“Brilliant Visions: Peyote among the Aesthetes”, @MikeJayNet on how the 1890s saw the first systematic explorations by non-indigenous Americans and Europeans into the powerful psychedelic effects of mescaline: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/brilliant-visions-peyote-among-the-aesthetes
The story of Humphry Davy's workplace in Bristol told by @mikejay.bsky.social in 'Free Radicals'.
Tristan Cork@tristancorkpost.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe astonishing & often untold story of the world's first psychedelic commune, in Bristol, is the subject of a new book - released just as the home's new owner is restoring it & opening it up. Read the full story of the Pneumatic Institution here: www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol...
In his essay “The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris”, @MikeJayNet explores how consuming powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/ether-dreams
bureauoflostculture.podbean.com/e/free-radic...
Free Radicals - Tripping in the 18th Century. | Bureau of Lost Culture
In the company of historian of drugs, MIKE JAY, we journey back to the first psychedelic age - not the 1960s, but the 1790s, when Britain was at the forefront, at the frontier, of gonzo psychedelic sc...
bureauoflostculture.podbean.com
did Ecstasy end football "hooliganism"? finally finally out OA, in time for the end of the season: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
Paperback £6 this month from Yale, same deal on Psychonauts and Free Radicals yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300...
Mescaline - Yale University Press London
A definitive history of mescaline that explores its mind-altering effects across cultures, from ancient America to Western modernity Mescaline became a popul...
yalebooks.co.uk
publicdomainreview.org/essay/magic-...
Magic by Return of Post: How Mail Order Delivered the Occult
What allowed occultism to blossom in the United States at the turn of the 20th century? Linotype machines, cheap pulp paper, and newly improved postal networks. Allan Johnson investigates the forgotte...
publicdomainreview.org
On the horizon for October www.waterstones.com/events/wireh...
Wireheads - An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain: an evening with Mike Jay | Events at Waterstones Bookshops | Waterstones
Events at Waterstones get you closer to the books and authors you admire most. Find information and tickets about Wireheads - An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain: an evening with Mike Jay ...
waterstones.com
“On May 5th, at night, after walking for an hour amidst the scenery of the Avon, at this period rendered exquisitely beautiful by bright moonshine; my mind being in a state of agreeable feeling, I respired six quarts of newly prepared nitrous oxide....” publicdomainreview.org/essay/o...
“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...
“A Beautiful Purplish Hue”: Frank Dudley Beane’s Experience with Ergot and Cannabis Indica (1884)
An early contribution to drug literature, in which a man came to be fashioned out of wood.
publicdomainreview.org
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...
Why America is falling out of love with cocaine
America's cocaine use is quietly collapsing — even as the drug floods the market at record purity and historic low prices.
san.com
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
www.arte.tv/de/videos/12... Have humans always intoxicated themselves? My thoughts, from the Poison Garden in Alnwick, overdubbed in German
Haben Menschen sich schon immer berauscht? - Stimmt es, dass ...? - Die ganze Doku | ARTE
Ist der Drogenrausch ein neues Phänomen – entstanden in einer genusssüchtigen Gesellschaft, die keine Grenzen mehr kennt? Funde tausende Jahre alter Drogenartefakte wecken Zweifel. Der Rausch scheint ...
arte.tv
www.skeptic.com/article/sell...
Selling Fear and Half-Truths: The Latest 60 Minutes ‘Exposé’ on Havana Syndrome
60 Minutes has aired four Havana Syndrome exposés—but two intelligence assessments say attacks are “highly unlikely.” Robert Bartholomew, a scholar of mass delusion, reveals the omissions, conflicts o...
skeptic.com
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
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...
Psilocybe Pickers by Robert Dickins
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...
psychedelicpress.co.uk
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 🧵
‘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...
Mike Jay · Demand Stolen Rings: The Dangerous Dead
It’s understandable that the dead should be angry or vengeful: after all, they have suffered a terrible calamity....
lrb.co.uk
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.”
Daydreamers and Sleepwalkers: Crossing the Borderlands of the Unconscious
Scientists and philosophers have spent centuries studying sleep. Each descent only deepens the mystery.
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
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.
“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
The Mythology Of Conscious AI | NOEMA
Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.
noemamag.com