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  Pop psychedelic author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl Daniel Pinchbeck has written features for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, Salon, and many other publications. He is one of the founders of Open City, an art and literary journal, as well as an independent book publisher. He was a 1999 – 2000 Fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. He has also been a columnist for The Art Newspaper of London and an editor at Connoisseur Magazine. In 1994, he was chosen by New York Times Magazine as one of “Thirty Under Thirty” destined to change our culture. Born in 1966, he grew up in New York City, where his father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract painter. His mother, Joyce Johnson, was part of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. A profound spiritual crisis in his late twenties led Pinchbeck to the study of shamanism. His first book, BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, recounted his personal initiation into several tribal cultures that continue to use “magic mushrooms” and other hallucinogens in their rituals. Pinchbeck became convinced of the legitimacy of the shamanic and mystical worldview held by indigenous peoples around the world. But this brought up troubling questions: If the modern West, in its pursuit of rational science and materialism, had rejected crucially important aspects of reality, what did this say about our society, and its immediate future? 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl chronicles the writer’s journey to answer these questions. The book is an unusually elegant, serious, critical and adventurous exposition of ideas often regarded as beyond the purview of intellectual inquiry. Readers may share or reject its conclusions, but they are certain to find the journey unforgettable. Pinchbeck lives in New York’s East Village, where he is editorial director of Reality Sandwich (www.realitysandwich.com). He writes a column, Prophet Motive, for Conscious Enlightment publishing (www.cemagazines.com), which appears in Conscious Choice (Chicago), Conscious Choice (Seattle), Whole Life Times (Los Angeles), and Common Ground (San Francisco). |
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