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The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah
The day after a weekend with Terence McKenna, I was offered DMT by a woman I’d never met…
“If you are looking for something different, try Ian Winn’s debut novel… It has all the travel fiction requisites in spades: trippy drugs, local eccentrics and dirty dreadlocks, as Winn recounts his journey from the pyramids of Egypt to the beaches of Goa with crazed enthusiasm and humour.”
— The Sunday Times
“Inventive, brilliantly realised characters… the book displays a rampant thirst for mysticism and self-discovery. One cannot help being won over by Winn’s enthusiasm and intellectual energy.”
— The Times
“Strangely gripping.” — The Scotsman
“If you meet a man named Ian Winn at a party, make your excuses and run.” — The Big Issue
“I loved (this) book. Could not put it down until I finished it. This novel runs perilously close to pornography, shocks, startles, pushes to the limits of decency. But the most startling thing of all is that it conforms to the age old prophesy that the second coming of Christ will come when and where you least expect it. I am not concerned with the idea that the second coming will be an actual person (I doubt if the first coming was an actual man) but will be a new kind of consciousness breaking in on mankind.”
— Robert A. Johnson, Jungian analyst and best-selling author of He, She, We, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche and Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth
“If you are looking for something different, try Ian Winn’s debut novel… It has all the travel fiction requisites in spades: trippy drugs, local eccentrics and dirty dreadlocks, as Winn recounts his journey from the pyramids of Egypt to the beaches of Goa with crazed enthusiasm and humour.”
— The Sunday Times
“Inventive, brilliantly realised characters… the book displays a rampant thirst for mysticism and self-discovery. One cannot help being won over by Winn’s enthusiasm and intellectual energy.”
— The Times
“Strangely gripping.” — The Scotsman
“If you meet a man named Ian Winn at a party, make your excuses and run.” — The Big Issue
“I loved (this) book. Could not put it down until I finished it. This novel runs perilously close to pornography, shocks, startles, pushes to the limits of decency. But the most startling thing of all is that it conforms to the age old prophesy that the second coming of Christ will come when and where you least expect it. I am not concerned with the idea that the second coming will be an actual person (I doubt if the first coming was an actual man) but will be a new kind of consciousness breaking in on mankind.”
— Robert A. Johnson, Jungian analyst and best-selling author of He, She, We, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche and Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth
362 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
2 people are currently reading
85 people want to read
About the author
Ian Winn
2 books6 followersIan Winn is a British American author and journalist with a degree in marine science from the University of California, Santa Cruz. As a journalist he writes articles concerning travel, wildlife and environmental degradation for publications including Esquire and the Anchorage Press. As an author, he writes memoirs about the intersection of science and consciousness. The Times had this to say of his first novel The Techno-Pagan Octopus Messiah: "Inventive, brilliantly realised characters. The book displays a rampant thirst for mysticism and self-discovery. One cannot help being won over by Winn's enthusiasm and intellectual energy."
Ian currently lives in London with his wife and their Jack Russell terrier.
Ian currently lives in London with his wife and their Jack Russell terrier.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
July 28, 2008
As pompous as The Alchemist. I read this a few years ago and realized American Literature is in serious trouble.
May 31, 2018
After a weekend with Terence McKenna, Ian Muir Winn takes DMT and not only sees the gods - many of them, most notably Lord Shiva - but comes to believe he is one with the gods, a messiah destined to bring a new awakening to the world through his writing. He is also reminded of a dream he had in childhood about travelling to the pyramids.
Somehow, everything starts to make a crazy kind of sense and he feels compelled to travel to Egypt and then India on a journey of spiritual enlightenment with some romantic and business diversions along the way.
The energy of Winn’s prose is palpable. You can’t help but be sucked in for a ride that combines travelogue with mystical yearning and includes several poems, the first of which you can sample on Ian’s website.
Not only is the prose energetic and full of rhythm, the situations are often as funny as they are poignant. We watch Ian clamber up the pyramids for a purple stone, which his guide later says can be found all over Egypt, the tourist police shouting at his heels. We follow him on horseback on the Saharan sands around the pyramids and on a camel in the sands of Rajasthan. He is bemused and enlightened by Sadhus and tantalised and confused by women.
Sometimes we can sympathise with other characters who find his whole messiah routine a little much, but when that’s coming from the mouths of two men travelling the world photographing the poor drinking from straws melted into different shapes, you realise that there is a message in all the madness that asks the reader to question their time and place on earth and to be open to the journey of life taking place on multiple levels of consciousness.
It is wacky, it is forceful, it is funny and fast-paced. It should be on the shelves of all backpacking hostels and hotels. You’d be hard-pressed not to enjoy the journey that is The Techo Pagan Octopus Messiah.
Somehow, everything starts to make a crazy kind of sense and he feels compelled to travel to Egypt and then India on a journey of spiritual enlightenment with some romantic and business diversions along the way.
The energy of Winn’s prose is palpable. You can’t help but be sucked in for a ride that combines travelogue with mystical yearning and includes several poems, the first of which you can sample on Ian’s website.
