A 51-page, non-fiction book about the psychedelic use of the Mexican mint, salvia divinorum. The book contains a prologue, in which the author summarizes the modern history of salvia divinorum's use in Mexico and North America. The author specifically cites two of the earliest literature sources on the psychedelic use of salvia divinorum, Valdez, Dias, and Paul (1982), and Kreig (1966).
Contents
The prologue describes some of the author's political and religious views, as well as his personal experience with certain herbal intoxicants, such as amanita muscaria and the ergot fungus he picked from a friend's rye crop; as well as his lack of experience with other herbal intoxicants, such as ayahuasca and ibogaine. The prologue uses a serif, Courier typeface.
The body of the manuscript uses a san serif, Arial or Verdana typeface. It is written in diary format, using data sub headings followed by paragraphs in which direct use experiences are described. These include settings and subjective experience descriptions written in prose form. Throughout the manuscript there are illustrations presumably drawn by the author in colored ink on lined paper, as in a spiral bound notebook. Some illustrations are photographic, as in the mirror illustration, and some appear to be computer generated graphics, as in the "cosmic network". There are minor prose examples in some of the illustrations, and there is one poem about a bumblebee pollinating a jewel weed.
Title: Confessions of a Salvia Sorcerer
The title describes the diary-style narration of a person who practices sorcery using salvia divinorum, or, the "diviner's sage".
Author
The author name is stated as Brother Harmonius, who claims to be a Gnostic monk. No other information, besides incidental autobiographical information is known.
Plot
The book is written in journal or diary form, and purports to be a self-written bioassay of the spirituality and the psychological effects obtained from smoking the leaves of salvia divinorum. It is written in the tradition of other bioassayers such as Alexander Shulgin's PiHKAL and Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, but with aggressively active engagements in the psychedelic environment. The author claims to use salvia to negotiate with and control psychic entities, which he refers to as "Totem Pole People".
Publication Date
The book does not contain a publication date. The title page says, "written in this Year 10 of Era Aquaria". The book does contain other referential information, however. It mentions the then owner of the entheogen.com website by name, with respect to the year 1997. It also mentions a correspondence with Owsley Stanley, who purportedly critiqued a design of a bear on a website Brother Harmonius claims to have built in 1998. Two paragraphs later, the author writes, "That’s where salvia was 10 years ago." Therefore, it is reasonable to place the year in which the book was written as 2007 or 2008.
Publication Type
There does not seem to be any printed publication of the book, which occurs commonly as a PDF ebook. Although the publication form can only be found as an ebook, it was clearly written at least in part on lined paper, as the manuscript contains several ink-drawn on lined notebook paper images, occurring inline with the text and in the appendix.