Aesop
The Greek fabulist whose tortoise and hare the essay uses to ask what survives a story: the plot or the players.
WikipediaThe Tortoise and the Hare
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
Resources for the Reading
The people I quoted, the books and films I named, and the ideas I leaned on along the road, with somewhere to read further.
The people
Alexander the Great
Named in Solstice Grove only as a date marker, showing how far into his era the old mystery cults still ran.
Apollo
Reason, logic and order to Dionysus's intuition, the pair the Paris chapter sets against each other as two sides of one whole.
WikipediaHomeric Hymns, which include the earliest surviving hymn to Apollo
in Paris
Ares
The Greek god of war the interlude imagines answering for what struggle is good for, in an essay on war and festivals.
in September 11 (the interlude War and Festivals)
José Argüelles
The New Age writer behind the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, whose book on the Maya calendar the narrator names directly as an analytic theory, and whose numerology gave the trance floor its countdown to 2012.
Aristotle
In the Iquitos chapter, he stands for the Western turn toward the material world, the hinge point before Jesus Christ.
Athena
Goddess of wisdom and Ulysses' protector in the Odyssey, who appears as if from nowhere to save him from every perilous situation, named in the Cancun chapter.
in Cancun
Gregory Bateson
Anthropologist and cyberneticist who defined information as a difference that makes a difference, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, cited in the Cassie chapter.
WikipediaSteps to an Ecology of Mind
in Cassie
Jean Baudrillard
French theorist of simulation and the hyperreal; Cassie borrows his line that the map now precedes the territory to describe living inside a simulation.
WikipediaSimulacra and Simulation
in Cassie
The Beatles
The band that carried Eastern philosophy into pop culture, cited in the Iquitos chapter for cracking open the West's imagination.
Hakim Bey
Pen name of Peter Lamborn Wilson, the anarchist writer invoked on the dance floor; his 1991 book is where the zone he is quoted for comes from.
WikipediaT.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
in Burning Man
Bon Jovi
An American rock band from New Jersey, named in the Birth of a Star essay as one shorthand for how a crowd wants to see itself.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
Brahma
The creator god the chapter says was born at Pushkar, rising from a turtle's back on a lotus flower.
in India
Buddha
The teacher behind the term Buddha nature, named indirectly in the Iquitos chapter for the innate awakened potential in everyone.
WikipediaBuddha-nature, the concept itself (Wikipedia)The Nirvana Sutra, the scripture that teaches it (Wikipedia)
Calliope
The Muse of epic poetry, the one Homer is said to have called on to sing the wanderings this whole book retells.
in The Muse (the interlude The Oral Tradition)
Calypso
The nymph who delays Ulysses on her island; grouped with Circe and Helen in the Cancun passage as a force that complicates his return.
in Cancun
Carlos Castaneda
Peruvian-American writer on shamanic apprenticeship, named among Niko's early reading in Athens, asked after in Tulum, and credited in Costa Rica with a book on lucid dreaming.
in Athens, Tulum and Costa Rica
Constantine P. Cavafy
The Alexandrian Greek poet he credits with saying it best, his poem on Ithaka giving shape to this passage's whole argument about arrival.
Manu Chao
French-Spanish musician whose blend of languages and rhythms colors the mood as the narrator packs for the second part of his trip.
in September 11
Saint Christopher
The patron saint of travelers, given to him as a little icon by his mother along with her stories, in the Athens chapter.
in Athens
Circe
The sorceress who turns Ulysses' crew into pigs while seducing him; the book calls on her twice, once in Cancun and again as a warning image in Babylon.
in Cancun and Back To Babylon
Kurt Cobain
Nirvana's frontman closes the list of trainwrecks in Birth of a Star; Nevermind is the record that made him famous.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
Paulo Coelho
The Brazilian novelist whose 1988 fable of a shepherd chasing his fortune gets named beside Castaneda and McKenna, in the Athens chapter's roll call of authors that shaped him.
in Athens
Erik Davis
Cultural writer on technology and the occult, spelled Eric Davis in the book; he visits in person in the Solstice Grove chapter, and Cassie cites his idea of tech as modern magic.
WikipediaTechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
in Cassie and Solstice Grove
Manuel DeLanda
The philosopher of self-organizing matter, arguing cities, markets and minds arrange themselves with no conductor at all.
Demeter
Greek goddess of grain and harvest, paired with Persephone in The Pendulum as a rebirth story that gives way to Easter.
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
Karl Denson
The real saxophonist and bandleader whose show, with his band Tiny Universe, is where a friend passes him the mescaline that opens the chapter.
Leonardo DiCaprio
The actor whose film gives Niko's Tulum companions their nearest comparison for a hidden beach community that already felt like a movie.
in Tulum
Dionysus
The god of wine and intoxication and intuition, set against Apollo in the Paris chapter and named again as Dionysian in the Solstice Grove chapter.
WikipediaThe Bacchae (Euripides)
in Paris and Solstice Grove
Albert Einstein
Cited alongside the Manhattan Project scientists as proof that the biggest ideas arrive in dream or in strange, fatalistic sequence, not on schedule.
Eurycleia
Ulysses' aged, loyal nurse, who recognizes him by an old scar; named in Cancun among the women around him on his way home.
in Cancun
Nelly Furtado
The Canadian singer he sees in a girl's face in Brazil, a flash of home in the middle of the trip.
in September 11
Ganesha
The elephant headed remover of obstacles, inked on the forearm of the young monk he meets on the road.
Che Guevara
The revolutionary whose young road trip, read in the Motorcycle Diaries, gave the whole book its founding image of travel as a wild odyssey.
WikipediaThe Motorcycle Diaries
in Cancun
Guns N' Roses
The Los Angeles hard rock band listed alongside Bon Jovi and Megadeth in the same essay, each one a mirror for a different crowd.
WikipediaAppetite for Destruction
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
Larry Harvey
He co-founded the desert burn in 1986 and later wrote the Ten Principles that still frame it; the Burning Man chapter opens on his fire.
WikipediaThe Ten Principles of Burning Man
in Burning Man
Helen of Troy
The beauty whose abduction starts the Trojan War; the Cancun chapter lists her among the figures who both stir and complicate the hero's path.
in Cancun
Hephaestus
The smith god of Greek myth, invoked in the Burning Man chapter for the price mastery exacts, mythically lame from his fall off Olympus.
WikipediaTheoi.com's page on Hephaestus, ancient sources gathered togetherHesiod's Theogony, the earliest surviving account of his birth
in Burning Man
Paris Hilton
Closes the reality star list in Birth of a Star. The Simple Life is the show that made her one.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
Adolf Hitler
Named only as a date marker in the Iquitos chapter, the day before his birthday, when Hofmann first took LSD.
Albert Hofmann
The Swiss chemist who first took LSD in 1943, named the day before Hitler's birthday and used twice in the Iquitos chapter to frame the story's fatalism.
Homer
The poet named twice, first for the trance behind The Odyssey, later for listeners lost to Circe's spell in the Babylon chapter.
in Iquitos, Peru and Back To Babylon
Michael Jackson
One of the five trainwrecks the essay lists, a pop star whose fame the piece treats as a warning as much as a triumph.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
Jesus Christ
Named as the figure who carried Aristotle's materialist turn forward, God made flesh in a single human body.
WikipediaThe New Testament (the primary source about him, not written by him)
Janis Joplin
Blues singer named beside Jackson and Monroe as a fame casualty in the Burning Man interlude, Birth of a Star; Pearl came out after she died.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
James Joyce
Irish novelist whose Ulysses remade what a novel could do, named among ideas that reshaped the narrator's outlook in college.
in Cassie
Carl Jung
Named once, among ideas that reshaped the narrator's outlook during his college years with Cassie.
in Cassie
Frida Kahlo
The painter Niko names as inspiration in Cancun, for the character and role she chose to play against her own history.
in Cancun
Kardashian family
Named first among the reality stars in Birth of a Star as people with no reason to be on TV, yet are.
WikipediaKeeping Up with the Kardashians
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
J.C.R. Licklider
The psychologist and computer scientist who forecast man-computer symbiosis in 1960, long before a screen fit in a pocket.
James Lovelock
The scientist Cassie quotes on bacteria and Gaia, the English researcher who proposed Earth as one self-regulating system.
WikipediaGaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
in Cassie
Ricky Martin
The Latin pop star named as the mainstream's sound, the counterpoint to the Goa trance the Tulum crowd chose instead.
in Tulum
Mary, mother of Jesus (the Virgin Mary)
The mother of Jesus: the other icon his mother pressed into his hands as a boy, alongside Saint Christopher, and the figure legend says crossed Greece and fell for Athos, which opens the Babylon chapter.
in Athens and Back To Babylon
Terence McKenna
The ethnobotanist and psychedelic philosopher named twice, once in the Athens reading list and once when Tulum asks what he and Castaneda would make of it all.
