Deathpower

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically reorients approaches toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactions with local religious practice and, by extension, reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself. Through a vivid study of contemporary Cambodian Buddhist funeral rites, he reveals the powerfully integrative role monks play as they care for the dead and negotiate the interplay of non-Buddhist spirits and formal Buddhist customs. Buddhist monks perform funeral rituals rooted in the embodied practices of Khmer rice farmers and the social hierarchies of Khmer culture. The monks' realization of death underwrites key components of the Cambodian social imagination: the distinction between wild death and celibate life, the forest and the field, and moral and immoral forms of power. By connecting the performative aspects of Buddhist death rituals to Cambodian history and everyday life, Davis undermines the theory that Buddhism and rural belief systems necessarily oppose each other. Instead, he shows Cambodian Buddhism to be a robust tradition with ethical and popular components extending throughout Khmer society.

Deathpower: Buddhism's Ritual Imagination in Cambodia

History

Davis, Erik

Asia

Columbia University Press

A richly illustrated exploration of the history, art, and design of printed LSD blotter tabs.\nBlotter is the first comprehensive written account of the history, art, and design of LSD blotter paper, the iconic drug delivery device that will perhaps forever be linked to underground psychedelic culture and contemporary street art. Created in collaboration with Mark McCloud’s Institute of Illegal Images, the world’s largest archive of blotter art, Davis’s boldly illustrated exhibition treats his outsider subject with the serious, art-historical respect it deserves, while also staying true to the sense of play, irreverence, and adventure inherent in psychedelic exploration.\nDavis weaves together two main stories: first, the largely unknown history of blotter paper’s development in the 1960s and its later flowering in the 1970s and 1980s; and second, the story of how San Francisco artist, professor, and “freak” McCloud began collecting blotter and ultimately became embroiled with the LSD trade. The book closes with a unique discussion of the market for “vanity blotter”—more recent perforated papers produced as collectible art objects never meant to be dipped in LSD. While vanity blotters are intimately related to the underground blotters of the LSD trade, they effectively open up their own visual world. As the ultimate document of this ephemeral artform, Blotter represents an exceptional contribution to the scholarship of art and psychedelics that will entertain older readers with lysergic nostalgia and younger readers with its image-driven journey through a colorful and scandalous corner of psychedelic lore.

Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium

Religion & Spirituality

The MIT Press

Exploring the mystical impulses behind our obsession with information technology, TechGnosis presents a fascinating and passionately original perspective on technoculture. Today we often assume that the triumph of technological rationality has condemned the spiritual imagination to the trash heap of history. But as Erik Davis explains, religious impulses and magical dreams permeate the history of technology, and especially information technology. Ranging from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to the Internet, Davis peels away the utilitarian shell of technology to reveal the mystical and millennialist fervor that attends each new communications breakthrough. As he unveils the hidden history of technomysticism, Davis shows how the religious imagination continues to feed the utopian dreams, apocalyptic visions, digital phantasms, and alien obsessions that populate today's technological unconscious. From shamanism to alchemy, evangelism to Buddhism, TechGnosis probes our virtual future through the visionary lenses of the past. In these pages, Davis offers a lucid, playful, and astonishingly erudite journey through our hyper-mediated environment. Anyone grappling with the morphing boundaries and terminal speed of our present moment will want to take the ride.

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

Computers & Technology

Networking & Cloud Computing

Harmony

Exploring the mystical impulses behind our obsession with information technology, TechGnosis presents a fascinating and passionately original perspective on technoculture. Today we often assume that the triumph of technological rationality has condemned the spiritual imagination to the trash heap of history. But as Erik Davis explains, religious impulses and magical dreams permeate the history of technology. Ranging from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to the Internet, David peels away the utilitarian shell of technology to reveal the mystical and millennialist fervor that attends each new communications breakthrough. As he unveils the hidden history of techno-mysticism, Davis shows how the religious imagination continues to feed the utopian dreams, apocalyptic visions, and alien obsessions that populate today's technological unconscious. In these pages, Davis offers a lucid, playful, and astonishingly erudite journey through our hyper-mediated environment. Anyone grappling with the morphing boundaries and terminal speed of our present moment will want to take the ride.

