Passage: The Naming Couplets

“To fathom Hell or go angelic, / just take a pinch of psychedelic., Osmond wins.”

The exchange: In 1956, Osmond and Huxley were corresponding about what to call these substances. Both submitted rhyming couplets as proposals.

Huxley: 'To make this trivial world sublime, / take half a gramme of phanerothyme.' Osmond: 'To fathom Hell or go angelic, / just take a pinch of psychedelic.'

Osmond's won. He introduced 'psychedelic' formally in a 1957 paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Why this passage: Because the choice between the two words was the choice between two philosophical positions, and the winning position shaped everything that followed.

Huxley's phanerothyme ('making the spirit manifest') located the substance's action in a spiritual register: what becomes visible is the spirit, the divine capacity of the human person. The word assumes an anthropology in which spirit exists and is ordinarily hidden.

Osmond's psychedelic ('mind-manifesting') located the action in a psychological register: what becomes manifest is the mind itself. The word does not assume a spirit. It assumes a mind that contains more than ordinary consciousness reveals.

Osmond's couplet also contains the bipolar truth Huxley's doesn't: 'fathom Hell or go angelic.' The choice of words acknowledged the negative possibility, that what the mind contains includes Hell, not only the divine, in a way that Huxley's 'trivial world sublime' did not. This acknowledgment would prove clinically crucial: set and setting matter precisely because the experience can go in either direction.

The word that won was slightly less philosophically precise but slightly more pharmacologically honest.

Sources

• Huxley & Osmond, in Moksha (1977)
• Osmond, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. (1957)