In the 1960’s something interesting happened — a “rediscovery” of entheogens had a dramatic effect on western culture. These cultural changes were expressed by dramatic shifts in art, fashion, appearance, and behavior. A rejection of existing cultural values and a strong sense of freedom. Art and music began to reflect the cultural change and the effects of the substances being used. This was seen most dramatically in music, the emergence of musicians like Bob Dylan with lyrics deeply critical of society, the transition of The Beatles from pop-rock to their deeply poetic psychedelic rock, and the emergence of bands like Pink Floyd and the Doors whose music felt inspired by the psychedelic experience.
The world had been growing smaller, having gone through two world wars, the emergence of the industrial-military complex, international travel, and advances in communication. The appearance of mass media in the 20th century allowed rapid dissemination of not only news and information, but also communicated social mores, expected behavior, and the ideals of the American dream. At some stage in the narrative, there was a tipping point. The 1960s suddenly became a melting pot of new ideas, anti-war, civil rights, and gender equality. Dissatisfied youths caught a wave of revolution, and it peaked during the mid to late sixties.
Although used for millennia by indigenous cultures around the world, this modern renaissance of psychedelics may have started in a Swiss lab.
On the 16th of April 1943, Dr. Albert Hofmann, a chemist in Basel, Switzerland, was working for Sandoz Laboratories. Five years earlier, he had been working on a series of compounds based on active constituents of Claviceps purpurea, the Ergot fungus, and repeated the synthesis of the 25th in the series (total synthesis). During his synthesis, Hofmann began to feel a “remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness”. Upon laying down, he “perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors”, then “after some two hours, this condition faded away”. His conclusion was he had accidentally absorbed the compound through his skin.
Three days later on April 19th 1943, he deliberately ingested 250 micrograms. What many consider the modern world’s first acid trip (celebrated on April 19th as Bicycle Day, commemorating the famous psychedelic bicycle ride Hoffman took during his self-administered experiment)
For over a century, chemists had been analyzing the plant world, extracting plant alkaloid secrets to better understand their actions. The advancement of chemistry allowed the extraction and then commercialization of many new medicines, heroin, cocaine, or compounds for which there was a sense of curiosity, mescaline — as described in Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” published in 1954. LSD was found in this same tradition of natural sources.
LSD as an experimental compound had quietly spread through various research departments and academic circles (both formally and informally), treated as a curiosity and gained ground in research. But in 1957, LIFE Magazine published an article based on the research of R. Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina Wasson. The publication of this article hit a cultural nerve — underneath the happy veneer of the American middle class was a growing sense of dissatisfaction and culture of disillusioned youths. In particular, this dissatisfaction and disillusionment was highlighted by Dr Timothy Leary.
The disillusionment behind existing social structures had been building for a long time, best represented by the Beats, which included Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, active amongst the milieu of the post-war 40’s and 50’s.
William S. Burroughs, best known as the author of the nightmarish “Naked Lunch”, and “Junkie”, had a fascination for a variety of entheogenic plants. “Junky”, published in 1953, ends with Burroughs feeling “maybe I will find in Yage
what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke — Yage may be the final fix”. In the appendix of “Naked Lunch” Burroughs describes several plants and their uses. “The Yage Letters”, published in 1963, is a collection of writings and letters from Burroughs to Ginsberg between 1952 and 1953. In 1953 Burroughs traveled to Iquitos in Peru in search of Yage (another term for Ayahuasca). After a number of false starts, Burroughs was successful, but it would prove to not be what he was looking for.
Burroughs is known to be the first Westerner to learn how Ayahuasca works. Burroughs learned from a brujo that the full hallucinatory effects of ayahuasca occur through the addition of another plant – chacruna. This even came as news to Richard Evans Schultes, who had spent a long time in the Amazon collecting plants, particularly medicinal plants. It would be another 50 years before Ayahuasca reached its status as one of the most significant entheogens.
The first conference on entheogens, The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, was held in San Francisco, California, from January 28-30, 1967. The psychedelic 60s peaked around 1967. LSD had well and truly escaped the lab. With underground chemists like Bear Owsley and Nick Sand having mastered LSD production, the genie wasn’t going back in the bottle. Prohibition led to the cessation of research, and during the 70s and 80s, the study of entheogens continued only in academic or anthropological settings or the underground. LSD and other well-known entheogens came to be treated as hard drugs with no medical value.
Meanwhile, some of the cultural focus shifted to entheogenic plants and fungi. In 1968 “the Teachings of Don Juan” by Carlos Casteneda was published. The book was very successful and led to an ongoing series. The entheogens discussed included Peyote (Lophophora williamsii), Psilocybe mexicana, and Jimson Weed (Datura stammonium). It is known that Casteneda borrowed from a variety of anthropological sources, but his books allowed a wide knowledge of some entheogenic plants, albeit laced with errors. The Don Juan series of books were so popular they would, in time, inspire a Simpsons episode (“The Mysterious Voyage of Homer”).
With the enthusiasm of the 1960s waning, the 1970s became a golden age of underground entheogen research and publishing, with the publication of many books on entheogens from citizen scientists keen to share their knowledge. From small zine-like publications on identifying psilocybin-containing mushrooms, and in time, on how to cultivate them, to more formal academic compilations of papers on entheogenic plants. Of particular interest are the early chemistry texts such as “The Psychedelic Guide to the Preparation of the Eucharist” on manufacturing a variety of compounds.
The 1960’s saw the emergence of a counterculture for whom entheogens were of significant importance in creating a sense of meaning and understanding when faced with an oppressive consumer culture and the military-industrial complex. These decades of modern rediscovery, of acceptance and rejection of psychedelics, of psychonauts keeping the flame alive in the underground — helped lead to today’s opportunity for a psychedelic renaissance.