Royal Academy Schools, 1-2 October 2010

Researching a series of unexplained incidents at this historic building, artist Blue Firth uncovered a first-hand account of apparent poltergeist activity in the artists’ studios.

While patrolling the 18th century corridors one night in 2008, Red Collar guard Nathan Phillips experienced something that prevented him from finishing his shift: “When I got back to where the skeletons are kept, the doors all slammed shut — like boom, boom, boom one after another. I tried to make out what it could be and checked all the doors again. I got to the same point in the same sequence and the bangs happened all over again. I didn’t finish my patrol that night.”

To make sense of what happened to Nathan, Blue has collaborated with parapsychologist Dr David Luke and writer Mark Pilkington. As preparatory research they undertook investigative training sessions with the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP).

Bringing together their knowledge and experience of the paranormal and arts fields, the trio have devised an event that merges Blue’s art practice with David and Mark’s expertise in making sense of the unexplained. The end result is a unique participatory experiment in which the audience are both observers and the observed, the haunters and the haunted.

Participants will be asked to complete psychological and physiological assessments before and after entering the site of the haunting, which will be monitored for any unusual occurrences. The vigil will take place under carefully controlled conditions and in total darkness.

Combining authentic investigative procedures with subtle performative aspects, Vigil examines and subverts the roles of audience expectation, spectatorship and belief.

Spaces for both nights are extremely limited so we advise reserving your position soon.

Visit the Royal Academy web site to buy tickets.

Well, they dominate anyway in ecological terms… But there’s been a meagre addition to this wider accolade within the insignificant sphere of human culture, as the Pestival—a festival dedicated to insects in art, and the art of being an insect—won the Observer 2010 Ethical Aware for Conservation. Apparently it’s the first time a left-field festival has won this award.

I’m honoured to have helped Pestival by getting their website together, which is well worth checking out as they’ve recently taken on some guest bloggers, including resonant figures such as musician and philosopher-naturalist David Rothenberg, who are over there talking about such things as recordings of oscillations from within insect bodies, and the co-evolution of insects and flowers…

The International Arts Pestival—a celebration of insects in the arts and the art of being an insect—is looking for volunteers for this year’s event, which will take place at the Southbank Centre in London, 3-6 September.

“Calling all insect workers, educationalists, artists and budding naturalists. . . . Reasonable out of pocket expenses paid.”

More details »

Palaeontologists in a vast desert. Large crested ridges of ancient red sand and rock formations… They remove the top layers, and reveal the skeleton of a giant snake beneath. No thicker than a man’s torso, but miles and miles long… stretching along the crest of the ridge… Sections of the remains are exposed intermittently

That was a dream I had once. It had an electric thrill about it, as if even the skeleton of this fantastic beast enlivened the dream landscape with seething energy.

I felt a surge of that reading a report about Titanoboa cerrejonesis, the name given to the recently discovered skeleton of the biggest snake known to have lived. From the steaming tropics of 60 million years ago, this beast was at least 13 meters long, “longer than a city bus … and heavier than a car”.

Link via Reality Sandwich. Creative Commons licensed photo by Doc Searls.

Consciousness Change: A Challenge for the 21st Century

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 21st-24th March 2008
• Venue: Congress Centre, Basel, Switzerland

The LSD symposium two years ago, commemorating Albert Hofmann‘s 100th birthday, was, it seems, successful enough to generate some healthy momentum. Catching a relatively quiet, but extremely significant wave of resurgence in scientific psychedelic research, this forum capitalized well on the attention garnered by the father of LSD’s centenary, bringing people from around the world to discuss psychedelics of all descriptions in the location of the notorious first ever acid trip.

Over 1500 people filled the Congress Centre in the peacefully stimulating city of Basel over Easter weekend. With official endorsements from Swiss International Air Lines and Basel Kantonalbank, this sort of event is a slight culture shock for the British or Americans. We may not have embraced psychedelics in the way the enthusiasts of the early ’60s might have envisioned, but their hopes are alive and well.

At the forefront of said wave of research are MAPS and The Beckley Foundation. I caught MAPS‘ Rick Doblin on the first afternoon, introducing Swiss psychotherapists who have been conducting trials investigating the therapeutic potentials of MDMA and LSD.

