Customer Reviews

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(29)

 

 

This is less of a book and more of a collection of note cards thrown into the air and then randomly assembled. Sometimes the reader gets a run of a few pages that seem linked, yet in other places Pinchbeck goes from topic to topic in a matter of paragraphs or within one paragraph itself. On pages 52-53 he goes from maya to Relativity Theory to enlightenment to psychic phenomena to synchronicity. Sounds good if you do justice to each of those topics, but not if you are just throwing them out there because they all sound good together.

His propensity for generalizing is rampant with such things as "according to Eastern thought" (cause we all know Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism are really of one mind). These generalizations turn scary whenever he broaches the topic of women. His anger and bitterness towards women (p.356) is obviously based on personal history, but he tries to couch it in cosmic terms. He also rails against monogamy, but his argument seems to be that monogamy is getting in the way of him having sex with whomever he wants (seriously). At one points he has the arrogance to write, "if women want to do the work of integrating their shadows" (p. 328), as if there are not legions of women out there doing it to a degree he can't begin to approach himself.

In places where he writes on his work with plant medicine (p. 254 -260), he seems to hit his stride and some of his best reflections come out. It seems as if the constraint of keeping to a story, however briefly, does him a world of good in regards to being coherent. It's always good to hear the plants speak, even if through such a shaky scribe.

I could go on about such things as Pinchbeck suggesting we deal with the issue of alien visitors by applying the nondual perspective of Dzogchen (as usual, there may be something in there, but not the way he slaps them together), but I will stop here. My suggestion is to give it a good 10 - 20 pages of reading in a bookstore before buying it, as I suspect people will have widely varying reactions (hence the differing reviews). Cheers.

Pinchbeck's "Breaking Open the Head" was as good a book as this one is awful.

In "2012" Pinchbeck capitalizes on two heavy cultural phenomena, one contemporary and the other ancient. A smart student of cultural trends, he rides the cresting, recent wave of renewed psychedelic research, entheogenic studies and self-experimentation; and as New Age Consciousness Wonk he also invokes the ancient, time-tested vehicles/archetypes of Prophet of Doom and End of World Preacher (though Pinchbeck's Apocalyse is of a particularly unspecific, vague, and metaphysical nature, when he is challenged about it; he will not tell you what the Apocalypse is, and he does not hesitate from using that undefined fear to sell books).

To these two Main Ingredients he tosses in a few smidgeons of UFO Religion, a morsel of Goddess spirituality, and a pinchbeck of post-modern neo-Mayanism (nothing like a dead religion; no living followers to challenge half-baked modern interpretation and misappropriation by the white man). And Bam! You got your basic Pinchbeck layer cake. Throw in some hints to the ladies that his guru stud services are available, and there's your frosting. But this rock and roll psychedelic celebrity cake, though loaded with calories, has zero nutritional value. Its only purpose is to put Pinchbeck on the lecture circuit and generate fame at Burning Man and a New York bohemia notable mention. Bon Apetit!

In a little more detail . . .

When I spend time reading about psychedelic culture, I want to read something original. Instead we get in "2012" highly secondary and derivative ramblings about a dozen different ideas originated and popularized by other people.

2012 as a psychedelic focus was popularized by Terence McKenna. Pinchbeck is no McKenna. There are no original ideas here. More distressing is the way Pinchbeck appears to be riding that old faithful steed of crazy eyed prophets everywhere, the Horse of the Apocalypse. By hitching his dreams to the End of the World, apparently he hopes to make a living on the lecture circuit, and increase his circle of shamanic goddess groupies, for at least the next four years (until the 2012 meme dries up).

The autobiographical content is embarrassing and inexplicable. Apparently Pinchbeck's celebrity hobnobbing has gone to his head; he feels that he himself is interesting enough to force us to wade through his life story. Uh uh - I advise you to move along, there is nothing to see here. Just another minion of the counterculture who thinks he is unique. My mother might have thought him interesting, but he's really just another self-obsessed, moribund hipster, and I've already seen plenty of that to last a lifetime.

