The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 99 of 125
Psychedelics culturally vindicated
A well-established, even well-heeled cult I had been expecting, but not one thriving like this. The hall was so packed you could barely move. Of all the revolutionary groups of my youth—the hippies, the New Left, the students, the blacks, the feminists—it was, however improbably, the druggies and the druggies alone who had made it through in one piece. And not just survived, but boomed. Culturally, psychedelics had been vindicated. After the death of his wife, Gordon Wasson, putting archaic cultures behind him, had proceeded to write two elegantly subversive studies of the role plant hallucinogens could have played in the evolution of major world religions. In the first, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968), he attempted to identify the enigmatic soma, which had played so prominent a part in the genesis of Hinduism. Again he found Amanita muscaria the most likely candidate: a hypothesis, which, so far as I know, has been accepted by scholars from a number of widely different disciplines. Subsequently, joining forces with Albert Hofmann and classics scholar Carl Ruck in The Road to Eleusis (1978), he examined the equally mysterious kykeon, the sacred potion drunk at the climax of the Eleusinian Mysteries. With initiates including Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle, the possibility that kykeon was psychoactive (Hofmann was to suggest a further ergot-based hallucinogen, ergonovine maleate, which could be produced by water infusion) would mean that an organic psychedelic could have helped catalyze an experience of transcendence informing the whole philosophy of classical antiquity. Ethnobotany had become a legitimate branch of science. Psychedelics, far from being the handful of high-tech mind-benders they had seemed in the 1960s, had a pedigree stretching back to the dawn of human history. Far from being toxic, with unknown long-term effects, they appeared disconcertingly safe. LSD itself had been tested for more than three generations now—ironically enough, there were few other drugs on the market with so clean a bill of health—and a variety of independent psychologists had suggested that altered states of consciousness were, just as much as dreams, vital to human health and sanity. “Our failure to incorporate hallucinogenic experience into our culture,” wrote Paul Devereux in The Long Trip, “puts us out of step with the entire record of human experience. It is our culture that is eccentric.”