Culture - Marcia Moore: "Journeys into the Bright World"

[enquirewithin]

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Thanks - I'll be reading this online at the first opportunity!
	Thanks for posting Journeys into the Bright World, should be an interesting read.

[enquirewithin]

BACK COVER: Why did Marcia Moore, the celebrated yoga teacher, astrologer and author, and Howard Sunny Alltounian, MD, a successful and respected anesthesiologist, risk their health, their careers, even their sanity?

This is the intimate personal story of their life together, their love and their explorations into forbidden zones of higher consciousness.

Here is tape-recorded evidence of the struggles they endured, the past lives they relived and the joy that they found--under the guidance of the goddess Ketamine. It's an inner-space adventure story, more exciting and more profound than any novel. And every word true.
MARCIA MOORE
Marcia Moore was a famous author of New Age books. She first took ketamine in 1976, aged 48, with friends in California. A year later she suggested taking ketamine to Howard Alltounian, MD, an anesthetist who came to one of her workshops. After two such 'journeys' together, as they called them, they became engaged, having known each other for just a week:
The spell was raying forth in a multihued canticle, a garland of love woven with bands of light - the next ten minutes or so were the most emotionally intense - the Goddess Ketamine had put the seal of approval on our union... At the point of emergence I often did weep and my tears seemed to be drops drawn directly from a shoreless sea of inexpressibly deep feelings...ketamine works primarily on the 'emotional body' whereas LSD is more mental in its effects..(Moore & Alltounian 1978)
Moore named what she perceived to be the 'highest' level of her experiences 'the cosmic matrix' or 'cosmatrix', the source from which everything was said to be derived. She noted that ketamine produced a 'higher, clearer and more real trip' than LSD, although some people just felt 'disconcertingly whacked out', and that ketamine produced fragmentation into subpersonalities, including her role as 'priestess of the Goddess Ketamine'. She took the drug with ever-increasing frequency, noted a rapid tolerance, her mental boundaries became more porous as 'the message of the Goddess' was interpreted as 'let the soul (the light) seep through', and there was an apparent increase in 'magical' coincidences between mental and physical events. By early 1978, she was taking the drug daily and only slept for 3 hours per night. She went to visit John Lilly, who had just been through a prolonged ketamine binge and near fatal accident. She told him that she intended 'to ride this comet through to the end': John Lilly's last words to me were: 'you'd better be damn strong if you're going to play that game'...As this book goes to press I have once again increased the doses. (Moore & Alltounian 1978).
'The Priestess', aged 50, disappeared on a freezing winter's night in January, 1979. Her bleached skeleton was found two years later. She had gone at night into a nearby forest, and frozen to death after injecting herself with all the ketamine she could find (Jansen 2000).

[enquirewithin]

Not many people care about Marcia Moore, but her story fascinates me. She was a very early pioneer using ketamine. She believed in the idea of 'ketamine therapy'. She and her husband, anesthetist Howard Altounian, were on the verge of having the technique officially approved.

She is also an example of the dangers of ketamine, as he death shows. Her book is one of the most detailed accounts of experiences with a drug. As a person who was involved with the occult (she had written books about astrology and arcane subjects) but who had no mediumistic tendencies, ketamine was ideal for her. It enabled her to experience the 'cosmatrix.' She loved it. John Lilly (a stronger personality) warned her it was dangerous, but she didn't listen....

The book has been out of print for a long time and is expensive to buy. It is a fascinating read if you are interested in the history of drugs. With John Lilly, she was subject of a chapter in Karl Jansen's Ketamine Dreams and Realties. Here is web site which offers a scan of her book in its entirety.

http://kitty.43host.info/index.html

[Expat98]

Sounds fascinating. Thanks very much for posting this.

[schwing]

Wow, this is awesome. Thanks!

[trip.more]

Actually found the whole thing on PDF.I can't find the actual book no one seems to have it ever

[enquirewithin]

^This was a PDF, but it's so huge (50mg) I couldn't upload it, so I made web site instead.

SWItrip.more, is your PDF a scan or text?

I do have the book, but It was expensive-- you can get it through Amazon's second-hand dealers.

[Paracelsus]

I deleted all the posts about 'spiritualization of drugs' and awarded Masa with an infraction for hijacking a thread. Now keep the discussion on topic please.