Shamanarchy in the UK (1992)

 

Part 1

Part 2
This film accompanied the 1992 techno compilation "Shamanarchy in the UK" (see video below) which was produced by Fraser Clark (1943 -2009). Fraser was one of the leaders of the global technogaian movement. As founder and editor of Encyclopaedia Psychedelica International, he outlined his views on entheogens and nature, and was a key advocate of the outdoor rave movement, hosting regular, small, indoor festivals such as those held at his central London clubs, Megatripolis and The Warp.

Clark believed the 1990s were the 1960s upside-down (9 being an upside-down 6). He advocated a new form of hippie—the "Zippie"—who would balance the "techno right brain" with the "hippy left brain", embracing nature, peace and love, as well as technology. In 1989, he and Marcus Pennell organised the first Zippie Picnic on Hampstead Heath in London. Zippie Picnics continue to this day.

Clark staged many pranks, particularly against the government of Margaret Thatcher and then John Major. He opposed the Poll Tax and later Criminal Justice Bill.

Also in 1989, the EPi team were joined by northern graphic designers the Scooby Doobies who brought with them a love of rave culture. This led to the creation of Evolution magazine in 1990, and regular small underground parties which laid the way for the launch of the Megatripolis nightclub in 1993.

Fraser was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2008.

From the archived website of Fraser Clark:

Megatripolis was an innovative, underground London nightclub created by Encyclopaedia Psychedelica editor and founder of the Zippie movement, Fraser Clark, together with a great many others. The club combined New Age ideology with Rave culture to create a vibrant, festival-like atmosphere presenting a wide variety of cross-cultural ideas and experiences. Club nights ran regularly from 1993 until 1996, and from then intermittently until 2001, being the focus of much of the Zippie movement. The club and its related activities also helped to popularize ideas such as cyberculture and the Internet between those years.

History & Venues

The club first started at The Marquee in Charing Cross Road as a collaboration with Tribal Energy in June 1993 with Terrence McKenna's opening lecture and DJs Nik Sequenci and resident DJ and co founder Jez Turner. A disagreement between the Tribal Energy and Megatripolis crews led to the latter being thrown out of the venue eight weeks later. After a practice run at the Stanstead Tree Party in September 1993 they consolidated into a bigger crew with much bigger ideas. In October 1993, the cathedral-like arches and winding passages of the Heaven nightclub under Charing Cross Station became home to Megatripolis. Heaven was London's original gay-only nightclub, but had run non-gay (known as Pyramid) nights for many years.

The Megatripolis 'Festival in a box' on Thursday nights attracted a diverse patronage from a wide age range, many of whom would not otherwise have considered going clubbing. By early 1994 it had also taken over the adjoining Sound Shaft nightclub and turned it into an ambient space with frequent all-night sets by Mixmaster Morris on the club's fourth separate sound stage. Megatripolis also put on several large parties at Bagley's in Kings Cross and escalated its political agenda by renting an armoured car for the Criminal Justice Bill protest rally in July 1994.

The club ran until New Year 1995 when internal pressures split it apart. It continued with a diminished agenda on an underground basis until October 24th 1996. A UK tour and two shows in Athens took place in spring / summer 1996. A 3-CD album representing the club was released in July 1996 featuring mixes by DJ regulars and completely packaged on paper made entirely from hemp. All production materials owned by the club were distributed amongst it's crew members. At a court case in London in June 1998 brought by Clark remaining rights to the name "megatripolis" were given to Clark. A single Megatripolis event organised by Fraser Clark took place at Heaven in May 2000.

Culture & Events

Megatripolis proved popular, although some reporting of it suggested a dichotomy between an avowed downplay of psychedelic substances and perceptions of substance use by some club-goers. In any event, the club provided a meeting place of like-minded people and served as a platform for social awareness and activism as well as more traditional nightclub fare.

Typical evenings combined lectures and workshops with live musical performances and DJing playing mostly progressive house accompanied by video imagery and live theatre. Visits from speakers such as Allen Ginsberg, Terence McKenna, George Monbiot, Howard Marks and Ram Dass were common, as well as from guest DJs including Colin Dale, Alex Paterson, Paul Oakenfold, Andrew Weatherall and Mr C with resident DJs Marco Arnaldi, Darius, Richard Grey and Nik Sequenci. Atmospheric music combined with sound effects was often played along to films in the "chill-out rooms" set apart from the dance floors.

Further to the club's festival theme, the usual security staff were supplemented by fluorescent jacket-clad "minders"; new-age style stalls occupied the central hallway selling non-alcoholic energy drinks, body jewellery, alternative "small press" comics and magazines (such as the short-lived, but influential Head Magazine), as well as T-shirts and other clothing.

