These local examples of compare-and-contrast underscore the central importance of comparison to the seekers and psychonauts of the seventies. The sort of pattern recognition associated with comparative religion, made popular by innovative and visionary thinkers like Jung and Eliade, went wild once it entered the feverish occult milieu that nurtured McKenna, Wilson, and Dick. Comparison here is not just a theory or ideology—it is a pragmatic procedure, one that mobilizes conceptual and symbolic resonance in order to increase the ontological charge or “believability” of any particular image,
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