilience
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Futurist, Ethereum programmer, and critical infrastructure guru Vinay Gupta talks about global poverty, practical enlightenment, galvanizing visions, and the wisdom of uncertainty. http://re.silience.com/ -
Media
Warrior Podcast Interview
The Future of VR and other Techno WeirdnessesRead moreThe Future of VR and other Techno Weirdnesses
Digital nomad Tony Balbin recently posted the thorough and entertaining interview he did for me for his cool Warrior podcast. In Tony's words, "In this interview, I pick his brain on some of the major themes of Techgnosis, which in many ways are even more relevant in today’s world than when originally published. We also discuss the startling impact emerging technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented reality (AR) will have on the individual and collective level." -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Paranthropology
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Anthropologist Jack Hunter talks about possession, parapsychology, permaculture, and the elusive ontology of spiritual beings. https://lamp.academia.edu/JackHunter -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Big Sur Encounters
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Musician and Gnome Life label head Fletcher Tucker talks about living through the Big Sur landslides, hunting for songs, and his haunting new eco-folk record Cold Spring. -
Media
Living with Others
The Ethics and Ecology of AnimismRead moreThe Ethics and Ecology of Animism
I won't be attending this year's Lightning in a Bottle, so I thought I would pull one out of the vaults and post a talk I gave at the Village at LiB in 2015. I talked about animism, ethics, and ecology, and I was pretty happy with it. Hosted by the fabulous Eve Ladyapples. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cocreating Spiritual Reality
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Transpersonal psychologist Jorge Ferrer talks about participatory spirituality, the problems with perennialism, the transpersonal evidence of psychedelics, and his new book Participation and the Mystery: Transpersonal Essays in Psychology, Education, and Religion. https://www.jorgenferrer.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cross Cultural Qawwali
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
North American qawwali musician Tahir Faridi Qawwal talks about sacred improvisation, the mystic bliss of qawwali music, breaking into tradition, and building bridges between East and West with his group Fanna-Fi-Allah. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Psychedelic Science
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Neuroscientist and former psychedelic researcher Matthew Baggott talks about anxious mysticism, the MAPS conference, the default mode network, and the blind spots within psychedelic research. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Occult Control Systems
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Hypermedia researcher and author Konrad Becker talks about algorithms from hell, the madness of rationality, media seances, and the martial art of freedom. http://world-information.net/en/ -
Media
Talking RAW
The Cosmic Trigger PodcastRead moreThe Cosmic Trigger Podcast
I talked to Alistair Fruish about Robert Anton Wilson, meme magic, and brain change techniques for the second edition of the Cosmic Trigger Podcast. The fnords have not left the field! -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Talismanic Bookseller
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Occult book dealer and underground musician Richard Bishop talks about modern grimoires, scorpion gods, Orientalist imagery, and hunting down physical books in the age of the Internet. https://www.richardbishopbookseller.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Diamond Truths
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Diamond Heart spiritual leader and integral theorist A. Hameed Ali talks about truth in the post-truth era, the method of inquiry, science fiction, and his new book The Alchemy of Freedom, written under his pen name A. H. Almaas. Diamond Heart website -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Desert Homesteading
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Joshua Tree homesteader and former Arthur editor Jay Babcock talks about turkey vultures, Vipassana, wildlife stewardship, and the communities of purpose he has discovered in the desert. https://defendjt.wordpress.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Analog Listening
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Canadian electronic musician Sarah Davachi talks about analog synthesizers, reverberating cathedrals, attention spans, and her amazing new ambient drone album All My Circles Run. https://www.sarahdavachi.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Tracking the Wild
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Ecologist and wildlife tracker Meghan Walla-Murphy talks about following bears, reading the landscape, and cultivating relationships across species (and political) lines. http://www.meghanwallamurphy.com -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cognitive Liberties
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Criminologist and law lecturer Charlotte Walsh talks about freedom of thought, neurotechnologies, religious exceptions, and how the role human rights might play in the decriminalization of psychedelics. -
Art and Design
Hippie Modernism
The Struggle for UtopiaRead moreThe Struggle for Utopia
My Frieze review of the awesome Hippie Modernism show at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives (2017) Along with the rains that have recently knocked California out of drought, the state is currently absorbing a flood of nostalgia and celebration on the occasion the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, San Francisco’s storied peak of hippiedom. Mudslides of sappy sentiment loom. Luckily, the Berkeley Museum of Art & Pacific Film Archive has seen fit to mount a very... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Alt-Right Meme Magic
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Media researcher and filmmaker Florian Cramer talks about 4chan, Pepe the Frog, memes, and the nihilism of the digital alt-right. More on Florian's dense mapping of the alt-right. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Acid Maker
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Former LSD chemist Tim Scully talks about acid idealism, magical thinking, biofeedback, and the Orange Sunshine history told in the new documentary The Sunshine Makers. Here's a trailer of the film, which should also be seen alongside the recent doc Orange Sunshine. P.S. Forgive the mediocre sound quality, there were technical issues with my travel mic. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Spirit Photography
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Photographer, artist, and ethnographer Shannon Taggart talks about Spiritualist mediums, ambiguity, orbs, and the metaphysics of photography. www.shannontaggart.com Here are a few more of Shannon's images: [caption id="attachment_3465" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Reverend Jean heals Jennifer, Lily Dale, NY[/caption] -
Media
My Gnostic Interview
Miguel Conner's Other Voices of GnosticismRead moreMiguel Conner's Other Voices of Gnosticism
The indefatigable Miguel Conner, host of the long-running Aeon Byte Radio show (and gnostic SciFi author), has released another book of interviews from his podcast. Other Voices of Gnosticism (Bardic Press) features interviews with many experts on Gnosticism inside and outside of academe, including super-scholars like David Brakke and Nicola Denzey-Lewis, as well as a whole bunch of thinkers I have also interviewed on Expanding Mind, including Stephan Hoeller, Richard Smoley, Robert Price, Eric Wilson, and Gary Lachman. I've also... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Inside Madness
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Author, historian, and curator Mike Jay talks about Bedlam, lunacy, Big Pharma, and the history of mental illness covered in his new book This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond. -
Art and Design
Visionary Art
The Vanguard of TraditionRead moreThe Vanguard of Tradition
Stretching out like one of the Buddha’s great bejeweled parasols, the term Visionary Art encompasses a wide variety of styles, genres, periods, and degrees of abstraction. Definitions abound, but here is my hard crystal: visionary art is art that resonates with visionary experiences, those undeniably powerful eruptions of numinous and multidimensional perception that suggest other orders of reality. Certain individuals have a predilection for visionary experiences, but these luminous glimpses bless us all at some point in our lives, sometimes... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Politics of Divination
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Philosopher and writer Joshua Ramey talks about oracles, markets, spontaneous order, and his new book The Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Global Osho
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Religious studies scholar Hugh Urban talks about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, freak tantra, intellectual property and religion, and his new book Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Ketamine & Transformation
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
The psychotherapist and MAPS researcher Dr. Phil Wolfson talks about psychedelic transformation, secular Buddhism, the rubber band effect, and his new edited collection The Ketamine Papers (MAPS). http://philwolfsonmd.com -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Nature Boy
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
The art critic and music curator Brian Chidester talks about his new compilation album of songs by Eden Ahbez, a California composer and hippie prophet whose wrote the tune "Nature Boy" and also walked the talk. Chidester's blog on Eden is at https://bcxists.wordpress.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Spiritual Drawing
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
The artist John F. Simon, Jr. talks about multimedia, improvisation, contemplative practice, and his wonderful new book Drawing Your Own Path: 33 Practices at the Crossroads of Art and Meditation. -
Music, Religions and Spirits
Out Come the Freaks
Listening to the Jesus Music of the SeventiesRead moreListening to the Jesus Music of the Seventies
I don’t believe there is a common thread running through the myriad of musics that have composed my listening life. But if there were, it would have to be a love of and fascination with the sacred, a capacious aesthetic category that, for me, includes both explicitly religious music and those exotic, popular, or avant-garde forms that variously juxtapose, fuse, and transmute the ever shifting boundary between the transcendent and the profane. Beneath this immense canopy, Messiaen butts heads with... -
Art and Design
The Thing is Alive
Artist Mark Leckey's WunderkammerRead moreArtist Mark Leckey's Wunderkammer
One of the recurring bits on the old kid’s program Sesame Street featured four objects, three of which formed a more or less obvious set. “One of these things is not like the others,” went the ditty. “One of these things doesn’t belong.” But what do we do with a collection where nothing--or everything--“belongs”? Exploring Mark Leckey’s curated assemblage, we confront a hugely heterogeneous collection, marvels at once archaic and utterly now: the clay idol of an automobile prototype, a... -
Media
Understanding Transcendental Meditation
And Understanding David LynchRead moreAnd Understanding David Lynch
Recently the cool NPR religious show Interfaith Voices brought me on-air again, this time to talk about Transcendental Meditation. My discussion follows an interview with David Lynch about his long-time practice and support of TM. My talk is here, the whole episode here. I like to think it makes a good one-two punch! -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Alchemical Fantasy
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
The award-winning novelist John Crowley talks about fantastic literature, alchemy, and his new translation of the 17th century hermetic classic, The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosenkreutz (Small Beer Press). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Yoga and Entheogens
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Ganga White, founder of the White Lotus Foundation and one of the architects of American yoga, talks about gurus, psychedelics, flow, and the value of a pathless path. https://www.whitelotus.org -
Media
Technocultures of Consciousness
A Consciousness Hacking talkRead moreA Consciousness Hacking talk
I am a big fan of the contemporary Consciousness Hacking movement for the ideas and technologies it provokes. I was very happy when I was invited to give a talk before the San Francisco CH meet-up on November 2, 2016. As usual, I spoke largely extemporaneously, which I do not just because I am lazy about preparing but because I find that it frees up the most interesting thoughts, especially with an attentive and tuned-in audience, which this certainly was!... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Peacock Angel
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Occultist researcher and OTO member "Azi Rasa" talks about the contemporary plight of the Yazidi, an Iraqi religious minority whose worship of the Peacock Angel has inspired fascination from modern occultists and genocidal hatred from ISIL. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Psychedelic Activism Today
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Twentysomething psychedelic activist Katie Tomlinson talks about psy-trance, religious experience, integration circles, and the potential role of psychedelics in overcoming oppression. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
God, History, Myth
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Author and esoteric theologian Richard Smoley talks about Canaanite deities, the apolitical Jesus, spiritual wine, and his new book How God Became God: What Scholars are Really Saying about God and the Bible (Tarcher/Penguin). http://www.innerchristianity.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Flyboy
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Writer, hip-hop critic, and musician Greg Tate talks about free jazz, Black modernism, spiritualized futurism, and his new collection Flyboy 2: the Greg Tate Reader. Tate is one of my favorite culture critics of all time -- very worthwhile! -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Esoteric Bibliophile
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Legendary occult book-dealer Todd Pratum talks about rejected knowledge, growing up Californian, book synchronicities, and the loss of knowledge in the age of the Internet. https://www.toddpratum.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Transcendent Childhood
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Author and journalist Claire Hoffman talks movingly about Transcendental Meditation, yogic flying, belief, and her new memoir Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
UFOs are Real
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Speculative fiction writer and book collector Jack Womack talks about flying saucers, modern myth, UFO blueprints, and his new book Flyings Saucers are Real!, which samples from his extensive UFO Library. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Moby Cannabis
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Writer, scientist, and Shulginist young Turk Lex Pelger talks about medical marijuana, Moby Dick, queer weed warriors, and the healing power of sharing our stories about drugs. http://www.lexpelger.com -
Expanding Mind Podcast
American Heads
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Author, journalist and WFMU DJ Jesse Jarnow talks about Dead shows, distribution rings, LSD "religion", and his comprehensive new book Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. http://www.jessejarnow.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Mana of Mass Publicity
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
University of Chicago anthropologist William Mazzarella talks about psychological resonance, the concept of mana, and how magic helps illuminate advertising and propaganda. https://chicago.academia.edu/WilliamMazzarella -
Expanding Mind Podcast
What Worlds Will Come
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Technology writer and futurist Kevin Kelly talks about digital socialism, surveillance fears, and the cosmic force fueling technology. Kevin's new book is The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape our Future. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Canines and Cyborgs
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
An inspiring discussion with writer, feminist, and historian of science Donna Haraway about cyborg companions, animal loves, and why the Chthulucene is a better name for our era than the Anthropocence. Donna's new book is Manifestly Haraway, which collects “The Cyborg Manifesto” with the “The Companion Species Manifesto,” along with an interview with the aptly named Cary Wolfe. -
Media
42 Minutes Interview
Synchronistic TechRead moreSynchronistic Tech
Douglas Bolles is one of the Sync Book crew, who investigate and play with media and synchronicity in playful and invigorating ways. Here Doug interviews me for their podcast 42 Minutes. [audio mp3="http://techgnosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/42minutes_231.mp3"][/audio] -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Poetry of Matter
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Alchemist, writer, and artist Brian Cotnoir talks about the Emerald Tablet, stereograms, the transformation of matter, and the alchemy of film. For more on Brian's work, see Khepri Press. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Getting High
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
British author Kester Brewin talks about rockets, Ken Kesey, charismatic Christianity, and his new book Getting High: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the Dream of Flight (Vaux). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
S-F Humans
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Science fiction author and English professor David Gill talks about Star Wars, entropy, androids, and his new book of short stories In Time's Empire They Were All Slaves (Pravic SF Books). Rudy Rucker called the collection a "Nice Zap!" -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cosmic Domes
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with media artist and researcher David McConville about planetaria, the art of scientific models, and the transdisiplinary possibilities of immersive media. To hear a great illustrated talk from David, check out "Valorizing the Sphere". -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Dharma and Drugs
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with Buddhist scholar Douglas Osto about perennialism, experiential narratives, the limits of reason, and his new book Altered States: Buddhism and Psychedelic Spirituality. -
Media
TANK Interview
Unreal realities and the trouble with fandomRead moreUnreal realities and the trouble with fandom
I wasn't familiar with TANK magazine until editor Thomas Roueché got a hold of me in order to do this interview. Thomas sent me a few recent issues, and I thought the was pretty ace for a edgy fashion thing that clearly keeps it together: smart, sparkly, knowledgeable about the past (Sergei Parajanov and Raymond Roussel in the same ish), full of unexpected articles and tales, mixed and matched with surprising art, tasty photos, and not-overly-slick fashion shots. The current... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Splinternet
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with author and communications consultant Scott Malcomson about online anonymity, countercultural computing, the military-industrial origins of the Internet, and his new book Splinternet: How Geopolitics and Commerce are Fragmenting the World Wide Web (O/R Books). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Space Music
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with Hearts of Space radio producer Stephen Hill about the rise of contemplative and ambient music, the trouble with the “New Age” tag, the psychology of sonic space, and the business of niche music distribution. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Perception Hacking
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A chat with journalist Kara Platoni about growing virtual limbs, questioning the cyborgs, and using science and technology to hack our experience of the world. Kara's new book is We Have the Technology: How Biohackers, Foodies, Physicians, and Scientists are Transforming Human Perception. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Dungeons & Dragons & Religion
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
An inspiring chat with Jeremy Crawford, one of the lead designers of the new 5th edition of the classic role playing game. We discuss identity, the multicultural multiverse, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the sacred absurdity of terrible dice rolls. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Big Dreams
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with seasoned dream researcher Dr. Kelly Bulkeley about big data, his new book on the dreaming brain, and keeping the door open for the weird and wonderful. Kelly's new book is Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion (Oxford University Press). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Data Surveillance
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with author and journalist Andrew Hultkrans about Puritans, predictive profiling, and the problems with social media in the era of Big Data. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Future Design Science
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with conceptual artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats about Buckminster Fuller, biomimicry, and making pornography for God. Jonathon's new book is You Belong to the Universe. For more on his work, read his amazing Wikipedia page. -
Music
AH!
The amazing freak bhajans of Bhagavan DasRead moreThe amazing freak bhajans of Bhagavan Das
Bhagavan Das is now the OG dirty grampa of the yoga circuit, a powerful bhajan singer and meditation teacher known for his grizzled white-boy dreadlocks and fully carnal devotion to young women. But Das is best known for becoming one of the first boomer trailblazers of mystic India. Born in Laguna Beach to a family who named him Kermit, Das joined an organized sadhu order after making his way to South Asia in 1965. Then he ditched his formal mendicant... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cognitive Occultism
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with the Norwegian historian of science and esotericism Egil Asprim about re-enchantment, cognitive science and occult experience, and the magic of role-playing games. Egil's website is http://heterodoxology.com/ His many excellent articles on academia.edu are also another good reason to join that service, which, if you are not attached to an academic institution, you can do as an "independent scholar." -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Neuropsychedelia
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with anthropologist and historian of science Nicolas Langlitz about mystic materialism, the revival of psychedelic research, and the return of perennialism in the age of the brain. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Visionary Woman
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A conversation with human rights activist, social sculptor, and psychedelic culture crafter Annie Harrison, aka Annie Oak, about her work with the Womens' Visionary Congress, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and the Full Circle Tea House. -
Art and Design
Foreword: HFT The Gardener
Suzanne Treister's latest art projectRead moreSuzanne Treister's latest art project
Once in a while, an object appears in your world with the uncanny force of a Spiritualist apport, like some dream-thing crystallized out of your own personal matrix of symbols and fascinations, of secret wishes and eldritch fears. Such was my experience when a friend hipped me to Suzanne Treister’s Hexen 2.0 Tarot deck. The seventy-eight cards were part of the artist’s Hexen works, which obsessively diagram and dramatize the occult (and occulted) networks of postwar power. By crafting her... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Transformative Teaching
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with teacher (and old pal) Ronan Hallowell about electronic media, Native American ritual, and the challenges of transformative pedagogy. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Philosophy of Science Fiction
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with cultural theorist James Burton about liberating fictions, the Black Iron Prison, and his book The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick, out in paperback later this year. Note: the archons interfered with the Skype connection at first, but the sound soon improves. And it's worth it! -
Expanding Mind Podcast
DMT Culture
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with anthropologist (and "vibe-ologist") Graham St. John about tryptamine entities, horror films, and his terrific new book Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT. Navigating between historical scholarship and high weirdness, Graham's book is the first cultural history of DMT that we have, and is full of fresh and overlooked information about the West's encounter with DMT over the last 75 years. -
Media, Psychedelics
The Psychedelic Book of the Dead
Bardo-Tripping with Timothy LearyRead moreBardo-Tripping with Timothy Leary
In this talk, which I gave at Brooklyn's wonderful Morbid Anatomy Museum in February 2016, I tell the story of how Timothy Leary appropriated the Tibetan Book of the Dead--more properly, the Bardo Thodol, or Liberation Upon Hearing in the In-Between State--in his quest to map the stages of psychedelic experience in terms relevant to the religious quest. While even most psychedelicists now discount the brazen and now rather dated work he created with Richard Alpert and Ralph Mezner, 1964's The... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cybernetic Ego-death
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with renegade religious philosopher Michael Hoffman about entheogens, determinism, and religious experience from an engineering point of view. Read Mike's overview of his Cybernetic Ego-death theory here. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
After Buddhism
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with secular Buddhist author and teacher Stephen Batchelor about the problem with religion, the aesthetics of the dharma, and why worries about McMindfulness are overstated. Stephen's latest book, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (Yale, 2015), is perhaps my favorite of his many excellent books. Based on a close reading of Pali sources, it is at once a vivid reframing of the Buddha's life and original message and a canny, heartfelt re-awakening of that vision for today's post-religious world. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Sound of Now
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with new age musician Laraaji about cosmic electronics, sacred New York, and the medicine of laughter meditation. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
You Are Soaking In It
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A discussion with "guruphiliac" Jody Radzik about aconceptual awareness, reframing spiritual experience, and the problem with Space Daddy gurus. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Psychedelics and Religion
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A chat with William Richards about God talk, roses, and the best playlists for psychedelic therapy. Also check out Richards' new book Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Our Robots, Ourselves
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with MIT technology historian and engineer David Mindell about drones, social robots, agency, and his enlightening new book Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy. -
Offline Archive
TechEmergence Interview
Techgnostic Reflections TodayRead moreTechgnostic Reflections Today
The energetic Daniel Fagella talks to me about the fallout of spiritual machines on his forward-looking podcast. Check The Spirit In The Machine May Not Be So Far Out. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cognitive Liberty
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with psychedelic freedom fighter Casey Hardison about human rights, doing time, and the good and bad sides of a hedonistic politics. Casey's Erowid page is here. -
Music
Whale Song
Whale Recordings by and with HumansRead moreWhale Recordings by and with Humans
During a visit to southeastern Alaska last summer, I found myself packed tight with fellow eco-tourists on a whale-watching skiff that had motored into a large pod of feeding humpback whales. Dozens of creatures surrounded us, spouting, cresting, flashing their flukes and performing the occasional breach. All of this was obsessively recorded by the phalanx of iPhones, Nikons and Canons around me, a spectacle whose acquisitiveness alienated me from the amazing scene before me. Then the guide dropped a hydrophone... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Robots on Acid
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with cognitive scientist Andrew Smart about artificial intelligence, hallucinations, computationalism, and his new book Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Setting Science Free
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with maverick biologist Rupert Sheldrake about morphic resonance, citizen PSI, and the crumbling of scientific materialism. -
Offline Archive
Keep the Portal Open
The Reality Sandwich InterviewRead moreThe Reality Sandwich Interview
Over a glitchy Google Hangout (you can watch both parts on YouTube), I talked with the sparkly Michael Garfield about our culture’s highest hopes and darkest dreams for our collective future, and how they’ve both become more complicated since the turn of the Millennium. The resulting interview is now on Reality Sandwich. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Uncanny Objects
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A wild and wonderful talk with ecological philosopher Timothy Morton about telekinesis, Buddhism, the weirdness of reality, and the trouble with "Nature" in the era of global warming. -
Music
Lost Shadows: In Defense of the Soul
Yanomami Shamanism, Songs, Ritual, 1978Read moreYanomami Shamanism, Songs, Ritual, 1978
Upon first picking up the new CD release by David Toop, Lost Shadows: In Defense of the Soul, you’re likely to get a pretty good initial idea of what you are in for. “Yanomami Shamanism, Songs, Ritual, 1978” announces the subtitle, and we see photographs of jungles and near naked Indians, wielding staffs and lounging about with those unforgettable Yanomami mop tops, some seemingly under the influence of the powerful hallucinogens favored by the tribe. But though we rightly surmise... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Lucifer Revising
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A Halloween chat with author Peter Grey about radical witchcraft, the trouble with neopaganism, and the devilish twists and turns of the story of Lucifer that animates his new historical study, Lucifer: Princeps. http://scarletimprint.com/ -
Media
Lovecraft on NPR
To The Best of Our Knowledge podcastRead moreTo The Best of Our Knowledge podcast
I talk about occultism, games, and Our Fellow of Providence on Wisconsin Radio's always interesting To The Best of Our Knowledge. Listen here. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Terra Nova
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with Martin Winiecki from the Institute for Global Peace Work about community building, trust, water, and the amazing Tamera cooperative in Portugal. See the new book by Tamera co-founder Dieter Duhm, Terra Nova: Global Revolution and the Healing of Love. Also see the main Tamera site. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Void and Imagination
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A sparkling chat with multimedia artist Michaelangelo about inspired language, dream theaters, and entheogenesis. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Inside the Machine
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with archivist and cultural historian Megan Prelinger about twentieth-century technology, modernist art, and her fascinating new book Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Documenting Divinorum
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with anthropologists and filmmakers Roberto Lopez Melinchon and Nicholas Spiers about the indigenous use of salvia divinorum, the plant's healing powers, and current attempts to ban salvia in Mexico. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Facing the Darkside
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with famed psychedelic researcher Dr. Stanislav Grof about nightmare visions, the lasting effect of birth traumas, and H.R. Giger's trains. For more on Grof's Giger books, follow the link. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Buddhism and Psychedelics
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with writer and editor Allan Badiner about dharma, science, spiritual liberty, and the new edition of his edited book Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Sound and Consciousness
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with ethnomusicologist, musician, and composer Alexandre Tannous about drones, overtones, the art of listening, and the problems with a lot of “sound healing” today. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
NeuroTribes
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with journalist and science writer Steve Silberman about autism activism, the vaccine wars, neurodiversity, and his terrific new book NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Heart of the Hereafter
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with art historian and religious scholar Marcia Brennan about multiple worlds, the art and technology of dying, and her work as an Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Palliative Medicine at Houston's M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Reactionary Psychedelia
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with cultural historian Alan Piper about LSD, fascist modernism, and Albert Hoffman's close friendship with the writer and enigmatic right-winger Ernst Jünger. See Alan's intriguing text, Strange Drugs Make for Strange Bedfellows. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Hexadic Music
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with psych-folk musician Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) about improvisation, guitars, Agrippa, and his new Hexadic System book and playing card set. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Jazz Spirits
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with scholar and musician Jason Bivins about improvising religion, sound as transformation, and his new book Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Afro Black Mythology
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with scholar Marques Redd about Sun Ra, cosmic Egypt, and stepping out of academia to explore esoteric initiation. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Tantric Tragedy
Scott Carney talks about renegade gurus, the dangers of meditation, and his book Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story…
Read moreScott Carney talks about renegade gurus, the dangers of meditation, and his book Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment.
