The Psychedelic Reader: A New Intro

Erik Davis recently posted his 2007 introduction to a new volume that collects highlights from the first four issues of The Psychedelic Review, a print zine created by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunther Weil in 1963. The intro is a great read, whether or not you're familiar with the Review:

The Psychedelic Reader is a time capsule, a message in a bottle—or better yet, a fistful of messages, rolled up tight like reefers and slipped into small vials labeled Sandoz LSD-25. Like those vials, the articles come from another time: the middle of the 1960s, the last span of time in modern history when psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and DMT were studied, and consumed, legally in the West. The psychonauts whose writings are contained within these pages—psychologists, ethnobotanists, biologists, poets, seekers—were convinced that psychedelics offered an unparalleled opportunity to explore and understand the human psyche—its heights and depths, its integral capacities and self-made hells. They also believed, with decent evidence, that psychedelics could heal. Today, when official psychedelic research is making a quiet if substantial comeback, these documents speak to us like the voices of long-lost ancestors—not the feathered lords of jungle sorcery, but the elders of Harvard and the Hollywood hills, in lab coats and smoking jackets, talking their way through a modern mystery in the light of day.

What their conversation looks like, at least to judge from this collection of articles cherry-picked from the first four issues of the Psychedelic Review, is the very opposite of the specialized jargon spats that characterize so many fields of knowledge today. Instead, we have a crazy-quilt collage of poems and plant histories, of third-person protocols and first-person experiences, of law and heresy. This kaleidoscope of voices and perspectives is, it seems, an appopriate reflection of the conundrum presented by the psychedelics themselves, which so emphatically insist on the many dimensions that must be traversed on the way to the One—if, indeed, the One can ever be reached. But the Psychedelic Reader’s collection of views and viewpoints also reflects the very particular and peculiar time and place that shaped the journal, not to mention the operating assumptions of the psychedelic counterculture just beginning to dawn.