MDMA is now being studied in several places for its beneficial role in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Its famed ability to enable contemplation of deeply negative memories without their imprinted, paralyzing associations, makes it a good candidate for success in this field. Peter Oehen (of the Swiss Association for Psycholytic Therapy) made some interesting observations on his experience with MDMA therapy, such as the arc of experience he has repeatedly seen in sessions: first, relaxation; then, the appearance of physical symptoms; then, as these somatic knots are worked with and through, the welling up of conceptual and emotional insights. Evidently MDMA resonates strongly with the work of people like Wilhelm Reich, in which trauma is seen to be bound up in the body.

Juraj Styk then introduced some general principles from psychedelic therapy, plainly building on the solid foundations of Stanislav Grof‘s work. (Grof was a ubiquitous presence at the forum, but I know his work so well I missed his presentations in favour of less familiar grounds. Anyone not aware of his work, however, is strongly urged to get to know his pioneering research.)

Also, at one of the “Rising Researchers” panels, I caught Sameet Kumar reporting on new research in Florida into how psilocybin may help terminal cancer patients reconcile themselves (and thus their loved ones) with their approaching demise. In commenting a couple of years ago on a recent book by Stan Grof, who made good headway with this kind of psychedelic research with Walter Pahnke in the early ’70s, I remarked:

There are very good cases to be made for psychedelic therapy in any number of situations. But, as Grof notes, the idea that it’s still difficult to license it for terminal patients who are deemed beyond medical help, is both ridiculous and revealing. It shows clearly that our culture’s problem with the issue has little to do with the idea that psychedelics might mess people’s lives up in some way, and much more to do with an unwillingness to do what [Grof and Pahnke's subjects] want to do: face death consciously.

The fact that this sort of research is proceeding again—along with all the other sanctioned psychedelic experiments now underway—is exciting, heartening news. Indeed, being so soaked in the broad, speculative end of psychedelic culture myself, I found these presentations much more thrilling and inspiring than many of the rallying cries for psychedelics to “save the world”. Not to dismiss such rhetoric entirely; it’s just a different, more tangible buzz for me to hear of individuals in genuine need having distress alleviated. This is the agenda of MAPS in action; more power to them.

The Beckley Foundation, headed by longtime advocate of consciousness research Amanda Fielding, was present at the forum as the proud sponsors of the first study in over thirty years of LSD use in humans. Our understanding of the brain has surged forwards since the last legitimate scientific LSD research took place, and this study hopes to use modern neuroimaging techniques to gain a high-res understanding of the interactions between this still-fascinating substance and human neurochemistry.

At the forum, Fielding presented her theory on the link between human consciousness and blood supply to the brain. Essentially, she thinks evolution has left us with an insufficient supply, leaving us susceptible to various mental disorders, and that through the ages healthy societies have been those who have found ways of compensating for this. It’s one of those perspectives that can persuade the open mind to an extent, but its very simplicity makes one wary of reductionism. Certainly, it’s another option in our increasing range of ways to understand consciousness, and deserves more research.

Jeremy Narby

The Saturday saw a splendid line-up of ideas, research, passion and art. Jeremy Narby delivered an erudite and stimulating talk on his ongoing quest to find spaces where science and shamanism can agree to disagree on points where they clash, to leave room for the tantalizing overlaps. Following his experiment of taking Western molecular biologists through ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon to see if they could gain accurate biochemical information from their visions (detailed in the excellent Shamans Through Time), he took on a more passive role in facilitating a cultural-scientific exchange between an American tuberculosis researcher and a Peruvian shaman. The shaman discovered, through his ayahuasca visions, a plant with great success in treating tuberculosis. Exactly where these tentative cross-pollinating missions are heading is uncertain; that they are happening at all, though, is hugely encouraging.

