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038 - Psychedelic Magick

Mar 05, 2018, 60 min read

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Julian Vayne

https://psychedelicpress.co.uk/products/getting-higher-psychedelic-julian-vayneToday’s Salon2 podcast features the return of Lex Pelger who interviews Julian Vayne, an author and oculist. They about the history of drugs and magick - especially in the underground London scene. Vayne also highlights some of the important ideas from his new book on creating psychedelic ceremonies.

This episode is cross-posted from the Greener Grass podcast.
Getting Higher by Julian Vayne
Trailer for Getting Higher
Julian Vayne’s blog
The psychedelic prisoner project

Lex Pelger’s cannabis graphic novels are now FREE online.
http://www.lexpelger.com/nononsense
Lex Pelger’s new program: The Greener Grass podcast.
http://greenergrass.libsyn.com/

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon

00:00:23 ►

2.0, and I am really pleased to welcome Lex Pelger back into the salon for another one of his very interesting podcasts.

00:00:32 ►

It’s been a couple of months since we’ve heard Lex here in the salon, and in the interim, he’s been, well, he’s been quite busy, as you will hear in just a moment.

00:00:40 ►

So, now we have two contributors to Salon 2 programs, Lex and, as you heard a few weeks ago, the Lakey Sisters.

00:00:48 ►

So, what I plan on doing for the next few months is to alternate each week between a Salon 1 and a Salon 2 podcast.

00:00:56 ►

As you know, I’ve been playing a Terrence McKenna class in Salon 1 lately, and just yesterday I received a package of seven new tapes of his that I’ve never

00:01:05 ►

heard. So you have a bunch of new McKenna coming your way as well. By alternating between Salon 1

00:01:12 ►

and Salon 2 podcasts each week, it frees up some of my time that I need for a few writing projects

00:01:19 ►

that I’ve been working on for a while. But never fear, I plan on continuing these podcasts for several more years now that

00:01:26 ►

I’ve got this help. So now let’s get on with the program where Lex will bring you up to date on

00:01:32 ►

his life these past couple of months. I’m Lex Pelger, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:01:43 ►

I’m Lex Pelger, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:01:48 ►

Hello, everybody. I’m back.

00:01:51 ►

And before I get to our rollicking chat with Julian Vane in the UK,

00:01:55 ►

I wanted to share a quick update to explain my absence.

00:01:58 ►

Because it’s been pretty busy around here,

00:02:05 ►

our baby Sophia Estelle arrived on January 7, 2018 at 1.20 a.m.

00:02:11 ►

She’s doing swell and she has her grandfather’s eyes and her mama’s nose and her papa’s suspicious frown.

00:02:16 ►

And in fact, on January 1st of this year, I asked her mama to marry me.

00:02:20 ►

So save the date of August 4th for the wedding party back in Pennsylvania.

00:02:22 ►

So there’s the news on this end.

00:02:26 ►

For all of you that already have children, thanks for the well wishes.

00:02:30 ►

For those of you who don’t have kids, I can say yes, it’s exactly what you think.

00:02:32 ►

Only more so.

00:02:36 ►

But now things are starting to settle down after seven weeks,

00:02:38 ►

and I can get back to making episodes for you all.

00:02:43 ►

Now that I’m at Bluebird Botanicals, they gave me the library to use as a recording studio,

00:02:45 ►

so you won’t hear any baby crying in the background.

00:02:50 ►

Also, Brandon, who runs Bluebird, agreed to sponsor a new show.

00:02:55 ►

Matt Payne and I decided to call it the Greener Grass Podcast, and we already have eight episodes out.

00:03:01 ►

On there, I’ll be interviewing a lot of people around the cannabis world, along with other green topics.

00:03:04 ►

We also want to cover psychedelics on that show,

00:03:08 ►

so sometimes we’ll cross-post favorite interviews here on the Salon,

00:03:10 ►

such as today’s talk with Julian.

00:03:12 ►

If you want to hear more about cannabis,

00:03:16 ►

feel free to follow along and listen to the Greener Grass podcast.

00:03:20 ►

Here on the Salon, I’ll continue to try and showcase a wide array of voices and topics around the psychedelic community.

00:03:24 ►

However, with a wee babe at home, I won’t be able to promise an episode every Thursday anymore, to try and showcase a wide array of voices and topics around the psychedelic community.

00:03:29 ►

However, with a wee babe at home, I won’t be able to promise an episode every Thursday anymore,

00:03:33 ►

so that’s why I’m delighted that my buddies Kat and Alexa are now rambling around gathering material and making episodes. The Lakey sisters helped me get started with the Psychedelic

00:03:38 ►

History Project back in Bruce Dahmer’s barn in California. And so it’s great that they started their run on the Salon 2.0

00:03:45 ►

with psychedelic tales from their parents.

00:03:49 ►

For me, I’ll be more stationary here in Denver or Boulder area of Colorado

00:03:53 ►

and interviewing a lot of people remotely.

00:03:56 ►

But if any of my old buddies come through this neck of the woods,

00:03:59 ►

come on by to say hi, and maybe we can get you in front of the microphone.

00:04:03 ►

Also, if anyone listening around the world wants to report on how

00:04:05 ►

the psychedelic revolution unfolded

00:04:08 ►

or is unfolding in their

00:04:10 ►

country, I’d love to hear from

00:04:11 ►

fellow travelers all over.

00:04:14 ►

Also, there’s still some

00:04:16 ►

of the psychedelic story sessions from the Blue Dot

00:04:17 ►

Tour that I’ll be scattering through the next episodes.

00:04:20 ►

And hopefully by the time they end,

00:04:21 ►

we’ll have a couple more live events around the country

00:04:23 ►

if that works out.

00:04:25 ►

So there’s the plan.

00:04:27 ►

Feel free to contact me at pelgratgmail.com with questions, concerns, praise, complaints, baby advice, and your psychedelic experiences, especially the odd ones.

00:04:37 ►

Speaking of odd stories and independent thinking, I’m delighted to share this interview of Julian Vane.

00:04:44 ►

Most recently, he is the author

00:04:46 ►

of Getting Higher, the Manual Psychedelic Ceremony. It’s published by the Psychedelic

00:04:51 ►

Press UK, and if you don’t know them, follow them online and subscribe to get their beautifully

00:04:55 ►

crafted journal. It is worthy reading for any psychonaut. As for Julian, he also works with

00:05:02 ►

the Psychedelic Museum that’s been popping up around Europe.

00:05:06 ►

However, Julian came to magic before he came to psychedelics.

00:05:10 ►

He was initiated early into the Wiccan tradition.

00:05:12 ►

He’s a member of the Kaolanot lineage and is a master mason.

00:05:17 ►

Today he shares about the history of magic and drugs, as well as his thoughts on creating psychedelic ceremonies.

00:05:24 ►

One last thing.

00:05:26 ►

My books are now online for free.

00:05:28 ►

Thanks to all the kind souls who bought a hard copy

00:05:31 ►

and to those brave few who actually finished them.

00:05:34 ►

You are now in the No Nonsense Club for life.

00:05:37 ►

I’m working on the third book now,

00:05:39 ►

but with a new baby it may be a while before I finish my next cannabis graphic novel.