Not only is the prose energetic and full of rhythm, the situations are often as funny as they are poignant. We watch Ian clamber up the pyramids for a purple stone, which his guide later says can be found all over Egypt, the tourist police shouting at his heels. We follow him on horseback on the Saharan sands around the pyramids and on a camel in the sands of Rajasthan. He is bemused and enlightened by Sadhus and tantalised and confused by women.
Sometimes we can sympathise with other characters who find his whole messiah routine a little much, but when that’s coming from the mouths of two men travelling the world photographing the poor drinking from straws melted into different shapes, you realise that there is a message in all the madness that asks the reader to question their time and place on earth and to be open to the journey of life taking place on multiple levels of consciousness.
It is wacky, it is forceful, it is funny and fast-paced. It should be on the shelves of all backpacking hostels and hotels. You’d be hard-pressed not to enjoy the journey that is The Techo Pagan Octopus Messiah.
March 10, 2009
What is interesting about this story is that while the narrator is probably the most far-gone ninties hippie travelling man I've ever known, his self-awareness of this fact is humorous and incites a sort of empathy that makes you wonder what would happen to you if you followed a crazy drug trip to the pyramids.
I think a lot about how people create their own fantasy of escape, because real life can be quite boring compared to the movies, fairy-tales, and childhood expectations. But there is a real adventure in travel if you let yourself follow the road less traveled, an irrational dream.
The book is "loosely based" on the author's own adventures in Egypt and India. "Loosely based" is loaded in post-James Frey/Oprah America. To me it doesn't matter what is truth and what is fiction in this story. That isn't the point of it. But then, what sort of reality exists for a Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah?
The story is disjointedly engaging, and despite the mystical realm of the quest itself, the narrator seems to walk on the same earth that we do. Personally, I've never been to Asia or Africa, but the level of detail provided by the experienced traveler's eye is honest and unique. A warm read for me in the cold and weird March weather of Washington, it definitely left me contemplating the idea of taking an adventure of my own.
I think a lot about how people create their own fantasy of escape, because real life can be quite boring compared to the movies, fairy-tales, and childhood expectations. But there is a real adventure in travel if you let yourself follow the road less traveled, an irrational dream.
The book is "loosely based" on the author's own adventures in Egypt and India. "Loosely based" is loaded in post-James Frey/Oprah America. To me it doesn't matter what is truth and what is fiction in this story. That isn't the point of it. But then, what sort of reality exists for a Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah?
The story is disjointedly engaging, and despite the mystical realm of the quest itself, the narrator seems to walk on the same earth that we do. Personally, I've never been to Asia or Africa, but the level of detail provided by the experienced traveler's eye is honest and unique. A warm read for me in the cold and weird March weather of Washington, it definitely left me contemplating the idea of taking an adventure of my own.
July 2, 2008
Exotic Travel, Romance, drugs, Sex, Sure... but what really makes this book a great read is the adventure. Is it a novel, a spiritual coming-of-age, a travelogue? Hard to know what shelf to find it on. Perhaps it's described best as a do-it-yourself guide to wide-eyed, slurp-it-up, grab-with-both-fists living: with the author's own experience teaching by example. I love the energy, power and atmosphere of Ian Winn and his wild, crazy and in the same time crystal clear and brilliant search for magic, mystery and myths in Egypt and India. Ian Winns adventures and lust for life power will change your life, your thoughts, your perspectives. Highly recommended.
June 12, 2007
Okay, so maybe some of the reason I love this book is because I lived through some of it, but I don’t feel at all hesitant about recommending it even to people who don’t know Ian and haven’t caught the Octopus Messiah bug yet. It’s being sold as a novel, but those of us who were there, man know that it’s All True and that Ian’s showing us the Way to make it into the new millennium with our prosperity stones intact.
November 7, 2011
This is a MUST read. One of my all time favorites. He flows. He tells it like it is. It's an adventure journey of women and drugs. You can read the first few pages on Amazon or something, but it's not like that. It changes up real fast. It is amazing.
February 1, 2008
I'm actually a character in this book. Seriously!
December 14, 2008
If you've been to india, you'll understand this book...
May 13, 2019
It’s the late 1990s, and a dreadlocked Jewish Californian hippie marine biologist, an aficionado of essential oils and precious stones, has recently (a) been declared Messiah by a mysterious committee at Burning Man; (b) been dumped by his girlfriend; (c) discovered Terence McKenna; and (d) smoked DMT, leading to a vision of Shiva meditating with other Hindu gods in a UFO above the Pyramids. What’s there to do but grab a Buddha squeaky toy, hop a plane to Egypt, and then press on to India? Sorting out the answers to his questions about spirituality and love, and writing as he goes, the Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah whisks us on a giddy yogic romp through slums and gem shops, on camels and buses, to mountains, jungles, and beaches redolent of ylang-ylang, curry, Nag Champa, patchouli, weed, sh*t, diesel fumes, salty waves, and yoni.
