Erik Davis's blog

In William Blake's Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision, Marsha Keith Schuchard makes a strange and compelling case that Blake's imaginative universe was deeply shaped by a thriving London subculture of spiritual sexuality. (more)

Since posting my two-part exploration of the Great Prank of 2007, I have had a number of thoughtful and substantial email exchanges and conversations, mostly with people from the Burning Man Department of Public Works – the DPW folks. Larry Harvey, Burning Man's exec director, also gave me a buzz. (more)

What happened on the playa that Monday night? There you are, in a fireman's coat, hurling through the wee hours across a parched and dusty lakebed in a 1979 American LaFrance fire truck. Above you the rare shadow of the earth has morphed the full moon into a dusky half-burnt clementine that hangs there pendulous like some wandering orb on the cover of a 70s SF paperback. "Baby's on Fire" is spewing out of the iPod, and Fripp's incandescent solo mixes with Burning Man's surrounding soundscape of engines, explosions, house beats, and the rising cries of gesticulating passersby who have-wait a sec-just realized that the iconic 40-foot-tall trademark that centers their entire week of organized revelry is prematurely aflame. (more)

As part of an ongoing but essentially lazy quest to wrap my psyche around alchemy, I had recently been drawn towards Paracelsus: the wonder-working itinerant sixteenth-century healer who is sometimes cast as the Copernicus of medicine. Rejecting the leech-loving, bass-ackwards, and literally by-the-book healing practices of most medieval doctors, Paracelsus instead made room for a medicine based on plants, material causality, and self-healing powers of the body. (more)

An enthusiastic former jock influenced, in roughly equal parts, by permaculture, Elfquest, plant medicines, Taoist poetry, and D&D, Delvin Solkinson is a dedicated crafter of scenes and rituals. One of his greatest concoctions is, to give it its full name, the Galactic Trading Card Oracle Complex Entheo Art Microgallery. This visionary artifact combines elements of the Tarot, the Dreamspell, and a trading card art catalog, creating a gorgeous and deeply millennial chunk of meta-programming soultech. (more)