Audio: Pop Apocalypse: Episode Seven: Psychedelics, California, and the Cultures of Consciousness - A Talk with Erik Davis

MATT DILLON: Greetings, listeners, and welcome to the Pop Apocalypse. I'm your host, Matt Dillon. And our guest today is the author, scholar, and longtime culture critic, Erik Davis. If any of you have never had the pleasure of hearing Erik, you are in for a treat. This is also going to be the longest interview we have yet, so I want to keep these opening remarks as brief as possible.

But it's important to note, if you're listening to this on or before April 30, you might want to attend the launch event for Erik's newest book, Blotter-- The Untold Story of an Acid Medium. We're holding it here at the Center for the Study of World Religions from 5:30 to 7:00 PM on Tuesday, the 30th. I'll drop the link in the show notes.

Now, as you'll hear from this interview, Erik is, among many talents, a world-class talker. So you don't want to miss a chance to see him live and answer questions on the fly. Speaking of talents, to my mind, Erik is one of the best nonfiction writers going not just in academia, but anywhere. He got his start writing culture criticism for places like The Village Voice, and then the celebrated gnosis in the '90s. His first book, TechGnosis, hit the shelves in 1998 and has somehow managed to stay in print ever since.

Now, as many of us are aware, that's difficult to do. Writing any book, but especially so when you're writing about technology that becomes outdated so quickly. So this is over 25 years ago. But Erik's book does more than trace the magical and mythical imaginations that made such technology possible. It destabilizes the distinction between magic, myth, and technology, and then it puts the reader in a place where we can feel the world is weirder, more mysterious, and sort of crackling with potential than we would have supposed.

That's an effect you might expect from a great poet or maybe a novelist. But for an academic and a culture writer, to pull that off is just super uncommon. Part of that comes from talent. Erik is a dazzling writer, to be sure, but the other part is that Erik has really digested this highly sophisticated philosophy and theory, like Derrida, Deleuze, Marshall McLuhan, and then made these insights legible to academics and non-academics alike.

So as you'll learn in the interview, Erik and I attended grad school together. As I don't say in the interview, but I want to say here, I learned as much from Erik as I did from any professor throughout my PhD. And I hope everyone else dives into everything that he has available online because it will alter the way you see things. So he has a wealth of material out there, 10 years worth of his podcast, Expanding Mind. Those episodes are up on his website, techgnosis.com, as are hundreds of written pieces that he's published far and wide.

There's also loads of talks or other podcasts, not this one, that he has given over the years. And of course, his books up to and including Blotter, which will be out very soon. So please go to his website and learn all you can and consume as much as you're able. But to get you started, here's our nearly two-hour interview with Erik Davis. Enjoy.

MATT DILLON: All right. So it is our wonderful honor to have on the show today, Erik Davis, author, independent scholar, wizard. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming.

ERIK DAVIS: Thanks, Matt. It's good to hang out with you again in a fun context.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, it's good. So I usually start each show asking more or less the same question. Some iteration of what relationship did you have to religion growing up, but you've written quite a bit about how you were raised outside of religion. So let me ask it a somewhat different way. How was being raised outside religion or without religion, how has that given you a different set of eyes while studying it from those of us very much raised within one?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, that's a great question. I've thought about that a lot. As you said, I have written about growing up. And I was not completely without religion, although my father was definitely an atheist. My mom was from-- she was raised Catholic and so had some of that lingering framework, although we were not really-- we did Christmas and there was a little bit of Jesus stuff in the house and my aunt was religious and things like that.

So it was not completely, completely heathen, but I always thought it was significant in my personal mythology that I was not baptized. And so I've kind of worn that somewhat proudly in a kind of funny way. But to the question, the way that I have come to think about it is that I have been drawn to the fantastic, the otherworldly, the strange throughout my life as a kind of imaginable escape and fascination.

And that for me, especially in my teens when I was already a voracious reader and an explorer, to some degree, of subcultures and worldviews that surrounded me-- and this is late '70s, early '80s Southern California, so it's very much a kind of post tail end of the counterculture kind of situation where the flea markets are full of hippies who went to India. The bookstores are filled with used paperbacks of Carlos Castaneda.

And it's just it's sort of everywhere that for me, religion became a dimension of fantasy literature. It's like, why just stop with Conan, and Lovecraft, and the Earthsea trilogy when you can go into Hindu mysticism, and ceremonial magic, and zen literature. It was sort of like an extension of the same fascination with the other worldly rather than a specifically religious quest or a specifically spiritual quest.

Similarly, my first stumblings in meditation or really trance work or mantra or singing Kirtan or all of that stuff, it was kind of an extension of drugs in the sense of like, well, clearly, there's something trippy going on here and we can focus our energies in this direction and make something more unusual, and fantastical, and lovely, and sometimes scary happen. And so it was like from the pop side rather than from the religious or spiritual side. And I just kept doing it. And then, of course, my feelings about all of these things changed and complexified over time.

But where that has, I think, left me in really good stead with both subcultures and with my fascination with other religions, and particularly with religious travel, both literally traveling to other countries and honing in on their religious sites, but also just approaching the kind of imaginal topography of religion as a traveler, is that my basic attitude is you go into the situation as if you are taking a drug in the sense that, well, you took the drug, go with it, don't worry about it. You'll come down the day after.

So don't go into the church or the sepulcher or the temple with a critical attitude. Go into it like, let's go. Like what's going to happen? Aesthetic experience, synchronicity, fascination, repulsion, love. I don't know. Let's go. Let's dive in. And then knowing that there's a morning after. We come out the other side and you're like, OK, what was that? Did that actually do anything? What do I do with what happened? Is this something I need to take on, engage more deeply?

And so that kind of attitude has really been helpful in my life and has made it very rich as well as fueling, I think, a lot of my approach to not just, again, not just religion but also subculture. And has given me a real taste for a kind of pluralism that is not necessarily in style anymore. But again, I think informs not just my writing as somebody who's sort of a cultural commentator or analyst of religion and spirituality, but also as a seeker or somebody who's a participant, observer in the things that I'm drawn towards.

MATT DILLON: Wonderful. Speaking of your teenage years reminded me of the piece of yours that I think I've shared the most over the years, is your Teenage Head: Confessions of a High School Stoner. It just seems to grab a lot of different people. But I love how it charts the ways in which the dynamic between the sacred and profane for teenagers and the way in which we will, being heads, end up slipping into these cracks.

We find these unindustrialized little forests and we go in there and it becomes sort of enchanted and mythic. And you can see how that sort of teenage head experience becomes a kind of initiation into this weird exploratory way in which you've dealt with religion going forward. So you have these teenage experiences, then you're off to Yale. So teenage head off to Yale. When you be-- as far as I know, you were an English major, right?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. And did you do that because you were already writing, you were planning on being a writer and you figured, hey, let's--

ERIK DAVIS: OK. Yeah.

MATT DILLON: Yeah.

ERIK DAVIS: No, I mean, I was-- I got into a freshman poetry seminar with Charles Berger, who was a scholar of romanticism, and particularly Wallace Stevens, who was very big at Yale in those years. It was a very important poet to me, still the most important 20th century poet to me, if I had to choose one. And so that kind of gave me an immersion in the most delicious practice of close reading. And close reading to me is the pinnacle of scholarly performance and practice.

To me, there is nothing as delicious as 10 people gathered around a table going through really minutely a particular text led by a professor or teacher who or grad student in my own experience, who knows the text intimately and can provide all manner of commentary and contextualization, but is primarily devoted to managing, and curating, and stimulating a real conversation.

For me, that's just-- it doesn't get better than that. And it's a dying art. I would have to say that while I got a lot out of our PhD program, I was absolutely shocked and terribly disappointed that with a few exceptions that were quite memorable, few of the professors really practiced that, whether they were reading methodological texts or primary sources.

So that kind of inculcated me to the deliciousness of that practice. And that's probably what kept me from-- at Yale at the time, there was also a literature major, which was separate from the English major, and the literature major was theory. And I did a lot of that, too. And I was very attracted to theory, like right off the bat. One of the most initiatory experiences for me was I believe I was a freshman year and Derrida was in town. And there was a David Krell-led seminar on Heidegger's Nietzsche books.

And I went to this thing and it was like-- there weren't that many students there. It was a couple dozen, 15 people or whatever. And it was so-- what I could say now is kind of like portentous and it had that quality like of esotericism, really. It was kind of an esoteric language. It was highbrow and arcane. There was some sort of unspoken right next to the spoken, something I have always appreciated about deconstruction. And I still think that it is a very important angle in towards the mystery because of the way it both speaks and does not speak.

