Daniel Pinchbeck and the New Psychedelic Elite

Pinchbeck, who is actively bidding to become his generation's Timothy Leary — or, more precisely, the less famous psychedelic thinker Terence McKenna — has created a scene around him that is perhaps the youngest and most vibrant of the current psychedelic establishment. "Leary, and Aleister Crowley before him, had messages that were essentially optimistic and expansive, about making your life a joy and a triumph through the methods they touted," says Brian Doherty, author of This Is Burning Man. "Daniel is much closer to McKenna's raging prophet, with an even more puritanical message about how we as a planet have to straighten up and fly right." When Pinchbeck came onto the scene in 2000, both Leary and McKenna had passed away, and he seemed poised for ascendancy. His current book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, has been largely panned in the mainstream press. In fact, his original publisher dropped it, with Gerald Howard, a venerable editor of authors like Don DeLillo, offering the comment "Daniel, you're not Nietzsche." Says Pinchbeck, "It was hard for him to conceive that someone of my generation was doing something of primordial significance."

Just as Leary promoted once-little-understood drugs like mushrooms and LSD as the key to unlocking the doors of perception, Pinchbeck promulgates the gospel of a group of psychedelics that have not yet found their way into the mainstream, taken in a shamanic context. As detailed in his first book, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, Pinchbeck has experimented with nearly every drug available around the globe, ingesting all manner of cactuses, seeds and weeds, plus "riding Hofmann's bicycle," a euphemism for tripping on LSD. But Pinchbeck's most popular choice of mind-bender is ayahuasca, an Amazonian jungle brew that carries the DMT compound, usually combining the leaves of a plant containing DMT with a vine found snaking around rain-forest trees, whose beta-carbolines make the DMT orally active.

"Drugs like ayahuasca are like interfaces that allow us to take messages from other realities instead of being overwhelmed or short-circuited by them," says Pinchbeck. "Some would insist that these messages come from your own psyche. I think it is possible that they come from another reality or, perhaps, a higher dimension."

A thick, brown tea that Pinchbeck describes as tasting like the "distilled essence of forest rot," ayahuasca is called yage in Colombia, which a South American Indian tribe translates as "vine of the soul" or "the rope of death." Vicious bouts of vomiting and even diarrhea are the usual side effects of the drug, which lasts a few hours. Until five or ten years ago, one still had to travel to the Amazon to take it, but lately it's become available in the right circles in the U.S., brought into the country in big jugs by leisure-suit-wearing shamans, or synthesized here by Catholic-spiritist religious sects primarily in the Southwest, who take it as a psychoactive Eucharist. People usually take the drug in small groups, almost always in a religious or quasi-religious context, much as peyote was usually taken in the context of Native American ceremonies in the Sixties. This January, settling a case brought by a Seagram's family distillery heir in New Mexico, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that ayahuasca was legal for these sects' religious rituals.

"If the leading edge of psychedelic exploration in the Nineties was characterized by ravers taking synthetic research chemicals, this decade has been about the spread of the ayahuasca religion," says Erik Davis, author of The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape. "DMT was around in the Sixties, but it never became a cultural force — you'd have to have been a real head to have taken it. But there's something about the televisual, hyperdimensional, data-dense grandiosity of the DMT flash that seems to resonate with today's globalized, hyperreal culture. At the same time, because it's an ancient jungle brew, ayahuasca ties us to so much we have lost — it gives one a sense of being part of something that is rooted in nature, which is such a source of longing and anxiety right now."

The earliest descriptions of the drug come from William Burroughs, who tried it in the 1950s a short time after he accidentally killed his wife. He had placed a glass on her head in a lighthearted mood; "It's time for our William Tell act," he said, and shot a gun at her brain. On ayahuasca, Burroughs found himself in a city where dead carcasses littered the streets. "Funerals and ceremonies are not permitted," he wrote. "Albinos blink in the sun, boys sit in trees languidly masturbating, people eaten by unknown diseases spit at passersby and bite them and throw pus and scabs and assorted vectors hoping to infect somebody." He began "seeing or feeling what I thought was a Great Being, or some sense of It, approaching my mind like a big wet vagina . . . a big black hole of God-Nose thru which I peered into a mystery — the black hole surrounded by all creation." He said ayahuasca was the scariest drug he'd ever taken.

Pinchbeck's perspective on ayahuasca is quite different. He took it for the first time about ten years ago in downtown Manhattan with a California shaman introduced to him by the poet Michael Brownstein; Pinchbeck wore Depends and a blindfold, and kept a plastic vomit bucket by his head. A year later, after ordering ingredients from a botanical-supply Web site, he cooked up the brew for two friends in his apartment. On the drug, "the thought came to me that human consciousness is like a flower that blossoms from the earth," writes Pinchbeck. "The stem and the roots are invisible cords, etheric filaments that lead back to a greater, extradimensional being. Our separation from that larger being was only a temporary illusion. The universe was, we would know if we could perceive its workings, purposeful and good. Then I was looking up from my grave as dirt was thrown on my coffin. Yet this horror-movie vantage point didn't bother me. It made me feel calm.". . .