00:05:43 ►

But she’s already shaping up nicely.

00:05:45 ►

So there’s the No Nonsense news. Now on with the show.

00:05:58 ►

I’m very happy to be joined here by Julian Vane. Thanks for joining us.

00:06:02 ►

Oh, thank you very much, Lex. Thank you for inviting me onto the show. It’s most appreciated. How would you define a cult for a modern audience?

00:06:11 ►

Okay, so I often describe myself as an occultist. So someone interested in the occult,

00:06:18 ►

the occult is literally anything that’s hidden, anything that’s mysterious. So from a pragmatic

00:06:23 ►

point of view, that’s the bit of the

00:06:25 ►

library that you go into that has all those books about the paranormal and magic. And it kind of

00:06:31 ►

shades off into psychology on one end, and on the other end into computing, if you use the

00:06:36 ►

geodecimal system. So you have this kind of like confluence of these ideas, which are all about

00:06:41 ►

the mysterious, the limits of human perception, parapsychological phenomena, strange spirit phenomena, whether understood through the lens of

00:06:50 ►

ufology or traditional shamanism. It’s the weird stuff that the occult is all about.

00:06:57 ►

And how did you first get interested in the weird stuff?

00:07:00 ►

I have no idea in the sense that I’ve always been interested in it. So from being like a really little kid, I would go to that section in the library where all those weird books were and I would read them.

00:07:13 ►

So I was familiar with the work of people like Alistair Crowley by the time I was 10.

00:07:19 ►

And I kind of read around a lot of I mean mean it sounds crazy, but it’s completely true. I read around a lot of the kind of classic texts like the kind of – you know, the Great Renaissance, Key of Solomon, and some of Crowley’s writing, the writing of various of the sort of early kind of Wiccan practitioners like Gerald Gardner and so on.

00:07:37 ►

Right from when I was a kid, I’ve just always been interested in the weird stuff.

00:07:41 ►

That’s just me.

00:07:42 ►

And so how did you take your first practical steps when it started

00:07:46 ►

to become a path and not just a reading obsession? Okay, so this is back in the Britain in the sort

00:07:54 ►

of early 1980s. And this is remarkably before the internet. So what I had to do was I had to kind of go to events I had to go to uh kind of psychic

00:08:07 ►

festivals so fairs where people would be reading tarot cards and trying to sell incense and you

00:08:13 ►

know this kind of new age kind of stuff but this is before the term new age had even really kind

00:08:17 ►

of kicked in in a big way in culture so I would turn up at these places and I would be looking

00:08:22 ►

for the witches I would be looking for the weird bit of the weird thing that I was already in.

00:08:48 ►

a sort of a mysterious, dark, liminal, feminine, occult vibe that I wanted,

00:08:50 ►

and also would allow practice within a group.

00:08:52 ►

And I’m a very kind of social person.

00:08:53 ►

I like working in group settings.

00:08:57 ►

So I got involved in Wicca because that was the means of entry where I actually met people and did stuff.

00:09:01 ►

And so that was where the whole kind of narrative began.

00:09:04 ►

And that was where the whole kind of narrative began and that was age about about 16 i became

00:09:07 ►

involved with the first uh first coven in in north london and what did a coven look like in north

00:09:12 ►

london in the 80s okay so it looked like um a group of people who i guess one would class as um

00:09:20 ►

uh working class bohemians or lower-middle-class bohemians,

00:09:26 ►

the kind that intersect.

00:09:28 ►

And they were people who were really interested in magic.

00:09:31 ►

They came from a variety of different traditions and styles,

00:09:35 ►

but it consisted of a kind of Alexandrian-style wicker.

00:09:39 ►

Although the group that I was involved with,

00:09:41 ►

very, very early on, we started experimenting with our ritual system.

00:09:45 ►

So we didn’t use a kind of standard book of shadows thing. We didn’t use the off the peg

00:09:48 ►

initiations. We built each one of our rituals, which were still based around the seasonal cycle,

00:09:53 ►

but we built each one individually. And we use lots of, I guess, what we call possession states.

00:10:01 ►

So what in the craft is called inv invocation of of god forms so you

00:10:06 ►

would bring this force this um uh possession state through a person well often they would

00:10:13 ►

kind of channel you know poetry or music or whatever something would would come from that

00:10:18 ►

a kind of an oracular process a very trance based process didn’t involve psychedelics didn’t involve

00:10:24 ►

anything in terms of changing consciousness beyond the ritual drama

00:10:28 ►

and a bit of chanting and a bit of wine.

00:10:31 ►

That was basically it.

00:10:32 ►

But that kind of eclectic approach to magic, which I encountered very early on,

00:10:37 ►

really sat well with me so that now the style of work that I do is still very much like that.

00:10:42 ►

It has basic building blocks,

00:10:45 ►

but otherwise it’s actually quite free form

00:10:47 ►

rather than being a particular style,

00:10:50 ►

particular kind of tradition.

00:10:53 ►

And you mentioned about the no drugs

00:10:54 ►

because it seems like often people interested

00:10:56 ►

in more traditional forms of magic,

00:10:59 ►

the drugs don’t interest them as much

00:11:01 ►

or they’re seen as maybe a lesser way to get there.

00:11:03 ►

Kind of like the Buddhists see it as well.

00:11:05 ►

Both forgetting their roots, and this is how they started oftentimes.

00:11:09 ►

Yeah, man, it’s really, really interesting.

00:11:11 ►

It’s a really interesting thing.

00:11:13 ►

The weekend just gone, I was hanging out in Boscastle in Cornwall

00:11:17 ►

at the Friends of the Boscastle Museum Witchcraft AGM,

00:11:21 ►

and Maxine Sanders was there of Alex and Maxine and the Alexandrian tradition one

00:11:25 ►

of the 1960s 1970s early emergent forms of Wiccan I was talking to her about this and I asked her a

00:11:31 ►

question how come you know what was the relationship between psychedelic culture of the 60s and this

00:11:38 ►

kind of magic stuff that was going on this Wiccan stuff and she said that although there was a

00:11:43 ►

relationship that they’re both kind of countercultural things, they occupied very different spaces. So, for example, if you look

00:11:49 ►

at the story of witchcraft, of what we describe these days as Wicca, that emerged in the mainstream

00:11:55 ►

press. It didn’t emerge within Oz and IT and the underground press. It wasn’t in there. It wasn’t

00:12:03 ►

a feature of that.

00:12:08 ►

And so they were just two parallel kind of processes.

00:12:11 ►

Later on in the story, what happens is that paganism,

00:12:15 ►

modern neo-paganism, wants to become an acceptable belief system,

00:12:17 ►

totally reasonable thing to want to do.

00:12:19 ►

You know, no one likes having bricks through their window.

00:12:33 ►

But in doing so, what it also did was it had to perhaps unconsciously distance itself from the more kind of ecstatic forms of paganism.

00:12:46 ►

And so those have only really made a reemergence within the occult story of the Western world through shamanism, through the way that shamanism has begun to kind of emerge and re-emerge and then be rediscovered in those traditions.