A talk with journalist Scott Carney about renegade gurus, spiritual ambiguity, and his book Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Liminal Dreaming
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with my lovely wife Jennifer Dumpert about hypnagogia, Tibetan dream yoga, and surfing the waves of the dreaming brain. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Botanical Beings
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison about plant spirits, the need for discernment, and how to navigate the conflict between western and indigenous worldviews. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Mind of Rocks
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with culture critic Steven Shaviro about panpsychism, science fiction, the liveliness of matter, and his book The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Syntheism Now!
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A lively talk with religious philosopher Alexander Bard about network metaphysics, psychedelic spirituality, digital narcissism, and his book (with Jan Söderqvist), Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Game Magic
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with game designer Jeff Howard about spellcraft in digital games, the grammar of the occult, and his book-cum-grimoire Game Magic: A Designer's Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice. -
Media
Why We Listen
Talking about music with Marc KateRead moreTalking about music with Marc Kate
Marc Kate recently invited me onto his very cool podcast Why We Listen, wherein he interviews folks about three music tracks that move or fascinated them. Mine were from Hüsker Dü, Exuma, and Helium. Deciding on the tracks to play proved very challenging (two of them were pretty easy recent obsessions/re-discoveries, the third I am still debating!), though this wrangling was itself a lesson in the importance of music in my life. The discussion is here. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
African American Esotericism
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with professor Stephen Finley about hoodoo, metaphysical blackness, and his co-edited (if prohibitively pricy) volume Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: "There is A Mystery..." -
Media
C-Realm Interview
"Not that guy": another talk with KMORead more"Not that guy": another talk with KMO
From the C-Realm site: "Techgnosis, by Erik Davis, was first published back in 1998, before the dot com crash, the presidential election fiasco of the year 2000, 9/11, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the financial crisis of 2008 and the protracted recession and jobless recovery. Erik joins KMO for a conversation about the continuity and evolution of their worldviews from 1998 to the present. In 1997, Wired magazine published their now famous headline story, "The Long Boom," which... -
Technoculture
Techgnosis Afterword
Afterward 2.0Read moreAfterward 2.0
IT MAKES ME SLIGHTLY PAINED to admit it, but the most vital and imaginative period of culture that I’ve yet enjoyed unfolded in the early 1990s (with the last years of the 1980s thrown in for good measure). There was a peculiar feeling in the air those days, at least in my neck of the woods, an ambient sense of arcane possibility, cultural mutation, and delirious threat that, though it may have only reflected my youth, seemed to presage more... -
Media
Robert Anton Wilson’s Pulp Illuminations
A talk at the Esoteric Book Conference, September 2014
Read moreA talk at the Esoteric Book Conference, September 2014
Here is a talk I gave at last year's wonderful Esoteric Book Conference about Illuminatus!, the occult, and the tension between high and low magic in the 1970s. [audio mp3="http://techgnosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/erik_davis_illuminating_pulp.mp3"][/audio] I highly recommend the EBC: the perfect (for me) Venn Diagram between esoteric scholarship and practicing occultism, the overlap being book nerdship, friendly enthusiasm, and good gender representation (key for occult conferences). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Early Leary
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with professor James Penner about Timothy Leary: the Harvard Years, his edited collection of Leary's earliest writings on psychedelics, scripting, and set and setting. -
Media
Shots of Awe Interview
Techgnosis in the Age of Experience Design
Read moreTechgnosis in the Age of Experience Design
The astronomically enthusiastic awe-riffer Jason Silva recently sat down in my living room to record a Shots of Awe conversation about Techgnosis. It was a fine and fun conversation. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Brains on LSD
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with psychedelic researcher Doctor Robin Carhart-Harris about dreams, the psychedelic brain, and the challenges of funding research about LSD. -
Music
Jordan de la Sierra
Gymnosphere: Song of the RoseRead moreGymnosphere: Song of the Rose
Finally, a proper reissue of Jordan de la Sierra’s dreamlike, drifty, and stark recording Gymnosphere: Song of the Rose, a stellar example of ambient kosmiche that first fell from the heavens in 1977. Restored here to its full original length, the recording consists of four roughly 25-minute piano improvisations that bring the temperamental absolutism of seventies minimalism and the more generous pastel visions of New Age music into sympathetic resonance. Included among the sacred designs and poems in the extensive... -
Media
Psychedelic Culture at the Crossroads
A talk at the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco.
Read moreA talk at the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco.
For many, today's "psychedelic renaissance" means the resumption of above-board psychedelic research and the positive shift in mainstream opinion represented by recent coverage in periodicals like the New Yorker and the New York Times. In this talk for the San Francisco Psychedelic Society, delivered on March 5, 2015, I offer a more complex picture of various tensions within the "psychedelic community" as it finds itself at a crossroads of what I identify here as four distinct zones of culture and discourse: the Underground, the Grey... -
Books
The Visionary State
A Journey Through California's Spiritual LandscapeRead moreA Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape
The following are a few selected Amazon reviews of The Visionary State (Chronicle, 2006). Excerpts of the book's texts and images can be found here. As a longtime student of the history of the utopian culture of California, who has pursued the original sources for 40 years now, there can't be more than a handful of books that are this valuable in that pursuit. Everything about this book is top notch, the photography, the text, and the overall book design.... -
Books
Nomad Codes
Adventures in Modern EsotericaRead moreAdventures in Modern Esoterica
In these wide-ranging essays, published by Yeti Books in 2010, Erik Davis explores the codes — spiritual, cultural, and embodied — that people use to escape the limitations of their lives and enrich their experience of the world. These include Asian religious traditions and West African trickster gods, Western occult and esoteric lore, postmodern theory and psychedelic science, as well as festival scenes such as Burning Man. Whether his subject is collage art or the "magickal realism" of H. P.... -
Books
Led Zeppelin IV
Led Zeppelin IVRead moreLed Zeppelin IV
What folks are saying... Ranked #32 on Blender magazine's roundup The 40 Greatest Rock & Roll Books: "The most intellectually inspired and flat-out fun of Continuum's ongoing 33 1/3 series of pocketbook album appreciations, critic Davis's adventurous treatise decodes every magikal property embedded within rock's most geeked-out masterpiece." "Erik Davis's bedazzling new book-length take on the Zep's epic fourth album is the literary equivalent of sparking the owl, crafting a sigil, cranking up a backmasked copy of "Stairway to Heaven,"... -
Books
Techgnosis
Myth, Magic, & Mysticism in the Age of InformationRead moreMyth, Magic, & Mysticism in the Age of Information
How does our fascination with technology intersect with the religious imagination? In TechGnosis—a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword and a foreword by Eugene Thacker—Erik Davis argues that while the realms of the digital and the spiritual may seem worlds apart, esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated (and sometimes inspired) technological communication. Davis uncovers startling connections between such seemingly disparate topics as electricity and alchemy; online roleplaying games and religious and occult practices; virtual... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Reclaiming Art
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with author and filmmaker (and future Weird Studies honcho) JF Martel about the weirdness of beauty, the rifts in the network, and his new gentle manifesto Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Transhumanism Today
Expanding Mind PodcastRead moreExpanding Mind Podcast
A talk with authors RU Sirius and Jay Cornell about techno-libertarianism, Google, and their new book Transcendence: The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity.www.transcendencethebook.net -
Art and Design, Religions and Spirits, Technoculture10 min
Secret Earths
Re-animismRead moreRe-animism
Today we are witnessing the dissolution of the autonomous human subject, a collapse of humanist agency that, at least from some angles, resembles a dystopian Sci-Fi submission to the technological apparatus and its various algorithmic controls, affect networks, and neuro-economic behavioral protocols. And yet, this radically disenchanted posthumanist condition has also been accompanied by a startling return of animism--or as an astrologer-coder named Matthew Souzis calls it, a movement of re-animism. What gives re-animism its force today is precisely the... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Seeds of Occulture
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with writer and artist Carl Abrahamsson about magic and art, Swedish occulture, and the sorcery of fiction. Check out his new book Reasonances (Scarlet Imprint). http://www.carlabrahamsson.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Haunted Ground
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with Professor Darryl Caterine about dowsing, angry ghosts, and the old weird America. Check out his book Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America (Praeger). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Alien Languages
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Diana Slattery talks about the psychedelic art and science of otherworldly tongues in her marvelous new book: Xenolingustics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness (North Atlantic). -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Long Conversation
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with Juris Ahn, aka Dr. Concrescence, about neurofeedback, voodoo archetypes, and the trials and triumphs of hacking consciousness (with and without tech). -
Media
The Vice Interview
Weirdness, Slenderman, and Jackass occultismRead moreWeirdness, Slenderman, and Jackass occultism
VICE: Hi Erik. The phrase "follow your weird" has been associated with you. What do you mean by that? Erik Davis: It's what I did instead of getting a normal job. I followed weirdness and wrote about it. The exploration of the unusual became a way of being. Most of the interesting people I've met did the same thing; characters like Terrence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson – those guys were very good at following their weird. I was struck... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Waking Dreaming Being
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Professor Evan Thompson talks about his wonderful new book Waking, Dreaming, Being: self and consciousness in (and between) neuroscience and first-person experience. -
Esoterica
The Counterculture and the Occult
Counter(o)ccultureRead moreCounter(o)cculture
Perhaps the single most important vector for the popularization of occult spirituality in the twentieth century is the countercultural explosion associated with “the Sixties”—an era whose political and culture dynamics hardly fit within the boundaries of that particular decade. A more useful term was coined by the Berkeley social critic Theodore Roszak, who used the word “counterculture” to describe a mass youth culture whose utopianism and hedonic psycho-social experimentation were wedded to a generalized critique of rationalism, technocracy, and established... -
Esoterica, Scholarship
The Magick of H.P. Lovecraft
from The Occult World (Routledge, 2014)Read morefrom The Occult World (Routledge, 2014)
H.P. Lovecraft was an American writer principally known for his weird fiction, a British and American sub-genre of speculative narrative that he helped both characterize and, as a critic, define. In his tales, Lovecraft blended elements of fantasy, horror, and science fiction into a strikingly original, infectious, and highly influential narrative universe. Lovecraft’s weird fiction is characterized by a fascination with occult grimoires and forbidden knowledge; a pantheon of bizarre extraterrestrial pseudo-gods who are essentially inimical to human life; a... -
Esoterica8 min
RAW Rah Rah!
Robert Anton WilsonRead moreRobert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson (1932 – 2007), born Robert Edward Wilson, was an American novelist, essayist, editor, playwright, and lecturer whose playful and prolific writings helped make him one of the most stimulating and influential popular thinkers in the “head” or “freak” currents of the American counterculture in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Wilson’s large, often digressive novels, including the seminal 1975 Illuminatus! trilogy written with Robert Shea, exploited the lore of conspiracy theories and occult secret societies to explore philosophical,... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Civilization of California
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with Professor Josef Chytry about his book Mountain of Paradise: Reflections on the Emergence of Greater California as a World Civilization: Disneyland, Queen Califia, and the culture of transformation. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Polar Cosmos
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with author Gyrus about his wonderful new book North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos: ice monsters, the trauma of the agricultural revolution, and the social politics hidden in myth. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Yoga of Sound
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with composer and author Baird Hersey about sound meditation, overtone singing, and the techniques of inner listening described in his book The Practice of Nada Yoga. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cameron: Witch Woman
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with journalist Tanja M. Laden about the visionary artist Cameron, esoteric Los Angeles, and the gender dynamics of the occult. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Symposium of the Sacred
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with Isis Indriya and Eve Bradford, co-organizers of the upcoming Symposium of the Sacred, about local vibes, connecting with elders, and educating in a sacred context. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Occult Rock
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with author Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, about imagination, performance, and rock star delusions. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Cosplay Shamanism
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with artist and performer Barron Scott Levkoff, organizer of Spookeasy SF, about Halloween, the cartoon underworld, and stepping into permission. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Singularity Archetype
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
A talk with Jonathan Zap about Jung, science fiction, and harnessing the apocalypse within. www.zaporacle.com -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Modern Satanism
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Satanic panics, transgression, and the sociology of the left-hand path: a talk with Professor Jesper Aagaard Petersen, co-editor of the book The Devil's Party: Satanism in Modernity. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Sex Positive Culture
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Objectification, Miley Cyrus, and the next turn of the sexual revolution: a talk with Polly Whittaker, author of the new memoir Polly: Sex Culture Revolutionary. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Underworld
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Horror films, Hiroshima, and the psychogeography of descent: a talk with Andy Sharp of the group English Heretic, whose latest release, The Underworld Service. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Convivial Chaos
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Dinner parties, anarchism, and cultivating the collective imagination: a talk with J. Christian Greer, co-founder of Corvid College and scholar of esoteric counterculture. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Terence Today
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Terence McKenna, multimedia mind, and the world-weaving power of stoned dialogue: a talk with film-maker Ken Adams, whose new film Imaginatrix: The Terence McKenna Experience is available to stream here: vimeo. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Burning Man 3.0
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Politics, partying, and the roads not taken: a critical assessment of "that thing in the desert" with Steven T. Jones, editor of the Bay Guardian and author of The Tribes of Burning Man. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
American Witchcraft
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Social networks, spiritual pragmatism, and the "organized innocence" of American witchcraft: a talk with Aidan A. Kelly, author of A Tapestry of Witches: A History of the Craft in America, Volume 1 and the memoir Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Yoga of Psi
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Yogic siddhis, paranormal research, and the strange sociology of science: a talk with Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and author, most recently, of Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Borg Like Me
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
The maker movement, the surveillance web, and fanning the embers of 90s cyberculture: a talk with Gareth Branwyn, former editor at MAKE, Boing Boing, and Mondo 2000, and now author of Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Consciousness Hacking
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Spiritual technologies, DIY neuroscience, and the renaissance of engineered mindstates: a talk with Mikey Siegel, Bay Area entrepreneur and consciousness hacker impresario. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Think Positive
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
New Thought, the trouble with skeptics, William James, and the history and power of positive thinking: an animated talk with Mitch Horowitz, author of One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Buddhas and Machines
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Chinese typewriters, Alan Watts, and how Buddhism (and motorcycle maintenance) infected digital capitalism: a talk with Professor R. John Williams about his new book, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West. campuspress.yale.edu/rjohnwilliams -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Principia Discordia
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Anarchism, synchronicity, and the joke religion spawned by the vision of a Goddess in a bowling alley: a talk with "crackpot historian" Adam Gorightly about his new book Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Yoga Sutras
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Patanjali, dualism vs nondualism, and the complex evolution of a spiritual classic: a talk with Professor David Gordon White, author of The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Transhuman Yearnings
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
The Singularity, the übermensch, and the yearning to overcome history: a conversation with philosopher and integral theorist Michael E. Zimmerman, co-author of Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Beast is Back
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Thelemic visions, magickal texts, and the tedium of transgression: a talk with occult historian Gary Lachman about his new biography Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World (Tarcher). gary-lachman.com. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Andean Travels
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Incan enchantments, bovine tourism, and the mental case that is the USA: Erik and Maja discuss Erik's recent Peruvian voyage and more. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Christ and Cthulhu
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Gnosticism, H.P. Lovecraft, and the labyrinth of Biblical interpretation: theologian and Lovecraft expert Robert M. Price discusses his new book Preaching Deconstruction. www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Toad and the Jaguar
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Underground therapy, 5-MEO-DMT, and the importance of radical empiricism: Dr. Ralph Metzner discusses his new book, The Toad and the Jaguar. http://www.greenearthfound.org. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Nemu’s End
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Apocalyptic inspiration, jungle parasites, and the alchemy of writing: a talk with Reverend Nemu about Science Revealed, the first volume of his Nemu's End series. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Spiritual Friendship
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Equanimity, long-haul meditation, and walking the path with pals: a talk with Tom Lane about dharma and personal practice. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Disquiet Sounds
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Ambient listening, the technology of sound, and the liminal music of Aphex Twin: a talk with Marc Weidenbaum, author of the 33 1/3 book on Selected Ambient Works Volume II. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Critical Beats
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Rainforest activism, the transformation of depression, and the musical epic of the spacedog Laika: a talk with Evan Bartholomew, who makes electronic music under the handle Bluetech. -
Media
The Dazed & Confused Interview
How Erik Davis invented networked mysticismRead moreHow Erik Davis invented networked mysticism
Dig deep into the world of cultural esoterica and you’re bound to find someone who’s dug there before. That’s particularly true of the cults of California and the mysticism of the global online, where Erik Davis has long laid claim. Cali-born and raised, the self-proclaimed “participant anthropologist” has been exploring the world of the weird since the 90s, in the process becoming a cult idol himself. Respected by many, virtually unknown by most, Davis is a journalist, academic and writer... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
How to Be a Witch
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Shadow work, ritual training, and the "amalgamous goo" of shakti: a talk with co-host Maja D'Aoust about her new practice DVD How to Be a Witch. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Trauma and Transformation
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Shamanic predation, cultural narcissism, and healing through language and learning: a talk with Lily Ross, a Masters candidate at the Harvard Divinity School and co-founder of Nomad Culture. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Complexity and Consciousness
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Self-organization, the empty cell, and the mind of the quantum foam: a wide-ranging talk with Dr. Neil Theise, stem cell specialist, complexity researcher, and practicing Zen Buddhist. https://www.neiltheiseofficial.com/ -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The New Animism
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Animist practice, sacred sites, and cultivating a relationship to significant otherness: a talk with Robert Wallis, professor of Visual Culture at Richmond University and a scholar of paganism, shamanism, and rock art. See also: Electromagnetic Animism Video: The Life of Things -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Democratic Surround
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Anti-fascism, the trouble with managers, and the multimedia creation of the liberal self: a talk with Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
A Religion of One’s Own
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Divine ignorance, reading tea leaves, and cultivating the practice of soul: a chat with Thomas Moore, author of the new book A Religion of One's Own. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Crazyology
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Visionary painting, trance states, and the art of animalgamation: a vibrant talk with artist (and crazyologist) David Normal. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Aya Awakenings
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Gonzo journalism, vibrating wisdom, and the globalization of ayahuasca: a talk with Rak Razam, author of Aya Awakenings, a book and a just-released narrative documentary directed by Tim Parish. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Exploring Salvia Divinorum
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Improvisation, isolation tanks, and transformative encounters with an often misunderstood psychoactive plant: a talk with Twig Harper, experimental musician and head technician of Be Free Floating. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Psychedelics and Dying
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Meditation, psychedelic science, and the integration of the end game: a talk with Katherine MacLean, PhD, who helped guide psychedelic and meditation sessions in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Santa Muerte
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
The cult of death, narco spirituality, and Mexico's increasingly international folk saint: a talk with Professor Andrew Chestnut, author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Emotional Trauma
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Shock, distraction, and techniques of working with trauma: Erik and Maja chat about the tough stuff. -
Psychedelics
Multidisciplinary Psychedelics
Psychedelic DiscourseRead morePsychedelic Discourse
I have been writing about psychedelics and psychedelic culture, off and on, for nearly all of my professional life. When starting out as a journalist over two decades ago, I penned articles on Terence McKenna, Burning Man, and the early psy-trance scene; later, I wrote think-pieces about Erowid, research chemicals, and the psychedelic roots of American Buddhism. In 1993, I flew out from New York to Santa Cruz for the Bicycle Day gathering, and began attending and eventually speaking at... -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Loving New Age Music
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Crystal visions, flutes, and the hidden sublimity of a reviled genre: a talk with Douglas Mcgowan, curator of the music collection I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950-1990. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Spectacle Today
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Situationist practices, critical design, and the politics of Guy Debord action figures: a talk with media theorist McKenzie Wark, author of The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages out of the 20th Century. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
The Politics of Synchronicity
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Congressional exorcism, magical thinking, and the technology of serendipity: Erik and Maja talk about divination today. -
Expanding Mind Podcast
Appletopia
Expanding MindRead moreExpanding Mind
Steve Jobs, technological paradox, and the metaphysics of Apple computers: a talk with Professor Brett T. Robinson, author of the new book Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs. -
Offline Archive
To the Best of Our Knowledge Interview 2
If traditional religion has lost its luster, where do you find sacred experiences? Anthropologist Erik Davis goes looking around the…
Read moreIf traditional religion has lost its luster, where do you find sacred experiences? Anthropologist Erik Davis goes looking around the …
If traditional religion has lost its luster, where do you find sacred experiences? Anthropologist Erik Davis goes looking around the edges of contemporary culture - from Burning Man and trance music to psychedelics. He says there's a long history of the esoteric, but it plays out in popular culture and in some very weird places. -
Media
The Revelation of Philip K. Dick
Exegesis and EventRead moreExegesis and Event
The same summer I attended Breaking Convention in the UK, I popped over to the October Gallery in London to give a talk on my PhD research to a very lively and engaged audience. In the talk, I approach Philip K. Dick's 2/3/74 experience as both a text (the Exegesis) and an event. More to the point, however, 2/3/74 represents an impossible interweaving of the two, with textuality pulling against the immediacy of revelation and mystical energies intensifying the text. Thanks... -
Media
Enchantment Now
Nottingham Contemporary, UK, June 2013Read moreNottingham Contemporary, UK, June 2013
This is a talk on animism and an object oriented world, delivered at the Nottingham Contemporary in the summer of 2013 for the opening of Mark Leckey's show "The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things." See also an overview of the exhibit in Frieze, from when the show opened at The Bluecoat in Liverpool, UK; as well as my essay for the exhibition catalog. -
Media
Electromagnetic Animism
Arts Catalyst performance, London, June 2013Read moreArts Catalyst performance, London, June 2013
A live collaboration with Mark Pilkington and Misty. The circuits are alive! See also: The Life of Things Expanding Mind: The New Animism -
Media
The Life of Things
Dr. Robert Wallis and the life of thingsRead moreDr. Robert Wallis and the life of things
Further reflections on animism in our contemporary moment. "How does our relationship to the world change if everything is alive?" Watch here. See also: Electromagnetic Animism Expanding Mind: The New Animism -
Religions and Spirits
Is Yoga a Religion?
The controversies over yoga in schoolsRead moreThe controversies over yoga in schools
"What if modern postural yoga is neither religious nor secular, but something in between, or something beyond, something whose evident appeal partly lies in that very liminality?" As Stefanie Syman shows in The Subtle Body (2010), her history of yoga in the US, American asana practice has been oscillating for more than a century between ashram and gym, sometimes clothed in exotic veils and other times in low-cut spandex. It is this very oscillation — a flux incarnated for many practitioners every time they... -
Media
Shamanism 2.0
Neuroscience and HypermediaRead moreNeuroscience and Hypermedia
This lecture, Shamanism 2.0: The Creative Imagination in the Age of Neuroscience and Hypermedia, given at the Bioethics Forum in the spring of 2013 is one of the most significant talks I have given on the subject of animism and perception in the context of the contemporary technological world. In other words: further reflections on the role of active imagination in the 21st century. -
Media
Aeon Byte: The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
A conversation with Miguel Conner
Read moreA conversation with Miguel Conner
A talk with the indefatigable Miguel Conner about being one of the editors on Philip K. Dick's Exegesis. Listen here. -
Moving Pictures
Trickster and Tricked
The trickster documentary KumaréRead moreThe trickster documentary Kumaré
To say that we live in a post-secular era does not mean that we are done with the disenchantments of modernity, or that religion – goddess forbid – will regain its previous hold over human affairs. True, many of the convictions and clarities that once undergirded modern secular society have dissolved, leaving many things — including our rational selves — up for grabs. But while radical atheists can rant all they want, the resonant claims of religion and the insistent... -
Psychedelics12 min
Return Trip
Psychedelic Research ResurgenceRead morePsychedelic Research Resurgence
We are what we eat, but what we eat is also a reflection of who (we think) we are. In other words, the stories we tell about the things we take into our bodies reflect the stories we tell about our more mysterious selves. A whale steak munched nostalgically in Japan would strike many nature-loving Americans as a moral horror, while the continued appeal of homeopathic pills lies as much with the holistic image of the bodymind they suggest as... -
Media
Philip K. Dick and Religious Studies
The Philip K. Dick Festival, SFSU, September 22, 2012Read moreThe Philip K. Dick Festival, SFSU, September 22, 2012
The worlds of science fiction scholarship, let alone science fiction itself, rarely overlap religious studies. As usual, Philip K. Dick scrambles the normal state of affairs. A talk I gave at The Philip K. Dick Festival, SFSU, September 22, 2012: watch on youtube. -
Art and Design
Rick Griffin, Superstar
A look at the art and spiritual struggle of the great psychedelic poster artist.
