MYSTIC CHEMIST – THE LIFE OF ALBERT HOFMANN AND HIS DISCOVERY OF LSD

Albert Hofmann was a chemist working for the Sandoz pharmaceutical company who synthesised Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, LSD, from ergot, (Claviceps purpurea), a parasite of rye. Ergotised bread had been the cause of various outbreaks of mass hallucinogenic hysteria, "St Anthony's Fire", across Europe in Medieval times, and probably before. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, I was privileged to have dinner with Hofmann, along with Charla Devereux and Ralph Metzner. I had assumed this would be a last chance to meet the great man, but his whole demeanour was that of someone at least 30 years younger than his actual age, and, indeed, he was to live for another 12 years. Mystic Chemist gives a detailed biography of the man, his work and the legacy of his important and far-reaching discovery. The book is replete with illustrations, including family album pictures of Hofmann's early and family life, many photographs showing him later on with some of the key ethnobotanical or psychedelic luminaries such as Richard E. Schultes, Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, Jonathan Ott, and many more, and handsomely garnished throughout with wonderful examples of colourful psychedelic art imagery.

After extensively describing Hofmann's biographical background, including an early spontaneous mystical experience, the authors provide a careful account of the discovery of LSD. Hofmann was engaged on routine analysis and synthesis of the alkaloids to be found in ergot, some of which proved to be medically helpful (in childbirth, for instance), and LSD-25 was duly synthesised as one of those in November 1938. Because Hofmann thought it might prove useful as a cardiovascular stimulant it was tested for that role but found to be not as effective as existing compounds. So Sandoz more or less forgot about it. But Hofmann claimed that he had a "strange premonition" that haunted him about the significance of LSD-25 and in 1943 he produced it again in his laboratory to test out possible uses for it. In the process, he unwittingly ingested a miniscule amount that sent him on what we would today call an "acid trip". At first he thought he had poisoned himself with something and was dying, but after a hastily summoned doctor assured him that he was physically fine, his experience transformed from a "bad trip" into a fascinating one. Finally identifying LSD-25 as the agent causing his experience, Hofmann and his team were shocked to realise the incredible potency of the substance. He and members of his team conducted further self-experiments with LSD, and his assistant, Susi Ramstein, became the first woman to take an LSD trip.

The authors of Mystic Chemist then proceed to conduct an extensive and detailed exploration of where the LSD story went thereafter, tracking how it was tested for psychotherapeutic purposes (with rather promising results), the ethnobotanical context, and the artistic, social, political and legal upheavals it occasioned, and the further potential it still holds for us. It is "the molecule that changed the world" the authors state, and it is true that never have so many people in the span of a couple of generations been able to penetrate into other dimensions of consciousness and travel to the hem of heaven, and, yes, the rim of hell. Indeed, not only have artists, musicians, writers, philosophers, and media people partaken of the molecule, but so have many scientists, working in fields ranging from quantum physics to the biosciences. (SMN readers might be surprised to learn just how many of their scientific heroes in these fields have done so!) And the use of the raw "LSD alkaloid" in ergot may go way back into antiquity. The Eleusian Mysteries cult of ancient Greece, for example, may very well have used an ergotised beer for its sacramental drink (the kykeon) – which would mean that many of the great philosophers and thinkers of classical Greece, at the very foundations of western culture, received insights from the magical molecule.1 And a discovery, too recent to be included in this book, of a piece of grass hosting an ergot parasite fossilised in a piece of amber some 100 million years old, shows that at least the potential for accessing the powerful alkaloids contained within ergot has existed from before and throughout the rise of all the strains of the homo genus.

I indelibly recall many things that Hofmann spoke about during that delightful dinner. One was that he felt modern humanity badly needed something like the Eleusian Mysteries if it was ever to break the narrow bounds of its collective consciousness and move towards greater enlightenment on a sufficiently broad scale, and he remarked how that a revelation LSD often provides is allowing us to understand the phoney way we perceive the outer world in normal consciousness; it is the opener of Blake's doors of perception. "We can measure the light that reaches the eye," he said, "and we can measure the impulses that travel via the optic nerve to the rear of the brain, but what happens then remains a mystery." And that is the mystery in which we dwell.

Anyone interested in knowing the full story of LSD, such an important element of the human story, will enjoy and value this hefty softcover tome.

• Devereux, P. (1997/2008). The Long Trip – A Prehistory of Psychedelia, Viking Penguin/Daily Grail Publishing. 96-99pp.