Marshall McLuhan
The media theorist behind global village, quoted in the Iquitos chapter to name the ritual scale of the modern world.
Megadeth
The Los Angeles thrash metal band Dave Mustaine formed after leaving Metallica, named in the same list of bands as tribal mirrors.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
Marilyn Monroe
Another of the five, an actress whose fame the essay reads the same way, brightness that burned faster than it could be carried.
WikipediaSome Like It Hot (1959)
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
Jim Morrison
Fronted The Doors and died at 27, one more name in the same list of trainwrecks in Birth of a Star.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
Muses (Greek mythology)
The goddesses of inspiration Niko thanks by name near the close of a reflective passage, for keeping him on the path when he wanted to quit.
Nausicaa
The Phaeacian princess who finds Ulysses shipwrecked and helps him home; the Cancun passage calls her the blue blooded princess among his helpers.
in Cancun
Isaac Newton
Named twice in one paragraph as the founder of a reason-driven method who dressed his own mystical, fatalistic streak in the falling apple story.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Named twice: once among ideas that reshaped the narrator's outlook in college, once as a philosopher a trilingual traveler in Brazil could debate fluently.
Nirvana
The Seattle band named as the sound the regular world was listening to, set against the Goa trance playing at the free parties.
in Tulum
Odysseus (Ulysses)
The wandering king of Ithaca the book keeps naming itself after, met in Cancun as the traveler whose road the narrator says he is walking too, invoked for Circe's men turned to pigs and for how a journey ends.
Patroclus
Achilles' close companion in the Iliad, whose death at Troy grieved the Greeks so deeply it inspired funeral games.
WikipediaThe Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray (Perseus Digital Library)
in Cancun
Penelope
Ulysses' wife, who waits in Ithaca warding off suitors; the Cancun chapter names her among the women who shape his journey home.
in Cancun
Persephone
Demeter's daughter, queen of the underworld each winter, set beside Christ's rebirth in The Pendulum's argument about myth and the seasons.
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
Peter Pan
J.M. Barrie's boy who never grows up, the figure the narrator borrows to describe his own footloose, ageless way of moving through the world.
WikipediaPeter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up
in Tulum
Pied Piper of Hamelin
The pipe-playing figure of German legend, paired with Peter Pan in the same line as another image for a life lived light and leading others along.
in Tulum
Plato
The Athenian philosopher the book turns to twice, at the solstice grove and in Iquitos, as a witness that real mysteries are kept half spoken.
in Solstice Grove and Iquitos, Peru
Simon Posford
The psytrance producer whose New York show pulled Niko back onto a dance floor after a year without dancing or psychedelics.
Elvis Presley
Used twice, in the desert chapter and again in Babylon, as shorthand for the machine of fame the narrator is trying to explain.
in Burning Man and Back To Babylon
Quetzalcoatl
The Aztec feathered serpent god, set beside the Greek gods in Cancun as proof that a myth can wear a human face or an animal one.
in Cancun
Ram Dass
Guru and psychologist whose 1971 book Be Here Now helped carry Eastern spirituality west, one name in the narrator's own list of ideas from college.
in Cassie
James Redfield
The Alabama-born author of The Celestine Prophecy, credited by name once in the Athens chapter's list of the books shaping Niko at the time.
WikipediaThe Celestine Prophecy
in Athens
Rumi
Held up in the Iquitos chapter as the clearest case of poetry as the only honest vessel for what the whirling dance reveals.
Carl Sagan
Astronomer and science communicator, quoted for the view of Earth that leaves no room for borders.
WikipediaPale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
in Cyber-Shamanism (the interlude Planetary Mating Call)
William Shakespeare
Named as the essay's third stop on the road from ancient drama to shared modern spectacle, no single play of his is named.
in September 11
Shiva
The Hindu god of creation and destruction, named in Tulum's talk of sacred geometry and later inked on a young monk's arm in Babylon.
in Tulum and Back To Babylon
Tarzan
The jungle hero who loses his grip on the vine becomes the narrator's figure for falling with no landing yet in sight.
in September 11
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Jesuit paleontologist he names while wondering whether the noosphere is insight or just expensive mysticism.
WikipediaThe Phenomenon of Man
in Costa Rica
Titans (Greek mythology)
The primordial gods the Olympians overthrew, first told in Hesiod's Theogony; the book borrows their name for the founders of a new scene in Tulum.
in Tulum
Eckhart Tolle
The spiritual teacher and author whose book is handed to Niko at a turning point in the Solstice Grove chapter.
WikipediaThe Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Donald Trump
Listed with the Kardashians and Paris Hilton in Birth of a Star as a reality star turned fixture on TV. The Apprentice made him one.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
The Who
The English rock band Niko says an unconfirmed legend credits with playing a concert in Goa and leaving behind the gear that seeded its recording scene.
in India
Ken Wilber
Integral theorist whose Sex, Ecology, Spirituality tried to fuse science and spirit into one map, one name in that same list of ideas from college.
WikipediaSex, Ecology, Spirituality
in Cassie
Zeus (Xenios Zeus)
The king of the Greek gods, praised in Cancun as Xenios, the guardian of hospitality and strangers, the very virtue the scene is honoring.
WikipediaEpithets of Zeus, including Xenios (Wikipedia)Xenia, the Greek guest-host bond (Wikipedia)
in Cancun
The books, films and songs
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho's parable of a shepherd chasing a dream to the pyramids, named in the Athens list and raised again on the Tulum beach.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice, the girl who tumbled down Lewis Carroll's rabbit hole, turns up at Burning Man's mobile bars for a mushroom brew in this chapter's imagery.
in Burning Man
The Beach (film)
Danny Boyle's film of Alex Garland's novel, the comparison Niko's new Tulum friends reach for twice to describe their hidden beach.
in Tulum
The Bible
Held up as the model of one master story carrying many small ones, the comparison the book reaches for to explain why an old tale still gets told again.
WikipediaThe King James Version of the Bible (full text)
in Cancun
Black Sabbath
The band Jorge asks if Niko knows, picking up a guitar in Ecuador, and later one of the only records he owns.
in Ecuador
Calibrating the Collective Consciousness
The narrator's own essay on 9/11, sports, and mass televised events, reproduced in full inside the September 11 chapter.
in September 11
Can I lie next to you (unattributed verse)
An unattributed verse set mid-chapter in Brazil; no printed source turned up, so it may be his own.
in Brazil
The Celestine Prophecy
James Redfield's 1993 novel of nine spiritual insights found in Peru, named in the Athens reading list and asked about again on the beach in Tulum.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (film)
Spielberg's 1982 film supplies the fingertip to fingertip image the book borrows for the screen reaching across the species line.
Earthrise
The Apollo 8 photograph of Earth over the lunar horizon, named right after the Moon landing in the same list of broadcast wonders.
WikipediaEarthrise (NASA's official image page)
in Cancun
Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within
The 2006 documentary by Rod Mann he says he was editing in California when Kevin invited him to the Fourth of July gathering that opens the chapter.
The Fifth Element
Luc Besson's 1997 film, the half joking yardstick Niko reaches for twice in Cancun to size up a woman who seems otherworldly.
in Cancun
Food of the Gods
Terence McKenna's 1992 book on psychoactive plants and human evolution; it is the book the dialogue names outright at this point in Tulum.
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (Open Library)
in Tulum
G.I. Joe
The Saturday morning cartoon watched with his father, named in Cancun as part of his early boyhood teaching.
WikipediaG.I. Joe: A Real American Hero
in Cancun
Ghost in the Shell (film)
Mamoru Oshii's 1995 anime, from Masamune Shirow's manga, about a cyborg policewoman questioning her own selfhood, the boyhood film he calls his second stranger.
I Ching
The ancient Chinese divination text Cassie returns to for pages, later set beside the Mayan calendar in Tulum, and credited in Costa Rica with teaching him that reality answers back.
WikipediaI Ching (Book of Changes)
in Cassie, Cancun, Tulum and Costa Rica
The Iliad
Homer's epic, its author unnamed in the text itself, the source for Patroclus and the funeral games the narrator describes.
WikipediaThe Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray (Perseus Digital Library)Internet Archive: The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore
in Cancun
Indiana Jones
The film franchise behind his fascination with lost jungle kingdoms, named in Cancun, on a Tulum guide's T-shirt, and again as shorthand at Palenque's lost temple.
Iron Maiden
Named among the handful of records Jorge owns in Ecuador, alongside Black Sabbath and Metallica, his only real possessions.
in Ecuador
Ithaka (poem) by C.P. Cavafy
Cavafy's 1911 poem, in which Ithaka gives the voyage rather than the destination; the passage paraphrases its ending rather than quoting it directly.