Read moreA look at the art and spiritual struggle of the great psychedelic poster artist.
"The peak years of California counterculture were suffused with sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, but they were also saturated with the spirit. Turbo-driven by the widespread use of psychedelics, the Beat mysticism of the ’50s had bloomed into a vibrant peacock tail of gods, symbols, and forces that drew from all times and places and religions without fixing on any of them. Jimi Hendrix’s celebrated cover for Axis: Bold as Love, based on modern Hindu god posters devoted to the theophany... -
Art and Design
Rick Griffin, Superstar, Pt. 2
Rick Griffin finds the Lord.
Read moreRick Griffin finds the Lord.
The second half of my Hilobrow Pop Arcana column on the great West Coast psychedelic artist: "In 1969, Rick Griffin left San Francisco, whose psychedelic underground he helped broadcast to the world with his remarkable posters and comix. Drawn to the more various and mellow surfer lifestyle of the southland, Griffin returned to SoCal with his girlfriend and settled in San Clemente to enjoy the waves, though the move may have been motivated as well by whatever spiritual struggles Griffin... -
Media
Cybernetic Psychedelica
MU Gallery, Eindhoven, NL, May 2011Read moreMU Gallery, Eindhoven, NL, May 2011
A talk I gave as part a terrific exhibit of "New Psychedelica." One of my most complete accounts of cybernetic systems theory in relationship to the psychedelic culture of the 1960s and 70s. -
Offline Archive
Summer Reading
Cool books for youRead moreCool books for you
My contributions to Roy Christopher's great yearly gathering of lists. Look at the rest here. For the last year, I have been part of the editorial team preparing a rather mammoth edited selection of Philip K. Dick’s largely unpublished Exegesis that should come out in late Fall from HMH. So most of my summer reading is a marathon swim through Dick’s dense, wonderful, insightful, disturbing, boring, and deeply bizarre explorations of metaphysics, cybernetics, madness, mysticism, and God. It is an... -
Articles and Essays
Religious Satanism Today
The details on the devilRead moreThe details on the devil
Compared with the broader field of Neo-Pagan religion, in which it is sometimes and incorrectly subsumed, religious Satanism remains an under-researched and under-reported topic. More work has probably been done on the illusory “Satanists” conjured by ritual abuse accusers than on self-proclaimed and practicing Satanists, a deficiency that Jesper Aagaard Petersen is aiming to remedy with this anthology devoted to contemporary currents of religious Satanism. The book, which is principally sociological in orientation, is divided into three main sections: studies... -
Esoterica, Scholarship
Prestigious Demons 3
Presto!Read morePresto!
Note: the following is the third of three sections of an essay I wrote as part of my Rice University graduate work. As such it is a different genre of writing than most of the pieces that appear on this site. But it's still good and weird... PRESTIGIOUS DEMONS III: THE DIONYSIAN MACHINE The Dionysian machine serves as a fit image for the transformations that demonic appearances undergo during the early modern period, when a growing culture of skepticism, an... -
Esoterica, Scholarship
Prestigious Demons 2
Hail the SimulacrumRead moreHail the Simulacrum
Note: the following is the second of three sections of an essay I wrote as part of my Rice University graduate work. As such it is a different genre of writing than most of the pieces that appear on this site. But it's still kinda weird... PRESTIGIOUS DEMONS II: THE PHANTASM The void that founds the asymmetrical antinomy of the phantasm is the nonbeing of evil, a concept whose theological necessity cannot contain the corrosive contradictions and double-binds the concept... -
Offline Archive
Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book
Modernism and MagicRead moreModernism and Magic
In 1959, Norman Holmes Pearson, a friend of the poet H.D.'s as well as her literary executor, asked Robert Duncan whether he would write up something for the older author on the occasion of her birthday. Duncan, who considered H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) to be a spiritual and poetic initiatrix of sorts, agreed. Over the next five years, his tribute blossomed, or metastasized, into The H.D. Book, a hefty and digressive meditation on modernism, literature, and esoterica whose twenty-odd chapters... -
Esoterica, Scholarship
Prestigious Demons 1
The Disappearing MemberRead moreThe Disappearing Member
Note: the following is the first of three sections of an essay I wrote as part of my Rice University graduate work. As such it is a different genre of writing than most of the pieces that appear on this site. But it's still kinda weird... PRESTIGIOUS DEMONS I: THE DISAPPEARING COCK The Malleus Mallifacarum (Hammer of Witches) is aptly named, as reading it can feel like an unrelenting encounter with a blunt and oppressive force: an obsessive cut-and-paste scholastic... -
Offline Archive
Nomad Codes interview
Talking with Antonio LopezRead moreTalking with Antonio Lopez
AL: What is the nomadic impulse that underlies these particular writings? ED: When I went to college in the 80s, the “nomad” was a trendy concept. For me the nomad is still an image of movement and transformation, but not necessarily joy. It might just be the way it is, or because you have no choice, like that sense of restlessness that’s so evident in a place like LA. A lot of the stuff that interests me -- ecstatic experience,... -
Esoterica
Hoodoo You Know
Goofer dust and teacup loreRead moreGoofer dust and teacup lore
"Though essentially African-American, hoodoo should not be confused with voodoo or other Caribbean transformations of African spirit possession. (If anything, it most resembles Jamaican traditions of obeah, or “science.”) Though hoodoo encompasses a variety of oracular and healing practices, its core moves rely on botanical materials and ordinary household products like soaps and toilet waters, and largely aims for this-worldly results: lottery numbers, love, protection from (or vengeance against) the boss. This pragmatism is also echoed in the tradition’s intensely... -
Art and Design
Damanhur
Underground esoteric templesRead moreUnderground esoteric temples
Over the weeks and years, without much formal training, working at night and with music blaring to cover up the drills, a select crew of Damanhurians hollowed out a series of mighty chambers and passageways, all without other members of the community—to say nothing of the greater world—clueing-in to their secret work. With tenacious devotion and a startling degree of art, they transformed these underground spaces into the Temples of Humankind: a remarkable otherworldly honeycomb of sacred murals, onyx mosaics,... -
Offline Archive
Synchronicity for the Day
Rainbow Gathering flashbackRead moreRainbow Gathering flashback
It was the last day of 1991's national Rainbow Gathering, which took place on a marvelous meadowed slope on the side of one of Vermont's Green Mountains. I had already packed my stuff up and was headed lazily towards the exit when I came across a dozen or so folks, holding hands and singing in a circle around a charismatic little goat of a man holding an acoustic guitar. They were doing Sufi dancing, or really "Sufi" dancing, since the... -
Esoterica
Cthulhu is not Cute!
Plushies, tentacle porn, the terrifying obscenity of Cute.
Read morePlushies, tentacle porn, the terrifying obscenity of Cute.
The most unsettling opening line in a horror story, I think, is the famous claim that launches H.P. Lovecraft’s 1926 tale “The Call of Cthulhu:” The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. Because of this inability, Lovecraft’s narrator opines, our reality is equivalent to “a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity.” But the time of ultimate correlation is nigh—a time... -
Articles and Essays
The Warcraft Civilization
William Bainbridge levels upRead moreWilliam Bainbridge levels up
OK, so there is no way of knowing whether any of those parallel universes described by theoretical physicists truly exist. But if any of those parallel Earths are out there, I have a pretty good idea what my parallel-me is doing right about now: slaughtering stormtroopers, cruising in a brigade of airships above Vana’diel, flirting with blood elves. In other words, the parallel-me is playing MMORPGs all the frigging time. In the universe we actually occupy, however, I have decided... -
Music
Don’t Mind if I Do
Joanna Newsom's Have One on MeRead moreJoanna Newsom's Have One on Me
"Glittering and plaintive, twisted and sometimes dull, Newsom’s music always flowed knowingly, disc after disc, down to that damn old sunless sea." The rest of my review of Joanna Newsom's Have One On Me, part of my Pop Arcana project, is at Hilobrow. -
Esoterica
The Comic Book of Thoth
One hundred (and maybe one) years of the Rider Waite Smith TarotRead moreOne hundred (and maybe one) years of the Rider Waite Smith Tarot
This month, I began writing a series of articles for Hilobrow, one of my favorite websites for cultural commentary. I began with a look back at the Rider-Waite (or Rider-Waite-Smith) Tarot deck, whose images--like many that haunt the modern occult--become more fascinating the more you look at them. The scans are better at Hilobrow, so check out "The Comic Book of Thoth" there: Pop Arcana 1: The Comic Book of Thoth -
Articles and Essays
Singing to the Plants
Stephan Beyer drinks upRead moreStephan Beyer drinks up
The spiritual superhero of the baby boomers was the guru. But where the guru once hovered with his beatific smile, the shaman now shakes his stuff: an earthier, more pragmatic icon of mystical powers more suited to our era’s green anxieties. Now a significant figure for scholarly discourses as well as popular ones, the shaman, and especially the ayahuasca-swilling Amazonian variety, has not only stepped forward as a vehicle of archaic spirituality but has become—as the gazillions of bedazzled Avatar... -
Media
Gnosis Now! talk 8
Pharmakognosis
Read morePharmakognosis
This is the last of eight lectures recorded in the spring of 2009 for a Maybe Logic Academy course called Gnosis Now! READINGS FOR WEEK EIGHT: PHARMAKOGNOSIS: • Rene Daumal: “The Determining Memory” • Dale Pendell: “Das Mutterkorn/The Luminosity of Sentient Dimensions” • John Lilly “Controls Below Human Awareness” [audio mp3="http://techgnosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Gnosis8.mp3"][/audio] -
Offline Archive
Aya Avatar
Shamanism in AvatarRead moreShamanism in Avatar
In paradoxical and altogether predictable terms, James Cameron’s ravishing Avatar sets a blue man group of mystically attuned forest dwellers against the aggressive and heartless exploitation that characterizes the military-industrial-media complex, with its virtual interfaces, biotech chimeras, and cyborg war machines. The paradox, of course, is that a version of this latter complex is responsible for delivering Camaron’s visions to us in the first place. To wit: before a recent screening of the film at the Metreon IMAX theater in... -
Media
Gnosis Now! talk 7
The Pink Light
Read moreThe Pink Light
This is the seventh of eight lectures recorded in the spring of 2009 for a Maybe Logic Academy course called Gnosis Now! READINGS FOR WEEK SEVEN: PKD's PINK LIGHT: • Philip K. Dick: “The Electric Ant” • Philip K. Dick: “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” [audio mp3="http://techgnosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Gnosis7.mp3"][/audio] -
Art and Design
Gothic Guns
Al Farrow's masterpieceRead moreAl Farrow's masterpiece
I went to the de Young museum with my Mom last weekend. We enjoyed the proto-Op Art tripster quilts of the Amish, as well as a fine collection of classic photography shots (best was some 1920s of an evil looking puppet conjoined to the phrase: The Return of Christmas). The most mind-blowing thing by far though was a large dollhouse-scaled cathedral built by the artist Al Farrow out of AK-47s, bullets and shells. (Cathedral) I spent ten minutes looking at... -
Media
Gnosis Now! talk 6
Poesis
Read morePoesis
This is the sixth of eight lectures recorded in the spring of 2009 for a Maybe Logic Academy course called Gnosis Now! READINGS FOR WEEK SIX: POESIS: • Harold Bloom: “A Prelude to Gnosis” from Agon • A.R. Ammons: “For Harold Bloom” • June Singer: “The Evolution of the Soul” • Eric G. Wilson: “The Dark Art” [audio mp3="http://techgnosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Gnosis6.mp3"][/audio] -
Offline Archive
On hating the GRE
a) bile b) resentment c) sorrow d) all of the aboveRead morea) bile b) resentment c) sorrow d) all of the above
For reasons that remain obscure even to myself, I have decided to apply to a PhD program this winter, which means that I was recently forced to submit myself to the joys of the Graduate Record Examination. I have always hated standardized testing, and my hatred has not abated in the twenty years since I last took the test—decades in which I have built a wayward and sometimes scholarly career whose appeal (and lack of remuneration) has a lot to... -
Media
Gnosis Now! talk 5
Archons Rule
Read moreArchons Rule
This is the fifth of eight lectures recorded last spring for a Maybe Logic Academy course called Gnosis Now! READINGS FOR WEEK FIVE: ARCHONS RULE • Antonin Artaud: “To Have Done with the Judgment of God” • Franz Kafka: selected “Parables” • William Burroughs: “Nova Express” (pages 1-8, books.google.com) [audio mp3="http://techgnosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Gnosis5.mp3"][/audio] -
Media
Gnosis Now! talk 4
The Alien Man
Read moreThe Alien Man
This is the fourth of eight lectures recorded last spring for a Maybe Logic Academy course called Gnosis Now! READINGS FOR WEEK FOUR: THE ALIEN MAN: • Hans Jonas: “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism” • Rene Daumal: “Provocations to Self Denial” [audio mp3="http://techgnosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Gnosis4.mp3"][/audio] -
Esoterica
Kosmiche Krautrock
Krautrock and the SublimeRead moreKrautrock and the Sublime
Imagine you are standing alone on a craggy windswept sea cliff beneath a moonless night sky. You spread your arms out at your side like superhero wings and you slowly begin to ascend, a dreamlike absorption into the dark embrace of the galaxy. Your pace quickens until you are rocketing through the stars like a spectral eyeball shot out of a quantum canon. The immensity of space swallows you up, and as nearly all of the perceptual frameworks you normally... -
Media
Gnosis Now! talk 3
Jesus Tricked Everyone
Read moreJesus Tricked Everyone
This is the third of eight lectures recorded last spring for a Maybe Logic Academy course called Gnosis Now! I will now abandon my attempt to post one a week because I am a confused puppy and so they will just arrive when they arrive. READING: JESUS TRICKED EVERYONE • “On the Origin of the World” in The Gnostic Bible • Ioan Couliano: “Interplanetary Tours”, from Out of this World [audio mp3="http://techgnosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Gnosis3.mp3"][/audio] -
Subcultures7 min
Tribal Revival
West Coast Festival CultureRead moreWest Coast Festival Culture
The following is adapted from the introduction to Tribal Revival, a new collection of photographs by Kyer Wiltshire, who has been shooting the neotribal festival culture of the West Coast for many years. I contributed texts throughout the richly designed book, which covers everything from garb to hooping to “prayerformances.” In the summer of 2006, I had the good fortune to attend a large and boisterous gathering of spirit mediums in the benighted land of Burma. These mediums, who channel... -
Media
Gnosis Now! talk 2
The Perfect Light
Read moreThe Perfect Light
This is the second of eight lectures recorded last spring for a Maybe Logic Academy course called Gnosis Now! I will now continue my so far failed attempt to post one a week for the next eight weeks, along with the readings for the week. The first few recordings are kinda crappy; they improve by week three but the completist in me urged posting nonetheless. READING WEEK TWO: THE PERFECT LIGHT: • Excerpts from “The Gospel of Philip” in The... -
Media
Gnosis Now! talk 1
The Gospels of Thomas and PhilipRead moreThe Gospels of Thomas and Philip
This is the first of eight lectures recorded last spring for a Maybe Logic Academy course called Gnosis Now! I will post one a week for the next eight weeks, along with the readings for the week. On October 26, I will be starting a six-week online course for MLA on the work and influence of H.P. Lovecraft. The first few recordings are kinda crappy; they improve by week three but the completist in me urged posting nonetheless. Week 1... -
Offline Archive
You Are the Doll
Dollhouse by Josh WhedonRead moreDollhouse by Josh Whedon
At its best, science-fiction TV satisfies our desire for escapist pop while also holding up a mirror to the zeitgeist, and especially to those deep fears and desires that elude the strategies of more conventional and realistic narratives. Battlestar Galactica, with its dark meditations on prophecy, war, and Cylon identity, is the shining recent example, but seemingly cornier fare can also provide candy-coated conundrums that bear rumination, and that almost sneak up on you with their significance. Dollhouse, a Fox... -
Music
Ligeti’s Requiem Mass
Cosmic choral chaosRead moreCosmic choral chaos
I’m not sure if it’s all the time I used to spend in zendos, but when I find myself in a modern American symphony hall, I usually treat these highly coded and uptight environments as an invitation to focused attention. Once everybody shuts up and the music starts, I sit as still as possible, sans the usual pint, and devote myself to listening, with mind and heart in as much sync as I can muster. This attitude, which can often... -
Articles and Essays
The Flower Garland Sutra
Psychedelic jewels and skillful meansRead morePsychedelic jewels and skillful means
When I was studying tons of Buddhism a while back, one of my favorite concepts was upaya, which is almost universally translated as skillful means. Upaya forms a core concept within the bodhisattva-bulging universe of Mahayana Buddhism. and it boils down—at least in the versions I imbibed—to the notion that the bodhisattva, devoted to the liberation of all sentient beings, would invariably use a variety of means to communicate the dharma to sentient beings (who of course don’t “really” exist,... -
Offline Archive
The End of the Ring
The close of Seattle's Ring cycleRead moreThe close of Seattle's Ring cycle
Some quick thoughts on the end of the Seattle Opera’s Ring cycle before we pile into Kermit for the long slog home. Dramatically, Siegfried is dominated by the fact that Wagner’s great hero is annoying and petty, a sort of golden lout. His character undercuts sympathy and makes Brunnhilde’s adoration puzzling, leaving us with one of musical drama’s most pointed expressions of a question we have all asked: What does she see in him? I complained about him to my... -
Offline Archive
Die Walkure
Heady reflections on Seattle's RingRead moreHeady reflections on Seattle's Ring
Last night, the core strength of the Seattle Opera’s Ring became crystal clear. This a Ring cycle focused, first and foremost, on drama. The acting, staging, sets, and props, were all designed to draw us into a story as tensely knotted in its emotions, allusions, and philosophical implications as the world ash the supports Hunding’s hut. This cycle is traditional not only in the sense that the trees look like the Olympic peninsula and the characters look like they perform... -
Offline Archive
Das Rheingold
The opening turn of Seattle's Ring cycleRead moreThe opening turn of Seattle's Ring cycle
After a grinding car ride up Interstate 5, it was a relief to sit back in our dress circle seats for Das Rheingold, the opening bon-bon of the Seattle Opera’s complete staging of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. It's not a new production, but that was fine by me, because one of the attractions about the Seattle Ring was its solid rep and the fact that the production design was about as trad as it comes these days: realistic forest... -
Media
A Brief History of the Phantasm
Phantasia, spirits, and technologyRead morePhantasia, spirits, and technology
This talk was recorded on a lovely early evening at the October Gallery, London, on June 30 this year. It was an attempt to grapple with the history of the esoteric and supernatural imagination, and to speculate on the proper balance of skepticism and celebration needed to face the phantasm in all is tricksy glory. -
Articles and Essays
The Atmosphere of Heaven
The universe is made of thoughtsRead moreThe universe is made of thoughts
The Atmosphere of Heaven, Mike Jay’s latest book of hard-as-nails history of consciousness, tells the curious story of the Pneumatic Institution, a somewhat heretical outpost of British medical exploration where chemistry, poetry, and Jacobin politics crossed. Researchers at the Institution, founded at the close of the eighteenth century by the clearly excellent Thomas Beddoes, had the good fortune and cleverness to discover, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the giddy metaphysical glee of sucking down bags of nitrous oxide.... -
Art and Design
Take Me to the Water
Another Dust-to-Digital triumphRead moreAnother Dust-to-Digital triumph
Think of religion as a kind of tapestry. The warp is belief and the woof is practice—the art, ritual, and embodied experience of the religious life. There is no practice without a structure of basic beliefs or assumptions, of course, but at the same time, you can’t reduce practice to beliefs. This is one of the many small-hearted mistakes committed by today’s flatland atheists, with their tin-eared harrumphing before the poetic mysteries of the religious imagination. So much more interesting... -
Articles and Essays
Rudy Wurlitzer Interview
Westerns and the SelfRead moreWesterns and the Self
I first heard about Rudy Wurlitzer and his 1969 novel Nog from a Village Voice article by Gary Indiana. Indiana’s description of Wurlitzer’s explosive first book, not to mention the haunting photograph of the somewhat haunted looking author, set me hunting immediately. At once of its era and of none, Nog is a funny and unsettling expression of place and placelessness, a hippie-Beckett drift trip that sucks you into the empty undertow of the American quest, longhair-style. In Nog, Wurlitzer... -
Articles and Essays
Nog reissue
Please lose yourself in this bookRead morePlease lose yourself in this book
To wind up a cult classic is not, perhaps, the most enviable fate for a book. But it is not the worst of worlds either, because cult means more than simple obscurity. The word also suggests mystery, like the mystery cults of antiquity, with their underground revelations and fanatic sharing of secrets. Nog, Rudolph Wurlitzer’s debut novel, is a cult classic in this deeper, more initiatory sense. The novel shines from the margins, as brilliant as it is obscure, as... -
Offline Archive
Tokyo through her eyes
A report from the land of the Rising SunRead moreA report from the land of the Rising Sun
An evocative email from my lovely wife Jennifer Dumpert, just landed in Tokyo: Under criss-crossing overhead subway lines, old Japanese men in black velvet read fortunes at rickety tables by candlelight. I noted a chart of the palm at one spot, a tarot deck in another. Teeming hordes of youth in an outstanding array of fashions poured out of tiny, winding streets lined with love hotels and "girl bars" and ramen joints onto other tiny winding streets lined with sex... -
Offline Archive
Sir Richard Bishop live
The Freak of ArabyRead moreThe Freak of Araby
Friday night brought me the unmitigated delight of catching the first stop on Sir Richard Bishop’s current tour, which is supporting his album The Freak of Araby, an album of Middle Eastern (and Middle Eastern inspired) instrumentals that has a smoky harem tart smoldering on the cover. Ever so slightly constrained, the album remains a nice fat slice of cannabinoid baklavah, especially if you like your Turkish psych and your Elias Rahbani and your exotica surf music. It finds the... -
Music
Bluetech
The Divine InvasionRead moreThe Divine Invasion
I don't listen to straight-up electronic music much anymore, but I'll listen to anything that my pal Evan Bartholemew cooks up. He’s worked on minimal techno, dub, deep ambient, and modern classical, but he’s made his most celebrated music—“psychedelic down-tempo” is a good enough pigeon-hole—under the handle Bluetech. What makes Bluetech’s music stand out are the almost impish sophistication of the melodies, the unique tactile pleasures of the various beats and timbres, and the delicacy with which these various layers... -
Music
Alasdair Roberts
Reveling in the SpoilsRead moreReveling in the Spoils
A Scottish singer-songwriter with a number of spare and lovely folk albums under his belt, Alasdair Roberts goes for the prophetic gusto on his new one, the powerfully strange and visionary Spoils. Backed by a loose rock combo, Roberts avoids the nostalgic jelly of neo-trad folk for a dynamic but intimate rock vibe that is ragged in all the right ways. Yes there are hurdy gurdies, finger-picked acoustic guitars, and songs about walks in the mountains. But Spoils sounds also... -
Offline Archive
Papercuts
Weepy joysRead moreWeepy joys
A friend of mine, a poet and novelist and a bit of a hermit, recently decided to ditch his home Internet service. He still surfs at work, where he follows news and opera stuff, and hunts down movies to add to his excellent DVD collection. But he was sick of the tension he felt at home between the physical machine that served as a multi-pronged typewriter for his creative efforts and the seemingly infinite virtual machine that lurked behind the... -
Psychedelics
Mushroom Magick
A Visionary Field GuideRead moreA Visionary Field Guide
Mushrooms are all about appearances. They emerge in the dark of night or the blink of an eye, and sometimes disappear just as quickly. Now you see them, now you don’t. No wonder the ancients thought they were germinated by thunderbolts: they don’t seem to grow out of the ground so much as to pop out of thin air. And now we know that the mushrooms that do show up above the surface are themselves just transient representatives of a... -
Offline Archive
Delusions of Normality
Sanity, Drugs, Sex, Money and Belief in AmericaRead moreSanity, Drugs, Sex, Money and Belief in America
J.P. Harpignies is one of my favorite people. I met him in New York in the early 90s when he invited me to come give a talk on Philip K. Dick at the New York Open Center, where he worked on making the New Age seminar programming there as interesting and edgy as possible. This talk helped launch my ship, the HMS Underground Esoterica, and I will never forgive him for that. J.P. also helped a young, heady and anxious... -
Esoterica
Meddling with Wizards
Occult LARead moreOccult LA
I had a fine time in LA this week. In addition to an excellent meal at the Elf Café and a delicious afternoon in Huntington Gardens, my talk at the Philosophical Research Society was the best presentation of The Visionary State material I have done. The “Occult Los Angeles” film lectures I organized at the Silent Movie Theatre also went down like a fine absinthe. We sold out one show, decided to add a 10:30 performance, and sold that out... -
Music
Manooghi Hi
East meets West and swap clothesRead moreEast meets West and swap clothes
Probably the first rocker to embrace South Asian sounds in public was George Harrison, who discovered the sitar on the set of Help!, added the instrument’s resonant timbres to “Norwegian Wood,” and famously went Krishna on the second side of Sgt. Peppers. But the first cat in London to have a sitar was actually Jimmy Page. Although he couldn’t play the instrument very well (neither could George), Page’s dabbling suggests to my hopelessly romantic Orientalist mind a lost world of... -
Articles and Essays
Hölderlin’s Odes and Elegies
Translated by Nick HoffRead moreTranslated by Nick Hoff
This morning, as I sat on my zafu for a half hour of still and incensed spacetime, I felt a rush of radiance infuse my being, as if my mind had just turned the corner into a momentary clearing of the inner dreck. It took but a moment to realize that it was simply the sun burning through a cloud and bouncing its light against the blank wall my window faces, rays that in turn warmed my half-closed eyelids. A... -
Offline Archive
Pantheacon 2009
A West Coast Neopagan gatheringRead moreA West Coast Neopagan gathering
Last weekend, J and I spent a marvelously rainy few days visiting Pantheacon, a large pagan/magick gathering held every February in an ancient, moss-encrusted tower keep in San Jose called the Doubletree Inn, which lies on the jasmine-scented banks of the 101 freeway, surrounded by the standing stones of office parks. Many moons ago, I got moderately deep into the East Coast pagan scene, though more as a participant-observer than a full-on practitioner. Since then, I have drifted away from... -
Offline Archive
John Law’s short stories
The Space BetweenRead moreThe Space Between
John Law is a tradesman and a prankster and a congenial mustachioed fellow who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His most famous legacy to date has been Burning Man, an event he co-founded and helped shape as much as anyone, and whose transport to the Black Rock Desert in 1990 he helped facilitate. But Law turned his back on the dusty Mad Max hoedown in 1996 after disagreeing with Larry Harvey about the direction of the event. His... -
Diary
