Psychedelic Press Blog

I was lucky enough to find a copy of Albert Glover’s The Mushroom: a curriculum of the soul recently. Published in 1972, this small, scarce, orange-clad pamphlet is a poetic record of the author’s hunt and subsequent trip with the folklorist’s favourite fairy mushroom, the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria).  When first I found you it was underneath a white Pine tree. That wood I took for my staff, That image entered my dreams. Led by a boy I walked through the pine plantation Calling your name, Mukhomer!   The poem describes Glover’s hunt for mukhomer (a folk name for the...

This article first appeared in the bi-monthly Psychedelic Press UK print journal, August 2015 (Volume IV). You can pick up a copy of the journal here, or subscribe and have original, innovative and select psychedelic literature delivered straight to your door every couple of months. —– Some thirty years ago, in May 1983, Terence McKenna’s contact lenses failed him during a critical moment of his speech at the psychedelic conference in Santa Barbara. Unable to read from the page, McKenna had to resort to improvising. Listening to the recording after the event, he couldn’t help but notice the crowd’s reaction to a certain bit in his improvised...

We are delighted to announce the publication of new book Noumenautics: Metaphysics, Meta-ethics, Psychedelics by Peter Sjöstedt-H – Available now for £9.99 from the Psychedelic Press shop and Amazon.co.uk Title: Noumenautics Author: Peter Sjöstedt-H ISBN: 978-0992808853 Price: £9.99 Philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-H’s Noumenautics traverses the mindscape of metaphysics, nihilism and psychedelic phenomenology. It navigates through subjects such as the sentience of cells, the constrictions of consciousness, the metaphysics of might, the magic of mushrooms, the narcotics of Nietzsche, and the neologism of neo-nihilism – the last of which may itself cause flashbacks. Tracing the fall of western morality through Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book descends deeper still into a metaphysics...

Author Ben Sessa is a psychiatrist, and his novel starts with a psychiatrist character, Dr Robert Austell, having a violent fantasy where he cuts a patient’s throat with a scalpel and nonchalantly watches her bleed to death. The reader can be forgiven for momentarily wandering just how autobiographical the work is, and indeed whether such things are the norm within the psychiatric profession! But of course this slasher opening is a piece of black comedy in order to set up the jaded, disillusioned Austell as someone who – like the majority of the working population – is bored with his job and...

Dr Ben Sessa has just written a novel called To Fathom Hell or Soar Angelic. The story follows the journey of a conventional, conservative, NHS psychiatrist, Dr Robert Austell, as he breaks free of that mould and learns to challenge the traditional medical model. The transformation occurs when he accidentally stumbles upon the field of psychedelic therapy and meets the enigmatic, Californian maverick, Dr Joseph Langley. Soon a small farm in Somerset is transformed into a hotbed of psychedelic research, as personal and social growth emerges amongst a plethora of psychedelic therapeutic wonders. Ben is the author of several novels...