Food of the Gods explores the idea that psychoactive plants played a central role in shaping human consciousness, culture, language, religion, and creativity. McKenna argues that early humans encountered visionary plants such as psilocybin mushrooms, which acted as catalysts for neural expansion, perception shifts, symbolic thinking, and the mystical impulse.

The book proposes psychedelics as ancient tools of initiation — dissolving the ego, revealing the deeper field of awareness, and opening access to archetypes of death, rebirth, and divine communion.

Rather than portraying these substances as escapes, McKenna frames them as technologies of evolution — part of the human dialogue with nature and the invisible world.

In this autobiographical reflection, Albert Hofmann recounts the accidental discovery of LSD-25, the famous “Bicycle Day” experience, and his lifelong conviction that this molecule could reawaken humanity’s spiritual connection to nature. Hofmann explores LSD not as a drug, but as a doorway to the same sacred experience once cultivated in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

This groundbreaking work bridges modern chemistry and ancient spirituality. The authors, an ethnomycologist, a chemist, and a classicist, propose that the sacred drink used for over two millennia in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the “Kykeon,” contained a psychoactive compound derived from ergot, the same fungus from which Albert Hofmann later synthesized LSD-25. By aligning historical research, chemical analysis, and mythological interpretation, they suggest that the Mysteries of Eleusis were not symbolic rituals, but direct initiations into divine consciousness.

John M. Allegro, a philologist and scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, advanced one of the most radical hypotheses of the 20th century: that early Christianity emerged from a fertility cult centered around the ingestion of psychoactive mushrooms, primarily Amanita muscaria. Through linguistic and symbolic analysis, he proposed that the figure of Jesus represented a coded myth of sacred intoxication — a vehicle to preserve the esoteric knowledge of plant-based communion under the veil of religious narrative. The work was rejected by institutional academia, but later recognized as a pioneering exploration into the entheogenic origins of spirituality.

Rick Strassman, a clinical psychiatrist and researcher, conducted the first government-approved human studies on DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) in the 1990s. Through controlled intravenous administration, he documented consistent reports of subjects encountering profound states of consciousness, non-human entities, and dimensions beyond physical perception. Strassman hypothesized that the human pineal gland naturally produces DMT and may play a role in birth, death, and mystical experience. The book bridges neuroscience, spirituality, and metaphysics, suggesting that the key to understanding the nature of consciousness lies within our own biology.

Drawing from fifteen years of research, classicist and lawyer Brian Muraresku reopens the investigation into whether the earliest Christians and ancient Greeks shared a secret sacramental technology — an entheogenic Eucharist capable of producing direct experiences of immortality. Building on the work of R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A.P. Ruck in The Road to Eleusis, Muraresku travels from the ruins of Eleusis to the catacombs of the Vatican, uncovering traces of a pre-Christian mystery religion centered on the Divine Feminine and ecstatic communion through psychoactive wine. The book bridges science, theology, and ancient spirituality, suggesting that the “lost sacrament” of the West may have been hiding in plain sight.

Out of print for more than half a century, A Journey into the Asked, the Answered, and the Unknown , is now available in a commemorative edition, with candid commentary, a new introduction by counterculture journalist Jessica Hundley, and a photographic portrait of a generation. 

In the midst of a raging national controversy around the indiscriminate use of LSD, two authorities – Richard Alpert, PhD (AKA Ram Dass) and psychoanalyst Sidney Cohen, MD – spoke out on the dangers, merits, legal regulations and control of the revolutionary psychedelic drug. Their book was illustrated with a groundbreaking photo essay by journalist Lawrence Schiller , whose cover story for Life magazine introduced America to the sweeping new LSD epidemic and was a precursor to the federal criminalization of the drug. As the first national photojournalist to capture the American acid scene from the inside, Schiller began with a single contact in Berkeley, California, and built a large network of young, receptive subjects who allowed him to document their private experiences with LSD. At first, his contacts were few and difficult. “Many of them were afraid,” and said no. There were others, however, who were trying to exercise their rebellion, “and some…had a sort of missionary quality. They not only wanted to tell about their experiences; they seemed as though they had to.” Schiller’s reporting expanded to include Timothy Leary , then on trial in Laredo, Texas, and the Merry Pranksters , who stopped by his studio for stroboscopic photos after the Hollywood Acid Test. 

The deeper he went into the story, the more questions he had. Questions like, “Is the LSD state reality or illusion?” and “Can you understand…without having had “the experience?” Figuring others did as well, he asked Alpert and Cohen to answer them for readers—from their two opposing points of view. The unexpected result is perhaps one of the most deeply informative documents on psychedelics ever published. It sold close to a million copies. At a time when the use of consciousness-expanding substances is again making headlines, the moment that LSD burst out from the rarified world of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s experiments at Harvard to acid parties on the Sunset Strip is worth a second look. 

Could psychedelic drugs change our worldview? One of America's most admired writers takes us on a mind-altering journey to the frontiers of human consciousness

When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness.

This manual uses material from The Tibetan Book of the Dead for this preparation. The authors also make an important contribution to the interpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. They show that it is concerned not with the dead, but with the living. The last section of the manual provides instructions for an actual psychedelic session, under adequate safeguards.

The authors were engaged in a program of experiments with LSD and other psychedelic drugs at Harvard University until sensational national publicity unfairly concentrating on student interest in the drugs, led to the suspension of the experiments. Since then, the authors have continued their work without academic auspices.

Tom Wolfe's genre-defining magical mystery tour through the 1960s published in Vintage Classics for the first time to mark its fiftieth anniversary.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JARVIS COCKERIn the summer of 1964, author Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters set out on an awesome social experiment like no other. Blazing across America in their day-glo schoolbus, doped up and deep ‘in the pudding’, the Pranksters’ arrival on the scene – anarchic, exuberant and LSD-infused – would turn on an entire counter-culture, and provide Tom Wolfe with the perfect free-wheeling subject for this, his pioneering masterpiece of New Journalism.' The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book...the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter' New York Times

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.