Sex, Drugs and Magick

Sex, Drugs & Magick can be considered a 'scholarly' appraisal of both the historical and modern use (an misuse) of drugs in conjunction with sex and 'occult' practices. But don't let the word 'scholarly' put you off. Don in Wilson' inimitable style, this is a book filled with humor, cynicism, wonder and essential information for those who would pursue what can be an immensely rewarding path, potholed with a array of social and physical dangers.

Excerpt:

Horned Gods & Horny Potions

One must sell it to someone, the sacred name of love ... all thinking all of it, the It with an itch in it, the All every inch of it, the pleasure each will preen her for, the business each was bred to breed by... The law of the jungerl.
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

The human brain consists of about two and one-half pounds of an oatmeal-like goo. (The stiffer, starchy-looking brains seen in laboratories or movies are dead; the rest of the body looks equally plastic after death.) In this goo-"this enchanted loom," neurologist Sir Charles Sherrington called it; "this hive of anar-chy," novelist Bernard Wolfe said more poetically-there are several billion separate cells, each one of which might be in an electric hook-up with any one, any dozen or any thousand of the others at one time. Each such circuit is a registration or response to something that has been impinging on the nervous system, either from deep inside itself in muscles, glands or cells, or from as far outside as the stars at night.

Architect-poet Buckminster Fuller sums it all up in one, fine, unforgettable paradox: "Everything we see," he says, "is inside our own heads." That is, we do not see with our eyes, but with our brain-plus-eyes working as a unit.

Thus, if a person has been blind and has his sight restored by an operation, he will not see what we see. He will see a whirling chaos, and it will probably frighten him; it is only gradually, over a period of months, that he will learn, through coaching by his doctors and nurses, to see what we see. We will not regale the reader with the neurological theories that attempt to explain why an LSD trip sets the experimenter into this same whirling chaos.

Needless to say, we also hear with brain-plus-ears, taste with brain-plus-tongue and, in general, know everything only through its registration inside our heads on what William S. Burroughs calls "the soft machinery" of our brain tissue.

Thus, under hypnosis, a person who has been given salt and told that it is sugar will taste it as sweet-thereby illustrating the brain-plus-tongue phenomenon. Similarly, a hypnotized subject shown a green circle and told that it is red will see it as red. That is because we see with brain-plus-eye.'

Now, obviously, anything that affects the brain will affect our perceptions of the whole universe. Frontal-lobe epilepsy-a disease of the brain that has afflicted such illustrious persons as Julius Caesar and the Russian novelist Feodor Dostoevsky- illustrates this process clearly. In his attempts to describe this condition, Dostoevsky sounds exactly like a modern acidhead, saying that, despite the pain associated with the fit, "I feel entire-ly in harmony with myself and the whole world ... for a few sec-onds of such bliss one would gladly give up ten years of one's life, if not one's whole life." It is nonverbal, like acid and other trips we will be discussing, because our language was invented to describe other, more statistically normal perceptions. Dosto-evsky (and other frontal-lobe epileptics) even describes a great "white light" that also has been seen by LSD trippers and Orien-tal yogis. (A rock group called The Clear Light is evidently named after this experience, which philosopher Alan W. Watts- who experimented on himself with LSD while it was still legal-

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NOVELIST, TEACHER AND FORMER PLAYBOY EDITOR Robert Anton Wilson is the author of the Prometheus Rising.