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High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies

Erik Davis

4.24 · Rating details · 360 ratings · 51 reviews

A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence 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 ...more

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Hardcover, 550 pages

Published June 11th 2019 by MIT Press

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Dec 24, 2020 Goatboy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

If you favor any of the three main authors being discussed you will most likely love this work. Davis's clear sighted yet non-judgemental survey of the authors' books and thoughts reminds you of all the reasons you loved them on first read and might point out some things you didn't notice before. The web of writers and thinkers he uses to discuss these authors is quite wide-ranging and added to my tbr list (as well as including one of my professors from grad school as a reference). Definitely fu ...more

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Nov 25, 2019 Kir rated it it was amazing

Shelves: esoteric-non-fiction, weird-dystopian

I listened to some really good recordings of Professor Davis giving entertaining lectures which led me to the book. He's such a great orator that his voice is narrating this book as I read it in my head, which has been so cool I now think its how it was meant to be read. He is a very distinctive thinker and writer. I do not have the qualifications or the background knowledge to critique all the material that is folded into this book, however as a fairly well read amateur I have learned a huge am ...more

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Apr 20, 2020 Raüv rated it it was amazing

Get the audiobook, Erik Davis does a great job.

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Nov 26, 2019 Darrell Reimer rated it really liked it

Rob Latham over at LARB has the definitive review of Davis' crackerjack book, I think -- I will defer to him and second his opinion that the portion dealing with Terrence McKenna is the least compelling.

The book broke my heart, I have to say. I lived through the 70s, 80s, 90s and the turn-of-the-Mil, and McKenna, RAW and Dick were a source of fascination for me these last 30 years. The further I followed Davis on his deep dive, the more deeply I realized that "weird" is no longer a fringe concer ...more

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Mar 03, 2020 B. Rule rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book basically lights up all my circuits: PKD, RAW, and the McKennas, all run through the academic machine of deconstructionism, systems theory, and religious studies. Davis is clearly simpatico with the subculture of high weirdness, but he does an admirable job of balancing keen personal interest and disinterested and cool-headed critical analysis.

It's clear that his primary focus is PKD, and his best work lies in close textual readings of Dick's published works read in the light of the E ...more

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Jan 08, 2020 Greg Kuchmek rated it liked it

This is an odd one. If you know nothing of its subjects, you'll find yourself quite lost. Yet, if you are already well-versed in the McKenna mythos, the RAW doctrine and the PKD canon, then you'll be experiencing deja vu.

Honestly, I really like Erik Davis. He's definitely well-meaning, good-hearted and "one of us"; but this book comes across as trying way too hard. It's overly long and often overly-worded. He has the penchant for using fancy esoteric words in place of more commonly used words to ...more

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Aug 29, 2020 Gregory Collins rated it it was ok

I read this because I was interested in learning more about the McKenna brothers, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick, four colorful counterculture figures who’s work I’ve enjoyed over the years. As a casual psychonaut, I thought it might be fun. Since finishing it, I now feel like I know LESS about them, if that’s possible. This book was apparently written as a doctoral thesis and academically examines “weirdness” through the lens of these figures’ mystical/psychotic experiences in the cont ...more

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Aug 27, 2019 Steve Erickson rated it really liked it

This book takes a while to get started: the section on Terence & Dennis McKenna seems much less engaged than Erik Davis' writing on Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. That may be because the McKennas wrote (basically) non-fiction, while some of the work by Wilson and Dick that Davis grapples with pushes genres categories in order to describe real psychic experiences that the writers went through. Davis does a good job of explaining how the psychedelic extremes of the counterculture have now ...more

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Sep 06, 2019 Daniel Elder rated it it was amazing

This book is mega, a deep dive into the weirdness of a very specific time (the early 70's) in a very specific locale (California) that, like tunneling into a fractal, flowers out to be about the deeper past and the future - i.e. the present we are currently living in. (In this, it reminded me, strangely, of Paris 1919, by Margaret MacMillan - though, obviously, way fucking stranger.) Just a flipped out, excellent book that makes me feel a squirmy thrill at being part of what I now see is a long ...more

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Jul 04, 2019 Anthony rated it it was amazing

An in-depth and erudite exploration of the psychedelic and the esoteric, triangulated through the lives and work of Terrence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. It feels as thorough a summation as one could hope for of these weirdos and their weird era without ever going down the rabbit hole and into mild psychosis that these three thinkers themselves inhabited. It successfully walks the tight rope neither rejecting the weirdness nor being "seduced by madness" a tricky feat! ...more

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Oct 10, 2021 Larry rated it liked it

Shelves: 2021

Great content but the fact it was a PHD thesis is apparent and all the weirdness is often dulled by academic language.

