Erik Davis (www.techgnosis.com) is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. He is the author, most recently, of Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, a study of LSD blotter art. He also wrote High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019), Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), The Visionary State (2006), and the cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Erik’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He currently writes the Substack Burning Shore, and appears regularly the Berkeley Alembic, a center for consciousness culture that he cofounded in 2022.