The Return of the Mystic

Britain has always been home to people who live differently. Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers, Showmen/women who carry the fairgrounds from town to town, families who made their homes on the waterways, and, more recently, the New Age Travellers who emerged from the 70s counterculture, the free festival movement and the rave scene.

If you're going to watch your local football team this weekend, or perhaps catch a big match on a TV screen in the pub, do you know that you may be unconsciously participating in an ancient ritual? And as you're shouldering your way to the bar from the mosh pit at some gig and grinning at those you pass, are you aware that the artist you were watching may be embodying some spirit of transformation? That was the radical proposal of the book The Death and Resurrection Show that Rogan Taylor published in 1985, a book that is exceedingly difficult to get hold of now but one that became the inspiration and touchdown for my guest in this episode. David Bramwell returned to the Bureau to talk about The Ghosts of the Medicine Show, the book he's written about the themes of Rogan Taylor's Death and Resurrection Show. It is also a personal memoir of something most of us can relate to -growing up and being transformed by seeing musicians and artists and actors. David asks: 'What if the musician, the actor, the clown, the circus performer, the rock star — even the celebrity — are the latest manifestations of something that began much, much earlier' For most of human history, before temples, books and organised religions existed, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Their knowledge could not be written down; it had to be remembered, performed and embodied. The figures who carried this knowledge were the shamans—storytellers, healers, singers, dancers, magicians and guides who used performance to preserve culture, bind communities together and lead people through experiences of suffering, transformation and renewal. Where are they now? We also get into football, funerals - and ABBA.. For more on David and The Ghosts of the Medicine Show --- We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But if you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, Join our Patreon HERE

For centuries, it seems Britain’s magic mushrooms remained hidden in plain sight—growing in fields, parks, and hillsides. When knowledge of them did emerge, it passed between people through rumours, oral testimony, underground publications, and increasingly, reports of court cases. Robert Dickens of The Psychedelic Press came to the Bureau to tell the extraordinary story of the Psilocybe Pickers: the kids, the Psychonauts, the countercultural explorers, and amateur mycologists who helped elevate a small native fungus into part of Britain’s psychedelic history, folklore, legal case studies, and relationship with the landscape. We get into that, explode some myths, talk about the power of landscape, fairies and hear about a strange magic mushroom incident in the 18th century Psilocybe Pickers - A Short History of Bemushroomed Britons Myths of the Magic Mushroom - Interview with Andy Letcher More on Rob and The Psychedelic Press All Things Fungi Festival

Has 20th-and 21st-century physics moved away from the brute materialism of the nineteenth century toward ideas that resemble the world’s ancient mystical traditions? Might many of the discipline’s greatest figures — Einstein, Niels Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer and others - have been privately motivated by philosophical and sometimes mystical questions about consciousness, reality and humanity’s place in the cosmos? Jonathan Black came to the Bureau to talk about A Secret History of the Universe - a countercultural narrative of science that has been obscured by a mainstream insistence on secular materialism, and one that reveals how biographers have routinely downplayed their subjects' metaphysical leanings. In 2007, after getting rejected by every major UK publisher, Jonathan's book The Secret History of the World became an international bestseller. The public resonated with an idea the publishers had not: the possibility that many pivotal cultural developments were shaped by ideas transmitted through occult rather than mainstream institutions, A Secret History of the Universe continues the theme. We get into all this and talk about consciousness, relativity, quantum physics, prayer, mystical experience, magic, and ideas as entities. For more on Jonathan and his work ------- Friends

She's 82 but is firing on all cylinders, still crazy after all these years, as Paul Simon sang, well, still crazy enough to believe the world can be changed for the better, that it's her duty to try to make that happen and crazy enough in her youth to try to levitate the Pentagon.