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Oct 18, 2020 Bryan Cebulski rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction-politics, nonfiction-philosophy

Davis handles a considerable heft of weird, clunky material here not quite gracefully, but compellingly. He's not great at introducing topics or transitioning from one thing to the next, and he lets himself get carried away and his rhetoric winds up emulating the long winded obtuse rambling of his subjects. But it's altogether an interesting trip.

He gets better with each section. I'm still not sure what to make of the Terrence McKenna chapters, but his work on Robert Anthon Wilson and Philip K. ...more

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Oct 30, 2021 Alan rated it it was amazing

I was very intimidated by the length of this book. But I found it moved quickly. It was a fun, wild, disorganized, artistically literary, deeply philosophical romp through the 70s - with all the psychedelic, paranoid, weirdness of the time. I enjoyed the conclusion that reflected how the weirdness of the 70s is back and becoming the new normal for today. (e.g., lsd microdosing, false-news v. paranoid news, reality tunnels vs. confirmation bias)

I was young at the time of these events, but remembe ...more

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Aug 29, 2021 Christine rated it really liked it

One Sentence Review: “Really fuxking weird.”

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Sep 08, 2021 Peter rated it it was amazing

Shelves: counterculture, american-writers, history, 21st-century, american-history, intellectual-history, 2010s

Reading (well, listening to) this book, appropriately enough given its content and tone, was an experience. Historian of religions Erik Davis landed this book right into two registers that produce very different emotional responses for me. One register is that of chewy, involved, critical intellectual history, a happy place for me, somewhere I feel both welcomed and challenged. The other register is that of mysticism, spirituality, and the particular chip on the shoulder of intellectuals who stu Reading (well, listening to) this book, appropriately enough given its content and tone, was an experience. Historian of religions Erik Davis landed this book right into two registers that produce very different emotional responses for me. One register is that of chewy, involved, critical intellectual history, a happy place for me, somewhere I feel both welcomed and challenged. The other register is that of mysticism, spirituality, and the particular chip on the shoulder of intellectuals who study esoteric subjects, a much more fraught and murky intellectual/emotional space for me. It is impossible to disentangle these strands in “High Weirdness” and pointless to try. In the end, the challenges involved in taking this book in have helped make it, for me, one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I locate an echo of my ambivalence in the three subjects around whom Davis structured his narrative: hallucinogen evangelist Terence McKenna, journalist and novelist Robert Anton Wilson, and scifi master Philip K. Dick. Before listening to this book, my feelings were reverence for Dick, distaste for Wilson, and for the most part a lack of interest in McKenna. In many respects, I took opposite paths between Dick and Wilson. Wilson’s “Illuminatus!” trilogy was passed around by the hippie/nerdy boys (gendered pronoun used advisedly) of my very hippie/nerd-heavy school. I got my hands on it at fourteen, enjoyed the first fifty or a hundred pages of historical references and sex, and then lost it. I picked it up again in my late twenties, and was distinctly unimpressed by the history, the sex, the libertarian politics, the prose style, and the general “ain’t I a stinker?!” tone of the work. I read Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” as an alternate history obsessed teenager. I liked it but didn’t really “get it” until I got into PKD more generally in college and reread it. As for McKenna, I only knew about him because a psytrance act I liked (don’t at me, they had some groove to them) sampled his lectures.

Did I change my mind about any of these impressions? Not really- maybe I’m a little more sympathetic to Wilson, learning about assorted personal tragedies of his, but that’s not enough to make me read more of him. But in many respects the men themselves are beside the point except as ideal types of “the psychonaut.” The word itself takes me back to attic rooms with boys tolerant of, but not always enthused by, my uptight company, shoving Chinese research chemicals from the internet up their noses while I sat by and prattled (knowingly) of tabletop role playing games and (utterly ignorantly) of girls… boys who are now men, many of them husbands, fathers, homeowners, and I’m very pleased to say some of them are still friends (it probably helps I got a bit less uptight). Anyway! Davis is a historian, methodologist, and champion of “the weird,” as both a topic of study and as a way of approaching the world. As I was in those attic rooms, I am ambivalent. Unlike my time in the attics, I am going to make a good faith effort to understand.

This is made difficult by a few things. In many respects, I came to what intellectual maturity I possess through interaction with the special bugbear of countercultural psychonautry- materialist critical analysis. Hippies need squares, and one suspects that goes both ways. Hippies and communists actually just don’t get on very well if they take each other’s premises even marginally seriously. They are incommensurate. I identify as a democratic socialist more than a communist, and my friends, then and now, interested in psychedelia identify even less with hippie-ness, but you get the idea. In college, I put down my few feelers to what Davis calls “consciousness culture” in no small part by reading The Baffler, which took great delight in skewering the conjunction between counterculture and capitalism that loomed so large during the first internet boom. I wasn’t a punk, and if anything, I’d rather listen to the 13th Floor Elevators than to Minor Threat any day, but many of my teachers were punk. Be fast, be mean, hit vulnerable spots… among other things, it seemed a better set of principles for someone escaping nerdery (let’s throw another subculture in the mix!) in my circumstances than “tune in, turn on, drop out.”