Also notable were early demonstrations of the World Wide Web at a time when most patrons were just beginning to be aware of what was then termed cyberculture, something seen as an important, if not defining, part of the Zippie future. Underground bulletin boards such as London's pHreak hosted live "cyber events" from the club. In what was seen as very progressive at the time, a live video interview with Arthur C Clarke was conducted via satellite from his home in Sri Lanka and Timothy Leary was transmitted via isdn for a video interview direct from his home in the Los Angeles hills into the club (he had been banned by the British government from entering the UK in person). A lecture by His Holiness the Dalai Lama was also broadcast at the club from the Barbican centre.

Environmental issues were an important part of the club's make-up with anti-road protests advertised on its noticeboards, hemp fashion shows, environmental debates and pedal-bike sound-systems playing on a regular basis..

Megatripolis West

An offshoot of the club was started by Fraser Clark and others, in San Francisco in late 1994. It ran for five consecutive weeks before closing.

The sixth and final night of the club was a "launch rave" hosted by Ronin Press for Timothy Leary's book Chaos And Cyber Culture. In true "illegal UK rave" tradition, patrons were given the event's location at a nearby burger joint. Leary jammed and performed jazz skat with famous Bay Area musician Maruga. He was later kidnapped by the Zippie Soundsystem and forced to release a statement condemning the UK Prime Minister John Major and the Criminal Justice Bill, which famously banned outdoor parties with music that included an "emission of a succession of repetitive beats".

Leary exerted a powerful influence over the philosophy of the club and the Zippie movement overall. An indication of this can be found in the introduction to his posthumous book The Fugitive Philosopher (Ronin Press, September 2007) written by Fraser Clark. The original title of the piece, published in Clark's online magazine the UP!, was Timothy Leary Was A Saint Who Will Be Remembered & Celebrated Long After Jesus, Mohamed and Elvis Are Forgotten Megatripolis Reunion Benefit for Fraser Clark.

In 2008 Fraser Clark announced that he had inoperable liver cancer and a farewell Megatripolis was held at Heaven on 13 November. He died on 21 January 2009.

She Is A Shaman | Full Ayahuasca Documentary (2024)

An Ayahuasca shaman balances hallucinatory rituals and her unusual daily life in this meditative documentary that explores the difference between the idolized shamanic figure and who they really are.

MYCO-COSMOS - Paul Stamets and Laraaji

MYCO Cosmos - A Journey Through Matter and Space

A guided exploration of biology, space travel and the interconnected universe led by famed mycologist Paul Stamets, with live accompaniment by new age musical legend Laraaji, which took place Nov. 4, 2017, at Los Angeles State Historic Park. Conceived and produced as part of an ongoing mycelial exploration between Fathomers, an LA-based creative research institute, and artist Phil Ross.

Yagé is Our Life - Documentary

Yagé is Our Life is a documentary film captured in the Putumayo region of Colombia. For centuries the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon have been using yagé (sometimes known as ayahuasca) for the health, social cohesion and spiritual guidance of their communities. Yagé is rich in the potent psychedelic substance DMT and for these indigenous groups it is sacred, allowing them access to ancient wisdom and the spirits of nature. In their ceremonies, the taitas or traditional doctors use yagé to treat their patients for physical and emotional illnesses and as a guide for making decisions.


The communities are now facing many new threats to their traditional way of life. Primarily, the commercialisation of their yagé medicine and foreign pressures exerted on their homelands by industrialised civilisation. This film gives indigenous leaders from the region a platform to discuss these issues and the importance of yagé as a living tradition in their communities.


Winner of the 'Best International Short Film' at the Respect Human Rights Film Festival, Belfast, 2017.

AYAHUASCA documentary ! full movie ! HEAVEN EARTH I 2008

HEAVEN EARTH explores the practice and commercialization of amazonian ayahuasca-shamanism in Iquitos. A critical look on ayahuasca-shamanism-culture in Iquitos.

SYNOPSIS
The film displays all day activities of Percy, a peruvian healer and another western ayahuasquero, named Ron. Both live near Iquitos and work with ayahuasca.

Participants of ayahuasca ceremonies, touroperators and --guides, as well as western visionquesters recount episodes of their journeys and internal imagery. A growing global pop cultural phenomenon, swinging between psychotherapeutic healing procedure and spiritual sell-out.

Mestizo- and gringo herbalists recount episodes of daily life and their career histories. Amazonian tourists and western visionseekers report about interior spaces, motifs and passages of their journeys.