00:12:50 ►

So that’s kind of how the thing works. So there is this kind of sense in which a lot of the Golden Dawn style,

00:12:56 ►

Wicca style, Masonic-y style emerging forms of paganism

00:13:01 ►

separated themselves from the psychedelic gnosis for all kinds of reasons, just luck of the draw to some extent.

00:13:09 ►

And it’s only now that those two things are coming back down together again, I would say.

00:13:14 ►

Wow. That’s fascinating about the parallel tracks.

00:13:21 ►

roots of Wiccan. What’s the feeling in the Wiccan community around

00:13:24 ►

this kind of idea

00:13:26 ►

that the drug people have that Wiccan

00:13:27 ►

started because witches

00:13:30 ►

were putting hen’s bane and deitora

00:13:32 ►

onto broomsticks and then

00:13:34 ►

broomsticks were applied to mucous membranes

00:13:36 ►

and that’s how people were getting high.

00:13:37 ►

How do they feel about this?

00:13:40 ►

Okay, so

00:13:41 ►

there’s a whole bunch of stuff. We can unpack

00:13:44 ►

the whole thing about witchcraft,

00:13:45 ►

which is a tremendously fascinating thing to go and explore.

00:13:49 ►

You know, if people want to kind of look at it,

00:13:51 ►

there’s a book about the witch by Professor Ronald Hutton,

00:13:55 ►

which has just come out,

00:13:57 ►

and I recommend going and having a look at that,

00:13:58 ►

look at his other work about witchcraft too.

00:14:02 ►

So how do they feel about it? mean there’s there’s so many interesting things

00:14:08 ►

to unpack from that one of the things is that a lot of the plants that we have access to in western

00:14:14 ►

europe um with the exception of things like psychedelic uh you know liberty caps and

00:14:20 ►

psilocybin mushrooms many of those those plants are very, very highly toxic.

00:14:28 ►

You know, they’re delirious, deturin, henbane, and so on.

00:14:32 ►

Go and read the Irawid vaults about them.

00:14:33 ►

Look at all the train wrecks.

00:14:34 ►

There are many.

00:14:39 ►

So there’s a sense in which, from a European point of view,

00:14:42 ►

because of this bizarre way that we don’t go anywhere near mushrooms, which obviously Gordon Wasson and Valentina Wasson noticed very strongly, we’re kind of cut off from this.

00:15:06 ►

are less a feature of Northwest European kind of folklore and tradition,

00:15:10 ►

except to say these things are really dangerous, don’t go near them.

00:15:14 ►

So it’s a really different kind of landscape in terms of the way that, say,

00:15:17 ►

witchcraft and magic exist within the Americas,

00:15:21 ►

or indeed some of the other areas that haven’t been researched as well, like Africa and so on.

00:15:24 ►

In terms of the way that wiccans

00:15:26 ►

see this you know everyday average you know your average witch is probably these guys got a very

00:15:31 ►

sort of pragmatic view about the value of these substances within the standard witchcraft manual

00:15:38 ►

the book of shadows there’s a bit where it talks about the eight paths to the center which is kind

00:15:43 ►

of like this way of you know there’s eight different approaches to alter states of consciousness one of the paths

00:15:49 ►

that’s given i think is number four uh is drugs and in the book of shadows right in gerald gardener’s

00:15:55 ►

stuff it says but of course don’t take too much of them because that would be really bad

00:15:59 ►

which of course is true too much of anything is. That’s why we use the term too much. But it’s played down within that tradition.

00:16:07 ►

I think these days it’s like, yeah, you know,

00:16:09 ►

it’s emerging as part of magic.

00:16:11 ►

It’s emerging as part of that revived forms of pagan culture.

00:16:15 ►

So I haven’t got a problem with it, speaking as a witch.

00:16:20 ►

And of the other paths,

00:16:22 ►

what are some of the ones that practicing them combines really well with the psychedelic path as well?

00:16:29 ►

Other ways of changing consciousness or other things?

00:16:32 ►

Yeah, from the Book of Shadows, of the other seven paths.

00:16:36 ►

Okay, it depends what you’re using.

00:16:37 ►

Okay, so one of the things from the Book of Shadows, one of the paths to power is that of restriction.

00:16:44 ►

because shadows, one of the paths to power is that of restriction.

00:16:48 ►

So using, in witchcraft, there are various forms of using things like cords to restrict you, to kind of give you this, to kind of shut down the senses.

00:16:55 ►

So it’s the kind of thing that if you read descriptions of the little information

00:17:01 ►

we have about the druids, about the way that they induced trance,

00:17:03 ►

which was to wrap someone in a bull’s hide and put a stone on their chest, and that they would go into a trance state.

00:17:09 ►

So, for example, if you’re working with ketamine, which is a substance that takes you into a trance state, then you might, for example, want to have a ritual that involved being wrapped up or tied up or constrained in some way to kind of go deep into that experience.

00:17:24 ►

Whereas another way of the path to power, of course, is to do dancing.

00:17:27 ►

And as everybody knows, there is nothing quite as wonderful in the world as dancing on MDMA.

00:17:33 ►

You know, everyone, exactly, it’s simply true.

00:17:37 ►

So some substances work with different other styles of changing or altering consciousness.

00:17:46 ►

It depends on what the substance is that you’re working with.

00:17:49 ►

How did psychedelics start creeping into your own path

00:17:51 ►

after you had all this other training in various traditions?

00:17:55 ►

Okay, so if anyone wants to go and read the most recent edition of Psychedelic Press,

00:18:02 ►

the Psychedelic Press Journal, which is published

00:18:05 ►

here in Britain. I’ve written about my first ever trip. So basically, I’d done lots and lots of

00:18:11 ►

ritual practice. I’d done kind of yoga and meditation for about 10 years, and I’d done

00:18:15 ►

group ritual practice for about five years. Then I had some LSD. I massively miscalculated the dose

00:18:23 ►

and ended up with quite a strong experience from that.

00:18:27 ►

And I was very fortunate because I kind of felt that all the sort of preparatory stuff that I’d done in the form of those other forms of practice kind of helped me navigate through that experience.

00:18:41 ►

It wasn’t until perhaps even as much as another 10 years before i really started bringing these

00:18:46 ►

two things together and that’s partly because um i was starting to encounter styles of magic

00:18:53 ►

and which um were very much kind of engaged with uh using psychedelics as a way of changing

00:19:02 ►

consciousness so rather than just having a ritual where you might sort of, you know,

00:19:08 ►

add a small amount of a consciousness-changing agent, incense, for example,

00:19:12 ►

or wine or even a small amount of cannabis or whatever,

00:19:15 ►

but actually constructing the ritual around the experience of a particular medicine,

00:19:20 ►

that’s something I only became interested in really only over the course of the last,

00:19:24 ►

I don’t know, 15, 20 years, something like this.

00:19:28 ►

So I’d done quite a lot of practice before kind of really getting into that territory, bringing those two things together.

00:19:33 ►

And do you see that as a pitfall for others if they don’t do enough of another practice before they dive into psychedelics?

00:19:40 ►

No, man, that’s just my story.

00:19:41 ►

I’ve got no prescription for anyone else.

00:19:43 ►

That’s their journey. I would suggest that for me, I found it useful because, as I said, when I took LSD for the first time, I took a much larger dose than I thought.