Dale Pendell – photo by Mark Pilkington

Dale Pendell was a great discovery for me. Just that morning I had remarked to a friend how discussion of magic and the occult was lacking from proceedings. Pendell more than made up for this with his trip through the “mythopoetic roots of psychedelic practice in the Western Tradition”. With Milton’s Eve as the first curandera, and Plato’s ambivalent pharmakon as a guiding principle for the “poison path” of plant medicine, Pendell rooted the mythology and philosophy of psychedelics right into west Eurasian soil. Through Faust, he pinpointed the West’s quintessential magical operation as that of conjuration, giving form to spirits. Commercial incorporation, he emphasized, is plainly a most dangerous form of magic, giving legal reality to an abstraction whose prime motive is gain and profit. The spirit is conjured, with no circle of containment; “hungry ghosts” empowered and turned loose on the world. ‘Nuff said.

(You can download an MP3 (65MB) of Pendell’s post-talk discussion from the Sunday, and read the transcript. See also my review of his book of walking and talking with legendary intellectual Norman O. Brown.)

Kathleen Harrison

Kathleen Harrison has been known to me for a while as the former wife of Terence McKenna. Her presentation on her long-term fieldwork with indigenous Mazatec people in Mexico neither substituted for, nor paled in comparison with McKenna’s unique presence. Harrison was perhaps the most outspoken and coherent voice for animism (or, as she phrased it, “inter-species drama”). The Mazatecs, famed via María Sabina for their use of psilocybin mushrooms, and as the lone guardians of the odd psychedelic Salvia divinorum, are evidently a treasure trove for ethnobotanists, and it’s fantastic that such a sensitive and dedicated researcher as Harrison is working with them.

In discussing how careful Mazatec shamans are when sourcing their plant medicines—wanting to know that no one saw them being picked, and so on, purely for animistic reasons of respect for the plants’ spirits—Harrison mentioned a little rite of observance for urban psychonauts. She said that every psychedelic session she has that involves substances that have placed people at risk to get them to her, she offers thanks to them, and remembers all those whose freedom has been taken from them. (Applause greeted this, echoing the earlier support showed for the call from Kajuyali Tsamani—a Kogi shaman from Columbia—to boycott all cocaine use, on account of the inordinate suffering it causes in the regions where it’s produced.)

Harrison’s talk was bursting with tips for pragmatic, conscious engagement with plants, ancestors, the whole realm of spirits. It was very edifying to hear someone so obviously versed in the extremes of visionary information downloads, that while responses to questions asked of ancestors inevitably come with persistence, they are “never quite verbal”. She feels these answers arise at the subtle levels of instinct and spontaneous impulse. A cautionary note against the showy verbiage of many methods of “contacting the dead”, and a reminder that animism is really a perpetual refining process, learning through direct experience how to hear the quieter voices around and within us.

She ended with a statement of belief in the value of research into consciousness, religion and healing that was all the more pointed and rousing for her acknowledgement that its worth lies in the ongoing importance of such work in any situation—not just the possibility of it effecting some large-scale world-saving miracle. Kat Harrison reminded us all why we were there.

A showing of Jan Kounen’s excellent documentary, The Other World, on ayahuasca use among the Shipibo-Conibo Indian of the Peruvian Amazon, rounded off a thoroughly engrossing day.

I sadly missed the bulk of Sunday’s presentations in a haze of tiredness and networking. Monday saw some juicy para-forum extras: seminars and workshops with illustrious folk such as Stan Grof, Ralph Metzner, and Alex & Allyson Grey beckoned. I opted for the coach trip to the HR Giger museum.

We got a brief but energetic tour around the current exhibition of visionary art there from Claudia Müller-Ebeling, including wine and cheese. (The museum is in Gruyères, the home of my favourite cheese; eating it right there while viewing psychedelic art was a genuine treat!) Naturally Giger’s own work was wondrous to behold, especially in a setting where every detail is crafted in his style, right down to biomechanical patterns on the paving outside and spinal column handrails on the steps.

The short trip ended magnificently with a swift beer in the Giger Bar, just opposite. Arched spines vaulted the roof, skeletal alien chairs supported the locals chatting against the bar, and incongruous smoky jazz drifted around. More than a few comparisons to the Star Wars cantina were bandied around to describe the atmosphere. Do pop in if you pass through Switzerland.

