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Castles in the air

Posted by TheFallen on December 05, 2002

In Reply to: Castles in the air posted by Woodchuck on December 05, 2002

: : : : : : : : Does anyone know the meaning of *Erowid*?

: : : : : : : I'm not sure it means anything at all - the only links to it I can find show it as the name of an organisation and its website "documenting the complex relationship between humans and psychoactives" - groovy.

: : : : : : : So unless you've got some context in which the word is used in another way, I reckon it's a made-up word, coined by those in kaftans.

: : : : : : I wouldn't be so quick to assume it's a made up word. The site name comes from the pseudonyms of the proprietors: Earth and Fire Erowid. They seem to have a shamanistic focus and include a bio of Carlos Castenada on the site. You might try looking for "Erowid" in Castenda's works or in Mayan mythology or plant pharmacology. Or maybe the simplest thing would be to e-mail the site owners and ask them why they chose their pseudonyms. It obviously has meaning to someone!

: : : : : It sounds sci-fi/fantasy.

: : : : I got bored scanning the 39,200 links that Google produced to "Erowid", and gave up after flipping through the first hundred or so - all of which led directly to our mushroom-loving friends. On sheer intuition, $5 will get you $20 that it's not Mayan, and any couple who decide to give themselves pseudonyms of Fire Erowid and Earth Erowid are in my book more than likely to invent whole separate realities, let alone words.

: : : : Someone more dedicated than I can trowel through the works of Carlos Castenada - suffice it to say that Bartleby has no mention of the word, and I wonder if it's in even the largest of encyclopaedias. My money says nope :)

: : : To honest I've got from that site:

: : : www.erowid.org/ index.shtml

: : : It's about drugs, but I really was wondering about the meaning of *erowid*, of course it has a link with plants... but it has to have a meaning and origin!

: : : What do you think?

: : Hello Tamio,
: : I believe the word is just a made up concoction of a person or two who are still living in the drug culture from 35-40 years ago.
: : I even went to the extreme of searching 411.com and whitepages.com and found not one listing under that surname.
: : Maybe you wanna send them an email asking for the meaning/origin of erowid.

: As I previously suggested. It must have a meaning to someone, but New Age pseudo-Mayan psychotropic-assisted spirituality isn't our field of expertise around here and we aren't likely to have appropriate references.

Tamio, if you do email the owners of the Erowid site, it'd be interesting if you pasted their answer here. $5 will now get you $40 that it's an entirely made-up word, nothing to do with Mayans, plant pharmacology or Carlos Castaneda, and that *only* has a meaning to whoever made it up.

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