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Breaking Open the Head : A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck is a religious work available to read on EtoBox.

What is Breaking Open the Head : A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism about?

A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe. Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shama

Who reads Breaking Open the Head : A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism?

Author

Daniel Pinchbeck

Publisher

Crown

Published

2002

Language

EN

ISBN

9780767907422

Category

religious

Subjects

Body Mind & Spirit, Science, Religion

Rating

4.05 / 5 (2,486 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14