Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (Volume 48)

by Aldous Huxley, Humphry Osmond, Cynthia Bisbee (Editor)

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was the author of nearly fifty books and numerous essays, best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World. Humphry Osmond (1917–2004) was a British-trained psychiatrist interested in the biological nature of mental illness and the potential for psychedelic drugs to treat psychoses, especially schizophrenia. In 1953, Huxley sent an appreciative note to Osmond about an article he and a colleague had published on their experiments with mescaline, which inspired an initial meeting and decade-long correspondence. This critical edition provides the complete Huxley-Osmond correspondence, chronicling an exchange between two brilliant thinkers who explored such subjects as psychedelics, the visionary experience, the nature of mind, human potentialities, schizophrenia, death and dying, Indigenous rituals and consciousness, socialism, capitalism, totalitarianism, power and authority, and human evolution. There are references to mutual friends, colleagues, and eminent figures of the day, as well as details about both men's personal lives. The letters bear witness to the development of mind-altering drugs aimed at discovering the mechanisms of mental illness and eventually its treatment. A detailed introduction situates the letters in their historical, social, and literary context, explores how Huxley and Osmond first coined the term "psychedelic," contextualizes their work in mid-century psychiatry, and reflects on their legacy as contributors to the science of mind-altering substances. Psychedelic Prophets is an extraordinary record of a full correspondence between two leading minds and a testament to friendship, intellectualism, empathy, and tolerance. The fact that these sentiments emerge so clearly from the letters, at a historical moment best known for polarizing ideological conflict, threats of nuclear war, and the rise of post-modernism, reveals much about the personalities of the authors and the persistence of these themes today.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

728 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The correspondence between Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond spanned the decade, 1953-1963. Much of it was about various psychoactives, including what Osmond came to call 'psychedelics', several of which Osmond, head of Canada's largest psychiatric asylum, introduced to the author. For Huxley, they were revelatory and relevant to his concern for states of mystical awareness and 'the perennial philosophy'. For Osmond, they were that as well as central to his consuming research for the biophysical/chemical bases of mental pathologies, schizophrenia in particular. But this is only part of what they discussed in the hundreds of letters filling the periods between their many encounters. With both, there's much discussion of their publications and public appearances, much about parapsychology, much about their families and friends, even the all-t00-c0mmon mentions of weather and health conditions. With Osmond in particular there's a sustained concern not only for his psychiatric research, but also for his experiments in hospital management and design.

The most interesting portion of this large volume, however, may be found in the appendices, containing letters and essays by their relatives. Most especially, I enjoyed the second, wherein some of the participants in a group LSD-25 experiment attempt to describe what the experience was like. Some of the accounts ring true indeed!--albeit as regards relatively mild dosages.

The letters trail off (Huxley was dying of cancer) into expressed concerns about Timothy Leary and others of his ilk, experimenting with larger doses and less scientific rigor and caution. Sadly, they end with no discussion therein, or in the editorial afterword, about the vast difference between, say, what happens on an empty stomach with 100 micrograms of LSD as opposed to 500 or more.