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2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl By Daniel Pinchbeck ( Tarcher )
Release Date: 2006-05-04
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List Price: $26.95
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Product Description
Cross James Merrill, H. P. Lovecraft, and Carlos Castaneda -each imbued with a twenty-first-century aptitude for quantum theory and existential psychology-and you get the voice of Daniel Pinchbeck. And yet, nothing quite prepares us for the lucidity, rationale, and informed audacity of this seeker, skeptic, and cartographer of hidden realms.
Throughout the 1990s, Pinchbeck had been a member of New York's literary select. He wrote for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Harper's Bazaar. His first book, Breaking Open the Head, was heralded as the most significant on psychedelic experimentation since the work of Terence McKenna.
But slowly something happened: Rather than writing from a journalistic remove, Pinchbeck-his literary powers at their peak-began to participate in the shamanic and metaphysical belief systems he was encountering. As his psyche and body opened to new experience, disparate threads and occurrences made sense like never before: Humanity, every sign pointed, is precariously balanced between greater self-potential and environmental disaster. The Mayan calendar's "end date" of 2012 seems to define our present age: It heralds the end of one way of existence and the return of another, in which the serpent god Quetzalcoatl reigns anew, bringing with him an unimaginably ancient-yet, to us, wholly new-way of living.
A result not just of study but also of participation, 2012 tells the tale of a single man in whose trials we ultimately recognize our own hopes and anxieties about modern life.
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 Fascinating Read! ( robinsrichards )
This is probably the best book I've read on the topic of 2012. I couldn't put it down! Definitely worth purchasing. Much more interesting than "Breaking Open The Head."
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 It's not 2012. It is 1960 ( edmaluf )
I am not here to tell you if this is a good or a bad book. You have many other reviews for that. I am here to tell you only one thing: if you want to read about the year 2012 and all the events that might happen on this year, THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT BOOK. The author keeps telling you about his own experiences with this or that drug, in this or that country. So, for 2012 information, look somewhere else.
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 prophecy and polypharmacy ( mweddle )
Early in this psychogenic memoir Daniel Pinchbeck tells us his mother dated Jack Kerouac. He then takes us on an 'On the Road' on steroids, or rather, on LSD, channeling the beat poet in addition to the Aztec serpent deity. But unlike 'On the Road', this is no scroll written in three weeks. The 400 page memoir takes us back and forth across four continents with an impressive collection of hallucinogenic polypharmacy. One major premise sees the world as waking dream. Human consciousness did not evolve, but is part of a greater consciousness that creates and maintains the universe. The right drugs can lift the veil, showing us, as in the Wizard of Oz, what's behind the curtain. The book was recommended to me by my local bookseller, an astronomer in a previous career, and I enjoyed it. But `2012' is not really a book about the Maya or their cosmic vision.
The book is about inter-dimensional beings making crop circles in southern England, reincarnated Indian potentates, the limitations of monogamous sexuality, and the possibility of a new consciousness that would end our obsession with rationality and herald a new age. None of this is absolutely provable, precisely because we create our own universe. Skeptics find hoaxes, true believers find miracles, and the undecided find only conflicting truths, one negating the other. Daniel Pinchbeck doesn't hide his own skepticism, and he cringes at times describing his visions while holding nothing back. Throughout the book, while taking hallucinogenic drugs, Daniel reminds us that he just might be hallucinating.
In `2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl,' the serpent deity speaks through the author and tells us that Daniel Pinchbeck is "the vehicle of my return." If I was one of the millions of living modern Maya, I might object to his use of my sacred cosmic vision to market a memoir. But I found the book both interesting and enjoyable. Daniel's willingness to use his body as a human test-tube was nothing short of heroic. I've practiced medicine for twenty years and have never heard of the drugs he comes across. It's a look from inside a subculture I know little about. I will probably never meet Daniel Pinchbeck in this life, but if I ever see him in a dream, I'm getting a six-pack and taking him to a mountaintop. Please don't wake me up. I'll be having a truly great conversation.
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Self importance defined... ( m_ras@earthlink.net )
Can this guy get over himself? I couldn't finish this book for two reasons.
1) Has very little to do with 2012...well, at least in the first half at which point I was so disinterested that I gave up.
2) Self-important drivel about psychedelic adventures that really don't mean anything to me.
While I did find his rants about his Psilocybin and LSD adventures interesting, it bought the book expecting more thoughts on 2012. Granted, I gave up after half way through, but as others have mentioned, the seemingly randomness of the story telling was off putting. Plus, the use of 'over complicated' language made me feel that if I didn't understand what he was talking about, I was stupid.
He is certainly a very smart guy...the other problem is that he has no problem promoting that fact. Get over yourself buddy....
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Excellent compendium of ideas. ( cjdl )
I liked and enjoyed this book very much even though it might have been a collection of essays/articles, some previously published in various magazines.
Sometimes you get the impression, as some reviewers have noted, that there are digressions between some of the subjects under discussion, but I believe that the writer is giving some personal insights--no matter how irreal or virtual they might have been-- which belongs to his private, intimate experiences offering an structure of his vision and perspective of the world he, and whether we like it or not, all of us live in, although sometimes I think too many do not seem to be living on this planet.
The prose is straightforward but, to me, on many instances exquisite. On page 388 he reaches his overall conclusion and from pages 392-394 he uses one of his extensive reference authors and his own criteria based on facts that we all can see, but many seem not to take into consideration for anything, to predict what is happening almost three years after he published this book,that is: at present time.
I find this book an excellent read.
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