“a peculiar lightness ... a horrible feeling of impending death ... a beautiful purplish hue ... My body seemed to be fashioned from wood” — from a New York physician’s 1884 “trip report” after ingesting cannabis and ergot (proto-LSD). More in our latest post: publicdomainreview.org/collection/e...
I wrote a piece about why America, perhaps surprisingly, is falling out of love with cocaine.
It's about cultural and economic shifts, plus exaggerated fears that most cocaine contains fentanyl.
san.com/cc/why-ameri...
🌵💚
Mike Jay's PSYCHONAUTS, with William James on the cover, sitting next to a cactus plant and a painting of Captain Beefheart.
Finished @mikejay.bsky.social's PSYCHONAUTS. Been a fan since reading his essays in Fortean Times and Anomalist (great piece on Coleridge!). Approachable, with deep insights. Text runs from Freud to Yeats, H.G. Wells, to Crowley, Blavatsky to Baudelaire. Bold, rich, nuanced.. and fun! 🔥 #BookSky
Yeah ‘fake news day’ has somehow lost its appeal…
www.arte.tv/de/videos/12...
Have humans always intoxicated themselves? My thoughts, from the Poison Garden in Alnwick, overdubbed in German
The Dream-God (1874) - One man's account of his intense and elaborate visions while under the influence of morphine, including 500 foot lizards and conversations with Confucius and Zoroaster. Read it here: http://bit.ly/17TOGOF
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m75...
Psilocybe Pickers tells the story of how these psychedelic fungi entered British consciousness in the twentieth century, the bemushroomed Britons who took them on as part of their culture, and how the authorities tried to police them.
psychedelicpress.co.uk/products/psi...
Yes it was PLW :-)
Young people: what’s an album?
The leech barometer in Whitby Museum: a huge cylindrical glass case with a bizarre steampunk contraption inside, featuring ornate metalwork, a lot of glass bottles, some chains, and a central totem-like structure
Title page: AN ESSAY EXPLANATORY OF THE TEMPEST PROGNOSTICATOR IN THE BUILDING OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION FOR THE WORKS OF INDUSTRY OF ALL NATIONS. READ BEFORE THE WHITBY PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY FEBRUARY 27TH, 1851. BY GEORGE MERRY WEATHER, M.D. WHITBY, The Designer and Enventor.
27 February? That can only mean one thing. YES, THAT’S RIGHT! It’s 175 years to the day since George Merryweather gave a three-hour lecture to the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society about his leech barometer 🧵
And the extent to which the experience is shaped by framing/expectation
‘Most of the tropes that came to define the vampire – neck-biting, blood-drinking or invisibility in mirrors – are recent inventions, though some, such as the protective virtue of garlic, do have a historical basis.’
@mikejay.bsky.social on the dangerous dead.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Sleep paralysis, somnambulism, hypnic jerks: we’ve all drifted through the borderlands of sleep & wakefulness. Those borderlands have preoccupied philosophers, scientists, & novelists, from Montaigne’s “most profound and maddest fancies” to E.M. Cioran’s warning of sleep’s “frightening importance.”
Exactly - anticholinergic eyes on Prof Dentinger’s lab results 👁️👁️
Lilliputian hallucinations (phalanxes of identical marching munchkins) are very familiar in non-psychedelic contexts, eg side effects of Parkinson’s meds. Suggests the mushroom pharmacology could be adrenergic/cholinergic?
Only recently learned that A MAN CALLED HORSE and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALLANCE are both based on short stories by a little-known female author. Both in this collection which is solidly excellent.
He’s first rate, should be much better known but copyright issues with his estate have left much languishing out of print. Loads of films based on his stories including Rear Window.
“If we conflate the richness of biological brains & human experience with the information-processing machinations of deepfake-boosted chatbots, or whatever the latest AI wizardry is, we do our minds, brains & bodies a grave injustice.”
— @anilseth.bsky.social, winner of @berggruen.org Essay Prize
Also his chemistry/engineering network overlaps with Beddoes and the Pneumatic Institution
You too - enjoying your Swedish snow scenes :-)
Cochrane a bit younger but they had close mutuals, notably Francis Burdett who was political ally to both
Peter’s book coming this autumn, will put you in touch
Absolutely cracking new biog of Cochrane forthcoming from Peter Moore - more on his science and radical politics than Thomas
The most detailed account yet of the Liberty Cap’s emergence - highly recommended 🍄
