The Long Trip - A Prehistory of Psychedelia

The author starts this book by stating that his aim is to show that it is our modern society that is unusual in its difficulty coming to terms with the use of entheogenic substances. In this he broadly succeeds, but on the whole the book is strangely unsatisfying. The difficulties come in three main forms - an ambivalence about its market, straying from the subject matter of the title and first paragraph, and a lack of following through. The ambivalence as to market is evident from the beginning - spending 5 pages explaining terms such as archaeology, hallucinogen, psychedelic and shaman strikes me as taking the idea of writing for the non-specialist to the extreme. A 28 page introduction on LSD25 (the author's own experience and a short history of it) is an example of the second difficulty, as is the 100 page or so digression on the imagery of pottery, textiles, carved stonework and landscape. The digression is thought provoking, but is a straying away from the supposed theme, and the landscape part in particular resonates with the sort of wooly-headed new ageism that the author criticises elsewhere. The final difficulty is with the author's failure to follow through on the really new (to a popular audience) findings in the European archaeological arena. The evidence on the use of cannabis, opium and datura species in the European neolithic is fascinating, but to jump from the neolithic to the use of datura species (Belladonna rather than Henbane) by witches in the sixteenth century without attempting to connect the two weakens the whole argument that modern society is the odd one out. On a similar point, certain references suggest that the author has not quite followed through all his sources - the published excavation report of the Balfarg/Balbirnie ritual complex states that Black Henbane does exist in Scotland as a rare species which was originally cultivated deliberately, whereas Devereux believes that "henbane is not found at this latitude". This is not to say that the book is not a worthwhile read. It is, especially for those who want a general introduction to the subject of archaeological evidence of entheogen use. The digression on symbolism (though I still think it a weakness of the book) provoked me into a whole new line of thought about the "talking stones" of north east Scotland. My difficulty is that it appears to promise more than it ultimately delivers. If the author were to have followed one of the straight roads of which he is fond and gone deeper, rather than rambling so much on the surface, the long trip could well have been quicker, better, and more satisfying.