In all, a resounding success. We felt the lack of more diverse after-hours social events—these being apparently limited to the customary trance and techno gatherings. But the balance between the tangible encouragements of hard science and more mercurial expressions of the psychedelic world worked well. Most importantly, it was easy to see a proliferation of new connections between individuals sparkling around the place. There’s an important cultural flame to be tended and maintained here, and Basel in 2008 saw it flare up with healthy enthusiasm.

[audio:2007-11-06-metageum-pauldevereux.mp3]
(Download 99 MB MP3)

The Metageum conference in Malta, “exploring the megalithic mind”, from which I’ve recently returned, was quite an event.

Certainly over-ambitious, it scheduled nine successive 13-hour days of talks, workshops, field trips, art exhibits, trance dances and performances, with contributions from a diverse array of academics, independent researchers, popular authors, artists, musicians and earth mystics. There were many dramas, organisational snafus, last-minute schedule changes, and the conference was unfortunately under-attended.

However, it was also one of the most inspiring pools of people I’ve swum in, and it was great to have such a leisurely dip. The schedule necessitated missing a morning here and an evening there, just to process things and relax into the pleasant Mediterranean November. But over the week I discerned a “conference conversation” welling up, with ideas criss-crossing between formal presentations, parties and dreams of their own accord. The boundaries between science, art, mysticism and daily life became pretty permeable. Peter Lloyd, Susan Waitt, and everyone else who helped organise and facilitate the event deserve recognition for staging such a fertile experiment.

I did plan to do a full “review” on returning, but it was just too unwieldy an experience to capture in a concise summing-up. I’ll content myself with nods towards some of the great people I met, plus some MP3s I recorded while there. Oh, you can also check out my photos (mostly of the astonishing Maltese Neolithic temples).

Archaeoacoustics

It was great to spend some time with Charla and Paul Devereux. I’ve been threatening to interview Paul for some years now, and it’s just not happened. Oddly, I was uninspired to do so during Metageum. One day…

Paul was at Metageum to talk about his latest cause, archaeoacoustics: the study of sound’s role in ancient monuments, sites and art. Together with Thomas Anderson (an inspiring sonics enthusiast / physicist / skate dude from Nashville, involved with Paul in the International Consciousness Research Laboratory), he also made use of his time in Malta to do some assessments of the famed Hypogeum, an underground Neolithic tomb complex with undoubtedly interesting acoustic properties. Paul classes the nascent field of archaeoacoustics as being where archaeoastronomy was in the ’60s. Given his exemplary record of trail-blazing in archaeology, we should keep an eye (or ear) out for this.

Paul’s research in this area is pretty cutting-edge, so while I did record his formal presentation, before posting it I’m waiting for him to check it over in case there’s anything in it he doesn’t want published in a half-baked form. Watch this space…

UPDATE: Paul’s talk can now be heard and/or downloaded here.

Also keep an eye out for Time & Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness & Culture, a new peer-reviewed publication edited by Paul and Neil Mortimer (former editor of 3rd Stone). Contributions come from esteemed Mayanists Dennis and Babara Tedlock (reappraising beliefs in “earth changes” in 2012), Benny Shanon (on psychotropic plants and the Old Testament), Jeremy Harte (on the age of the Devil in Dartmoor), Robert Wallis (on animism and rock art), and many more. If Metageum wasn’t enough, the launch of this journal surely tells us that something is in the air. Subscriptions are currently being offered at a reduced rate until the end of 2007, so get in there!

Art from Atlantis

Erik Davis arrived with his old friend Christopher Fülling, who gave a presentation on his involvement in creating the Atlantis-themed opera for the Burning Man festival. As one who spent very little time among the wackiness of Atlantis theories before deciding they were of mild interest to social anthropologists at best, it was a disarming thrill to be captivated and charmed by Christopher’s exposition of his Atlantis trip, a fascinating mixture of knowing New Age lurve, exhuberant Playa bacchanalia, and respectful postmodern art appropriation.