Representatives of the local tourism industry talk about guided tours, the psychoactive drink ayahuasca, vanishing indigenous cultures, spiritual sellout triggered by "experience consumerism" and also discuss excursions into the surrounding rainforest of a jungle metropole.

Iquitos - a city affected by the change of time, fluctuating between tradition and modernity - a locus of cultural transition facing the impact of globalization and its sequences.

Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations (Full Movie) HD

Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations is an experimental documentary about the chaos at La Chorrera, the imagination, time, the Logos, belief, hope, madness, and doubt. Created by Peter Bergmann, this project is an expansion of ideas first presented in "The Transcendental Object At The End Of Time".

In 1971, Terence McKenna, along with his brother Dennis and three other companions, ventured by plane, boat, and foot to the paradisical Colombian mission town of La Chorrera, where they hoped to encounter the elusive psychedelic oo-koo-hé. Fate would have it otherwise. Their attention soon turned to the large numbers of Stropharia Cubensis that they lucked upon, and before long, Terence and especially Dennis were formulating the psychopharmacological "experiment at La Chorrera" which would eventually give rise to Terence's expanded Jungian notion of the UFO as human oversoul, and his I Ching based TimeWave Theory which holds, among other things, that history as we know it is accelerating and, in fact, will come to a major concrescence.

Based on the underground classic book and talking book 'True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise', this tale of alchemical understanding is a deep dive into the young minds of the McKenna brothers, and an effort to provide some kind of visual aid and emotional center to a much larger story, with details scattered through hundreds of talks. Featuring unearthed photos and notebook pages which have never been seen by the public since generated in 1971.

Special Thanks to Dennis McKenna, Klea McKenna, Kathleen Harrison and Stephanie Schmitz, since their contributions of documents, and approval were crucial in making this film a reality.

Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris - The Psychedelic State (two videos)

Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris - Psilocybin and the Psychedelic State from Matt Faw on Vimeo.
New research on Psilocybin and how psychedelics could be used in therapy to help with depression, addiction, and other problems of rigid thought patterns. Interview shot as part of forthcoming 3D Consciousness documentary.

Filmmaker: Matt Faw
Backgrounds videos are downloaded from YouTube, copyright of their prospective creators. Footage used for previsualization only and will be replaced.


New research using psychedelic drugs to understand the brain could lead to new treatments for mental disorders such as depression. Dr Robin Carhart-Harris will describe his research with these unusual compounds, which includes the first ever functional brain imaging studies with LSD and magic mushrooms. This talk was recorded at Imperial Festival 2015

Website for the research: http://psychedelicscience.org.uk/

The Substance

The Substance - Albert Hofmann's LSD Part I by OriginalGreenThumb
By coincidence rather then by design the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann made a sensational discovery in the spring of 1943. He realized that he is dealing with a powerful molecule that will have an impact not only on the scientific world. THE SUBSTANCE - is an investigation into our troubled relation with LSD. Told from its beginnings until today.

The Secret Life of Plants (Full Film)

Rare documentary from 1979 taken from the book of the same name. Even on the lower levels of life, there is a profound consciousness or awareness that bonds all things together. A fascinating account of the physical, emotional, and spiritual relations between plants and man. Essentially, the subject of the film is the idea that plants may be sentient, despite their lack of a nervous system and a brain. This sentience is observed primarily through changes in the plant's conductivity, as through a polygraph, as pioneered by Cleve Backster. The book also contains a summary of Goethe's theory of plant metamorphosis.

I would suggest also turning the sound down and listening to music while watching the images, such as the 1997 classix Fat of the Land by Prodigy

Shine on Star Children!! We are not alone.

Closer

I can teach you
A secret geometry
Beyond skin where
Everythis is a version
Of everythat, where
We live and lie
Beside ourselves,
And beyond what
Is called love,
That joins the stars
With our shadows,
Where desire spreads,
Light becomes truth.

Rave New World (1994)

EQUINOX examines the rave experience from the technological point of view; the music, the lighting, the new video technology and the neuroscience of ecstasy, the drug that is an integral part of the rave scene. A technological view of the rave scene. Looks at American research on the longterm effects of ecstasy (MDMA) on the brain neurotransmitter serotonin. Dr Charles Grob of UCLA studies its use in therapy. Alexander Shulgin, the `father of ecstasy' creates psychoactive drugs in his garden-shed lab. Charts the evolution of rave and its technology. Moves from 3000 teenagers in an aircraft hangar in Kent, via an Orbital show in Amsterdam to 1000 techno-hippies in the Nevada desert. Examines the science and technology of the rave experience, considering the effects of the music, the lighting, new video technology and the neuroscience of the drug ecstasy. Features Dr. Charles Grob of UCLA, Alexander Shulgin, a pharmacologist, and ambient techno musicians the Future Sound of London.

