Works by
Francis Huxley
(Anthropologist, Writer)
[1923 - ]

Books

• Shamans Through Time: 500 Years On The Path To Knowledge (2001) by Francis Huxley and Jeremy Narby
  An anthology of excerpts from 64 previously published works to illustrate how shamanism has been perceived through the centuries. The essays are divided into seven parts, each including an introductory essay that identifies the prejudices of the researchers and shows how preconceived notions influenced both their methodology and the evolution of the study of shamanism. Many of the authors included in this anthology, such as Black Elk and Claude Lévi-Strauss, are familiar to those interested in the subject. What makes this work unique is that it also includes translations of relevant materials that were previously available only in foreign languages.

• Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley (1999)  by Francis Huxley, Juliette Huxley, May Sarton, and Susan Sherman


May Sarton's love for Juliette Huxley, ignited that first moment she saw her in 1936, transcended sixty years of friendship, passion, silence, and reconciliation. In the extraordinary breadth and variation of these letters, we see Sarton in all her complexities and are privy to the nuances of her rich amitii amoureuse with Juliette, the preeminent muse and most enduring love of her life.
The letters chart their meeting; May's affair with Juliette's husband, Julian (brother of Aldous Huxley ), before the war; her intense involvement with Juliette after the war; and the ardent and life-enhancing friendship that endured between them until Juliette's death. While May's intimate relationship with Julian had not been a secret, her more powerful emotions for Juliette had.

May's fiery passion was a seductive yet sometimes destructive force. Her feelings for and demands on Juliette were often overwhelming to them both. Indeed, Juliette refused all contact with May for nearly twenty-five years, the consequence of May's impulsive threat to tell Julian of their intimacy. The silence was devastating to May, but her love for Juliette never diminished. Their reconciliation after Julian's death was not so much a rekindling as it was a testament to the profound affinities between them. Although theirs had been a relationship rife with complications and misunderstandings, the deep love and compassion they shared for each other prevailed.

Included in this volume are original drafts of and notes for an introduction May Sarton was hoping to complete.

• The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1999), Francis Huxley and Jeremy Narby, eds.


A personal adventure, a fascinating study of anthropology and ethnopharmacology, and, most important, a revolutionary look at how intelligence and consciousness come into being.

This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences," leads the reader through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge.

In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.

• The Eye: The Seer And The Seen (1990)
  In this book, Francis Huxley blends science, art, mythology, and religion to demonstrate the layers of meaning in the image of the eye. The text is interspersed with drawing, diagrams, and color plates throughout, so the entire book is quite visually engaging. Huxley explores the eye as a symbol of the Sacred, as a preternatural attribute of monsters, as a weapon (e.g. "the evil eye"), and as an emblem of what is highest in human nature. The images in the book draw from ancient and modern sources worldwide. This is a wonderful and thought-provoking book about this ubiquitous symbol.

• The Dragon: Nature of Spirit, Spirit Of Nature (1979)
  Covering the dragon in all its mysterious glory. The seductress in the waters, weather maker, slaying it, first parents and a host of others. Drawing on the great tradition of the Chinese and European dragon history & lore.

• The Raven and the Writing Desk (1976)
  As all readers of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland will know, when Alice sat down (uninvited) at the Mad Tea-party, the Hatter opened his eyes very wide and asked, "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" The riddle is famous because when Alice in turn asked "What's the answer?" the Hatter replied that he hadn't the faintest idea. It has provoked ingenious possible answers from many Great Minds, but in this "recondite enquiry into the Dodgsonian convention of Nonsense.." Francis Huxley has undertaken the first investigation in depth.

• The Way of the Sacred (1974)
  Through the sacred, man tries to achieve communion with the divine, and also with his own physical nature. He sets apart, physically or ritually, things that overwhelm him. In particular, Huxley explores the symbolism of the sacred, because it is really in symbolic terms that the sacred can be approached. But because of man's susceptibility to them, symbols can wield their own power: the enactment of a sacred rite can bring about supernatural experience, an actual experience of the sacred. These shared human experiences - as in rites of reproduction, puberty the seasons, the stages of life and death - become a primary basis for man's relationship with other men. Huxley shows how through celebrations of the sacred men have discovered their origins and understood the meaning of their lives.

• Affable Savages: An Anthropologist Among the Urubu Indians of Brazil (1956)
  For some months Francis Huxley traveled and lived alone among the natives in a district seldom penetrated by Europeans and, as he slowly grew proficient in the language, he began to collect the fascinating material which a clean style and a shrewd eye have enabled him to present so lucidly. This book is a summary and interpretation of an intricate system of myths and customs, so curious and so different from our own and yet so beautifully natural, that they throw a fresh light on our own lives and beliefs. An extremely revealing work of anthropology.

• The Invisibles: Voodoo Gods in Haiti (1966, 1969)
  A definitive reference to the rituals of magic as they are practiced by the indigenous peoples of Haiti. Francis Huxley holds in view throughout the pages, the vivid human-ness of the subject of this work, and the result is a compelling and intimately beautiful narrative.

• Peoples of the World (1964)
  321 colored illustrations of the people of the world in typical or national costumes.

• Tribes of the Amazon Basin in Brazil : Report for the Aborigines Protection Society 1972 (1973) with E. Brooks, R. Fuerst, and John Hemming
  A report by the Aborigines Protection Society on a mission led by the author. With a foreword by Sir Douglas Glover and some observations of the report by the president of FUNAI, Oscar Bandeira de Mello. The mission visited tribes in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Surinam.

Other

• Drug-Taking and the Arts (1994)
  Storm Thorgeson directs this insightful documentary. Based on the idea that drugs have influenced some of our greatest minds (Poe, Baudelaire etc.) it documents just how influential drug experiences have been on the minds of great writers, poets and thinkers. It shows that one hundred years ago many people thirsted for some form of 'drug' to fuel imagination and creativity. Storm Thorgeson may be known to some viewers as the designer of Pink Floyd album covers. Informative, enjoyable, and spiritual.

See also:

• Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World (2007), J. P. Harpignies, ed.
  23 leading experts reveal the ways that psychoactive plants allow nature’s “voice” to speak to humans and what this communication means for our future
   

  • Presents the specific “human-plant interconnection” revealed by visionary plants

  • Explores the relevance of plant-induced visions and shamanic teachings to humanity’s environmental crisis

  • With contributions from Alex Grey, Andrew Weil, Charles S. Grob, Dale Pendell, Dennis McKenna, Edison Saraiva, M.D., Ethan Nadelmann, Ph.D., Florencio Siquera de Caralho, Francis Huxley, Jeffrey Bronfman, Jeremy Narby, John Mohawk, Kat Harrison, Katsi Cook, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ph.D., Marcellus Bear Heart Williams, Michael Pollan, Michael Stewartt, Paul Stamets, Terence McKenna, and Wade Davis.

  Visionary plants have long served indigenous peoples and their shamans as enhancers of perception, thinking, and healing. These plants can also be important guides to the reality of the natural world and how we can live harmoniously in it.
  
  In Visionary Plant Consciousness, editor J. P. Harpignies has gathered presentations from the Bioneers annual conference of environmental and social visionaries that explore how plant consciousness affects the human condition. Twenty-three leading ethnobotanists, anthropologists, medical researchers, and cultural and religious figures present their understandings of the nature of psychoactive plants and their significant connection to humans. What they reveal is that these plants may help us access the profound intelligence in nature--the “mind of nature”--that we must learn to understand in order to survive our ecologically destructive way of life.