Mike Jay
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Articles by Mike Jay
Demand Stolen Rings
The word ‘vampire’ entered common parlance in the Anglophone world in 1732, as sensational reports arrived via German newspapers about an episode on the Serbian front in the wars between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. A soldier called Arnaut Pavle had died after breaking his neck falling from a hay wagon. It was said that he had been troubled by vampires throughout his life and had eaten earth from their graves in an attempt to free himself from them.
The Peptide Paradigm: Biology, Regeneration & Evolutionary Health - Jay Campbell
Episode 326 In this episode of The Psychedelic Podcast, Paul F. Austin sits down with Jay Campbell, five-time bestselling author, men’s physique champion, and founder of BioLongevity Labs. Together they explore the intersection of consciousness and human optimization. From hormone balance and therapeutic peptides to energy and inner coherence, Jay shares a paradigm of health rooted in evolution as much as biology.
Psiconautas. Cómo las drogas han transformado la mente humana Mike Jay - espacioLogopedico
Una historia cultural provocadora y absolutamente original sobre los científicos, escritores, artistas y filósofos que consumieron drogas para explorar el lado oculto de la mente. Hasta el siglo XX, los científicos que investigaban los efectos de las drogas en la mente lo hacían experimentando consigo mismos. Las detalladas descripciones de sus experiencias dieron pie a avances en todas las ciencias de la mente, en la farmacología, la medicina y la filosofía.
Priest of the Devil
On the remote island of Siberut off the west coast of Sumatra, the Mentawai have a well-documented tradition of shamans: individuals known as sikerei heal people by communing with spirits. Manvir Singh, in the middle of his doctoral research in human evolutionary biology, went there in 2014 to undertake fieldwork.
Psiconautas. Cómo las drogas han transformado la mente humana Mike Jay - espacioLogopedico
Una historia cultural provocadora y absolutamente original sobre los científicos, escritores, artistas y filósofos que consumieron drogas para explorar el lado oculto de la mente. Hasta el siglo XX, los científicos que investigaban los efectos de las drogas en la mente lo hacían experimentando consigo mismos. Las detalladas descripciones de sus experiencias dieron pie a avances en todas las ciencias de la mente, en la farmacología, la medicina y la filosofía.
Free Radicals: How Nitrous Oxide Galvanized Psychedelic Science - Mike Jay
Episode 316 In this episode of The Psychedelic Podcast, host Paul F. Austin welcomes cultural historian and acclaimed author Mike Jay. Together they explore the untold history of nitrous oxide, psychedelic experimentation in the Romantic era, and the deeper cultural and philosophical roots of psychedelic science. Mike shares insights from his latest book, Free Radicals, highlighting how figures like Humphry Davy and William James helped shape psychedelic thought long before the 1960s.
High Society by Mike Jay
A global history of intoxication, exploring the international spectrum of drug use in cultures across the world, from prehistory to the present day. Every society is a high society. Every day, people drink coffee on European terraces, chew betel nut in Indonesian markets, take cocoa leaf on Andean mountainsides and smoke tobacco in every nation on earth.
Nowhere Need Be Foreign | Charles Taylor
Travel writing in English has always been a byproduct of Empire: the servants of Victoria scattering across the exotic corners of the globe, notebook in hand, with a sense of having been born to rule. These travelers went in the manner of gentleman farmers riding out to the farthest expanses of their estate so that they could see how their subjects were, and how they might even extend their terrain a little.
Ecstasy’s Odyssey | Mike Jay
What does science tell us about MDMA? It is currently telling us a great deal, and the news is overwhelmingly positive. Over the past decade psychedelic research has made a spectacular ascent from a network of marginalized enthusiasts to the highest peaks of the academy.
Russell Newcombe obituary
Russell Newcombe advised Benedict Cumberbatch on his Bafta-winning portrayal of a heroin addict in the 2018 TV miniseries Patrick MelrosePhotograph: Nigel Brunsdon Russell Newcombe, who has died aged 66 of lung cancer, was an advocate of progressive policies on illicit drug use and the first person to use the term “harm reduction” to describe an alternative path to the punitive goals of the “war on drugs”.
Why do we sleep?
Why do we sleep? The habit is pretty much universal among animals, though it takes a wide variety of forms. Many hibernate; a dolphin sleeps with half its brain at a time, so it can keep surfacing for air; Arctic reindeer continue ruminating while in non-REM sleep; and the Antarctic chinstrap penguin, we learned last year, fits thousands of four-second ‘microsleeps’ into the course of a day.