00:19:58 ►

So I thought that this, you know, I made the classic rookie error of thinking this thing that I had in my hand was one, when in fact it was actually four.

00:20:08 ►

And so the other one I had in my other hand, which I thought was one, which was also four.

00:20:13 ►

So by the time I’d taken a half and then a half and then another one, thinking none of it was any good, I’d taken quite a lot. So I was very pleased for me in that experience to be able to kind of go, oh, well, I know how to do meditation and breathing through this mentalness.

00:20:31 ►

And it was great.

00:20:34 ►

Equally, there are other stories.

00:20:36 ►

There are other ways of exploring consciousness having a baseline practice of doing a little bit physical

00:20:49 ►

stuff so like yoga running whatever just being in your body in some way and having a bit of

00:20:58 ►

non-stylized meditation so like something really really simple like just sitting down

00:21:04 ►

listening to your breathing thoughts come come up, notice thoughts come up, smile.

00:21:09 ►

That’s thoughts, isn’t it?

00:21:10 ►

Go back to your breathing, rinse and repeat 20 minutes a day.

00:21:14 ►

Something like that I think is – I would go as far as recommending that as a kind of a baseline pair of practices. Something for the body, you know, generally keeping looking after the body

00:21:27 ►

and looking after the kind of the non-psychedelic mind,

00:21:33 ►

just the attentive mind of the moment.

00:21:36 ►

That’s probably a good place to start.

00:21:38 ►

Everything else is up for grabs.

00:21:39 ►

It just depends on how the story unfolds, you know.

00:21:42 ►

And what you said earlier reminded me of a line from your book,

00:21:44 ►

the intelligent psychonaut does not confuse quality with quantity. on how this story unfolds, you know? And what you said earlier reminded me of a line from your book,

00:21:49 ►

the intelligent psychonaut does not confuse quality with quantity.

00:21:52 ►

Yeah, man, this is to do with my, like, I do this rant now, basically,

00:21:56 ►

about how the heroic dose, yeah?

00:21:58 ►

Terence McKenna, peace be upon him.

00:22:04 ►

That was one of the things that he was an was an advocate of there are other people like you

00:22:05 ►

know this amazing guy kalindi is another advocate for this sort of stuff but neither of them uh i

00:22:12 ►

think would say that that makes you better than anybody else certainly i know you know it’s not

00:22:19 ►

it’s not about that if i tell you that i took a heroic dose of whiskey hey man i took this heroic dose of whiskey

00:22:25 ►

i drank the whole bottle man and i was just i vomited all over myself and i don’t remember

00:22:32 ►

and then i think i know my maybe it fell my mother or something you know so what so what

00:22:38 ►

have you really got something better out of that and we all know that uh a low dose of something take in a um you know you want

00:22:48 ►

to go to a museum you want to go to a park you want to go to a party and interact with people

00:22:52 ►

you probably don’t want a heroic dose ain’t no point there’s no point going to a gallery

00:22:58 ►

and enjoying and interacting with the art in a psychedelic way which is an amazing thing to be

00:23:03 ►

able to do on a heroic dose.

00:23:09 ►

It’s just, you know, that’s why you have silent darkness because there’s no point having anything else, you know.

00:23:12 ►

Sometimes, of course, that’s a valuable experience,

00:23:15 ►

but there are many valuable experiences,

00:23:18 ►

including microdosing and including abstinence.

00:23:22 ►

You know, it’s about intelligent dosing, not heroic dosing.

00:23:27 ►

Intelligent dosing. That’s excellent.

00:23:30 ►

How would you recommend approaching set and setting?

00:23:34 ►

It seems like that’s a big part of what your book is about.

00:23:37 ►

I guess just being aware of the fact of it.

00:23:40 ►

These substances are tremendously plastic.

00:23:43 ►

So whatever is going on in the brain that goes into that experience and in the environment in which that brain lives is going to hugely influence the way that these substances are.

00:23:57 ►

And you can actively utilize that.

00:24:01 ►

And you can also be aware of that in terms of any difficulties that might arise and how you can control the experience.

00:24:08 ►

Actually, once you’re familiar with it, man, everyone makes mistakes and everyone has problems.

00:24:14 ►

But there is a degree of competence that comes with learning that those facts.

00:24:26 ►

out those facts and whether you choose to describe that or or create that in terms of like elaborate ritual practice or if not you have just a personal practice whatever it looks like realizing that you

00:24:33 ►

have um the opportunity to kind of make um it’s like making an offering to the medicine it’s like

00:24:42 ►

saying okay i’ve got this stuff yeah this stuff is going to change my consciousness.

00:24:46 ►

Fantastic.

00:24:47 ►

That’s an amazing opportunity.

00:24:49 ►

So I’m going to try and set up a really good environment for that.

00:24:53 ►

You know, within the limits of what seems reasonable and possible.

00:24:56 ►

I want to I want to optimize this.

00:24:58 ►

And even if that just means I’m going to keep this till Christmas or I’m going to use this when Joe comes around because he would really appreciate this.

00:25:07 ►

Yeah. Being really aware of how those things are used, you know, and that’s that’s that for me,

00:25:17 ►

I think is that is one of the kind of the essential points of certain setting is being just aware of our agency with the psychedelic experience and how we can

00:25:26 ►

be active co-creators of whatever unfolds for ourselves and those around us

00:25:32 ►

by understanding those variables. And for those who would be intrigued by this

00:25:37 ►

different take that you’re taking, what would be the types of psychedelic ceremonies that would be

00:25:44 ►

something that somebody

00:25:45 ►

could start off as, you know, trying to do something a little bit differently than they’ve

00:25:49 ►

done before?

00:25:51 ►

Really easy.

00:25:51 ►

Give you an example.

00:25:52 ►

So in Britain, every weekend, we take about half a million pills of MDMA, half a million

00:25:58 ►

doses of MDMA.

00:25:59 ►

Probably that estimate may be as many as 750,000 doses.

00:26:05 ►

So 500,000 doses, half a million doses.

00:26:09 ►

So that’s what, like 26 million doses a year, something like this.

00:26:15 ►

So that’s a lot of MDMA.

00:26:17 ►

Now, what I would suggest with those people who are taking MDMA,

00:26:19 ►

they’re having a fantastic time.

00:26:21 ►

The vast majority are having a brilliant, brilliant time, which is great.

00:26:24 ►

And I think you can actually get higher because i think that what you can do is you can utilize the fact

00:26:29 ►

that this is mdma this is the i like to think of it as the daughter of mescaline the daughter of

00:26:34 ►

grandfather peyote yeah that’s mdma that’s molly that’s who she is so she’s a special special

00:26:41 ►

miraculous material which we know can heal veterans who’ve been to war

00:26:46 ►

of the hurt within them, that our whole culture, let alone the war itself, is inflicted on these

00:26:52 ►

individuals, that can heal people with abuse and trauma, that can help people open up and love each

00:26:58 ►

other, and can help people dance in unity. That’s an amazing thing. So if we’re going to take these

00:27:03 ►

half a million doses every

00:27:05 ►

weekend, all I would suggest is wouldn’t it be great if just before you take the stuff,

00:27:10 ►

let’s imagine you’re going to take it before you go into the club, before you walk outside.

00:27:14 ►

So you will just take hands for a moment, you and the gang, you and your friends, yeah?

00:27:18 ►

Just hold hands. Just take a couple of breaths together. Recognize how beautiful and amazing

00:27:22 ►

this experience is. Thank the medicine.

00:27:25 ►

Thank the people who brought the medicine to you. Thank all the people who have discovered this

00:27:31 ►

medicine and who are using this medicine well this weekend. Put a little blessing into that

00:27:35 ►

medicine, maybe a little intention if you’ve got one. Go and take the medicine. Have a fantastic

00:27:40 ►

night. When you come back at the end of the night, before you will go and crash out

00:27:45 ►

and go your separate ways, do the same thing. Just hold hands, check in with each other a moment,

00:27:51 ►

take that special time just to recognize that this is sacred. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.

00:27:57 ►

No one has to have a funny hat on. Just do that. Just do that. Start you know your opportunities next weekend like for half a

00:28:07 ►

million people you know and this is about like reclaiming spirit our spirituality and reclaiming

00:28:13 ►

the psychedelic gnosis the the psychedelic power that drove probably uh the um the mysteries

00:28:21 ►

elusives the psychedelic power that bonds together, many cultures who have not managed to rip the planet apart.

00:28:27 ►

We must do this.

00:28:29 ►

It would help us.

00:28:31 ►

So we’ve already got the medicine.

00:28:32 ►

All we need to do is, or we’ve got the substance,

00:28:35 ►

is just to transform that into the medicine in the way that when the native

00:28:39 ►

people speak about the medicine, because the medicine is the ritual,

00:28:44 ►

the set and the setting and the substance.

00:28:47 ►

So, yeah, just do that with Molly next time you meet her.

00:28:50 ►

And what’s it like for you as you go out doing your performances and your readings to share a message like this?

00:28:58 ►

What kind of response do you get?

00:28:59 ►

And is there any kind of negative pushback to the approach you’re taking?

00:29:04 ►

So far, so good.

00:29:05 ►

No, not that I’ve noticed.

00:29:08 ►

Because, okay, so with Getting High, I’ve been really, really pleased,

00:29:13 ►

really honored, in fact, to have lots of people come back to me

00:29:16 ►

and say that it’s been, I don’t know, just really interesting,

00:29:20 ►

really inspiring.

00:29:21 ►

They’ve really enjoyed reading it.

00:29:23 ►

I’ve been very, very fortunate to work with Pete Loveday, who’s done the illustrations for it and the cover, which,

00:29:29 ►

you know, I mean, the writing is good, but the pictures are brilliant.

00:29:35 ►

So it’s been a beautiful thing to produce, you know, working with psychedelic press.

00:29:41 ►

People have responded really, really well. You know, I’m fortunate to have because i like doing group

00:29:47 ►

practice i’ve got friends in lots and lots of different traditions so people who have

00:29:51 ►

who are members of cultures who have entheogenic traditions genuinely going back thousands of years

00:29:58 ►

and all of those people have been really supportive they’ve they’ve helped with um discussions around the book and i

00:30:07 ►

think that that attempt at being kind of inclusive and authoritative but not authoritarian has been

00:30:14 ►

really warmly received by people i don’t have all the answers i’m just a guy you know i don’t i’m

00:30:19 ►

nothing special i have i’ve written this book partly to help other people, partly to distill my own ideas,

00:30:26 ►

partly to honor those practitioners who’ve shared their ideas with me.

00:30:30 ►

It’s just a set of serving suggestions for what you could do with your drugs.

00:30:34 ►

That’s all it really is.

00:30:36 ►

But people seem to like it, so that’s kind of nice.

00:30:39 ►

That would be nice.

00:30:41 ►

And how did the book come about for you?

00:30:44 ►

When did the first inklings come

00:30:45 ►

oh man i’ve been thinking about it for years because it just seemed one of the obvious things

00:30:50 ►

to do um like i say i had a youthful misadventure with lsd which although this book i mean it

00:30:56 ►

actually may maybe it would have helped because it hasn’t got a big thing at the beginning saying

00:30:59 ►

know your dose know how much you’re taking and stuff um it was it was because of the kind of tradition

00:31:09 ►

the style of magic that i’m involved with so the magical style that i’m most closely

00:31:13 ►

i guess uh associated with these days is a thing called chaos magic

00:31:17 ►

and um the thing about chaos magic is it’s an approach which is very much about technique.

00:31:26 ►

So, yes, you can have a complex cosmology.

00:31:29 ►

You can have a very, very complex worldview with all sorts of special symbols and layers and diagrams and all kinds of lovely stuff.

00:31:36 ►

That’s brilliant.

00:31:38 ►

But the question I always kind of want to ask is, yeah, okay, so what do you actually do?

00:31:42 ►

What does the practice look like of your

00:31:45 ►

you know the process that you’re telling me about um and so chaos magic is very much about the idea

00:31:52 ►

of within all the different spiritual traditions you can find underlying structures that everyone

00:31:58 ►

uses so people use sound and voice and rhythm and ritual poetry and certain types of movement.

00:32:06 ►

And because we’re humans, actually, underneath the cultural wrapper, it all looks much the same, really.

00:32:30 ►

When you tease out the elements, you know, there’s the creation of perimeters, the movement of objects across perimeters, the all kinds of relationships that are set up.

00:32:36 ►

So with Getting Higher, what I wanted to do is I wanted to do the same kind of idea, the chaos magic approach.

00:32:42 ►

I wanted to drill down and say, well, what are the underlying ideas under these different psychedelic rituals?

00:32:47 ►

And what are the kinds of, you know, the practices that people can actually do?

00:32:49 ►

So that’s why I’ve called it a manual.

00:32:56 ►

So it’s designed for people to give them techniques to experiment with.

00:32:58 ►

So this is not answers to things. These are kind of questions as much as anything else.

00:33:02 ►

They’re opportunities to explore and to play with the

00:33:05 ►

psychedelic state. It’s nothing to do with me or anyone else coming up with any answers about what

00:33:10 ►

it means. So there are ways of engaging with it. And that’s what I wanted to share with people.

00:33:15 ►

Yeah, it sounds like a very non-dogmatic approach. And I think it would make sense.

00:33:21 ►

The chaos magicians are more into the drug side of things as one more useful tool in the arsenal.

00:33:28 ►

Yes, in a word. Yes.

00:33:30 ►

I mean, it has to be said, not all chaos magicians use drugs, of course,

00:33:35 ►

and that is in fact true.

00:33:38 ►

But if you look at the history of chaos magic,

00:33:42 ►

because it arose in Britain essentially in the kind of late

00:33:47 ►

1970s 1980s um it was very heavily influenced by punk it was very very strongly influenced by the

00:33:55 ►

kind of by lsd and uh and and it was certainly a style of magic which attempted to really look at kind of two interesting sort of ideas.

00:34:08 ►

One, which was the idea of the paradigm, the idea of belief,

00:34:12 ►

the idea that we have this kind of set of symbolic envelope in which we place ourselves.

