To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

The relationship between ego-dissolution and ego-inflation for experiences occasioned by:

Classical psychedelics

Coacine

Alcohol

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: Albion Dreaming by Andy Roberts. Replaced after my first copy accompanied a close friend to his new life in NY

From the first chapter: ‘William Blake drew on Albion as a symbol of man before the Biblical fall and historian Peter Ackroyd has used the term for the title of his book charting the origins of the English imagination.

From the Sixties onwards sections of the counter culture used the term Albion to refer to their vision of a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD.

Thus, Albion embodies the mythological imagination of these Isles, a state akin to the aboriginal Dreamtime, to which everyone should have access. This, then, is Albion’s dreaming.’

Andy Roberts is Britain’s answer to Erika Dyck; our national chronicler of the far out. Psychedelic Renaissance author AWAKN’s Dr Ben Sessa says:

“Andy is an anti-authoritarian, free-thinking individual who has happily nailed his colours to the weirdness mast without being lost in its sea of ethereal fluffiness.”

Indeed he’s unafraid of toppling sacred cows, like in this forensic inquisition into the Francis Crick LSD-DNA connection and his biography of disruptive-at-best prankster Michael Hollingshead. Grab his recent collection of essays from Psychedelic Press and see vids on the New Psychonaut YouTube depository.

Next issue: Dr Joe Tafur explains traditional and modern indigenous perspectives