Using psychedelics and psychedelic reputation for sex is nothing new. Timothy Leary wrote the book on taking advantage of women from a guru / psychedelic provider power position. Is this a path that Pinchbeck really wants to follow?

To conclude on a positive note: "Breaking Open the Head" was a useful book as an introduction to the entheogenic experience and culture. I recommend people read that book instead. Or don't read any Pinchbeck at all, until he decides to come up with a new idea. Maybe he needs to find some new psychotropic medicines, because the current ones aren't working.

For someone who has spent so much time ostensibly obliterating his ego, Pinchbeck uses the words "I, me, and mine" with surprising frequency. "Breaking Open the Head" was a brave and well-told story, and Pinchbeck does have great skill at telling the tales of his own adventures down the rabbit hole. He is, at his best, a journalist with a skill for wrapping his own experience into fascinating questions.

But 2012 is a disorganized, rambling repeat of many of the delightful "Breaking Open" tales with some vague and poor attempts at analyzing and synthesizing "scholarly" information about the upcoming apocalypse, mysticism, crop circles, and psychedelics.

2012 left me with the nagging, slightly sticky feeling that Pinchbeck was not a wide-eyed explorer of consciousness, but rather a rich Manhattan art world brat (his description of walking around Berlin in the rain is particularly indicative) who left his wife and daughter in pursuit of the End of the World Party complete with as much free sex and intoxication as he could afford. Rock star or mystic? Free thinker or man trapped by his own pursuit of What Is Cool?

After bushwacking through the crop circle revelations and the mysteries of the modern calendar, 2012 settles upon and rediscovers - or discovers, as Pinchbeck seems to believe - the complex world of non-monogamy. He declares that the polyamorists among us are more emotionally evolved and free, and uses this thin, tired excuse to treat women with great disrespect. One wonders if the feminine principle Pinchbeck claims to value includes women over 40, mothers, and women who choose celibacy as a spiritual pursuit.

Pinchbeck pays a great deal of lip service to the necessity of compassion and community, but all his stories are about skipping from country to country, enjoying himself at Burning Man, exploring the jungles of priestesses and princesses...all quite selfish pursuits. If his compassion is so great, why doesn't he write about his volunteer work with the poor? The hungry? The disabled? The unhip, unwashed masses? I finished the book realizing that it doesn't make as good or salable a story to spend your time with those members of your community, that Pinchbeck's fans would much rather read about the heartfelt, wacky hijinks of the Man Who Would Be Terrence McKenna.

Leave yourself entertained and intruigued by "Breaking Open the Head", and forget the ego of "2012".

It's all about the author and his wild experiences tripping on shrooms in the Amazon and hating the chicks who dumped him. If you're buying this because you're interested in 2012, give it a pass. If you're a fan of deluded and arrogant autobiographies, I change my review to 5 stars.

This book is a step back from the previous tome in which Pinchbeck described his experiences with a variety of drugs including hallucinogens such as yage, Psilocybe mushrooms, DMT and iboga. In contrast to the previous book (as superficial as it is), however, the new one is incoherent, simplistic, rambling and has little if anything to do with Quetzalcoatl, Nahua mythology or Meso-American "prophecies". While Pinchbeck seems to have wormed his way into the epicenter of the New Age pseudo-shamanic lecture circuit, he seems to have lost his inspiration and enthusiasm with the very subject topics one would expect him to be most familiar with. There is no scholarship in this book, and even less original insights/teachings from indigenous cultures that use plant substances for religious ceremonies and spiritual growth. Rather, we see is a conspiracy - type pablum along the lines of David Icke's 'alien invaders and body snatchers'. Kind of sad.... looks like a promising young man lost his way.

To learn about the history of Tollan, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, ancient Meso-American beliefs or their calendar(s), I'd recommend books by David Carrasco or Henry Nicholson.

I recently finished Daniel Pinchbeck's "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl." The author has an incredibly developed gift with words, but he never stoops to cleverness. He comes across as bright, lucid, honest, vulnerable and congruent. It' was the "10,000 volt honesty thing" that really got to me, however. Daniel has shown enormous courage in writing from the heart about his own personal life, relating it to his spiritual growth and the growth of humankind. I found myself saying again and again, "Wow, I wish I could write like that!"

