Richard Grossinger - Migraine Auras: When the Visual World Fails

Selected Other Works by Richard Grossinger

Book of the Cranberry Islands

Book of the Earth and Sky

The Continents

Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity

Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life

Homeopathy: The Great Riddle

The Long Body of the Dream

New Moon

The Night Sky: The Science and Anthropology of the Stars and Planets

On the Integration of Nature: Post-9/11 Biopolitical Notes

Out of Babylon: Ghosts of Grossingers

Planet Medicine: Origins

Planet Medicine: Modalities

The Provinces

The Slag of Creation

Solar Journal: Oecological Sections

The Unfinished Business of Doctor Hermes

Waiting for the Martian Express: Cosmic Visitors, Earth Warriors, Luminous Dreams

As Editor or Co-editor

The Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century

Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life

Ecology and Consciousness

Into the Temple of Baseball

Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior

Olson-Melville Sourcebook: The Mediterranean

Olson-Melville Sourcebook: The New Found Land

Copyright 2006 by Richard Grossinger. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover image by Heather Brady (see )
Cover design by Paula Morrison

Migraine Auras: When the Visual World Fails is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and crosscultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Grossinger, Richard, 1944
Migraine auras : when the visual world fails / by Richard Grossinger.
p.; cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Summary: This book examines the phenomenon of visual scotomata that is known as migraine aura (whether in tandem with a headache or not); it has intrigued humankind since the dawn of time, yet this is the first book to inform and reassure the many sufferers. With suggestions for healingProvided by publisher.
eISBN: 978-1-58394-701-2
1. Migraine aura. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Migraine with Auracomplications. 2. Complementary Therapies. 3. Migraine with Auratherapy. 4. Vision Disordersetiology. WL 344 G878m 2006]
RC392.G77 2006
616.84912dc22

2006009446

v3.1

For John Upledger, Eugene Alexander, Frank Lowen, Robert Zeiger, and Michael Wagner, healers who have shown me the way

Medical knowledge is ever changing. As new research and clinical experiences broaden our knowledge, changes in treatment and drug therapy may be required. The author and editors of the material herein have consulted sources believed to be reliable in their efforts to provide information that is complete and in accordance with the standards accepted at the time of publication.

However, the author, editors, publisher, or any other party who has been involved in the preparation of this work, do not warrant the information contained herein and are not responsible for any errors or omissions resulting from the use of such information.

Readers are encouraged to confirm the information contained herein with other sources to best suit their particular situations.

This book is offered solely for educational purposes. Therefore, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for the use that any reader makes of the information it contains. The reader is simply urged to consider the material presented and to use it at his or her own risk.

Some of the product names, patents, and registered designs referred to in this book are in fact registered trademarks or proprietary names, even though specific reference to this fact is not always made in the text. Therefore, the appearance of a name without designation as proprietary is not to be construed as a representation by the publisher that it is in the public domain.

By Klaus Podoll, M.D. and Markus Dahlem, Ph.D.

Richard Grossingers book Migraine Auras is a twentieth (or rather twenty-first) century migraine sufferers personal record and synthesis of what is currently known about this enigmatic phenomenon. Migraine auras may herald the headache of an acute migraine attack or occur without any pain. The seemingly infinite varieties of aura portrayed in this book consist of brief interruptions of everyday life consciousness, occurring to people of all ages at unpredictable times, from Hildegard of Bingen to Marvin Minsky. These episodes are described by them as visions of hell or, alternately, glimpses of heaven.

Grossinger, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, has forty years experience as a writer and ethnographer, his previous work ranging from experimental literary prose and oral history to popular science on medicine, cosmology, and embryology. In Migraine Auras, amalgamating motifs of his earlier books, he draws on autobiographical experiences; accounts from doctors, friends, and casual acquaintances; literature (both medical and fictional); fine arts; and post-Gutenberg media like films, CDs, and, last but not least, the Internet which is here mined for the first time as a source of original data in a monograph on the phenomenon in question.

That this is a book from a non-medical writer accounts for both its strengths and limits. For instance, it is not primarily an evidence-based scientific account but includes methodologically deviant speculation in the traditions of psychoanalysis, the Jacksonian principle of evolution and dissolution of the nervous system, and homeopathy. That also turns out to be one of its virtues, as it provides migraine sufferers with new ways to imagine and experience their auras. The author invites the reader on a journey exploring the phantasmagoria of a psychoneural experience that is usually weird, traumatic, and stigmatized as well as beautiful, revelatory, and consciousness-expanding. Beyond the scope of books akin to What You Always Wanted to Ask Your Doctor But Didnt, Grossinger raises questions and provides answers vis a vis those aspects of the migraine aura experience that are excluded from the common medical discourse: its ontological, semeiological, and psychospiritual dimensions. He thus offers his readers and fellow sufferers the outlines of a migraine-aura aesthetics that can serve as a valuable means to cope with this humanall-too-humancondition as a gift rather than an illness.

Klaus Podoll, M.D., Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Aachen, Aachen, Germany

Markus Dahlem, Ph.D., Clinic for Neurology II, Medical Faculty, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany