Synopses & Reviews
Erik Davis is a unique writer with a devoted following. His breakthrough work, "Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information" (Harmony, 1998; Five Star paperback, 2005), was both successful and widely influential, and was followed by the acclaimed "The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape" (Chronicle, 2006). "Nomad Codes" collects his major essays and journalistic work of the last decade, many of them drawn from the Village Voice, Wired, Salon, and Slate. Essay subjects include: H.P. Lovecraft, "The Technofreak Legacy of Golden Goa," Tantric psychedelia, the Klingon language, "UFO Epistemology," Peter Lamborn Wilson, and "My Date with a Burmese Tranvestite Spirit Medium."
Review
"Erik Davis is an astute guide through the heavens and hells where cyber-reality, pop culture, and spiritual impulses arm wrestle each other for dominance." Jay Kinney, author of
The Masonic Myth and the Inner WestSynopsis
In these wide-ranging essays, Erik Davis explores the codes spiritual, cultural, and embodied that people use to escape the limitations of their lives and enrich their experience of the world. These include Asian religious traditions and West African trickster gods, Western occult and esoteric lore, postmodern theory and psychedelic science, as well as festival scenes such as Burning Man. Whether his subject is collage art or the "magickal realism" of H. P. Lovecraft, Davis writes with keen yet skeptical sympathy, intellectual subtlety and wit, and unbridled curiosity. The common thread running through these pieces is what Davis calls "modern esoterica," which he describes as a no-mans-land located somewhere between anthropology and mystical pulp, between the zendo and the metal club, between cultural criticism and extraordinary experience. Such an ambiguous and startling landscape demands that the intrepid adventurer shed any territorial claims and go nomad.
About the Author
Erik Davis is the author of three other book, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, Led Zeppelin IV, and The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape. He lives in San Francisco.