Spirit Plant Medicine Conference: Books

 Mycelium Running is a groundbreaking manual for saving the world through mushroom cultivation. The science goes like this: fine filaments of cells called mycelium, the fruit of which are mushrooms, already cover large areas of land around the world.

“If you are going to buy one book on psilocybin mushrooms, get this one. It is up to date, comprehensive, and a beautiful object in itself. There are excellent photographs, and detailed descriptions of the many species (several of them new, including the extremely potent psilocybe azurescens).

Kava, Piper Methysticum, is the most effective relaxing and stress-relieving plant in all of nature. This book is the tale of plant researcher Chris Kilham's investigations into this plant and his far-ranging explorations deep in the South Pacific in search of a source of kava.

This collection of essays traces Western civilization’s struggle to interpret and understand the ancient knowledge of cultures that revere magic men and women—individuals with the power to summon and communicate with spirits.

In the Amazon, shamans do not talk about psychotropic plants in terms of hallucinogens but as tools for communicating with other life-forms. Ayahuasca, for example, is first and foremost a means of breaking down the barrier that separates humans from other species, allowing us to communicate with them.

Here, the author of Acid Dreams (which tells a similarly fascinating social history of LSD) tells the great American pot story—a panoramic, character-driven saga that examines the medical, recreational, scientific, and economic dimensions of the world’s most controversial—and revered, and vilified—plant