Biography/Memoir

69 years ago… groundwork… psychedelic

This drug, Moksha, could be seen as the mirror image of Soma: a fantastic agent for spiritual liberation that provides a full-blown mystical experience and stands at the foundation of the utopian society described in the novel…

Huxley’s fascination with the threat and promise of consciousness-altering chemicals constitutes a thread that runs through his writing. Brave New World features the fictional drug Soma, described in the novel as the perfect escapist drug. Huxley’s Soma functions as a foremost agent for social engineering, a tool for the repression of the deeper longings and higher aspirations found in [the human] soul. This theme of psychochemical social engineering was further developed in Huxley’s 1936 essay “Propaganda and Pharmacology,” which envisioned a future society subjected to a state of complacent hypnosis by the mass employment of powerful mind-control drugs. By contrast, Huxley’s final work, the 1962 utopian novel Island, features another fictional drug, evidently inspired by Huxley’s involvement with psychedelics.

Original Article (Inverse):
68 years ago, Aldous Huxley laid the groundwork for the psychedelic renassance
Artwork Fair Use: Stig Nygaard

Biography/Memoir

Patented…

Biography/Memoir

…launch of…