Was use of entheogens a factor?
No. Long before that. Very early I read Jung’s books, and the drawings in them, of course, are so magical. It pulled so many things together work with metals, work with smith craft. I did a lot of work with precious metals. My first book was called The Gold Dust Wilderness and comes out of a Placer claim that I had in the Trinity Alps. And prospecting and geology led into assaying, which led to laboratory work with metals. So that flowed right into it. Working with crucibles… Did you ever make any money gold prospecting? I got a good book out of it. Do you feel there’s an alchemical aspect to computation now? Number theory? We’re stretching the metaphor here. I like that… An alchemical aspect to computers or number theory? Certainly there’s more of a tradition to number theory which goes back to the Pythagoreans. Since computers have returned to digital work, to the discrete mathematics rather than continuous, there’s some connection that way, to the Pythagorean approach. As is als
