Doors Of Perseption

ALDOUS HUXLEY

THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION

2 It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to science. To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than afriend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, "they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity." Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote. True, they stoppedshort at a point well this side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to mescalin a position among drugs of unique distinction. Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the pharmacologist's repertory. Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since the days of Lewin and Havelock Ellis.Chemists have not merely isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply no longer depends on the sparse and intermittent crop of a desert cactus. Alienists have dosed themselves with mescalin in the hope thereby of coming to a better, a first-hand, understanding of their patients' mental processes. Working unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow arange of circumstances, psychologists have observed and catalogued some of the drug's more striking effects. Neurologists and physiologists have found out something about the mechanism of its action upon the central nervous system. And at least one Professional philosopher has taken mescalin for the light it may throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and therelationship between brain and consciousness1. There matters rested until, two or three years ago, a new and perhaps highly significant fact was observed2. Actually the fact had been staring everyone in the face for several decades; but nobody, as it happened, had noticed it until a Young English psychiatrist, at present working in Canada, was struck by the close similarity, in chemical composition, betweenmescalin and adrenalin. Further research

1 See the following papers: "Schizophrenia. A New Approach." By Humphry Osmond and John Smythies. Journal of
Mental Science. Vol. XCVIII. April, 1952. "On Being Mad." By Humphry Osmond. Saskarchewan Psychiatric Services Journal. Vol. I. No. 2. September. 1952. "The Mescalin Phenomena." By John Smythies. The British Journal of the Philosophy of Science.Vol. III. February, 1953. "Schizophrenia: A New Approach." By Abeam Hoffer, Humphry Osmond and John Smythies. journal of Mental Science. Vol. C. No. 418. January, 1954. Numerous other papers on the biochemistry, pharmacology, psychology and neurophysiology of schizophrenia sad the mescalin phenomena are in preparation 2 In his monograph, Menomini Peyolism, published (December 1952) in theTransactions of the American Philosophical Society, Professor J. S. Slotkin has written that "the habitual use of Peyote does not seem to produce any increased tolerance or dependence. I know many people who have been Peyotists for forty to fifty years. The amount of Peyote they use depends upon the solemnity of the occasion; in general they do not take any more Peyote now than they did years ago. Also,there is sometimes an interval of a month or more between rites, and they go without Peyote during this period without feeling any craving for it. Personally, even after a series of rites occurring on four successive weekends. I neither increased the amount of Peyote consumed nor felt any continued need for it." It is evidently with good reason that "Peyote has never been legally declared a...