2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl | 
 enlarge | Author: Daniel Pinchbeck
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $5.66
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Avg. Customer Rating:  111 reviews
Sales Rank: 103252
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.6
ISBN: 1585424838
Dewey Decimal Number: 191
EAN: 9781585424832
ASIN: 1585424838
Publication Date: May 4, 2006
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Product Description
Cross James Merrill, H. P. Lovecraft, and Carlos Castaneda -each imbued with a twenty-first-century aptitude for quantum theory and existential psychology-and you get the voice of Daniel Pinchbeck. And yet, nothing quite prepares us for the lucidity, rationale, and informed audacity of this seeker, skeptic, and cartographer of hidden realms.
Throughout the 1990s, Pinchbeck had been a member of New York's literary select. He wrote for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Harper's Bazaar. His first book, Breaking Open the Head, was heralded as the most significant on psychedelic experimentation since the work of Terence McKenna.
But slowly something happened: Rather than writing from a journalistic remove, Pinchbeck-his literary powers at their peak-began to participate in the shamanic and metaphysical belief systems he was encountering. As his psyche and body opened to new experience, disparate threads and occurrences made sense like never before: Humanity, every sign pointed, is precariously balanced between greater self-potential and environmental disaster. The Mayan calendar's "end date" of 2012 seems to define our present age: It heralds the end of one way of existence and the return of another, in which the serpent god Quetzalcoatl reigns anew, bringing with him an unimaginably ancient-yet, to us, wholly new-way of living.
A result not just of study but also of participation, 2012 tells the tale of a single man in whose trials we ultimately recognize our own hopes and anxieties about modern life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 106 more reviews...
 Lame Lame Lame July 28, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I thought that this book was going to be about 2012, but instead it was some annoying guy justifying his drug habit. I wish I had kept my money and bought something of substance.
 2012 July 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I found this book very interesting and very well written. The interesting with Pinchbeck is his backgrund in the intellectual art milieu of New York combined with a later interest in the occult, new spirituality and mysticism. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl is sort of a spiritual and intellectual biography. We follow Daniel on his travels and thoughts, to Stonhenge to look for crop circles, to the amazonas to try hallucinogenic mushroooms and so on. Driven by a frustration over the shallowness and crudeness of "western" "materialism" he seeks new and/or alternative world views.
What I like is Pinchbecks openness towards "the other side". He actually tries it all: drugs, crop circles, meditation, 2012 "prophesies", mayan calendar stuff and so on, with an open but inteligent mind. Often his reasoning is interesting to follow, sometimes it gets a bit too longwinded. I also like that he does not give the reader a new philosophy or ontology or religion or system of beliefs. Rather, as I read him, it is an attempt to shake a little the ingrained view of reality we usually take for granted. Is the established conception of reality so obvious? Or is there something fundamental that we can't see? And if so, can alternative world views give us a hint? 2012 opens up windows to alternative and fascinating ideas, described by someone with a foot in mainstream acedemic discourse as well. Which I think is unusual.
New age-fans or seekers of a belief system will probably find 2012 too ambiguous. Rather I think this book is intended for sceptical readers with an open mind.
 Fascinating Read! July 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is probably the best book I've read on the topic of 2012. I couldn't put it down! Definitely worth purchasing. Much more interesting than "Breaking Open The Head."
It's not 2012. It is 1960 June 25, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am not here to tell you if this is a good or a bad book. You have many other reviews for that. I am here to tell you only one thing: if you want to read about the year 2012 and all the events that might happen on this year, THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT BOOK. The author keeps telling you about his own experiences with this or that drug, in this or that country. So, for 2012 information, look somewhere else.
prophecy and polypharmacy June 4, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Early in this psychogenic memoir Daniel Pinchbeck tells us his mother dated Jack Kerouac. He then takes us on an 'On the Road' on steroids, or rather, on LSD, channeling the beat poet in addition to the Aztec serpent deity. But unlike 'On the Road', this is no scroll written in three weeks. The 400 page memoir takes us back and forth across four continents with an impressive collection of hallucinogenic polypharmacy. One major premise sees the world as waking dream. Human consciousness did not evolve, but is part of a greater consciousness that creates and maintains the universe. The right drugs can lift the veil, showing us, as in the Wizard of Oz, what's behind the curtain. The book was recommended to me by my local bookseller, an astronomer in a previous career, and I enjoyed it. But `2012' is not really a book about the Maya or their cosmic vision.
The book is about inter-dimensional beings making crop circles in southern England, reincarnated Indian potentates, the limitations of monogamous sexuality, and the possibility of a new consciousness that would end our obsession with rationality and herald a new age. None of this is absolutely provable, precisely because we create our own universe. Skeptics find hoaxes, true believers find miracles, and the undecided find only conflicting truths, one negating the other. Daniel Pinchbeck doesn't hide his own skepticism, and he cringes at times describing his visions while holding nothing back. Throughout the book, while taking hallucinogenic drugs, Daniel reminds us that he just might be hallucinating.
In `2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl,' the serpent deity speaks through the author and tells us that Daniel Pinchbeck is "the vehicle of my return." If I was one of the millions of living modern Maya, I might object to his use of my sacred cosmic vision to market a memoir. But I found the book both interesting and enjoyable. Daniel's willingness to use his body as a human test-tube was nothing short of heroic. I've practiced medicine for twenty years and have never heard of the drugs he comes across. It's a look from inside a subculture I know little about. I will probably never meet Daniel Pinchbeck in this life, but if I ever see him in a dream, I'm getting a six-pack and taking him to a mountaintop. Please don't wake me up. I'll be having a truly great conversation.
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