Opium exhilarates the spirit; it can produce endlessly unraveling streamers of thought and rhapsodic speculation. The fifty years following De Quincey’s Confessions were to see a deep grappling with the impact of opium use on creativity, especially literary creativity.

In the sixth millennium B.C., settled agricultural populations had already been present in Europe for over two thousand years and urban civilizations were already ancient in the fertile river valleys of the Near East and the Anatolian plain.

Could it not be that we are willing to pay the terrible toll that alcohol extracts because it is allowing us to continue the repressive dominator style that keeps us all infantile and irresponsible participants in a dominator world characterized by the marketing of ungratified sexual fantasy?

A Moslem priest exhorting in the mosque against the use of “beng,” a plant of which the principal quality is to intoxicate and induce sleep, was so carried away with the violence of his discourse that a paper containing some of the prohibited drug which often enslaved him fell from his breast into the midst of his audience. The priest without loss

This fact—that a simple water-cooled condenser can capture the vapor of alcohol and return it to liquid form—made it possible for alcohol to be the first intoxicant to be chemically “isolated.” (The quality of being recaptured from its vaporous state is what gave rise to the practice of referring to distilled alcohol as “spirits.”)

Honey is a magical substance—a medicinal substance in all traditional cultures.

this enemy, this demon of which I have told you; the force of my words has put it to flight, take care that in quitting me it does not hurl itself on one of you and possess him.” No one dared to touch it; after the sermon, the zealous sophist recovered his “beng.”7

Outpourings of style and esthetically managed personal display are usually anathema to the nuts-and-bolts mentality of dominator cultures. In dominator cultures without any living traditions of use of plants that dissolve social conditioning, such displays are usually felt to be the prerogative of women. Men who focus on such concerns are often

the demonic side of this process are fully aware of this potential and are hurrying full tilt forward with their plans to capture the technological high ground. It is a position from which they hope to turn nearly everyone into a believing consumer in a beige fascism from whose image factory none will escape. The shamanic response, the Archaic