I was born in the United States. My father was Canadian and my mother, American. I was educated in America, where my experiences in academic terms, were, at various times, distinctly different. I attended public schools, in the halcyon days of the Kennedy administration, when pupils were given a great deal of individual attention and the opportunity to study in advanced classes based on scholastic performance in general aptitude and intelligence tests. After commencing a five year course of undergraduate study at University, the rules changed radically, for during the Vietnam War, the American Selective Service Board became the ultimate arbiter of the academic careers of the male student population. These circumstances forced me to reorganize my plans for undergraduate study and to complete them in a much shorter period of time.

From childhood, my principal preoccupation was the mind and perception. From a very early age, I was aware of heightened states of consciousness and the mystery of dreams. During adolescence, I realised that I wanted to explore the broad spectrum of human consciousness via direct experience with altered states of perception. However, I wished to present my findings in their proper intellectual and historical context. At university, I was inspired by the power and complexity of history as presented to me by a group of unforgettable Professors: Bob Fredrickson, Dan Morrill; Ed Perzel; Robert Rieke, John Robbins and Loy Witherspoon.

As I progressed in my early studies, a chasm opened up before me, as my quest, to explore the powers of the mind, came into conflict with the mechanistic philosophy of Descartes that denies the ability of science to explain the phenomena of the mind. While I enjoyed academic culture, I realised that the Cartesian chasm was rapidly becoming an abyss, and I felt the need for a broader and more powerful methodology. Rather casually, I discovered the scholarship of shamanism, which appeared to offer the potential to define a more powerful form of perception. After preliminary experiments with the shamanic practice of altered states of consciousness via psychoactive substances, I was filled with great anticipation by the possibility of rediscovering a lost but more powerful science that had been practiced by Newton and predated the Cartesian method. I discovered that altered states of consciousness precipitated via psychoactive substances falsified Descartes's duality of mind and matter in a direct and indisputably objective manner, that was consistently scientific, for it was based on Newtonian experiment. Indeed, in 1999, millions of people have confirmed the unity of mind and matter by conducting their own experiments with psychoactive substances. The shamanistic practice of altered states of consciousness present evidence that challenges the definition of science, for it requires a restructuring of the history of science, through a reconfiguration of the epistemology of science.

I met a great authority on shamanism and thanatology, 'M', a parapsychologist, who consulted the psychiatric faculty at Duke, in the 1950s. 'M' prefers to remain anonymous and is unknown to the general public. Academic experts familiar with her case regard 'M' as one of the most powerful psychics known to science, and she continues to practice parapsychology in private, in collaboration with a small circle of scientists and intellectuals.

My investigation into shamanistic practices deepened, and I conducted many optical experiments including: naked eye and telescopic observations of the moon, meteorite showers, planets, occultations and a total eclipse of the sun, while in altered states of consciousness.

Through my studies of the history and philosophy of science, I gravitated to the lost scientific tradition of alchemy. During this period, I studied with Tom Cook, who had been a student of Thomas Kuhn at Princeton. I was deeply influenced by Kuhn's work, as well as other philosophers of science; Sir Karl Popper, with whom I would correspond in the 1990s, and Paul Feyerabend, who presented a theory of science that was fundamentally different from Kuhn and Popper. At this time, I was inspired by the theories of relativity of Einstein and the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics discovered by Werner Heisenberg.

With the classicist and poet, Elizabeth Sewell, author of The Orphic Voice, I began my studies of Renaissance science, magic and alchemy, that would eventually lead me to the alchemical archives of Europe. Sewell is a living exponent of a poetic and magical philosophy. She introduced me to the work of Goethe and his philosophy of a wholistic science, derivative of alchemy. Isaac Newton became a focus of my investigations, as I sought to understand his method, by a critical reading of his texts and interrogating his mind with the techniques of psychoanalysis and depth psychology, in the context of shamanism. Swiftly, it became apparent that Newton opposed Cartesian duality, for he practiced a wholistic theory of nature, derived directly from the alchemical tradition.

From this period, Newton has been central to my research. When asked who are the two most important scientists of the 20th century, it is commonplace to answer, "Einstein and Freud." Newton is universally acknowledged as the predecessor of Einstein, and I hold that he -- through his status within the alchemical tradition and his investigation of dreams -- is the direct scientific predecessor of Freud, as well.

