Psychedelia
PSYCHEDELIA
* * *
An Ancient Culture
A Modern Way Of Life
This other world, where everything
is brighter and clearer and more
real than in our world, is a vision of
blessed beholders.
(Plato, The Faedo)
About the author
Patrick Lundborg (b. 1967 d. 2014) had a B.Sc in Information Science from Stockholm University, with additional studies in Classic Philosophy and History of Religion. After retiring from a professional career as a project manager at an international consultancy firm, he worked full-time as a writer-researcher in the field of psychedelic culture. Among his earlier works are The Age Of Madness (1992), a guide to 1960s garage music, and 13th Floor Elevators–The Complete Reference File (2002). The Acid Archives (2006-2010), a pioneering study of underground 1960s-70s music from North America, is Lundborg’s most popular work to date, having gone through two editions and five reprinting’s, and receiving favorable reviews in leading magazines such as Mojo and The Wire. In addition to the books and the Lysergia.com website he edited, Lundborg has written magazine articles, monographs and album liner notes.
PSYCHEDELIA
An Ancient Culture,
A Modern Way Of Life
by Patrick Lundborg
STOCKHOLM LHASA MOJAVE
Psychedelia–An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way Of Life
© Patrick Lundborg 2012
Front and back cover painting 'Sinfonia Shamanica' licensed from the artist Anderson Debernardi, Peru
All other images and items from the author's private collection
Lysergia 25-12
http://www.lysergia.com
LIAC 23 Sarvam Anityam
ePub Edition
Published by Subliminal Sounds
http://www.subliminalsounds.se
Printed in the Infernal method, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid.
CONTENTS
Foreword
PROLOGUE A tale of two trips
PART ONE: An Ancient Culture
Chapter I: The Philosophy of Hallucinations
The failed metaphors of LSD * Sartre, Walter Benjamin & mescaline * Merleau-Ponty's hallucinations * Husserl's phenomenology * Eugen Fink, Alan Watts & the purposeless play * The problem of structuralism * The use of psychedelic phenomenology
Chapter II: All Things That Exist Are Light
Apollonius & Hellenism * The Neoplatonism of Eleusis * Allegro's mushroom Messiah * Eleusinian visionaries in early Christianity * Plato's Italian renaissance * Pascal's vision and the death of Pan
Chapter III: Discovering The Amazon
McKenna brothers & the events at La Chorrera * Ayahuascan unawareness * A brief survey of Amazonia * Spruce's Caapi * Naranjo's harmaline * The riddles of yagé * Schultes, Burroughs & Ginsberg * The DMT/MAOI revelation * Aboriginal deception?
Chapter IV: Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On
The Tempest * Shakespeare's twilight language * Esotericism vs mysticism * Renaissance men: Ficino, Paracelsus, John Dee * Witches & plant drugs * Witch-cult heritage * Descartes' vision
Chapter V: The Heart Of Light
Apocalypse Now * The Waste Land * Anthropological kings & princes * Modernism and mysticism * Jessie Weston, Eleusis & Ezra Pound * Yeats, Theosophy & peyote
Chapter VI: Exploring The Unknown
Forbidden Planet * Early space electronica * 1960s New York avant * Watts, Kesey & Himalayan Academy * Exotica's roots in classical * Tiki & jungle exotica * Space exotica * Exotica as lifestyle * Eden Ahbez * Exoticists of note
Chapter VII: Energy Is Eternal Delight
Images seen and reproduced * Huxley's higher vision * William Blake * Marriage of Heaven & Hell * The Proverbs of Hell * Yeats & Blake * The psychedelic Swedenborg
Chapter VIII: Head Shrinkers And Mind Expansion
Early psychiatric LSD research * Psychotomimetic & psycholytic * CIA & military experiments * Leary and Alpert at Harvard * The miracle at Marsh Chapel * Gerald Heard * Concord Prison study * Exit Harvard, enter Millbrook * General psychedelic trip model * LSD as a professional tool * Research ban and Transpersonal psychology
Chapter IX: The Mushroom At The End Of History
Psilocybian myths * Gordon Wasson & Albert Hofmann * The McKenna brothers return * Home-growing mushrooms * The eloquence of St Terence * The Mushroom Voice & its messages * Tryptamines re-booting Psychedelia * Other mushroom men
Chapter X: Coming To A Head