Vegas Baby
Broken Dream MachinesRead moreBroken Dream Machines
I’ve been to Vegas four or five times in my life, and most of the time it takes about two hours before I’m totally depressed, hollowed out and captured by the bardo of cheese and loss that lurks beneath the blinky neon surface of the American Dream. This was not the case about my trip last week, however, though the hungry ghosts were everywhere afoot. This time I managed to enjoy the glittery void, to appreciate the histories of enchantment... -
Moving Pictures
The Alchemical Dream
Esoteric PoliticsRead moreEsoteric Politics
Sometime around 1996, the psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna set off to Europe with a small film crew in order to make a movie about a poignant and esoteric period of European history that the great scholar Frances Yates dubbed “the Rosicrucian Enlightenment.” The directors of the project, which did not go much beyond this initial jaunt, were Sheldon Rochlin and his wife Maxine, filmmakers and owners of Mystic Fire Video. McKenna died in 2000 and Rochlin followed him two years... -
Articles and Essays
Welcome to Mars
Ken Hollings' hallucinates the history of the late 40s and 50sRead moreKen Hollings' hallucinates the history of the late 40s and 50s
The following is the foreword to Ken Hollings' terrific recent book Welcome to Mars. A hidden history of the postwar imaginary, Hollings' book unearths the circuits of technology and consciousness that still shape our world: UFOs, psychoactives, cybernetics, interior design, military tech, cinema. Hollings is an ace researcher, but the way he compiles his material is even better: a dense but delicious fever dream of historical and mythic correspondences. It's got pretty black and white pictures too. ** The year... -
Articles and Essays
All Known Metal Bands
Howling MoreRead moreHowling More
This has been a media-centric holiday shopping season, meaning that I mostly stuck to gifting books, DVDs, and music. By far the most sparkling item I stumbled across during the hunt was Dan Nelson’s All Known Metal Bands, a smart, gorgeous, and exotic object that achieves the ideal of all metal discourse: a loving but ambivalent mixture of power and perversity, the heavy and the ridiculous, high brow and low. The concept is strong, and perfectly executed: Palmer collected the... -
Mind and Philosophy
Slow Down
Unfasttracking the futureRead moreUnfasttracking the future
You can hardly blame anyone for feeling the fear and panic that helped drive last October’s near financial meltdown. Scanning the headlines or the newsfeeds, our eyes greeted a steady pulse of bummer lingo. “Global Recession.” “Great Depression.” “Financial Collapse.” But there was another phrase I kept stumbling across, less apocalyptic certainly but still delivered with a grim fatalism, that struck me differently. The economy, we were warned, was showing signs of a significant slowdown. Slowdown? I don’t know about... -
Offline Archive
Toward 2012
Perspectives on the Next AgeRead morePerspectives on the Next Age
I don’t spend much time online visiting the various go-to countercultural sites. One exception is Reality Sandwich, an ongoing experiment in grass-roots group bloggery that covers alternative spirituality, psychedelic culture, modern sex, and a grab-bag of edgier “shit coming down” takes on the transformations underway in community, economy, health, and ecology. My favorite thing about the site, which sometimes posts stuff I write on here on Techgnosis, is the balance it strikes between the “bottom up” force of young turks... -
Art and Design
Terence McKenna’s Butterflies
Klea McKenna's The Butterfly HunterRead moreKlea McKenna's The Butterfly Hunter
The smartest thing I did when I interviewed the mushroom bard Terence McKenna shortly before his death in 2000 was to ask this inveterate collector of exotica to tell me about his most precious objects. Here is what I wrote for the subsequent Wired profile: An altar lies on top of a cabinet over which hangs a frightening old Tibetan tangka. With McKenna at my side, the altar's objects are like icons in a computer game: Click and a story... -
Media
The Imagination is What We Are
Beneath the Teaching TreeRead moreBeneath the Teaching Tree
Last June, I joined entheo-poet Dale Pendell, his bookmaker wife Laura, my oneironaut wife Jennifer Dumpert, and UC Berkeley prof David Presti for an excellent weekend workshop at the Ojai Foundation. The weekend, which was organized by my good pal Tom Lane, was devoted to Visionary Practice. We talked a lot beneath the gnarled majesty of the institute's teaching tree, but also pounded on drums and drank calea zacatechichi liquor and invoked the power of the condor. If you weren't... -
Esoterica
Astral Organics
A Cow Jumped Over the MoonRead moreA Cow Jumped Over the Moon
A decade or so ago, I was spending a lot of time at a Northern California Zen Center that also trained organic farmers. One day I was talking to this one fellow about the difference between organic and Biodynamic farming, and he explained that, in addition to various techniques of crop rotation and pest control, Biodynamic farmers track the positions of the moon and other planets so as to time their planting and harvesting according to astrological conditions. Woah. Even... -
Offline Archive
Algerian Proto-Rai
North Afro-pop from the 70sRead moreNorth Afro-pop from the 70s
I always get something out of listening to the records released by Sublime Frequencies, the outsider world music label spearheaded by former Sun City Girl Alan Bishop. Even the records I don’t particularly enjoy listening to—and there are a few—always expand my world. These releases have also taken a vague suspicion of mine and congealed it into conviction. The suspicion is that, outside of self-consciously traditional styles, the freshest and most interesting era for recordings of popular music outside the... -
Esoterica
Voices Carry: Jack Spicer
My vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack SpicerRead moreMy vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
In the summer of 1965, the poet Robin Blaser discovered his friend Jack Spicer lying comatose in the poverty ward at San Francisco General. The forty-year-old Spicer had passed out drunk in the elevator of his North Beach flat a few days before and was wheeled in, without ID, in a torn and befouled suit. When an attending doctor suggested to Blaser that Spicer was just your typical middle-aged alcoholic, Blaser grabbed the fellow’s shirt: “You’re talking about a major... -
Music
The Blithe Sons
A Memory in a Dark RoomRead moreA Memory in a Dark Room
I was most happy to have received the Blithe Son’s The Great Orthochromatic Wheel on vinyl, not only because I love the musical equivalent of hardback books, but because the experimental acoustic act is so deeply analog in attitude and atmosphere. It also allows me to describe the moment on the first side where the Bay Area duo’s beautiful and hazy improv drone-trance—here woven from a rag tag clutch of instruments including plucked guitars, zithers, bells, and the wheezily wonderful... -
Articles and Essays
John Giorno’s poetry
Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962-2007Read moreSubduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962-2007
Until recently, John Giorno cut only the vaguest of profiles in my countercultural imagination. I knew he was an old school bohemian Buddhist guy who lived in lower Manhattan, occupying a loft above the famous bunker once inhabited by William Burroughs. I knew Giorno had something to do with poetry and music and performance, but that was mostly based on the John Giorno Poetry System record I bought long ago with Laurie Anderson and Burroughs on it. Long ago I... -
Articles and Essays
The Hashish Eater
The witchery of wordsRead moreThe witchery of words
When I was a strange young teen, I wrote ornate and old-fashioned poems haunted by images of demons, wizard scrolls, and implacable fortresses. Matthew Greenfield, a sophisticated chap I knew at college who later became a professor of English, was guilty of a similar sin, which he called “Dungeons and Dragons poetry.” Though I didn’t play much D&D, I did read a lot of weird fantasy stuff from Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, and, of course, H.P. Lovecraft.... -
Articles and Essays
Why Mrs. Blake Cried
Tantric visionaries in Georgian LondonRead moreTantric visionaries in Georgian London
Like a lot of folks drawn with almost equal power towards spirituality and the delights of the senses, I count William Blake as a hero and mentor. When an older chick in a Unitarian Youth Group I ran with turned me on to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in high school, my already dangerously expanded mind was thoroughly blown with Blake’s carnal theosophy, raging humor, and imaginal fire. The fact that I studied the longer and even wackier prophetic... -
Subcultures
Trance Planet
The Analog Life, Arthur issue 31Read moreThe Analog Life, Arthur issue 31
Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal—This August, around 25,000 people hauled their kit and caboodle down a long hot narrow road in the middle of the Portuguese nowhere to camp like migrants along the shores of a lake not far from the border with Spain. They made the trek to attend Boom, a biannual electronic dance music festival that has grown into a large and successful event that eschews corporate sponsorship and keeps its roots in the underground alive. All sorts attend, but the... -
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Mahler on Gaia
MTT's "Das Lied von der Erde"Read moreMTT's "Das Lied von der Erde"
When I was a tyke, my mom used to play me classical records like Peter and the Wolf, the 1812 Overture, and Scheherazade, to which I possibly owe my bottomless and problematic love of aesthetic Orientalism. But the first classical composer I turned onto as a serious music head in my late teens was Gustav Mahler. My apprenticeship began with the grim hammer blow of the Sixth symphony, delivered by the fell hand of Herbert von Karajan. The anxious, death-haunted... -
Moving Pictures
Phase IV
You are looking at the hive mindRead moreYou are looking at the hive mind
The Pilkdown Man just wrote me from England, asking me to pick him a DVD that just came out this year and for some peculiar reason involving Best Buy is unavailable across the pond. Phase IV is a high-concept 1974 SF film about a rapidly evolved ant society. Undemanding in a B-movie way, the film is intelligently plotted, magically shot, and imaginatively designed, and shimmers with radiant pulp prophecy. Along with Silent Running and THX 1138, Phase IV nails that... -
Religions and Spirits
Captain Jack’s Stronghold
Ghost DancingRead moreGhost Dancing
One passageway into the sometimes nebulous topic of psychogeography is to remember that landscape is always haunted. Ghosts cling to the folds and vessels of earth and architecture—it is houses that we say are haunted, not texts or minds or flowing rivers. I make no claims as to what exactly these spectres are, whether metaphysical entities or traces of human consciousness or narratives that shape perception. But many of us have encountered land features and structures that are so layered... -
Diary
Lava Beds
Tubes and SignsRead moreTubes and Signs
I first heard about California’s Lava Beds National Monument from a deeply traveled tantrika who proclaimed the desolate, faraway region east of Mount Shasta one of her favorite spots on the planet. Volcanism is always cool, but the area’s strange and evocative terran formations are also the site of California’s one major Indian war, fought when Captain Jack and a tribe of Modocs held off the US army for months in a protracted, bloody siege. More than most National Monuments,... -
Articles and Essays
Bill Hicks
Goat Boy returnsRead moreGoat Boy returns
My pal TJ turned me on to the comic Bill Hicks a number of years ago. Like Hicks, TJ was a sarcastic funlover from Texas, and he showed me a faux ninja movie that Hicks made back when he was a teenager already beginning a stand-up career. It was terribly hilarious. Hicks spent much of the rest of his life on the road, disguising brutal political diatribes and philosophical explorations—both rationalistic and psychedelic—as comedy. Though Hicks appeared frequently on Late... -
Offline Archive
Wake Up and Dream
A talk at Burning Man 2008Read moreA talk at Burning Man 2008
Here is a half-hour recording of a talk I gave this year at Shift camp on the year's theme of Dream. (Actually, it was the American Dream, but I went for the dream part.) I had given another version of the same talk a few weeks earlier at Boom in Portugal, but this one, which also had the feature of being recorded, was better. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the lavalier mic together so the sound quality is not great, and... -
Articles and Essays
Maurice Nicoll’s Gurdjieffean Gospels
The New Man and the MarkRead moreThe New Man and the Mark
There are a number of great books that have emerged from the stream of modernist mysticism initiated by the wiley Gurdjieff and his heady Russian student Ouspensky, not the least of which is Ouspensky’s own indispensky-able In Search of the Miraculous. But, if you don’t count Rene Daumal, my favorite Gurdjieffean writer has to be Maurice Nicoll, the British student of Ouspensky known for a six-volume commentary on G & O that I haven’t even cracked yet. Nicoll was also... -
Subcultures
Burning Man 2008
Temples and Portals and Bloody MariesRead moreTemples and Portals and Bloody Maries
BLACK ROCK CITY, NV. This year was my—cough—twelfth Burning Man, and my time there was, for once, dominated by continuity rather than novelty. With some important exceptions, I was drawn less to plunge into new experiences than to enjoy and re-affirm the people and places that already had a claim on my heart and my imagination. My most transformative and exquisite moments nearly all took place with people and within confines I was basically familiar with—which is another way of... -
Articles and Essays, Esoterica
Jodorowsky’s Spiritual Memoir
On koans and rotting dogsRead moreOn koans and rotting dogs
A friend recently asked me if I though Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain was a “good” movie, and I had to answer that, in the case of this surreal mythopoetic masterwork, the usual good/bad categorization does not apply. The film is truly beyond category; or rather, it is “terribly good.” While the first half of the movie—which was definitively released on DVD within the last year—is perhaps the greatest sustained expression of visionary psychedelic filmmaking ever, I can understand why people... -
Subcultures
Boom Festival 2008
Dancing on liminal groundRead moreDancing on liminal ground
Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal: This year’s Boom festival compelled at least 25,000 people to make the long trek to a hot and dusty corner of Portugal near the Spanish border, where they decamped along the shores of a large lake whose presence mitigated the ferocity of the sun and the sear environs. The bi-annual festival has been running for over a decade, and it has long been recognized as one of the more underground and intentional of the larger festivals devoted to... -
Offline Archive
The Power of Nightmares
Wef's Scary List from BeebRead moreWef's Scary List from Beeb
I have had strong nightmares off and on throughout my life, and rather than fear them, I have come to enjoy their ingenuity and emotional power. I remember one dream from long ago that ended with the site of a rotten corpse hanging from a lonely gibbet in some godforsaken desert, and what stayed with me was not the image but the overwhelmingly intense emotion of nausea and existential distress that overcame me in the dream. I woke up wondering:... -
Moving Pictures
FLicKeR
Dreaming the MachineRead moreDreaming the Machine
Around the turn of the millennium, the nightscape of the Burning Man festival looked a museum of phantasmagoric technologies, and especially engines of flicker, from xoetropes to cinema to laser light shows to huge, kerosene-fueled bonfires, fire being the old ones' TV. For years one cushion-bedecked tent was outfitted with a tall, rapidly spinning cylinder whose stacks of evenly spaced holes created a festival of flicker creating as many trip flicks in the brains of the prone Burners as there... -
Offline Archive
The Lumerians
San Francisco psych-rockRead moreSan Francisco psych-rock
The idea of a long-lost sunken continent called Lemuria first emerged as a scientific concept in the nineteenth century, when natural historians tried to explain the uneven distribution of lemur fossils across Africa and the East. But it did not take long for the concept—which plate tectonics later rendered unnecessary—to drift into the occult imaginary. According to the famed Theosophical trickster Madame Blavatasky—not to mention, I should fess, Wikipedia—Lemuria had been ruled by the hermaphroditic, egg-laying, seven-foot-tall witless mystics who... -
Articles and Essays
Blade Runner Scarecrows
Zizek meets HawthorneRead moreZizek meets Hawthorne
In one of my favorite passages from the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the slovenly Lacanian points to the difference between what Lacan called “the subject of enunciation” and the “subject of the enunciated.” The basic idea is that there is a yawning gap between every thing we can say about who we are and the empty, mute site from which such statements are launched. The positive “me” that I can describe and experience as a particular person with particular desires, thoughts,... -
Technoculture
Archive Fever
The Analog LifeRead moreThe Analog Life
Last month Paul Miller—the avant-garde DJ, musician and theorist who always appends his name with “aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid”—finally released a collection of essays he has been editing for ages on digital and sampling culture, called Sound Unbound. It’s a cool book, and I’m not surprised. I first met Paul at the Village Voice in the early 90s, when I recognized the voodoo vévé for Legba that appeared on one of his stickers. Over the years, his DJ... -
Articles and Essays
G.K. Chesterton
Anarchists, beer, and the man in the moonRead moreAnarchists, beer, and the man in the moon
Prompted by Adam Gopnik’s insightful if somewhat troubled New Yorker profile of the great (and enormous) G.K. Chesterton, and my own recent return, with enormous pleasure, to the Victorian/Edwardian fantasy fiction of Machen, Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson, I finally sat down and gobbled up Chesterton’s classic metaphysical and political romp, The Man Who Was Thursday. And what a romp it was—a cheery antimodern screed wrapped up in a Kafkaesque detective yarn disguised as a slapstick cartoon and topped with... -
Esoterica
Lachman on Ouspensky
In Search of P.D. OuspenskyRead moreIn Search of P.D. Ouspensky
Since the 2001 publication of Turn Off Your Mind, his prickly revisionist history of the dark side of the spiritual Sixties, former Blondie bassist Gary Lachman has become an increasingly prolific engine of literate, well-written, and clear-headed books about esoteric history and “occulture.” Having read his Steiner bio a couple months ago and enjoyed it, I just gobbled up his 2004 biography In Search of P.D. Ouspensky: The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjieff. It is a great tale, very... -
Music
Halflife iPod
Zombie radioRead moreZombie radio
Recent developments with my iPod have once again hammered home to me how transformations in the technology of recorded music continue to shape and alter our sense of music, of listening, even of our selves. My Mom bought me my first iPod a few years ago: a 60 gig monster designed to hold photos as well as tunes. The white unit, with a grey screen, is about as thick as a deck of cards and has a nice heft in... -
Articles and Essays
Marsupial
Our Mother for the Time BeingRead moreOur Mother for the Time Being
I get a fair amount of stuff in the mail, mostly books and records, which is nice because when I come home from a discouraging day there is usually a little pile of Christmas presents wrapped in brown cardboard at my door. Most of the time, of course, the thrill of anticipation is more pleasurable than the discovery phase. Not so the other day, when I unwrapped the kind gift of Marsupial: Our Mother for the Time Being, the new... -
Music
Masaki Batoh and Helena Espvall
Neofolk improv from two psych innovators
Read moreNeofolk improv from two psych innovators
Masaki Batoh and Helena Espvall hail from two of the more notable acts in the contemporary spectrum of psych-folk, he as vocalist and leader of Japan’s sacred freaks Ghost, and she as the cellist in Philadelphia-based spectral folk rock act Espers. Their new self-titled collaboration opens with a strange and wheezy hurdy-gurdy invocation, and proceeds to an utterly lovely series of neofolk songs and improvisations that simultaneously shake the tree of time and eat its fruit in the here and... -
Moving Pictures
Occult LA
Watching SoCal's Mind ExpandRead moreWatching SoCal's Mind Expand
Last Sunday night I curated a set of films for the Silent Movie Theatre, an excellent edge-dwelling film palace that lies in the Fairfax district in LA, just down the block from Canter's Deli and their deadly delicious pastrami sandwiches and chocolate horns. The program was called "Occult LA," and it was a smash success. Scores of Angelino freaks, wizards, hepcats, and students of the mysteries gathered for a program of historical talks and experimental shorts devoted to LA's magickal... -
Music
Dennis Wilson
Pacific Ocean Blue and BambuRead morePacific Ocean Blue and Bambu
Dennis Wilson was the only Beach Boy who actually surfed, but as their occasional drummer (better players replaced him on the albums) didn’t do much more than look ruggedly handsome on stage until the late '60s, when he started writing sad and beautiful songs for the Boys' albums. In 1977, six years before he drunkenly drowned in its namesake waters, Wilson released Pacific Ocean Blue, a moody, groovy, and immensely appealing solo album. Dennis had his brother Brian’s gift for... -
Articles and Essays
The Dying Earth
Dungeons & DatabasesRead moreDungeons & Databases
My e-pal Elizabeth Hand recently mentioned that she was rereading Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth and was going to contribute something to a forthcoming volume about this masterwork of modern fantasy. Since I’ve read other Vance books and liked them, and was hungry for some juicy imaginal fare, I decided to finally read it myself. I dug out an old crumbly paperback with yellow pages, tiny print, and a thoroughly cracked spine. Though I don’t enjoy reading these sort of... -
Offline Archive
Visionary Hollywood tour
Reflections of a bus tour leader
Read moreReflections of a bus tour leader
Ever since I put together The Visionary State, my book about sacred sites and histories in California, I have had a yen to lead a crew of folks to some of my favorite places and to introduce themto the joys of spiritual tourism, California-style. When I found out that Kim Cooper--a 33 1/3 book author whom I met through a secret society--also ran an alternative bus tour business called Esotouric in LA, the experiment became inevitable. Usually Kim and her... -
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Stebmo
Groovy instrumental music from keyboardist Steve Moore
Read moreGroovy instrumental music from keyboardist Steve Moore
I love it when music not only confounds my expectations, but exceeds them. Stebmo is the debut album from Steve Moore, a pianist and composer who has performed with Earth and the even heavier sunnO))), and it is out on the stoner rock label Southern Lord. I knew Moore was a bit of a jazzbo too, and has played with Sufjen Stevens, but I still expected art-damaged sturm und drang. But what I found instead was one of the most... -
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The Invisible Forest
Antero Alli's latest filmRead moreAntero Alli's latest film
Like a lot of heads, I first encountered the Finish wizard Antero Alli through his playful, prophetic, and handy books. If you are looking for a real-deal reality programming manual with just the right amount of Discordian spice, you can hardly do better than his classic debut, AngelTech. Later books cover postmodern archetypes, ritual dynamics, and the implications of Leary’s 8-circuit model, still one of the most productive post-occult psycho-cosmologies out there. Ali is also a professional astrologer, the kind... -
Moving Pictures
Cocksucker Blues
Robert Frank's Rolling Stones slop-docRead moreRobert Frank's Rolling Stones slop-doc
Finally got a chance to see Cocksucker Blues, photographer Robert Frank’s rarely-seen spooge doc on the Rolling Stones during their 1972 American tour. I went on craigslist to sell some Grateful Dead paraphernalia and a grey market DVD had just been posted and it was only twelve bucks and seemed like a sign so I got it. I’ve been on a Stones kick lately, re-affirming my great love for the great records, even as I become more convinced that their... -
Moving Pictures
Mock Up on Mu
Craig Baldwin's latestRead moreCraig Baldwin's latest
Collage filmmaker Craig Baldwin’s new movie, Mock Up on Mu, is a madcap hyper-meditation on magick and mind control that takes place in a hallucinogenic California spliced together, literally, from B-movies, self-help infomercials, UFO cable access shows, and aerospace promo films. Actually Mock Up on Mu is about a lot of things, too many probably, but the core story it tells—or rather, the story it allegorizes into a SciFi agitprop ADD fantasy—is one of the core narratives of the California... -
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Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana
A Brief History of the Twentieth CenturyRead moreA Brief History of the Twentieth Century
The last time I saw Dale Pendell, we got together to plan a weekend workshop that we are doing at the Ojai Foundation with some other cronies. Dale had just gotten back from the Czech Republic, where his hosts had pressed upon him the need to read Patrik Ouředník's Europeana: A Brief History Of The Twentieth Century, which Dale recommended and which I purchased immediately. It came out a couple of years ago in English, and it's a gas. Grim,... -
Diary
Brittany, Stoned
Breton Megaliths and parish closesRead moreBreton Megaliths and parish closes
Brittany, the northwestern départment of France much beloved of French tourists, is one of those enchanted places that form a Celtica countercurrent to the national maps of Europe, bridging the UK cluster of Cornwall, Ireland, and Scotland with Galicia to the south: a webwork of faded faerie lore, paganish Christianity, nasal pipe music, and hard cider (at least in Cornwall and Brittany). As in the UK, the province is also littered with ancient Neolithic structures. I didn’t have my shit... -
Moving Pictures
Tube Toss
Digital vs Analog TVRead moreDigital vs Analog TV
Last month I ditched my old 17-inch Sanyo TV and bought a big flat acronym—a Samsung LNT2653H LCD HDTV to be precise. My main motivation was visual hedonism. Though I don’t watch a ton of movies, I am something of a cineaste, having gone to college in the days when a decent sized campus like ours might boast a dozen film societies. Until recently, I fed my Janus jones in repertory cinemas, while at home I watched lighter fare—B movies... -
Art and Design, Esoterica
Managing Superstition
The Shroud versus the CodeRead moreThe Shroud versus the Code
When I am in Europe I love visiting churches. They are portals into a resplendent and disturbing imagination, their architecture is fascinating and constantly varying, and, best of all in times like ours, they are almost always free. I visited a lot of churches in my brief stay in Paris—including La Trinité, where the great Messiaen was organist for over sixty years, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an atmospheric and often profound mélange of Romanesque, Early Gothic, and old school Merovingian stuff that... -
Offline Archive
Zachary Lazar’s Sway
Anger, the Stones, and CharlieRead moreAnger, the Stones, and Charlie
Zachary Lazar is one of those fiction writers you might come across in the New Yorker and—if you are anything like me—rapidly flip by on your way to the critics. As the jacket flap of his recent novel Sway is happy to tell us, the guy graduated from Brown and won a prize at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which is one of the main pedagogical engines of contemporary literary fiction. And his prose reflects some distinct Iowa predilections, especially in... -
Diary
Catacombs
Paris By Eternal NightRead moreParis By Eternal Night
On the eve of flying to France, I asked my pal Layil, who is a refugee from the darkside vampire scenes of New York city and Barcelona, if she knew any night crawlers in Paris who could get me into the catacombs. She said she would ask a cerain Father Sebastian, an old crony who now lives in Paris, but I never heard anything more about it. Tant pis, I thought, never really figuring I'd be able to get into... -
Offline Archive
Packing my Library
Bringing books to ParisRead moreBringing books to Paris
Actually all I was doing was packing for a two-week trip to Paris. I don’t like packing. I simultaneously want to be prepared for every contingency and to reduce my stuff to a clean, nomadic minimum. But the real bear, a lot of the time anyway, is the books. For this last round, I’d say I devoted nearly half of my time to weighing and shuffling and reconsidering the handful of novels and histories, criticism and pulp that would join... -
Mind and Philosophy
Bicameral Now!