James Bond
Named in an email quoted in Cancun, the spy Ian Fleming created, invoked half joking as a stand in for Niko's own adventures.
in Cancun
Le Monde
The French daily the narrator names as the world waiting at his feet in Paris, founded in 1944 and still France's leading paper of record.
in Paris
The Legend of Zelda (video game series)
Nintendo's fantasy adventure game series, named in the same breath as Star Wars during the joking recap of tape footage in the Palenque chapter.
in Palenque
Lonely Planet (guidebook)
The travel guidebook series the woman in San Cristobal clings to, a shorthand in the chapter for the wandering backpacker abroad.
Mad Max
Mad Max, the Australian franchise of wasteland chrome and outback raiders, lends its crew to the same Burning Man scene beside Alice.
in Burning Man
Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960 essay)
Licklider's essay naming the partnership between human minds and machines, the very phrase this chapter borrows outright.
The Matrix
The Wachowskis' 1999 film about a simulated reality: the chapter compares calling a friend for answers to Morpheus guiding Neo, and Tulum reaches for it twice as shorthand for a numbed, systematized life.
in Solstice Grove and Tulum
The Mayan Factor
Argüelles' 1987 book reads the Mayan calendar as a countdown to planetary shift; Tulum's chapter borrows its theory of time.
The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology
in Tulum
Metallica
The third name in Jorge's small stack of records in Ecuador, next to Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden; named again in Birth of a Star beside Bon Jovi and Megadeth.
in Ecuador
Michael's coffee paintings (untitled series)
The unnamed paintings a fellow traveler in Costa Rica made with coffee itself, folk art turning colonial history into pigment on paper.
in Costa Rica
The Motorcycle Diaries
Che Guevara's memoir of his 1952 motorcycle trip across Latin America, named in Cancun and echoed unnamed on the beach at Tulum.
My First Trip
The narrator's own journal poem, quoted in full across three pages of the Paris chapter; it exists only inside this book.
in Paris
The Odyssey
Homer's epic of the long way home, the book's own namesake and the measure it repeatedly holds its journey against.
WikipediaThe Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler (full text)
in Cancun, Iquitos, Peru and Back To Babylon
Odyssey (Homer)
Homer's epic of a long way home, the poem this book's own title winks at when Niko calls his story my Odyssey near the end.
in The Muse
Pale Blue Dot (Carl Sagan)
The phrase the book borrows for Earth seen whole comes from Sagan's 1994 meditation on the Voyager photograph.
in Athens (the interlude Why We Dance)
Penthouse
Bob Guccione's magazine, Playboy's rival, named in the same breath as the Swimsuit Issue in the Birth of a Star essay.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
The medieval German legend of the piper who leads the children away, borrowed here only as a figure for how MTV hypnotized Greek youth in the Athens chapter.
in Athens
Playboy
Hugh Hefner's men's magazine, named with Penthouse and the Swimsuit Issue as a picture of a body a culture is asked to want.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
The Power of Now
Eckhart Tolle's guide to living in the present moment, the book Mary gives Niko at Solstice Grove, telling him it will help.
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue
The annual Sports Illustrated issue of swimsuit photography, named beside Playboy and Penthouse as an example of a wished for image.
in Burning Man (the interlude Birth of a Star)
Star Wars
George Lucas's space saga, invoked as Jedi talk in the Palenque chapter and echoed, unnamed, in the Force blessing after the effigy burn in the Burning Man chapter.
in Palenque and Burning Man
TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
Erik Davis's 1998 book on technology as modern magic, the very book Cassie names when she calls this whole practice divination through technology, and the one its writer brings to Michael's dome.
TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Informationthe book's own page at techgnosis.com
in Cassie and Solstice Grove
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
In Iquitos he reaches for this old Tibetan death text to explain the ayahuasca ecstasy, a traditional terma with no single author to credit.
The Tortoise and the Hare
Aesop's fable, invoked in The Pendulum to ask what a fable loses if its animals change; here read in Joseph Jacobs's 1894 translation.
WikipediaThe Hare and the Tortoise (Joseph Jacobs translation, 1894)
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
The children's song offered as a small, familiar anchor point for a European listener, proof that a tune can cross a continent unchanged.
WikipediaThe Star, by Jane Taylor (the 1806 poem the song is set to)
in Cancun
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
DeLanda's 1991 book, alluded to rather than named, tracing war and technology through Foucault's and Deleuze and Guattari's tools, narrated by a robot historian.
The Wizard of Oz
Baum's fantasy, best known as the 1939 film, invoked for the illusion the narrator felt he was seeing through, curtain and machinery behind the myth.
The lines quoted
Lovelock on Gaia
Cassie's paraphrase of Lovelock's Gaia idea, humans as Earth's bacteria, the internet as its forming nervous system.
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
in Cassie
Eric Davis on TechGnosis
The phrase Cassie puts in Erik Davis's mouth; not located verbatim in TechGnosis, though it fits the book's argument that technology carries old magic forward.
TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
in Cassie
Baudrillard on the map and the territory
From Simulacra and Simulation, where Baudrillard argues the map now precedes the territory; Cassie's wording is a close paraphrase, not an exact quotation.
in Cassie
Bateson on information
Gregory Bateson's phrase about information as a difference that makes a difference, from his 1972 essay collection, quoted in the Cassie chapter.
WikipediaSteps to an Ecology of Mind
in Cassie
Eric Davis on technology and transcendence
The friend riffing on prayer wheels and circuit boards in the Solstice Grove chapter is the writer Erik Davis, whose TechGnosis argues the same case at length.
WikipediaTechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
The teacher must die before they can teach
This aphorism in Solstice Grove reads as the narrator's own line. Nothing in Gurdjieff, Sufi, or Zen teaching collections matched it word for word.
Plato on the mysteries
Attributed in the book to Plato; the words are Thomas Taylor's, from his 1791 Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries.
A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic MysteriesThomas Taylor, the Neoplatonist translator who wrote the line
A tourist takes their home with them on vacation
Attributed to Oliver in Cancun; it echoes a tourist versus traveler saying common online, but no single original source could be verified.
in Cancun
They say how you do something is how you do everything
A line the book repeats without a source; closest in print to Cheri Huber's 1998 workbook, though the saying had already spread widely by then.
How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything, by Cheri Huber
in Cancun
Wink wink, say no more
Echoes Monty Python's Nudge Nudge sketch, where nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more stands in for whatever is left unspoken.
in Tulum
Bom Bolonat
A traditional call to Shiva as Bholenath, lord of innocence, sung out before the chillum is lit, not a line from any book.
in Tulum
Not in Kansas anymore (The Wizard of Oz)
An echo of Dorothy's line in the 1939 film, unattributed here, marking the moment San Cristobal stopped feeling familiar.
The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)Wiktionary's entry on the idiom not in Kansas anymore
Dance like nobody's looking (proverb)
The book calls it a wise proverb, but the closest traceable line is from a 1987 country song, not an old saying handed down anonymously.
in Ecuador
I'll be right here
The line closing that meditation on distance and touch is E.T.'s promise to Elliott, from Spielberg's 1982 film.
The ideas and the places
0=1 (zero equals one)
Niko's own name for the framework he lands on in Tulum: an unglossed trance-floor phrase, the void and everything folding into one, the thing his sister once thought was mystical nonsense and later took seriously.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Shankara, source of Vedic nondualismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on monism generallyWikipedia's overview of nondualism, the broader tradition the phrase echoes
in Palenque, India and Back To Babylon
Aboriginal songlines
He holds these up as the model for relearning lost myth, the paths Aboriginal Australians walk that carry ancestral stories across the land.
Alchemy
Named in the same Iquitos sentence as one of the old traditions he says share ayahuasca's premise of hidden order in nature.
WikipediaScience History Institute overview of alchemy and early science
Alternative healing
The broad family of healing practices outside conventional medicine, one of the frameworks in the narrator's college list of new ways of seeing.
WikipediaNCCIH: an overview of complementary health approaches
in Cassie
Amazon basin and Amazon River
The rainforest the travelers drop into on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes, and the river they later float down toward Iquitos.
WikipediaAmazon River (Wikipedia)Amazon rainforest overview
in Ecuador
Amazon rainforest (deforestation)
The clearing of the Amazon basin's forest, the loss he weighs against Ivan's vanishing plant knowledge at the end of the Palenque chapter.
WikipediaOur World in Data: Deforestation
in Palenque
Ancient Greek theater
The September 11 essay opens its case for shared feeling here, at the Athenian stage where a crowd first felt one thing as one body; the Epilogue borrows the stage itself, where the mask, not the man, seemed to speak.
WikipediaAristotle's Poetics, full text (Internet Classics Archive)World History Encyclopedia: Greek TheatreGreek chorus (Wikipedia)
in September 11 and When the Masks Speak
Ancient Olympic Games
Oliver's claim at the Cancun table, that the Games began so Greeks would not have to fight each other.