And then there’s the chip on the shoulder that students of esoterica who get as far as Davis has gotten — well-known journalist, history PhD — in “straight” intellectual life. I get it… kind of. Academia can, indeed, be stultifying. Studying stuff off the beaten path can get you frozen out, especially considering grim economic realities (though esoterica can also be flashy enough to attract grant money and undergrad eyeballs, it’s worth noting). But there is a distinctly passive-aggressive hippie-macho quality to the way psychedelic advocates express the chip on their shoulders, and Davis is no exception. He broadly implies that academics don’t engage more with the esoteric, the “weird,” and the psychedelic because they are afraid of having their minds blown, that they have to stay within the rules of consensus reality because they’re too chicken to venture outside.

Well… lord knows academics are often cowardly enough. But I’ve also known a lot of people who would do god knows what with their bodies and cerebellums but are terrified of critical thought or honest self-examination. They’ll brave the ayahuasca jungle but not the therapist’s couch, take aboard criticism from fellow impaired miscreants before listening to an editor. Moreover, speaking as a materialist, what’s more comforting- the idea that there is a big magical universe that takes human consciousness as a key element, or the idea that there is nothing other than the material, that there’s no magic, that when we die we rot, and human consciousness was probably an evolutionary adaptation to make us better hunter-gatherers? I could just as easily say psychonauts, heads, and freaks are the cowards, retreating up their own assholes, refusing the trek into the desert of the real. That’s certainly something like what The Baffler would have said back in its glory days, if they could stop laughing at what they saw as countercultural clownishness long enough.

It’d probably be pretty good if I got into what’s actually in this book, huh? Because it’s good. It’s really good. Even the parts where I was ambivalent made me happy because they made me think. Davis dealt not just with three “psychonauts,” but their most outre flights of fancy, on their own terms but in a way that made them relevant even to my materialist ass. It would have been easy to focus on “Illuminatus!” and “The Man in the High Castle,” and Davis does discuss them, but as a prelude to jumping into the deep ends with his subjects: the McKenna brothers’ efforts to build a… psychedelic musical computer/philosopher’s stone? in the Colombian jungle, Wilson’s entry into (and out of) a paranoid “Chapel Perilous,” and Dick’s “2-3-74” experience, which dominated the last part of his life and helped produce the Valis series as well as his impenetrable Exegesis. Davis’s own exegeses of these are bravura performances of insight, sensitivity, and erudition, borrowing from vast arrays of historical and theoretical literature. This is already a long review so I’m not going into detail, but take it from an only intermittently-sympathetic interlocutor, they are quite good.

But there is a certain extent to which these exegeses, for me, were more like (noble, accomplished) work-showing for the larger contextual points Davis makes in “High Weirdness.” As far as the exegeses themselves are concerned, they serve as proof of concept for Davis’s takes on how to approach “the weird.” Neither confirming nor denying whether his psychonaut’s experiences were “real,” applying Bruno LaTour’s actor-network theory where objects are constituent, active parts in the construction of truth, borrowings from Derrida, there’s a lot going on here. Some of it is genuinely innovative- some of it reminds me of that other habit of esoteric academics, using “what do you mean by REAL?!?”-type rhetoric to keep alive the idea (often a childlike hope- not that of the six year old desiring magic power, but the twelve year old who doesn’t want to put his magic kit away) that the supernatural is real… more the former, really, I guess I’m just sensitive to the latter, especially from a guy who likes to take his shots at the intellectual courage of materialists… really, I’d say methodologically, Davis is at his best in incorporating “trash culture” and subculture histories into serious intellectual history, but that could just be reflective of my particular interests.

Historically, Davis makes some provocative claims for his subject. McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were proud freaks, outsiders… but their thoughts and actions weren’t so far outside of the mainstream as that might imply, especially not in the seventies. I have some disagreements with Davis, here, though probably more about emphasis (and arguably misprision) than fact. Davis wants to upend the seventies-as-decline narrative, one of the few things both the left and the right can agree on. All three of his subjects were involved, to one degree or another, with the sixties movements, and according to many readings, their retreat from politics and entry into paranoid delusion (if we choose to look at their experiences that way) goes along with the decline-into-individualist-malaise theme of a lot of seventies historiography. I basically agree with this notion, but also think it is ripe for some productive disagreement. If nothing else, the psychonauts didn’t (always) understand the situation as a decline, especially not the comparatively hearty Terence McKenna and the increasingly smug right-libertarian Robert Anton Wilson… the depressive (and actually brilliant, as opposed to half-smart like Wilson or just sort of questionably relevant like McKenna) Philip Dick had a tougher time. A lot of people thought they were going in the right direction. I might disagree (so might PKD!) but it’s worth understanding their perspective.