The return of Julian JaynesRead moreThe return of Julian Jaynes
Tucson, Arizona. The bi-annual conference Toward a Science of Consciousness takes place this year in a downtown conference center pleasantly landscaped with palm trees, barrel cactus, bubbling fountains, and Dr. Seuss sorta adobe. The gathering draws philosophers, neuroscientists, psychonauts, headshrinkers, and hardcore nerds in tie-dye. A large percentage of these are characters are graying white men, and a significant percentage of these have pony tails. There are also some New Age ladies and a couple guys who look like bikers,... -
Diary
Lotusland
Ganna Walska's fantastic gardenRead moreGanna Walska's fantastic garden
When I was writing The Visionary State, my book about alternative spirituality in California, I had the opportunity (and the excuse) to visit scores of sacred and eccentric sites in the state. It often seemed that the more sites I visited and researched, however, the more sites I discovered, so the pilgrimage became endless, like all pilgrimages perhaps. Last week I got to check off another box by visiting the lavish and peculiar gardens of Lotusland with my folks. The... -
Music
Where it Starts Getting Sweepy
Talking with Pat Gubler about improv and cherry treesRead moreTalking with Pat Gubler about improv and cherry trees
I first time I heard PG Six’s solo album, Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites, I had that spooky, rare, and altogether priceless sense that the artist behind the music—the singer and multi-instrumentalist Pat Gubler—had somehow tapped directly into my soul. Actually that’s not quite right—a lot of the time I’m not sure I have a soul. Maybe it’s just a neurochemical fiction, right? So it’s more like the music reminded me what having a soul feels like, at least for... -
Offline Archive
The Entrance Band
Ferocious psych trioRead moreFerocious psych trio
Some nights ago I swung by San Francisco's Café Du Nord to catch the Entrance Band, a psychedelic trio from LA that is riding a wave equally composed of fuzz and buzz. It was the Noise Pop festival, and the crowd was full of groovy twentysomethings moving and shaking, in denim and suits and skirts, with thin-brimmed fedoras making a particularly notable showing. I hunkered down in front of the stage with my pint of bitter, chatting with bearded young... -
Articles and Essays
Bardo Frontier
Rudy Wurlitzer's Dharma WesternRead moreRudy Wurlitzer's Dharma Western
The Drop Edge of Yonder, Rudy Wurlitzer’s first novel in over twenty years, may be the most hallucinogenic western you’ll ever catch in the movie house of your mind’s eye. Indeed, the novel is so saturated with cinema that its considerable pleasures may, I fear, demand from the reader a love or at least admiration for that mightiest and most hackneyed of film genres. For though Drop Edge continues the withering dissection of personal identity that Wurlitzer began with his... -
Offline Archive
The Imaginal Earth
The Nature of the ImaginationRead moreThe Nature of the Imagination
I have noticed over the last few years that the quality of my talks, and especially the many spontaneous bits, seem to be in direct proportion to the engagement and interest of the crowd. It's like jazz or something. So for my talk at Palenque Norte at last summer's Green-themed Burning Man fest, I decided to not prepare at all beyond setting a title, attacking a problem I feel unresolved about, and opening my mind on my bike ride over.... -
Music
Ronin on the Prowl
Funk and ArchitectureRead moreFunk and Architecture
This Friday, Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin is finishing their American tour at San Francisco’s acoustically delicious Yerba Buena Center. I’m got two tickets and I’m psyched, far more than I usually am these days, and especially with an act I’ve never before seen live. I was going to wait and write about the show and the album together, but ECM’s friendly and excellently named Tina Pelikan asked me to pump the performance for all you locals, so here’s the pump. Nik... -
Mind and Philosophy
The Omega Network
A Teilhard Techgnosis remixRead moreA Teilhard Techgnosis remix
Last December, Pascal Rousseau, a French art historian with a fun philosophical name, asked me to contribute something techngnostic for the issue of Palais de Tokyo's Palais magazine he was guest-editing. So I remixed a section of Techgnosis that dealt with Teilhard de Chardin and the concept of the noosphere, looked at from the perspective of our growing network society. The issue, no. 5, which fans of Strange Attractor and other cultural forteana will love, is inspired by the work... -
Articles and Essays
Meta-Mughal
"The Shelter of the World"Read more"The Shelter of the World"
I have been a New Yorker subscriber for years, and I love literature. But these two facts have rarely interacted with much felicity. Like a lot of subscribers I know of, and tons more I have my suspicions about, I face your average New Yorker offering of fiction with a sullen, implacable blankness, an anticipation of deep tedium that congeals into an unmoved mover who moves right along into the critical essays. My antipathy is compounded by my deep sense... -
Art and Design
Escape into Real Life
How To Travel Back HomeRead moreHow To Travel Back Home
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot On a recent walk to my writing lair, I passed this bus kiosk, taken up lately with an ad for the touristic pleasures of Mexico. Now I love crumbly old pyramids arrayed beneath a clear blue sky as much as the next gringo, but what struck me was the tag... -
Diary5 min
Liking It, As Is
Catching Shakespeare at the cuspRead moreCatching Shakespeare at the cusp
Last spring, with the last few weeks of my thirties draining away, I drove back alone to San Francisco from a music conference in Seattle, where I had given a talk on The Tower Recordings and the paradoxes of experimental folk music. I crashed with some friends in Portland, and left early in the morning so that I could catch a Shakespeare play in Ashland that afternoon. It was a pretty attractive drive, especially once I left I-5’s rank papermill... -
Music
Northern Songs
Sequentia's Eddic MusicRead moreSequentia's Eddic Music
Perhaps the most powerfully enchanted literary source for old-school European paganism is a 13th century Icelandic manuscript called the Codex Regius, which contains a group of poems known as the The Poetic Edda. The Icelanders were tucked away in the attic of the world, and though they converted to Christianity around 1000—voluntarily, and for largely diplomatic reasons—the old ways held on, albeit transformed, and made an unusually direct impression, here and elsewhere, on the island’s literary corpus. Of course, a... -
Articles and Essays
Romantic Religion
Creative Imagination and the InklingsRead moreCreative Imagination and the Inklings
I was raised without belief, but I’ve always been attracted to religions, to the luminous icons, the bric-a-brac of ritual, the lore, the architecture, the mysterious emotions of passionate believers. For quite a while I considered myself a seeker, and lodged time in Zen monasteries, Hare Krishna temples, New Age retreat centers, shamanic circles and, when I was much younger, a Bible study led by a fiery born-again surfer. But I am an unredeemably independent mind, too readily drawn to... -
Psychedelics
The Psychedelic Reader
A new introduction (2007)Read moreA new introduction (2007)
The Psychedelic Reader is a time capsule, a message in a bottle—or better yet, a fistful of messages, rolled up tight like reefers and slipped into small vials labeled Sandoz LSD-25. Like those vials, the articles come from another time: the middle of the 1960s, the last span of time in modern history when psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and DMT were studied, and consumed, legally in the West. The psychonauts whose writings are contained within these pages—psychologists, ethnobotanists, biologists, poets,... -
Offline Archive
Horses Brawl
Put that in yr cumhorn and smoke it!Read morePut that in yr cumhorn and smoke it!
I first got wind of the feisty sorta early music duo Horses Brawl on emusic, which is my favorite of the new-fangled MP3 music delivery systems. Admittedly I have yet to try Rhapsody, but I doubt I’ll really be able to make the shift from recordings as possessions to recordings as ether-streams siphoned from the data cloud. I like emusic because the interface is pretty swell, the paid reviewers are solid, and my friend Evan is really obsessive and has... -
Offline Archive
Digital Dharma
Steven Vedro's technomystic handbookRead moreSteven Vedro's technomystic handbook
Ten years ago, I came out with the first edition of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Information Age, which for its novelty alone still stands as probably the most “important” thing I’ve written. Lots of things have happened in the last decade to the media ecologies I looked at back then, but I am happy to say that, though the book was written at the height of the dot.com mania (which also explained the advance that allowed me... -
Music
Semper Dowland
The Mopey Pleasures of John DowlandRead moreThe Mopey Pleasures of John Dowland
When I listen to John Dowland, I don’t just hear a great English lutenist and composer of the late Renaissance/early modern period. I also hear the first singer-songwriter, the godfather of Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and Elliott Smith. Dowland wrote for the lute, for one thing, that feathery godfather of the guitar, but the real link is the creative and self-cherished melancholy that saturates songs like “I saw my Lady weep,” “Come, heavy sleep,” and the killer “In darkness let... -
Articles and Essays
The Circus of Dr. Lao
Charles Finney's masterpiece of American fantasyRead moreCharles Finney's masterpiece of American fantasy
So a couple semi-secret hermenauts I know recently said that one of their favorite fantasy novels was Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao, whose title and year of publication (1935) sent me to Amazon with alacrity. Though understandably obscure, the volume is in print from the Bison Frontiers of Imagination series, which features a number of more known (to me) heavies like David Lindsay, H.G. Wells, and M.P. Shiel. The new edition directly follows the original, so you get... -
Music
Sir Richard Bishop
The Arthur magazine interviewRead moreThe Arthur magazine interview
Superlatives can be lame, but Richard Bishop is one of the few post-punk guitarists who came of age in the 1980s to have achieved the incendiary prowess of a true Guitar God. Though largely unknown outside the underground, Bishop plays and improvises with an uncommon and original power. He can tantalize in a myriad of styles, he has a global juke box in his head, he can shatter the walls of sleep and chaos, and he can turn on a... -
Religions and Spirits
Mormons are Cool
The most cosmic American religionRead moreThe most cosmic American religion
I have been following, with great fascination, the controversy over Mitt Romney’s prominent membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is a really long-assed way of saying Mormons, which is what everybody else calls them and most of them call themselves. I am glad he made his speech, although I wasn’t so glad about the speech itself, which I think should have been more weirdness-forward. But I am happy the Mormons are getting a lot... -
Offline Archive
Fantastique Symphony
MTT doses the hall with BeliozRead moreMTT doses the hall with Belioz
I’ve been waiting to hear the Symphonie fantastique live for years, and last night, which happened to be the 177th anniversary of the piece’s first Paris performance, all the waiting was rewarded with a rousing and exquisite throw-down of Berlioz’s total zowie. Coming in the wake of Beethoven, that idiosyncratic shape-shifter bellowing the way from the classical to the Romantic eras, Berlioz' 1830 Symphonie fantastique is thoroughly, achingly Romantic, the first tortured, drug-addled, gothic, mystic, ironic, visionary symphony for a... -
Offline Archive
San Francisco Soundscapes
Sound art at Recombinant Media LabsRead moreSound art at Recombinant Media Labs
A fine San Francisco evening. Dressed in feather-mafia leather, J and I arrived at Recombinant Media Labs, a high-tech R&D and production house devoted to developing and implementing surround-sound and video installations. The place is run by Naut Human, a musician and mediatech avant-gardist who has been around San Francisco since the mid 70s, and since I have digging around to find out more about Tuxedomoon and punk-era San Francisco, we had a nice chat about the old days as... -
Diary
Diamond Solitaire
Washing Beets with GodRead moreWashing Beets with God
A little over a decade ago, I had a bona-fide, Grade A, no-shit “mystical” experience—or at least something that felt a hell of a lot like a mystical experience. I have never written about it before, don't talk about it much, but I’ve been thinking about it lately and thought I’d give it a shot here, ineffability and scare quotes and all. The deal went down, absurdly enough, during a month-long retreat at a Zen center in northern California; even... -
Articles and Essays
Mind the Gap
Jeff Warren's The Head TripRead moreJeff Warren's The Head Trip
Last summer I met Jeff Warren, a Canadian science writer and radio guy who was cruising around the West Coast talking to folks about consciousness. We had an amazing chat, which I intend to post as soon as I get the podcast flow going (where is the AV monkey of my dreams?). Jeff is my kinda guy: an experiential pragmatist in the William Jamesian mode, he is restlessly eclectic, deeply informed but pop, aggressively open to (and dissatisfied with) both... -
Diary
On the Road 3
Italy's hermetic gardensRead moreItaly's hermetic gardens
Now I don't want to sound like some misty-eyed American ready to pull up stakes and move to Tuscany and refurbish a villa with my bare hands and write a best-seller about gorging myself on pasta and squabbling with irritating but lovable Italian bureaucrats. But I loved my time in Italy a couple weeks ago. The place definitely passed the Circus Test, which is the basic measure of whether a circus is good: after the show is over, you want... -
Diary
On the Road 2
Rome's great pagan buildingRead moreRome's great pagan building
There are scores of amazing cities on this planet, but Rome is the one European urb I had yet to visit that really called me, and it called me, most of all, because of one building. The Pantheon is often called the most solidly preserved remnant of ancient pagan Roman architecture, and moreover a temple to a principal -- eclectic or synthetic depending on your leaning -- that has long attracted me: all gods. Everyone into the pool. Though the... -
Diary
On the Road 1
Wandervogelin' in BerlinRead moreWandervogelin' in Berlin
I woke up groggy as all hell yesterday after staying up til 6 am club-hopping in Berlin. Our small crew stuck around Mitte, avoiding (or being turned away from) the larger parties, and found ourselves grooving to strange, classic disco in a small, literally underground club painted to look like deep space and largely frequented by Asians. It wasn't as goofy as the Russian CCCR club we visited later, whose East German mid-century danceroom kitsch formed the perfect counterpoint to... -
Media
To the Best of Our Knowledge
Mapping the ImaginationRead moreMapping the Imagination
"The Visionary State" discusses the book and the state it covers. From Wisconsin's great public radio talk show, produced by Steve Paulson. -
Articles and Essays
The Green Knight Grins at You
Reading the Round Table taleRead moreReading the Round Table tale
Too many irons in the wire have gotten hot of late, which means even less time for pleasure reading. So when I turn to yummy books -- texts read for wonder and fascination more than useful information or the pressure to "keep up"I try to go short. Poems, short stories, comics, codices. It's the blip culture attitude, I admit, but applied to a pretty firm Gutenberg sensibility: what gives me the most genuinely literary bang for the buck in the... -
Moving Pictures
The Gaahl!
