Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
Plant shamanism from its ancient beginnings, through its medieval repression, to the funded psychedelic renaissance now underway — taught by the author of Breaking Open the Head.
A three-hour lecture and workshop on extraterrestrial and inter-dimensional communication, and the overlap between the UFO phenomenon, psychedelic contact experience and the collective unconscious.
Written from Tulum for Purple’s Mexico issue. Pinchbeck traces Mexico’s psychedelic legacy — psilocybin and the Mazatec, peyote among the Huichol and Tarahumara, Salvia divinorum, the Sonoran toad, and Castaneda’s disputed Don Juan — against the commercialisation now overtaking it, from Thiel-funded psychedelic startups to Tulum’s Bufo trade. Recounts his own DMT initiation at Palenque, a 5-MeO-DMT session in Mexico City, and Wasson’s encounter with María Sabina, and closes on Sergio Magaña’s account of the Sixth Sun and Octavio Paz on Mexican solitude.
Christopher Bache on twenty years of high-dose LSD sessions and the cosmology he derived from them, recorded for Building Our Regenerative Future. Free, and paired with his dialogue with Ervin Laszlo.
Originally published on VICE US. Pinchbeck interviews Allan Badiner about his anthology Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, asking whether the two traditions conflict. Badiner recounts a grueling Sri Lankan meditation retreat, meeting the chemist Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna, and cites Huston Smith and Ken Wilber on the gap between altered states and altered traits.
Announces When Plants Dream, co-written with anthropologist Sophia Rokhlin of the Chaikuni Institute in Peru. Pinchbeck traces his route from Manhattan magazine journalism through Bwiti iboga initiation in Gabon and ayahuasca with the Secoya in Ecuador, then argues that the global ayahuasca boom carries real costs: scarcity of banisteriopsis caapi vines, destabilized indigenous communities, and shamans pulled onto the international circuit.
A brief note introducing video of Pinchbeck’s closing talk, Psychedelic Initiation and the Ecological Crisis, delivered at Breaking Convention 2015, the third International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness, held at the University of Greenwich that July. A question-and-answer session with Russell Brand followed. The talk belonged to the Beckley Foundation’s Transformations with Psychedelics symposium.
A Dazed & Confused interview with Sergio Magana, a Mexican healer trained in the Nahuatl lineage and author of 2012-2021: The Dawn of the Sixth Sun. Magana says the Fifth Sun ended in 1991 and the Sixth Sun, a Sun of Darkness, arrives in 2021, requiring mastery of the dream state and the nagual. He ties the shift to the work of Jung and Freud.
An introduction to Alan Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology, written in the early 1960s about LSD and psilocybin. Pinchbeck argues that Watts’s real claim is that the Western ego does not exist, and that the psychedelic revolution has barely begun. He cites Thomas B. Roberts’s view of entheogens as a second Reformation.
An argument for the legalization of ayahuasca, published in Dazed & Confused in 2012. Pinchbeck describes the brew’s pharmacology, the syncretic churches Santo Daime and Uniao do Vegetal, the Brazilian Ministry of Health study finding no harm, Gilberto Gil’s campaign to declare it cultural patrimony, and US court rulings, against arrests in England and Spain.