Davis takes us home towards the end of the book with a discussion of “the network society,” a concept that starts taking on valence more in the seventies and which the three subjects prefigured, and especially McKenna participated in. Whatever credulity Davis might display towards the claims and especially the premises of psychedelia, he is no naïf about the magic of networks, showing how from the beginning, whatever supposedly liberatory, freaky-Deleuzian (to bring in another theorist he name-checks) quality networks might have had, they were also systems of deception, fuckery, and control- and it was impossible to disentangle the two. This he displays in the case of hippie, early network enthusiast, and murderer Ira Einhorn’s both digital and social network of futurists and freaks. I know a thing or two about how cold the countercultural imagination can be, from that same school often described as a “hippie” school. When I enrolled in the late nineties, this school openly advertised itself as being the school for the network society, but there wasn’t much peace and love there. The founders were libertarians, ruthless Zionists, pigheaded supporters of the Iraq War, and one of them even made the local news for how much money he donated to Trump’s reelection campaign. In a gesture at contemporary relevance that I don’t think Davis necessarily needed to justify his work, he ties in the altright, “meme magic” etc., in an impassioned call to understand “the weird” before it destroys us.

Well… as it happens, I know a thing or two about fighting fascists and cut my teeth in fighting the “altright” variant. We beat the altright by dragging them away from fora and memes and into the real. We challenged them to come fight on the streets, with the means of politics, violent and otherwise. They tried, and we beat them so hard that no one calls themselves “altright” anymore. There are plenty of Nazis, but that specific strategy is played out, dead, because of us and what we did, in reality, relying on masses, weight, truth. If you ask me, that points to a good way to study the weird- not necessarily with an eye towards beating it (though learning to break anything down is often quite instructive), but by relating what it says about itself to assorted tests of consensus reality. You don’t need to be “reductive” to do that. You don’t need to grade the weird like so many undergrad essays. Just throw it around and see how it reacts. If these ideas are so interesting and important, they should survive.

Along with “psychonaut,” Davis uses an interesting word, mainly for Dick- “hermenaut” (not sure of the spelling because audiobook), navigator of the word and the methods of reading. Maybe it was my odd sensitivities, but it seems like Davis had an odd relationship with Dick. It turns out that Davis knew Terence McKenna “Bob” Wilson- Dick died when Davis was fifteen, and they did not meet. Davis knew of Dick’s work and helped edit the Exegesis, and maybe this herculean task introduced a certain frustration with the great man that Davis doesn’t have for his old, now dead, friends McKenna or Wilson. It got borderline disrespectful, from where I sat- more emphasis on Dick’s romantic failings, the phrase “mendacious imagination” came up… but “hermenaut” is interesting. It’s worth noting Dick had given up on psychedelics, mostly, by the time he had his vision in 1974. He still did plenty of drugs, especially the proletarian uppers needed to keep him writing. All three subjects were voracious readers but Dick had a reading (and writing) habit that put the other two to shame. There’s a reason (beyond academic appreciation, which Dick has more than the other two) for the Borges comparisons.

Forgive me for another reference to my youth. At my weird hippie-nerd high school, I was known for my refusal to use drugs, and a boy I knew who was quite enthusiastic for them asked me how I intended to expand my mind. As far as he was concerned, the options were either psychedelic drugs or decades of meditation- I didn’t want to do either, so what was I going to do? “I’m going to expand my mind by reading,” I told him. I don’t relate this story to “own” the boy. I don’t actually stand with the Baffler crowd in dismissing other ways of learning and other existential concerns out of hand, though I may not have much time for them myself and utterly refuse to be shamed for that. But I’ve chosen to explore the noosphere — the realm of human thought, which Davis refers to once or twice but wasn’t really part of his or his subjects approach — instead of whatever dimension the psychonaut chooses. Truth be told, I think it’s been good for me, and has actually granted some of the benefits, like enhanced connection with others, that more esoteric strains of consciousness promise. Dick’s hermenaut imagination helped raise him from his “tomb world” of depression and paranoia (funny how the whole range of “spiritual” thought avoids the realities of clinical depression like it’s a damn leper, like it doesn’t disprove the idea of a good universal consciousness…). I think that way of doing things has helped me, too. And that’s part of why, despite my ambivalence, despite occasionally rolling my eyes, I can only feel gratitude to Erik Davis for producing this work. ***** ...more

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Sep 03, 2019 Donald rated it really liked it

If you were there in the 70 s, or was it the 80’s, and had a certain, fringe culture frame of reference, then you will either love this or wonder if it was telling you anything new.

