The Doors of Perception
First edition (UK)
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| Author | Aldous Huxley |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Philosophy |
| Published | 1954 Chatto & Windus (UK) Harper & Row (US) |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 63 (hardcover, first edition; without the accompanying essay "Heaven and Hell", written in 1956) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 54372147 |
| 615/.7883 22 | |
| LC Class | RM666.P48 H9 2004 |
The Doors of Perception is a philosophical essay, released as a book, by Aldous Huxley. First published in 1954, it details his experiences when taking mescaline. The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.
Mescaline is the principal agent of the psychedelic cactus peyote and San Pedro cactus, which has been used in Native American religious ceremonies for thousands of years. A German pharmacologist, Arthur Heffter, isolated the alkaloids in the peyote cactus in 1897. These included mescaline, which he showed through a combination of animal and self-experiments was the compound responsible for the psychoactive properties of the plant. In 1919, Ernst Späth, another German chemist, synthesised the drug. Although personal accounts of taking the cactus had been written by psychologists such as Weir Mitchell in the US and Havelock Ellis in the UK during the 1890s, the German-American Heinrich Kluver was the first to systematically study its psychological effects in a small book called Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations published in 1928. The book stated that the drug could be used to research the unconscious mind.
In the 1930s, an American anthropologist Weston La Barre, published The Peyote Cult, the first study of the ritual use of peyote as an entheogen drug amongst the Huichol people of western Mexico. La Barre noted that the Indian users of the cactus took it to obtain visions for prophecy, healing and inner strength. Most psychiatric research projects into the drug in the 1930s and early 1940s tended to look at the role of the drug in mimicking psychosis. In 1947 however, the US Navy undertook Project Chatter, which examined the potential for the drug as a truth revealing agent. In the early 1950s, when Huxley wrote his book, mescaline was still regarded as a research chemical rather than a drug and was listed in the Parke-Davis catalogue with no controls. Mescalin also played a paramount part in influencing the beat generation of poets and writers of the later 1940s to the early 1960s. Most notable, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg-all of whom were respected contemporary beat artists of their generation. Theirs and many other contemporary artists works were heavily influenced by over the counter forms of mescalin during this time due to its potency and attainability.
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