I was saddened, however, when I finished the book no closer to understanding the book's structure than I was in the beginning. It was clearly autobiographical, but the title suggested something more. It felt to me that Daniel had put together a bunch of sometimes unrelated essays under the "2012 and Quetzalcoatl" banner and that the choosing of that name was a tad bit exploitive.

Some of the essays (Kali/Shakti, crop circles, UFO's, Burning Man) were totally brilliant--Daniel developed certain themes that others have not addressed nearly as well--but the Santo Daime story at the end of the book was just too weird for me. After all but ignoring Quetzalcoatl for most of the book, Daniel begins to hear what he imagines is Quetzalcoatl's "voice." This occurs after he has deeply embraced the tradition of Santo Daime, which initially, he just as deeply rejected. After messing with his mind for far too many pages, the "voice" comes through as a series of "teachings." Given Q's effect on his life during that period, it seems probable that this figure was an exponent of an unintegrated archetype, specifically that of the Trickster. The figure whom Daniel calls Q certainly seems to be split off and unintegrated. That Daniel constellated a "connection with Q" after weeks (?) of taking ayahuasca is no big deal. Bush proclaims a connection with God. Q's "voice" sounded suspiciously like a cross between Ramtha and Shirley MacLain. It said a lot of lovely things, yes, but Daniel said them far more eloquently and, to my mind at least, far more authoritatively when he spoke in his own voice.

On balance, however, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was seminal and is an essential piece of literature for our times.

I would tentatively add a few words of my own to the Mayan mix. As a symbol, Quetzalcoatl may very well be the Plumed Serpent of Revelation that the Judeo-Christian tradition has, on an unconscious level, so vigorously rejected. Perhaps those who look to the sky (the so-called noosphere) for the signal of his coming are mistaken. Perhaps in this coming incarnation, he will come from within the Earth itself.

Light alone will not save us. It needs to be grounded in LIFE. "The explusion from Eden," at an esoteric level, represents the collective shift from a recognition of the Life and sentiency in everything around us to a view that Matter is DEAD. A "return to the Garden" implies the ability to resonate with the "signature temporality" of everything that exists. It implies the ability to look at rocks and walls and bodies, and see that the One Consciousness that they share is infinitely individuated and totally ALIVE. I am reminded of that old Leonard Cohen song from Beautiful Losers, "God is alive/ Magic is afoot."

Could it be that Matter is not at all a dead thing? Could it be that within Matter, there are elemental beings that are as oppressed by their lot as we are by ours? Could it be that beyond all the quarks and charms of the physical world, there is a choir of angelic beings from whose SONG Matter and everything else in the world emanates on a moment-by-moment basis?

If that is true, perhaps it is heuristically meaningful to suggest that Quetzalcoatl's role in his latest incarnation is to serve as a "conductor" for this "choir," and in so doing, transform the "Fire in the Earth" into something bright and beautiful and living, so that, in a lightning flash, the curtain is lifted and the optical illusion in which we have been living for so many millenia gives way to an entirely new vision. It is interesting to note that in Kabbalistic gematria, the word for Eden and time are ontologically related. Perhaps Quetzalcoatl's cosmic mission in this latest incarnation is to bring us back to the Garden and open the Gates of Understanding.

I really liked Pinchbeck's first book, "Breaking Open the Head." It was a story of how he began experimenting with psychadelics, what those experiences were like, and how they changed him. It was an interesting story and held my attention.

Unfortunately, this book says nothing. It doesn't tell a story, and it didn't hold my attention. Most of the book is page after page, chapter and chapter -- and I mean on and on -- of pseudo-intellectual babble in which he drolly expounds on Jung and other philosophers, without even a hint of a plot or story line.

There are a few bits of personal story here, though. Pinchbeck tells us that he has a spinal condition that causes him to walk with a hunch, due to a childhood disease. Later, he talks about his marital problems and how he went on a series of trips to the Burning Man festival and then to the jungles of South America, trying to get laid. Unfortunately, he is rebuffed by women at every turn. (Take a look at his photo on the back page.)