A black metal momentRead moreA black metal moment
For the last day and a half I've had this VBS TV video stuck in my head, and it's kinda cool and kinda creepy. I've been listening to tons of black metal lately, partly for research and partly for passion, and when I saw mention of the documentary True Norwegian Black Metal on a Wikipedia entry, I had to track it down. I haven't watched any VBS webeos, or whatever you call them, but I like Vice magazine in a... -
Subcultures
Burning Men, Part 2
Part Two: THE ORDER OF THINGSRead morePart Two: THE ORDER OF THINGS
On Monday night of this year's Burning Man festival, when Larry Harvey saw the figure he first built over twenty years ago burst into flame before its appointed time, the man's immediate reaction was laughter. A pure and perfect response. Harvey also noted that he laughed only after he knew that the fire was under control and that no one was apt to be hurt. (I'll be honest: I laughed without knowing if anyone had been injured.) Soon afterwards, Harvey... -
Subcultures
Burning Men
Part One: CHAOSMOSRead morePart One: CHAOSMOS
And so there you are, in a fireman's coat, hurling through the wee hours across a parched and dusty lakebed in a 1979 American LaFrance firetruck, a pumper from Danville Illinois named Sparky who occasionally spits gobs fire from a flamethrower mounted on the roof of the cab. This is no ordinary Monday night. Above you the rare shadow of the earth has morphed the full moon into a dusky half-burnt clementine that hangs there pendulous like some wandering orb... -
Technoculture
My Data Crime
Copyrights and CrimeRead moreCopyrights and Crime
Shortly after returning from Burning Man this last week, I hit the blobular button on my answering machine and heard the voice of a reporter who said she was from Billboard magazine. She wanted to talk to me about the Beirut advance leak that had apparently stirred up a flurry of email. I had no idea what she was talking about, and left a message for her to that effect. Then I checked my email and discovered a number of... -
Esoterica
Paracelsus in the World
Renaissance Magic and ScienceRead moreRenaissance Magic and Science
It's a rare treat to be able to trace an abiding intellectual obsession to a single moment in time. But so it is when I ponder my ongoing fascination with the occult fringes of science, and, more generally, with the anthropology of knowledge. It was senior year in high school, and for once I was paying attention to Mr. Grey, a physics teacher whose name I don't actually remember but whose entire being radiated the sort of officious banality my... -
Music
Nina Nastasia and Jim White
Listening to musicians listeningRead moreListening to musicians listening
I get a large number of promotional CDs, though thankfully fewer than the crateloads of crap that sailed my way over a decade ago, when I was an aggressive and hoarding rock critic. Believe me: it was no picnic obsessively sifting through grunge and hip hop back in the heyday of the CD, and I did it all for you. I still listen to almost everything, although that means I rarely get back to even the resonant recordings more than... -
Diary
My Day on Dartmoor
The author slogs through Britain's wettest summer in centuriesRead moreThe author slogs through Britain's wettest summer in centuries
During my recent water-logged but highly entertaining trip to the UK, where I spoke at the Glade music festival, played psych-rock guitar with Ragnagrok, and biked across London to visit William Blake's lucky-penny-strewn grave, I decided to spend a few days hiking and camping by myself in Dartmoor, which lies in the southwestern county of Devon. This lonely land of peat-bog and tors— hilltops generally crowned with enchanting piles of granite outcrop, like Pictish building blocks—is about the closest thing... -
Music
The Freaky Origins of Christian Rock
70s Christian rockRead more70s Christian rock
Next time you see some young folks flexing their subcultural muscle, take a closer look. Along with the baggy hoodies or the four-fin surfboards, you might catch a telltale sign of the Risen Lord: an ixthus fish tattoo or a T-shirt that looks like the wrapper for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups but says, “Jesus: Sweet Savior.” Traditionally, American fundamentalists resisted secular youth scenes and their sock hopping, sinful ways, but contemporary Christians believe that resistance is futile. Evangelist ministries and... -
Art and Design
The Oracle Complex
Delvin Solkinson's Oracle DeckRead moreDelvin Solkinson's Oracle Deck
In an earlier post about Jose Argüelles' prophetic calendar game Telektonon, I mentioned a crew of British Columbians I know -- an elvish tribe of galactivators and technomystics who reside, appropriately enough, in the vicinity of Mt. Elphinstone, a modest peak along Canada's kindly Sunshine Coast. I have encounter many glowing (and spectral) lights among this loose network—which is really just one node in a widespread, largely West Coast field of post-rave culture creators—and they have often inspired me with... -
Religions and Spirits
Amma’s Cosmic Squeeze
My journey into the arms of Amma the hugging saintRead moreMy journey into the arms of Amma the hugging saint
The amount of "skeptical" hostility directed towards this (IMO) very balanced piece was a stark lesson in the limitations of writing about religious culture in anxiously secular publications. The Mata Amritanandamayi Center is a cluster of gardens, ponds and institutional buildings nestled in the dry and rolling hills of Castro Valley, a rural area that lies about an hour east of San Francisco. For most of the year, it serves as the sleepy North American outpost for the empire of good works... -
Moving Pictures
PixelVisionary
Kyle Silfer's expanded machinimaRead moreKyle Silfer's expanded machinima
Kyle Silfer is a pal of mine who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We had some wild times, playing dominos and stuff, and still enjoy margaritas whenever our paths cross, which is only occasionally. Kyle is a fan of obscure and trippy 80s videogame mods and other esoterica, and, back in the day, was the editor of the occasional and excellent techcult zine Reign of Toads. Over the last few years Silfer has been obsessed with making abstract animation flix... -
Offline Archive
PKD Cover art
My guest post to David Gill's PKD blogRead moreMy guest post to David Gill's PKD blog
Though DAW's edition of A Scanner Darkly came out in April of 1984, its cover drips with the hazy aura of American freak culture in the 1970s. The figure on the DAW cover, with his desperate look, his compulsion, and his brain-scanning gear, certainly reflects themes in PKD's book. But it also presents a portrait of the reader, or a possible reader: a white male longhair getting high, seeing through other eyes, and sinking into the sort of cavernous headphones... -
Subcultures
The Dreamspell Calendar
Jose Argüelles' TelektononRead moreJose Argüelles' Telektonon
My pal Gregory p TM was recently offloading some stuff and decided to ditch his copy of Telektonon: The Game of Prophecy, a boxed Mayan-calendar board-game mind-virus that was released in 1995 by Jose Argüelles. Old school New Agers will remember Argüelles as the guy responsible for the harmonic convergence of 1987, but these days he is best known for his feathered boosterizing of the belief that the year 2012, the end of the Mayan Long Count, forebodes an epochal... -
Diary
Bardo Flight
The hidden lessons of a flight that skirted hellRead moreThe hidden lessons of a flight that skirted hell
I just returned from a couple weeks in Costa Rica, where I spoke at the semi-annual Mindstates conference and tooled around with some pals. I had hoped to herein recount some of the highlights of the trip, perhaps in an attempt to make up for my unmitigated posting sloth during the last fortnight, a laziness that was no doubt partly inspired by the actual sloths I saw blissfully konked out in the jungle foliage. But about the only thing on... -
Diary
Wind Chimes
A meditation on sonic tortureRead moreA meditation on sonic torture
I love wind, the gusts that make moaning music from the pines in the mountains, or the zephyrs that blow in from the Pacific over my toy city, thrusting fog and briny mists eastward towards the bay, and tunneling up my street on their climb toward Twin Peaks. I am also down with the music of metal, the resilient blast of archangelic trumps and gluttonous tubas, not to mention the shimmering arpeggios of vibes and hammered dulcimers and the clarion... -
Articles and Essays, Esoterica
Phantasy Island
Stanzas by Giorgio AgambenRead moreStanzas by Giorgio Agamben
Stanzas, the nerdishly titled study of "word and phantasm in western culture" that I just finished, is one of the tastiest and most nourishing books of scholarly cultural criticism I have read since Morris Berman's study of nomadic spirituality, Wandering God. Stanzas is the first book by Giorgio Agamben, who is now one of Europe's most famous philosophers. I dig him too, although some of my reasons are more hedonistic than rigorous. For one thing, Agabmen writes beautifully, in a... -
Offline Archive
Grotesque Animal’s Of Montreal
Breaking down the breakdown songRead moreBreaking down the breakdown song
I know the whole ga-ga creampuff period over the most recent Of Montreal record is over, but I can't get one of those songs out of my mind. I know it's kind of a heavy tune, and things have been going rather well of late, but "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" has got me in its claws, something that happens rather more infrequently than it used to and which thereby slams into the heart with a heightened sense of... -
Offline Archive
Elizabeth Hand’s Slipstream Fiction
Two books of fantastic realismRead moreTwo books of fantastic realism
I have heard good things about Elizabeth Hand's slipstream fiction for years, but I never got around to checking it out because the Erik Davis clones currently perusing the mountain of backlogged books in the universe next door are no longer returning my calls. So you can imagine my glee when, out of the blue, Ms. Hand personally sent me two of her books. Though one of them was a galley for her new one, Generation Loss, I could tell... -
Offline Archive
Kiran Over Mongolia
An enchanting semi-doc about Kazakh eagle-lordsRead moreAn enchanting semi-doc about Kazakh eagle-lords
In high school I knew a guy with the Quentin Tarantino-worthy name of Joe Spaid. Joe was more a friend of Wef's than mine, but we hung out and had some laughs and shared the unusual pleasure of being taught the art of writing by Rosie Sleigh, a wizened crone who sometimes came to class, late, wearing large furry slippers and what looked to be a bathrobe, and in my case did more to pass on the enthusiasm of the... -
Media
Burning Man Escapade
A Dramatic ReadingRead moreA Dramatic Reading
Here is a YouTube video of me reading from my chapbook "Beyond Belief: the Cults of Burning Man." It was shot at a celebration for the publication of Dale Pendell's own Burning Man book, Inspired Madness: The Gifts of Burning Man. More on the cults of Burning Man. -
Offline Archive
Harlan Builds a Portal
Sacred Geometry on the PlayaRead moreSacred Geometry on the Playa
I first met Harlan Gruber about 15 years ago in some artist warehouse in Brooklyn, where he had landed after touring the country visiting intentional communities. We talked about UFOs, and subsequently became friends. So you could say that I am biased, but Harlan is, for me, one of the best creators of large-scale interactive art at Burning Man. And I place this entire opinion on the strength of one work: 2004's Diamond Portal. Subtler and more soberly mystic than... -
Offline Archive
Pop goes the EMP Conference
Music Geekery in SeattleRead moreMusic Geekery in Seattle
I got back a few days ago from Seattle, where I attended the sixth Pop music conference, which is held at the Experience Music Project in a Frank Gehry building that resembles a crushed beer can. The conference of music geekery is unique in its yoking of academic, professional and hobbyist music writers, a mixture that makes, at its best, for a less professionalized and more passionate conference environment than most. It was a four-ring circus, and so rather chaotic,... -
Music
Saharan Guitars
Dune rock and other gritty dreamsRead moreDune rock and other gritty dreams
Like the late Ali Farka Toure, Tinariwen is a guitar-driven act from Mali whose traditionally styled tunes also resonate with rootsy Americana. But rather than Toure's invocation of country blues, the Tinariwen crew -- who belong to a nomadic Berber desert folk called the Touareg -- recall a swampy blues-rock combo from the early 70s, especially on their new record, Aman Iman: Water is Life. The vocals are raw, the circular groove lopes along, and the songs boil down to... -
Psychedelics
Yuri’s Night
NASA meets Burning ManRead moreNASA meets Burning Man
On April 12, 1961, the apple-cheeked cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin hurtled into orbit and became the first human being to gaze down at the misty blue ball of earth. Tucked into a cute little sphere called Vostok 1, he whipped around the planet only once before tumbling back to earth; in the transcripts of his VHF and short-wave communications with ground control he frequently notes that he's "in good spirits" and doing "very well." Twenty years later to the day, NASA... -
Offline Archive
Call-in Prayer Centers
The Demon Prayer LineRead moreThe Demon Prayer Line
According to Lark News—a "good source for Christian news"—Christian churches in the States have been following their corporate cousins in the rush to outsource some of their telecommunications labor—in this case, the venerable institution of the call-in prayer center. As I discovered researching the amazing Aimee Semple McPherson for my book The Visionary State, the practice of fielding telephone prayer requests began at McPherson's Angelus temple in Los Angeles during the 1920s. The prayer center became a standard part of... -
Offline Archive
George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides
Post-Apocalypto 3Read morePost-Apocalypto 3
George R. Stewart came out with the speculative fiction Earth Abides in 1949, when the threat of the bomb loomed but the full force of post-apocalyptic mania was yet to hit the mass mind. Stewart was an English professor at UC Berkeley, and his biggest claim to fame before Earth Abides won him some awards was his novel Storm, whose protagonist—a nasty weather system he called "Maria"—inspired the National Weather Service to start using personal names to identify storms. This... -
Music
Black Moth Super Rainbow
Fellini, analog, and the new Dandelion GumRead moreFellini, analog, and the new Dandelion Gum
One nice thing about being whacked with sickness is being able to kick back and consume some of those media files so many of us postmillennial archivists spend our hours squirreling away for the proverbial rainy day. For me, two weeks of pneumonia's approximation of rainy days meant a ton of DVDs down the gullet. Among those myriad hours of Ealing Studios comedies, revisionist Westerns, Janus films, a complete rewatch of The Lord of the Rings (plus appendixes) and far... -
Offline Archive
P.G. Six’s Slightly Sorry
The great PG Six's rock recordRead moreThe great PG Six's rock record
A number of bands in the American neo-psych-folk underground regularly juxtapose two rather dissimilar styles: experimental improv (often electric) and more-or-less traditional folk forms (often acoustic). This curious mash-up—itself partly rooted in a selective remembering of early generations—is reflected in acts like Pelt, Matthew Valentine, Feathers, Tower Recordings, and P.G. Six, the moniker of former Tower guitarist Pat Gubler. P.G. Six's first two releases, Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites and The Well of Memory, brought together a brooding, mystic sensibility—Phil... -
Offline Archive
The Writing of Delirium
This is my brain on fluRead moreThis is my brain on flu
I have had a nasty flu for a week, and today has been the official turnaround day. After a period of childlike surrender, I have achieved a stoic "old-man mind." Life has settled to minimum expenditure, as I shuffle from just that to just this: this shuffling passage to the toilet, this slowly-operated can-opener, this patient walk to the store. I am dogged, awake, and do not give a flying fuck. I no longer see my neighborhood as the papery... -
Offline Archive
Miranda Mellis’ The Revisionist
Post-Apocalypto 2Read morePost-Apocalypto 2
Usually I am too loaded up with philosophy, SF, esoterica, and novels by dead white males—not to mention embodied life and its attendant existential crises—to get around to small-press literature, which, like everything else these days, is a Whole Damn World. Then I met Miranda Mellis, who is one of the editors of the Encyclopedia Project, a collaborative collection of definitions, images, stories and crazy etymologies created by a host of poets, artists, and experimental writers. The first volume, which... -
Offline Archive
Rudy Wurlitzer’s Flats
Post-Apocalypto 1Read morePost-Apocalypto 1
Since reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road back a spell, I have been lurching—in rags, without grub, through noxious, stinking piles of irradiated carcasses—through other works of post-apocalyptic literature. First up was Rudy Wurlitzer's experimental 1970 novel Flats, an exhausted marvel that was reissued about a decade ago by Serpents Tail. Everything has been blasted in this book—not just the land, but the characters, even subjectivity itself. All the aimless wrecks who populate the "story" shuffle through degraded forms of social... -
Articles and Essays, Music
Joe Boyd, Superproducer
White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960sRead moreWhite Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s
When I was a young music fan, with far more interest in the bands than the biz, Joe Boyd was the first record producer I clued into who wasn't a big name like George Martin or Phil Spector. I knew Joe Boyd's name because it appeared on the much-perused copies of some of my favorite records of all time: the inimitable (though they try) Nick Drake, as well as the early LPs of Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band.... -
Offline Archive
Roy Christopher’s Techno-dialogues
The frontwheeldrive.com interviewsRead moreThe frontwheeldrive.com interviews
Roy Christopher is the supersharp, humble, and very friendly guy who runs the website frontwheeldrive.com, which has long been one of my favorite spots online to feel the technocultures intellectual pulse -- which in Christopher's case is primarily sensed through dialogue. The thirtysomething Christopher has a rich background -- skateboards, BMX, zines, hip hop, Communication Theory degree from San Diego State (which is brimming with SF writers, by the way)and all this (or something else, perhaps an alien implant) has... -
Music
Gurdjieff’s Music
Gurdjieff and de Hartmann's Orchestral MusicRead moreGurdjieff and de Hartmann's Orchestral Music
Whether you regard him as a master of awakening or a mustachioed flim-flam man, G.I. Gurdjieff stands as one of the most fascinating spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. A charismatic and confounding Greek-Armenian born in the Caucasus, Gurdjieff spent decades scouring the lamaseries, hermitages, and dervish haunts of the East searching for the keys to the human psyche. His resulting system -- which he called "the Fourth Way" or simply "the Work" -- detailed the operation of the "human... -
Offline Archive
Terence McKenna’s Ex-Library
A great book collection goes up in smokeRead moreA great book collection goes up in smoke
Last Wednesday, February 7, a 5-alarm blaze erupted in an old building in downtown Monterey. The fire started in a Quiznos sub shop, that exemplar of tasteful dining, and went on to thoroughly destroy a number of joints, including Goomba's Italian restaurant, a Starbucks, and some storage offices belonging to Big Sur's Esalen Institute—the launching point for the human potential movement. Esalen lost little of their own archives, the vast bulk of their books, photos, audio and videotapes residing elsewhere.... -
Offline Archive
Oliver Vernon
A New York opening for this fantastic visionary artistRead moreA New York opening for this fantastic visionary artist
On Thursday, February 15, New York's MicroCOSM gallery will host an opening of new work by the fantastic Brooklyn painter Oliver Vernon. MicroCOSM is the gallery space at COSM, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors that serves as a combined temple/museum/community space for Alex Grey's celebrated cartographies of the visionary body. The newly renovated gallery is a perfect place to peer into the magnetic, multifaceted worlds crafted by Vernon, who lines up with Damon Soule and Mars-1 as one of the... -
Subcultures
Au revoir La Contessa
Burning Man's Spanish Galleon on a BusRead moreBurning Man's Spanish Galleon on a Bus
On a recent Friday night, with a full moon glowering waxy from above, a feline and freaky crowd gathered on a toxic finger of San Francisco's bayside no-man's-land to bid symbolic adieu to one of the most powerful works of art that the Burning Man arts festival has ever seen: the great dame La Contessa. A massive Spanish galleon encased around a bus, with crow's nests and rigging and a scuttlebutt for all I know, La Contessa was, on the... -
Music
Listening in on Christian rock
From the Danielson Famile to Relient KRead moreFrom the Danielson Famile to Relient K
For iTunes users, the contents of one's library is a rather sacrosanct space—an often intimate archive of the music that moves and fascinates. Which is why one of the more quietly subversive things about iTunes is the feature that automatically gives you access to the music libraries of iTunes users on your local network, whether they know you are there or not. If you are a habitué of today's wireless café, where headphones shut off the hubbub we clearly crave... -
Articles and Essays
Maqroll the Magnificent
Latin American sea shanty talesRead moreLatin American sea shanty tales
Lore has it that my college buddy Chad McCracken showed up freshman year toting three well-thumbed books: a King James Bible, The Portable Nietzsche, and the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook. Almost two decades later, and more or less out of the blue, Chad sent me a copy of Álvaro Mutis' The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, a fat, tiny-typed collection of seven novellas about an appealing but world-weary seafaring adventurer of indeterminate origin named Maqroll the Gaverio (the... -
Moving Pictures
Frisbee. The Man
The Life and Death of a Hippie PreacherRead moreThe Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher
When I was researching The Visionary State, my book about Californias eccentric religiosity, I had the pleasure of meeting many marvelous characters from out of the depths of time. My hands-down favorite was a a longhaired prophet of God with the extraordinarily groovy name of Lonnie Frisbee, who more or less single-handedly turned the Jesus People movement into a mass phenomenon, as well as inspiring two of the most dynamic Protestant revival movements to appear over the last thirty years... -
Music
Joanna Newsom and Ys
Always Coming HomeRead moreAlways Coming Home
Last February in Los Angeles, Joanna Newsom took to the stage at the ArthurBall and performed, for the first time in their entirety, the five loonnggg songs that make up her new album Ys. Many folks present were already chest-deep in the cult of Joanna, a fandom that made 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender a left field indie hit and turned Newsom herself into the sort of music-maker who inspires obsessive devotion as well as pleasure. At the time I admired... -
Offline Archive
Live Review: Bert Jansch
The gentle giant of BritfolkRead moreThe gentle giant of Britfolk
Caught Bert Jansch at the Great American Music Club Wednesday night. The undine and I arrived just on time, but in a foul mood, having had our mutually unpleasant days topped with a $250 citation delivered by overbearing and preachy Berkeley cops for the heinous act of pausing in a bus-stop for the two or three seconds it took for me to get into the vehicle. Hey jerk-offs: thanks for the warning! But the sketchy moods melted away like mist... -
Articles and Essays
Cormac McCarthy’s Road
In such a world, survival alone is an ambiguous valueRead moreIn such a world, survival alone is an ambiguous value
Just finished the latest jaunty little joyride from Cormac McCarthy. The Road is an unnerving tale of a man and his boy scratching their way through the toxic ruins of an America utterly devastated by some unnamed violence on a global scale. I've been reading McCarthy for decades, finding in his clipped dialogue and rangy descriptive lines and chiseled Anglo-Saxon verbiage a high tone all too rare—bleak and blessed, at once Biblical and pagan to the bone, but Beckett-like in... -
Offline Archive
RU Sirius Interview
A talk about The Visionary StateRead moreA talk about The Visionary State
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Media
Pharmacology and the Posthuman Phuture
A 2006 Burning Man talkRead moreA 2006 Burning Man talk
Here is a crisp podcast of one of the talks I gave at Burning Man this year: "Pharmacology and the Posthuman Phuture". It was recorded as part of the Palenque Norte series curated by the always energetic Lorenzo Hagerty, who inaugurated the first major speaker's series on the playa in 2003. It was held at Entheon Village. Check it. -
Media
The Gnostic Poetry of Wallace Stevens
A recording of a talk at Burning Man 2006 about Wallace Stevens, with ace recitations by Jennifer Dumpert.
Read moreA recording of a talk at Burning Man 2006 about Wallace Stevens, with ace recitations by Jennifer Dumpert.
A podcast of a talk recorded as part of the Speaker's Corner series at the Erowid dome at the Oracle at Erowid camp. For this exploration of the gnostic mysticism in Wallace Stevens, I was joined by the lovely Jennifer Dumpert. Other talks at this great series, which was curated by Mark Pesce, can be found at Mark Pesce's hyperreal site. -
Art and Design, Psychedelics
Visionary Art
Visionary Art and TraditionRead moreVisionary Art and Tradition
The sad truth about descriptive categories like "visionary art" is that they are both useful and lame. Especially in the art world, the language of genres and styles often has more to do with galleries and critics than with making and enjoying art. But reflecting about categories can also be fruitful, because it shapes the context of our seeing and more importantly, the way we share and talk about our seeing. So here is my seed crystal: visionary art is... -
Art and Design
Chasing the Tengu
The Mystic Undertow of Vinyl ToysRead moreThe Mystic Undertow of Vinyl Toys
I have the great good fortune to live near Kidrobot, a cozy vinyl toy boutique in the Haight-Ashbury. A few years ago, I wrote one of the first overground pieces about the vinyl toy subculture, which began in the 1990s when Hong Kong fabulists like Michael Lau and Eric So decided to apply their figure-making fu to their fantasies about American street culture. Japan, with its own delirious toy culture firmly flaming, soon got into the act, as well as... -
Offline Archive
On the Visionary Tour
My book tour through the Golden StateRead moreMy book tour through the Golden State
I just got back from a couple weeks on the road promoting my new book The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape, whose amazing photographs were taken by Michael Rauner. My honey and I squeezing into her 86 VW Westfalia with boxes of books, a guitar, and tons of CDs, including Robert Greenberg’s lecture series How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, which is pretty great itself. We drove south from San Francisco and did events in... -
Offline Archive
Motorola’s Gnostic Ad Campaign
Motorola's hip handheld deviceRead moreMotorola's hip handheld device
As our digital devices and dataflows increasingly interoperate, we may be fooled into thinking that the merging of our gadgetry is just a rational matter of problems and solutions. But something less tangible glimmers at the far end of convergence, a magical tool that seems to beckon beyond the endless push and pull of technological fusion and fragmentation. Call it the Angelic Communciator. In real life we juggle various mobiles, digital cameras, iPods, PDAs, and GPS units, and the juggling... -
Moving Pictures
Lutz Dammbeck’s The Net
A Unabomber documentaryRead moreA Unabomber documentary
Though it's too short on rants to have anything like the impact of Fahrenheit 9/11 or An Inconvenient Truth, Lutz Dammbeck's 2003 film The Net deserves a wide audience, especially among those who, like me, are drawn to the twisty ties that link contemporary technology to the countercultural experiments of the 1960s and 70s. A painter and filmmaker from East Germany, Dammbeck became obsessed with studying the Unabomber years ago, and his film follows the serpentine course of his research... -
Music
Espers II
Elven sublimities, dark undertowsRead moreElven sublimities, dark undertows
This record moves me mightily. Lots of bands in todays acid-folk revival cultivate a shaggy, improvisational haze, and that can be fun, and delirious, and occasionally revelatory. But there's nothing unkempt about the Philadelphia sextet Espers on this, their exquisite sophomore outing. (Ok, there was a nifty EP in there as well, with BOC and Durutti Column covers). Espers II packs gorgeous songs, artful arrangements, and strong, bittersweet melodies that recall ace British folk-rock combos like Fairport Convention and the... -
Psychedelics
Jeremy Narby Interview
The ayahausca anthropologistRead moreThe ayahausca anthropologist
The anthropologist and author Jeremy Narby hit the intellectual freak scene in 1998 when he published The Cosmic Serpent, an audacious, intriguing, and entertaining dose of righteous mind candy that grew out of his decades-long explorations—both personal and scholarly—of the ayahuasca-swilling tribes of the upper Amazon. A Canadian living in Switzerland—at least when he’s not researching in the jungle or working on indigenous rights—Narby is no bug-eyed hippie prophet of “the tea.” He is a grounded, sensible fellow with a... -
Diary
Burmese Daze
My Date with a Transvestite Spirit MediumRead moreMy Date with a Transvestite Spirit Medium
I do not have children, which saddens me a bit, for I would like some day to tell my descendents of the time I met Valiant Lord Kwawswa, the Burmese guardian god of rogues and vagabonds, on the hot and dusty planes of Mandalay. We were traveling in the month of August, J and I, and the sky was low and heavy with monsoon. Our guides had brought us to the town of Taungbyon, famed throughout the land for its... -
Offline Archive
Art for Altered States
A review of a 2005 LA MOCA exhibitionRead moreA review of a 2005 LA MOCA exhibition
There is a moment in Talo/The House, 2002, a video installation by the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila currently on display at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, where the furtive glimpse of a dog triggers an altogether different kind of vision: Outside a new order arose, one that is present everywhere. Everything is now simultaneous, here, being. The monologue is derived from the artists interviews with schizophrenics, but we have all known moments like this, when we harbor intimations... -
Media
Practicing Spiritual Practice
With Jennifer DumpertRead moreWith Jennifer Dumpert
This is a classic: one of the few talks I have given where I directly address the topic of spiritual practice, particularly meditation. It is also one of the few I have done with my wife Jennifer Dumpert, who is a writer and speaker in her own right. Soon we will do more! This talk was recorded at the Synergenesis II conference on October 8, 2005, and kindly uploaded by Jon Hanna. Tune in here. -
Esoterica
The Source Family
My introduction to a new book on the most colorful of Cali cultsRead moreMy introduction to a new book on the most colorful of Cali cults
Using your psychic powers, mentally combine the words "cult" and "1970s," and I guarantee that your brain will almost immediately conjure up the horror shows of the Manson Family and Jonestown, with maybe a gun-slinging Patty Hearst or a Hare Krishna flower scam thrown in for spice. These images are real, and are important to keep in mind, because small sectarian religions can be a dangerous game. But the power and persistence of these images says more about the society... -
Subcultures
Druid Heights
Zen, Drugs, and Hot TubsRead moreZen, Drugs, and Hot Tubs
I first heard about Druid Heights a few years ago, when I began doing research for a book about the history of alternative spirituality in my home state of California. A musician, Colin Farish, described about a gorgeously constructed round wooden building hidden in the woods of Marin County that once served as a library for Alan Watts. Farish told me that the building was condemned, and that he was working hard to save it, perhaps by transporting it elsewhere.... -
Art and Design
The West Coast Art of Spiritual Collage
The Alchemy of TrashRead moreThe Alchemy of Trash
The trivial is as deep as the profound because there is nothing in creation that does not go to the profound. Robert Duncan The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum. Philip K. Dick You have probably already heard the one about the yogi huddling in his mountain cave who believes he's finally cracked through the cosmic egg. Having reached enlightenment, he decides to clamber down to the village below and spread the love. As he... -
Subcultures
The Cults of Burning Man
IYKYKRead moreIYKYK
For without corruption, there can no Generation consist. Corpus Hermeticum I tell you: one must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" Black Rock cliché has that you can't say anything very penetrating about Burning Man because its diversity and contradictions undermine any generalizations you might be tempted to make. This truism is solid enough, and should be mulled over by any Burner foolish enough, like me, to venture into a... -
Technoculture
Looking at Mars
Envisioning the Red PlanetRead moreEnvisioning the Red Planet
A couple of years ago, when the Mars Global Surveyor was circling the Red Planet and beaming snapshots back to Earth, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke lectured remotely to an audience gathered at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Speaking from his home in Sri Lanka, Clarke informed the crowd that the images he'd downloaded from NASA's Web site showed something growing on the planet's surface. "I'm quite serious when I say I have a really good look... -
Esoterica
Cameo Demons
Profile of the Sun City GirlsRead moreProfile of the Sun City Girls
Alan and Rick Bishop are two halfbreed desert rats on the cusp of middle age who live in Seattle and play, when they do, in a trio called Sun City Girls. Rick's on guitar and Alan plays bass and sings, but the brothers play with lots of other things as well: double-reed pipes, gamelon, puppets, language, demons, audience expectations, states of consciousness. The third Girl is named Charlie Gocher and he's a scraggy Californian transplant the Bishop boys first met... -
Subcultures26 min
Hedonic Tantra of Goa
Golden Goa's Trance Dance TransmissionRead moreGolden Goa's Trance Dance Transmission
In the early 1990s, I became aware of the growing psychedelic undertow of dance and electronic music. With the exception of the Bay Area, the United States was largely out of step with this aspect of the techno scene, and it was only through stray clues — a boast by a British backpacker, liner notes on an import ambient CD — that I first heard about Goa. When I interviewed Orbital for Spin, Paul Hartnoll confirmed the rumors: on the... -
Religions and Spirits
Slavoj Zizek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf
Turning Christianity upside downRead moreTurning Christianity upside down
The most interesting thing about the New Yorker's May 2003 profile of Slavoj Zizek was the suggestion that the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, whose mitteleuropan mug gazed out at us with an expression at once shocked and bemused, was actually a comedian. And indeed, Zizek's hyperactive video-clerk neo-Hegelianism has become something of a shtick by now, his most characteristic rhetorical move--the paradoxical switcheroo, whereby X in fact turns out to be Y inside-out--a punch line in analytic disguise. But... -
Moving Pictures
The Matrix Way of Knowledge
The Philosophy of the MatrixRead moreThe Philosophy of the Matrix
The most curious feature of Warner Bros' official Matrix website is not the handful of jaw-dropping Animatrix clips, but the collection of high-quality philosophical essays by heavy hitters like Hubert Dreyfus, Colin McGinn and the cognitive science superstar David Chalmers. These essays, which hash out Descartes, Mahayana Buddhism and the proverbial "brain in the vat" problem, are all the evidence you need that the Wachowski brothers' original 1999 film has vaulted into that curious category of Big Think mainstream sci-fi... -
Mind and Philosophy
Descartes and the Matrix
Cogito in the MatrixRead moreCogito in the Matrix
Introduction: Techno Cogito Of all the lumbering giants of the Western philosophical tradition, none resembles a punching bag more than René Descartes. He gets it from all sides: cognitive scientists and phenomenologists, post-structuralists and deep ecologists, lefty science critics and New Age holists. The main beef, of course, is the stark divide that Descartes drew between mind and body, a dualism that, by its very claim of rationality, now appears even more obscene than the religious dualisms that stretch back... -
Offline Archive
Mary Timony’s Golden Dove
The best indie-prog artist hits another highRead moreThe best indie-prog artist hits another high
One of the spookiest verses in the whole pop arcana belongs, as it should, to Robert Johnson: "I got stones in my passway and my road seems dark at night," he cries, repeating the line before the killer twist: "I have pains in my heart, they have taken my appetite." He's not talking about satisfying the munchies but about the losing the hunger for life, a loss that can make the agonies of love seem like a merry-go-round by comparison.... -
Offline Archive
Songs in the Key of F12
Sunday night at Open AirRead moreSunday night at Open Air
It's Sunday night at Open Air, a small, sleek lounge in downtown Manhattan. A couple dozen musicians, DJs, and bedroom hackers huddle around the bar or relax on couches. Many are toting computers. The atmosphere is trendy but soothing: Exposed wood conjures a California vibe that counterbalances the space-station chill; sunsets and moonscapes float across a wall of flat-panel displays. Everyone's paying more attention to their laptop screens than to the art on the walls - making the scene more... -
Psychedelics
The Tantra of Psychedelia
The Paisley Gate, from Zig Zag ZenRead moreThe Paisley Gate, from Zig Zag Zen
I first visited Green Gulch Farms on a sunny Sunday in the fall of 1995. A group of students were sitting beneath the alien rows of eucalyptus trees, talking casually with Tenshin Reb Anderson, then abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. Jerry Garcia had recently died, and at one point in the conversation, a blond, fortysomething woman asked Anderson, in all seriousness, whether Garcia was a bodhisattva. Myself I would have failed this particular Marin County koan. But not... -
Religions and Spirits
Meditating in Sensurround
Zen retreat with SIGGRAPH chaserRead moreZen retreat with SIGGRAPH chaser
It would be nice to begin the journey with who we are. But "who we are" is a house of mirrors, a tangled knot, a great and terrible Oz that in the final analysis may consist of nothing more than, well, nothing. The self, I am afraid, may be more of an onion than a fruit, and "who we are" is the skin we shed. So instead we start, as the Yankee Tibetan Pema Chdrn suggests, from where we are... -
Offline Archive
Drug Lit
An early aughts overviewRead moreAn early aughts overview
Drug books occupy a curious niche in the world of letters. My local bookshop calls their section "Altered States," and its volumes range promiscuously between history, mysticism, natural science, user manuals, social policy and poetry. Drugs may be the ultimate object of interdisciplinary studies. What other field can encompass Alan Watts and Irvine Welsh, Walter Benjamin essays and Advanced Techniques of Clandestine Psychedelic & Amphetamine Manufacture? This diversity of perspectives makes sense, and not just because drugs themselves are such... -
Moving Pictures
An Interview with Richard Linklater
Waking DreamsRead moreWaking Dreams
Working on the periphery of the Hollywood beast, Austin, Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater has already made a handful of great movies (Slacker, Dazed & Confused, Before Sunrise). But 2001's Waking Life is a masterpiece: an idea movie that seeps into your dreams. Literally. The loose structure will be familiar to anyone who has seen Slacker: an unnamed young man, played by Wiley Wiggins (who also played the stoned naif in Dazed & Confused), wanders about, bumping into various philosophers, revolutionaries,... -
Technoculture
Videogames 1971-1984
The joy of joysticksRead moreThe joy of joysticks
Leafing through Van Burnham's Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, 1971-1984, a coffee-table book that fetishistically catalogs the games, arcade machines, home consoles, and early computers that distracted hearts and minds from 1971 to 1984, you can be forgiven for feeling like you've struck a motherload of geek porn. Between the glossy screen-shots and retro gear, though, Supercade makes a crucial point: Not only did the "Golden Age" of video games kick-start an entertainment industry that now rivals... -
Articles and Essays, Moving Pictures
Tolkien Fandom and LoTR
Tolkien Fandom and Peter Jackson's LOTRRead moreTolkien Fandom and Peter Jackson's LOTR
In early 2000, young Jonny Grindlay and his dad drove down to the studio backlots of Wellington, New Zealand, to see what they could see. The 15-year-old was fascinated by Kiwi writer-director Peter Jackson's production of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings, one of the most loved—and most purchased—books ever. That morning, peering through a fence, Grindlay spied a large spiked wheel sitting in plain view, and he snapped a shot of the prop with his dad's... -
Psychedelics
Psychedelic Culture(s) of the New Millennium
One or Many?Read moreOne or Many?