Tripping on Utopia
Subscribe to our Daily Deal emails and never miss a great deal. Daily Deals are available only to Audible customers in the US and Canada. Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science Narrated by: Suzanne Toren Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins 4.6 out of 5 stars 4.6 (26 ratings) Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Book World: Psychotropics help us map our minds. They might also bring us together.
Yale University Press. 359 pp. $32.50 - - - I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World By Rachel Nuwer Bloomsbury. 373 pp.
In the Alchemist’s Den
In 1770 a new perfume shop opened in the centre of Paris on the rue du Bourg-l’Abbé, a fragrant oasis adjoining a district that was, according to one contemporary, ‘by far the worst-smelling place in the world’. This stretch of the Right Bank was home to an abattoir, a fish market, a butcher, an overcrowded prison and a mortuary, whose combined effluvia flowed through open sewers directly into the Seine.
Psychonauts: Mike Jay (1885)
By the 1880s customers could buy all sorts of branded pills, lozenges and ‘tabloids’ in these shops. These variously promised to relieve aliments like stomach cramps, sore throats and exhaustion and they were very often marketed under cheerful names like ‘Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup’. But in these bottles was danger as well as relief. Their ingredients were not usually listed, but in them were powerful substances like opium, alcohol and cocaine.
The 19th-Century Trippers Who Probed the Mind
Nullius in Verba—Nothing on authority. In 1660, on the eve of its founding, The Royal Society of London took this defiant Latin phrase as its motto. For the United Kingdom’s main scientific body, it announced a new way of thinking that came to dominate the scientific revolution: Classical and scholastic authority could prove apocryphal. Only direct evidence, generated by experiment and first-person observation, revealed scientific truth.
The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris
Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain — psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of mind and suffered Promethean consequences.
'Oh Excellent Air Bag!': Science, poetry, consciousness expansion and the discovery of laughing gas
On Boxing Day of 1799 the twenty-year-old chemist Humphry Davy – later to become Sir Humphry, inventor of the miners’ lamp, President of the Royal Society and domineering genius of British science – stripped to the waist, placed a thermometer under his armpit and stepped into a sealed box specially designed by the engineer James Watt for the inhalation of gases, into which he requested the physician Dr. Robert Kinglake to release twenty quarts of nitrous oxide every five minutes for as long...
New On My TBR List This Month
I’ll admit that I haven’t added that many books to my TBR list this month. Maybe only 10 due to the fact that I feel very behind on my reading and my TBR shelf is looming over me. Nonetheless, some great looking reads came across my many screens this month, including books on cancel culture, cobalt mining, Tupac, drugs, and more.
Psychonauts by Mike Jay
Enlarge Image Flyer Inspection Copy Google Preview Google Preview « Back Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind Product Description Psychonauts A provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind “Captivating. . . .
Obituary - Colin Dobson
Colin Dobson Bristol Rovers was saddened to learn that former Rovers midfielder and player-coach, Colin Dobson, passed away in Middlesbrough on 16th February, at the age of 82. Born on 9th May 1940, in Eston, Cleveland, Colin turned professional with Sheffield Wednesday in November 1957 and in almost a decade with the Hillsborough side scored 49 goals in 177 league games, though he was left out of the FA Cup Final side when Wednesday were beaten 3-2 by Everton.
The Melancholy of Anatomy | Mike Jay
Frederick Ruysch’s exquisitely preserved human and animal body parts were marvels of both art and science in an era when the divide between the two was less clearly drawn than it is now.
Hitchhiking · LRB 23 June 2022
I’m trying to remember the last time I saw someone standing by the side of the road with their thumb out, holding a cardboard sign. Like innumerable other bygones – the last milk bottle on a doorstep, the last rag and bone cart – it’s a sight that disappeared without fanfare. Growing up in West London close to the M4 I would see hitchhikers all the time, and by my late teens I was one of them.
Documenting Drugs: The Artful Intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
In pursuit of Pure Form, the Polish artist known as “Witkacy” would consume peyote, cocaine, and other intoxicants before creating pastel portraits. Juliette Bretan takes a trip through Witkiewicz’s chemical forays, including his 1932 Narcotics, a genre-bending treatise that warns of the hazards of drugs while seductively recollecting their delirious effects. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Self-Portrait, 1938 — Source.