And here we were dealing with these metaphysical matters, questions of the eternal return, which have always obsessed me. And it was really initiatory and they're like, this theory stuff is kind of the closest thing that I'm going to find in the contemporary intellectual environment to esotericism. So I always approached theory as a psychedelic esotericist. So I would write about magic or Castaneda or I love Deleuze because even though it's a very different spirit and in some ways a contradictory one to deconstruction, it allowed for this kind of richness, almost a sort of psychedelic density to things.

So for me, theory kind of saved the way in which I was already a kind of esoteric or psychedelic or spiritual thinker, even though it was still highly skeptical and not effectively be very secular in its modalities for the most part. All that said, it still wasn't as much fun as reading poetry. And so I loved Blake. I loved the romantics. I loved Stevens. I did seminar or a private like a personal course on Gravity's Rainbow. And so I just love literature. So I was able to do both of those things. And I took a lot of philosophy classes, too. So that was the shape.

Now, you asked about where my writing came from. That's actually a different story. I've always liked writing even scholarly material. And I find writings from-- there's a story I wrote when I think I was nine years old and I read it. And it's my voice. I'm like, yeah, I'm already that guy. It's funny in a certain way, has a certain sensitivity to street language and grittiness. It's playful, but it has some--

Anyway, so it's like, oh, yeah, in a way, there's always been this kind of voice there that was already in my high school papers and definitely in some of my college papers, which were really the kind of thing I would continue to do as an essayist and a writer going forward.

But the real jazz for me was writing about rock music in a school paper called Nadine. And Nadine was founded by and then perpetuated by a series of editors, and fans, and freaks, many of whom went on to have careers in rock criticism or culture writing in general, mostly in New York City. And for me, that zone was a place where my ID could come out. My pop culture, suburban Southern California, over-the-top druggie voice had a home.

That was almost kind of like an escape from the constraints and the posturing of learning academic moves and moving in a very, very intellectual environment at Yale like the people I knew. My close friends were really funny folks, but they were super smart. And the world we were moving in was very sophisticated in terms of its references. And I had to level up a lot as coming from my background to find out how I could be in this environment. It was actually interesting as an already psychedelicized person showing up there.

I had a couple close friends who were sort of on that tip, but mostly not. They were mostly just-- they had other interests and they were extremely funny and they were my friends. There was one group on campus that were super psychedelic. They were deadheads, but they were private school deadheads. So they had gone to prep schools. And there's a whole prep school, Park Avenue deadhead circuit within the larger deadhead ecology. It's very normal for there to be sort of prep school, upper-class deadheads, which I already knew about.

But when I hung out with them, I just could not. It was just not my flavor because I had grown up in a very suburban, free for all of just-- I knew the party-- people I partied with were not going to prep schools. They were not going to university. So there was a kind of hermeticism and insularity that I found repulsive. And so I ended up just hanging out with people who liked to drink, and make jokes, and be smart, and it was much more of an open situation than the intensity of that.

So yeah, so that's kind of-- it was writing for Nadine and writing about rock music that gave me a kind of zap. And in those years, in the mid 1980s was really the first wave of cultural studies where it was still radical to say, no, no, no, no. Madonna is important. It's worth it to think about these cultural texts that are coming from popular music or also the underground and-- but because it was new and fresh and because some of the discourse was not-- a lot of it was not managed by the university. There was a freedom to it as well so that it became a very freeing thing to write about pop music.

But to do it in a smart way, it had an edge. It was kind of radical at the time and it would take another decade for that style of thing to become more organized and predictable and brought into the academia, which is just what happens. It's the same thing with esotericism and psychedelics in our generation.

I mean, you're younger than me, but it's the same from our intellectual generation coming through it. We were watching the same thing. What was radical 15 years ago is banal now. It's like you're writing about psychedelic. What? OK, go, go, go for it, kid. But for us, that was a no go zone. That was a career killer.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, it was. I mean, I remember-- and we've talked about this offline, talking to our mutual advisor, Jeff Kripal, about, hey, I would like to present a paper on Terence McKenna, and he's like, absolutely not. All right. He's great. He's wonderful. He's fabulous. He's a brilliant writer. But don't. If you are aiming to eventually get inside within the academic circles, you just can't do that. And yeah, things couldn't have changed more. And that was less than 10 years ago, having that same conversation. Like it's just-- the turnover is crazy.

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah.

MATT DILLON: So all this talk on writing rock criticism leads into your post-college career. And so you were a rock critic, you were a culture critic, you were in New York. And when I was going back and looking through and reading your old pieces, it's like you were one at all of the things that seem to matter. It's like, here's burning man, here's the birth of Goa trance, here's rave culture. You're hanging out with chaos magicians that we can go down the line.

But then that made me ask a different question, which is that, man, the '90s were really weird, right? But also, I think, important in ways that haven't been unpacked. So what is it for you who had very much front row seat to all of this, what do you think it was that made the '90s so rich in a culture in ways that we haven't really seen the same richness since?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah. There's a lot to say there. I'm redoing my website, which holds I mean, there's 700 items on my website. I've tended to put up almost everything I've published, although there's a lot of stuff from that era that I haven't put on the site. And so I've been going through my clips as I turn my site even more into a transtemporal archive of all these things that I've been interested in for 35 years now.

And so I've been going through a lot of it and really thinking again about the '90s and trying to read my own writing to find things that I wasn't aware of at the time. And for me, it's really particularly the early '90s where the magic of the decade lies, partly because by the end-- the advance of the first internet bubble and the kind of mutations of the internet in the late '90s are already closing down opportunities as well as making new ones, although the real shift doesn't really happen until the early to mid 2000s when it just starts being less interesting. And now, of course, it's actively the opposite of interesting.

MATT DILLON: We're all going analog now. But, yeah.

ERIK DAVIS: So yeah, it was a beautiful transition period in a lot of ways. And I think it's like there's a magic that's opened up in these transition periods when new technologies or ideas about technology or subcultures and they all kind of open up. And it's hard to find a particular line in. But one of the things that has been coming up for me is the attitude of what was known at the time as the slacker and trying to understand how the slacker related to the current that came before.

So one way of thinking about it is that there's some kind of fascinating, rich, propulsive subcultural current that runs through from the hippie, beat hippie zone through the crazy '70s and then into the very subcultural '80s when things were really kind of hidden in a way. They were like people went underground. There was little lines of punk rock and hardcore, and there were these magical subcultures, and there were extremist subcultures, and industrial music, and proto Burning Man craziness.

And then in the late '80s, partly through zine culture and partly through shifts in the media, things became more visible and more networked. And that networking quality really takes off in the '90s. So you have this beautiful, sweet spot where there is networking and it's both analog through zines and whatever, but it's moving online. But it maintains a lot of that embeddedness and material richness of the analog. And it's as if all these different currents are now being networked and crossed.

So it was a time of, from my experience and my perception, of a remarkable exuberant pluralism. So for me, the rise of the re-injection of psychedelia through rave and ambient culture chill out music was not separate from the exuberant cultural cannibalization and collaging of hip hop and particularly, the idea of remixing.

The notion of the mix start and gains extraordinary power and so it's as if everything is pulled apart, and echoed, and twisted, and rewoven in a way that was really exuberant and allowed for interchanges across lines that we would now see as very rigidly defined by essences. What's going on over here is not related to what's going on over here. There's more of a sense again, in a way, of reverting to more clear essences around things. The way that I perceive it.

So at that time, I think there was a real sense of possibility. And a lot of it for me was actually hip hop, even though I didn't write about hip hop that much or very much. It was really influential in terms of-- not so much in terms of the voice of the street or black voices and perspectives, although that was incredibly exhilarating and super fun to be able to like-- especially living in New York City, where it's like local culture, where when Public Enemy record comes out, it's like Bob Dylan coming out. It's like it's directly responding to a situation you're actually living in.

But it was just as much about remixing and about how did EPMD build their tracks, how did De La Soul build different tracks with different sources, how did the Beastie Boys use sampling to create these kinds of Glass Bead Games, these audio Glass Bead Games. And so there was a certain period of time when the rights management had not caught up with the technology. So there was this beautiful early '90s bloom of sampling culture, which wasn't just in hip hop, it's in Negativland, it's all over the place. But it's focused on hip hop.

And it was so resonant of the sense of a kind of like, Glass Bead Game, Art of Memory, Theater Palace echoing transtemporal psychedelic interconnection between all of these sort of elements, the way you could build a track out of little bits of other tracks that if you knew what they were, had extra meaning, you know? So, in PE's "Fight The Power", there's a little sample from "I shot the Sheriff." So you hear the sample, the audio sample and it works musically. But then if you know yeah, that's "I shot the Sheriff", oh, you know it's a joke. It's a layer.