WikipediaInternational Olympic Truce Centre: history of the Olympic Truce
in Cancun
Antigua Guatemala
The colonial city he keeps returning to in the Guatemala chapter, named four times as a base and a backdrop.
in Guatemala
Apollo 11 Moon landing
The televised first Moon landing that the Cancun chapter lists among wonders of the broadcast age, and that Tulum credits with humanity's first shared story, Earth seen whole from space.
WikipediaNASA's official Apollo 11 mission pageSmithsonian: Apollo 11, the Moon landing
Apollonian and Dionysian
Nietzsche's pairing of order and ecstasy, reached for three times: the pendulum of a whole book, a festival's fluid world, and the grain of Eastern versus Western music.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Nietzsche's AestheticsThe Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's full text (Project Gutenberg)
Archetype (Jungian concept)
Jung's term for the inherited patterns he thought lie beneath myth and dream: the word the Ecuador chapter uses for our deepest needs, the jester he names for himself in Babylon, and the masks set against stereotypes in the Epilogue.
WikipediaThe Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung's own text on the ideaCollective unconscious, the related concept archetypes belong toJester, the historical court fool (Wikipedia)Archetypal literary criticism, the framework built on Jung's workInternet Archive: Jung's own The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Arenal Volcano
The cone that fumes over the Costa Rica chapter, a real andesitic stratovolcano in Alajuela province, active for decades before it quieted in 2010.
in Costa Rica
Ashtanga (yoga)
In the Palenque chapter the cook who teaches yoga leads Ashtanga, the disciplined, sequence-based vinyasa style founded by K. Pattabhi Jois in Mysore.
WikipediaSharath Yoga Centre, the Pattabhi Jois family's Ashtanga institute in Mysore
in Palenque
Astrology
Reading character and fate in the stars, on Niko's list of new interests in college and again where he goes looking into tarot and divination systems.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Science and Pseudo-Science (discusses astrology's evidential status)
in Cassie
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the two atom bombs he says humanity needed to learn to tolerate imperfect, subjective truths.
WikipediaThe National Museum of Nuclear Science and History's accountThe Manhattan Project that built the bombs
Attractor (dynamical systems)
A term from dynamical systems, the state a system settles toward regardless of starting point, used here for a path curving toward what wants to happen.
Automatic writing
Automatic writing is the unfiltered writing he lists beside surfing and skateboarding as another way into the flow state.
WikipediaFlow, the state the passage is really pointing toSurrealist automatism, the movement that made the practice famous
Ayahuasca
The Amazonian plant brew at the center of the book's Peru and Iquitos chapters, named outright and drunk on the page.
Wikipediaa technical overview of the research on it
in The Muse, Paris, Solstice Grove, Ecuador, Iquitos, Peru, Brazil and Back To Babylon
Aztec civilization
The Mesoamerican empire the book reaches for to size up cultural distance, as far from the conquistadors as the hippies were from the Cretans.
WikipediaWikipedia: Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital
in Tulum
Babylon
The ancient city on the Euphrates, and the Rastafari name for corrupt ordinary society the narrator borrows twice, in New York and again coming home from India.
WikipediaRastafari, section on exile in Babylon
in September 11 and India
Banisteriopsis caapi
The vine half of the same brew, carrying the MAO inhibitor that lets the DMT survive digestion, as he explains it.
WikipediaWikipedia on monoamine oxidase inhibitors, the mechanism he describes
Bardo
The Tibetan Buddhist state between death and rebirth, lent to the chapter's psychedelic montage for its shifting, liminal quality.
WikipediaThe Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol), the source text
in Burning Man
Black Rock City
The tent city that rises and vanishes each year in the Nevada desert, the ground the Burning Man chapter walks on.
WikipediaBurning Man org's own page on the temporary city
in Burning Man
Boom Festival
The Portuguese psytrance gathering named alongside Burning Man as a modern stand-in for the ancient full moon party.
WikipediaBoom Festival, official site
in September 11 (the interlude War and Festivals)
Brazilian Carnival
Brazil's pre-Lenten festival, the swirl the Brazil chapter hopes to catch a piece of on his way through.
WikipediaAsh Wednesday and Lent, the calendar Carnival leads into
in Brazil
Buddha nature
The Buddhist idea that every being already holds an awakened nature, named in the Iquitos chapter's search for something greater within.
WikipediaTathagatagarbha sutras, the primary texts behind the idea
Buddhism
One of the traditions folded into that early list of influences, then met again in Iquitos through the idea of Buddha nature.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: BuddhaThe Dhammapada, a core text, full translation
in Cassie and Iquitos, Peru
Buddhist meditation
The practice Niko's teacher Chen taught him at Tulane, named once in the book but present throughout its contemplative chapters.
WikipediaThe Satipatthana Sutta, the founding text on mindfulness meditation, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Burning Man
The desert gathering in Nevada, first a name on a list, then chapter seventeen's own subject, and the odd detour on the way home from India.
WikipediaThe event's own Ten Principles
in Solstice Grove, Burning Man and Back To Babylon
Cartesian dualism (Rene Descartes)
The split of mind from matter that Descartes set going, the muse blames for a world drained of wonder.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, DualismDescartes, Discourse on the Method, full text
in The Muse (the interlude The Oral Tradition)
CERN
The particle physics laboratory near Geneva, a few hours from Basel, he sets beside psychedelic insight, another place where knowledge crystallized into discovery.
Chacruna (Psychotria viridis) and Mimosa hostilis
The leaf half of the brew he describes, the DMT source that the vine in the next line helps the body absorb.
WikipediaWikipedia on Mimosa tenuiflora, the plant now filed under that nameWikipedia overview of the ayahuasca brew both plants go into
Chakras
The Hindu and tantric energy centers Niko invokes when he says one thing appeals to a lower chakra than another, base pull against higher.
WikipediaKundalini, the energy the chakras are said to channel in tantric yogaJohn Woodroffe, who wrote as Arthur Avalon and whose 1919 book The Serpent Power founded the chakra system's reception in the West
in India
Chaos theory
One of the frames folded into the narrator's new looking glass in college, the study of how deterministic systems become unpredictable.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Chaos
in Cassie
Chichen Itza
The Maya city whose ballcourt and pyramids Oliver names in the Cancun chapter, then Niko climbs with a companion in Tulum's retelling of the same ruins.
Chillum
The small ceramic pipe Tarquin holds between crossed legs in Tulum, a traditional Indian tool for ritual cannabis smoking; in Ecuador a driver's golden pipe is a miniature Incan one.
WikipediaWikipedia: Sadhu, the wandering ascetics who traditionally smoke it in ritual
Chinese medicine
He reaches past the Amazon to Chinese medicine as another tradition that reads the body's organs as metaphors for something larger.
WikipediaHuangdi Neijing, the classical text its organ theory traces back to
Coachella (music festival)
One of the big commercial festivals a former crew member names, set against Burning Man's noncommercial spirit in the same chapter.
WikipediaCoachella's official site
in Burning Man
Collective consciousness
The idea that keeps returning from September 11 through Cancun, that minds knit together into something larger than any one of them.
WikipediaInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Emile DurkheimDurkheim's The Division of Labour in Society, primary text (Internet Archive)Jung's collective unconscious, the related but distinct idea (Wikipedia)
in September 11 and Cancun
The Colosseum and the gladiators
One stop on the essay's short history of crowds gathered to feel one thing together, between Greek theater and Shakespeare's stage; in Cancun, the Romans' way of folding death back into sport.
WikipediaWorld History Encyclopedia: ColosseumWikipedia: Gladiator
in September 11 and Cancun
Conceptual art
The 1960s art movement that puts the idea before the object, one entry on the wide list of interests Niko describes exploring in his sophomore year of college.
WikipediaTate: Conceptual art (museum overview and definition)
in Cassie
Curandero
The traditional Latin American folk healer: Carlos in Chiapas, Clara's cousin, whom Oliver tells Niko to check in with, and the teachers Scott learns from in the Amazon.
WikipediaMaya religion (Wikipedia), the cosmology a curandero like Carlos works withinFAMSI, an open research archive on Maya and Mesoamerican civilization for anyone who wants to go deeperTrotter and Chavira, Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing (Internet Archive)The University of New Mexico's Curanderismo program, teaching the tradition today
in Cancun, Palenque, San Cristobal and Iquitos, Peru
Cyber-shamanism
The book's own term for DJs as shamans, later a chapter title; no single encyclopedia article covers it yet.
Fraser Clark, a rave-era figure whose Zippie movement fused psychedelic culture with technology
in The Muse and Cyber-Shamanism
Dactylic hexameter
He wonders if the ayahuasca chants echo this six beat line, the meter that carries Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
WikipediaHomer's Odyssey, Book 1 opening, in the meter itself, Greek text with an English translation (Perseus Digital Library)
Daimon (ancient Greek concept)
An old Greek word for a spirit that watches a life closely, older and stranger than the word demon it later became.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Socrates, who spoke of his own daimonion
David and Goliath (biblical story)
The underdog story from the Book of Samuel the narrator reaches for to describe 9/11 news coverage as myth re-enacted live.