The Lotos-Eaters
Welcome to the new Psychedelic Press Substack newsletter! Learn more about what we will be publishing on our About Us page. Otherwise, please enjoy this wonderful opening article by the brilliant Mike Jay! The land of the lotos-eaters is known only from a few classical fragments, but it has thrown a long shadow over modernity. The story is familiar mostly from the brief passage in Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey, in which after nine days of storms Odysseus finds himself beached on an unknown island.
CTA designs for TakeBackDemocracy.co.uk - Online Protest Itinerary
As is the case, sometimes things need improvements, a horizontal leaflet sized design that showcases a new design (excluding the colours, to start). So, I was emailed the digital online itinerary for the protest to be held on the 19th of February 2022 at 12pm. And was asked by the delightful ℓουℓου if I could do my thing.
Obituary - Andy Spring
Bristol Rovers are saddened to hear of the passing of former player Andy Spring. Tall, well-built right-back Spring played under manager Bobby Gould at both Coventry and Rovers, making his debut in the Sky Blues’ 5-0 defeat against Liverpool at Anfield in May 1984. Rovers did not score in the first four home League games of 1985-86 and, after a 6-0 hammering at Walsall, his final game for the club was the 1-1 draw at home to Wolves in March 1986.
The Well-Blown Mind
Hope Gangloff: September Plant Report, 2021 The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”); it was only around 1900 that it developed a more specialized meaning, uniting what had previously been a disparate group of pharmaceutical products, chemicals used in medical research, and herbal intoxicants.
In the Drug Archives
In the September 23, 2021, issue of the magazine, Mike Jay reviews two books that seek to broaden the conversation about drug use in society. Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants and Carl Hart’s Drug Use for Grown-Ups ask provocative questions: Why have psychedelics escaped the stigma of cocaine and heroin? Why is our morning shot of caffeine legal, but a nightcap of opium tea not? And what’s so wrong with getting high for fun, anyway?
The Well-Blown Mind
Hope Gangloff: September Plant Report, 2021 The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”); it was only around 1900 that it developed a more specialized meaning, uniting what had previously been a disparate group of pharmaceutical products, chemicals used in medical research, and herbal intoxicants.
Man-Bat and Raven
On 25 August 1835, the New York Sun ran a sensational scoop: the ‘Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c, at the Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant reflecting telescope, on a mission to map the southern skies and observe the return of Halley’s Comet.
Lace the air with LSD
It was during the fallout from Watergate that the American public first heard of MK-Ultra, the most notorious of the secret mind control programmes that the CIA ran through the 1950s and 1960s. After Nixon’s men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger.
We can’t wage war on drugs. We don’t know what they are – Mike Jay | Aeon Essays
When the US President Richard Nixon announced his ‘war on drugs’ in 1971, there was no need to define the enemy. He meant, as everybody knew, the type of stuff you couldn’t buy in a drugstore. Drugs were trafficked exclusively on ‘the street’, within a subculture that was immediately identifiable (and never going to vote for Nixon anyway). His declaration of war was for the benefit of the majority of voters who saw these drugs, and the people who used them, as a threat to their way of life.
The Hide That Binds
John Hay Library, Brown University An edition of Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death bound in human skin, 1898 In June 2014 the Houghton Library at Harvard University announced that its copy of Des destinées de l’âme, a meditation on the soul by the French novelist and poet Arsène Houssaye dating from the mid-1880s, had been subjected to mass spectrometry testing and was “without a doubt bound in human skin.” The book had been presented to the library in 1934 and was one of three in Harvard’s...
"Everything BUT The Show" Podcast Makes Its Debut, Co-Hosted By Mike Jay And Eric Kilby
Everything BUT The Show, 3 June 2020 - Nashville, TN - A welcoming new podcast is now live! Introducing a podcast that shares, literally, everything but the show. Each week, in-depth stories will be heard about touring, life behind the scenes on the road, what it takes to put on a show, along with so much more about the touring life as well as the music industry. Everything BUT The Show was created by music industry veterans Eric Kilby and Mike Jay, who also co-host the podcast.
Fungi, Folklore, and Fairyland
Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. The Intruder (ca. 1860) by John Anster Fitzgerald, with a fly agaric centre stage — Source. The first recorded mushroom trip in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on October 3, 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man identified in the subsequent medical report as “J.
