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High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World
History is littered with evidence of humanity's fascination with drugs and the pursuit of altered states. From early Romanticism to late-nineteenth-century occultism and from fin de siècle Paris to contemporary psychedelic shamanism, psychoactive substances have playedcatalyzing people. Yet serious analysis of the religious dimensions of modern drug use is still lacking.
the use of drugs and the pursuit of transcendence from the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with the Romantic fascination with opium, it chronicles the discovery of anesthetics, the psychiatric and religious interest in hashish, the bewitching power of mescaline and hallucinogenic fungi, the more recent uses of LSD, as well as the debates surrounding drugs and religious experience. This fascinating and wide-ranging sociological and cultural history fills a major gap in the study of religion in the modern world and our understanding of the importance of countercultural thought, offering new and timely insights into the controversial relationship between drugs and mystical experience.
the use of drugs and the pursuit of transcendence from the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with the Romantic fascination with opium, it chronicles the discovery of anesthetics, the psychiatric and religious interest in hashish, the bewitching power of mescaline and hallucinogenic fungi, the more recent uses of LSD, as well as the debates surrounding drugs and religious experience. This fascinating and wide-ranging sociological and cultural history fills a major gap in the study of religion in the modern world and our understanding of the importance of countercultural thought, offering new and timely insights into the controversial relationship between drugs and mystical experience.
472 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2018
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About the author
Christopher Partridge
41 books18 followersDr Christopher Hugh Partridge is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster, Lancashire, England.
Partridge (born 1961) is an author, editor, professor, and founding Co-director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Popular Culture. According to Gordon Lynch, Partridge is a leading scholar of topics in popular culture.
Partridge (born 1961) is an author, editor, professor, and founding Co-director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Popular Culture. According to Gordon Lynch, Partridge is a leading scholar of topics in popular culture.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 5, 2021
This is a decent high-level literary and cultural history of Western drug "occulture" from roughly the Romantics up to 1990s McKenna-style techno-shamanism. Partridge covers the major intoxicants excluding alcohol, but it's clear that his primary interest lies with psychedelics, which get a much more in-depth and considered analysis than the sections on opium, hashish, etc.
Partridge does an effective job teasing out the ties of 20th century psychedelic thinking and a longer tradition of perennialist mysticism focused on epistemological-experiential excursions beyond ordinary consensus reality. He rightly notes that many of the lions of mid-century drug culture specifically saw themselves furthering an esoteric mystical tradition, whether its specific flavor was more Orientalizing (Huxley, Watts, to some extent Leary) or even more archaic (McKenna, Wasson, and others seeking to tie psychoactive drugs to primordial shamanistic practices and even the birth of the human mind).
While all this stuff is naturally fascinating, Partridge's style is kind of bloodless. While he drops a few acid judgments, there's not nearly enough humor or weirdness in a book about deeply funny and weird stuff. I found this a disappointment in comparison to someone like Erik Davis, who writes with more sympathy and knowing winks for the counterculture, or Michael Pollan, whose enthusiasm excuses his guilelessness. Partridge tries to keep a critical distance, but this is a subject where insider insight is a desideratum. I wish he would have enjoyed himself more on this trip.
Despite these defects in tone, Partridge hits all the highlights you expect in this kind of survey, even if it's a superficial pass or an epitome of the hoariest anecdotes. You get to spend time with DeQuincey, Humphry Davies, Baudelaire, Crowley, Yeats, Huxley, Leary, the Brothers McKenna, and others. Partridge uses Foucauldian concepts of "technologies of transcendence" to link a certain approach to drugs to gnostic ideas of ineffable, experiential knowledge and escape from the strictures of bounded space and time. While he remains agnostic about the independent existence of the presences encountered by psychonauts, he is broadly respectful of experiences of the "Other World" as a valid form of knowledge with its own stable topography of concepts, even if it's a little off-kilter from the everyday.
So while this isn't a great book, it is a fertile prompt to thinking about all of the deepest concerns of human existence. Recommended for those interested in reasoning about forms of knowledge orthogonal to ratiocination. You'll get a surprisingly sober intellectual history with very little woo-woo nor moralizing about the dangers of substance abuse.
Partridge does an effective job teasing out the ties of 20th century psychedelic thinking and a longer tradition of perennialist mysticism focused on epistemological-experiential excursions beyond ordinary consensus reality. He rightly notes that many of the lions of mid-century drug culture specifically saw themselves furthering an esoteric mystical tradition, whether its specific flavor was more Orientalizing (Huxley, Watts, to some extent Leary) or even more archaic (McKenna, Wasson, and others seeking to tie psychoactive drugs to primordial shamanistic practices and even the birth of the human mind).
While all this stuff is naturally fascinating, Partridge's style is kind of bloodless. While he drops a few acid judgments, there's not nearly enough humor or weirdness in a book about deeply funny and weird stuff. I found this a disappointment in comparison to someone like Erik Davis, who writes with more sympathy and knowing winks for the counterculture, or Michael Pollan, whose enthusiasm excuses his guilelessness. Partridge tries to keep a critical distance, but this is a subject where insider insight is a desideratum. I wish he would have enjoyed himself more on this trip.
Despite these defects in tone, Partridge hits all the highlights you expect in this kind of survey, even if it's a superficial pass or an epitome of the hoariest anecdotes. You get to spend time with DeQuincey, Humphry Davies, Baudelaire, Crowley, Yeats, Huxley, Leary, the Brothers McKenna, and others. Partridge uses Foucauldian concepts of "technologies of transcendence" to link a certain approach to drugs to gnostic ideas of ineffable, experiential knowledge and escape from the strictures of bounded space and time. While he remains agnostic about the independent existence of the presences encountered by psychonauts, he is broadly respectful of experiences of the "Other World" as a valid form of knowledge with its own stable topography of concepts, even if it's a little off-kilter from the everyday.
So while this isn't a great book, it is a fertile prompt to thinking about all of the deepest concerns of human existence. Recommended for those interested in reasoning about forms of knowledge orthogonal to ratiocination. You'll get a surprisingly sober intellectual history with very little woo-woo nor moralizing about the dangers of substance abuse.
March 15, 2019
Meta-transcendence analysis,
to keep in mind while building the next phase of high human culture.
to keep in mind while building the next phase of high human culture.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews