Mike Jay occupies a special niche in the ever-expanding universe of psychedelic literature: He consistently produces well-written, incisive, and accurate histories and analyses of human interaction with mind-expanding plants, fungi, and even animals. Along the way, he also has penned pieces on the history of asylums, anatomy, and books bound in human skin. In his newest book, Psychonauts, he casts his net still wider, endeavoring to explain how experimentation with psychoactive drugs by a wide and diverse array of Westerners directly contributed to the birth of psychology and helped expand the frontiers of art, medicine, music, and science. In these pages, one encounters Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wade Davis, Humphry Davy, Thomas De Quincey, Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Hooke, Alexander von Humboldt, Thomas Huxley, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, Henry Rusby, Joe Rogan, Mike Tyson, and Andrew Weil — all before the second chapter. The author’s central thesis is that self-experimentation with entheogens — outside of the Indigenous societies that first discovered them — did not begin in the 1960s with Timothy Leary, PhD, and the Beatles, but rather had a long and esteemed tradition in Western circles, particularly in the 19th century. The book provides ample and detailed support for this conclusion. Jay covers well-trodden ground when writing about Sigmund Freud and cocaine. Freud was addicted to two mind-altering plant products from the New World: cocaine (from the coca [Erythroxylum spp., Erythroxylaceae] plant) and nicotine (from tobacco [Nicotiana tabacum, Solanaceae]). He began experimenting with cocaine in his early 30s and made the classic error of over-promoting a plant’s therapeutic properties. Freud recognized its utility not only as an analgesic and a stimulant, but also for a myriad of mental and physical problems. And he went further, as Jay explains on page 65: “… as part of [Freud’s] case that [cocaine] was a remedy for nervous weakness and depression, he relayed the claim with which Parke-Davis had originally launched the drug in the USA that it was ‘an antidote to the opium habit’, removing the cravings and pains of withdrawal.” Freud soon was disabused of this last notion. His colleague Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow suffered chronic pain resulting from a botched amputation of his thumb, and the resulting nerve damage and chronic pain led to morphine addiction. Freud treated von Fleischl-Marxow with cocaine, which initially reduced and then eliminated his morphine addiction. However, the end result was the worst of both worlds: The cravings for opiates returned and von Fleischl-Marxow died in agony at age 45 in 1891, addicted to both cocaine and morphine. (While Freud’s dalliance with cocaine is detailed extensively in the book, it was his other addiction that proved fatal. A lifelong cigar smoker, he died of cancer of the jaw in 1939.) Perhaps the second best-known scientist who appears in Psychonauts is William James, widely regarded as the “father of American psychology.” The wealthy and erudite James, brother of the novelist Henry, was a pillar of the Boston establishment but had a lesser-known wild side. Just a week before the end of the American Civil War in April 1865, medical student James joined his college mentor Louis Agassiz on a natural history collecting expedition in Brazil. There, the aristocratic James spent almost a year in the Amazon rainforest working shoulder to shoulder with local peasants and Indigenous peoples, certainly a mind-expanding experience in and of itself. James’ experiences outside the mainstream did not begin and end in the tropical rainforest. Encouraged by the renowned neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, James experimented with peyote (Lophophora williamsii, Cactaceae), which he did not like. As Jay recounts, however, James was enraptured by nitrous oxide, going so far as to say that until he inhaled nitrous, he didn’t really understand Hegel. (Disclosure: This reviewer inhaled heroic quantities of nitrous as a college student, yet he still does not understand Hegel.) The least known and most fascinating character in psychedelic history brought to life in Jay’s book is Paschal Beverly Randolph. Born and raised in the notorious Five Points slum of Manhattan in 1825, this self-educated Afro-American — remotely related to both Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall — was a lecturer, physician, trance medium, and writer. He was one of the first Black novelists, played a leading role in recruiting African soldiers for the Union Army during the Civil War, and upon the war’s end moved to New Orleans to educate Freedmen. Abandoned by his father and left destitute as a small child by his mother when she perished during a cholera epidemic, Randolph went to sea as a cabin boy where, like the extraordinary ethnobotanist and British spy Edward Bancroft a century before him, he learned enough medicine to eventually become a physician. Before that, however, he returned from his oceanic travels and settled in New England where he worked as both a barber and a dyer. Embedding himself in the spiritualist community of the northeast, Randolph began penning works on birth control, health, magic, sex, and spiritualism. He also became a prodigious promoter and consumer of hashish, an oleoresin made from cannabis (Cannabis sativa, Cannabaceae). Jay introduces him thusly on page 201: “The hashish vogue of mid-century Paris diffused across the globe in surprising ways. It would have been hard to predict, for example, that by the 1860s the largest importer of hashish to the United States would be a Black Rosicrucian sex magician.” While Randolph employed hashish for better understanding of himself and as a treatment for his patients, it also inspired him to pen dazzling descriptions of its power and potential: “[It has enabled us] to pass through eternal doors, forever closed to the embodied man save by this celestial key, and passing through them, in holy calm, to explore the ineffable and serene mysteries of the human soul, and attain unto a conviction of immortality” (page 205). Randolph was not the only figure celebrating the power and mystique of hashish. Intrigued by reports of this substance brought to France by soldiers in Napoleon’s army returning from Egypt, leading intellectuals formed the “Club des Hashischins,” who met regularly in the Hotel Pimodan on the Île Saint-Louis to consume dawamesc, a paste of hash, honey, and pistachios (Pistacia vera, Anacardiaceae). Participants included Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, and Arthur Rimbaud, an all-star team