Wikipedia1 Samuel 17, the primary text
in Cancun
Dionysian and Apollonian (Nietzschean duality)
The pendulum he names in San Cristobal, intuitive against rational, and again in the Epilogue between analog and digital, comes from Nietzsche's reading of Greek tragedy.
WikipediaNietzsche entry, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's 1872 book that popularized the pair (Wikipedia)
Dionysiou Monastery
The Mount Athos monastery he calls unconventional, looser in its schedule than the others he visited there.
DMT (dimethyltryptamine)
The short-acting psychedelic that the Paris chapter names as a marker in time, that opens the Solstice Grove chapter, that Tarquin carries at the Castle in Tulum, and that Palenque recalls.
Wikipediaa 2018 scholarly review of DMT's pharmacology and proposed endogenous roleA scholarly review of DMT research and the God molecule claims around itWikipedia's article on the 2010 documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule, based on Rick Strassman's book that shaped its popular mythology
in Paris, Solstice Grove, Tulum and Palenque
Ecstatic dance
Ecstatic dance is the free, unscripted movement chapter 19 holds up as a metaphor for surrendering and dancing through life.
WikipediaTrance, the state ecstatic dance aims for5Rhythms, a related freeform movement practice
EDC (Electric Daisy Carnival)
The other big commercial festival named in the same breath as Coachella, both offered as the contrast to Burning Man.
WikipediaElectric Daisy Carnival's official site
in Burning Man
Ego dissolution
The state Niko cannot sum up in one sentence at Tulum, the felt loss of a separate self that psychedelic researchers now file under ego death.
WikipediaWilliam James's founding account of mystical, self dissolving states of consciousness
Ekstasis
The Greek root behind the chapter's account of losing the self: ekstasis, standing outside oneself, the state the passage reaches for first.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Plotinus, whose mysticism turns on this same self-transcendence
in Costa Rica
Eleusinian Mysteries
Demeter and Persephone's ancient initiation rite at Eleusis, the model Solstice Grove sets beside the Kabeirian rites, returned to fully in Tulum and Iquitos, and the rites India recalls as punishable by death to reveal.
WikipediaThe Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the mysteries' founding myth, in English translationa scholarly overview of the rites and their historyEleusis, the sanctuary near Athens where the rites were held
in Solstice Grove, Tulum, Iquitos, Peru and India
Emergence (complex systems)
The idea that a whole can behave in ways none of its parts do alone, the word the passage reaches for directly.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Emergent Properties
Enantiodromia
Jung's term for a thing turning into its opposite under its own extremity, the shape the fringe drifts into in the cyber shamanism chapter.
WikipediaJung's Psychological Types, the book where he coins the term (full text, Internet Archive)
The Enlightenment
The intellectual turn toward reason and science that The Pendulum credits, alongside the Scientific Revolution, with mapping the physical world.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Enlightenment
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
Entheogen
The general term for a sacred psychoactive substance, used here only inside the documentary's title and not spoken again in the chapter.
Ergot
The rye fungus in the solstice grove's potion and the Iquitos wine, and, two and a half millennia later, the raw material Hofmann turned into LSD.
WikipediaKykeon, the Eleusinian drink some scholars trace to ergotAlbert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD from an ergot compound
in Solstice Grove and Iquitos, Peru
Fall of Constantinople (1453)
The 1453 Ottoman capture of Constantinople, the last loss The Pendulum names as ancient knowledge slipping away from the West.
WikipediaNicolo Barbaro's eyewitness diary of the 1453 siege (Internet Archive)
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
Fana
The Sufi word placed third: fana, the ego's annihilation before God, a dissolving the chapter reads as the same experience under another name.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on mysticism, which places fana among the world's traditionsAl Ghazali's own account of the mystical path, Deliverance from Error
in Costa Rica
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)
The Colombian guerrilla movement named twice as a travel hazard to route around, in the Tulum chapter and again in Ecuador.
Filter bubbles
Eli Pariser's name for the personalized bubble a feed builds around a reader, one of the costs the masks speak chapter sets against the global village.
WikipediaThe Filter Bubble, Pariser's 2011 book that named it (Wikipedia)
First Waver (generational cohort)
Tarquin's word on the bus for people born 1975 to 1985 is his own coinage in the book; the nearest real term for that same cusp cohort is Xennials.
Xennials (Wikipedia), the closest real-world cohort term for the same birth years
in Athens
Flow (psychological state)
The Costa Rica chapter's central idea, the immersive mental state Csikszentmihalyi named and spent his career mapping; in Ecuador riding the flow is the narrator's own idiom for trusting the path, a related but looser sense.
WikipediaCsikszentmihalyi's TED talk on flowPenn's Positive Psychology Center, the research home of flow studiesCsikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Open Library)APA Dictionary of Psychology: flow
in Costa Rica and Ecuador
Fractals
Self-similar shapes on the narrator's college list of lenses, and later heard in the book's own image of hurricanes and galaxies alike.
WikipediaThe Fractal Geometry of NatureRead the book itself at the Internet Archive
in Cassie
Full Moon Party (Koh Phangan)
The monthly all-night beach rave on Koh Phangan running since 1985, his last base before he headed to Tulum.
in Tulum
Gaia hypothesis
Earth as one living organism, the idea recurs from Cassie's list of influences through Costa Rica to Iquitos, where he finally names it.
WikipediaLovelock's founding 1972 paper, Gaia as Seen Through the AtmosphereLovelock's book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, full text
in Cassie, Solstice Grove, Costa Rica and Iquitos, Peru
Garden of Eden
The narrator reaches for this biblical paradise to name a place that felt like perfection, in the Paris chapter; in Tulum the Eden story stands for the loss of innocence.
Gift economy
The no-money exchange someone explains to the narrator at Burning Man; Mauss's essay is where the idea was first argued out.
WikipediaMarcel Mauss's The Gift (1925), the founding anthropological study of gift exchange
in Burning Man
Global village
The phrase both chapters reach for when the world feels like one organism, coined by Marshall McLuhan to describe media shrinking the planet.
WikipediaUnderstanding Media, the 1964 book that popularized the termThe Gutenberg Galaxy, where McLuhan first used the phrase in 1962
in Costa Rica and Iquitos, Peru
Gnosticism
The early mystical movement prizing direct knowledge over doctrine, the talk Erik Davis brings to Michael's dome over tea.
WikipediaGnosticism, overview essay in the Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe Nag Hammadi scriptures, the primary Gnostic texts, borrowable on the Internet Archive
Goa trance and the full moon parties
The psychedelic dance scene born on Goa's beaches in the early 1990s, the sound he says he has listened to since he was sixteen, and the full moon rituals Michael's stories point him toward.
WikipediaAnjuna, the Goa beach where the hippie scene and its full moon parties took holdGoa Gil, the DJ credited with shaping the full moon party ritualPsychedelic trance, the genre Goa trance grew into
in Solstice Grove, Tulum and Back To Babylon
Golden ratio
The proportion Niko names among his twirl of new lenses on the world in college, known since Euclid and found across nature and art; in the Epilogue, phi stands in for the spiral of time.
WikipediaMacTutor: history of the golden ratioEuclid's Elements, Book VI, Prop. 30, the first known definition
in Cassie and When the Masks Speak
Greek Civil War
The war of 1946 to 1949 his grandmother lived through and was nearly executed in, named directly in one chapter and implied by context in two others.
in Athens, Cancun and When the Masks Speak
Greek Mystery rites (the Mysteries)
Where the theater's mask stayed on, the secret initiations of the Mysteries were said to strip it away entirely.
WikipediaEleusinian Mysteries, the best documented example (Wikipedia)Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the founding text behind the Eleusinian rite (Wikipedia)
Greek Orthodox Christianity
His grandmother's faith, church every week, prayers, and fasts kept, as the text describes her; and the tradition he later calls more mystical and esoteric than other forms of Christianity.
Wikipediathe Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, its historic seatan Orthodox parish's own primer on the faith
in Athens and Back To Babylon
Greek War of Independence (1821)
The 1821 revolution against Ottoman rule that Niko cites as the birth of the modern Greek state, in the Cancun chapter's history aside.
WikipediaFirst National Assembly at Epidaurus, where independence was proclaimedThe 1822 Greek Declaration of Independence, the founding document
in Cancun
Guatemalan Civil War (1960 to 1996)
The thirty six year war Diego asks him about, the backdrop the whole Guatemala chapter walks through, mostly indigenous dead.
WikipediaNational Security Archive: declassified US and Guatemalan records on the war's death squads
in Guatemala
Hashish
The pressed cannabis resin ground up in Paris and later spotted, by stained teeth and burn holes, on a British psy-trancer in Cancun.
