The Vocabulary of a New World

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

Aldous Huxley was 58 years old, with poor eyesight, when a young British psychiatrist came to Los Angeles in May 1953. Humphry Osmond was 35. Two years earlier he had moved from England to Canada to work at the mental hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. With his colleague John Smythies he had written a joint article for the Hibbert Journal, and Huxley had sent an appreciative note about it, along with a copy of his book The Devils of Loudun. Osmond answered from Weyburn on March 31, 1953, enclosing an account of one of his own mescaline experiences. A little over a month later he was in Los Angeles for a psychiatric conference, spending his evenings with the Huxleys.

On a morning in early May, with Osmond and Huxley's wife Maria beside him throughout, Huxley took mescaline. Accounts give the date as May 3 or May 4. The session became The Doors of Perception, published the next year, in which Huxley likened what he felt to Meister Eckhart's Istigkeit, or is-ness.

It began a ten-year correspondence. The editors of the published collection, Psychedelic Prophets, transcribed more than 275 of the letters, which run to the last weeks of Huxley's life.

In May 1955 Huxley was at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Atlantic City, where he had been invited to a mescaline evening. On May 11 he wrote to Osmond from his hotel, describing the scene as "the Electric Shock Boys, the Chlorpromaziners and the 57 Varieties of Psychotherapists." It was a fair picture of the profession they were trying to reach: electroshock, the new chlorpromazine drugs, and a long list of talking therapies.

The letters' best-known exchange came in the spring of 1956. The term then in circulation was psychotomimetic, meaning psychosis-mimicking, which the volume's editors say seemed insufficient because it put undue emphasis on the pathological side of the experience. On March 24, ahead of the paper he was to present to the New York Academy of Sciences on April 12, Osmond sent Huxley a list of candidates. Psychophrenics and psychoplastics had been abandoned, he wrote, and euleutheropsychics, though accurate, was "too much of a mouthful." The one that seemed "the most promising" was psychodelics, which he glossed as mind manifestors.

Huxley answered on March 30 with a word of his own making, phanerothyme, which the editors gloss as soul revealing, and a couplet in the postscript: "To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gramme of phanerothyme."

Osmond replied in early April with a rhyme of his own, glossing the new word "Delos, to manifest": "To fathom Hell or go angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic." It is usually quoted today as "soar angelic," as in the editor's note to Huxley's letter in the 1969 edition of his letters. Osmond added that he liked phanerothymes, and suggested they discuss which to push before the engagement.

He presented to the Academy that April, and the word reached print in his paper "A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents," published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in March 1957. The volume's editors say that paper is where the term was first expressed publicly. Osmond explained his choice by calling the word "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations." It means mind manifesting. It names an effect and leaves the verdict open: whether what appears is perception, imagination or illness is a separate question, and the label does not decide it.

Huxley died at home in Los Angeles on November 22, 1963, at 5:20 in the afternoon. Unable to speak, he had made a written request to his wife Laura for LSD, and she gave it to him. President Kennedy had been assassinated that day, less than seven hours earlier, and the news of Huxley's death was overshadowed.

The word spread far beyond the laboratories and the correspondence that produced it. Osmond's choice still names what these substances are claimed to do, and the question he built it around is still open: what, exactly, is being shown?

Sources

• Bisbee, P., Carson Bisbee, C., Dyck, E., Farrell, P., Sexton, J. & Spisak, J.W. (eds.) Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond. McGill-Queen's University Press (2018)
• Smith, G. (ed.) Letters of Aldous Huxley. Chatto & Windus (1969)
• Osmond, H. A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents, Ann. NY Acad. Sci. (1957)
• Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)
• New York Academy of Sciences, The Origin of the Term Psychedelic (blog)
• Wikipedia, Humphry Osmond
• Wikipedia, Aldous Huxley
• Wikipedia, The Doors of Perception