Erik Davis (www.techgnosis.com) is an author, award-winning journalist, and scholar based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, psychedelics, and the popular imagination. He is the author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, co-published by MIT Press and Strange Attractor, and recently on audiobook. He also wrote Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. For a decade, he explored the “cultures of consciousness” on his weekly podcast Expanding Mind, and currently writes the online publication The Burning Shore at erikdavis.substack.com. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and later earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University. His forthcoming book is a history and analysis of LSD blotter art.