Early underground labs * The Czech connection * Owsley arrives * Sand, Scully & STP * LSD purity * LSD dosage * Brotherhood of Eternal Love * Orange Sunshine * Ronald Stark & British acid * Microdots, Windowpanes * Modern LSD scene * Kansas missile silo affair
Chapter XI: 15.000 Years Of Getting High
Cohoba, bufotenine & 5-MeO-DMT * Siberian mushroom migration * Archaic entheogens of America * Red Bean & peyote shamanism * The Aztec drug culture * teonanacatl, ololiuqui, sinicuichi & Salvia divinorum * Maya culture & mushroom stones * Incas, mochica, San Pedro cactus * Wasson's soma theory * Ibogaine and Bwiti
Chapter XII: Father Peyote & Der Meskalinrausch
The peyote ritual * The rise of The Peyote Cult * Peyote literature: Artaud, the Beats * The Native American Church & legislation * Mescaline as a modern street drug
PART TWO: A Modern Way Of Life
Chapter XIII: Five Years Ahead Of Our Time
Early days of The Lyman Family * Embryonic Elevators * Acid punk as music & lifestyle * LSD from Monterey to JFK * Early media coverage of acid * Timothy Leary goes global
Chapter XIV: Til Waiting Is Filled
Second phase of modern Psychedelia * '60s Counterculture & LSD * Merry Pranksters vs Berkeley * Mel Lyman Family * Easter Everywhere
Chapter XV: Haight And Love
Diggers & the true Haight culture * Embryonic SF acid rock * Psychedelic bohemians & radical critique * The Human Be-In * The deluge of 1967 * Pentagon protest & the end of Haight * Mainstream backlash and anti-LSD propaganda
Chapter XVI: Psychedelic Music Peaks
San Francisco Psychedelia arrives * Psychedelic authenticity? * Transatlantic acid music * Tunes for tripping to * West Coast music matures * A selection of vintage psych LPs * Mad River, Golden Dawn, Bobb Trimble & co
Chapter XVII: The Music Of The Ages
Psychedelic folk music & acid folk * Birth of rock culture * Acid music theory & Grateful Dead * European 1970s Psychedelia * America's 1970s private press underground * Maintaining the spirit
Chapter XVIII: The Mystery Cults Of Psychedelia
Father Yod & The Source Family * Spiritual utopias: Brook Farm, Huxley, Hesse * The psychedelic churches of Aiken, Leary & Kleps * Eden Ahbez & California's Nature Boys * German Naturmenschen & Wandervogel * Hippies and spiritual leadership * Acid Messiah and the Manson Family * Rural communes: Drop City, Hog Farm, Gaskin's Farm
Chapter XIX: Electric Tibet
Western Psychedelia & Eastern religion * Zen Buddhism * Path and end-state confusion * Interpreting the visions * dhyana, vipassana & Vajrayana * Krishnamurti, Sri Aurobindo, Gurdjieff * The high plateau lifestyle
Chapter XX: The Future Is Psychedelic
Psychedelic sci-fi: 2001, Altered States & The Matrix * Electronic dance music * Ecstasy, Ibiza & Acid house * Rock rediscovers psych * Goa PsyTrance * LSD re-enters * Ambient to psybient * Shpongle * Continental chillout * Thomas Pynchon & Philip K Dick * Cyberpunk * Views on psychedelic art * Mati Klarwein & Ernst Fuchs * Visionary art * Alex Grey & Robert Venosa * Pablo Amaringo & Anderson Debernardi * 1960s poster art
Chapter XXI: New Maps Of Innerspace
Beyond religion & psychology * Inadequate maps of the past
* Is language a problem? * Conflicts with traditional science * Description, memory and ego * Semantic challenges in flight * Poetry, gibberish and eloquence * The magic language of the afterglow
Chapter XXII: Climbing The Vine Of The Soul
Ayahuasca vs LSD * yagé shamans & hoasca churches * Tryptamine Entities Part 1: The Gatekeeper & The Snakes * Ayahuasca as a spiritual school * Anthropological shortcomings * An ayahuasca trip model * Benny Shanon & Gerard Reichel-Dolmatoff * Pharmahuasca & Endohuasca
Chapter XXIII: Divine Moments Of Truth
DMT background * Stephen Szara & Al Hubbard * Early trips of Harner & Leary * McKenna's generic DMT experience * Rick Strassman's research * Trip contents of DMT and Ayahuasca * Models of Innerspace: Huxley, Grof, Narby, Shanon * Shamanistic perspectives * Psycho-integration of the Triune Brain * Tryptamine Entities Part 2: aliens, Elfs, the Overseer * Evolution and DNA * The Von Neumann realization * Origins of intelligence & the Overseer * A Unified Psychedelic Theory
Note: An A-Z index to the book can be found on-line at: www.lysergia.com/psychedelia
COLOR PLATES
Inside front cover
Original Japanese poster for Roger Corman's The Trip (1967).