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Aug 15, 2020 Rory Tregaskis rated it really liked it

The main thrust of what Erik Davis does is this book is attempt to take anomalous experiences seriously, if not literally. I really like that approach. Anything but curious agnosticism seems like keeping yourself in the dark. If you only believe in the quotidian physical of ordinary experience you close off all possibility and arguably become as ignorant as someone driven by superstition.

The book is kind of hard work though. I don't know that much about Robert Anton Wilson, or Terrance and Denn ...more

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Jul 30, 2019 Robert Patterson rated it really liked it

High Weirdness by Erik Davis

Interesting, academic insights into the 70s thru the literally comparative and religious analysis of 3 writers/physic explorers (Terence Mckenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K Dick) bordering the thin line between madness, creative genius, mystical / psychotic visions and the dynamic uroboros loop between popular culture motifs, the zeitgeist and the internal "heart of darkness" adventure that each encountered.

Davis the ultimate post modernist shows an openness to tak ...more

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Jun 21, 2021 SP rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: eccentrics, audiobook, nonfiction

This book is a cornucopia of information about some of the weird parts of the late 60s and early 70s, focusing in particular on the McKenna brothers (esp. Terrence McKenna), Robert Anton Wilson (of Illuminatus! fame), and Philip K. Dick. As a longtime fan of PKD, that alone made it worth the price of admission for me. (I discovered listening that the author, Erik Davis, had worked on the published version of PKD's Exegesis, so he knows whereof he speaks.)

The discussion is written at a high leve ...more

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Oct 17, 2021 Benji rated it it was amazing

' These are archon times, my friends, and grappling with high weirdness may paradoxically be a kind of mental health regime.

An era of banal eschatology, a time when the old war in heaven, whose combatants we are condemned to hallucinate and misread, is waged through products, gadgets, media, and our own occluded minds - now riven by fears, traumas, and sometimes paranoid suspicions, but still sparkling with the hot light of resistance.

The weird that saturates culture today is present often throu ...more

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Sep 23, 2019 Robert Hudder rated it liked it

A look at a particular time through three different writers: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. I could spend a lot of time trying to describe what is going here but instead I'll put it another way. If you are into the uncanny and the weird then this book is for you. If you spent time in Lovecraft or even read two of those three folks then this is an interesting trip to try and explain was was happening between 1970-1975.

There is a bit at the end that tries to tie it toget ...more

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Mar 27, 2020 Tom Goulter rated it really liked it

The best, purest weirdness is a self-renewing resource that provides novel glimpses of the real even as it expands the boundaries of the explicable way beyond the horizons of the comprehensible. And this is that real shit. Davis is a very clever dude with a lot of love for his subjects that drives him to ask big questions about their work and bring back bigger answers. I’ve never read anything quite like it. Highly recommended.

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Feb 10, 2021 Mike rated it liked it

A very dense, very academic text. I found the book most interesting when Davis discussed his subjects in the context of the 1970s as a whole— I would rather have read more of that analysis, I think. The sections examining the McKennas, Robert Anton Wilson and PKD separately got bogged down in a lot of heavy academic discourse at times. I think Davis has some fascinating insights into these guys, but there’s a lot to sift through.

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Jul 08, 2019 Chris Moule rated it it was amazing

If you’re interested in Terrence McKenna and/or Robert Anton Wilson and/or Philip K Dick, this book is for you. The author, Erik Davis, adds rich and fascinating context to the very weird “contact” experiences of the 3 thinkers above, without diluting the mystery.
It’s one of the most interesting and compelling books I’ve come across on esoterica since Cosmic Trigger.

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Oct 01, 2019 Aaron rated it it was amazing

Pulp fiction and high theory. I'm a sucker for this shit. ...more

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Feb 06, 2022 Chris Porter rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I had high hopes for this book. In theory, it's right up my ally -- an exploration of the weird world of California in the 60s and 70s, as engendered by the proliferation of psychedelics and other consciousness-changing or eradicating substances, practices, beliefs, and/or rituals. The book seeks to describe this context, as well as a new concept of "high weirdness" (a sort of aesthetic and quasi-"religious" state), through the experiences of three figures prominent in the 60s and 70s -- Terrenc I had high hopes for this book. In theory, it's right up my ally -- an exploration of the weird world of California in the 60s and 70s, as engendered by the proliferation of psychedelics and other consciousness-changing or eradicating substances, practices, beliefs, and/or rituals. The book seeks to describe this context, as well as a new concept of "high weirdness" (a sort of aesthetic and quasi-"religious" state), through the experiences of three figures prominent in the 60s and 70s -- Terrence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Before beginning Davis' book, I was passingly familiar with all three, but had only read one Wilson book and one book by Dick.

