Erik Davis

“A most informative account of a culture whose secular concerns continue to collide with their supernatural flip-side.”—Voice Literary Supplement In this dazzling book, writer and cyber guru Erik Davis demonstrates how religious imagination, magical dreams and millennialist fervor have always permeated the story of technology. Through shamanism to Gnosticism, voodoo to alchemy, Buddhism to evangelism, TechGnosis peels away the rational shell of infotech to reveal the utopian dreams, alien obsessions and apocalyptic visions that populate the ongoing digital revolution. Erik Davis' work has appeared in Wired, The Village Voice and Gnosis, and he has lectured internationally on technoculture and new forms of religion. He is a fifth-generation Californian who currently lives in San Francisco.

Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information

TechGnosis

An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence 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 In High Weirdness, Erik Davis--America's leading scholar of high strangeness--examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.

Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies

High Weirdness

Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information (Five Star Paperback)

Techgnosis

In this wickedly entertaining and thoroughly informed homage to one of rock music's towering pinnacles, Erik Davis investigates the magic—black or otherwise—that surrounds this album. Carefully peeling the layers from each song, Davis reveals their dark and often mystical roots—and leaves the reader to decide whether [FOUR SYMBOLS] is some form of occult induction or just an inspired, brilliantly played rock album. Excerpt: Stripping Led Zeppelin's famous name off the fourth record was an almost petulant attempt to let their Great Work symbolically stand on its own two feet. But the wordless jacket also lent the album charisma. Fans hunted for hidden meanings, or, in failing to find them, sensed a strange reflection of their own mute refusal to communicate with the outside world. This helped to create one of the supreme paradoxes of rock history: an esoteric megahit, a blockbuster arcanum. Stripped of words and numbers, the album no longer referred to anything but itself: a concrete talisman that drew you into its world, into the frame. All the stopgap titles we throw at the thing are lame: Led Zeppelin IV, [Untitled], Runes, Zoso, Four Symbols. In an almost Lovecraftian sense, the album was nameless, a thing from beyond, charged with manna. And yet this uncanny fetish was about as easy to buy as a jockstrap.

Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV

A richly illustrated exploration of the history, art, and design of printed LSD blotter tabs. Blotter is the first comprehensive written account of the history, art, and design of LSD blotter paper, the iconic drug delivery device that will perhaps forever be linked to underground psychedelic culture and contemporary street art. Created in collaboration with Mark McCloud’s Institute of Illegal Images, the world’s largest archive of blotter art, Davis’s boldly illustrated exhibition treats his outsider subject with the serious, art-historical respect it deserves, while also staying true to the sense of play, irreverence, and adventure inherent in psychedelic exploration. Davis weaves together two main stories: first, the largely unknown history of blotter paper’s development in the 1960s and its later flowering in the 1970s and 1980s; and second, the story of how San Francisco artist, professor, and “freak” McCloud began collecting blotter and ultimately became embroiled with the LSD trade. The book closes with a unique discussion of the market for “vanity blotter”—more recent perforated papers produced as collectible art objects never meant to be dipped in LSD. While vanity blotters are intimately related to the underground blotters of the LSD trade, they effectively open up their own visual world. As the ultimate document of this ephemeral artform, Blotter represents an exceptional contribution to the scholarship of art and psychedelics that will entertain older readers with lysergic nostalgia and younger readers with its image-driven journey through a colorful and scandalous corner of psychedelic lore.

The Untold Story of an Acid Medium

Blotter

William Hope Hodgson

Night Land

In this wickedly entertaining and thoroughly informed homage to one of rock music's towering pinnacles, Erik Davis investigates the magic-black or otherwise-that surrounds this album. Carefully peeling the layers from each song, Davis reveals their dark and often mystical roots-and leaves the reader to decide whether [FOUR SYMBOLS] is some form of occult induction or just an inspired, brilliantly played rock album. Excerpt: Stripping Led Zeppelin's famous name off the fourth record was an almost petulant attempt to let their Great Work symbolically stand on its own two feet. But the wordless jacket also lent the album charisma. Fans hunted for hidden meanings, or, in failing to find them, sensed a strange reflection of their own mute refusal to communicate with the outside world. This helped to create one of the supreme paradoxes of rock history: an esoteric megahit, a blockbuster arcanum. Stripped of words and numbers, the album no longer referred to anything but itself: a concrete talisman that drew you into its world, into the frame. All the stopgap titles we throw at the thing are lame: Led Zeppelin IV, [Untitled], Runes, Zoso, Four Symbols. In an almost Lovecraftian sense, the album was nameless, a thing from beyond, charged with manna. And yet this uncanny fetish was about as easy to buy as a jockstrap.

