April 7:The
psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond coined the term "psychedelic" on this
day in 1956, by way of a poetic exchange with Aldous Huxley. In 1953 Huxley had
enthusiastically volunteered himself as a guinea pig for Osmond's drug
experiments and, after some initial reluctance, Osmond had agreed—he said he
didn't "relish the possibility, however remote, of finding a small but
discreditable niche in literary history as the man who drove Aldous Huxley
mad." Huxley's mescaline experiences with Osmond inspired The Doors of Perception, published in
1954; wishing to promote their research further, the two felt that a new word
was needed to capture the nature of the new experience, Huxley offering his
coinage in rhyme:
To make this trivial world
sublime,
Take half a gramme of
phanerothyme.
Osmond replied with his
own couplet, and entered Far Out history:
To fathom hell or soar
angelic,
Just take a pinch of
psychedelic.
Over his last few years,
Huxley was also a friend and colleague of Albert Hofmann, the chemist who first discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD. In LSD: My Problem Child, Hofmann describes his first, 1961 meeting
with Huxley—"a gentleman with a yellow freesia in his buttonhole, a tall
and noble appearance, who exuded kindness." In a letter shortly
afterwards, Huxley wrote to Hofmann to urge him on:
I have good hopes that
this and similar work will result in the development of a real Natural History
of visionary experience, in all its variations, determined by differences of
physique, temperament and profession, and at the same time of a technique of
Applied Mysticism—a technique for helping individuals to get the most out of
their transcendental experience and to make use of the insights from the "Other
World" in the affairs of "This World." Meister Eckhart wrote
that "what is taken in by contemplation must be given out in love."
Essentially this is what must be developed—the art of giving out in love and
intelligence what is taken in from vision and the experience of
self-transcendence and solidarity with the Universe….
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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