So there's a layered density to what's happening just in cultural psychic space that for someone like me, who's total culture vulture at that point and inspired already by this sense of a theater of memory or of a cyberspace of information, that's resonating and interconnecting like a glass bead game. It was very, very powerful. And I was playing like glass bead games through the pre-world wide web internet on various Listservs where we were actually using the information space to hop around and play games through gesture, and resonance, and allegory, and all this kind of material.

So it was just a very magical time, which in retrospect you could see as either naive or as a sort of feature of early media adoption when there's a lot of subcultural space that can be exploited or as a possible parallel world that we just weren't able to continue to go down. There's a lot of ways to talk about it, but it was certainly a very exhilarating time. And it was a great time to be a writer because there was still an economy of freelance cultural criticism that I could survive on in New York City.

And I also was able to, in a way, writing-- I mostly wrote for The Village Voice and identified with writing for The Village Voice, which was still a very dynamic place to write in those days and put a lot of attention on the voice, on people having voices, having singular ways of writing. So I was encouraged to develop my singular style and voice. But also, I found-- and this has been true throughout my career, is that while I am not an explicitly political writer for the most part, and I don't directly engage a lot of issues around race or gender or class or whatever, although it's there if you look for it.

I've always lived right in that milieu. But it's like my identity if you want to talk about identity politics is like weirdness, being a weirdo. And what is that? Nerd culture, drug culture, these things that in the '90s are still edgy and underground and not cool. Nerd culture is not cool in the early 1990s. People right now in our age of Marvel universe or whatever, it's like nerd is totally triumphant, which has had some really deleterious effects on culture.

I'm definitely an underdog guy. I think that almost everything is better when it's the underdog. And so weirdness was underdog then and that was kind of an almost an identity or a sympathy that I had with various parts of the culture, including things that were not officially culture, stuff that was public access TV or Star Trek fanzines or things that were still outside of the hypermediation that we have now, where everything that's online is potentially pop or potentially a market or where there's been this kind of leveling. And there, in those years, there was still a way of defining a margin and that created these other kinds of dynamics that were really fun to ride.

MATT DILLON: By speaking to your voice and by speaking to the '90s and by speaking to the optimism, and the blending, and everything around this that sort of naturally leads us into TechGnosis So I'm pretty sure most of the people who are listening here know what TechGnosis is, but just in case, could you give a little snippet of what was TechGnosis about and what drew you to write it?

ERIK DAVIS: Sure, sure. Well, back to already at Yale, I had started to intellectually weave together cyber criticism, particularly Baudrillard, and the idea of the simulation with a fascination with the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, with an interest in actual Gnosticism, something that was really important at Yale principally through Harold Bloom, who spoke often about Gnosticism in a kind of literary context. But it created a space to actually go, hey, what are these things. And start to read actual gnostic texts.

So I already had all those elements coming out of school. And so when I was trawling the world of culture, I was always almost collecting little incidents, anecdotes, stories, texts, records, films where there was some kind of conjunction, a juxtaposition, a sort of almost a collaging of spiritual, technological and sometimes visionary or esoteric material. And that was just-- sometimes, I'd write about that stuff or I'd write about it from that perspective.

And there are elements in TechGnosis that go back to the very early '90s, and it made me interested right off the bat in virtual reality, and the internet, and diving through the visionary dimensions of the internet, and thinking about it as a visionary space, and tracking new psychedelia and its relationship with electronic music. So all that stuff was kind of already in play. And what it led to was this book that came out in 19-- oh, god, I'm going to forget. '98? '97? '98.

And TechGnosis which I got a decent advance for, which is nice because it was like, wow, technology and spirituality, that's so cool. Let's give the guy some money. But it ended up being a lot more arcane and dense than I think what they had expected or wanted because in a lot of ways, it was the graduate thesis, the dissertation that I didn't write by choosing not to go to graduate school, which was one of the biggest decisions in my life and definitely the correct one. I'm glad I went when I was an older person.

So it has that density and that intellectual ambition and that sense of wrestling with other figures. I mean, it was extremely difficult to write, but it basically tracks all these different domains where there's some kind of conjunction between the spiritual imagination, religion, esotericism and technology, and particularly media technology, which is a privileged role to play. So it's very McLuhanesque in a way. It is a ultimately a media theory or media criticism, but it's just one where I'm so fascinated with these subcultural, and esoteric, and psychedelic zones that weren't really on the table as legitimate material for a scholar. But because I'm not a scholar, I can just do what I want.

So I can write about Heaven's Gate and Star Trek and whatever I want to do to find these little signs. And in a way, it has a kind of apocalyptic energy. I mean, that was something about my experience of the '90s, was that while there was some utopianism and definitely a sense of creative possibility around new technologies early on, I mean, I read through my writing, there is a sense of this incipient dread of what's coming, and part of it is the specific millennialism of being the last decade of the century.

And some of it is more just a sense of what was coming, which is what we're in, which kind of sucks. So it was a sense of like, oh, this might not go very well and like riding a wave, you know? McKenna was very articulate about this, where he just talked about that image of the future being a sort of tractor beam that's sucking historical forces and developments towards this point of ultimate novelty. And he had a real positive spin on it but I think it's almost more of that sense of being sucked forward into an unthinkable future that was very much part of the vibe of the '90s and partly gave it a fun flavor.

But also, in my experience, also had a current of dread in it, which was very much articulated in TechGnosis And it's one of the reasons that the book is still in print and was just translated this year into Spanish and Italian. It was a retranslation into Italian. And I'm like, why? How could you write a book about technology that's 25 years old that still works? And I'm like, I don't-- well, I was prophetic in some ways, or I had a good imagination so I could see the way that all these irrational currents were going to become more and more central.

But I think I also had a balance of sensitivity to the creative possibilities of the technology mixed with dread, suspicion, and even outright paranoia, where I was sensitive to the way that paranoia and conspiracy were part of the picture. So-- because I had that almost psychological feature of there's always been some dread in my view of the world and my sense of spirituality. And I'm definitely what James would call a sick soul.

But that gave me a way of seeing something deeper and more profound and more troubling that makes the text alive and resonant today in a way that a more happy, fluffy version would just be--

MATT DILLON: Forgotten.

ERIK DAVIS: Forgotten.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. So is that-- follow up on that, there's been a techgnosis re-boom, not just with the translation but didn't it end up being taken up as part of a large language learning model for AI? And you started doing podcasts and shows on it. So was it that when people invited you on, was it about the conspiracy side and basically connecting it to Q or where did the questions come in that made that resurface for them?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, that's-- I mean, I did more of the conspiracy conversations around High Weirdness, which came out in 2019 and that because I wrote about conspiracy theory more densely, particularly through Robert Anton Wilson's approach, that ended up being very, very resonant with all of the emergence of QAnon and the kind of very paranoid early 2020s.

So I think-- so I'm not actually entirely sure exactly what people are most excitedly tuning into in TechGnosis. I think part of it is just a permission to go ahead and think esoterically in a technological context and whether that means your Wiccan TikTok feed is like this, of central importance or how people navigate esotericism in the contemporary media environment. I think there's a lot of dimensions to it.

But I think it's the sense that it gives, again, permission or a way of thinking about the role of the esoteric and the visionary and the religious even in a Christian sense of how those things are actually of vital importance as we navigate the future, which is obviously partly involves technology and even its explicitly apocalyptic dimension.

MATT DILLON: That makes sense. And I also just want to point out, in terms of academic writing, you're one of the best going out there. But the thing about going back and reading TechGnosis is that, that is an inspired work, right. I go back into it and there's this multidimensional harmony that seems to be singing through the prose. I can't quite put it into words. But I was interested to hear you say that it was hard to write because it's almost like when you read something like that, you think, oh, that just must have been an energy coursing out of Erik's fingers as he was doing it. But that's interesting that it was very crafted in order to get to that point.

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, I would say I do think of that as being aware of the possibility of megalomaniacal attitudes here, that I was inspired. When I look at it in retrospect, it's more I don't think I wrote that than other things that I've done. And I felt like whatever. The lucky stars chose me to do this at that point. But it was very difficult to actually get the words on the page and to have it have that liveliness.

I mean, it's true of writing in general. I don't find writing particularly fun. And it doesn't take me a long time. But I'm not a quick writer because it takes a long time to get the prose to that level where it sings. Not all the time, but often. And in this one, particularly because I was wrestling with materialism and skepticism like I was-- that was what made it really difficult, is that I was wrestling with these voices that are going to say, no, no, no, you can't take this stuff seriously. Or if you are going to write about it, you have to do it in a completely materialist, critical way.

And I didn't have to because I wasn't in school and I wasn't going to get busted at a conference for not toeing the line. But in my head, I still had to do that because I respect all of those methods. Like the way that Kripal talks about it, not only respect, I embrace and celebrate historical criticism and ideological critique. Even Marxist analysis of power and economy as ways of distributing-- of ideology in general. And yet at the same time, I've always been pulled beyond the kind of materialist limits of that.

