Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism Paperback – Illustrated, 12 August 2003

While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in The united states these days, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the globe. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness–to a holographic vision of the universe.

Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and occasionally rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the up to date consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It’s also a scrupulous recording of the creator’s wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia within the Black Rock Desert that may be the Burning Man Festival.

Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its perfect, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors within the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck’s personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.