There is a code here - like that of Morse or the genetic code...All of this is a language calling to be deciphered. Shanon, Charting The Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience

What are psychedelics? Psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond coined the term in 1956 in order to amplify mescaline and LSD's capacities to actualize or "manifest" mind, offering it as at once a corrective to the older non sequitur "psychotomimetic" and a counter point to Huxley's putatively "too beautiful" "phanerothyme." The rhetorical history of these compounds - the description and management of the states linked to them, the composition of their recipes and means of propagation - maps a series of corrections, disputations and differentiations linked to the essentially variable and often powerful effects of tryptamines and phenethylamines. This course will look closely at the history of scientific attempts to study these molecules, focusing on the rhetorical forms researchers used to articulate dynamically ineffable symptoms and make them available to the repetitions and insights of technoscientific investigation.

September 8 Distributed Consciousness, Sexual Selection, and the Rhetoric of Science: Merlin Donald, Darwin, Darwin, Latour