Trying to subvert the New Age’s lack of conscious political responsibility as well as our culture’s frequently puritanical cynicism, the project looked like a load of fun. Christopher also gave a demonstration of his 3-dimensional “Atlantean tarot”, an octahedron supplemented by four pyramids to form a larger pyramid, each facet decorated with images and glyphs drawn from a consciously fabricated Atlantean symbol system. I’d been party to a personal reading at a party a few nights before, which I have to say was great. I’d been deeply disturbed by a stupendously screwed-up dream the previous night, and Christopher’s divination helped unearth the enlightening side of it. In such consultations, the person doing the reading performs a crucial mediatory role between the querent and the symbol system, treading a subtle balance between guiding and stepping back to give the querent permission to allow their own unconscious wisdom to unfold. Christopher proved to be a dab hand.

The motivations behind the Atlantean opera seem to have moved on for him, though, and he’s currently involved in an amazing-looking project to create an “Art Monastery” in a converted convent in northern Italy.

The entheogens panel

Sadly, Benny Shanon couldn’t make to do his talk about ayahuasca and artistic creativity. I mentioned to Peter Lloyd that there were a number of notable people with interests in psychedelics and art there anyway, so why not have an impromptu panel discussion?

Come Wednesday evening, I happened across Erik Davis, Laurence Caruana and others just about to order food at a restaurant near the conference venue. (A number of artists and photographers had work exhibited during the conference, but the pieces that stood out most for me were Laurence’s vivid, syncretic works that blended myths and symbols with a Gnostic eye for hidden harmonies—see above.) Erik and Laurence each rolled their fingertips together and said, “Ahhhhh, Gyrus!” in a conspiratorial tone. I immediately guessed they were “the impromptu panel”, and wanted to rope me in to fill things out. I was feeling good and breezy, so I assented.

The panel wasn’t exactly structured, and it was held in the intimate setting of the Shisha bar in the upper reaches of the venue, so it turned into more of a group discussion. It threatened to descend into knotty philosophizing at one point, but some interesting ideas were broached. Note that my mike was directed towards the panel, and as I was engaged with this I didn’t have the time to point it at audience members when they spoke—these bits are a little quiet. Peter Lloyd introduces, Erik talks first, then Laurence, then me.

[audio:2007-11-07-metageum-entheogens.mp3]
(Download 95 MB MP3)

The archaeologists

Respect has to be paid to Simon Stoddart and Caroline Malone, two leading archaeologists who have spent much of the past 20 years excavating the so-called Brochtorff Circle, another hypogeum or Neolithic funerary catacomb, as part of the Gozo Project. They presented their laboriously elaborated datasets of bone and artifact categorization and placement with clarity and enthusiasm, doing a job of mediation between bewildering esoteric information and the wider community that’s probably as tricky in its own way as any shaman’s task.

Their tentative efforts at interpretation were a little disappointing, but conjuring interpretations that appeal to people like me is obviously not their forté, probably not even their job. They’re just finalizing the final results of their exhaustive data gathering, so it’s early days for interpretation; and at least they had a few stabs.

Some finds—such as the apparently prime placement of three male corpses at the lowest level of a large communal burial—caused friction with the strong Goddess contingent at the conference. And I have to say I felt that some of their interpretive moves were as much motivated by reaction to Goddess worshippers as these Gimbutas-inspired people are motivated by reaction to current patriarchy. Objectivity, as Erik showed in his talk, is less to do with which individual has gained the most “balanced” perspective than it has to do with the collective apprehension of complexity manifested over time by diverse groups pooling and debating their ideas.

It was encouraging to find such rigorous data-fiends as Simon and Caroline mixing with more wayward researchers, and pleasant to find them so good-humoured and charming to boot.

Chanting in the Hypogeum

After a couple of false starts in trying to fulfill the booking I’d made to visit the Hypogeum, it was great to find myself in a relatively intimate bunch of people (myself, Erik, Christopher, and three women), which included Wende Bartley, a very capable musician and vocalist who led us in a semi-improvised chanting and toning session.

The Hypogeum isn’t the only underground Neolithic tomb in Malta, but it’s the best preserved and most famed. It’s surreal to walk in off a typical urban Maltese street (see picture), through an entrance like your typical modern museum, then down a walkway into an ancient tomb complex carved out of the living rock, a bewitching combination of rough stone tunnelling, exquisitely fashioned chambers, and wild spiralling red ochre art on the roof. None of the images of it I’ve seen give any real sense of the space, like the architected large intestine of a partially artificial stone beast.