00:34:19 ►

So whether or not we call that, you know, whatever the practice might be,

00:34:26 ►

we call that um you know whatever the practice might be it might be an envelope that looks like hinduism or looks like nlp or looks like performance art or looks like discordianism or looks like

00:34:32 ►

whatever the belief system and then you also have gnosis so this idea of changing consciousness the

00:34:38 ►

same thing that the eight paths to power in witchcraft talk about but you know what other

00:34:42 ►

ways of doing it and people by that point in history fortunately in even in magic had managed to get hip to the idea that drugs might actually

00:34:50 ►

be the answer um so they started experimenting with them and the rest as they say is history

00:34:55 ►

and so and speaking of history that’s the point i wanted to get to um is drugs and magic and also

00:35:02 ►

your work with the psychedelic museum if you want to talk a little bit about that and how the psychedelic museum came about okay so um i’m i’m i’m involved with

00:35:13 ►

a lot of my professional work is to do with sort of museums and heritage sites and so on it’s

00:35:17 ►

something it’s an area that really interests me and i think that um like they say if you don’t

00:35:22 ►

know your history then you don’t know where you’re coming from. And I think that one of the interesting things about the psychedelic renaissance that we’re in now,

00:35:29 ►

the third summer of love, it’s also been called, is that that calls into mind these first two sort of iterations of summers of love

00:35:38 ►

and the whole history of this thing.

00:35:49 ►

of this thing. I’m also really interested in prohibition and finding ways to change the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And in order to understand prohibition, I think it’s

00:35:54 ►

really, really essential to understand the history of, you know, what was going on, particularly in

00:35:58 ►

the US over that period of, you know, Nixon being in power and so on. Really, really important to understand those things.

00:36:06 ►

And also there’s a lot of fun to be had because there’s now,

00:36:10 ►

from the first psychedelic revolution, there’s loads and loads and loads of art and culture

00:36:15 ►

and, of course, this continuous rediscovery of the kind of indigenous,

00:36:21 ►

non-European cultures as well.

00:36:22 ►

So we have all this stuff.

00:36:24 ►

What do we do when we have a big load of stuff that we find valuable and interesting,

00:36:29 ►

but basically no one’s got a house room for?

00:36:31 ►

Well, what we do is we put it into a museum.

00:36:33 ►

And I would like to see whether or not I’m involved with it.

00:36:38 ►

There are lots of people.

00:36:39 ►

There’s about five of us involved in this kind of project at the moment.

00:36:42 ►

There’s a psychedelic museum in Paris,

00:36:44 ►

which is very much focused around kind of the art side of things this is an idea whose time

00:36:49 ►

has nearly nearly nearly come so however it emerges i would like to see a museum with uh which

00:36:56 ►

is a a collection where we can put some of this art and some of this culture and we can also begin

00:37:01 ►

to have that as a place for um you know for archive for research

00:37:05 ►

for for that sort of um culture whether that happens as part of a university it happens as a

00:37:11 ►

result of some kind of rich person dying and bequeathing a vast fortune to uh me or my and

00:37:18 ►

my friends for example that would equally be cool um but i’d like to see a psychedelic museum we’ve run a series of

00:37:25 ►

pop-up museums in britain um where we’ve done a couple a couple of different shows we did one

00:37:31 ►

which was focused around alice and underground culture and um that happened in london there was

00:37:36 ►

some lectures and things that sat around the exhibition um we’ve done one at breaking

00:37:41 ►

convention which is the big psychedelics conference that happens at Greenwich, also in London.

00:37:47 ►

We’d like to do others.

00:37:48 ►

We’ve got one of our directors is in North America.

00:37:53 ►

So he’s been kind of working over there on the project.

00:37:56 ►

As I mentioned, there’s a kind of sister organization to the one that I’m directly involved with in Paris.

00:38:02 ►

that I’m directly involved with in Paris.

00:38:05 ►

So it’s an idea that’s kind of bubbling up because to understand where we are

00:38:08 ►

and to have an opportunity to create visions of the future

00:38:12 ►

and to be able to celebrate the story thus far for us as Europeans

00:38:17 ►

and broader than that for the whole of our species,

00:38:21 ►

our engagement with psychedelic drugs,

00:38:23 ►

I’d love to see temporally autonomous or permanent spaces where those exhibitions and those ideas

00:38:32 ►

could be shared and explored.

00:38:34 ►

That’s what I’d like to happen.

00:38:37 ►

And so if you did get your millions from some listener out there and you were put in charge

00:38:42 ►

of curating the history section what would you be

00:38:45 ►

most interested in bringing up about psychedelics in history and magic wow i don’t know i mean

00:38:52 ►

there’s a there are so many things aren’t there i mean i guess one of the big things for me about

00:38:59 ►

psychedelics generally in terms of understanding their history is understanding how the psychedelic state,

00:39:06 ►

so the states of awareness that we’re beginning to really understand from the fMRI work,

00:39:12 ►

the recent fMRI work, for example, these states of awareness which involve a downregulation of the narrative self

00:39:20 ►

and the emergence of all these interesting novel connections within a mind that is still

00:39:26 ►

aware but aware in a very different way than we are when we’re in our sort of default mode

00:39:32 ►

way of consciousness from the very moment we can stand we stand up and then we turn around and

00:39:40 ►

round and round and round and round and round and round and we sit down because one of the things we learn as humans is that we can control our own state of mind and our

00:39:50 ►

own awareness and we can do this in a variety of different ways and then we learn things like we

00:39:54 ►

can do holotropic breath work and we can do it like that we can lose ourselves in dancing and

00:39:59 ►

then of course we discover that there are substances out there there are special types of food, we discover that there are substances out there. There are special types of food that we can eat that make our consciousness change as well. And I would guess that one of the things I

00:40:10 ►

would want to bring up in an exhibition like that was how other creatures than humans engage in the

00:40:16 ►

psychedelic experience. So there are plenty of examples of other animals that take various

00:40:22 ►

substances. I was reading recently about some film of dolphins playing with a puffer fish,

00:40:30 ►

essentially getting stoned off the puffer fish.

00:40:33 ►

So I would want to bring out the fact that this is simply a behavior of biology

00:40:38 ►

and that that brings up all sorts of interesting questions.

00:40:42 ►

So I want to normalize the psychedelic experience in that sense as just a thing that living things do not even humans do

00:40:50 ►

living things do and then of course we can ask the question well what does that mean and what can

00:40:55 ►

that what does that uh uh what do those states allow us to have access to that may be beneficial or useful or indeed problematic.

00:41:07 ►

Because the thing about the psychedelic state is that from the fMRI work,

00:41:12 ►

we now know that this is, there are gradations of it,

00:41:16 ►

but it’s a very different state of awareness.

00:41:18 ►

It’s a state of awareness that has all of these magical possibilities within it.

00:41:22 ►

So the level of placebo effect healing that you can have the

00:41:26 ►

fact that you can figure out problems and we know now from the lsd research at imperial last year

00:41:31 ►

that objective problem solving is possible on 75 micrograms of lsd that’s what you need so we know

00:41:38 ►

that this other state of awareness the state of awareness that we go into when we down regulate the narrative self it can

00:41:45 ►

do all kinds of stuff and it may be that it’s important for our own psychic health the psychic

00:41:52 ►

health of us as a species um it may be that it has these quotes magical abilities it certainly

00:42:00 ►

seems to have healing ability on individuals, which is sometimes quite profound.