LSD: The Beyond Within (1986)

This refreshingly frank and impartial study of the discovery and development of the notorious hallucinogenic drug is notably free of moral judgmental, and features contributions from such legendary heroes of psychedelia as Albert Hoffman - the Swiss scientist who discovered the drug - Aldous Huxley - author of 'The Doors of Perception' - Ken Kesey - author of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Alex Trocchi: A Life in Pieces

This biography attempts to portray the many sides to Alexander Trocchi's personality through the words and memories of some of those who interacted with Trocchi during his lifetime. Contributors range from Patti Smith to Edwin Morgan, William Burroughs to Irvine Welsh, Leonard Cohen to Terry Southern, Jane Lougee Bryant to Allen Ginsberg, Ned Polsky to Marianne Faithful, Greil Marcus to Kit Lambert. Combined with these pieces are extracts taken from key essays by the man himself, including "Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds" and "Cain's Film" and previously unpublished interviews. Born in Glasgow in 1925, Alexander Trocchi had by the time of his death in 1984, cut a colourful swathe through many of the important post-war cultural movements both in Europe and America. A controversial figure, he has been variously described as a junkie, visionary, pimp, Scottish beat, literary outlaw, pornographer, philosopher, underground organizer and antique-book collector.

My scow is tied up in Flushing, NY, alongside the landing stage of the Mac Asphalt and Construction Corporation. It is now just after five in the afternoon. Today at this time it is still afternoon, and the sun, striking the cinderblocks of the main building of the works has turned them pink. The motor cranes and the decks of the other scows tied up round about are deserted.
Half an hour ago I gave myself a fix.
So begins Cain's Book, Alexander Trocchi's incredible novel of existential dread. Young Adam, its predecessor, is better known, but the latter is the "Scottish Beat's" classic.
Asked to name the best existential literature, most of us would probably say Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre or Franz Kafka. But Cain's Book actually takes the reader one step further into the philosophical world of existential angst than any of them. It positively drowns us in a word of unremitting absurdity and meaninglessness.
A roman à clef, Cain's Book details the life of one Joe Nechhi, a Glaswegian heroin addict living and working on a scow in New York's Hudson harbor. It is a book almost entirely devoid of plot: Nechhi occasionally details trips into the city to score heroin, recollects his childhood in Glasgow, or talks of his attempts to write a book. What is incredible about the book is its unrelenting bleakness, and the sheer poetic quality of Trocchi's writing.
Heroin for Trocchi, as Remainder author Tom McCarthy noted in a lecture on Cain's Book recently, "is a moveable void: taking that void around the city with him, in him, he ensures that he inhabits negative space constantly. This is his poetic project and it's also the way his whole perception system works at its most basic level (the two are the same)."
In real life, Trocchi seemed very glad to cut himself off from his peers, saying that his only concerns as a writer were "sodomy and lesbianism", that those were the only interesting subjects in the previous 20 years of Scottish writing and that "I have written it all."
Sadly, Cain's Book was his last. As the 60s gave way to the 70s, Trocchi's addiction to heroin took its toll and his talent lay pretty much squandered. The stories of his wild and tragic life are infamous and extensively documented in many of the leading "swinging 60s" biographies (Marianne Faithfull's account of doing drugs with Trocchi is one of the best). Despite his addictions, and his sad death at the age of 59, Trocchi left us some of the bleakest, most beautiful writing to come out of the 60s.
In Cain's Book the writing is all - the words ebb and flow like the inky blackness of the Hudson River. Trocchi's descriptive powers are mesmerising: one barely even notices the lack of narrative drive until after the book has been put down.
His other books includes some interesting pseudonymous pornography for the Olympia Press. (Titles like Helen and Desire, Sappho of Lesbos and White Thighs deliver their smut with a Sadean political edge.) Young Adam, of course, was turned into a successful film starring Ewan McGregor, and helped to raise the author's public perception a little. But it's Cain's book that best fulfils Trocchi's hopes for "the invisible insurrection of a thousand minds".

Jungle Trip - Ayahuasca

Documentary for Channel 4 To The Ends of The Earth. Amateur ethnobotanist
Piers Gibbon gets drawn into the world of Shamans and the hallucinogenic
Ayahuasca drug. Filmed in Peru !