The long and tortured history of LSD has been well chronicled in books like Don Lattin’s The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America (2010), Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus (2008), and Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (1995). The point I would like to make in this essay is speculation based on some preliminary reflections on spirituality (and not, in case anyone is wondering, based on nostalgic flashbacks). Lysergic acid diethylamide is intimately linked to the history of spirituality in modern American culture and became a popular touchstone in new religious cultures—countercultural at first, but within decades it became quite mainstream. Although the drug would always be on the margins of practiced experience, its interpretive effects lasted well after the 1960s.
Note: I should also say right off the bat that I am not advocating drug use or making any claims about LSD’s value in the endeavor to discover the authentic self or inner spiritual truth. I am saying though that contemporary discussions about spirituality are linked—via experiences, via language, via music, via writing—to the popularity of LSD and its promoters during the 1960s and early 1970s, even with, or in spite of, the very public early awareness of bad trips, illegal activities, and dangerous effects. How can the highly personal, ethereally immaterial, soulfully profound New Age spiritual revelations of the last four decades be connected to the undeniably material effects of twenty atoms of carbon, twenty-five atoms of hydrogen, three atoms of nitrogen, and one atom of oxygen? Hopefully you won’t have to turn on to see the point.
Lysergic acid diethylamide has been on the American scene since the 1950s, after the chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in a Swiss laboratory in 1938 and then experimented with it and realized its mind altering potential in 1943. From that point of origin the history of LSD in America gets complicated, with early excitement about the potential useful benefits of the drug in the newly created Central Intelligence Agency in the later 1940s and in the burgeoning field of psychotherapy, which no longer limited itself to psychoanalytic theories restricted to the talking cure. Indeed in its earliest appearance on the American landscape it was labeled a psychotomimetic that could induce forms of psychosis. For the CIA and military, it was seen as a drug that could possibly lead to mind control and be weaponized; for psychiatrists and therapists, it was seen as a drug that could possibly lead to better mental health and more creativity. Early on a great deal of scientific research interest and energy emanating from discipline-centered institutions like the military and universities focused on researching the effects of LSD on the mind and psychological well being.
The religious history of the drug and its impact on American spirituality, however, is driven less by specific institutional initiatives and more by undisciplined individual practitioners and advocates who understood the promise of LSD in cosmic rather than instrumental terms.
To fathom hell or soar angelic
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.
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