In the late 1970's, continuing my investigations of shamanism, I read the corpus of writings attributed to the Welsh bards, and I discovered that these authors had used psychoactive substances in their quest for mystical illumination through visionary experience. I broadened my research into the classical and ancient sources, where I found many hitherto unrecognised references to psychoactive shamanism.

At this time, I met Weston La Barre, America's pre-eminent anthropologist, and he encouraged me to investigate the origin of science from shamanism. On one occasion, I served as liason between La Barre and Timothy Leary, who took an opposing position on the historical significance of psychoactive substances. Leary viewed psychoactive substances as the recent products of scientific progress, rather than the most powerful instruments of a lost, ancient and esoteric tradition, a viewpoint which La Barre and I proposed.

La Barre introduced me to R. Gordon Wasson of the Harvard Botanical Museum, who had discovered a living culture of psychoactive shamanism in Mexico in the 1950s. While working at the Wasson Library in the Harvard Botanical Museum, I received many courtesies from the great Richard Evans Schultes, who introduced me to his student, Wade Davis, just returned from Haiti, where he had boldly explored the psychoactive substances used in voodoo. Subsequently, Wasson and La Barre encouraged me to investigate the shamanistic use of psychoactive substances in ancient and mediaeval civilisations. I decided to accept this assignment, and this decision necessitated my relocation to Europe.

In 1985, I arrived in London, where I lived in Bloomsbury and read books and manuscripts in the British Library. From London, I moved to Cambridge, where I read many of the alchemical manuscripts of Isaac Newton, which illuminated Newton's experimentation with psychoactive substances. However, it was in Oxford, where I discovered the proliferation of direct references to psychoactive substances in the huge collections of alchemical manuscripts bequethed to the Bodleian Library in the 17th century, by Elias Ashmole and Kenelm Digby.

In the Bodleian, I read a myriad of rare books from the Renaissance which detailed a profound knowledge of the psychoactive properties of a broad array of materia medica. I was permitted to examine the herbal of John Locke, which contains dried psychoactive plants collected by his medical students at Christ Church. In Duke Humphry's, I pored over the parchment folios of mediaeval herbals and bestiaries, that testified to the lost science of psychoactive medicine practiced by ancient, classical and mediaevel physicians. I pondered the profound foresight and breathtaking intellectual scope of the greatest Oxonian, Roger Bacon.

Investigating the esoteric chemistry of the alchemical corpus, I met with several chemists and pharmacologists in Oxford and discovered that the alchemists had identified many psychoactive substances that we are only beginning to rediscover in the late 20th century. The chemistry underlying the esoteric tradition of alchemy represents the refutation of a principal thesis in the work of one of the most prominent scholars of alchemy, Carl Jung, who mistakenly held the opinion that there was no chemistry whatsoever in the esoteric accounts of the alchemical corpus, reducing his theory to the status of a subjective configuration of evidence.

Although, I read five languages when I arrived in Oxford, I was compelled to learn rudimentary reading skills in over a dozen more languages, in order to investigate the broad spectrum of alchemical literature.

My investigations led me to the origin of alchemy in Egypt, and I entered the Griffith Institute, located in the Ashmolean Museum. The archive of Howard Carter is preserved in the Griffith Institute, and I examined his notes, illustrations and the photographic archive of the artifacts he discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun. In London, I entered the Petrie Museum and examined the impressive collection of psychoactive artifacts excavated from Aketaten, the utopian capitol of Egypt during the Amarna Period. The archaeological record and the literature of ancient Egypt indicated that the Egyptian science of psychoactive shamanism was unsurpassed in the ancient world.

In 1986, at Wasson's suggestion, I contacted Joseph Needham, the world's ranking Sinologist, and he invited me to join him for dinner at Caius and to spend several days in Cambridge with him and his collaborator, Lu Gwei Djen. Needham held the opinion that Chinese alchemy, brilliantly detailed in the Taoist Canon, predated Egyptian alchemy, but I argued that the archaeological evidence for the Egyptian practice of sophisticated chemistry and chemically heightened states of shamanic awareness clouded the issue, and, given the dearth of evidence available from Chinese excavations, granted the palm of priority to the Egyptians or their pre-historic ancestors. Needham encouraged me to investigate the Islamic alchemists.

To read more about Michael Carmichael, click here.

2000 MICHAEL CARMICHAEL - Alchemy Online. All Rights Reserved.

top