Three Rivers Press

In this wickedly entertaining and thoroughly informed homage to one of rock music’s towering pinnacles, Erik Davis investigates the magic—black or otherwise—that surrounds this album. Carefully peeling the layers from each song, Davis reveals their dark and often mystical roots—and leaves the reader to decide whether [FOUR SYMBOLS] is some form of occult induction or just an inspired, brilliantly played rock album.Excerpt:Stripping Led Zeppelin’s famous name off the fourth record was an almost petulant attempt to let their Great Work symbolically stand on its own two feet. But the wordless jacket also lent the album charisma. Fans hunted for hidden meanings, or, in failing to find them, sensed a strange reflection of their own mute refusal to communicate with the outside world. This helped to create one of the supreme paradoxes of rock history: an esoteric megahit, a blockbuster arcanum. Stripped of words and numbers, the album no longer referred to anything but itself: a concrete talisman that drew you into its world, into the frame. All the stopgap titles we throw at the thing are lame: Led Zeppelin IV, [Untitled], Runes, Zoso, Four Symbols. In an almost Lovecraftian sense, the album was nameless, a thing from beyond, charged with manna. And yet this uncanny fetish was about as easy to buy as a jockstrap.

Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV

Arts & Photography

Music

Continuum

Looking for answers to life, the universe, or nearly anything? Here they are--mapped beautifully and expressed concisely. Grasp this text! It will walk you through four domains of existence, seven chakras, seven powers, seven habits, and seven virtues. It then reveals five functions of a healthy mind, four aspects of human action, four stages and seasons, four dimensions of a robust culture, and four requirements of a healthy society. Best of all, it will summarize this wisdom in a unique "map/mandala" of life, the universe, and nearly anything.

Map of Meaning: A Guide to Well-being

Independently published

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 Davis explores the codes (spiritual, cultural and embodied) people use to escape the limitation of their lives and enrich their experience of the world, from Asian religious traditions and West African trickster gods to Western occult and esoteric lore, to media technology and psychedelic science. Whether his subject is transvestite Burmese spirit mediums or Ufology, tripster king Terence McKenna or dub maestro Lee Perry, Davis writes with keen yet skeptical sympathy, intellectual subtlety and wit, and unbridled curiosity.

Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Large Print 16pt)

ReadHowYouWant

How does our fascination with technology intersect with the religious imagination? In TechGnosis—a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword—Erik Davis argues that while the realms of the digital and the spiritual may seem worlds apart, esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated (and sometimes inspired) technological communication. Davis uncovers startling connections between such seemingly disparate topics as electricity and alchemy; online roleplaying games and religious and occult practices; virtual reality and gnostic mythology; programming languages and Kabbalah. The final chapters address the apocalyptic dreams that haunt technology, providing vital historical context as well as new ways to think about a future defined by the mutant intermingling of mind and machine, nightmare and fantasy.

Computer Science

North Atlantic Books

“A most informative account of a culture whose secular concerns continue to collide with their supernatural flip-side.”—Voice Literary Supplement
In this dazzling book, writer and cyber guru Erik Davis demonstrates how religious imagination, magical dreams and millennialist fervor have always permeated the story of technology. Through shamanism to Gnosticism, voodoo to alchemy, Buddhism to evangelism, TechGnosis peels away the rational shell of infotech to reveal the utopian dreams, alien obsessions and apocalyptic visions that populate the ongoing digital revolution.
Erik Davis’ work has appeared in Wired, The Village Voice and Gnosis, and he has lectured internationally on technoculture and new forms of religion. He is a fifth-generation Californian who currently lives in San Francisco.

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information

Five Star

Curated by Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things explores the theme of “techno-animism,” whereby the inanimate comes to life through technology. Leckey juxtaposes contemporary art with machines, archeological objects and historical documents.

The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things: Mark Leckey Curates

Bovey, Alixe

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Hayward Gallery Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Davis, Erik. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Davis, Erik

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Davis, Erik. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Deathpower: Buddhism's Ritual Imagination in Cambodia

Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV

Map of Meaning: A Guide to Well-being

Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Large Print 16pt)

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information

The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things: Mark Leckey Curates