Id like to paint a picture of contemporary psychedelic culture and how it relates to the larger world that were swimming around in. Of course, there have always been very different models of how psychedelics influence the culture at large how they should influence it, and how they do influence it. If you go back to the Sixties, you can get the simplistic idea that the counterculture was one great wave of psychedelic experience that was united in its ethos,... -
Mind and Philosophy
Creativity, Data, and Limits
To infinity — or maybe not quiteRead moreTo infinity — or maybe not quite
Years ago, during a trip to India, I lay my head down to sleep in the vicinity of a booming jungle rave. As I dozed, I dreamed I was climbing up a mountain path, twisting and turning along rocky switchbacks that soared into an empty Technicolor night. At the top of the mountain, with almost cartoon predictability, sat a bearded wise man in a robe. He taught me that reality was like a television set, and that all one had... -
Technoculture
Forging the Dragonslayer
Artisans are metalRead moreArtisans are metal
Wandering the aisles of the recent Materials Solutions trade show in St. Louis, one phrase comes to mind: old economy. Materials is an exotic field these days, but this is not the place to check out fringe semiconductors, zirconium ceramics, or the synthetic polymers that make up our increasingly Mars-ready fashions. This place is about steel, that ubiquitous but unsexy stuff that continues to form the backbone of skyscrapers, vehicles, and millions and millions of tools and machines. The expo... -
Mind and Philosophy
Remote Control
The car speaksRead moreThe car speaks
A couple of months ago, after flying into Chicago on assignment, I rented a car. Since it was on someone else's dime, I got a Chevy Impala, a smooth ride with cool bubble curves and a dashboard that glowed like the console of a shuttlecraft. Making my way from O'Hare to the Doubletree Inn in Skokie, I turned on the radio, stumbling across the city's peculiar "progressive rock" station KXRT ("like dungeons and dragons on your radio"). Styx's "Come Sail... -
Art and Design
Experience Design
And the Design of ExperienceRead moreAnd the Design of Experience
There is no creation ex nihilo. We always work from pre-existing material, both literal substances (wood, a language, the resonance of strings and reeds) and the existing cultural organization of those materials within history, tradition, and contemporary networks of influence. So as we survey the expanding and converging landscape of electronic, virtual, and immersive production, we might ask ourselves: what material is being worked here? Is it simply new organizations of photons, sound waves, and haptic cues? Or does the... -
Mind and Philosophy
Baudrillard and the Information Age
Remembering rhizomesRead moreRemembering rhizomes
In 1985, at an art school open house, I bumped into the scruffy, taciturn sculptor who served as the TA for my undergraduate drawing class. He asked me if I had ever heard of Jean Baudrillard. Then he slipped me the slim blue-black Semiotext(e) volume of Simulations, briefly glancing around as if he were handing over a vial of crack or a collection of truly scandalous pornography. Which in a way he was. Unlike most of the theory the profs... -
Psychedelics
Psychonauts
Explorers of inner spaceRead moreExplorers of inner space
Let's say you're a buttoned-down organic-chemistry jockey at Merck. One day you tweak a molecule ripped off from a Peruvian native medicine, and you wind up with a powerfully psychoactive compound. Instead of squelching anxiety, instilling a reliable boner, or giving young minds that magic amphetamine edge, the drug helps you touch the hem of God -- or at least something a lot like the hem of God. At times it hurtles you into a blazing hieroglyphic phantasmagoria more sublime... -
Mind and Philosophy
The Matrix and Pharmacology
Take the Red PillRead moreTake the Red Pill
You probably have seen the ads on TV: a cartoon thirty-something female, animated with bland, funny-pages strokes, mopes against a white background, her glasses pushed distractedly back on her head. "I can't concentrate," she complains. "I feel anxious." "I'm so irritable." The words materialize around her, heavy text that she throws onto a mounting pile of other phrases, like "out of control" and "slipping." Meanwhile, the kind and understanding female voice-over informs us that if we have experienced "excessive worry"... -
Art and Design
Dome Sweet Dome
R. Buckminster Fuller and the Art of Design ScienceRead moreR. Buckminster Fuller and the Art of Design Science
The largest exhibit of R. Buckminster Fuller's work ever assembled has already closed at the Zurich Museum of Design, but those of you who couldn't make the trip can now avail yourself to this nifty brick of a catalog. Curator/editors Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein have done a fine job brushing the dust off of Fuller, but whether their work indicates a general uplift in the technovisionary's stature remains to be seen. Over fifteen years after his death, Fuller remains... -
Moving Pictures
Future Schlock: Antiques Roadshow
The value of thingsRead moreThe value of things
Only the deranged look to PBS for visceral thrills, but the basic game plan of their Antiques Roadshow seems exceptionally mundane. Inside a noisy convention center in Anywhere, USA, thousands of ordinary folks bring their heirlooms and thrift-store finds to high-dollar auction-house experts for verbal appraisal. The most interesting items are culled for the camera's eye, and we watch as a series of people get the scoop on their pieces, with the current auction value finally revealed with a kind... -
Articles and Essays
The Jerusalem Quartet
Edward Whittemore's Jerusalem QuartetRead moreEdward Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet
Some mornings I stop and talk with Maurice, the Christian Palestinian guy who runs the local corner store. As a young man, Maurice was a rabble-rousing student living in the West Bank, but now he is a businessman worried about keeping the flowers fresh. One day I pointed to a front-page photo of Kosovar refugees, and he blurted out: "That's what happened to my family!" Before Maurice was born, he told me, his family was forced at gunpoint from their... -
Technoculture
Game Over: the Mutation of Pinball
The evolution and decline of pinballRead moreThe evolution and decline of pinball
What is it about pinball? The bastard child of Yankee ingenuity and pop-cult razzle-dazzle, pinball manages to be at once seedy and silly. And it's fun - the perfect expression of 20th-century America's technological quest for trivial distraction. Not quite a sport but more than a game, pinball is perhaps best seen as a media machine. It unveils a kinetic cosmos under glass, a comic-book world of collisions and speed that draws us in even as it remains forever out... -
Mind and Philosophy
Ecce Robo
Adding "subjectivity" to robotsRead moreAdding "subjectivity" to robots
Cynthia Breazeal has no time for me, but she's still going to show me her robot. As we pass through the halls of MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab, now spearheaded by the robotics guru Rodney Brooks, Breazeal -- a youngish Korean-American snowboarding fanatic -- explains how urgently she needs to complete her Ph.D. thesis. This is her way of telling me that she does not have the half hour or so to boot up Kismet, the robot that's consumed her research... -
Music
Vibes, Beats, and the Mystic Mix
A musical meditationRead moreA musical meditation
Human beings are born into the world almost as wired for music as we are for talk. From lullabies and rope-skip chants to national anthems and pop tunes, music is one of the primary ways that consciousness get shaped by the culture around us. In the postwar world, when the "teenager" was invented and the commodification of music kicked into overdrive, music became the raw material out of which budding adolescents helped define their bodies, their pleasures, and their selves.... -
Religions and Spirits5 min
On the Buddha Trail
Spiritual tourism in IndiaRead moreSpiritual tourism in India
Ditching the idea of visiting Hawaii or Niagara Falls, my freshly minted wife and I decided to devote our honeymoon to spiritual tourism. We had both been infected by the Buddhist virus years before, and the obvious choice for our mystical adventure was the pungent chaos of India, where the Buddha lived and died in the fifth and sixth centuries, BC. So we bought our tickets, got our shots, and, wanting to squeeze a drop or two of decadence out... -
Offline Archive7 min
Terence McKenna Vs. the Black Hole of Death
Terence McKenna muses on deathRead moreTerence McKenna muses on death
The following are excerpts from interviews that I conducted with Terence McKenna in late October and early November of 1999, in preparation for a profile that appeared in the May 2000 issue of Wired. These interviews have also been edited and released on a CD, Terence McKenna: The Last Interview. Given McKenna's subsequent demise, I chose selections concerning his feelings about death and dying. The October interview was conducted in San Francisco just a few days before Terence underwent a... -
Mind and Philosophy5 min
Futurism and Its Discontents
The business of envisioning the future should not be a business but a callingRead moreThe business of envisioning the future should not be a business but a calling
When you attempt to divine the road ahead -- perhaps by gazing at that liquid crystal ball glimmering on your desktop -- you may find that all the funhouse futures that reflect back to you possess the undeniable warp of science fiction. Indeed, it's already a chestnut among science journalists and newspaper columnists to point out how stuff like cloned stem cells, Mars missions, or Sony robots bring a little SF into our lives. At the same time, the very... -
Offline Archive
The Musical Genius of the Magnetic Fields
Stephin Merritt and the intertwined legacies of Wilde, Proust, and Phil SpectorRead moreStephin Merritt and the intertwined legacies of Wilde, Proust, and Phil Spector
Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt is the mordant svengali of indie-pop, an openly gay maestro of New Wave synths, acerbic and hilarious lyrics, and moving melodies that might as well be viruses. This Tuesday the low-tech multi-instrumentalist released 69 Love Songs, a work that consists of 69 love songs. Despite whatever images that particular numeral conjures in your brain, the songs of these three CDs -- sung by Merritt and four other singers -- don't traffic in sex much past bunny... -
Articles and Essays2 min
Mount Daumal
Rene Daumal, his life and workRead moreRene Daumal, his life and work
When 36-year-old Rene Daumal died in Paris near the close of World War II, he left behind one blistering book of poetry, numerous essays on Hindu aesthetics and various Surrealist obsessions, and two weird and amazing allegories: the absurdist satire A Night of Serious Drinking, and the unfinished Mount Analogue, a masterwork of 20th-century spiritual literature. At their best, these writings crackle with an intense and empyrean glow, a hard glint of the Absolute that, coupled with their Pataphysical humor,... -
Music2 min
Electromagnetic Voice Phenomena
A review of The Ghost OrchidRead moreA review of The Ghost Orchid
From the moment that human beings started communicating with electrical and electromagnetic signals, the ether has been a spooky place. Four years after Samuel Morse strung up his first telegraph wire in 1844, two young girls in upstate New York kick-started Spiritualism, a massively popular occult religion which attempted to fuse science and seance. One of the movement's main newspapers was called "The Celestial Telegraph," and many of the spirits contacted by mediums were electricity geeks. Totally legit scientists like... -
Religions and Spirits15 min
Databases of the Dead
The Mormon Church and Genealogical DataRead moreThe Mormon Church and Genealogical Data
Twenty-two miles southeast of Salt Lake City, buried deep in the ragged rock of Utah's Wasatch Range, lies a catacomb of names. Behind 700 feet of granite and six monstrous Mosler doors, the Mormon Church has squirreled away the world's largest collection of genealogical material: more than 2 million microfilm reels of parish records, marriage indexes, necrologies, census reports, pilgrim registers, and piles of other documents - some dating back to the Middle Ages. The Granite Mountain Record Vault holds... -
Mind and Philosophy7 min
This is Your Brain on Buddha
Buddhism and neuroscienceRead moreBuddhism and neuroscience
Anyone studying the mind will soon stumble across a fundamental tension between first-person and third-person accounts of cognition. On the one hand, you have three pounds of gray matter flowering on top of a post-simian spine -- meat that can be mapped, poked, drugged, and registered. On the other hand, you have your own internal flow of impressions, thoughts, sensations, and memories, a stream of consciousness that includes thoughts like "the stream of consciousness is an illusion." How can we... -
Offline Archive12 min
Joe Firmage, Silicon Valley UFOnaut
Entrepreneurship and UFOsRead moreEntrepreneurship and UFOs
Late on night in October 1997, just for the heck of it, Joe Firmage decided to go web surfing. As the CEO of a major Silicon Valley start-up, USWeb, Firmage didn't have a lot of leisure time. But he had studied physics as an undergrad at the University of Utah, and wanted to brush up on some of the latest findings. So he plugged in a few searches, and soon came across a report by a Lockheed-Martin scientist asserting that... -
Moving Pictures8 min
The Sacred Art of Star Wars
Toys and IdolsRead moreToys and Idols
A tale of two action figures: in "The Sacred Arts of Vodou," a traveling exhibit that made the rounds in 1998, UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History cobbled together an impressive range of costumes, ritual objects, paintings, flags, and videos in order to get across some of the power of Haiti's rich and popular religious tradition, whose gods bristle with all the foibles and lusts of Zeus' ancient crew. But unlike the Olympians, the Haitian pantheon is a living tradition,... -
Mind and Philosophy3 min
N. Katherine Hayles’ Posthumanism
How We Became PosthumanRead moreHow We Became Posthuman
There is a new cosmology blowing in from the horizons of the technoscientific imagination, and it may well swallow you up. Call it the computational universe, a cosmos in which everything -- thoughts, genes, galaxies, subatomic wiggles -- is reduced to bits churning through algorithmic cascades. From artificial life to quantum physics to cognitive psychology, the computational universe has become a Major Metaphor. Everything computes; everything is code. And as N. Katherine Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman, the... -
Technoculture9 min
Perl creator Larry Wall
From divinity to programmingRead moreFrom divinity to programming
He has quoted scripture before crowds of hackers. He glides from notions of devotion and divinity to the nuts and bolts of evolutionary programming. And his progeny is just about everywhere on the Web. Larry Wall, a linguist and self-effacing polymath, is the creator of the popular and ubiquitous Perl programming language. (Perl stands for "Practical Extraction and Report Language" or, if Wall is in the mood, "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.") Created over ten years ago with contributions and critiques... -
Offline Archive3 min
Boards of Canada
Music has the Right to ChildrenRead moreMusic has the Right to Children
Even since Luigi Russolo bent his avant-garde ear to trains and bombs and automobiles, declaring the arrival of a new "art of noises," the music of machines has been the site for future shock. As the British critic Kodwo Eshun argues in his book More Brilliant Than the Sun, today's samplers, synths, and drum machines breed sonic science fictions, rippling portents of the technocultural tsunami to come: high-speed, recombinant, and thoroughly posthuman. At the same time, a deep strain of... -
Technoculture10 min
Electricity, Magnets, and Vibes
The Electromagnetic ImaginaryRead moreThe Electromagnetic Imaginary
Though sound and music are essentially incorporeal aspects of human experience, they are dependent on the latent potentials of matter: bamboo tubes, stretched animal skin, throat-flesh. Even more fundamentally, sound rests upon vibration, the analog fluctuations of that vaporous fluid we call air. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that ocean of vibration became electrified. Just as traditional instruments can be seen as alchemical transformations of earth and air, woods and metals, so can the revolutionary sonic... -
Music5 min
Pop Stars Search for the Spirit
In the Material WorldRead moreIn the Material World
From Christian grunge to hip-hop prophecies to art-pop dharma, spiritual vibrations bombarded the musical universe in 1998. Take the Video Music Awards, normally the great carnal feast of MTV Babylon. Tibetan mala beads dangled from Courtney Love's mic stand, while Buddhist Boy Adam Yauch called for nonviolent reconciliation with Muslims. Pras wore a cross, Will Smith thanked God, and the Backstreet Boys gave it up for Jesus Christ. But the biggest metaphysical blast came from Madonna, whose Ray of Light... -
Articles and Essays, Music3 min
Days of the Dead
Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure, by Carol BrightmanRead moreSweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure, by Carol Brightman
For better or worse, my adolescent bodymind was permanently altered by its encounter with the Grateful Dead in the early 1980s. Murky days for the band to be sure, but the shows my teenage drug buddies and I caught throughout California, and especially at the dusty Ventura County fairgrounds, poured psychedelic kerosene onto the dying embers of the hippiedom we emulated. The Dead offered more than a hedonic escape hatch into a world of ritual song, wink-wink symbols, and patchouli-drenched... -
Articles and Essays5 min
Physicists on Star Trek
The Science of the Final FrontierRead moreThe Science of the Final Frontier
Gene Roddenberry was the Ray Kroc of things to come: the man who faced the pregnant void of futurity by building one of the most dominant, lucrative, and fiercely guarded franchises in the history of the entertainment industry. Over thirty years have past since the original Star Trek series hit the air, and Paramount's golden goose shows no signs of letting up: the series still dominates the syndicated TV drama market, merchandise sales have topped two billion dollars, and the... -
Articles and Essays4 min
Tibet Your Life
Tibet and the WestRead moreTibet and the West
From Hollywood's Himalayan eye-candy to the Dalai Lama's elfish Macintosh grin, from Beastie Boys Buddhism to the proliferation of "Free Tibet!" bumper stickers, it's clear that Tibet has captured the pop mind. Of course, we would not be dreaming of the lost horizon again were it not for the powerful entrance of Tibet's religious consciousness into the West, a process coupled, in ways not always clear, with the nonviolent struggle against China's annexation of the land. But as Prisoners of... -
Mind and Philosophy10 min
Acoustic Cyberspace
Marshall McLuhan and the "space" in cyber-Read moreMarshall McLuhan and the "space" in cyber-
Today I'd like to talk about some abstract ideas, some images, some open-ended notions about acoustic space. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between electronic sound and environments, on the Internet or in music. I won't talk about the various technologies involved; instead, I'll try to get at some of the deeper issues about sound and the ways it constructs subjectivities and can act as a kind of map. A good place to start is with a distinction... -
Esoterica19 min
Dub, Scratch, and the Black Star
Lee Perry on the MixRead moreLee Perry on the Mix
Having abandoned the Jamaican tropics for the snowy peaks of Switzerland, the legendary reggae producer Lee Perry -- aka Scratch, the Upsetter, the Super-Ape, Pipecock Jackson, Inspector Gadget, the Firmament Computer, and a cornucopia of other monikers and aliases -- now makes his home in one of the quietest corners of Europe. It's an odd but somehow fitting environment for Perry -- not because precision clocks and banks have much to do with the intense, spooky, and profoundly playful records... -
Articles and Essays14 min
Philip K. Dick’s Divine Interference
VALIS, media, and 2-3-74Read moreVALIS, media, and 2-3-74
It was February of 1974, and the American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was in pain. The man whose darkly comic novels of androids, weird drugs, and false realities stand as some of the most brilliant and visionary in the genre had just had an impacted wisdom tooth removed, and the sodium pentathol was wearing off. A delivery woman arrived with a package of Darvon, and when the burly, bearded man opened the door, he was struck by the beauty... -
Offline Archive10 min
Char Davies’ Osmose
An early VR art immersionRead moreAn early VR art immersion
One afternoon while deep-sea diving in the Bahamas, Char Davies got an unforgettable taste of virtual space. Floating over one of those yawning ocean trenches where Navy submarines prowl unseen, Davies and her companions found themselves suspended in a watery void. Only a thin rope stretched between their boat's anchor and a nearby buoy helped them keep their sense of direction from being swallowed up. They were waiting for sharks, and the sharks never came. The group became bored, restless... -
Religions and Spirits, Technoculture16 min
Lance Daybreak’s Digital Dharma
Surfing the IndranetRead moreSurfing the Indranet
Standing at the door of his crumbling shack, Lance Daybreak looked kind of like I'd expected him to look, which was something of a disappointment. Long blondish-brown hair, bushy beard, drawstring pants, bare feet. He wore a rave T-shirt emblazoned with an Alien Workshop design, and a Star Trek medallion dangled around his neck. I don't know where you live, dear reader, but out here in the goofball crucible of California (or Kali-fornica, as the Chaos magicians say), techno-hippies like... -
Religions and Spirits4 min
Spiritual Chaos?