of French poets and writers. It was their belief that hashish could inspire creativity while also enhancing their comprehension of the human psyche. A major contention of Jay’s book, that entheogenic substances deeply impacted the minds and creativity of a number of great artists, is exemplified in overlooked passages in two of the 19th century’s greatest novels: when the adventurer Epinay visits the Count of Monte Cristo, he is fed a sweet green paste (presumably the aforementioned dawamesc), and when Dr. Jekyll takes an intoxicating white powder (presumably cocaine) before turning into Mr. Hyde. Another theme threading through Psychonauts is the role of self-experimentation. When the 20-year-old chemist Humphry Davy created a novel gas in the laboratory, he inhaled it and experienced “a highly pleasurable thrilling in the chest and extremities.” A colleague notes that Davy “leapt violently around the laboratory, shouting for joy” (page 40). Davy christened this compound “laughing gas.” The role of serendipity in scientific discovery is not overlooked. Nitrous oxide consumption became something of a parlor trick. It featured in traveling medicine shows as something to be … well, laughed at. A “medical” lecturer named Gardner Quincy Colton would allow audience members to come onstage and inhale the nitrous, claiming that it would “reveal the true character of anyone who inhaled it” (page 115). At a performance in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1844, a young druggist inhaled the proffered gas, fell, and cut himself but exhibited no pain. A dentist in the audience named Horace Wells decided to employ the gas on his patients and in so doing launched the age of anesthesia, one of the greatest medical discoveries and advances of all time. In one of the book’s more memorable sentences, using phrasing that could be applied to many of the other drugs in the book, Jay writes: “Nitrous oxide, for Davy and his circle, collapsed the distinction between the intellect and the passions: it stimulated both, with equal intensity” (page 41). To place the drug consumption in context, it is important to mention the breadth of interest and intellectual curiosity of the thought leaders of the time. Unlike the career silos that characterize modern science, in which a biologist can spend her career focusing on a single species of fruit fly or lizard, scholars could be polymaths whose interests and contributions could be much more wide-ranging. In addition to his famous experiments with electricity, Benjamin Franklin helped invent bifocals, studied ocean currents and weather patterns, and was a world-class diplomat and statesman. Englishman Christopher Wren was not only the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but also an astronomer, a physicist, and a cofounder of the Royal Society, one of Britain’s most prestigious scientific organizations. Also featured in Psychonauts is Robert Hooke. Hooke was an astronomer, biologist, physicist, microscopist, and urban planner. He is best remembered today as the fellow who, when looking at cork under a microscope, “discovered” the cell. More to our point, he was quite the fan of “Indian Bengue” (cannabis), reporting in 1689 that it made him “very merry … and exceeding[ly] hungry” — likely the first documented scientific account of the munchies (page 37). One of Humphry Davy’s lab assistants went on to achieve greater renown, but not in the field of science. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, despite his early efforts pursuing a career as a scientist, attained fame as a poet, philosopher, and theologian and is widely considered one of the most influential figures in English literature. He was also addicted to opium, which he took as treatment for a variety of physical ailments and — in the words of Jay — to find “a novel and introspective language to capture feelings and states of mind never previously described” (page 42). So prodigious was his consumption of opium that one reviewer described him as the “Keith Richards of Romanticism.”1 (Coleridge penned two stanzas of “Kubla Khan,” one of the most famous poems ever written, after coming out of an opium reverie. However, he paused to answer the door, and upon returning to his desk had forgotten the rest of his dream, such that the conclusion was never written. This incident reflects how these entheogens can both inspire and distract.) Another friend of Davy’s who had participated in some of the nitrous oxide experiments became Coleridge’s secretary and, subsequently, a man of letters in his own right: Thomas De Quincey. A writer, essayist, and literary critic, he was also an opium addict. In fact, his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), is one of the most insightful and important books on addiction ever written. Jay explains why De Quincy’s work lives on: “His originality, and the reason for his tremendous influence over the following decades, was in the way he used the drug as a device for exploring the hidden recesses of his mind…. De Quincey dredged up from these hidden depths not merely details that had been beyond his conscious recall, but entire worlds whose existence the rational intelligence never suspected” (page 49). In passages like these, Jay proves himself a peer of writers like De Quincey in conjuring lost times and mysteries of the mind and the cosmos. In conclusion, I have two minor quibbles. Mike Jay’s High Society: The Central Role of Mind-Altering Drugs in History, Science, and Culture (Park Street Press, 2010) was the most strikingly illustrated volume on entheogens since Schultes, Hofmann, and Rätsch’s classic Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers (Healing Arts Press, 2001), yet Psychonauts provides only black-and-white illustrations. For a $32 book detailing visions of “living arabesques ... an orgy of vision … thick glorious fields of jewels … flower-like shapes … [turning] into gorgeous butterfly forms or endless folds of glistening, iridescent, fibrous wings” (in the words of Havelock Ellis on page 225), these dull illustrations represent a missed opportunity. In addition, the subtitle of the book — Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind — is a bit puzzling. Nowhere does the author detail what the modern mind is, and how it differs from the pre-modern one. Nonetheless, these criticisms are minor compared to book’s marvelous scope and scale. Psychonauts is a feast for the heart, soul, and mind — modern or otherwise. Mark Plotkin, PhD, LHD, is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon Conservation Team (www.amazonteam.org) and host of the popular podcast “Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing Culture and Conservation.”