And so I find myself often at this point between enchantment and disenchantment, that at this point in my life, I'm very comfortable with and see as a source of energy, a kind of driving tantric polarity that allows me to feel comfortable not having a specific ground or point of view theoretically or intellectually. But when I was younger, was very painful. Am I full of shit? Like maybe I'm-- why am I fighting-- she just give in to the thing or reject it entirely and just go rogue or whatever it was. So it was quite challenging to do. And I think part of the-- that's what still gives it a quality of animation.

MATT DILLON: So in TechGnosis, it's very expansive, right. You go back to ancient Egypt and tie it in and ancient Gnostics and such, but it's really it finds its grounding in California. And then in the 2000s, you wrote the essays for that wonderful book with Michael Beaumont or pardon me, Michael Rauner, The Visionary State. And so Michael Rauner features various photographs of spiritual spaces. You write the essays for it.

And following that and going forward, California starts to become more, and more, and more a part of your work. So I mean, obviously, you're from there. You've set roots there. That's part of it. But what is it about California as like a space, as an idea or as a metaphysical possibility that speaks to you so much that you're really trying to capture it in a lot of different ways?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it took me a while to even see that in my head. The Visionary State, written 10 years later than TechGnosis, was the first thing that I did that was explicitly about California. But then I realized that it's just always been there, that it was my experience growing up, that it was my fascination with Philip K. Dick, a Californian writer, that TechGnosis, while it went all over the world, it really ended up being in-- it's like I'm a sort of-- again, I have this profoundly ambivalent relationship to California where there's been a lot of thinking about the future of consciousness, about new religious movements, about new technologies, about new media.

And a lot of it is fatuous and a lot of it is superficial. And increasingly over time, as it became clearer and clearer that elements of California were going to and have defined our dystopia that these features had, it was time to call them up for critique. In the mid 1990s, already Richard Barbrook was talking about the California ideology, which was this fusion of libertarian hippie ideas and raw capitalism that was creating a certain culture, which is a perfectly legitimate analysis for what was peculiar about California techno culture and even in industrial development, but certainly around new technologies.

Something that, again, I could kind of resonate with the critical element of it. But at the same time, just because of my subjectivity, I have a fondness and a fascination and a love that's based on my actual experience of growing up here. So my fascination with California is also like it is about trying to understand where I've come from and what shaped me when I was growing up, what shaped my family, which goes back in California to the mid 19th century in good and bad ways that are difficult and fascinating.

So I started to see the way all the stuff I was doing was really kind of writing from that perspective. Even my book about Led Zeppelin is very much like a Californians book about Led Zeppelin. And California had played a particular role in their own mythology, and songcraft, and hedonistic excess. And so, yeah. So it became increasingly clear that in a way, that's what I was doing, was kind of narrating this subcultural, spiritual, psychedelic zone within a larger context that also fascinates me. And it's really served as a kind way of organizing the fact that I'm just interested in too many things.

I'm just one of those people who-- I'm no polymath. I wish I was a real polymath, but I am like polymathic in my interests of science and technology, and media art, and surfing, and macrame, and food culture, and drugs, and media, and comic books, and all this crazy stuff. And so by being a California-ist, I can filter things so that yeah, OK, like, I'm into the pulp crime novels. I'm going to stick with Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Like, that's good enough for me. I can-- or Ross MacDonald or film noir because it's California.

So California is also like a filter against the incoming fascinations of the world. And so it lets me tune into elements of these larger stories that are particularly relevant for developing a richer and richer map of what California is. And I'm a California exceptionalist. I believe that in some ways it's a singular civilization. I mean, a very multiplicitous, singular civilization, but that it can be understood just as well outside the context or alongside the context of the larger history of the United States as just being another feature of the United States.

And I think it's a prophetic place and not a particularly good way in a lot of ways, but that it both-- not just that it saw the future, but that it engineered the future and in so doing, brought along with it a lot of its horrible paradoxes and compromises, and delusions, and inability to integrate its own crimes. And that sense of the complexity and the kind of even bloodiness of the story is increasingly complexifies my vision, which was never super romantic.

But I always also have an appreciation for the romance of the place and how it has told its own story in a romantic voice or in a cosmic voice, as well as all of the contradictions, and all of the suffering, and tragedies that the place has carried forward, including extraordinary racism, including a particularly pernicious and genocidal relationship to the native populations.

I mean, there's some very, very dark aspects of the story that I-- I think in keeping with a lot of us at this time in history, I can't put in a box anymore. It's just part of the picture in a way and has made my own views more complex and troubled over the years. And yet I still see a singularity there that's still not always that well articulated.

And I'll think I'll say one more thing. One of the categories that I've increasingly seen is like, what-- when I was doing The Visionary State, I was like, what draws all this together? What is a way of talking-- if we're just talking about, let's say, alternative spirituality and religion in California, which has to also include some very conservative and reactionary elements. Because even in that world, California led the way like we had some particularly pernicious racist Christian nationalists, particularly pernicious conservative Catholic, really hard core reactionaries for good reasons.

Tucker Carlson comes from San Francisco. OK, what's going on there? That's part of the story. But when I was thinking about it, I've never really settled. There's too many dimensions of it. Nature mysticism, altered states, eclecticism. There's so many elements of it. But one that has come to be really important to me is the idea of the cosmic, the cosmic being a location, a relationship to the larger cosmos that is simultaneously secular and scientific and let's call it mystical. Let's call it, I guess, ultimately kind of religious and that sort of fuses and confuses those modes.

And the cosmic takes in everything from the aerospace industry, which was as important in California's history as the much more famous Hollywood or Silicon Valley. Those are the three pivots of California's contribution to industrial capitalism and whatever. And includes the amazing story of Jack Parsons, this occultist, who was working for JPL. I mean, like this crazy-- you can't-- if I just told you that story about Jack Parsons and how he related to the emergence of rocketry and the work of Aleister Crowley, you wouldn't believe it. It'd be like, come on, that's not real. That can't actually happen. But it did.

So that's a whole side of it, but also just a quest to come up with a positive principle that's able to suffer the collapse of humanism without just collapsing into mere materialism. And the cosmic then becomes this point of openness, of exploration that deals with, I think, one of the major themes of the spiritual transmutation that is so magnified in California, which is the realization that the human as such is not enough to make the transition. That there's some kind of beyond humanism or post-humanism or collapse of the subject, collapse of the ordinary personality that is spoken to from alternative mysticism, from Eastern traditions, from psychedelia, from even scientific models of human subjectivity, et cetera, et cetera.

But if that's not going to be a bummer, it's got to be reframed and refashioned in a different key. And a lot of the things you see being gestured towards are some kind of cosmic subjectivity, whether it's in new-age music or it's in a popular culture or dark star or whatever. There's this gesture towards the cosmic as a space of possibility that probably ultimately fails, but is one way that I've come to think about California. And it's both the developments of its science and technology and its cultural dynamics.

MATT DILLON: What was really interesting about following that thread for me is, especially as it started to land with the cosmic, and the post-human, and the ways in which humanism is not enough to be able to take on all of these different possibilities, that was a way of encapsulating a lot of the conversations that we had when we were both at Rice. And you were very much the most active person in bringing post-human philosophy to our various seminars and classes and whatnot. And I want to get into High Weirdness because that seems to be where all that crystallize first.

And if this question doesn't work, I can just cut it. But I'm very curious. So with Expanding Mind and then with all your cultural criticism, you explored these cultures of consciousness, right. And you have this ethnographer's eye that's very smart, that's able to go inside of it as a sort of participant, but also able to come back.

To that end, how did you take the PhD experience and more specifically, the academic study of religion? Because for those of us who basically invested our whole lives in it, it's kind of becomes the water that we swim in. But you've been able to dive in and out. So how did you analyze, basically, this academic study or Rice, whatever you want to do with it as a culture of consciousness?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, that's a fascinating question. I had regularly, periodically in my life, just wanted to go back and get a PhD. And then when I get to the actual process of applying, it was too much like cold calling. And I just said, I just can't deal with it. And so when I met Jeff, he invited me. And there was an invitation. And I have to say that one of the secret keys of my life is that I have made many decisions based on invitation.

There's been a door open, a call, a hint dropped, like go, follow the invitations as a way of rather than my idea about what I want. Like, let's say maybe the universe is showing you a little bit through some personal connection and through some specific invitation. Check this out. Why don't you come with me? Try this out.

So when Jeff invited me, so Jeff sees me as part of a particular way of approaching these things, and that really made a lot of difference to me. I did apply to other places, particularly Santa Barbara, but I'm really glad that I wound up at Rice because of the freedom that it gave me. And its particular kind of culture of going through this stuff. And frankly, also that it enabled me to get out of California for a short time. That was really, at that point in my life, really important to get some distance.

