Peter Lamborn Wilson

Twenty-year-old Taz, African American sound engineer for the all-white-teenaged YB2, questions his sense of belonging.

The Rig Veda, written in India about 1500BC, praises a holy plant called Soma, which is sacrificed and consumed, granting the drinker an experience of enlightenment and ecstasy. The late Gordon Wasson identified Soma as a "magic mushroom," Amanita muscaria, and he and his followers discovered that such Indo-Europeans as the ancient Greeks, Iranians, and Norse had also used a Soma-type plant. In Ploughing the Clouds Peter Lamborn Wilson investigates the probability of a Soma cult in ancient Ireland, tracing clues in Irish (and other Celtic) lore. By comparing Celtic folktales, romances, epics and topographic lore with the Rig Veda, he uncovers the Irish branch of the great Indo-European tradition of psychedelic (or "entheogenic") shamanism, and even reconstructs some of its secret rituals. He uses this comparative material to illuminate the deep meaning of the Soma-function in all cultures: the entheogenic origin of "poetic frenzy," the link between intoxication and inspiration.

A look at the Islamic pirates and the Europeans that joined them, from the 16th–19th centuries, with particular reference to the independent Pirate Republic of Sale in 17th century Morocco. Swashbuckling never looked so good. (Source; [PM Press](

A tradition of intentional and initiatic dreaming connects the sufism of Ibn Arabi and the Owaysi Order, medieval Kabbala, Taoist scriptures, Afro-Brazilian spirit-cults, Siberian shamanism, and early Christian "angel alphabets." This book deals with specific methods for inducing prophetic or "veridical" dreams, because this book has a purpose: the experimental achievement of non-ordinary consciousness through autonomous openings ("Initiations") to the world of the imagination.

"Peter Lamborn Wilson proposes a set of heresies, a culture of resistance, that dispels the false image of Islam as monolithic, puritan, and two-dimensional. Here is the story of the African-American noble Drew Ali, the founder of 'Black Islam' in this country, and of the violent end of his struggle for 'love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice.' Another essay deals with Satan and 'Satanism' in Esoteric Islam; and another offers a scathing critique of 'Authority' and sexual misery in modern Puritanist Islam. 'The Anti-caliph' evokes a hot mix of Ibn Arabi's tantric mysticism and the revolutionary teachings of the 'Assassins.' The title essay, 'Sacred Drift,' roves through the history and poetics of Sufi travel, from Ibn Khaldun to Rimbaud in Abyssinia to the Situationists. A 'Romantic' view of Islam is taken to radical extremes; the exotic may not be 'True,' but it's certainly a relief from academic propaganda and the obscene banality of simulation. Peter Lamborn Wilson lives in New York and works for Semiotext(e) magazine, Pacifica Radio, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. A long decade in the Orient (1968-1981) inspires his writing, including The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry and Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy."

Sufism can be seen to have functioned as a positive and healthy reaction to the overly rational activity of the philosophers and theologians. For the Sufis, the road to spiritual knowledge could never be confined to the process of purely intellectual activity, without the direct, immediate experience of the Heart. In this book we are concerned with one art that the Sufis made peculiarly their own: poetry. Why should Sufis in general, and Persian Sufis in particular, choose to write poetry? When they wanted to 'be themselves', lovers of the Truth, they needed a language more intense, closer to the centre of human awareness than prose. Truth is beautiful, so when one speaks of it, one speaks beautifully. As the lover sings to his beloved, so did the Sufis to theirs. Love itself creates a taste for this language, so that even the prose writers of Sufism scatter verse throughout their works and create poetic prose. The overwhelming theme of this poetry is the Love relationship between the individual, the lover, and his Beloved, God.

Angels puts Jamie Mays--a runaway wife toting along two kids--and Bill Houston--ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con--on a Greyhound bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind-shattering surprise. Denis Johnson, known for his portraits of America's dispossessed, sets off literary pyrotechnics on this highway odyssey, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.--Amazon.com