Unfortunately, Davis too frequently gets in his own way and creates a somewhat jumbled mishmash of philosophical concepts, "low brow" pop culture, occult(ish) practices and beliefs, and earnest psychedelic explorations. Somewhere in this book is a truly mind-blowing and revolutionary story about human potential and the edges of human knowledge and consciousness. What this book desperately needed was an editor, someone who could effectively push back on Davis and work with him to clarify concepts and simplify what is often the worst kind of academic speech. It won't come as a surprise to any reader of this book that it began its life as a doctoral dissertation. An example of the kind of needlessly complex writing: "This question also compels the longings of esotericism and a myriad of religious cosmologies, and is as good a diagnosis of the weird as anything. But in Rickles' emphatically embodied view, which insists on absolute finitude, the absent presence of such specters negates the existential possibilities of the supernatural views they inevitably engender" (emphasis mine). If something is finite, it is absolute, fully contained, so "absolute finitude" is a redundancy that adds nothing and only serves to confuse the reader. Likewise, "absent presence" is meaningless, self-satisfied drivel that should have been caught and cut by an editor. The book is laden with this type of writing, which only obfuscates an already challenging concept (an aesthetic of "the weird"). So often, it took my an hour or more to read 10-15 pages, and I would have to reread certain sentences over and over to try and understand them. As a reader, it is frustrating, particularly as you might consider this to be an interpretative text, one that is trying to explain and contextualize a new idea for a more general audience.

It is clear that Davis owes a great debt to cultural critics like Greill Marcus, people who are able to connect wildly different historical figures and movements to precise moments of culture eruptions in ways that are new and surprising, and which are therefore enlightening or challenging, depending on how you view their assertions. Unfortunately, where Marcus takes great pains to illuminate the core concepts of his books (thinking specifically of his books Lipstick Traces and The Old, Weird America) in language most of his readers will be able to comprehend, Davis instead leans too heavily on academic or specialized language to move the reader through key concepts in the book. I can't tell you how many times he used such words as, "ontological," "hermeneutics," "exegetical," "oneiric," and so on. I'm not trying to be petty or insolent in this critique -- one of my favorite writers is Cormac McCarthy, who is often accused of using obscure or difficult language for no real reason. But Davis' is not a work of fiction, and unfortunately the bridge through the difficult material that he builds for the reader is beset with mines and snares of his own making.

The other note I would add about this book is that, while it is not necessary for the reader to be familiar with McKenna, Wilson, or Dick, it would be helpful, and I suspect that they would get a lot more out of this if they were more familiar. Often, the tone of the book assumes familiarity, and while you might hope that Davis will go deep into the context and happenstance of particular incident, he doesn't. This is not a retelling of Dick's 2-3-74, McKenna's Experiment at La Chorrera, or Wilson's climb out of the "Chapel Perilous." Some explanation is provided, of course, but if you, like me, aren't familiar with those incidents just listed, you may find yourself somewhat frustrated by how they are handled in this text.

I don't mean to be too harsh. I really wanted to love this book. And yet, after finishing it, I'm only relieved at having made it through. Now, onto reading some Philip K. Dick! ...more

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May 10, 2021 cuvtixo rated it really liked it

I haven't completed this book by a long shot, but if you aren't ecstatic over academic writing on historical figures in "psychedelic studies", you're not going to care about my review here anyways.
When I was in college in the late 80s, serious studies of the Beat writers and genres like sci-fi was a surprising change. Some pointed to Boomers finally becoming literature professors, wanting to relive the late 60s. But actual psychedelic drug-taking, and what is now being called "psychonautics", w I haven't completed this book by a long shot, but if you aren't ecstatic over academic writing on historical figures in "psychedelic studies", you're not going to care about my review here anyways.
When I was in college in the late 80s, serious studies of the Beat writers and genres like sci-fi was a surprising change. Some pointed to Boomers finally becoming literature professors, wanting to relive the late 60s. But actual psychedelic drug-taking, and what is now being called "psychonautics", was still not viewed as worthy of serious study.
I am excited about this change in the public's attitude to psychedelics, having wrestled with major depression for my adult life, and a straight twenty years of conventionally prescribed antidepressants,... well I don't mean to write a memoir here, but I'll take the segue to a book I finished at the beginning of this year, "Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change", by Taiwanese-American writer, Tao Lin. He concentrates on Terrence McKenna, and finishes with an interview with the late McKenna's wife, Kathleen Harrison. Now, Lin is interested in making a literary experiment, he writes this "biography" in a very autobiographical way, in some ways in imitation of McKenna's writing and talks. Lin tells his own stories about himself by concentrating on a part of his life where he is obsessed with McKenna. Except, for example, he tells of a "bad trip" that doesn't go well, but not horribly either, just unpleasant with a "hangover" of paranoia. this is in completely in contrast to McKenna, who mostly told of his most spectacular and colorful trips. (perhaps exaggerating on occasion, like a prototypical Irish bard)
Lin's book also requires extra effort to read, because it plays these literary "meta-" games, and you have to accept that this "biography of McKenna" is really about Lin. It's like a mirror image, or even a fun-house mirror image of "Experiment at La Chorrera". If you don't like storytelling games, it's going to be a yawner, and Tao Lin will sound like an unappealing jerk.
"High Weirdness" goes in a very different direction, keeping mainly to conventional "popularized" academic writing, dumbing it down a bit, also in a fairly conventional way. Erik Davis doesn't try to imitate the writings of his subjects, and thank goodness! But it's going to turn off a whole spectrum of people, from Michael Pollan fans, the garden-writer and psychedelic newbie, to the rebellious psychonauts who want an insider version and modern versions of "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Such a tale of a modern contemporary scene is Bett Williams' "The Wild Kindness".
Maybe you can tell the way I'm shamelessly name-dropping, I love this subject, and I don't mind getting into the weeds of academia writing, or prose-poetry. But, if you couldn't figure this out for yourself what this book is like. from a Kindle sample, or maybe leafing through pages at Barnes & Noble, I don't know what to tell you. I'd like to make taking and writing about psychedelics as boring as taking, or re-treading stories about the discovery of, penicillin. I think that would be a good thing. How we can get from A to B is through your personal choice, though. I'm not going to guilt trip anyone on what to read. ...more