And so the actual experience of it was really fascinating. As mentioned, I was somewhat overwhelmed with the overall class work because I had fantasized about intimate seminars of close reading, primary texts, which only happened a few times. And there was so much emphasis on methodology and learning. And after time, I realized that's what it is to get a PhD in a humanities discipline. And I kind of came to terms with it and was interested enough in that feature.

And then there were other things on a more ethnographic level that interested me. One is the definite fact that unlike other humanities disciplines, people come to religious studies largely because they have some personal, twisted relationship with religion. And so it becomes a way of working out and working through personal experience or upbringing or fascinations. And that is interesting because then you're, in a way, part of the consciousness of the environment. It is the proximity to other people's weird and intense relationships to religion or spiritual experience or both.

And that gives it a kind of not-- again, it's one of those in-between places where there's one foot in the secular and one foot in the whatever you want to call it, otherworldly or beyond or sacred. And that tension, again, between the sacred and the profane that runs throughout my whole work and my whole being is operative on this kind of intellectual level within the individuals that are making up the department. That was very interesting to me.

I also enjoyed the kind of sense of the university being a very temporary but still mildly Utopian place of camaraderie outside of the market. Like there's this sweet spot in doing a dissertation where in a way, everything after that is rougher, more worldly, more real world, more hassle, more hustle. And it just never stops, particularly as the humanities collapse or are crushed or fall apart based on their own internal contradictions, however you want to articulate it.

So there was a sweet spot there that I enjoyed as a 40-year-old in a way that I would not have been able to enjoy as a 21-year-old if I had gone after university. And so I learned as much from random drunken, stoned conversations with my fellow graduate students as I did from the coursework. And so that was interesting to me. I don't know what else. Is there another question that's sort of--

MATT DILLON: No, no, no. I just wanted to hear you unpack that. But I did want to flag because a number of the listeners, just based on emails and such, that we get our grad students and I want to really flag that point that you ended with, which is that when you're in a graduate school or a PhD program with your colleagues, your cohort, your friends, and those sort of conversations flesh out the whole of your education in a way that being in seminars just does not. So that's something really important to flag, just that experience.

ERIK DAVIS: That's really important. I mean, I'll underscore it by saying that I've also been a spiritual seeker and I've had teachers and have worked with different traditions, ceremonial magic, zen, a little bit of Christianity. I've gone through that stuff as well but I still come away with the idea that the real deal, the most important relationships are more or less horizontal peer-to-peer relationships with, let's call them spiritual friends. And that involves intellectual friends.

So for me, that is the primary. That's what I like about close reading classes, because the good ones, even if the professor is a genius, he or she gets down at the level of where everybody at the table is. And it's about this networked peer-to-peer conversation, which is really my ideal of spiritual connection with people of the social form of this.

And so the informal spaces around intellectual production are so much more interesting than the formal ones. And that part of graduate student life is very delightful because there is space and time to some degree within which you can have these more informal peer-to-peer relationships where a lot of the real, really interesting stuff goes down. And-- yeah.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. And it's usually fresh, too, because the "younger people, young kids." Quotation marks. But they're being driven by the concerns that are going to be more contemporary that will be what the field looks like in 10 years. Whereas you're sort of being passed on something secondhand already.

Anyway, so while you're in grad school and finishing the PhD, you write the dissertation and then the book, High Weirdness. So I mean, it's a very thick book. It's a very good book. But if you could just sort of encapsulate for people who haven't read it before.

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, I'll tell the story of it. So as mentioned, I've been fascinated by the work of Philip K. Dick since I discovered him in 1984. And I wrote my thesis at Yale on Dick, and I was one of the popularizers in the early '90s that sort of turned him into an important figure for our cybercultural freakout. So I wrote a lot of articles, then got into the PKDS Society and things.

And then I had the opportunity in the late 2010s to participate in the preparation and the publication of The Exegesis, which was this private, philosophical, crazy kook diary that Dick kept the last 10 years of his life, roughly. That was this mountain of madness that people had been thinking was this Holy Grail of Phil Dick, visionary material. And it does have that in it, but it has a lot of dreck as well. And so I was part of the process of bringing that into publication.

And so I was able, through that process, supporting the main editors, Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. But I got my hands dirty with the nitty-gritty of this problem, which and again, is the same sacred, profane thing we keep coming up against, although in this case, it's kind of like, was he crazy or was he a visionary or was he just telling science fiction stories on metaphysical levels?

And so I got my hands dirty with the nitty-gritty of those processes. And I'm like, all right, I'm golden. I'm going to just write my dissertation about Philip K. Dick, his religious experience and the texts that he produced from them, both The Exegesis and his late novels that are, most of which are-- all of which, in a way, are inflected with some dimension of this so-called religious experience he had in 1974. Good to go. So that was my whole course through. And then I literally-- I had the whole thing charted out. I was ready to go. And then I was just struck with this dread that I would go crazy if I spent that many years just in Philip K. Dick land.

And so I pulled back and when I pulled back, I started to pay attention to something that I had noticed during my research, which was this strange resonance between his experiences and other experiences that took place in the early 1970s, including the two gentlemen who I ended up spending a lot of time with, Terence McKenna and his brother, Dennis, and Robert Anton Wilson. But there were others, John Lilly, Uri Geller.

I mean, there was this pattern in the early '70s of these experiences of high weirdness that involve the paranormal, science fiction, drugs, psychedelia, new media, synchronicity, fiction. And so I went, whoa, what is that? How do we talk about that? And so the way I approached it, which I must say, I do not think that I fully explored the resonances and how and why they worked because the project became overlong. But the way that I tried to do is that I wanted to set up what was happening in the early '70s.

And the early '70s has gotten so much less attention than the '60s, so much so that people tend to even think of it as just sort of an extension of the '60s, which I totally disagree with. It's something very distinctly shifts in 1970, '71 that sets up what happens afterwards or in any case, you can-- that kind of historiography is only so interesting. But the point being that I wanted to set up the context where these guys were all having their experiences and writing about them.

So it forced me to set up a number of different problematics that were happening around Esslin, and psychology, and new religious movements, and cults, and new technologies, and emergence of surveillance tech. So I really love that work of being able to map a zeitgeist and map it from a particular perspective that hadn't really been addressed in that depth from that angle, certainly.

And then once I did that, I'm kind of setting the stage for these three essentially different stories, and I didn't end up weaving them together as much as I had predicted when I started. But they all continue to resonate. And it allowed me then, again, to do some fresh work that was really fun. I mean, Terence McKenna had not received very much scholarly attention at that point, so I got to lay down my take on a lot of what was going on there, including some nitty-gritty detail.

All of these guys wrote a lot and so that allowed a lot of close reading and burrowing into multiple accounts of the same story. And so there was a lot of rich text to play with as I played with this edge between experience and writing and all of the issues that raises. So I was able to get nitty-gritty with him and with Robert Anton Wilson, who also had next to no scholarship around him at that point, though, he's very important for modern, esoteric, and countercultural, and magical currents as well as libertarian currents. Extremely fascinating, very congenial and problematic guy.

So it was super fun to get nitty-gritty with all that stuff and to follow the symbols and the synchronicities and the textual appropriations as they are being played out in these texts. And then finally getting to do a remix of the religious dimension of Philip K. Dick. He, of course, has had a lot more scholarship around him, but little of it really focused on the religious and mystical questions that are raised by his late work, which actually exists throughout the work.

And so what I tried to do is flip him by saying rather than, oh, let's analyze his writings because he's a writer. It was like, no, no, he's a writer who then becomes an example of this religious moment where all of these things are heterogeneously combined. Psychosis, paranoia, science fiction, drugs, fantasy, God esotericism, pulp media, the surface of the '70s.

And so I kind of turned it inside out, and I was really happy with how that worked out. I'm not convinced that it made that much of an impression on the Phil Dick world because it doesn't have Phil Dick's name on the cover of the book. And it's like, the study of buildings. So if I had done that other project, it would have been much more narrowly focused, but it probably would have made more of a distinct mark on a particular discourse. But I wrote the book that I did, and I'm happy that it's a little bit anomalous in itself.

And I very much wanted the book itself to have a charge or magic to it. So I was really happy that I got to work on the design of the book as well, too, so the cover art, and the illustrations, and the way it's laid out is all very much designed to communicate some of the crackle that animates these other guys' books and to some degree, their experiences.

MATT DILLON: So yeah, it's a beautiful book. Not just the way it's written, but being able to handle it, right. The image on the cover, the drawings within the leaf there. So as a religious studies scholar, well, one who I'm fascinated by all these figures and I'm fascinated by this time. So I think mapping the zeitgeist, super important, but it's also coming from the department. We did a really interesting theory book And you're playing and working with this very high-level philosophy in psychology, exploring all those loops, and there's epistemic slippages that you've been looking at forever.

