I tried to find a nifty, timely reason for posting this sweet YouTube discovery, but I’m coming up blank. Fact is, I was just screwing around online when I came across this playlist of Terence McKenna reading Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s “The Hash Eater.”

“Reading” doesn’t really capture what McKenna does here: fans of the man know that he’s a yarn-spinner of the highest order and his take on this tome is more of a performance than a simple recital.

Here’s some Wiki words on the text…

The Hasheesh Eater is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author’s altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract.

First published in 1857, The Hasheesh Eater went through four editions in the late 1850s and early 1860s, each put out by Harper & Brothers. In 1903, another publishing house put a reprint of the original edition — and the last complete edition until 1970. As of 2006, two editions are in print, including an annotated version first published in 2003.

Ludlow said, “The entire truth of Nature cannot be copied,” so “the artist must select between the major and minor facts of the outer world; that, before he executes, he must pronounce whether he will embody the essential effect, that which steals on the soul and possesses it without painful analysis, or the separate details which belong to the geometrician and destroy the effect.”[1] Many of his passages, which may have seemed like fantastic myth-making to his contemporaries, ring true today with more modern knowledge of the psychedelic state.[2] Ludlow writes of one hallucination: “And now, with time, space expanded also… The whole atmosphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side.”[3]

Ludlow describes the marijuana user as one who is reaching for “the soul’s capacity for a broader being, deeper insight, grander views of Beauty, Truth and Good than she now gains through the chinks of her cell.”[4] Conversely, he says of hashish users: “Ho there! pass by; I have tried this way; it leads at last into poisonous wildernesses.”[4]

The popularity of The Hasheesh Eater led to interest in the drug it described. Not long after its publication, the Gunjah Wallah Co. in New York began advertising “Hasheesh Candy”:

The Arabian “Gunjh” of Enchantment confectionized. — A most pleasurable and harmless stimulant. — Cures Nervousness, Weakness, Melancholy, &c. Inspires all classes with new life and energy. A complete mental and physical invigorator.[5]

John Hay, who would become a close confidant of President Lincoln and later U.S. Secretary of State, remembered Brown University as the place “where I used to eat Hasheesh and dream dreams.”[6] And a classmate recalls that after reading Ludlow’s book, Hay “must needs experiment with hasheesh a little, and see if it was such a marvelous stimulant to the imagination as Fitzhugh Ludlow affirmed. ‘The night when Johnny Hay took hasheesh’ marked an epoch for the dwellers in Hope College.”[7]

Within twenty-five years of the publication of The Hasheesh Eater, many cities in the United States had private hashish parlors. And there was already controversy about the legality and morality of cannabis intoxication. In 1876, when tourists could buy hashish at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, the Illustrated Police News would write about “The Secret Dissipation of New York Belles… a Hasheesh Hell on Fifth Avenue.”[8]

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The new Psychedelic Sex book published by Taschen this spring is currently being sold on eBay for $69. That’s a silly point to make about what amounts to a seriously in-depth look at what happened to the burgeoning culture of “men’s magazines” when they ran smack into the psychedelic revolution in the 1960′s.

During a tiny, titillating window between 1967 and 1972, LSD, the sexual revolution, pop art graphics and the go-go entrepreneurialism that’s always been the hallmark of the pornography industry all combined in a cauldron of hippie chicks, surfer girls and counterculture couplings that created “psychedelic sex.” While the freaks flew their flags of free love and good drugs in San Francisco, men’s magazine publishers were anxious to sell the revolution to the squares on the sidelines.

Magazines like Way Out and Where It’s At attempted to capture the aesthetics of psychedelic culture beginning at the place where the jeans and the fringe and the flowers hit the floor. In a sense, the magazines were playing catch-up — the actual permissiveness and experimentation that was happening in the youth culture of the time was making the forbidden fruit that men’s magazines always claimed to offer look like something much more boring that what might have been happening on a college campus or after hours at the coffeehouse.

Like Hollywood films and television of the era, these magazines ultimately had to be satisfied with presenting a facsimile of the hippie lifestyle, but there’s something refreshingly honest and direct and innocent about these pictures of real people with real natural bodies that makes contemporary magazine photography in any genre look cold, slick, machined and unreal. The book also recalls a time when a premium nudie magazine would have to be purchased in person for a pretty penny, long before the internet make similar images available for nothing and in private, devaluing both the images and the viewer according to Taschen’s Sexy Books Editor, Dian Hanson.

Make no mistake, Psychedelic Sex is a pornographic publication full of outrageous images from six years of niche publications that capture the psychedelic era in a wild spread of flesh, fantasy, paisley and pop art. The book is gorgeous and hilarious and — at the risk of sounding like a square myself — it also includes two illuminating essays by collector Eric Godtland and that timeless spokesman of the 1960′s, the “father of the underground press,” Paul Krassner.

The book measures in at 408 pages and comes in a great pop art slipcase.

To get you in the mood for, er, reading, here’s a chapter from Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations audiobook in which he recounts a boudoir encounter under the influence of datura and DMT. Bizarre. Freaky. Hilarious…

Psychedelic SEX Terence Mckenna recounts having sex on high doses of datura and DMT from Ethereal Exposition on Vimeo.