Here’s the full recording of our chanting session:

[audio:2007-11-09-hypogeum.mp3]
(Download 67 MB MP3)

If you’ve not got time to make your way through that, the finale is worth a listen at least. Christopher—an operatic tenor—led me and Erik in a chant as the women did their thing in another part of the complex. It’s amazing how perfectly you can hear the women’s voice merge in—effects like this, it is speculated, may have been designed. I’m a little off here I think, but it’s pretty cool for a spontaneous performance:

[audio:2007-11-09-hypogeum-finale.mp3]
(Download 3 MB MP3)

Wrapping up

Erik Davis gave the final talk of the proceedings, a virtuosic and impassioned attempt to fold the conference’s many threads into a multi-dimensional image of engaged, collective apprehension of prehistory:

[audio:2007-11-11-metageum-erikdavis.mp3]
(Download 72 MB MP3)

A couple of vids

I loved the rock-cut tombs at Xemxija. The earliest human constructs in Malta, they’re tiny caves cut into a rocky hillside. Only marked by small piles of rocks, you can squeeze through the tiny holes and check them out first-hand. They’re so small that photos would never convey anything of them, so I shot a little video on my snapshot camera. It’s dingy but it gives some atmosphere, and someone does some good toning at the end…

And, just for fun, here’s a taste of the rough-but-fun ferry crossing when we went on a day trip to Gozo, the smaller island next to Malta:

We know from the biological sciences that humans have evolved from other animals, and we know from our own direct experience that humans have consciousness. Given these two facts, it makes sense to assume that human consciousness evolved from pre-human consciousness. In other words, other animals are sentient, aware beings just like us. Thus, understanding animal consciousness may help reveal our own origins and the dynamics of our minds.

Actually this isn’t wholly a blindspot. For example, Richard Dawkins admirably puts his money where his mouth is in his support for The Great Ape Project, which aims to extend basic legal rights to our closest cousins.

Still, the specter of Christianity and humanism’s obsession with our “special status” in the scheme of life, and Descarte’s mechanical animals vision, continue to haunt our general paradigm for relating psyche and consciousness to other-than-human life. With brilliant minds like David Abram and Jeremy Narby as advisors, CIR looks very interesting indeed.

Pedantically speaking, it’s hard to deny that this sudden change in the climate is due to climate change. Duh! The real argument is whether this climate change has been influenced by humans or not. And it’s virtually impossible to find a sane, uncorrupted scientist left who will deny this.

Still, Jim Dale (no relation to the twitchy Carry On star, we assume), a risk meteorologist at British Weather Services, says “it’s down to bad luck, not global warming.” He continues:

It’s a sexy subject and people like to stick labels on things. Global warming is the latest bandwagon going past so whenever we get a heatwave or floods they blame it on that.

Yeah, baby, sexy! Aren’t you getting hard already at the thought of millions dying?

And – bandwagon? It might be currently being chewed and digested by mainstream capitalism, absorbed into fashion and lifestyle. But that seems to be kind of what the market economy does, Jim. Leave your complaints on the grave of Milton Friedman.

Personally, I remember joining Greenpeace in the mid-’80s on the strength of documentaries I watched about the seriousness of the challenge faced by global warming. Well over 20 years is a long-running bandwagon.

On a brighter note, Chris Rapley, the incoming head of the Science Museum, has called for discussion of the obvious: cutting birthrates.

A manifestly simple and easy to follow idea – that less humans means less human-created environmental impact – is of course made immensely complex once inter-national pettiness and faith in unbridled growth (as long as we don’t call it cancer) are taken into account. But the debate, complex or not, is important and conspicuously absent from public life; Rapley deserves credit for braving the inevitable “What have you got against the Third World?” and “So you’re advocating genocide, then?” overreactions.

Either we manage our population and habits, quickly, or nature will manage them for us. You’re free to choose; but denying that these are the options is rapidly becoming the most popular way of choosing the latter.