Chaos SpiritualityRead moreChaos Spirituality
Chaos stirs. Its fragment signs, millinery filigrees, and guttural moans are everywhere -- in the collapsing nation-state, in the ferocious world market, in the damaged matrix of the biosphere, in your communications devices, and even in the plain old ordinary sense that nothing is plain, old, or ordinary any more. Paradoxically, it was science, that last bastion of reason and order, that planted chaos anew in our heads. The new field (actually, a set of related and overlapping interdisciplinary fields)... -
Religions and Spirits, Scholarship11 min
The Esoteric Scholarship of Antoine Faivre
Meet Hermes, the god of scholars and techgnosticsRead moreMeet Hermes, the god of scholars and techgnostics
Imagine you're a bookish paleface wandering through the stained and musty halls of Western civilization, sick to death of the endless tales of bloody conquests, heinous Churchman, and the ominous march of abstract and manipulative reason. Just when you're ready to cash in you chips and join the barbarians and bodhisattvas at the gate, you stumble across some moldering side door, thick with sigils and glyphs and glints of otherworldly light. The door opens unbeckoned, and you stumble past animated... -
Mind and Philosophy21 min
Polyrhythmic Cyberspace and the Black Electronic
Roots and WiresRead moreRoots and Wires
Where are we? The collective mindscapes we both find and lose ourselves within seem to be rapidly mutating: the compressed "urban" density of an increasingly globalized, networked, and overpopulated world; the twilight zones introduced by media saturation and the collapse of master narratives; the blurry boundary regions between identities, ethnicities, bodies, cultures; the virtual interdimensions of cyberspace. These new social and psychic morphologies demand that we reimagine space itself. One thing is clear: the Cartesian coordinate system will no longer suffice as our central conceptual or tactical... -
Music5 min
Ethnic Music Classics: 1925 – 48
The Secret Museum Of MankindRead moreThe Secret Museum Of Mankind
One afternoon, in the same anthropology section of San Francisco's Austen Books where I scored cheap editions of Conversations with Ogotemmeli, The Gift, and a rare copy of Herskovitz' Life in a Haitian Valley, I stumbled across a mighty bizarre volume known as The Secret Museum of Mankind. Lacking page numbers, pub date, or any editorial information beyond the name of an obscure press (Manhattan House), this apparently early-1930s volume consists of a couple thousand captioned "photographs" of traditional folks... -
Subcultures10 min
Burning Man 1995
Terminal Beach PartyRead moreTerminal Beach Party
Many moons ago, a crusty old Chinese anarchist wrote that "we shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want." Now I'm standing on clay, a blank 400 square-mile alkaline slab in northern Nevada know as the Black Rock Desert. I'm submerged in emptiness. Sixty thousand years ago, this parched playa was Lake Lahontan; twelve years ago its supremely flat surface helped some British racing nuts break the world land speed record. Nothing... -
Articles and Essays, Esoterica
H.P. Lovecraft’s Magick Realism
A profile of Lovecraft's life and workRead moreA profile of Lovecraft's life and work
Consumed by cancer in 1937 at the age of 46, the last scion of a faded aristocratic New England family, the horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft left one of America's most curious literary legacies. The bulk of his short stories appeared in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine devoted to the supernatural. But within these modest confines, Lovecraft brought dark fantasy screaming into the 20th century, taking the genre, almost literally, into a new dimension. Nowhere is this more evident than... -
Esoterica
TechnoPagans
May the Astral Plane be Reborn in CyberspaceRead moreMay the Astral Plane be Reborn in Cyberspace
Mark Pesce is in all ways wired. Intensely animated and severely caffeinated, with a shaved scalp and thick black glasses, he looks every bit the hip Bay Area technonerd. Having worked in communications for more than a decade, Pesce read William Gibson's breathtaking description of cyberspace as a call to arms, and he's spent the last handful of years bringing Neuromancer's consensual hallucination to life -- concocting network technologies, inventing virtual reality gadgets, tweaking the World Wide Web. Long driven... -
Technoculture5 min
Barbed and Wired Net
Online after the Oklahoma BombingRead moreOnline after the Oklahoma Bombing
As one message on an Internet newsgroup devoted to explosives put it, "There are a lot of unstable compounds out there." The writer was responding to a naif surprised that a bunch of fertilizer and some diesel fuel could rip the side off a nine-story building. But the man could have been talking about the rhetoric of Net politics itself. Long a fertile ground for anarchist and antiauthoritarian thought, Net political culture also includes heaps of reactionary conspiracy theory, racist... -
Music23 min
Sampling Paradise
The Technofreak Legacy of Golden GoaRead moreThe Technofreak Legacy of Golden Goa
It's one hour past midnight, and the jungle throbs with techno. The tropical breeze off the Arabian Sea is warm and wet. I stuff a wad of rupees into the outstretched palm of the auto-rickshaw taxi-driver, and head toward the noise. I'm 350 kilometers south of Bombay, in India's coastal state of Goa, and I'm about to hit a rave. The forest clearing swarms with bohemian backpackers and European hipsters strutting their cyberdelic stuff: holographic sneakers, flared fractal jeans, floppy... -
Subcultures16 min
Klingon Like Me
Travels into the Dark Side of TrekkerdomRead moreTravels into the Dark Side of Trekkerdom
The dealer floor of the latest Star Trek Creation Convention is closed, the day's security work is done, and in a darkened Ramada Inn conference room, the Klingons prepare for their ritual, Tera'daq Tlhinganghom'mey. The hulking beings, all members or allies of the Karizan Empire, file past a table in silence, depositing their energy weapons in a pile. Incense chokes the room as twelve aliens, both male and female, take their seats around an altar. Candlelight reflects off the latex... -
Religions and Spirits10 min
Solar Temple Pilots
Reading the End Times with Luc JouretRead moreReading the End Times with Luc Jouret
In the beginning, there is only the event: the Order of the Solar Temple's mass demise by fire, drug, and bullet. Forty-eight corpses in Switzerland, divided almost evenly between a farmhouse in Cheiry and a cluster of gutted chalets 100 miles to the south in Granges-sur-Salvan; plus five more bodies in two torched homes in Morin Heights, Quebec. But before that cool newsprint ax attempts to fall between clarity and madness, information and cult, there is nothing but a kind... -
Religions and Spirits18 min
Snakes & Ladders
The spiritual tension between immanence and transcendenceRead moreThe spiritual tension between immanence and transcendence
These days, when everything breaks down and comes together, spiritual explorers find themselves in a vast, tangled forest. Myths and metaphors, practices and words of wisdom, criss-crossing paths multiply in all directions. In many ways, this eclectic and fragmentary zone itself defines our moment of religious experience. Perhaps the question is less which path you find yourself on--what religious philosophy or spiritual technology you're remaking yourself with--but on how you move through the space itself. How do you engage its... -
Technoculture5 min
Into the Myst
Myst: The Miller Brothers' Virtual TaleRead moreMyst: The Miller Brothers' Virtual Tale
In the third grade, we loved The Hobbit so much we wanted to live in it. And after school, screwing around in the arroyos that sliced through our SoCal neighborhood, we did, projecting Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains onto a landscape of sandstone cliffs and chaparral. Today's technoculture mavens -- Las Vegas hotel architects, interactive game designers, virtual reality gearheads -- want to engineer a similar sense of immersion: the peculiar feeling that you have passed from this world into... -
Technoculture12 min
Space 1994: Looking Out, and Back
One Small Step for a Man, One Giant Explosion for Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9Read moreOne Small Step for a Man, One Giant Explosion for Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
The first chunk of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's 21 fragments plunged into Jupiter's swirling gaseous soup at 37 miles per second, producing a fireball half as wide as Earth and spurting a plume of gunk 700 miles above the planet's top cloud layer, on July 16, 1994. A quarter century to the day before this 225,000 megaton blast, three men in glittery suits sat atop a 36-story tube filled with tons of flaming propellant and headed for the first walk on... -
Articles and Essays19 min
The Gods of the Funny Books
An Interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel PollackRead moreAn Interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack
Messy, brash and thoroughly unsuited for the reflective sophistication of mystical philosophy, popular culture nonetheless keeps the spiritual world alive. Historically, magic and divination were the link between the sage and the serf, and the arcane hierarchies of daemons rode the back of everyday desires for good crops, cures, and the lass down the lane. These days, fragments of esoteric lore are scattered throughout popular culture: angels grace Time magazine, ravers celebrate Neopagan holidays with goofy hats and electronic beats,... -
Mind and Philosophy7 min
Deleuze & Guattari’s What is Philosophy?
D&G's "virtual philosophy"Read moreD&G's "virtual philosophy"
Michel Foucault's blurb is stamped on the back of What is Philosophy? like a slogan: "Perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian." Deleuze insisted that Foucault made the quip to amuse their fans and irritate their enemies, but it's presence on the back of the latest Deleuze and Guattari translation indicates two things: One, that one senses something mighty in Deleuze, an epochal shift in the plate tectonics of thought. And two, that in America, a personal... -
Moving Pictures10 min
The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
The hottest media meme/kiddie-toy infection of the mid-1990sRead moreThe hottest media meme/kiddie-toy infection of the mid-1990s
My television sits about three yards away from my computer, and every hour or so during writing bouts I wax up my remote control and catch a couple waves. A few months ago, getting bored with shitty videos, yapping Headline News heads, and the parade of thick and seething folks spilling their guts on Maury and Sally Jesse, I began leavening the mix with solid doses of kid's TV. What initially caught my eye were the insane ads: Kids morph... -
Moving Pictures6 min
James Burke’s Connections
The delightful British maestro of science TVRead moreThe delightful British maestro of science TV
One of the smarter inmates I knew at the university I attended had a mediocre grade point average for the simple reason that he took physics classes way out of his league. In love with the poetry of science, he surrounded himself with impossible jargon and competitive jerks because the introductory classes they forced us humanities majors to take basically sucked. Instead of drawing people into the material by putting it in a juicy context, these exercises in tedium sketched... -
Technoculture14 min
It’s a Mud, Mud, Mud, Mud World
Exploring Online RealityRead moreExploring Online Reality
In our media-primed brains, the phrase "virtual reality" triggers off images of Robocop helmets, studded gloves, and 3D Nintendo. VR is seen as the scuba gear for the seas of simulation, a purely technological means of tricking the central nervous system into inhabiting a digitally concocted space. But some netheads are coming to suspect that MUDs—which, depending on whom you talk to, stands for either Multi-User Dimension or Multi-User Dungeon—have already incarnated the spirit, if not the letter, of VR.... -
Religions and Spirits10 min
The Wandering Sufi
Into the Mystic with Peter Lamborn WilsonRead moreInto the Mystic with Peter Lamborn Wilson
The exotic desires uncorked by travel make for a messy romance, blending recognition and projection -- a crush on the Other. Muzaffarabad, Zamboanga, Babdaroon -- for Westerners, can these fail to seduce? (Okay, Babdaroon is from Lord Dunsany). Unfortunately, for the last half millennium, Westerners have courted travel in empire's brothel. Today the recognition of this imperialist imagination has led to a refreshing political deconstruction of exoticism, whether of the "primitive" or the Orient. But in some corners, this has... -
Religions and Spirits, Technoculture13 min
The Notebooks of Lance Daybreak
Shards of the Diamond MatrixRead moreShards of the Diamond Matrix
In January, while attempting to scrounge up my first assignment for Wired, I visited a Tibetan Buddhist monastery located in the Indian state of Karnataka. Along with their usual tasks, the young monks at Sera Mey were inputting rare and crumbling woodblock sutras onto cheap XTs. Under the auspices of the Asian Classics Input Project, mountains of this digital dharma eventually found its way onto freely-distributed CD-ROMs and the Internet. One evening, after the monks served me a bowl of... -
Mind and Philosophy12 min
An Interview with Francisco Varela
Gentle bridges between Buddhism and scienceRead moreGentle bridges between Buddhism and science
Since the days of the Theosophical quest for a modernist spirituality, many Westerners have found Buddhism strangely compatible with the experimental, impersonal, and critical outlook of modern science. Driven to integrate the wisdom of the East with the scientific picture of "ultimate things" (principally, quantum physics), readers continue to gobble up works like The Dancing Wu-Li Masters and Mysticism and the New Physics. But while metaphysical pop science highlights many intriguing connections and asks some hard questions about the relationship... -
Technoculture36 min
Techgnosis: Seed-Crystal
Magic, Memory, and the Angels of InformationRead moreMagic, Memory, and the Angels of Information
One of the most compelling snares is the use of the term metaphor to describe a correspondence between what the users see on the screen and how they should think about what they are manipulating ... There are clear connotations to the stage, theatrics, magic—all of which give much stronger hints as to the direction to be followed. For example, the screen as 'paper to be marked on' is a metaphor that suggests pencils, brushes, and typewriting....Should we transfer the... -
Moving Pictures, Technoculture12 min
Modern Neopaganism
Reading the return of paganismRead moreReading the return of paganism
By now, most of us need barely glance over our shoulders to see the cracks and fissures running through the facade of Western Civ. Rationality has degenerated into an instrument of control, science spawns the very problems it then hopes to mend, traditional canons crumble, and the social system that crawled out of Europe's chilly bogs now munches its way across the planet's surface like some cancerous machine set on auto-destruct. For those of us inside this bustling ruin, the... -
Moving Pictures5 min
The X-Files
I want to believeRead moreI want to believe
A few months ago, I gave a lecture at the New York Open Center on various aspects of the UFO subculture: New Age channelers, conspiracy theorists, nuts'n'bolts researchers. At one point I turned to the abductees, those tens of thousands of basically ordinary people who, possessing no less sound minds and bodies than the rest of us freaks, have a movie in their brains that shows them being taken aboard spacecraft by little gray dudes or other aliens, and frequently... -
Technoculture5 min
The Play-Doh of the Future, Here Today
The Soft Machine of GakRead moreThe Soft Machine of Gak
A glossy, violet glop is oozing through Magda Gross's 10-year-old fingers. "It feels like clams," Magda says, holding a pendulous glob over a nearby minirecorder. "It doesn't drip that easily." With the air of a fifth-grade science whiz, she pads the clammy goo together and holds it next to my Sony. "Let's see what it sounds like," she says, shoving her fingers into the synthetic sludge. "Here's the music!" Ffflarrpptt. The source of the emission was not Magda's intestinal tract... -
Diary9 min
Teenage Head
Confessions of a High School StonerRead moreConfessions of a High School Stoner
I became a teenager the year Reagan ran for president, and by the time the lizard slid into office, I was already a total stoner. I bonged skunk bud, chased JD with Coke, snorted Beauties, and had dropped my first dose of acid the previous Halloween, tripping to Ummagumma amidst the paisley bedsheets and pillows that lined the loft my friend Bry-Fry knocked together in his family's garage. Phasing between the reveries of a bookish childhood and the hormone-fueled angst... -
Offline Archive5 min
David Lynch’s Wild Palms
VR on TVRead moreVR on TV
Remember three years ago, when Laura Palmer's bloated blue lips opened up a hole in your TV? Part of the thrill of those first episodes of Twin Peaks was the fact that something so self-consciously strange had no business being on network television. Even if the show's pregnant nothings became cloying over the weeks, the space it opened up—menacing, surreal and tediously oblique—seemed to signify some larger mutation of the airwaves. For Lynch did much more than sneak pomo idiosyncrasies... -
Technoculture11 min
A Computer, A Universe
Mapping an Online CosmologyRead moreMapping an Online Cosmology
Information wants to be space. From flowcharts to data maps to those yahoo graphs in USA Today, spatial imagery incarnates abstraction into three dimensions. But however rigorous this mapping is, an imaginative residue always remains -- population charts using human figures become a cop line-up of dwarfs and giants, while nonrepresentational scientific charts take us into Mondrian. There is a peculiar pleasure to art that we know is also information, a pleasure at once visual and abstract. Think about the... -
Offline Archive4 min
Now and Zen
Kung Fu: The Legend ContinuesRead moreKung Fu: The Legend Continues
Forget about the Mod Squad -- the only field-day the hippies got on TV was Kung Fu. Not only was Kwai Chang Caine a dangerous Shaolin freak with bare feet, mystical powers, and a Billy Jack hat, but he was played by David Carradine, a dangerous Hollywood freak with Aquarian babes, prodigious appetites, and a hut in the Hollywood hills. Kung Fu's vibe was scruffy and occult, and its formal effects memorable -- all those flashbacks, slo-mo kicks, and overexposed... -
Esoterica
My Favorite Martians
A UFO EpistemologyRead moreA UFO Epistemology
If we're to believe our ancestors, close encounters with the gods are no joke. Even if they beam down in a celestial glow, they still scare the shit out of everybody. And more often than not they lurk on the edge of revelation, in the outer dark, where the firelight is swallowed in gargantuan night. Today our fires are so bright—the skeptical lights of labs, satellites, and TV cameras—that such entities would need to go guerilla to penetrate our glaring... -
Mind and Philosophy
De Landa Destratified
The Liquefaction of Manuel De LandaRead moreThe Liquefaction of Manuel De Landa
In War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa cuts through humanism and adopts the position of “robot historian.” Like a techno-Foucault, he traces the evolution of self-organizing machine consciousness under the selective pressures of human warfare. Even more interesting is that he combines three theoretical influences: non-linear dynamics, the “nomad thought” of French post-structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the psychedelic experience (DeLanda returns yearly to ritually trip with a shaman in Oaxaca). Crosslinking these already... -
Moving Pictures
Toon In, Turn On, Drop Out
The Sacred Wisdom of Bugs the ElderRead moreThe Sacred Wisdom of Bugs the Elder
To grapple with Ted Turner's 24-hour cartoon network, you must address childhood, not because the classic cartoons on the channel are childish, but because beings a child is so cartoon. When you're a kid, you're tripping all the time. Objects warp, animals rule, and funny noises abound, while the speckled beasts of dream are always lurking under beds and popping out of closets. Though most of the classic animation kids imbibe from TV (Warner Bros., MGM) was initially developed for... -
Offline Archive6 min
Trialogues at the Edge of the West
Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert SheldrakeRead moreTerence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
The best pop science resonates with popular desire. For Zen hippies pouring through The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters in the '70s, the paradoxes and chimeras of the quantum world not only explained their acid meltdowns, but uncovered a yawning void in the heart of Western scientific materialism. When scientist and Gaia Hypothesis author James Lovelock slapped the name of the Greek earth goddess onto his theory that the planet regulates itself as if it were... -
Moving Pictures11 min
FernGully
The jungle in filmRead moreThe jungle in film
A few weeks ago, $2.99 at a Pizza Hut counter got you a FernGully: The Last Rainforest kid's pizza pack: a single-topping Personal Pan pizza and beverage of your choice, a packet of seeds, and a bowl-shaped plastic terrarium vaguely reminiscent of Bruce Dern's deep-space greenhouse in Silent Running. After slurping your Coke dry, you could fill the faerie-decorated cup with soil, plant the seeds, and slap the terrarium cup on top. You got a booklet too ("See the movie,... -
Religions and Spirits22 min
Tongues of Fire, Whirlwinds of Noise
Images of Spiritual InformationRead moreImages of Spiritual Information
Information is low on the totem pole of consciousness, just a notch up from raw data and a leg up from total noise. In contrast to knowledge or wisdom or understanding—which, we imagine, well up from within or slowly blossom with time and diligence—information comes in discrete packages of data, signals bursting from without. Information is perhaps the most worldly (even "fallen") form of knowledge—newspaper listings, messages scrawled on match-books, coded satellite transmissions, as well as maps of systems, astrological... -
Offline Archive
Organic Machines
Magnetic Fields, back in the dayRead moreMagnetic Fields, back in the day
A young couple picnics at the side of a country road. They’re dressed like English majors and they’re lost in thought, gazing off at a solitary snowy mountain in the distance, set against a reddening sky. The treats on their blanket are beautifully arranged. They do not see the bus that’s careening their way. It’s all here on the watercolored cover of the Magnetic Fields’ The Wayward Bus: introspection, space, sweet afternoons, death just over the hill. Though Susan Anway’s... -
Music6 min
The Big Playback: Filmi Music
Indian Film MusicRead moreIndian Film Music
Slowly gyrating across a Bombay cabaret stage, a busty courtesan promises a night of delight to an enraptured drooler; then a greasy Elvis clone in shades, bell-bottoms, and a sequined jacket hound dogs in Hindi alongside a girl in a white leather miniskirt and thigh-high boots; then strings, sitars, and ardent voices swell as a young couple flies through blue skies and frolics through door frames propped up on the side of a verdant hill, door frames painted with flames... -
Subcultures10 min
Love and Anarchy
Hippies, Faeries, and Hoboes at the 20th Rainbow GatheringRead moreHippies, Faeries, and Hoboes at the 20th Rainbow Gathering
GREEN MOUNTAIN NATIONAL FOREST, VERMONT: A young backpacker with short hair and jeans stands on a rock surveying the riot of color and scruff around him: tents draped with scarves, bands of face-painted kids, verdant hills, hairy people hanging around waiting for cookies. "It's my first Gathering," he says, taking in the scene. "I'm being pulled in so many directions. I guess I'll go where my karma takes me." He smiles and wanders off. In most of America, language that... -
Religions and Spirits19 min
Trickster at the Crossroads
West Africa's God of Messages, Sex and DeceitRead moreWest Africa's God of Messages, Sex and Deceit
When we think of tricksters, we generally imagine folk characters and culture heroes, not gods. Tricksters either tend to be associated with animal spirits (such as Coyote), or are Promethean figures, archetypal "humans" who interact with and upset the world of the gods. But one of the world's greatest and most interesting trickster figures is not only a god, but a god of high metaphysical content. He is Eshu-Elegbara, one of the orisha, the West African deities that are worshiped... -
Religions and Spirits6 min
Televangelists Tune Into the End
National Religious Broadcasters convention during the first Gulf WarRead moreNational Religious Broadcasters convention during the first Gulf War
Washington, D.C.: Peter Warren III, a short, round Texan with lizard eyes and slicked back, thinning hair, shuffled around the showroom floor of the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. As head of El Paso's nonprofit STC Broadcast Consultants, Warren spoke for many here at the Sheraton hotel when he asserted that communications technology is part of the divine plan. "The angels in Revelation? Well, I think they're broadcasting satellites spreading television and radio signals over the earth. Technology is advancing unbelievably.... -
Music9 min
Look! Listen! Vibrate! SMILE!: The Beach Boys
The Apollonian Shimmer of the Beach BoysRead moreThe Apollonian Shimmer of the Beach Boys
When I was boogie-boarding the Del Mar waves in the mid-'70s, I remember hearing this surf tune that name-dropped my hometown and thinking, cool, we're on the map, right along with "Hollywood" and "Disneyland" and "Chico." But the Beach Boys sounded pretty dinky to my Led ears, and the images that crusted the band like barnacles—Sunkist soda, bearded burnouts, state fairs, longboards—were too lame to hook me much. And the canons of AOR, new wave, and indie rock didn't teach... -
Mind and Philosophy, Scholarship8 min
Parsing Gilles Deleuze
Professor DesireRead moreProfessor Desire
It’s difficult to place Gilles Deleuze. A seminal poststructuralist, as rigorous and inventive as any in the postmodern pantheon, he has yet to noodle his way into hipster thought as thoroughly as Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, et al. Maybe this is because his work challenges in ways that Postmodernism 101 doesn’t prepare you for: he is critical of the linguistic turn; science and mathematics emerge from his bag of tricks as often as literature; arcane and wacky metaphors abound; and—most... -
Articles and Essays, Technoculture6 min
Technomancer: PKD
Divine DiscontentRead moreDivine Discontent
When Philip K. Dick died after a stroke in 1982, he left behind almost forty science fiction novels, over a hundred short stories, a few remarkable essays, and the “Exegesis,” a crazed document that attempted to interpret the divine intelligence that he claimed invaded his mind in 1974. Thought Dick remains partially buried in the mildewed heap of yesterday’s pop trash (best known as “the guy who wrote the book they based Blade Runner on”), his dedicated following has grown...