Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Gallimaufry

Having been knocked down by a head cold the past week, I am just cleaning out some old links.

• Should you use digital cameras for ghost-hunting?

I notice that a lot of the ghost-hunting articles in Fate magazine count "orbs" as evidence of spirits. But are they just artifacts of the digital photographic process?

• I think I want to read Breaking Open the Head.

In a similar vein, I recently bought Dale Pendell's latest, Pharmako/Gnosis, and it is another stunning combination of entheogenic analysis, poetry, and pharmacology.

• You won't find "Paganistan" here, but these religious-affiliation maps are interesting.

I note from the low affiliation counts in counties that match the Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona and much of the Lakota reservations in South Dakota that tribal religions were not censused either. This map's concentration of Episcopalians in western South Dakota, however, is the result of that church's presence on the various reservations.

• Bloggers like to note odd Google searches that brought readers to their blogs. Mine today is from Google Turkey: "sacrifice sheep watch woman video." Does that seem a little creepy to you too?

1 Comments:

Anonymous Fritter said...

I've read "Breaking Open the Head," and while I enjoyed it, a lot, and though he's got a phenomenal bibliography, I don't think Pinchbeck really "got it." In one respect he's gotten to understand the nature of different entheogenics, but not the intersubjective context of those substances in their native cultures. Yeah, you can buy a week with a tribe who drinks Ayahuasca, but you won't understand their cosmology, or their environment, or the native plants that these indigenous cultures know intimately. That's where the real context of the shamanic experience comes from, being in the liminal space between the known civilization and the unknown animistic world surrounding the civilization.

All that being said, it's a great read, and I have encouraged lots of people to read it. I write the re:Sources column for White Crane and I know that I've mentioned it in there at least once.

8:37 AM  

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