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Comment by programmarchy | Hacker News Reader

I'm also familiar with Jan's work and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of mind control and psychedelics. He's uncovered a lot of interesting history. It has been interesting to see Jan's development from being pro-psychedelics (e.g. his film Pharmacratic Inquisition) to his stance today which place psychedelics and mysticism mostly in the realm of mind control tools. To say the least, there are some very bizarre connections between military intelligence and the formation of the "counter culture". And seemingly, this is nothing new, with these types of links going back to at least classical civilization with Eleusinian cult initiations.

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Does that mean he no longer agrees with his findings in "The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity" and "The Pharmacratic Inquisition"? Which later works are you referred to? Because I wouldn't even define him or Andrew Rutajit as necessarily "pro psychedelics" even if you can read between the lines that they used psychedelics that's never a major point in either of these works. Their works are not even remotely some kind of commercial for psychedelics. The documentary "The Pharmacratic Inquisition", of which one can find a LQ version on YouTube, is a complimentary work to the book which has a foreword by Jordan Maxwell (aka Russell Pine, a jehova witness), a fraud from whom Irvin has distanced himself [1].

[1] http://www.esotericonline.net/forum/topics/jordan-maxwell-ma...

Can you elaborate on those connections? My cursory googling surfaced some thread-bare conspiracy theories, but nothing of substance to follow-up on.

I recommend reading “Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond“

It covers MKUltra’s LSD experiments.

I suggest you look at Irvin's brain [0], which contains a lot of the connections. Red items are confirmed, documented CIA, yellow is "highly likely but not 100% confirmed".

[0] https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6FBA86B0-0C57-9FCA-5CF9...

Confirmed by whom? Which source? I went to the entry about "Robert Anton Wilson" and I didn't see any quotes to references that he is linked to the CIA. It is also not mentioned on his Wikipedia page AFAICT.

That R. Gordon Wasson was part of the US government doesn't surprise me. That fellow thoroughly grilled John Marco Allegro with all kind of fallacies which are thoroughly debunked in Irvin's "The Holy Mushroom".

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