Griffin was arguably the greatest artist to emerge from the maelstrom of psychedelic visual culture in California in the late 1960s. An early and influential underground comix creator, contributing to R. Crumb’s legendary Zap, Griffin was also known for his rock poster art and album covers, including the Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa album. Griffin was also a genuine seeker, drawing concepts as...
In 1964, Timothy Leary and a few colleagues published The Psychedelic Experience, a manual for “tripping” explicitly based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. At the core of the Tibetan materials lies the concept of the bardo, the “in between” realm of the afterlife. While acknowledging the problematic nature of Leary’s radical appropriation, this essay argues that his application of these...
When Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis performed the so-called “Experiment at La Chorrera” in Columbia in 1971, they staged what became one of the most legendary and storied trip tales in contemporary psychedelic culture. This paper diagrams the matrix of Jungian alchemy, Marshall McLuhan, and science fiction that underpinned the protocols and conceptual apparatus of the Experiment. These...