radio receivers, can tune in to different frequencies of consciousness.
Huxley also believed that at the base of all the world’s religions there lies
a common core of mystical experience he called “the Perennial
Philosophy.” Naturally, Huxley’s morning on mescaline confirmed him in
all these ideas; as one reviewer of The Doors of Perception put it, rather
snidely, the book contained “99 percent Aldous Huxley and only one half
gram mescaline.” But it didn’t matter: great writers stamp the world with
their minds, and the psychedelic experience will forevermore bear
Huxley’s indelible imprint.
Whatever else it impressed on the culture, Huxley’s experience left no
doubt in his mind or Osmond’s that the “model psychosis” didn’t begin to
describe the mind on mescaline or LSD, which Huxley would try for the
first time two years later. One person’s “depersonalization” could be
another’s “sense of oneness”; it was all a matter of perspective and
vocabulary.
“It will give that elixir a bad name if it continues to be associated, in
the public mind, with schizophrenia symptoms,” Huxley wrote to
Osmond in 1955. “People will think they are going mad, when in fact they
are beginning, when they take it, to go sane.”
Clearly a new name for this class of drugs was called for, and in a 1956
exchange of letters the psychiatrist and the writer came up with a couple
of candidates. Surprisingly, however, it was the psychiatrist, not the
writer, who had the winning idea. Huxley’s proposal came in a couplet:
To make this mundane world sublime
Just half a gram of phanerothyme.His coinage combined the Greek words for “spirit” and “manifesting.”
Perhaps wary of adopting such an overtly spiritual term, the scientist
replied with his own rhyme:
To fall in hell or soar Angelic
You’ll need a pinch of psychedelic.Osmond’s neologism married two Greek words that together mean
“mind manifesting.” Though by now the word has taken on the Day-Glo