Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index

PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story.

Shulgin, Alexander, and Shulgin, Ann. (1991).
Berkeley: Transform Press.


ISBN: 0-9630096-5


Description: Paperback original first edition, xxx + 978 pages. Transform Press, P.O. Box 13675, Berkeley, CA, 94701.


Contents: Definition of phenethylamine, table of contents, foreword, note to the reader, search for a title, preface, introduction, Book I-The Love Story, 3 parts: 1. Shura's Voice, chapters 1 - 15; 2. Alice's Voice, chapters 16-34; 3. Both Voices, chapters 35-42; Book Two-The Chemical Story; index; appendices: A. Long Index to Book II, B. Glossary, C. Acknowledgements.


Note: Book II describes the synthesis, dosage, duration, qualitative comments, and extensions and commentary for 179 substances.


Excerpt(s): Do you remember hearing the word, Krystalnacht, from the history of the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, in the late 1930's? This was the might of broken crystal, when there was a sweep of the state-empowered police and young Nazis through the Jewish sections of the German cities, when every pane of glass that was in any way related to the Jewish culture-be it the window of a store, a synagogue, or a private home-was shattered. "If we rid ourselves of the scum known as Jews," the authorities said, "We will have solved the social problems of the nation."

I see a comparable move here, with merely a few changes in the words. "If we rid ourselves of the scum of our society, if we deprive them of their homes, their property, their crack houses, we will have solved the social troubles of the nation."

In Germany the Jewish population was attacked and beaten, some of them to death, in a successful effort to focus all frustration and resentments on one race of people as the cause of the nation's difficulties. It forged a national mood of unity and single-mindedness, and it allowed the formation of a viciously powerful fascist state. The persecution of the Jews, needless to say, failed to solve the social problems in Germany.

In our present-day America, the drug-using population is being used as the scapegoat in a similar way, and I fear that the end point might well be a similar state of national consensus, without our traditional freedoms and safeguards of individual rights, and still lacking resolution of our serious social troubles. (Chapter 42, Lecture at the University, page 444)


PLUS FOUR, n. (++++) A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a "peak experience," a "religious experience," "divine transformation," a "state of Samadhi" and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2 and +3 of the measuring of a drug's intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of the same drug. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of, the human experiment. (pages 964-965)

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