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Dec 19, 2020 Nick rated it really liked it

Shelves: altered-states, philosophy-phenomenology

Reading Erik Davis' lengthy and dense tome brought me back to a specific yet nebulous feeling from my childhood, surfing the World Wide Web for conspiracy theories and urban legends, well before the days of the "Creepy Pasta." Davis, a comparative religions PhD, gives that exciting and foreboding feeling an academic sheen as he traces how Terrence (and Dennis) McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick grappled with and reified the American post-war and Californian post-sixties hangover of Reading Erik Davis' lengthy and dense tome brought me back to a specific yet nebulous feeling from my childhood, surfing the World Wide Web for conspiracy theories and urban legends, well before the days of the "Creepy Pasta." Davis, a comparative religions PhD, gives that exciting and foreboding feeling an academic sheen as he traces how Terrence (and Dennis) McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick grappled with and reified the American post-war and Californian post-sixties hangover of paranoia, disillusionment, and postmodernism, through psychedelics, esoterica, and psychosis (respectively, although that last one applies equally to all three at one point or another).

Basically, Davis seeks to engage with the writings and experiences of these characters on their own terms, without getting bogged down into epistemological concerns, and to help him out, the gang's all here--Freud, Jung, Lacan, James, Latour, Morton, McLuhan, Discordians, Situationists, Leary, Felix & Guattari, the I Ching, Lovecraft, Agamben, Watts, Burroughs, and many more. Engaging with each of his principle subjects, Davis illuminates the ways in which they used any and all tools at their disposal to make meaning out of the accelerating and murky cultural forces shaping the world around them, and often arrived at a similar narrative--the "downloading" of pure information from a superindividual/superhistorical/posthumanist/extraterrestrial source. Eventually he manages to tie this zeitgeist of the "undecade" of the seventies to modern issues such as rapidly accelerating technological/cultural complexity, the "reality tunnels" of social media, the hard resurgence of conspiracy theories, the political monkey wrench of right-wing libertarianism, etc.

While dense, High Weirdness is often a pleasure to read, even if it can't always escape problems of repetition and redundancy. Further, the book is exceedingly masculine (just look at the list of interlopers up there!), and while there are undoubtedly some historical/contextual explanations for this, one wonders what the ladies were up to during the uncanny decade. In the stories of the book's three subjects, they are largely accessories to revelation, or grounding forces for their partners' rapidly disintegrating (and reintegrating and disintegrating again) mental states. It would have been interesting to read how the female counterparts of McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were navigating the Weird.

These quibbles aside, this book scratches an itch so niche and specific that it at times feels like "mainlining the secret truth of the universe," as Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle puts it in True Detective season 1. Like his character, the subjects of Davis' book were forever changed by their experiences in the deep end of the "wilderness of mirrors" that culture had become after the advent of LSD, the CIA, and the UFO, and through them that wilderness mutated and changed in turn. Davis does an admirable job of charting this nebulous and diffuse history, and makes it a fascinating read to boot. Weird, indeed. ...more

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Nov 04, 2020 Willy Boy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: underground-70s, mos-wanned

Overlong, hard to digest work that betrays it's origins as an academic thesis. The maddeningly overwrought, impenetrable attempt to define to a minute degree of precision is the mumbo jumbo of institutions of higher learning, more arcane than anything HP Lovecraft could conjure. The book is laced with interesting nuggets but they are incorporated into a bloated corpus that saps energy and interest. If one is already familiar with the works of Wilson, the McKennas and Dick, much here is contemptu Overlong, hard to digest work that betrays it's origins as an academic thesis. The maddeningly overwrought, impenetrable attempt to define to a minute degree of precision is the mumbo jumbo of institutions of higher learning, more arcane than anything HP Lovecraft could conjure. The book is laced with interesting nuggets but they are incorporated into a bloated corpus that saps energy and interest. If one is already familiar with the works of Wilson, the McKennas and Dick, much here is contemptuously overfamiliar, and for the novice there is too little of the respective authors personalities to make the subject matter engaging. I suspect this will be bought as a status symbol and sit unread on many bookshelves. The best place to start with all of the above is with their own work, which is highly accesible, entertaining and stimulating, or the hours of recorded interviews on youtube.

