“More amusingly, I happened to see the old movie, Harvey, on TV a few weeks later, and began to notice that Elwood P. Dowd, the hero, has the same relation with "Harvey," an invisible white rabbit. I began to wonder if the author of Harvey might have been an initiate of some witch-coven, Crowleyan lodge or similar psychic group.
At this point in the play, a character named Wilson, learning that Harvey is a pookah, looks up pookah in the dictionary. The entry begins, "A Celtic elf or vegetation spirit of mischievous nature ..." and ends, remarkably, "and how are you tonight, Mr. Wilson?" The actor playing Wilson (on the Television) dropped the book in shock, and I was a bit startled myself.
…As for me, after working with the ideas that my experiences resulted from telepathic assistance by real adepts on Earth, or similar adepts on Sirius, or from my own Poetic Imagination (as William Blake called this faculty) I now tell people, when they ask about this aspect of my career, that I currently attribute it all to the pookah, a six foot white rabbit with supernatural powers well known in County Kerry. I like that model because I don’t think anybody exists damnfool enough to take it literally.”
from Robert Anton Wilson’s “The Cosmic Trigger“
Experiment:
A decade ago, I encountered what the Irish call “púcaí” or “pookies”, psychedelic fungi named in Gaelic after the fairy rabbit-shapeshifter of Celtic lore. The púca has counterparts throughout the mythologies of Celtic and Germanic cultures. For instance, in Scandinavian languages such as Old Icelandic and Norwegian, we find púki, meaning mischievous demon, nature spirit, or the Devil. The Anglo-Saxons came to know this entity as Pook or Puck of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” fame.
About thirty minutes in, or after an hour, these things are hard to tell, my girlfriend at the time and I were walking to Eeyore’s Birthday in Austin, Texas when I began to puke blood. My girlfriend’s head was a television set. It was playing, on repeat, an old commercial for Gushers fruit snacks where people exploded into colored corn syrup.
Hellish digestion, I felt every cell metabolizing. A guy wearing a black fairy outfit was ejected from the festival garden for smoking a cigarette.
Before humans modernized, there were strange archaic humanoids walking the earth. Mitochondria built the Pyramids, the first office cube farm hell, the thralldom of fishes and whales.
Data:
What my girlfriend looked like:
an image of a woman with a television for a head (note the dipole “rabbit ears” antenna)
Conclusions:
To fair the experience didn’t impress much upon me in any measurable cognitive sense except my IQ is lower probably and my light-sensitivity has been cranked up.
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.