And so one of the things that I'd be curious to hear you reflect on is focusing on these three white dudes in the early '70s. But I think that the theory that you're putting forth regarding the relationship between experience and writing or experience in fiction is something that could be transported. You could use it to understand historical mystics. So is that something you've thought through in any way? Or how would you make your theoretical paradigm translate to these other historical world?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I remain a McLuhanist in the sense that I put a great deal of significance on the material practices of media and therefore, text. And so writing, practices of writing, and the way in which writing and practices of writing are embedded in a larger media environment is really primary for me. And I have come to understand a little bit more about why that is the case.

And this isn't quite answering your question, but I think it's an interesting thing to talk about, which is before we started recording, we were having a conversation about what happens when scholars begin their argument with the assumption that it's perfectly legitimate to talk about mystical or transrational experience without any sort of qualification. Like you can just start like you read Kripal and you say, all right, I'm good to go. And then you go and you talk about your matter with all of the openness and encouragement that his texts and other texts from other figures have about being able to just directly talk about transrational experiences or the paranormal or whatever it is.

In a way, it's liberating. And in a way, I find something's missing. There's a lack of tension. And to get more gritty on it, I would say that I have always been in some sense-- I don't know how to really phrase it. Like a materialist or at least one where I'm going to underscore the power and importance of material circumstances, historical circumstances and particularly, material media situations as well as the brain and ideas that we have about how bodies operate.

Not to stay limited there, but in a way stay honest and to see what of the other worldly remains after you've insisted on the coherence of an essentially materialist approach. And why did I do this? I'm not sure. Maybe it's not really useful because now you can just go ahead and write about whatever you want to write about.

But for me, I think it has to do with this question of cultures, of consciousness, that there is something in consciousness that eludes these frameworks, that eludes neuroscience, that eludes historical contextualization, that eludes just material social relations. And that's really primary. And it's always been there and there's always been a reason for that. And that partly explains enchantment. But at the same time, we can still apply this critical to some degree disenchanting, to some degree analytic categories to understand the context within which consciousness does its thing. And that's really important for me.

So one way-- theoretically, what I wanted high weirdness to do, and I don't know whether it succeeds and I won't know ever really, but probably not for a little while, is that on the one hand, I want an open-minded materialist to be able to read that and follow the argument and be like, yeah, OK, that's a solid argument, that we can talk about loops, we can talk about the weirdness, you can talk about synchronicity, and other seemingly paranormal phenomena without just leaving your commitment to an expanded materialism.

And on the other hand, that because that-- and this is a little more subtle aspect of it. Because you've done that, especially if you're talking about psychedelics, if you're coming from the academic materialism in that broader sense of the term, whether you want to call it historical materialism or neuroscience or social constructionism or whatever, and you're dealing with these materials and you're following these arguments, you can't avoid getting stained by sacred possibility.

You can't keep it out of the picture because there it is. No, no, no, no. See that self-referential loop, the way that it opens up an abyss? And now the abyss is staring at you? So there's little parts of it. And this is, again, those fantasies you tell yourself as you're writing some long, difficult work about its magic potential. But in a way, there are theoretical elements in there that I think are useful.

I think our fresh, in some way, work with some of the existing presuppositions about matter, and history, and bodies, and social formations, but have within them a little bit of as Easter egg or a surprise. A twist. And you can't get out of the loop. And then you're like, oh, the loop is bigger, and more complicated, and more weird than I thought it was. And that's, in a way, what weirdness functions as.

Weirdness is something that we can gesture towards as secular people. We know, oh, that's weird. That person is weird. It was a weird coincidence. It's not-- you're not saying sacred. You're not saying supernatural. You're not saying mystic. You're saying something that is accessible, that is mundane even. Not mundane, but profane. Profane. But if you go into it, it gets stickier. It gets-- there's multiple dimensions. You lost. Now suddenly, all these other things begin to make sense. Or they have their own claim. And there you are. And the sacred is sort of in your face. So it's kind of like a back door into the sacred.

MATT DILLON: That was great. Thank you. I have two more questions for you. So one of which was going to be The Blotter. But I actually wanted to take a quick stop in this psychedelic Renaissance because you've been involved with and writing about psychedelic culture for a long time. For decades. And as I understand it, you were friends with Terence McKenna, right. You were pals or you hung out and, yeah. So it's underground, it's illicit, it's transgressive. It's weird all this time and now, it's something different.

So, as a doyen in this field, what do you see as the upshot or the great part of this psychedelic Renaissance, but also what might be being missed about these psychedelic cultures and the epistemologies that you've been exploring for so long?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to say there and I think I'll reflect a little bit on how confusing it's been to find my own role in it. Admitting from the top that there was some disappointment because one feature of the rise of the psychedelic Renaissance was the concerted effort by both legitimate forces or institutions or individuals as well as the new younger self-promoting expert influencers to ignore what had come before.

So I am not alone in feeling a little bit like, hey, kids, I've been doing this thing for 25 years. You might want to listen to me on a little bit at least. And while-- because one of the poisoned gifts of being in an underground that had an intellectual underground associated with it-- and it was actually the intellectual underground that most interested me more than just taking a lot of drugs or the crazy, weird subcultural things that happen, which were also cool and all that adventurous.

But what really fascinated me were these interdisciplinary little gatherings of ethnobotanist, psychologists, poets, mystics, crazy motherfuckers, musicians, poets, artists in this weird, multigenerational, enthusiastic, subcultural kind of engagement that had a specifically intellectual dimension. What are these things? How do we talk about them? How do we think about them? What sort of frameworks do we use and how are they-- and then once people saw that we were marching towards greater and greater acceptance, what do you do in order to try to make that as positive as possible?

Along the way, all these negative things started happening for a little while. I thought like, oh, my job is to be a gadfly about all the bullshit that comes along with the institutionalization, and the rewriting of history, and the rise of a kind of influencer. I'm a shaman kind of bullshit because nobody's checking. There's no mechanism to say no, no, you haven't done your homework. There's nothing, because that's not how the underground works.

So in a way, it was set up to not really be a very productive communication between these worlds. I mean, it's more complicated than that, but that'll do for now. At least it's part of the story. So now, what does it look like? I mean, I think the best way to thinking about it and it actually underscores the importance of our field is that religion is the elephant in the room.

And by religion, I don't just mean a sort of organized social praxis that involves dogma and ritual and organization, but also religious experience and whatever called spirituality. But spirituality is actually not as interesting here as the problem of religion. If it was just the problem of spirituality that would say, well, yes, psychedelics inspire, at least in many of its users, a kind of personal quest that involves altered states, and restructurings of identity, and personal narrative, and encounters with things that might challenge their previously materialist presuppositions about how the world works.

But that can be largely dealt with as individual expressions. And in a way, that's not too complicated for the medical industry that's building because it's still individualized. It's still personalized. You have an individual problem. You have an individual psychological issue. We are in a room all by yourself. You are going to be taking this pill for your purposes. You're going to have the experiences you have. We can integrate them and it's part of your healing and blah, blah blah, blah. That's not that hard.

Religion, on the other hand, is kind of a pain in the ass because its collective beliefs, its collective structures, it's the charisma of leaders. It's the existence of kind of almost esoteric layers of initiation, like if you're running a psychedelic religion, how do you get from being a newbie to being one of the leaders? Well, you've got to go through this kind of initiatory process.

And all that stuff does not work well with the largely secular approaches of clinical research, mainstream psychotherapy, pharmacology, and the VC money behind it, which some of which is super spooky. It's like full transhuman silicon tech, crazy ass like they see a future that is very bizarre and they see the psychedelics having a role in it that's not necessarily that pretty.

So for me, religion is both an alternative to a secular, individualized wellness path for the rollout of psychedelics in society that asks really important questions like your individual experience there. You may not have the tools to be able to integrate what happened to you, whether because it's so scary or it's so profound or it's so undermining of your previous model of the world. And secular psychotherapy is not going to give you those tools. So where do you go? You go to some kind of, well, psychedelic religion.

And because in America, at least, there's already space for psychedelic religion and there's already been some legitimization around psychedelic religion, that's going to grow. And it's going to grow in some terrifying ways as well. It's not like I have some kind of romantic idea about how dangerous a situation we are when you have uninformed but slick Instagram influencers who are acting as spiritual leaders completely outside of any kind of tradition, whether indigenous or mestizo or freak, who are then managing the spiritual experiences, which can be extremely powerful of naive, searching, broken people who are trying to keep their shit together as the world explodes.

