Back to top
3.
The Host and The Ghost: Psychedelics and the Unconscious.
Original prospectus, April 1972. 19pp., printed rectos only, bound in thin oversize card wrappers bound with three brass clips. SIGNED by the author on the title page.
The last page reproduces a carbon copy of a lengthy letter to Abrams from Francis Huxley (the book’s intended dedicatee), dated April 20, 1972, at the foot of which Abrams has added in holograph ink: “copy of a carbon. The original plus a copy of Prospectus intercepted and stolen by Thom Keyes and/or Michael Hollingshead” (the theft probably occurred at Hilton Hall in Cambridgeshire, then occupied by Abrams and house guest Keyes, either when Hollingshead was passing through on the way from his commune on the Isle of Cumbrae to London in late 1971, or, perhaps more likely, several months later, when he temporarily based himself there).
Abrams' book project sought to unify his lifelong research into parapsychology, Jungian synchronicity and the psychedelic experience, but remained unrealised, this detailed prospectus its only manifestation.
Together with: Steve Abrams’ lengthy review of “Drugs and Magic”, an anthology edited by George Andrews and published by Panther Books. 4pp. typescript with holograph amendments, dated March 1975. Probably unpublished. In it, Abrams’ critiques the book, in part due to its inclusion of an extract from an essay by Jung: “not the first time that George Andrews has tried to create the erroneous impression that Jung was favourably disposed toward the use of drugs and the practice of magic.”.
