The Lost World of James Lee

Twenty years on the trail of a 19th century psychonaut

Read More →

Peyote among the Aesthetes

psychedelic experiments in 1890s London

Read More →

A Journey Between Worlds

the encounter that introduced peyote to western science

Read More →

The Acid Farmers

How Sandoz Pharmaceuticals produced the LSD that turned on the world

Read More →

Bicycle Day Revisited

What really happened on the first acid trip?

Read More →

‘The Colony of the Mad’

The history of Geel, and the future of mental healthcare

Read More →

Shaman’s Revenge?

the birth, death and afterlife of our romance with tobacco

Read More →

The Lotus Eaters

The island drug culture of Homer’s Odyssey, and where we might find it today

Read More →

Stranger than Fiction

From mind control to the Truman Show: how paranoid delusions colonised popular culture

Read More →

Sargant Battle for the Mind cover

Over the Edge

William Sargant and the Battle for the Mind

Read More →

Iranian tile

The Green Jam of ‘Doctor X’

Science and literature at the Club des Hachischins

Read More →

Dreaming While Awake

A history of sane hallucinations

Read More →

Movie Poster

The Pope of Opium

Thomas de Quincey, the archetypal drug fiend

Read More →

Holmes

“Watson: the Needle!”

Sherlock Holmes and cocaine

Read More →

Illuminati image

‘Darkness over All’

John Robison and the birth of the Illuminati conspiracy

Read More →

Robert W Paul

Adventures in the Fourth Dimension

The Time Machine and the birth of cinema

Read More →

Chavinoid Stela

Enter the Jaguar

The temple ruins of Chavin in Peru reveal the role of hallucinogenic plants in the origins of Andean civilisation

Read More →

Cliffe Bonfire Society 150 years

We Burn to Remember

Bonfire Night in Lewes: its riotous origins and survival against the odds

Read More →

James Tilly Matthews

James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom

The secret life and turbulent times of the first man to believe that his mind was being controlled by a machine

Read More →

Soldier

The Last Cargo Cult

On the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific, the worshippers of the mysterious John Frum are still waiting for their promised American cargo…or are they?

Read More →

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘The Fruitful Matrix of Ghosts’

The psychic investigations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Read More →

Faerie Dance with Mushrooms

Mushrooms in Wonderland

Was Victorian fairy art and lore inspired by actual experiences with mind-altering fungi?

Read More →

Jamin on one of the sacred stones

The Sacred Stones of Borneo

When the Kelabit people of the Borneo highlands first came into contact with the the modern world during World War 2, they were still erecting ceremonial megaliths

Read More →

War of the Worlds book cover

Man of the Year Million

The evolution of H.G.Wells: the Darwinian terrors of The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau and The War of the Worlds.

Read More →

symphonie fantastique painting

Opium and the Symphonie Fantastique

The fever dreams of Hector Berlioz, and the role of opium in the composition of his nightmare masterpiece

Read More →

Joseph Schneller, Zuchthaus-Chikane, undatiert

The Art of Mind Control

The influencing machine in visionary and outsider art

Read More →

Sign of Maitreya by Roerich

The Rites of Roerich

Artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich, after recreating the world of the ancient Slavs for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, tracked its surviving traces in an epic quest through the Himalayas

Read More →

Colonel Despard

Edward and Catherine Despard

A revolutionary mixed race marriage in Georgian London

Read More →