The Virus and the Martians | Mike Jay
Audio brought to you by Curio, a Lapham’s Quarterly partner A deadly virus once saved humanity from destruction. A civilization so technologically advanced as to appear invincible was brought down by microscopic pathogens it had not known existed, let alone considered in its plans for global domination.
Signs and Wonders | Francine Prose
Near the end of Death in Venice, the narrative takes a sharp turn and veers from a close third-person point of view into straight-up exposition, as if to circumvent our hero’s blinkered consciousness and deliver the bad news that he has so far refused to acknowledge: Venice is overrun by cholera. To remain in the city would be fatal, as it turns out to be for Gustav von Aschenbach, immobilized and doomed by his obsession with a beautiful Polish boy.
What Preparations Are Due? | Travis Chi Wing Lau
In a word, I would have everyone prepare themselves for death, prepare together, and prepare apart. —Daniel Defoe, Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well for Soul as Body Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year was published in March 1722.
‘Smells’ and ‘Smellosophy’ Review: What the Nose Knows
Smell is a paradoxical sense, both intimate and elusive. The olfactory bulb transmits signals directly into the brain, which can astonish us by summoning detailed memories of forgotten scenes. At the same time, odors or aromas often lurk along the borders of our conscious awareness, and are notoriously hard to describe in words, and thus to translate between cultures. Is smell best understood by studying the workings of the brain, or by its social roles and meanings?
Edward James’s Sculpture Garden · LRB 21 May 2020
Edward James was charming, eccentric, generous and immensely wealthy. For most of his life, his greatest talent was placing himself in interesting situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.
The Unpredictable Cactus
The San Pedro cactus evolved thirty or forty million years ago in the deserts of South America. Today its native habitat is the barren cliffs of the high Andes, two thousand metres above sea level. In spring, the distinctive green columns produce a large white and yellow blossom, which blooms at night and is pollinated by hummingbirds and bats. Like many plants, the San Pedro cactus converts amino acids into compounds known as alkaloids.
Un-American · LRB 21 June 2012
Please sign in to read the full article. Login How can opium be so ancient, and addiction so modern? The drug has not changed, nor has the human metabolism. In the earliest written records – Sumerian tablets and Egyptian papyri – it is already praised as a euphoric, a sedative and a supreme remedy against pain.
Mike Jay | On Michael Neve · LRB 19 November 2019
Please sign in to read the full article. Login Michael Neve died on 9 October. I first met him in 1995, at a funeral. We had been taught Nietzsche by the same lecturer at Cambridge; that had been enough academia for me, but Michael had advanced (or, by his own account, stumbled haplessly) to the position of senior lecturer at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.
Mike Jay · On Michael Neve · LRB 21 November 2019
Michael Neve died on 9 October. I first met him in 1995, at a funeral. We had been taught Nietzsche by the same lecturer at Cambridge; that had been enough academia for me, but Michael had advanced (or, by his own account, stumbled haplessly) to the position of senior lecturer at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. He had a contract with Penguin for an anthology of Fin-de-Siècle writings, on which he insisted I join him as coeditor.
Sartre's Bad Trip
Mike Jay The Paris Review August 26, 2019 Beyond their visual qualities, mescaline’s hallucinations posed profound philosophical questions. During the mid-1930s three prominent writers and thinkers left records of their experiments with it.
Sartre’s Bad Trip
By Mike Jay August 21, 2019 Arts & Culture Beyond their visual qualities, mescaline’s hallucinations posed profound philosophical questions. During the mid-1930s three prominent writers and thinkers left records of their experiments with it.
The Encounter That Introduced Peyote to Western Science
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Brilliant Visions: Peyote among the Aesthetes
Used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas for millennia, it was only in the last decade of the 19th century that the powerful effects of mescaline began to be systematically explored by curious non-indigenous Americans and Europeans. Mike Jay looks at one such pioneer Havelock Ellis who, along with his small circle of fellow artists and writers, documented in wonderful detail his psychedelic experiences. Detail from The Rose-Way in Giverny (ca. 1920) by Claude Monet — Source.
Brilliant Visions: Peyote among the Aesthetes
Used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas for millennia, it was only in the last decade of the 19th century that the powerful effects of mescaline began to be systematically explored by curious non-indigenous Americans and Europeans. Mike Jay looks at one such pioneer Havelock Ellis who, along with his small circle of fellow artists and writers, documented in wonderful detail his psychedelic experiences. Published Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.
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