00:42:06 ►

So I would want to say this is a normal state of awareness that all biology appears to seek

00:42:12 ►

out to some extent, certainly all complex biology.

00:42:16 ►

It will find ways of getting high.

00:42:18 ►

Secondly, that getting high is a particular set of states of awareness, the limits of which we do not yet know, but

00:42:28 ►

which are nevertheless certainly capable of particular things, some of which are undoubtedly

00:42:34 ►

beneficial to us.

00:42:36 ►

That’s the kind of baseline message I want to get.

00:42:38 ►

I’d like to have loads of kind of weird stuff in there kind of pointing at that, but that’s

00:42:43 ►

basically what I’d be saying. And so from all of these different shamanistic paths

00:42:49 ►

that you’ve seen around the world,

00:42:51 ►

did any of them really ring true to you

00:42:55 ►

as something that helped

00:42:56 ►

as you were devising psychedelic ceremonies

00:42:59 ►

and ceremonies in general?

00:43:01 ►

Oh man, all of it.

00:43:02 ►

I mean, you know, there’s generally,

00:43:05 ►

in my experience,

00:43:07 ►

there’s generally something useful to be learned from

00:43:08 ►

many, many different settings.

00:43:11 ►

So I’ve been really, really

00:43:12 ►

honored to participate

00:43:14 ►

in ceremony with,

00:43:17 ►

so with the people

00:43:20 ►

usually referred to as

00:43:21 ►

the Weechild people.

00:43:24 ►

And with various kind of like the people usually referred to as the, as the, uh, the Weechild people. So, um, and with,

00:43:25 ►

um,

00:43:26 ►

various kind of like,

00:43:27 ►

uh,

00:43:28 ►

North American and Mexican shaman.

00:43:31 ►

And,

00:43:31 ►

um,

00:43:32 ►

they,

00:43:32 ►

they’ve all been really,

00:43:34 ►

really helpful people.

00:43:35 ►

You know,

00:43:35 ►

they’ve all been,

00:43:36 ►

I’ve,

00:43:37 ►

uh,

00:43:37 ►

um,

00:43:38 ►

the interactions I’ve had with people like the Santa Dami church,

00:43:42 ►

the interactions I’ve had with various kinds of organizations. Um, I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve encountered many, many really good teachers.

00:43:51 ►

So again, my style is very, very collaborative. It’s what I like doing. Yeah, I’ve written,

00:43:56 ►

I think Getting High is like my 11th book or something. But if you look back at them,

00:44:00 ►

most of them are co-authored or many of them are co-authored i think it’s most of them actually

00:44:05 ►

are co-authored because i like working with other people and so i’ve been able i hope uh in a in a

00:44:13 ►

a thoughtful and respectful way to be able to draw on those indigenous traditions i’ve been fortunate

00:44:20 ►

to um to interact with and to to uh learn from them yeah to learn from them.

00:44:26 ►

Yeah, to learn from many of them, all of them.

00:44:30 ►

And for people out there listening who are curious about this

00:44:33 ►

and would like to perhaps start exploring this more,

00:44:36 ►

would there be certain directions you would recommend at this nexus

00:44:40 ►

between psychedelics and shamanism and magic?

00:44:44 ►

I guess there are several things that

00:44:47 ►

you could try doing. So one of them is just this process of being thoughtful about the use of the

00:44:53 ►

medicine. So bringing that kind of intention into the way that you take your drugs. The next one, I guess, would be to think about the idea of how you might use desire or intention in that space.

00:45:10 ►

Because the psychedelic state allows us to enter this other form of awareness, the limits of which we are not quite certain of yet,

00:45:19 ►

if you have particular goals, particular desires, able to be able to frame those in an

00:45:25 ►

intelligent and thoughtful way and bring those into the experience in some way you may also want

00:45:32 ►

to then do uh things in the experience which are to do with kind of actively listening to to what

00:45:38 ►

you’re being told so for example you might want to experiment with anything from a kind of artistic practice through to, I don’t know, reading the future and dividing patterns in clouds or in tarot cards or whatever.

00:45:57 ►

You might want to have a practice which is about kind of reflecting on your own thoughts about where you are now, where you have been, where you may be in

00:46:05 ►

the future. So it’s about just utilizing that space. So it’s about making it sacred, noticing

00:46:13 ►

how important and valuable it is. It’s about thinking about how you can bring your desire

00:46:19 ►

intelligently into that space. So you’re actively using it like a magician you’re using that

00:46:25 ►

opportunity to make uh you know however you want to frame this to um try and uh assist with your

00:46:34 ►

own unfolding and therefore the unfolding of all those all those beings in the world so it should

00:46:39 ►

be good for you it should be good for everyone around you it should be about like empowering

00:46:43 ►

yourself and in

00:46:45 ►

order to do that successfully that’s like that you know fourth turn of the wheel stuff it has to be

00:46:50 ►

for everyone else as well and then it’s about listening listening listening because as well

00:46:55 ►

as going into the space with desire it’s also important to be able to listen listen listen

00:46:59 ►

what is the stuff that’s coming up from the unconscious what are your thoughts and fears

00:47:04 ►

and feelings?

00:47:05 ►

How can you process those?

00:47:06 ►

How can you externalize those into something and dialogue with them?

00:47:10 ►

You know, one of the things about, for example, ayahuasca, which is really helpful for people,

00:47:14 ►

is because of the way it works on our nervous system, it fantastically conjures spirits for us,

00:47:20 ►

even those of us who don’t believe in that nonsense.

00:47:23 ►

And so that allows us to have our

00:47:25 ►

problem in front of us with a face and to dialogue with it, or to have something that gives us a

00:47:31 ►

personality that tells us something. And part of the psychedelic state is about that. It’s about,

00:47:37 ►

as well as going in and using it for problem solving, using it for healing, using it for,

00:47:42 ►

you know, utilitarian stuff, it’s also about kind of listening what’s going to come up in it, using it for healing, using it for utilitarian stuff. It’s also about kind of listening what’s going to come up in it,

00:47:48 ►

making sure that you’re doing both of those sides of it, really.

00:47:51 ►

So make the space sacred, use your desire,

00:47:54 ►

and listen to what the medicine tells you.

00:47:57 ►

Thank you for that one.

00:47:58 ►

I think it’s a really easy one for me to forget is the listening part.

00:48:03 ►

It’s so easy to be there and keep running

00:48:05 ►

with your own dialogue and forget that you can just slow it down and take it in yeah yeah yeah

00:48:12 ►

i’m rubbish at that as well i have to spend ages trying to do that shit it’s really tricky for me

00:48:17 ►

and a question that i just have to ask um for the tarot um are there any decks that are particularly

00:48:24 ►

or decks that are particularly close to your heart, out of curiosity?

00:48:27 ►

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:48:28 ►

There’s a couple that I really like.

00:48:29 ►

I mean, I like the one, the Freed Harris-Allister Crowley deck, the Thoth Tarot deck.