Daniel A. Schulke

DAIMON and PHARMAKON contains thirteen cutting-edge essays on the contribution of psychoactive substances to occult traditions, by contemporary authors on subculture and esotericism. The book will be of interest to students of Entheogens, Occultism, Comparative Religions, Psychedelia, and the Noetic Sciences. The essays included examine the role of chemically-altered consciousness in spirituality, particularly in secret traditions of magic and occultism, and focus especially on Western esoteric traditions such as Thelema, Witchcraft, and lodge-based magical orders. Sections on History, Theory, Practice, and Influence of psychoactives and the occult are also provided.

Essays on the Nexus of Entheogens and the Occult

Daimon and Pharmakon

In these wide-ranging essays, 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. Lovecraft, Davis writes with keen yet skeptical sympathy, intellectual subtlety and wit, and unbridled curiosity. The common thread running through these pieces is what Davis calls "modern esoterica," which he describes as a no-man's-land located somewhere between anthropology and mystical pulp, between the zendo and the metal club, between cultural criticism and extraordinary experience. Such an ambiguous and startling landscape demands that the intrepid adventurer shed any territorial claims and go nomad.

Adventures in Modern Esoterica

Nomad Codes

Looking for answers to life? Here they are-mapped beautifully and expressed concisely. In simple language, this extraordinary text walks you through four domains of existence, seven chakras, seven powers, seven habits, and seven virtues. It then outlines five functions of a healthy mind, four aspects of human action, four stages and seasons, four dimensions of a robust culture, and four requirements of a healthy society. Best of all, it summarizes all of this wisdom in one map/mandala of life, the universe, and nearly anything!

A Guide to Well-being

Map of Meaning

Federica Timeto

Pablo Echaurren

Todd Schorr

Massimiliano Geraci

Daniel Ouellette

Eric White

Joe Sorren

Marcello Faletra

Painting Collection

Joe Sorren in Celebration of Blanace & Opposable Thumbs

Theodore Roszak

Jeffrey Kripal

John Graham

James Diego Vigil

Josef Chytry

Janferie Stone

Craig Lockwood

Ted Wells

Brian Chidester

Colette Gaiter

Cal Winslow

California's social and cultural revolution that began after WW II shaped the world as we know it today.

Art and Culture Abide Then Divide Along the California Coast

Bohemian Highways

In these wide-ranging essays, Erik Davis explores the codes—spiritual, cultural, and embodied—that people use to escape the limitation 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 (of which Davis is the best-known chronicler). Articles on media technology further explore themes Davis took up in his acclaimed book Techgnosis, while his profiles of West Coast poets, musicians, and mystics extend the California terrain he previously mapped in The Visionary State. Whether his subject is collage art or the “magickal realism” of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, transvestite Burmese spirit mediums or Ufology, tripster king Terence McKenna or dub maestro Lee Perry, Davis writes with keen yet skeptical sympathy, intellectual subtlety and wit, and unbridled curiosity. The common thread running through all these pieces is what Davis calls “modern esoterica,” which he describes in his preface as a ‘no-man’s-land located somewhere between anthropology and mystical pulp, between the zendo and the metal club, between cultural criticism and extraordinary experience, whether psychedelic, or yogic, or technological.” Such an ambiguous and startling landscape demands that the intrepid adventurer shed any territorial claims and go nomad. Davis wanders with sharp eyes and an open mind, which is why Peter Lamborn Wilson calls him “the best of all guides to modern American spirituality.”

More than 150 full-color photographs are interwoven with a study of California's rich cultural history to provide a compelling study of religion, faith, and spirituality throughout the Golden State, bringing together both immigrant and native religious influences that have shaped California, from UFO cults and Zen Buddhism to televangelism and neopaganism. 12,500 first printing.

A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape

The Visionary State

Alixe Bovey

Mark Leckey

Turner Prize-winner artist Mark Leckey, presents the latest in the Hayward Touring celebrated series of artist-curated exhibitions.The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things explores the tenuous boundaries between the virtual and the real, between the 'dumb' and the animate. As modern technology becomes ever more sophisticated and pervasive, objects appear to communicate with us: phones talk back, refrigerators suggest recipes and websites seem to anticipate our desires.Through a conceptual assemblage of archaeological artifacts, contemporary artworks and visionary machines, Leckey proposes an exemplary network of objects – an 'Internet of Things' – all communicating, talking away to one another and, implicitly, looking back at us.The most imaginative, innovative and authoritative thinkers and writers in this field are brought together in this book – practitioners of art-writing, cultural criticism and the history of technology. Three unique, new texts deal with themes including monstrosity, the power of writing and the boundless power of the Internet.Myth, monstrosity, animism and the articulate are the subjects of this highly original statement on our increasingly technologised world.Published on the occasion of the Hayward Touring exhibition in 2013 to Bluecoat, Liverpool (16 February – 14 April), Nottingham Contemporary (27 April – 30 June), and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-sea (12 July – 20 October).

Erik Davis

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