Soma
Before the ban
The banker-turned-scholar who argued the Vedic Soma was a mushroom, and started a field.
The Doors of Perception
Reportage & memoirBefore the banHistory, culture & policy
What it is
Aldous Huxley's account of a single mescaline session in 1953, published the following year and titled from a line of Blake. Huxley took mescaline; psilocybin appears nowhere in the book. The essay still set much of the vocabulary that later psychedelic writing inherited, including the habit of describing the experience in the language of perception, where the medicine of the day saw pathology. The shelf carries it as a primary document of the years before these compounds were criminalized. Nothing in it is evidence about what any drug does.
The record
- Author
- Aldous Huxley
- Published
- 1954
- Publisher
- Vintage Classics
- ISBN
- 9780099458203
- Kind
- Reportage & memoir
- Subject
- History, culture & policy
- Era
- Before the ban
- Links checked
- 04 Sep 2026, and they resolved.
Where to find it
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