The word psychedelia was coined by English psychiatrist Humphry Osmond after serving as a guide for writer Aldous Huxley on his legendary mescaline journey in 1953; An experience that gave rise to The Doors of Perception (Edhasa, 2002), an essay in which Huxley describes the sensations he observed after ingesting the peyote-derived hallucinogenic alkaloid.
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Upon his return, Huxley decided to omit the word “psychotomimetic” to describe the experience. Instead, Huxley preferred the word “fanerotime,” which means something like “making visible the soul.” However, Osmond felt that Fanero time was not an appropriate term, although he did define such a sublime experience. To express the same thing, a more classical term with Graeco-Roman roots was needed. In this way, psyche – soul – merged with delos – reveal – and thus a word emerged that would define not just an experience but an era.
The American sociologist Don Lattin recounts all this in his book The Harvard Psychedelic Club (Errata naturae, 2023). A work which chronologically reviews the events leading to the cross paths of professors Timothy Leary, Huston Smith and Richard Alpert with physician Andrew Weil to show that the human brain, conditioned by rigid structures , which filters reality in a way that doesn’t allow impressions to slip through that could be dangerous to the social functioning of the system. Driven by this premise, Timothy Leary directs a psychedelic experiment at Concord Prison, in which he administers twenty milligrams of psilocybin to two of the inmates and a Harvard graduate student named Ralph Metzner, who volunteered to take the test administered at the prison. This first experience was followed by others for nine months.
Fanerotime has not precisely defined such a sublime experience. It took a classic word with Greco-Roman roots: ‘psyche’ – soul – merged with ‘delos’ – reveal – and so was born a word that would define not just an experience but an era
Timothy Leary, “high priest” of 1960s drug culture, speaks to students.Bettmann (Bettmann Archive)
The result of all this was that 75% of the prisoners who were given psilocybin and who were released did not reoffend. We are in 1963; Year Psychedelics Changed the World. The social patterns that had hitherto prevailed in the western corners will be turned upside down from Harvard University, and scientific experimentation with mind-altering substances will penetrate beyond the university borders into the prisons. The results of the Concord experiment are politically dangerous and soon troubles begin, accusations between members of the Harvard Psychedelics Club, leaks and tips for using unqualified personnel for their experiments.
Because the most important thing in scientific research is the intention of the researcher and even more so when working with recreational substances, well, the intention, i.e. the idea that is pursued in the experiment, will be decisive for the result of the experiment. And that’s what Don Lattin points out in this book, a must-read for those interested in studying the substances that shaped an era. Between his paragraphs, we witness the clash of strong personalities whose intentions were ever further removed from the scientific result. Therefore, the club would end up breaking between allegations and allegations.
In conclusion, the experiments that took place at Harvard in the 1960s not only opened the doors of perception but also of tolerance, so that today psilocybin is no longer pursued and its use for therapeutic purposes is considered.
the stone axe It is a passage in which Montero Glez, with his desire for prose, exerts his particular attack on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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