The Psanctum Psychedelic Library: An Ongoing Process of Psychedelic Discovery
It is with great pleasure that we announce the opening of the Psanctum Psychedelic Library!
The idea for this library began twenty-two years ago, when I had my first psychedelic experience with psilocybin mushrooms. It was love at first insight. For the next twenty years after that I expanded my horizons with LSD, Ayahuasca, MDMA, 5-MeO DMT, and lots—lots—of cannabis.
During that time, I also researched, collected, and devoured a wide range of psychedelic literature. Everything from flying ointments in the 15th century to CIA mind control tests in the mid-20th century and everything in between. I drove from state to state, flew from country to country, dug up, photocopied, and cataloged these findings.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Timothy Leary and my graduate thesis on LSD during the 1950s; the latter the basis for my forthcoming book Wonder Child: How LSD went from a Mimicker of Madness to a Mystical Sacrament (Inner Traditions: Park Street Press, 2021).
This Library quickly morphed into something like an ongoing exercise in discovery. As I collected and read and cross-referenced and critiqued the papers I found I learned more and more about the complicated byways, highways, and bike paths of our entheogenic past. I explored history, psychology, ethnobotany, and religion. I tried (and failed) to further explore psychopharmacology, physiology, complicated graphs, and mathematical measurements. And now I want to make this vast anthology available to everyone.
We at Psanctum Psychedelia consider education and harm reduction our two main objectives and hope that this Library can serve as a positive contribution to both. We also hope that it fosters more study in the psychedelics sciences, both hard and soft.
This Library contains a world of psychedelic literature that has been largely overlooked or even forgotten. But so much of our current story began many years ago, when Western Intellectuals rediscovered what magicians, wise women, seers, shamans, and mystics all over the world have known for centuries: the power of plant and fungal medicines to gain access into the deepest parts of the mind and soul.
Please check out the beginnings of this ever-expanding library here.