Color inlay
1 Family Dog Denver poster by Rick Griffin & Victor Moscoso, 1967. What does it say?
2 First ever LSD coverage in mainstream media: MacLeans of Canada 1953. Cary Grant and Aldous Huxley beg to differ on the 'madman' bit.
3 Some vital proto-psychedelic LP records from the 1950s.
4 Two faces of DMT research: Waika shamans and Hungarian scientists.
5 Psychedelic pioneers from top left: Tommy Hall, Mel Lyman, Owsley, Art Kleps.
6 The Godfathers of Psychedelia: Richard E Schultes,Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Weston La Barre in the late 1970s. Tim Leary and Phil Lesh at another gathering of heads, the Human Be-In.
7 A small selection of classic psychedelic LPs from the 1960s.
8 Sunshine Supermen: Eden Ahbez, Brian Wilson, Donovan.
9 Rare promo material from two classic 60s trip movies.
10 One of movie history's more bizarre tie-in campaigns, a good indication of how little the studio understood of 2001.
11 Some of the best spoken word and anti-LSD propaganda LPs.
12 Fake Rolling Stone issue made as a prop for Apocalypse Now; also an excerpt from the opening of John Milius' original 1969 script.
13 Promo poster for the McKenna brothers underground classic Psilocybin.
14 Douglas Trumbull behind some classic Blade Runner architecture; William Hurt suffering serotonergic flashes in Altered States.
15 Two sides of rave culture; exploitation board game complete with plastic 'Ecstasy' pills and fake fliers; a non-fake flier for classic London acid house temple.
16 Rare painting by Amaringo in that it features both ayahuasca and mushrooms.
Inside back cover
Power Plant head shop poster, partly used for the psychedelic rock LP by Golden Dawn
FOREWORD
The half million words contained in this book are the product of some 20 years of studies and field research, but the impetus to organize these words into a printed and bound book can be traced to a specific moment. About three years ago I was reading the foreword to Ralph Metzner's Ayahuasca anthology while making notes, as is my habit when reading anything psychedelic. In the foreword, which is lucid and well-structured even by Metzner's high standards, I came upon the chance remark that the psychedelic perspective had a useful counterpart in Edmund Husserl's philosophy of Phenomenology. Having studied Husserl somewhat, the astuteness of this suggestion caused me to jot down a few words in my notebook.
After a few minutes I found myself unable to continue reading the Ayahuasca book, as my synapses seemed eager to run off with the implications of Phenomenology. When these waves of creative energy come, one must put everything aside and try and surf them. In short time, several hand- written pages of speculative thoughts concerning Husserl, Huxley and hallucinations had been produced, for no obvious purpose except that it seemed somehow meaningful. Such an outburst usually leaves me in a state of satisfied fatigue, but this time was different. New ideas kept pouring forth. This wasn't just about Husserl; it seemed a much bigger wheel had been set in motion. This was why I had been reading all those books and made those notes, and listened attentively when people talked about their weirdest psychedelic experiences. It was what I had been waiting for – but I still couldn't put a label on what 'it' was. To figure that out I wrote this book, Psychedelia.
The result of the quest is presented in two parts. These two parts correspond, largely but not rigorously, to two cycles of psychedelic culture; one that begins with the hallucinogenic rites at Eleusis and ends in Albert Hofmann's laboratory during WWII. Matters of anthropology, philosophy, pharmacology, ethnobotany, shamanism, occultism and classic drama and poetry are examined. The second and shorter cycle deals with the post-war era up to the present day, and is oriented towards psychedelic art and pop culture, layman drug use, Psychedelia's connections to Western socio-culture, neo-shamanism, and the future implications of psychedelics.
According to a major newspaper recently, 'psychedelics are back, and this time they mean business'. Except for the fact that they were never gone, as the coming 500 pages hopefully will show, this could be an accurate prediction. Psychedelic culture may in fact be standing at the brink of a mystery greater than anything it encountered in the 20th century. This mystery, which presence is felt most strongly in the chapters that deal with ayahuasca and DMT, has reverberations far outside the realms of Psychedelia, cutting into mankind's most vital questions about evolution and consciousness. If the 2000s are to be the century of the brain, the psychedelics will prove even more important than they've been.
Patrick Lundborg, Stockholm 2012
* * *
Dedicated as always to the Lumber Island Acid Crew, with special thanks to the Three Wise Men of Stockholm; Carl Abrahamsson, Max Fredrikson and Stefan Kéry. Inspiration in either word or spirit has also been received from Michael Bowen, Tommy Hall, Hugh Kenner and Ralph Metzner. These last words are reserved for Vincent and Edgar, who never gave up teaching me the importance of purposeless play.
PROLOGUE
1
1935 was not a pleasant year for Jean-Paul Sartre. Unknown and unpublished, the young French philosopher had taken up a teaching position in Le Havre, a seaport town far from the intellectual circles of Paris. After class, Sartre spent his free time working on a study of the German phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger, whose advanced theories on perception interested him. But technical essays on philosophy didn't really satisfy the ambitions of the strong-willed school teacher. Sartre wished to create something significant, a major work that would catapult him out of obscurity. Already 30 years old, and educated at some of the finest institutions in France, he had produced nothing worth remembering. A mental dreariness, acerbated by his creative inertia and the grey seashore days at Le Havre, weighed upon him.
Yet it was something else, a more urgent problem than career misgivings, that occupied Sartre's mind. For several weeks he had lived with the idea that he was being pursued by giant lobsters. In less fear-stricken moments Sartre understood that the oversized lobsters were not real, but this insight brought him no comfort, since it seemed to suggest that he was going insane. The gigantic lobsters, along with a menagerie of bizarre notions that haunted him, had their origins in a psychological experiment Sartre had undertaken in the early months of the year. With the help of a doctor friend he had received a large injection of mescaline, in the hope that it would help him understand consciousness. Instead, the experiment quickly devolved into a classic 'bad trip', with threatening shapes lurking in every corner and ordinary objects turning into hostile creatures. Poorly informed on the nature of a hallucinogen trip, Sartre clung to his terrified ego as ugly apes and huge flies seemed to attack him. Because he refused to let go of his mental defens
es, the classic psychedelic peripety, or turning point, never came. The mescaline trip finally wound down, but Sartre suffered relapses into the hallucinatory trauma for months to follow1. The effects lingered for almost a year, a duration not uncommon with powerful psychedelic experiences.
Jean-Paul Sartre never took mescaline again, but in an ironic turn, this terrifying experience provided him with exactly the breakthrough he was searching for. Based in no small part on ideas and visions from his mescaline trip, Sartre wrote the groundbreaking novel La Nausée (1938) and soon found himself at the center of a new intellectual movement. La Nausée is a classic of 20th century prose, and the one Sartre work that most people are familiar with. It signals the beginning of existentialist philosophy, but as pure fiction it remains an arresting peek into the sufferings of the modern mind. While millions have read it, few are aware of its roots in a difficult mescaline experience, and re-reading the work from a psychedelic perspective is illuminating. The unpleasant impressions the main character has of seeing his own hand, or his face in a mirror, emerge in a new light for those familiar with hallucinogens. Beyond such visual details, the vision of the world as a mass of heavy, ugly, amorphous 'existences' that marks an apex in the novel, also seems psychedelic in nature. It's easy to sympathize with the misfortune of the protagonist, and Sartre, if one is familiar with the euphoric counter-part to such a depressing vision, as most users of mescaline or LSD are. If mentally prepared and in a more agreeable milieu, the courageous Frenchman might have had a positive experience of equal power; then again, if he did, we wouldn't have had La Nausée.
2
One must imagine a landscape around Athens that is somewhat different from what it is today; a land with clean clear air, rich in forests and fertile soil. The Summer heat may have been a little less oppressive, and the hills and lowlands held a generous green flora, not yet laid waste by man-made deforestation and wildfires. The people tilled the land and grew barley, wheat, grapes and olives, alongside less vital crops, as they had for generations.