Wikipediaa plain overview of hashish, its composition and effects
Heavy metal (music genre)
Heavy metal, the genre Niko reaches for to describe Jorge's look in Ecuador, then finds stacked as his only records, Sabbath, Maiden, Metallica.
WikipediaHeavy metal subculture (Wikipedia)
in Ecuador
The Hero's Journey (monomyth)
Joseph Campbell's pattern for the mythic quest, named only to be pointedly denied when the masks speak of what it leaves out.
WikipediaThe Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's founding book (Wikipedia)
Hetaira
The Cancun chapter's aside on ancient Greek women names the hetairai, the rare class of educated courtesan-companions who lived outside the household.
WikipediaWorld History Encyclopedia, a scholarly overview of the hetairaiLucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans, a primary text online
in Cancun
Hinduism
Named beside alchemy, shamanism and pre-Aristotelian Greek thought, one more old system the book sees reaching for the same abstract reality.
Homeopathy
A remedy system built on extreme dilution, with no effect shown beyond placebo, named in passing in the same list of alternative frameworks.
WikipediaNCCIH fact sheet on homeopathy
in Cassie
Huipil
The hand woven blouse he sees women wearing in Guatemala, the one the text itself pauses to explain.
WikipediaVictoria and Albert Museum, huipil pieces in the collection
in Guatemala
Hunab Ku
A colonial Maya term for the one god, repurposed by Argüelles as a galactic core; Tulum's chapter follows that newer, cosmic sense.
WikipediaBooks of Chilam Balam, the colonial Maya text where the term first appearsThe 1987 Harmonic Convergence, where Argüelles' cosmic reading of it took hold
in Tulum
Inca civilization
The Andean empire the book sets beside the Maya and Aztecs when it counts the horseless civilizations, and returns to for temples built by the stars.
WikipediaWorld History Encyclopedia: Inca Civilization
in Tulum
Indian caste system
The chapter names this as the part of Indian life that spiritual tourists conveniently looked past; in India, Vishnu is a Brahmin, the highest caste.
WikipediaAmbedkar's Annihilation of Caste, the founding critique of the systemBrahmin, the highest varna (Wikipedia)The Laws of Manu, the ancient text that sets out the four varnas (Wikisource)
in Costa Rica and India
Indian classical music
The tradition Niko points to for its drone principle, the sustained tone that anchors a raga the way a held note anchors a room.
WikipediaThe Natyashastra, the ancient text that first systematized Indian music, dance and dramaRaga, the melodic framework built on the drone that Indian classical music is organized around
in India
Indra's Net
A Buddhist image of infinitely reflecting jewels, each holding all the others; Tulum's chapter calls it Hindu, though Wikipedia traces its elaboration to the Avatamsaka Sutra.
WikipediaThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Huayan Buddhism, the school built on the imageThe Avatamsaka Sutra, the founding text where the net first appears
in Tulum
The Industrial Age
The era he declares over, one line before naming the one he says replaced it.
WikipediaThe Industrial Revolution, the change this era names
Industrial Revolution
The next leap the same sentence names, machines and factories replacing hand work, the step before humans split the atom and rethought matter itself.
WikipediaKhan Academy's overview of the Industrial RevolutionAdam Smith's Wealth of Nations, 1776, free full text, the economic theory that grew up alongside it
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
The Information Age
The era he says had arrived, named in the same breath as the Industrial Age it was replacing.
WikipediaManuel Castells' trilogy that gave the era its nameStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the entry on information
Information theory
Claude Shannon's mathematics of signals and meaning, the other thread of Davis's tea time talk in Michael's dome.
WikipediaA Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude Shannon's 1948 founding paperInformation, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Intrepid (aircraft carrier museum)
The retired aircraft carrier turned museum he passes at a red light, a real landmark docked on the Hudson River.
Iquitos, Peru
The Amazonian city Niko and his companion pick almost on a whim, the jumping off point for the ayahuasca ceremony ahead.
WikipediaAyahuasca (Wikipedia)
in Ecuador
Judo
Listed alongside tai chi as a repetitive practice the chapter says can open the same flow state.
WikipediaThe International Judo Federation's history of the sportThe All Japan Judo Federation, descended from Kano's Kodokan
in Costa Rica
Kabeirian Mysteries
The lesser known mystery cult of Samothrace that Solstice Grove pairs with Eleusis as proof initiatory traditions ran deep into antiquity.
Wikipediathe Archaeological Museum of Samothrace, built around the sanctuary's findsan Archaeology magazine feature on the excavated sanctuary
Karakatsaneiko philosophy of life
His own family's counterweight to the Spartan view, this reads as a term of his own coining with no outside documented source.
in Athens
Klathmonos Square (Weeping Square), Athens
The Athens square whose nickname, Weeping Square, gives the book's image of a grandmother standing in a line to be executed its exact setting.
How Klafthmonos Square got its nameStadiou Street, the Wikipedia article for the street the square sits onDekemvriana, the December 1944 Athens clashes the square's killings belong toMuseum of the City of Athens, housed on the square today
Kundalini
The dormant spiritual energy said to rest at the base of the spine, one more current in the eclectic mix of the narrator's college list.
WikipediaJournal for the Study of Religious Experience: Kundalini Awakening, Kundalini Awareness (scholarly article)
in Cassie
Kung fu
The last of the chapter's four movement disciplines said to bring a practitioner into flow.
WikipediaThe International Wushu Federation's overview of the practice
in Costa Rica
Kuxam Suum
The name some modern Maya writers give a cosmic cord binding earth to sky, invoked beside Hunab Ku at Tulum.
Hunab Ku y Kuxan Suum, an excerpt from Arguelles’s El Factor Maya (Internet Archive)
in Tulum
Lake Atitlán
The lake the chicken bus climbs toward, a volcanic crater lake in the Guatemalan highlands and the deepest in Central America.
WikipediaSololá Department, where the lake sits (Wikipedia)
in Guatemala
Leave No Trace
The closing ceremony of Burning Man, and the outdoor ethic behind it, the rule that the desert city leaves no mark it was ever there.
WikipediaThe National Park Service on the seven principlesBurning Man's own tenth principle, Leaving No Trace
in Burning Man
Library of Alexandria
Ancient Egypt's great library, named in The Pendulum as one of the losses that dimmed an enchanted, mystical view of the world.
WikipediaWorld History Encyclopedia: overview of the Library of Alexandria
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide)
Named across the Paris, Tulum and Iquitos chapters, among the handful of inventions, alongside human flight and the splitting of the atom, that bent the collective path.
WikipediaAlbert Hofmann (Wikipedia), the chemist who synthesized LSD in 1938 and found its effects in 1943LSD, My Problem Child (Wikipedia), Hofmann's own account of the discoveryMAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
in Paris, Tulum and Iquitos, Peru
Machu Picchu
The Inca citadel in Peru, named as the setting for solstice ceremonies in a job ad the narrator writes early in the book.
in The Muse
Manhattan Project
He cites its scientists, alongside Einstein, as proof that breakthroughs arrive unplanned, in dream or in strange accident, not by design.
WikipediaManhattan Project National Historical Park (National Park Service)Manhattan Project history overview (National Museum of Nuclear Science and History)
Marine Corps Hell Week
He likens the shamans' plant apprenticeship to this trial by exhaustion, his shorthand for an ordeal that forges survival skill.
Marlboro Man
The cowboy of Marlboro's old cigarette ads, borrowed once to describe the pilot's sunglasses and weathered look.
WikipediaLeo Burnett, the adman who created the characterUCSF tobacco industry document archive
Mars rover mission (2003)
The Spirit and Opportunity rovers, launched in 2003, the future wonder the same speaker predicts in the Cancun chapter, alongside the Moon landing.
WikipediaNASA: Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity
in Cancun
Mate (yerba mate)
Mate, the caffeinated South American infusion Ivan keeps brewing through the Palenque chapter, threads through several mornings there as a small daily ritual.
WikipediaWikipedia on yerba mate, the plant the drink is brewed from
in Palenque
Mavericks (big-wave surf break)
The measure he reaches for to describe the perfect wave, a break off Half Moon Bay known for some of the biggest rideable waves anywhere.
WikipediaTitans of Mavericks, the competition held there (Wikipedia)
Maya calendar and the 2012 prophecy
The ancient Mesoamerican timekeeping system, and the modern doomsday reading of its Long Count end date on 21 December 2012, which fascinated him since boyhood and which Tulum lays out through Argüelles' theory of time.
WikipediaThe 2012 phenomenon the calendar's end date set offThe Mesoamerican Long Count calendar the belief was built onSmithsonian's Living Maya Time, the Maya's own telling of their calendarMexicolore's guide to how the Maya calendar actually works
in Solstice Grove, Cancun, Tulum, Palenque and Costa Rica
Maya civilization
The Mesoamerican civilization whose script, calendar and cities shaped southern Mexico and Central America, the region the chapters on Tulum and San Cristobal pass through, and whose ruins he films across Guatemala.