In a pensive mood, Winn writes, "I respect the Hindu gods and goddesses because, in the same way an airplane looks purpose-built to fly and a submarine looks purpose-built to dive beneath the sea, a four-armed elephant riding a rat while holding an axe, quill and magic seashell looks purpose-built for astral realms where anything is possible. However, when I shared this with my father the professor, he said, ‘Astral? Temporal? What are you talking about?’ Then he said he was worried about all the drugs I'd been taking."
The narration is vivid and direct. I felt splashed by cow dung and encroached upon by strangers asking what my name was and where I was from in broken English. I felt slimed and enlightened. This book is great at evoking the sensory environments through which it takes us, including their flashes of bliss: “On my way to the foot-bridge I buy some bananas and notice an old puppeteer on the pavement. He’s performing the Ramayana with chapati-dough puppets, delighting a gaggle of uniformed schoolchildren. I recognize Krishna, playing the flute, charming a songbird for a blushing milkmaid. The puppets are crude and colored with crayons. It’s two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old entertainment.”
Interspersed are hip-hoppy, Seussian poems that sing of the matters of which the prose speaks, lending credence to the narrator’s half-believed DMT vision of himself as an incarnation of the serpent muse of poetry. The narrator’s background in marine biology adds an occasional charming touch of rationality. Two decades after its first publication, newly whipped into shape, muscular and sweaty with crazy wisdom, TPOM remains a wild and delightful ride.
In a pensive mood, Winn writes, "I respect the Hindu gods and goddesses because, in the same way an airplane looks purpose-built to fly and a submarine looks purpose-built to dive beneath the sea, a four-armed elephant riding a rat while holding an axe, quill and magic seashell looks purpose-built for astral realms where anything is possible. However, when I shared this with my father the professor, he said, ‘Astral? Temporal? What are you talking about?’ Then he said he was worried about all the drugs I'd been taking."
The narration is vivid and direct. I felt splashed by cow dung and encroached upon by strangers asking what my name was and where I was from in broken English. I felt slimed and enlightened. This book is great at evoking the sensory environments through which it takes us, including their flashes of bliss: “On my way to the foot-bridge I buy some bananas and notice an old puppeteer on the pavement. He’s performing the Ramayana with chapati-dough puppets, delighting a gaggle of uniformed schoolchildren. I recognize Krishna, playing the flute, charming a songbird for a blushing milkmaid. The puppets are crude and colored with crayons. It’s two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old entertainment.”
Interspersed are hip-hoppy, Seussian poems that sing of the matters of which the prose speaks, lending credence to the narrator’s half-believed DMT vision of himself as an incarnation of the serpent muse of poetry. The narrator’s background in marine biology adds an occasional charming touch of rationality. Two decades after its first publication, newly whipped into shape, muscular and sweaty with crazy wisdom, TPOM remains a wild and delightful ride.
June 3, 2018
This changeable, Spring morning, I read through the last page of a miraculous, fall-down funny, oceans deep look at one man’s odd, psychedelic-fueled journey. Seems as if the moment we can officially anoint ourselves adults varies widely. In fact, the closer we get, the more it can recede. Mr. Winn’s breathless, first-persona account of an extended trip to the Middle East and India by a broken hearted young man with galaxies in his eyes satisfied some very basic needs for me. The nature of his prose, literally doused in frequent poetic breaks, brought to mind a favorite writer of mine, Hunter S. Thompson. His characters are somewhat nebulous but also solidly engaging, oddly enough. About the time we begin to ask ourselves if we’ve finally arrived at our “life”, it may or may not become clear that the journey has a distance still to go. In great, rolling humor and wise insight, Mr. Winn’s book asks and asks and asks and the joke isn’t lost on his main character that the answer lies… just ahead. Really. If Summer’s calling and a great read will help you spend it well, by all means, buy this book
March 7, 2024
it feels wrong to rate this book so highly because the author is so deeply misogynistic but it was really interesting to see how the brain of the average cis-het-white-man-that-thinks-travelling-is-a-personality-trait-and-has-a-god-complex kind of guy thinks. felt like I was at a zoo being taught the intricacies of the life of an animal. reminds me of the tweet that said men think their feelings are knowledge.
February 25, 2019
Hits on so many levels. Intelligent, hilarious, honest. For anyone looking for an adventure, this story will keep you entertained for the whole journey. Its vulnerability lures you in, makes it real, and allows you to laugh along.
February 25, 2019
An adventure worth taking. It could be about India, drugs, spirituality, gems, ladies, friendship... or its about all of those things and more. An honest portrayal of life, made exciting through a journey, but still very real, honest, funny, and entertaining.
July 20, 2018
Loved Ian's book. By turns funny, sweet, weird and informative. Great self-discovery book with some great travel aspects too. Not to mention a lot of drugs!
January 3, 2025
What a scamp.
January 2, 2008
Crazy title, but great book to read while travelling...
September 5, 2015
The best thing about this book was the poem and that was shit.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews