High culture : drugs, mysticism, and the pursuit of transcendence in the modern world / Christopher Partridge.
"History is littered with evidence of humanity's fascination with drugs and the pursuit of altered states. From early Romanticism to late-nineteenth-century occultism and from fin de siècle Paris to contemporary psychedelic shamanism, psychoactive substances have playedcatalyzing people. Y...
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| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2018]
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Table of Contents:
- Introduction
- 1. Technologies of transcendence. Technologies of the self ; Psychedelic gnosis and the transcendence of ordinary consciousness ; Perennialism and the experience of oneness ; Shamanism and ekstasis ; Concluding analysis : the drug problem?
- 2. Opium dreams. Opium in Britain in the early nineteenth century : some background notes ; The art of dreaming ; The English opium-eater ; Opium and the Orient : fear and fascination ; Concluding comments
- 3. Anesthetic revelation. A ladder to the heaven of heavens ; Syntax, surgery, and celestial visions ; Benjamin Blood's anesthetic revelation ; Anesthesia and the Society for Psychical Research ; Concluding comments
- 4. Hashishdom. Cannabis and clinical research in the nineteenth century ; The old man of the mountain and the assassins ; Artificial paradises ; The American hashish-eater ; Concluding comments
- 5. Occultism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mesmerism, hashish, and somnambulism ; Dowameskh, the Orient, and neoplatonic esotericism ; Abstinence and ambivalence ; Theosophical reflection ; Discourses of decadence ; W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, drugs, and fin de siècle occultism ; The highs and lows of a drug fiend ; A note on drugs and post-Crowleyan thelemic thought ; Concluding comments
- 6. The antipodes of the mind. Psychedelic research : some background notes ; A mystic and a scientist ; Mysticism, sacred, and profane ; Concluding comments
- 7. Revolution in the head. Adventures in the chemistry of consciousness ; A religious set and setting ; Notes on the counterculture ; Millbrook and psychedelic religion ; The neo-American church ; The psychedelic sacrament ; Turning on and turning East ; Concluding comments
- 8. Psychedelic shamanism. Archaic techniques of ecstasy ; The long trip and the origin of religion ; The sorcerer's apprentice? ; Alien dreamtime ; Concluding comments.