Wikipediathe Maya calendar systems, including the Long CountMaya civilization overview, World History Encyclopedia
in Tulum, San Cristobal and Brazil
Maya prophecy tradition
The popular 2012 doomsday reading of the Maya calendar, named in passing in a job ad for stories worth collecting.
Wikipediathe Long Count calendar the 2012 date comes from
in The Muse
McDonaldization
George Ritzer's term for the fast food logic of standardization spreading into everyday life, invoked here for the sameness the narrator half expected to find.
WikipediaGeorge Ritzer's founding book, The McDonaldization of Society, on WikipediaThe book itself, to borrow from the Internet Archive
MDMA
MDMA, the empathogen behind Tulum's days-long dance rituals, credited there with the rush of connection the chapter calls a new mystical experience.
WikipediaMAPS: overview of MDMA and MDMA-assisted therapy
in Tulum
Mescaline
The entheogen drawn from peyote and San Pedro cactus that carries the whole chapter, first the pill passed to him at the Karl Denson show.
WikipediaAldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, his own mescaline account
Mesoamerican ballgame (pitz)
The ritual Maya ball game called pitz, played across Mesoamerica for over three thousand years, which Oliver describes to Niko in the Cancun chapter.
WikipediaThe Maya Ball Game: an overview (Mayan.org)
in Cancun
Mount Athos (Agion Oros)
The self governing peninsula of Orthodox monasteries in northern Greece, called here by its Greek name, Agion Oros, early in the Babylon chapter.
Wikipediathe monastic community's own self governing statusan American foundation supporting the monasteries today
Muse (Greek mythology)
The classical Muses, goddesses of memory and inspiration, whom the book's opening chapter calls on directly: I need a muse.
WikipediaHesiod's Theogony, the invocation that starts the tradition
in The Muse
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine in the brew
The molecule at the center of the brew, the compound the two plants combine to carry through the stomach, as he explains.
New Age (movement)
The seekers Scott brings to his lodge in Iquitos are New Age travelers, part of the loose Western spiritual current this chapter quietly places him among.
WikipediaHuman Potential Movement, one of New Age's closest precursors
Noosphere
The idea of a global layer of shared mind, coined by Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky, that recurs across the book as a name for collective consciousness.
WikipediaTeilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, full textVernadsky's The Biosphere, full text of the first English translation
in Cassie, Solstice Grove, September 11, Costa Rica and Burning Man
Okeechobee Music Festival
The Florida festival Niko directed, named here as the first attempt at building a space for young people to let loose safely.
WikipediaThe festival's own site
in San Cristobal (the interlude Design and Friction)
Opium
The drug the chapter says a desert host dissolves in water for a guest, offered as a gesture of peace and welcome.
in India
Oracles of Ancient Greece
The Greek habit of consulting oracles before a journey, offered as an ancestor of the narrator's own habit of consulting the internet.
WikipediaPythia, priestess of the Delphic oracleDelphi, the sanctuary itself
in Cancun
The Palace (Palenque)
The royal residence and administrative complex at the heart of the Palenque ruins, walked past on that jungle morning in the Palenque chapter.
WikipediaWorld History Encyclopedia: Palenque and its Palace
in Palenque
Palenque (Maya archaeological site)
The Maya city-state in Chiapas that gives its name to the next chapter, first named when Palenque waits until Thursday.
WikipediaINAH: Palenque archaeological zone (official site record)
Panspermia
The hypothesis that life seeded Earth from space; the Planetary Mating Call interlude in the Cyber-Shamanism chapter uses it to picture cosmic conception.
WikipediaSvante Arrhenius, Worlds in the Making (1908), the founding textDirected panspermia, the later variant proposed by Crick and Orgel
in Cyber-Shamanism (the interlude Planetary Mating Call)
Patrokleia
The funeral games Achilles held for Patroclus in the Iliad, the origin Niko gives for organized sport itself.
WikipediaPrimary text: Homer's Iliad, Book 23 (Perseus Digital Library)
in Cancun
Permaculture
The sustainable design philosophy Niko studied at the grove, treating farms and communities as one ecosystem.
WikipediaPermaculture: A Designer's Manual, Mollison's later, comprehensive guide, borrowable on the Internet ArchiveBill Mollison, who coined the term with David Holmgren in 1978
Post-constructivism
He calls this a post-constructivist worldview in the Iquitos chapter, moving past constructivism's built realities toward a freer sense of subjectivity.
Constructivist epistemology (Wikipedia)Radical constructivism (Wikipedia)
Pragmatism
The philosophy the Iquitos chapter calls too depressive and realistic, judging ideas by their practical results rather than their truth.
WikipediaPragmatism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)William James, Pragmatism, 1907, full text
Pre-Aristotelian ancient Greek philosophy
In the Iquitos chapter he sets this beside alchemy and shamanism, one more old system built on connections modern science does not track.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the Presocratics
Psilocybin mushrooms
The mushroom hunt with Ivan in the Palenque chapter is psilocybin, the psychedelic fungus at the center of that morning's search and the trip that follows.
WikipediaJohns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research
in Palenque
Psychedelic trance (psytrance)
The high tempo electronic genre and subculture, born from Goa's beach parties: it pegs Tarquin as a type in Cancun, gets sworn off after one club night in Brazil, and names the music behind the Burning Man chapter's rave scenes.
WikipediaGoa trance (Wikipedia), the Indian scene psy trance grew out of
in Cancun, Brazil, India, Burning Man and Cyber-Shamanism
Psychoanalysis
The listening style Niko names for a guy in Paris who says little and asks a question here and there, the classic analyst's silence.
WikipediaFreud's founding text, The Interpretation of Dreams, full text
in Paris
Puja (Hindu worship ritual)
The Hindu worship ritual Vishnu packs offerings for in chapter 15, distinct from Puja the person named earlier in the same chapter.
WikipediaArti, the lamp offering usually performed as part of a puja
in India
Purging (ayahuasca ritual practice)
The vomiting and release the ceremony brings on, which the book names purging, a normal and expected part of an ayahuasca night.
Ayahuasca, whose Wikipedia article covers the purging that follows the brew
Pushkar
The Rajasthan pilgrimage town chapter 15 keeps returning to, holy to Hindus as the place where Brahma is said to have descended.
WikipediaBrahma Temple, Pushkar, one of the very few temples anywhere dedicated to BrahmaPushkar Lake, the sacred lake tied to Brahma's creation myth
in India
Rastafari
The Jamaican-born faith and culture glimpsed on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast, a movement of its own rather than just a beach aesthetic.
WikipediaLeonard Howell, an early Rastafari preacher and organizerThe Holy Piby, a foundational text in early Rastafari thought
in Costa Rica
Reiki
A hands on energy healing practice from 1920s Japan, one more thread in the list of ideas reshaping the narrator's outlook in college.
WikipediaNCCIH fact sheet on reiki
in Cassie
Rorschach test
The inkblot test Niko borrows to describe a twirling orange snowflake, yellow and red twisting together at its center.
in Paris
The Sacred Circuit
Niko's own phrase for the loop he is building, mythology, technology and ritual closing back on each other, named plainly in his own words.
Sacred geometry
Geometric patterns read as holy, named on Niko's college list of interests, drawn on the walls of the Solstice Grove house, and swirling through his time in Costa Rica.
WikipediaMacTutor History of Mathematics: the Golden Ratio (scholarly overview of a core sacred-geometry proportion)Euclid's Elements, Clark University edition (the primary geometric text this tradition builds on)
in Cassie, Solstice Grove and Costa Rica
Samadhi
The Hindu term set beside it: samadhi, meditative absorption, the mind stilling into oneness, the chapter's second name for the same threshold.
WikipediaThe Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the founding text where samadhi is defined
in Costa Rica
Samba
The Afro-Brazilian music and dance heard live on his last night by the lagoon in Florianopolis.
in Brazil
San Cristóbal de las Casas
Ivan, studying neuroscience in the Palenque chapter, had just come from San Cristóbal de las Casas, the Chiapas highland town where he studied with a Mayan shaman.
WikipediaWikipedia overview of Maya religion and ritual specialists
in Palenque
San Pedro cactus (huachuma)
The Andean cactus used in solstice ceremonies at Machu Picchu, named alongside ayahuasca in the same call for writers.
in The Muse
Scientific Revolution
The sixteenth and seventeenth century turn from old natural philosophy to observation and proof, the leap the Pendulum essay names on its way to splitting the atom.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on scientific revolutions as Kuhn defined the term, a different but related senseKhan Academy's short overview of the historical Scientific Revolution
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
Shamanism
The practice threaded through the whole book, from why shamans exist in Paris to the shaman Niko seeks out in Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador and Iquitos.
WikipediaMircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, the founding academic study
in Paris, Solstice Grove, Guatemala, Ecuador, Iquitos, Peru and India
Shambhala
The hidden kingdom of Tibetan Buddhist lore, borrowed here for the higher self a player finds inside their own story.
WikipediaThe Rubin Museum, dedicated to Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist art
in Tulum (the interlude The Pendulum)
Shiva consciousness
The state of oneness with Shiva that the Tulum fire ritual reaches for, combining the four elements to get closer to it.
Wikipedia: Kashmir Shaivism, the philosophical tradition behind the termWikipedia: Abhinavagupta, its leading philosopher
in Tulum
Silk Road
The ancient trade network between East and West that the book returns to again and again as a shorthand for pilgrimage, wandering, and countercultural romance.
WikipediaUNESCO Silk Roads Programme, an overview of the routes and their historyWorld History Encyclopedia entry on the Silk Road
in Cassie, Tulum, Costa Rica and India
Sociology of Sport
The college class Niko mentions in the Cancun chapter, the one he says changed how he sees modern sport.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Philosophy of Sport
in Cancun
Solstice Grove
A dance gathering Niko recalls from earlier in his travels, named once in the India chapter as a place he had already danced, and the title of chapter four.
in India
Spanish conquistadors
The Spanish conquerors of the Americas, the far end of the scale the book uses to measure how strange the hippies looked to Crete.
WikipediaWikipedia: Hernan Cortes, the conquistador who took Tenochtitlan
in Tulum
Spanish Inquisition
The tribunal the Iquitos chapter blames for destroying the west's esoteric knowledge to save the church's remaining authority; The Pendulum names its burning of books among the losses.
WikipediaThe Spanish Inquisition, overview (Jewish Virtual Library)
Spartan view of family
The line borrows Sparta's discipline as a foil for a gentler family philosophy; the real Spartan agoge did pull children from their parents to raise them communally.
WikipediaAgoge, the Spartan training system that separated boys from their familiesSpartan army, on the militarized culture behind that view
in Athens
Sputnik (1957 satellite)
The first satellite humanity ever sent up, used here as the planet's opening syllable in a much longer conversation.
Stoned Ape Theory
McKenna's hypothesis that psilocybin mushrooms catalyzed the leap into human consciousness, named and welcomed in the same breath as the Eden story.
Wikipediathe theory's founding text, McKenna's Food of the Godsa 2024 piece arguing evidence now supports the theory
in Tulum
Structuralism
Named beside pragmatism in the same disenchanted sentence, the method that reads culture and mind as fixed underlying patterns.
WikipediaFerdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, the founding text (Wikipedia)Claude Levi-Strauss, who carried it into anthropology (Wikipedia)
Sufism
The tradition the book says used whirling dervishes to keep an ecstatic ritual alive as it died out in Europe.
WikipediaMysticism, general overview (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)Mevlevi Order, the order behind the whirling practice (Wikipedia)
Surveillance capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff's term for a business built on harvesting attention as data, another cost the same chapter weighs against the promised transparency.
WikipediaThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff's 2019 book that developed the term (Wikipedia)
Synchronicity (Jungian concept)
Carl Jung's name for coincidences that feel meaningful without a causal link, the word the Ecuador chapter reaches for twice.
WikipediaSynchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung's own book on the ideaCarl Jung, the psychologist who introduced the concept
in Ecuador
Syncretism
The blending of distinct belief systems into one, the word the narrator reaches for to name what he found in San Cristobal's churches.
WikipediaSan Juan Chamula, near San Cristobal, where Maya and Catholic worship fuse in one church
Tai chi
One of the four disciplines the chapter lists as paths to flow through repetitive movement.
WikipediaNIH's plain overview of tai chi and what the evidence shows
in Costa Rica
Tantra
The esoteric Hindu and Buddhist tradition on the narrator's college list of influences, and the word Niko reaches for twice in India to describe wordless closeness.
WikipediaEncyclopedia of Buddhism, via Encyclopedia.com: a scholarly overview of Tantra
Telepathy
The word Niko reaches for, for lack of a better one, to name the theme of the secret rituals in Paris.
WikipediaPhantasms of the Living, the 1886 case-study collection that coined the modern study of it
in Paris
Temascal (Mayan sweat lodge ceremony)
The Mesoamerican sweat lodge ceremony, the shaman's rite that recurs six times through the San Cristobal chapter.
Temple of Inscriptions (Palenque)
The Temple of Inscriptions the travelers walk to at Palenque is the real Maya pyramid where archaeologists found King Pakal's tomb inside in 1952.
WikipediaNational Geographic on Palenque and the discovery of Pakal's tomb
in Palenque
Temporary Autonomous Zone (T.A.Z.)
Bey's term for a pocket of freedom outside formal control, named on the dance floor rather than quoted exactly.
Wikipediathe full text of T.A.Z. hosted at the Anarchist Library
in Burning Man
Ten Principles of Burning Man
Three of the event's ten founding principles, chanted in the chapter: radical self-reliance, self-expression, and inclusion.
WikipediaBurning Man's own statement of its Ten Principles
in Burning Man
Tikal
The ruined Maya city he leaves behind him twice in the Guatemala chapter, once in a letter and once walking its ruins.
WikipediaWorld History Encyclopedia overview of Tikal
in Guatemala
Trance (electronic music genre)
The music he first heard at sixteen, the genre that carries into the next paragraph's Goa DJ and the strand called Goa trance.
WikipediaGoa trance, the subgenre tied to the DJ from Goa mentioned right after
in Athens
Tulum
The Maya ruins on Mexico's Yucatan coast, the sunset video Niko plays early in the Muse chapter that plants the pull toward Tulum later in the book.
WikipediaWorld History Encyclopedia: Tulum
in The Muse
Tulum (Maya archaeological site)
The walled Maya ruins on the Yucatan coast that open the chapter, the place Akiko asks if the narrator really went to, and where, standing on the pyramid with Tarquin, he felt the old boundaries dissolve.
WikipediaWorld History Encyclopedia: TulumINAH's page on the Tulum archaeological site
in Tulum, San Cristobal and Back To Babylon
Tz'utujil (Maya people)
Diego's people, one of Guatemala's twenty two Maya groups, settled mainly around Lake Atitlan since before the conquest.
WikipediaSantiago Atitlan, pre-Columbian capital of the Tz'utujil, on the lake (Wikipedia)
in Guatemala
Tzotzil and Tzeltal (Mayan languages)
The two Maya languages he cannot tell apart in San Cristobal, still spoken by hundreds of thousands in the highlands of Chiapas today.
WikipediaTzeltal language (Wikipedia)Mayan languages, the family both belong to (Wikipedia)
Whirling dervishes
The Sufi order in Konya whose turning meditation the Iquitos chapter says kept an ecstatic ritual alive after Europe let it die out; the sight he remembers from Turkey in the India chapter.
WikipediaMevlevi Order, the order that performs it (Wikipedia)Mevlevi Sema Ceremony (UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage)
in Iquitos, Peru and India
White magic and black magic
White magic and black magic are the two poles chapter 19 draws, selfless intent set against selfish harm.
WikipediaBlack magic, the opposite poleThe Golden Bough, the founding study of magic and religion
World Wide Web
Named here as CERN's other great invention, the global system Tim Berners Lee proposed in 1989 and built there by 1990.
WikipediaTim Berners Lee's original 1989 proposal (W3C)The first website, restored (CERN)
Wu wei
The Taoist word named last: wu wei, effortless action, moving with nature instead of against it, closing the chapter's list of four names.
WikipediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Daoism, on wu wei's place in the traditionThe Dao De Jing itself, the founding text of wu wei, in Chinese and English
in Costa Rica
Yin-yang
He reaches for the yin-yang symbol on the next page, to picture two views that look opposed but actually complete each other.
WikipediaInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on yinyang
Yoga
The physical and spiritual discipline that threads through the book, from Niko's college reading, an email in the Costa Rica chapter, and the seekers he meets in India.
WikipediaInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (primary text and overview)
in Cassie, Costa Rica and India
Zapatista movement
The indigenous rights movement out of Chiapas that surfaces first as a name on a list, then as its own thread in Cancun, and five times as the backdrop to the San Cristobal chapter.
WikipediaThe 1994 uprising that first put them in Chiapas' plazasSubcomandante Marcos, the movement's masked spokesmanEnlace Zapatista: the EZLN's own communiques
in Solstice Grove, Cancun and San Cristobal
Zulu people
The Nguni nation of southern Africa a woman wrote to him about, from a village stay, back in the Paris chapter.
WikipediaSouth African History Online: Zulu
in Paris
Zuvuya
Argüelles' word for a memory circuit linking past and future, introduced a year after The Mayan Factor, in Surfers of the Zuvuya.
Surfers of the Zuvuya, Argüelles' book that coined the term, readable at the Internet ArchiveJosé Argüelles' Wikipedia biography, for the term's place in his wider system
in Tulum