University of Illinois Press
April 20, 2017
Stephen Siff
1 citation
This chapter details the celebrity coverage of Timothy Leary in the early 1960s and interest in LSD at Time and Life, where the publisher Henry Luce was becoming increasingly outspoken about his interest in the drug. Reporters often treated Leary—a Harvard psychologist removed from his job as a result of drug experimentation—with skepticism while still permitting him to explain the LSD...
University of Illinois Press
April 20, 2017
Stephen Siff
This chapter studies the dramatic appearance of LSD on the news agenda in reports on scientific studies using drugs to simulate madness, and the concurrent discussion of mystical, mind-expanding drug use sparked by the publication of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. In addressing these topics, journalists introduced American audiences to new drugs and to the use of drugs to create mental...
University of Illinois Press
April 20, 2017
Mark A. Lause
This chapter examines how the mystical Union came to represent a spiritual republic and of all the souls involved in the working out of a common destiny. It considers how the emergence of the Republicans and the crisis of civil war forced spiritualists to final reckoning with antebellum nonresistance and transformed spiritualism into an even more coherent national force. Without any real...
University of Illinois Press
April 20, 2017
Madhuri M. Yadlapati
This chapter explores several notes of ambiguity or self-correction in Hindu faith: the relationship between mystical certitude and discursive doubt in the Upanishads; bhakti (devotional faith) and the limitations of dharma in the epics; the questioning of assumptions about reality spurred by the doctrine of maya; and the paradoxical character of Hindu theism as reflected in the figure of...
University of Illinois Press
April 20, 2017
Michael A. Uzendoski, Edith Felicia Calapucha-Tapuy
This chapter explores the poetic qualities and nuances of the art of ritual healing, a genre termed as “somatic poetry.” Flowing out from the emphasis of the body as a site of social and cosmological action in the Amazonian world, somatic poetry is multimodal art created by listening, feeling, smelling, seeing, and tasting of natural subjectivities, not just those emanating from human speech or...