That's going to have some gnarly dimensions to it. But overall, I think that's the thing to pay attention to as scholars and even as people who hope for a better psychedelic future than the one we might be looking at, where there is an emphasis on the social and the communal, there's an emphasis on collective meaning making, on group practice, which even for very pragmatic reasons, has to be part of a psychedelic future. That is just because the costs of individualized treatment will never allow it to be widely available in the way unless you're just having everybody on apps the whole time.

So you just sit at home and you order something online and you have an app for preparation, an app for guiding you through the trip, or you have a playlist that you download from somewhere, and then you have an app that integrates it where you don't have any humans involved. Yeah, OK, maybe you can scale that, but a much better way of scaling is to learn how to do group experiences.

Well, is there going to be all sorts of disasters and train wrecks? Absolutely. But I think that it behooves us to look at how the dynamics around religious experience and the social dynamics around religion are going to shape and influence this parallel track of psychedelic culture that develops in the shadow of the psychotherapeutic approach.

MATT DILLON: So speaking to your place in all of this and in the psychedelic Renaissance and this religious dimension, collective and communal, around psychedelics, what role does the alembic, which you started recently in Berkeley as part of the-- is it an extension of your online Psychedelic Sangha, or no, it is not? OK, so what is the Alembic then?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah. Yeah. No, I co-founded this space with two comrades, Michael Taft and Kati Devaney. We started talking about it about two years ago. And it's a meditation and movement space, but also a center for what we call visionary arts and culture. And I came out of the pandemic, having worked as my solution to the problem of the pandemic. So I was kind of burned out from working. I was working on Blotter and also my Burning Shore, Substack I started up.

And so it was actually a very productive and rich time for me intellectually. But I came away with this really sinking sense that unless we worked hard, we were the analog, physical, face-to-face world was going to be difficult to recharge. And so it was really important for me not to continue to do more work on the internet or figure out how I could become more of a pundit or get invited to this and that or have more followers or have more. I mean, I just didn't care anymore. I'm happy with whatever. Oh my god, people follow me and occasionally give me money. That's great. Love it.

But the quest to get more out of the internet, I think is actually wrong at this point in the game. If that's part of your other quest, great. But if that's the focus, I think you're not reading the writing on the wall, which for me meant doing stuff in the world and the physical world. And so when I was invited again, another invitation. I was invited to join these people. They had already been talking about this idea. I was like, perfect, let's just try something new.

So for me, it was probably just an experiment. But what it has come to be is what does it mean to sort of how do you craft a larger cultural context for not just psychedelic experience, but also altered states and meditative experience. Because I think there's a parallel story to talk about. We haven't talked about meditation and that part of my life and how important that's been. But one thing to say about it is that in the last five to 10 years, it too had its own version of a sort of renaissance. Not that it wasn't already well established as an object of study or whatever, but it was a lot more study of it.

But there's also been a shift in the approaches. And there's a lot more younger people in particular who are doing it, not at all in the terms of the earlier alternative post-hippie generations where there's a directness and a pragmatism, and it fits alongside cultures around the efficiency of the self or these protocols of self-realization sometimes in a very digital capitalist way with a lot of new apps and a lot of the old hippy dippy of romanticism stripped away and a more pragmatic emphasis on practice.

But where does that leave you? It leaves you, once again, with this problem of context. And to my mind, that's the main thing, both with psychedelics and with meditation, is that the old contexts are blown out of the water. And what do we have if we don't actively try to build together some better context? We're just going to get capitalism as it is. We're just going to get self-promotion bullshit, manipulation, the same just stripped away from the existing, tentative, insufficient context within which people explored these things.

So what the Alembic has been is, in a way, like a Petri dish to try to see how do you craft a set of cultural practices, attitudes, social forms that can serve as a context for these explorations and experiences. It's also very much a Bay Area event. I talked before about how I'm along for the ride and the West Coast consciousness game, but I have my own critical relationship with it. And in a way, the Alembic carries that forward. I mean, we have a lot of people there who are deep digital industry of people working for OpenAI.

We're in the Bay. It's not like we're separate from the Bay. And so that has its own twists and turns that are interesting, and challenging, and fascinating. And so for me, it's been a way to take all of my understanding of how culture works, how context works within these cultures of consciousness and to culture craft, but do it in a way that's still guided by that ultimate vision, that it's the peer-to-peer relationship. Some peers might have more skills than the other, and so they operate as a mentor for a while.

But it's very much in that post-tradition, a more ecumenical spirit or a spirit that is not unlike aspects of Esalen in terms of no one captures the flag. There isn't a flag to capture. And so it's been a really interesting concrete experience of that. And it might take more explicit forms in terms of how it relates to psychedelic therapy and meditative practice going forward.

But it is a place where we can play with neuroscience, and psychedelics, and ceremonial magic, and Vajrayana traditions, and create a pluralistic environment and hopefully inculcate some of the values that I think are really important to navigate that pluralistic environment that step away from the temptations of know-it-allism of the fetish for a particular tradition. But also not being just postmodern whatever, anything-goes kind of folks.

So it's a fascinating experiment and I think it will not become what it is for a number of years. But I'm having a good time shaping it as a kind of para-academic space in a lot of ways.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. See you guys do courses and sort of walking history tours of psychedelic Berkeley and such. So yeah, it's fascinating. We'll definitely put the link to that underneath in the--

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, because a lot of--

MATT DILLON: --show description.

ERIK DAVIS: A lot of the things we do, stream. I mean, that's been an interesting tension itself. It's like how do you deal with streaming if you're running a physical space because you want people to show up and particularly, local people. Obviously, if people are in Budapest, they're not going to show up. But if people are local and they can just stream, it's kind of easier. Why commute? But I'm like, no, no, the point is not to do that.

So one of the things that I've done with my courses-- I've taught a course on psychedelic counter-culture, one about American zen, one on a Philip K. Dick novel, and I'll do more that are course like-- is that I stream my talks but I don't stream the Q&A. So by being present, you get a little extra. There's something magical. And then I get to enjoy being in a room with people that is not recorded, which is a great joy these days, especially. So it's partly just a personal gift to myself to do that. But in any case, the point being that we have a lot of material streamed as well.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. All right. And going to land on the last question here about the book that you have coming out, it's in April, right?

ERIK DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

MATT DILLON: That Blotter will be coming out. And I feel like we've sort of been building-- let me rephrase this. When I first heard about this book, I was like, why is Erik writing a book just on Blotter? What's that about? And then as I started to read the book, I'm like, this is the most Erik subject ever in a certain way. It's ephemeral, but people are making it last. It's an art form, but it's also kind of a product. It's like something that people are going to buy. It's matter, but it's also launching people out into psychic space. So it makes perfect sense. But anyway, let you say it. What brought you to write this particular history of Blotter as an object and especially at this time, I guess?

ERIK DAVIS: Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I think you're lucky, too, because I'm about to launch into promotion world, but I'm at that sweet spot early on where I haven't developed all the shtick. So I'm doing it live. You get to enjoy and then in a month, it'll be the same thing. And I'm like that, oh, that story that I told Matt.

But basically, I wanted another project. It started before the pandemic, but just before the pandemic. And so once the pandemic was in place, it was the perfect thing to do. But in some ways, it was just a low-hanging fruit. I had known Mark McCloud, who owns by far the largest archive of street LSD Blotter in the world. But I've known him for a long time, for decades. And he's a super fun character, super character.

And even though he has this-- he calls his house the Institute of illegal images. And it's basically just his collection. He's a collector of a lot of stuff, including psychedelic posters, and ceramics, and all sorts of stuff. And it had been in the papers since the '90s. People have been going by and they write a little local article about, oh, you can go by and visit this LSD collection and da, da, da, da.

And I was like, Mark, how come nobody ever wrote a book? Like, I mean, this is just waiting to be a book. And he's like, oh, yeah. And he had these different stories of failed book projects or whatever. And so part of it was just realizing that I was in the right place at the right time with the right connections and that I was the right person to do it, that there was no-- if you wanted to design somebody to write about this, you couldn't do better than me. Not like me, because of my personality, but just because of the stuff that I was interested in and the stuff that I know about. And my facility with multiple dimensions of an object.

So it's an ethnography. It is a California history. It is a media art study. It's a study of iconography, a study of religion, all of these sort of elements that I had already developed. It was just like, wow, this is just in a way it was-- but it was super pretty easy and pretty fun to research and write. And I got to do a lot of original archival research, and underground newspapers, and personal interviews with people.

It's hard writing underground history for a lot of reasons, and there's undoubtedly more errors than I would like in there, although I probably won't find out what most of them are because the people who could fill in the real story are not going to talk to me or they're dead or nobody ever wrote it down. But it was a real gas to research as well. And in a way, my experience of having a long writing life is when I was younger.

