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284 Book Reviews Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. Estonia: Strange Attractor Press / MIT Press, 2019. ix–545 p. ISBN: 9781907222870. High Weirdness emerged in June, 2019 as a joint publication of MIT and Strange Attractor Press.1 This publishing alliance is reflected in Davis’ attempt to appeal to both an academic and non-academic audience, the former a renowned aca- demic press, the latter an independent publishing house dedicated to an eclec- tic mixture of esoteric, pulp, and underground culture. In terms of design, the volume definitely leans towards the aesthetics of Strange Attractor: the front cover of High Weirdness depicts UFO-like mushrooms beaming a ray of light into the centre of a luminous triangle—a nod to the occultural density of the book’s subject matter. High Weirdness presents a history of three influential countercultural fig- ures in 1970s America—Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick.The study focuses on a selection of visionary experiences the three men underwent between the years 1971–1974. Davis investigates these by means of a close reading of the individual accounts, and places these within their histori- cal and discursive contexts. However, Davis retains an openness regarding the ultimate status of his subjects’ visions, auditions, and alleged revelations. Plac- ing himself within the Pragmatist lineage of William James, Davis rejects any form of reductionism. His intellectual investigations are merely to be regarded as approximations, never claiming full grasp of the ontological provenance of the three men’s experiences. This methodological ethos is furthermore sub- stantiated in one of the opening quotes in High Weirdness by William James: ‘Something always escapes’ (xi). This ‘Something’ Davis also calls the ‘Outside’ or the ‘Beyond’, two concepts he is ‘happy to leave perfumed with mystery’ (22)—a vagueness at times vexing to the scholar seeking analytic clarity. In the introduction, Davis provides a working definition of the term “weird” and bases his study on three dimensions of the concept: an aesthetic aspect, an association with deviancy, and an ontological principle. The aesthetic dimen- sion of the weird describes a specific cluster of ‘feelings and images associated with stories, spaces, atmospheres, and moods that relate to the uncanny, the fantastic, the perverse, and the macabre side of the supernatural’ (9). The weird is thereby not only characterised as a genre of cultural production, but also as a form of sensory and emotional reception. In this sense, Davis describes the weird as a style of ‘affect and possibility, of the visionary imagination and the 1 Many thanks to J. Christian Greer for his helpful comments on the initial draft of this review. Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15700593-02002008 Book Reviews 285 experimental body’ (9). The weird as a space of deviancy moreover refers to its connection with anomaly; it challenges norms and expectations—social, sci- entific, or otherwise. Last but not least, the weird as an ontological category claims weirdness as a ‘mode of reality’ (9), something inherent to the fabric of the universe itself, and by that exceeds mere psychological implications asso- ciated with terms such as the “uncanny”. Davis renders the “weird” a conceptually rich category. What is unfortunate, however, is that he fails to maintain a comparable standard with respect to numerous other concepts. Scholars of religion will be irritated by the frequent lack of terminological transparency or precision—possibly a side-effect of the otherwise laudable methodological openness mentioned above. Terms such as “esoteric”, “mystical”, or “gnostic” are deployed loosely throughout the book, compromising their analytic value. This concerns more technical terms such as “theurgy” as well. However, Davis’ impressive ability to negotiate between emic and etic perspectives, to my mind, compensates for this shortcoming. The context-sensitive interpretations of his subjects’ experiences allow readers intellectual access to some of the strangest theories, worldviews, and experi- ences witnessed in the history of religions in general and Western esotericism in particular. In the first chapter, Davis elucidates different facets of the counterculture, such as a novel form of subjectivity he calls the ‘centrifugal self’ (52)—a way of being that sees the self as an experiment, something to be created or per- petually sought rather than postulated as fixed essence. Davis also introduces central ideas to the 1970s such as “liminality” and “anomaly”, concepts which deal with social and scientific forms of deviancy that characterised much of countercultural discourse and practice. Davis also uses the occasion to insert his own, ontological views on anomaly: ‘anomaly is a characteristic of the real’ (67). There are few such metaphysical assertions made throughout the work, but they are central in understanding Davis’ attitude towards his subjects’ experiences and ideas. Resonating with the three men’s fundamental views on reality—which could be described as “weird”—Davis nevertheless maintains a fine balance of critical sympathy, and evades the pitfall of apologetics. In the second chapter, Davis deals with Terence McKenna and the latter’s visionary experiences in Colombia in 1974. He recounts the story of how Ter- ence and his brother Dennis consumed large quantities of Psilocybe cubensis— a hallucinogenic mushroom—in the Amazon basin, and how they went through a prolonged series of visionary experiences. These, however, were allegedly anything but passive journeys into the deep recesses of the mind: the McKennas were effectively trying to manifest what they would eventually describe as a philosopher’s stone, or an ‘ultimate technological artifact’ (111)—a Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 20 (2020) 273–302.

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