Recent Writings

From my new printed pamphlet: "The pleasure is a singular suffering. Like a fine perfume, it blends a variety of notes into an evocative medley whose torment is greater than the sum of its parts."

Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” leaps, or rather drifts, into that temporal breach between sacred and profane, and becomes thereby perhaps the most reverent of godless American ballads.

In an era of “sacred plants,” commercial formulations, and manageable microdosing, LSD the Mighty has drifted to the periphery of our consciousness. What lessons does it still hold?

Wilson developed a wayward if deeply self-reflexive theory and dialectical method of visionary practice, one that, amidst the paranoia, presented its own deconstructive and libertarian vision of gnosis.

"In 2019, two remarkable photography books appeared, both of which document, in an appropriately twisty fashion, the California of the late 60s and 1970s."

"Across genres and across the globe, music became psychedelicized in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, very much including soul and R&B. Indeed, in many ways funk music begins as R&B on acid."

Consciousness Culture from a California perspective, plus news, notes, and reviews. www.burningshore.com

"Gnostic spirituality, we might say, is gnosis against the grain. Its antinomian illuminations and agonistic hermeneutics are directly posed against those concentrations of power that wield control over cosmic, worldly, and psychological existence."

Turk presents the viewer with mandalas, strange creatures, and biological cosmograms that depict mutant metamorphoses of animal, human, plant, and god.

"The garden of forking paths is really a one-way labyrinth, a plunge into a single conundrum that is swallowing us up."

With “Dopesmoker,” Sleep sealed the tomb of an entire genre.

A look at the controversy over for-profit psychedelic pharmaceutical companies, and how the outlaw values of the underground may show a way out.

A scholarly essay on the relationship between magick and science in the rocketry and sorcery of Jack Parsons.