Oh yeah, the book is supposed to be about Quetzalcoatl and the end of the Mayan calandar in 2012. Go to pages 367-370, where Pinchbeck acts as a medium for Quetzalcoatal and transcribes his statement about what will happen then. There is NO need to plow through the filler in the rest of the book.

It is obvious that Pinchbeck wrote this book solely to fulfil his contract obligtion to write a 300+ page book, for royalties alone. Financial pressure make bad literature.

I enjoyed parts of this book, but like others I got really, really turned off by the author's weird diatribes against women and his manic justifications for his bad behavior. Like the author's wife I also suspect he's an addict- not just drugs but addicted to any adrenalin rush experience. i don't think psychadelics are bad per se but he seems to be avoiding the very advice he sets for himself as quoted from Steiner- that spiritual development must be made calmly and maturely. I give Pinchbeck credit for his honesty and his sense of adventure, but i kept cringing when he would throw every idea in the pot together. You could see he had lost all ability to discern,to use his metaphor, the signal from the noise. He writes about how a certain author or idea is even to him ridiculous and then proceeds to wear down his own intuition by giving in to the idea so he can go further and further out there. The man clearly responded well to experiencing devotion and diligent spiritual practice at the end of the book- not very glamorous but any true spiritual practitioner will tell you this is what it is like 90% of the time. His diatribe against monogamy, his own attempts at prophecy, and the jumbling of every alternative theory together were a distraction from some truly interesting thoughts buried in this book. Instead of coming away with transformative, deeply spiritual ideas the book felt like a cheap carnival ride. His ego overwhelms what he professes to be the intent behind his book.I agree with another reader that anyone purchasing this book should read about 20 or so pages before they buy it.

If you look in a dictionary, you will see that a "pinchbeck" is a sham, a fake, a fraud. It was originally a word used to describe an alloy used to falsely imitate gold. We might say, then, that the very definition of a pinchbeck is something which purports itself as possessing great value, but, upon closer inspection, that value is found to be lacking. This is what we have in '2012: Return of Quetzalcoatl,' the rantings of an unabashed pinchbeck. Pinchbeck produces nothing of value, nothing original, and brings all of this lack to us with a unique & distinct air of smugness, self-righteousness, and complete abandon for any need for argument, evidence, or demonstration that only Pinchbeck can muster. This book is the epitome of the "because I say so (and I'm so important)" rationale that we all found unsatisfactory when our parents tried to use it on us. I recommend that nobody buy this book, that nobody mention it to anybody else, and that nobody even mention the name Daniel Pinchbeck (shhhhh), but instead just find relevant ways to include that actual word "pinchbeck" into your daily vocabulary, so that people properly associate the word with something shiny and ultimately valueless. ;)

Like many other reviewers, I read Pinchbeck's previous book, Breaking Open The Head, and was mightily impressed. It was literate, relevant, and engrossing. At the time I couldn't put it down, and even now when I read it, new ideas and directions of thought make themselves manifest. BOTH sets a very high mark for both the author and the reader. So, when I found out about "2012" my enthusiasm and expectations were high. The Mayan cycle ending in 2012 has been in my thoughts for the last couple of years, but when I tried researching it, everything I found was academic and dry -- with an emphasis on esoteric mathematical equations. Daniel Pinchbeck's writing is tremendously erudite, and I felt if anybody could make the whole concept understandable, it would be him.

Sadly, this time I was mistaken. The Mayan calendar and its accompanying end-time themes are certainly important here, but I would say maybe ¼ of the book directly pertains to that. The other, stronger themes include:
- Crop circles (about half the book)
- The dissolution of a romantic relationship
- His increasing involvement with the Santo Daime religion
And while he came across in BOTH as literate and learned, he comes across here as merely pedantic. The names of writers, thinkers, and philosophers are scattered across the pages like birdshot. I found it annoying in an Ezra-Poundish, look-at-me-I'm-too-hip-for-the-room sort of way. There's definitely good stuff in "2012", but one has to travel down too many winding paths to find it. His first book is great, and his magazine articles that I've read have been consistently good. Daniel Pinchbeck has the makings of a great writer in him, and hopefully his future work will reflect that.