00:48:39 ►

You know, I quite like that kind of, you know, as a young man, I was very into that sort of philemic style of magic and Crowley and all that kind of you know as a as a young man i was very into that sort of um philemic style

00:48:45 ►

of magic and crowley and all that kind of thing so that that i really really enjoy um i also like

00:48:52 ►

so there’s a deck called the um usually referred to as the rider weight deck which is more i think

00:48:57 ►

more properly described as the coleman smith deck because it’s pamela coleman smith who did the

00:49:01 ►

artwork and rider was just the publisher weight wrote the book she is the artist let’s honor her so the Coleman Smith deck the so-called

00:49:09 ►

Ryder Waite that classic deck you know you can’t really go wrong can you really you know it’s like

00:49:15 ►

it’s it’s the it’s it’s the absolute standard then there’s you know occasionally I come across

00:49:21 ►

kind of you know various crazy wild ones and just enjoy doing those, using those.

00:49:26 ►

There was one that was created by a Facebook group, a Chaos Magic Facebook group, which is called the Chaos Magic Group Tarot.

00:49:35 ►

And it was a collective work.

00:49:37 ►

So I think about 40 of us submitted images that became a deck.

00:49:43 ►

I’ve got a copy of it here, in fact.

00:49:45 ►

Here we go.

00:49:45 ►

So there it is.

00:49:48 ►

So I don’t think you can actually buy this now,

00:49:50 ►

but we kind of created this with,

00:49:52 ►

and each of the cards are by different artists.

00:49:57 ►

So they’re all kind of,

00:49:58 ►

there’s a couple in here by me

00:50:01 ►

and by my partner, Nicky, as well.

00:50:04 ►

So that’s a really nice thing and quite fun

00:50:06 ►

to use. So yeah,

00:50:08 ►

those are my favorites.

00:50:10 ►

Yeah, the Tyroian drugs make sense to me.

00:50:12 ►

Well, you’ve got to cut stuff up with it, haven’t you

00:50:14 ►

really? And you need to cut… That’s not profane?

00:50:16 ►

Is anything profane, actually?

00:50:18 ►

That might be a good… What is it they say?

00:50:20 ►

To the pure, all things are pure? I don’t know.

00:50:22 ►

I mean…

00:50:24 ►

I don’t know. Don mean, I don’t know.

00:50:25 ►

Don’t ask me.

00:50:26 ►

I have no idea.

00:50:27 ►

The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled, says Blake.

00:50:31 ►

Well, one good question to ask a researcher like you, for the books that were really influential

00:50:37 ►

for you at different stages on your journey, which ones come to mind as books that really

00:50:42 ►

helped you figure out this getting higher in psychedelic

00:50:45 ►

ceremonies um the classic plants of the gods i think was one of those ones that i remember kind

00:50:51 ►

of encountering and thinking this is amazing i remember reading uh terence mckinnon’s food of

00:50:56 ►

the gods and thinking this is a fantastic narrative you know it’s very inspirational and very inspiring text to read.

00:51:09 ►

What other things?

00:51:10 ►

I don’t know.

00:51:11 ►

Pical and Tical, just from the point of view of like someone who’s not a chemist

00:51:14 ►

but who likes kind of obscure Kabbalah and bizarre words of power,

00:51:20 ►

I can look at the back bit, which I don’t really understand.

00:51:23 ►

But as a magician, it seems to have like magic symbols and then magical words that I can’t pronounce and don’t look like they’re actually meant to be pronounced by a human.

00:51:32 ►

They’re like a kind of, you know, Lovecraftian sort of text.

00:51:36 ►

So I like those.

00:51:40 ►

They’re good.

00:51:41 ►

I don’t know.

00:51:42 ►

What else?

00:51:43 ►

Like I say, I was really heavily influenced by by

00:51:46 ►

by um crowley’s work which i encountered as quite a young man so um i really enjoy uh

00:51:53 ►

reading his kind of accounts of sort of drugs and magic it’s of course rather disappointing

00:51:59 ►

that we don’t have his his book the cactus because crow Crowley experimented with mescaline.

00:52:06 ►

And there was a book, which was probably a collection, just a collection of trip reports

00:52:12 ►

of his mescaline experiments, which unfortunately doesn’t exist.

00:52:17 ►

You know, it was, I think that there’s a story about it being taken by customs at one point,

00:52:22 ►

and a copy has as yet not surfaced.

00:52:27 ►

So that, and of course, Carlos Castaneda.

00:52:30 ►

Where would I be without Carlos Castaneda?

00:52:31 ►

Where would any of us be without Carlos Castaneda?

00:52:34 ►

Fantastic.

00:52:35 ►

You know, again, really evocative stuff.

00:52:37 ►

I really don’t care if it’s true or false.

00:52:40 ►

I’m not even sure I understand what those categories mean.

00:52:43 ►

But I know that for me, it was inspirational.

00:52:46 ►

So for me, it was like, wow, this other reality, that’s so exciting.

00:52:51 ►

You can get them on drugs.

00:52:52 ►

Look, there’s a dog pissing on him.

00:52:54 ►

It’s Mescalito.

00:52:55 ►

Fantastic.

00:52:56 ►

You know, it’s brilliant stuff.

00:52:58 ►

What’s not to like?

00:52:59 ►

All right.

00:53:00 ►

What’s not to like?

00:53:01 ►

And so I guess before I let you go here, would you have any final advice you’d like to share with people who are interested in more ceremonial psychedelics?

00:53:12 ►

I think just realize that psychedelic ceremony is just a natural thing.

00:53:19 ►

Ceremony is just a natural process.

00:53:21 ►

We shake hands.

00:53:22 ►

We toast with our wine glasses.

00:53:21 ►

It’s just a natural process.

00:53:22 ►

We shake hands.

00:53:24 ►

We toast with our wine glasses.

00:53:30 ►

We lay flowers at the tomb of people that we love and that we respect.

00:53:32 ►

We just do this naturally.

00:53:46 ►

So by all means, kind of, you know, read stuff, engage with different practices, but make up your own way because as a as a human as a symbol making creature and as communities of humans as affinity groups of humans if we want to do a psychedelic ceremony we can just build it in our

00:53:51 ►

own way yeah so there’s a lot to be said for kind of you know going off to a ketos and going to

00:53:57 ►

mapia and going to take the ayahuasca with you know some cool person in the jungle that’s brilliant

00:54:01 ►

if you have the opportunity but if you don’t have that opportunity ain’t no problem yeah because if you can get hold of the medicine and you have a

00:54:09 ►

little bit of intelligence you can make this stuff up because guess what it’s all made up every single

00:54:16 ►

thing that any of these people do is all made up everything that i do i just make up yeah i make it

00:54:24 ►

up in a way that i like to think is informed by other practices and my experience,

00:54:29 ►

and I hope I do it in a good-hearted way, but I am nevertheless just making it up.

00:54:33 ►

So make up your own stuff.

00:54:35 ►

Make up your own mind, and make up your own way of making the medicine.

00:54:40 ►

Julian, we have to leave on that because it’s just perfect.

00:54:43 ►

Thank you so much.

00:54:44 ►

This has been such an enjoyable talk.

00:54:46 ►

Oh, man, you’re really, really welcome.

00:54:47 ►

Thank you very, very much for speaking with me and inviting me onto the show.

00:54:51 ►

And, yeah, peace.

00:54:53 ►

Lovely.

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