Coming in October
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...
10.03.2026 16:24
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Psilocybe Pickers tells the story of how these psychedelic fungi entered British consciousness in the twentieth century, the bemushroomed Britons who took them on as part of their culture, and how the authorities tried to police them.
psychedelicpress.co.uk/products/psi...
Yes it was PLW :-)
Young people: what’s an album?
The leech barometer in Whitby Museum: a huge cylindrical glass case with a bizarre steampunk contraption inside, featuring ornate metalwork, a lot of glass bottles, some chains, and a central totem-like structure
Title page: AN ESSAY EXPLANATORY OF THE TEMPEST PROGNOSTICATOR IN THE BUILDING OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION FOR THE WORKS OF INDUSTRY OF ALL NATIONS. READ BEFORE THE WHITBY PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY FEBRUARY 27TH, 1851. BY GEORGE MERRY WEATHER, M.D. WHITBY, The Designer and Enventor.
27 February? That can only mean one thing. YES, THAT’S RIGHT! It’s 175 years to the day since George Merryweather gave a three-hour lecture to the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society about his leech barometer 🧵
And the extent to which the experience is shaped by framing/expectation
‘Most of the tropes that came to define the vampire – neck-biting, blood-drinking or invisibility in mirrors – are recent inventions, though some, such as the protective virtue of garlic, do have a historical basis.’
@mikejay.bsky.social on the dangerous dead.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Sleep paralysis, somnambulism, hypnic jerks: we’ve all drifted through the borderlands of sleep & wakefulness. Those borderlands have preoccupied philosophers, scientists, & novelists, from Montaigne’s “most profound and maddest fancies” to E.M. Cioran’s warning of sleep’s “frightening importance.”
Exactly - anticholinergic eyes on Prof Dentinger’s lab results 👁️👁️
Lilliputian hallucinations (phalanxes of identical marching munchkins) are very familiar in non-psychedelic contexts, eg side effects of Parkinson’s meds. Suggests the mushroom pharmacology could be adrenergic/cholinergic?
Only recently learned that A MAN CALLED HORSE and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALLANCE are both based on short stories by a little-known female author. Both in this collection which is solidly excellent.
He’s first rate, should be much better known but copyright issues with his estate have left much languishing out of print. Loads of films based on his stories including Rear Window.
“If we conflate the richness of biological brains & human experience with the information-processing machinations of deepfake-boosted chatbots, or whatever the latest AI wizardry is, we do our minds, brains & bodies a grave injustice.”
— @anilseth.bsky.social, winner of @berggruen.org Essay Prize
Also his chemistry/engineering network overlaps with Beddoes and the Pneumatic Institution
You too - enjoying your Swedish snow scenes :-)
Cochrane a bit younger but they had close mutuals, notably Francis Burdett who was political ally to both
Peter’s book coming this autumn, will put you in touch
Absolutely cracking new biog of Cochrane forthcoming from Peter Moore - more on his science and radical politics than Thomas
The most detailed account yet of the Liberty Cap’s emergence - highly recommended 🍄
In the middle of a wild wkend at Entheogenesis Australis' Garden States. Missing way too much but what I have caught has been deeply engaging.
Below daytime is Dave Nickles dropping bombs on the local community and night time is @mikejay.bsky.social going deep on mescaline art.
Still a few tickets left for this event with the amazing @mikejay.bsky.social tonight 6-7.30 at @kingsioppn.bsky.social
All welcome as Mike discusses his new book on the discovery of N2O & the birth of psychedelic science👌👌
Cover for a book called "The Unconscious: A Cultural History from Hippocrates to Philip K. Dick and Beyond" by Antonio Melechi. The cover features a floating black bowler hat above a cloudy sky backdrop.
From ancient dream theory to hypnosis, somnambulism to psychedelic mind-expansion, "The Unconscious" by Antonio Melechi traces the wider social and scientific history of the unconscious mind. Coming in February! mitpress.mit.edu/978026205102...
#OnThisDay in 1977 the artist William Kurelek died. His 1953 autobiographical painting, The Maze, painted during his time as a patient at the Maudsley Hospital, continues to captivate visitors to Bethlem Museum of the Mind. Discover this intriguing artwork here: bit.ly/MOTMMaze
Listen to a series of recordings made by the ethnographer James Mooney in 1894 of different Native American Ghost Dance songs. According to the Library Of Congress notes that accompany the recordings, the performances are probably by Mooney himself — publicdomainreview.org/collection/j...
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The tragic story of James Tilly Matthews, a former peace activist of the Napoleonic Wars confined to Bedlam asylum in 1797 for believing that his mind was under the control of the “Air Loom” — a terrifying machine which was brainwashing politicians: publicdomainreview.org/essay/i...
