Erowid
 
 
Plants - Drugs Mind - Spirit Freedom - Law Arts - Culture Library  
Review Erowid at GreatNonprofits.org
Help us be a "Top Rated Nonprofit" again this year and spread
honest info (good or bad) about psychedelics & other psychoactive drugs.
("Share Your Story" link. Needs quick login creation but no verification of contact info)
cover image
Mystery School in Hyperspace
A Cultural History of DMT
Rating :
rating
Author(s) :
Graham St John
Pages :
492
Pub Date :
2015
Edition(s) at Erowid :
2015(pb,f)
Publisher :
North Atlantic Books
ISBN :
9781583947326
BACK COVER #
Attracting the attention of experimentalists and prohibitionists, scientists and artists, alchemists and hyperspace emissaries, the psychoactive compound DMT is a unique story unto itself. Until now, this story has remained untold. Mystery School in Hyperspace is the first book to delve into the history of this substance, the discovery of its properties, and the impact it has had on poets, artists, and musicians.

DMT has appeared at crucial junctures in counterculture history, and in the narratives of William Burroughs, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna. It has guided the inception of the Grateful Dead, and has been evident at Nevada's Burning Man as spiritual technology supplying shape, color, and depth to a visionary art movement. The growing prevalence of use is evident in a vast networked independent research culture, and in its impact on fiction, film, music, and metaphysics. As this book traces the effect of DMT's release into the cultural bloodstream, the results should be of great interest to contemporary readers.

Exposing a great many myths, this engaging cultural history reveals how DMT has had a beneficial influence on the lives of those belonging to a vast underground network whose reports and initiatives expose drug war propaganda and shine a light in the shadows.

BLURBS #
"Meticulously researched and highly readable. St John covers everyimaginable aspect of DMT's place in the Western aesthetic andintellectual landscapes. Setting down his book, I came away with a newappreciation of just how embedded the DMT meme has become."
-- Rick Strassman MD, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule and DMT and the Soul of Prophecy and clinical associate professor of psychiatry, University of New Mexico School of Medicine

"Graham St John's book on DMT untangles the threads of this holy molecule, from anthropological antiquity to labs in Hungary, fromhipster soothsayers to visionary art at festivals, including some of the best descriptions of the wonderfully weird tryptamine worlds inside all of us. Read Mystery School in Hyperspace and appreciate the miracle inour midst."
-- Alex Grey, artist and author of Net of Being

"Scholars and psychonauts alike will find much to appreciate in this lucid, thoughtful, provocative, and thoroughly enjoyable culturalhistory of DMT. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Mystery School in Hyperspace is remarkable in its deft interweaving ofneurochemistry, countercultural thought, spirituality, and the arts. Inyears to come, anyone with a serious interest in the socio-culturalsignificance of induced altered states will have read this book."
-- Christopher Partridge, professor of religious studies, Lancaster University, UK