Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits
A potentially explosive book if it catches on. It is remarkably free from the Alice-in-Freakland logic so popular among drug scene apologists; concurrently it has enormous built-in appeal for those we lump--for want of a more explicit term--into the "counterculture." Wilson's major concern--the causal relationship between the "real" sex drugs (marijuana, hashish, cocaine, the psychedelics) and sexual pleasure and performance--is pursued via case histories, consideration of the medical and social scientific evidence, and personal formulations (e.g., a tabular comparison of "ordinary" sex and sex on varieties of dope). All of this is accomplished in an easy spirit of author-reader camaraderie. But Wilson's turn-on goes well beyond examination of the sensate drug-sex experience: he analyzes historically and cross-culturally the use of stimulants in Christian and Oriental societies, finding parallels, for instance, between Masters and Johnson's recent findings and Hindu practices. More important, he sees the drug-sex equation (or "revolution") as precipitating a "holy war" within the hitherto repressed "Christian" (or puritan) soul--"the crisis in Christian culture is mainly sexual [and] we should not be surprised that sexual elements are very prominent in the unconscious channels opened by the Drug Revolution." Wilson recognizes the hazardous side of the drug milieu and includes a risk-warning glossary which emphasizes moderation and small doses ("I write as a war correspondent, awash in a deluge of propaganda from both sides."), but his sympathies are openly pro-liberation--Timothy Leary, he says, made the "second most important scientific-political decision of our century" (the first was Einstein's resolve to help the U.S. obtain the A-bomb) when he decided that LSD "was too important to be monopolized by any government, or any scientific committee, or any other elite; that it should be available to all." To reiterate: if this essay gets the attention it should, psycho-sexual consciousness could be expanded by, what?, a decade, an orgiastic eruption, one person's victory over frigidity? Who knows? The only sure thing is, "the future will be much wilder and hairier than the immediate past." --Kirkus Reviews