A look inside almost half a century of pioneering research in the Amazon and Peru by a noted anthropologist studying hallucinogens, including ayahuasca • Reveals how ayahuasca successfully treats psychological and emotional disorders • Examines adolescent drug use from a cross-cultural perspective • Discusses the deleterious effects of drug tourism in the Amazon Ayahuasca is an alkaloid-rich psychoactive concoction indigenous to South America that has been employed by shamans for millennia as a spirit drug for divinatory and healing purposes. Although the late Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes was credited in the early 1950s as being the first to document the use of ayahuasca, other researchers, such as the distinguished anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios, were responsible for furthering his findings and uncovering the curative capabilities of this amazing compound. The Psychedelic Journey of Marlene Dobkin de Rios presents the accumulated experience of de Rios’s 45 years of pioneering field studies in the area of hallucinogens in Peru and the Amazon. Her investigation into ayahuasca--which she undertook in collaboration with more than a dozen traditional Mestizo folk curanderos, shamans, and fellow ethnobotanists--focuses on the use of this revolutionary plant in the treatment of recalcitrant psychological and emotional disorders. She also shares some of her theories that prove that the ancient Maya used psychedelic plants as part of their religious rituals, thereby demonstrating the impact of plant psychedelics on human prehistory. In addition, Dobkin de Rios examines altered states of consciousness derived from the use of biofeedback and hypnosis and discusses her current work on the deleterious effects of drug tourism in the Amazon.

An exploration of how LSD influences imagination and the creative process. • Based on the results of one of the longest clinical studies of LSD that took place between 1954 and 1962, before LSD was illegal. • Includes personal reports, artwork, and poetry from the original sessions as testimony of the impact of LSD on the creative process. In 1954 a Los Angeles psychiatrist began experimenting with a then new chemical discovery known as LSD-25. Over an eight-year period Dr. Oscar Janiger gave LSD-25 to more than 950 men and women, ranging in age from 18 to 81 and coming from all walks of life. The data collected by the author during those trials and from follow-up studies done 40 years later is now available here for the first time, along with the authors' examination of LSD's ramifications on creativity, imagination, and spirituality. In this book Marlene Dobkin de Rios, a medical anthropologist who studied the use of hallucinogens in tribal and third world societies, considers the spiritual implications of these findings in comparison with indigenous groups that employ psychoactive substances in their religious ceremonies. The book also examines the nature of the creative process as influenced by psychedelics and provides artwork and poetry from the original experiment sessions, allowing the reader to personally witness LSD's impact on creativity. The studies recounted in LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process depict an important moment in the history of consciousness and reveal the psychic unity of humanity.

A medical anthropologist’s account of fortune-telling and management of one’s own destiny in Peru • Explains the fortune-telling naipes cards and how Amazonian shamans use them to diagnose clients’ ills • Looks at the Sacred Mystical Order of Septrionism and its techniques for managing destiny While studying Amazonian shamans who use ayahuasca and Peruvian coastal healers who use mescaline cactus to treat psychological illness, Marlene Dobkin de Rios learned about the naipes cards--fortune-telling cards similar to the tarot used as part of the healers’ method of diagnosis. Immersing herself in their culture, she began telling fortunes with the naipes cards and was surprised by the intimacy it induced in the native people she was trying to study as well as the profoundly accurate results she encountered. Finding herself pulled further and further into Peruvian culture, in 1977 Dobkin de Rios was initiated into the sacred mystical order of Septrionismo, which emphasizes specific techniques--such as meditation, ritual, and reflection--to manage one’s future rather than depending solely on fate and fortune. Explaining how to use the naipes cards as well as examining the practices of the Septrionic Order, Dobkin de Rios explores her experiences with both traditions through the lens of her anthropological and psychological training, describing how these diverse encounters opened her mind to the powers of divination as well as taught her the means of directing her own destiny.

Poets on the Edge critically explores the relationship between poetry and its context through the work of four Latin American poets: Chilean Vicente Huidobro (1898-1948), Peruvian César Vallejo (1893-1938), Chilean Juan Luis Martínez (1943-1993), and Argentine Néstor Perlongher (1949-1992). While Huidobro and Vallejo establish their poetics on the edge in the context of worldwide conflagrations and the emergence of the historical avant-garde during the first half of the twentieth century, Martínez and Perlongher produce their work in the context of the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships respectively, developing different strategies to overcome the panoptic societies of control installed throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Martínez recreates the avant-garde tradition in a playful manner to avoid censorship and also proposes a philosophical poetics to stage a utopian project oriented toward redesigning the house of civilization that has fallen apart. Perlongher unfolds his peculiar Neobaroque sensitivity in order to reshape the complex Latin American identities, culminating his poetic project with two collections written under the influence of ayahuasca-based ceremonies. Poets on the Edge offers the reader a new understanding of the hybrid and edgy nature of Latin American poetics and subjectivity as well as of the evolution of poetry written in Spanish during the twentieth century.

How historical, social, and cultural forces shaped the psychedelic experience in midcentury America, from CIA LSD experiments the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Are psychedelics invaluable therapeutic medicines, or dangerously unpredictable drugs that precipitate psychosis? Tools for spiritual communion or cognitive enhancers that spark innovation? Activators for one's private muse or part of a political movement? In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers studied psychedelics in all these incarnations, often arriving at contradictory results. In American Trip, Ido Hartogsohn examines how the psychedelic experience in midcentury America was shaped by historical, social, and cultural forces—by set (the mindset of the user) and setting (the environments in which the experience takes place). He explores uses of psychedelics that range from CIA and military experimentation to psychedelic-inspired styles in music, fashion, design, architecture, and film. Along the way, he introduces us to a memorable cast of characters including Betty Eisner, a psychologist who drew on her own experience to argue for the therapeutic potential of LSD, and Timothy Leary, who founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project and went on to become psychedelics' most famous advocate. Hartogsohn chronicles these developments in the context of the era's cultural trends, including the cold war, the counterculture, the anti-psychiatric movement, and the rise of cybernetics. Drawing on insights from the study of science, technology, and society, he develops the idea of LSD as a suggestible technology, the properties of which are shaped by suggestion. He proposes the concept of collective set and setting, arguing that the historical and sociocultural context of midcentury America offered a particular set and setting—creating the conditions for what he calls the American trip.

A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe. Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival. Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.

When National Geographic Adventure published an article in 2006 about the powerful antidepressant effects of ayahuasca, the piece received a phenomenal reader response. That article struck a chord with psychotherapist Rachel Harris, who had encountered many clients unresponsive to traditional therapy and antidepressant protocols. Used for more than 8,000 years in the Amazon rainforest, ayahuasca is a powerful, and illegal, psychedelic that has distressing gastrointestinal side effects. Yet Harris found many willing to try it, so deep was their suffering. Harris here shares her original research (the largest study of ayahuasca use in North America) into its effects on depression, anxiety, and PTSD, along with her own personal experiences. By detailing ayahuasca's risks and benefits, she aims to help those driven to investigate ayahuasca to do so safely and to give their psychological caregivers a template for transformative caring and healing.