A shorter work, with a more detached authorial voice, perhaps leavened with wry dry amusement and even mild skepticism, incorporating more fully a broad survey of the seventies weird culture milieu (certain things we now take for granted and mundane such as Yoga represent a progression from oddball fringe to mainstream, for one example). Not to mock the stimulating work of these writers, but to demonstrate the acuteness of their intuitions, and provide a contextual background.

These authors essentially cam eto live their own fictions, or through fiction, uncovered barely hidden meanings and possible futures inherent in everything dulled by routine and familiarity. The commonality is ecstasy - ex stasis - breaking out of factory flow chart planned existence, and expanding the possibilities of experience. A process that brings both Joy and Terror, as cherished institutions of thought, moral, social, religious and political certainties are revealed to be nothing more than House Built on Shifting Sands, regardless of their utility, reinforced by habit. Such revelations should not be administered willy-nilly. Indeed, they cannot be - such a destination can be dreamed of, but is rarely, if ever, arrived at. Even then one is advised to maintain skepticism.

Wilson defies all orthodoxies, deliberately, and is therefore unattractive to guardians of culture such as academia. Terence McKenna was a brilliant storyteller and observer who frustates the scientifically minded because of his focus on subjective, untestable phenomena. Dick elevates paranoia to a transcendent state - his life The Word, finally becoming an ecstatic fusion of svi fi spy thriller and religious epic (think of the superficial, glistening artifice of a Hollywood liquor store at twilight, manufactured light in abundance, with the overwhelming presence of the divine, ominous and sticky, hanging pregnant over all. Or the shadowplay of a cinema or TV - God is always suspended just outside the rectangle, either the passive viewer or the puppetmasters who designed and control the action).

Before reading, I harnoured fantasies that this title would be the kind of thing soon to be immolated in great pyres, and made tentative provisions to ask acquaintances to purchase copies and hide them for the duration of the next Dark Age. Unfortunately (?), this will not be necessary, since the undertakers of academia have already embalmed these illustrious corpses. That's harsh but dammit its how I feel. I am no critic or man of letters, simply an enthusiastic 'normal' man of mediocre status.

Even so, because consumerism leads me to beleive their are elves at my beck and call, next I would like a compendium of 'Bad Craziness', a sequel (of sorts) to the above, centring around 1980s paranormal and occult currents, from the mainstream out, so Ghostbusters, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and World of STrange Powers, Uri Geller, In Search Of ... and other charlatans sponsored by goodness knows who and for what purpose ... punctuated by National Enquirer headlines ... The Shamshaman soon finds that what is summoned comes, and is difficult to get rid of.

Life is itself strange and is fundamentally a subjective experience - is there really anybody else there, anybody at all? Don't answer - one story endlessly repeated: if you stray away from the well worn paths you'll be in deep shit. And if you think the Gods have forgotten you, be grateful ... ...more

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Jan 19, 2022 Chumley Pawkins rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022, dnf

This book was apparently expanded from a doctoral thesis, and it shows, because as fascinating as the subject matter is, it’s ultimately strangled to death by the kind of interminable academic jargon that I used to dread having to wade through while studying for my degree.

I made it through 136 pages and then gave up.

If you want someone who explores this kind of material in a way that is just as intelligent (and frankly far more accessible and entertaining), check out the esoteric analyses of the ...more

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About Erik Davis

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Erik Davis is an American writer, scholar, journalist and public speaker whose writings have ranged from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism.
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“One important consequence of this approach is that the meaning or full activity of a drug can only be worked out and constructed in practice. A drug's effects, in this view, aren't discovered, but nor are they purely invented. Instead, they are enacted.” — 1 likes

“The transitive shift from observer to participant, from gaze to encounter, requires both active engagement and a passive willingness to allow the phenomenon to reveal itself in its own terms. This visionary leap opens a dimension of experience, of ontological possibility, that is simultaneously a kind of abyss. In finding a “Thou” where before there was an “it”—as Martin Buber would describe it—the psychonaut suddenly faces all manner of risks: terror, madness, delusion, or what Terence ironically called “death by astonishment.” But to not take the chance, for some anyway, falls short of the mark.” — 0 likes

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