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Keeping with my recent posts on all things eschatological here is a charming-as-hell, cyberific video of Terence McKenna explaining his Timewave Zero theory. Listen closely with your third eye and draw your yarrow sticks with care…

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They say you can judge a man by the company he keeps, and according to author Tom Robbins’ Wiki page, he’s kept his company very well, indeed…

Robbins was a friend of Terence McKenna,[20] whose influence appears evident in a couple of his books. A main character (Larry Diamond) in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas advocates a theory similar to those of McKenna, involving the history and cultural influences of psychedelic plants. Robbins also spent time with Timothy Leary and the author has said that one of the protagonists in Jitterbug Perfume (Wiggs Dannyboy) exhibited certain characteristics of Leary’s personality; Robbins has admitted to using LSD with Leary.[21]

He is friends with Gus Van Sant, and performed the voice-over narration in Van Sant’s film adaptation of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. He has been friends with directors Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph, as well, and has had small speaking parts in five feature films.

Celebrating the recent publication of Tom Robbins new memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, here is a great little video of the counterculture hero’s classic short story “The Purpose of the Moon.”

Buy Robbins’ Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
here and help to support Insomnia!

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This month we remember the late, great Terence McKenna. The author, lecturer, scientist and philosopher was the heir apparent to Timothy Leary, bringing more lucidity, humor and insight to spreading the gospel of the psychedelic experience than anyone has been able to muster since we lost McKenna to brain cancer in April, 2000.

While it’s always nice to recall our heroes in an online post, I mention McKenna to point to the remembrance created by his daughter. Klea McKenna’s The Butterfly Hunter is a gorgeous photography volume that documents her dad’s butterfly collection as she explains in the introduction of her book:

For four years, beginning in 1969, my father lived out an unlikely fantasy: he became a butterfly collector. (We use the term collector but that is just a euphemism for hunter.) Butterfly hunting is a conflicted activity, a desire for beauty and a small act of violence, both justified by science. Preserving something by taking its life. As a child he had idolized the Victorian era’s explorers and naturalists, in particular Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s forgotten partner in the discovery of Natural Selection. The ship carrying Wallace’s entire collection of Amazonian specimens (four years’ worth) caught fire and sank into the Atlantic before reaching Europe, and in turn history overlooked him. After my father’s death, more than three decades after they were collected, I inherited a large trunk full of butterflies, over 2000 of them. Unopened since they had been captured, each one was still meticulously labeled and wrapped in the papers he had available to him at the time: American magazines, local newspapers, letters and his own notebook pages.

I began to sift, slowly, through his collection, as though it were an archeological treasure or encoded messages from another time. Through the dates and place names I traced his course – Sumatra, Timor, Singapore, Colombia, Amazonas – and began to see how, as our parents’ children, we are each tied to the history of the events that we missed. I see him, each night returning to a small, sweaty, mosquito-netted room, sorting and labeling the day’s boon to the hum of an electric fan. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was raging, the Nixon administration was self-destructing, student revolts were flaring around the world and he was folding the headlines of these events into hundreds of origami-like envelopes to hold his Lepidoptera specimens.

McKenna’s book is full of thoughtful images that provoke contradictory responses: If we kill something to preserve it, what has actually been preserved? Do images from the past contain the energy of the events they document, and does making images of those images make that energy more immediate or even further removed?

Terence McKenna was educated as an art historian and an ethnobotanist who traveled the world as a young adult seeking art, plants, psychedelic experiences with indigenous shamans, and butterflies. This book invites us to walk in his footsteps by including images of Terrence McKenna’s actual field maps and previously unpublished snapshots of the author on his adventures — a passport photograph from the period is both haunting and hilarious.

The creatures he captured for his collection are exquisite, made even more beautiful and fragile-seeming by the headlines and photographs on the papers they were wrapped in. The book opens with a speckled, golden specimen wrapped in what looks like a Tarzan comic strip from Malaysia — one can imagine McKenna himself getting a chuckle out of the juxtaposition. A handful of butterflies fall out of another piece of paper featuring a photo of Vietnam War protesters in San Francisco carrying a sign that says “Not one more dead.” A gorgeous black and red butterfly is pictured alongside the ghostly stain it left on the plain white paper it was wrapped in and we are treated to yet another symbol of the persistence of memories.

The book is very spare with each butterfly and wrapper shot against a plain white background, but it’s full of complex conversations between cultures from around the world, between the present and the past, and — most importantly — between a daughter and her father. Here are some of Klea’s photographs:

The Butterfly Hunter also includes an unfinished, unpublished short story about butterfly hunting written by Terrence McKenna. The book originally appeared in 2008. Buy the new printing of The Butterfly Hunter directly from Klea McKenna here.

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I haven’t read this new book yet, but after hearing this Coast-to-Coast interview with Dennis McKenna, I can’t wait to read The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss – Dennis’s new memoir about his psychedelic adventures with his brother Terence.

Is there a more eloquent spokesperson for the psychedelic experience than Terence McKenna? For me, McKenna even eclipses early enthusiasts like Leary and Kesey in his message-making and no one since his passing has even come close to filling his shoes. But, what about his brother Dennis?

McKenna’s readers will know that Dennis was a vital part of the early experiments with mushrooms, marijuana and DMT that eventually lead to Terence’s formulating of the Timewave Zero mapping – a novelty-tracking formula that finds human history diving into a seemingly-limitless space of unlimited potential newness in less than a month on December 21, 2012.

Dennis doesn’t exactly agree with Terence’s Timewave ideas – or with many of Terence’s other takes on the psychedelic experience. In short, he’s his own man and he’s got a unique story to share. But, one thing he shares with Terence is that low, reverberating Kermit-the-frog-esque McKenna drawl and – just like with his brother – it’s a pure pleasure to listen to the man and consider his ideas.

Enjoy the interview!