Review: Paul Bisbee, Cynthia Carson, Erika Dyck, Patrick Farrell, James Sexton, and James W. Spisak (eds.), Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2018) lxxix and 644 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7735-5506-8

Charlie Williams, Queen Mary University of London

Humphrey Osmond is best known as the man who turned Aldous Huxley on to mescaline in 1953. Following a brief correspondence, Huxley invited Osmond, a psychiatrist based in Saskatchewan, Canada to come and stay with him and his wife in Los Angeles. In another letter, he suggested that Osmond might bring some mescaline. Huxley’s mescaline trip was described in detail in The Doors of Perception (1954), a book which would introduce countless psychic wanderers to the powerful subjective experience of mescaline and the ‘labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity’ discovered in the folds of Huxley’s grey flannel trousers. Their meeting in California was also the beginning of a close friendship, now captured in this recent edited collection of their correspondence, Psychedelic Prophets.

As a preface to the collection tells us, both men were prodigious letter writers. Huxley is estimated to have written 10,000 letters in his lifetime. Osmond, was both an ardent letter writer and a meticulous archivist, keeping copies of both sides of the transaction. Thus, the volume is said to represent a complete set of their correspondence (apart from one or more missing pages from a letter written by Osmond on April 30, 1956). Consisting of over 275 letters, Psychedelic Prophets begins formally, with a letter addressed to “Dear Mr Huxley” on March 31, 1953 and ends ten years later with tones of much deeper affection – “My Dear Aldous” – one month prior to Huxley’s death on November 22, 1963. Their discussions follow the arc of a close friendship and a rich intellectual connection, taking deep dives into questions of psychopharmacology, schizophrenia, parapsychology, mysticism, cybernetics, Jungian psychology and psychoanalysis, alongside never-ending intrigue about the effects of psychedelic drugs. The letters also feature their impressions of numerous notable figures they encountered over this period, including Timothy Leary, Norbert Wiener, Abram Hoffer and Gerald Heard.  

The most famous moment contained within this correspondence involved a question raised by Osmond about what to label psychoactive pharmaceuticals such as mescaline. In a letter dated March 15, 1956 Osmond wrote that he felt the widely used term “psychotomimetic” (psychotic mimicry) did not do justice to the full range of experiences these drugs could produce. Various candidates for an alternative were put forward including “psychophrenics”, “psycholytics” and the accurate yet clunky “euleutheropsychics” (260-263). Huxley was keen on phanerothyme (soul revealing) and signed off his letter with a short rhyme: “To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gramme of phanerothyme” (266). But they eventually settled on Osmond’s suggestion “psychedelic”, combining “psyche” – the Greek for “mind” – and “delos” – meaning “to manifest” or “bring to light”. Osmond even penned his own ditty: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of PSYCHEDELIC” (267).

It was certainly an artful piece of branding. “Psychedelic” met their criterion of having a clear meaning, being easy to pronounce and being unlike any other name. It captured their idea that the consciousness altering experience of psychedelic drugs was no mental aberration but instead facilitated a widening of the doors of perception, an opening up of the self and the possibility of furthering human potential beyond the limits of everyday consciousness. It was an idea that would not only shape early approaches to psychedelic therapy, but also carry through to popular culture as LSD became a symbol of rebellion and cultural change in the 1960s. More recently, Nicholas Langlitz has shown how the idea derived from Huxley and Osmond that psychedelics remove some kind of vestigial filter on the mind or brain remains influential in psychedelic culture and research today, despite conflicting neurophysiological evidence (2012, 125-127).  

In the last two decades proponents of psychedelics have championed a so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’ (Sessa, 2012). Strict regulations that all but put an end to legitimate research in the 1960s have been cautiously lifted and psychedelic drugs are once again being touted for their potential to treat various common and chronic mental conditions. This resurgent biomedical interest has also been accompanied by a wave of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, much of which has shown how difficult it is to decouple contemporary psychedelic research from its turbulent history (Dyck, 2008; Richert, 2019; Evans, 2017; Langlitz, 2012; Hartogsohn, 2020).. Despite remarkable progress in the decriminalisation of psychedelics for clinical use, Ericka Dyck, an editor of Psychedelic Prophets, points out that the latest phase of psychedelic research shares much in common with its historical beginnings – ‘enthusiasm and awe, and hyperbolic claims about the drug’s potential impact on a wide range of medical concerns’ (2017).  Navigating this hyperbole, Dyck suggests, requires attention to the same fault lines and epistemological problems that psychedelic research has tripped up on in the past. In Britain today, ketamine therapy for depression is available on the NHS and advocates hope that psilocybin, MDMA and LSD will all be added to the roster of widely prescribed pharmaceutical therapies within the next five to ten years. But the popularity of microdosing, retreats and informal encounters with psychedelics also show that self-medication and experimentation are how the majority experience these drugs, suggesting that psychedelic therapy will continue to traverse the boundaries of the medical establishment even as these drugs become part of more orthodox therapeutic interventions.   

Other scholarship has focused on the question of how cultural meanings of psychedelic drugs influence how an experience plays out in a lab, clinic or recreational setting. During the first wave of psychedelic research both Osmond and Huxley were well aware that the psychedelic experience was influenced by social and environmental factors often referred to as ‘set’ and ‘setting’. Set may be understood as any factor that an individual brings to the experience, including their personality, motives, previous knowledge or experience, mood and preparation. Setting refers to both the physical and social environment in which the experience takes place. More recently, researchers have referred to set and setting under the more general umbrella term “context” (Carhart-Harris et al, 2018). If context is key to the effectiveness of psychedelics in therapy so is an understanding of the history of ideas that surround them. In his account of post war LSD research, Ido Hartogsohn argues that the principles of set and setting may be applied historically to understand the ‘psychosocial construction’ of drug effects through an examination of the complex interactions between psychopharmacological effects and broader socio-cultural factors shaping drug experience (2020; see also 2017). Hartogsohn (2017), for example, suggests that early 1950s experiments which studied psychedelics under the pretext of inducing psychosis were far more likely to foster negative experiences and instigate ‘the very responses they expected to find’. Many of the epistemological challenges encountered by psychedelic researchers, including set and setting, are dealt with in Langlitz’ Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain (2012). Langlitz suggests that the age of psychedelic research offers a unique opportunity for empirical research scientists to apply the kinds of approaches associated with the medical humanities and science studies scholarship.  

Much of the history of psychedelics, particularly those that incorporate a more diverse understanding of the actors, places and cultures that have lent psychedelics their meaning is still to be written. But between 1956 and 1963 Osmond and Huxley found themselves in a unique position, with access to many newly synthesised or recently “discovered” psychoactive substances and amongst a network of influential intellectuals interested in how these drugs could reshape not only therapy but society more broadly. Their history as well as that of psychedelic research is mapped out in the comprehensive introduction and epilogue to Psychedelic Prophets. But for historians, scientists or anyone else interested in delving deeper into the foundational ideas that have driven psychedelic culture, this huge volume of Huxley and Osmond’s correspondence contains rich pickings.