Tag: aldous huxley

In November 1956, three people gathered in a converted Connecticut barn to take LSD, a powerful psychedelic drug that was legal at the time. 

The children had just been put to bed upstairs. In the converted barn’s main room, Elizabethan ballads drifted through smoke-thick air as someone scattered chrysanthemum petals across a sheepskin rug. The flowers seemed to reanimate in the candlelight, blooming and dying with each flicker. Two of the participants lay hand-in-hand in ecstatic communion, while a third sat rigid and apart, his detachment crumbling into barely contained fury. 

By midnight, everything would shatter. 

One participant spiraled into visions of nuclear war. Another transformed into a 10-foot colossus of feminine power. And in the space between these extremes, a marriage began its quiet collapse. 

The aftershocks would reverberate through three generations of Britain’s most celebrated intellectual family, the Huxleys, leaving wounds that simmered in private letters for more than sixty years. 

It’s fitting that this story should be told on Bicycle Day, the annual commemoration of April 19, 1943, when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first rode his bike home under the effects of LSD — and ushered in the modern psychedelic era. Nearly 14 years after that inaugural ride, the drug had drifted from the lab into the lives of artists, seekers and intellectual elites like the Huxleys. 

The trip’s architect was Dr. Humphry Osmond, the psychiatrist who had first guided Aldous Huxley — the author of “Brave New World” and “The Doors of Perception” — in experiments with mescaline. and coined the term “psychedelic.” His subjects that evening were Aldous’ only son, Matthew Huxley; Matthew’s wife, Ellen; and Francis Huxley, Matthew’s cousin and the son of biologist Julian Huxley. 

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