As a personality, I had something to prove. And I developed my singular voice. This is the zones that I'm into. You got to take me seriously. And I don't agree with you there and da, da, da, da. And then in a way, the last thing I had to prove was to get a PhD. And I did get a PHD, partly with a chip on my shoulder. I did not like the feeling of being non-PhDed when in certain kinds of conversations and in certain kind of cultural zones.

And so I did it partly like, to be frank, [BLEEP] you. I can write about the weird shit that I've been studying for 20 years and make it a really good dissertation academic book with all the "fat", quote, comments and footnotes. And getting in there and nailing the theory. And getting everything right and like, I can do that. And I did it. And when I finished that, in a way, I was sort of done with proving myself. Now I've got this whatever weird career. It's like some people think I'm cool. I'm not that well known, but I don't care. It's fun. I get enough to really enjoy the space I've carved out.

But what is then driving me forward if it's not a need to prove myself? In a way, this project was so perfect for me because it's not really-- it's not me writing the-- I mean, I'm writing it, but it's I'm-- it's a love letter to LSD. It's like I can honor the underground pre-psychedelic Renaissance history that shaped me that I've learned a lot about, that I carry information about that other people don't have, and I can honor that with a book.

And so the whole thing is done in service of this story, this medium that no one had identified really even as a medium. I mean, it's a very rare thing to be able to write the first book about a medium and say, oh, it's actually a medium. Here's some of its technical features, here's some of the ways to think about it. How do we think about the images on it? It's a great question. Are they brands? Are they idols? Are they icons? Are they signs? Are they comics? What is it? How do we think about this print medium?

And so it was a super, super gas to just have that space to be able to do it and to write about something new in psychedelic discourse where now, there's hundreds of books a year on psychedelics. So to have a zone that has not really been treated very much at all, hardly at all, that has this material culture dimension, that has this subcultural practice dimension, that has this technical media art dimension was just really great. But the whole thing was animated. The whole time was not to show off or to be like, oh, here's some clever thing I can add.

But it was really being in service of the story and of the material and taking it seriously. Arguably overly seriously, but as a way of arguing for its centrality and enjoying the way. Despite all that, it will always have a greasy kid stuff kind of quality to it. It's never going to be legitimate. It's never going to be appropriate. So really great, great quote by a blotter dealer, an art blotter dealer in the book.

And I should say that while the most the bulk of the story is about street blotter, over the last 25 years, there's emerged a culture of call it art blotter or vanity blotter is how it's often referred to, which are blotters made by artists that aren't dipped in LSD and are just traded as collectibles. And they're sometimes signed by psychedelic luminaries and so it just becomes another kind of way for an artist, particular street artist or lowbrow artists or visionary artists to sell their work.

It's another surface like a giclee or a comic book or a mouse pad or all the sort of surfaces you can put an image on and sell. Blotter is like another one just because some people like to buy and sell them without having any acid in them. And one of these dealers sort of said, he goes, yeah, that's the thing about blotter, is that it will-- even if it's completely free of the Black market, it will always have that stain of illegitimacy to it.

There's no way. And his line was like, Disney is never going to make a blotter, right. And so there's a way in which it still has, and I admit, a romantic attachment to the fact that it's still kind of unseemly because one of the difficulties about both the psychedelic Renaissance and, in a way, our moment in general is that everything is getting valorized. All these margins are getting uplifted, everything, strange kinks, and neurodiverse behaviors, and all these things are being like, no, no, you're part of the-- we're all part of this together, no stigmatization, whatever.

And yeah, that's a wonderful thing in many ways. It really is. It's a great thing that people aren't going as many people are going to jail for having cannabis. How could you ever argue against that? All that said, there's something that is lost with the eclipse of that kind of edge, that kind of alienation from the culture at large, that kind of like even if it's just greasy kid stuff, even if it's reveling in a certain untoward culture.

But I still have a romantic attachment to that. And in a way, Blotter will always have that quality to it. And it's partly what makes it attractive, is that it is kind of gritty, and greasy, and it's a commodity. It passes in untoward ways, and the people who are drawn to it are scruffy and not necessarily, whatever. So it has that kind of element to it that I just, I guess, personally attached to. Yeah.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. It still has some of that '90s slackery vibe to it also. Actually, so I do you want to close on this, though. The architecture of the book is really interesting to me. So the first thing, and I'll just admit, I kept wanting to say, all right, so once I hit a chapter heading, I will take a break. And then I'm like, there's no chapters. It just flows. I'm like, is this-- are you mimicking a little LSD thing or is this like the it keeps going, it keeps going, it keeps going but it's in these clips? So that's one part of it.

The other one is, holy smokes, the honor roll of people who joined in your love letter to LSD at the end to write about specific sheets of Blotter, I'm just curious how that came about. Did you have a lot of people who-- did you ever get turned down or were people just like, yes, please sign me up for being--

ERIK DAVIS: That's a good question. I think there were a couple of people who weren't able to do it for some reason or another. Part of it came from my experience with working on The Exegesis, because my main job at The Exegesis, I mean, I did help Pamela Jackson with a lot of issues as a sort of editorial assistant. But the main job I had was that I edited annotations that, again, came in from other scholars about particular pieces of The Exegesis. So Jeff Kripal is one of the annotators as well as a number of Philip K. Dick scholars.

And so that was my job, was like who to get to talk about what passage so that we have some footnotes that are from luminaries. And I'm not really sure who came up with that idea in the first place, whether it was Jonathan or Pamela, I don't remember that, but I really like it. And with the acid, with the Blotter book in particular, I don't even really know why I didn't make them into chapters. I mean, I think oh, yeah, I guess that would have been more conventional and kind of easier on people's minds. Oh, well--

MATT DILLON: No, I actually really enjoyed it. It's just the formal aspect of it. I'm like, this reminds me it has the formal qualities of a certain LSD type trip where it's just-- it keeps going and you shift the scene really quick. And then you shift another scene but there's never any finality to it. Remind me a little bit-- I mean, this is very different, but of Mr. Show, which is one of my favorite shows of all time-- how each episode, each sketch would flow into another. Anyway--

ERIK DAVIS: That's good. I'm going to steal that. So when people ask me-- oh, that was very intentional, I wanted to do it. But I think it was because I just wanted to go on a ride. And I wrote it as a ride that has these different features because it both tells Mark's personal story and then it has this analysis that had to weave these things together. And they wove so well that it seemed, in a way, you break the weave to have distinct chapters in it. Whereas as it is now, there's these connectors.

Anyway, so I really like the idea of having other voices. And for this project, it was particularly important because my voice was not going to be personal. I was not going to talk about my acid experience even though it, of course, informed everything that I was writing. But I wanted-- there had to be personal voices in there, had to be this is my experience things. But not just that, also people talking from different angles and to get some diversity in the voices if there's relatively little in the history itself.

So that was just part of the project. And it was wonderfully edited by Jesse Jarnow, who's a writer, and DJ, and a master of the histories. He runs, The Grateful Dead, Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast, which is a wonderful podcast about The Grateful Dead. And he also wrote the book Heads, which is one of my favorite histories of psychedelics. It's a brilliant book because it's not about the famous people. It's about psychedelic culture in America, and it's really, really worthwhile.

Anyway, he helped me edit those and chased down the cats to do all that. And it let me have a wide range of voices of people who had really different kinds of experiences, too. One of my favorites was my friend Andy Oak, who's a psychedelic journalist, and a producer, and a really, really brilliant woman. And I was like, what is she going to write about? Because she wanted to do one on Orange Sunshine.

And what she wrote about was her first time that she took acid or first or second time she took acid with her boyfriend at the time and just how wonderful their lovemaking was. Like I was like, well, that's not what I would have expected you to do because she's such a kind of intellectual person. But it was actually a really sweet love letter again to the powerful erotics of LSD.

And she was writing as like a young woman who was taking it with an older boyfriend. I mean, the kind of thing that you could be like, ooh, what's going on there? And she was just like, it was awesome, you know? And so you had these little, little reflections of a variety of psychedelic lives as well as some critical voices who are making really good comments about particular pieces that were meaningful in their lives.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, wonderful. All right. And for those of you who are in Cambridge, Erik, you will be coming to visit us. I believe April 30 is the event. Wonderful. And do you have other readings around here at that time?

ERIK DAVIS: Not in that area. No, not in Massachusetts.

MATT DILLON: OK. We'll definitely put the schedule, also a link to the schedule in the comments. Pardon me. Description. All right. Well, I'm really looking forward to having you in town and being able to talk more about this, but also to let everyone else get to enjoy Blotter. All right. With that, thank you so much for coming on. It's been nice.

ERIK DAVIS: Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate it.

MATT DILLON: All right. Take care, bud.

Last Edited by 3Play Media on 05/03/24, 6:42pm