Recovering the Psychedelic Players from the Margins of History
When I was living in Puerto Rico in 2012, I used to look forward to receiving the early print issues of Psychedelic Press. Each issue featured vibrant works of psychedelic art in black and white and in color. In those early editions, I was introduced to the work of Mike Jay, Andy Roberts, Ben Sessa, David Luke, Ross Heaven (not an alias), Nikki Wyrd, Henrik Dahl and many others who would eventually be associated with the psychedelic renaissance. I later learned that Psychedelic Press was the godchild of Rob Dickins, a graduate student at Exeter University. It began as a small literary blog that reviewed books on drugs and eventually morphed into bi-annual and quarterly print magazine/journal. For me, what made Psychedelic Press stand out was how it featured articles by scholars of expanded consciousness alongside essays and trip reports from psychonauts of every stripe. Psychedelic Press was an important venue for alternative expression at a time when the mainstream press paid little attention to psychedelia.
Rob Dickins was an ideal curator for that cultural moment (roughly 2012 to 2018); he had one foot in academic culture and one foot in festival culture. Therefore, he knew which authors and articles could simultaneously appeal to both audiences. Although Rob is still the editor in chief of the digital version of Psychedelic Press—the print version ended in 2023—he recently turned his attention to writing Cobwebs of Trips: A Literary History of Psychedelics, a fascinating and highly original history of British psychedelia from 1943 to 1984. Dickins is in a unique position to write an alternative history because he possesses a highly eclectic and encyclopedic knowledge of psychedelic history.
In Cobwebs of Trips, Dickins scours the margins of psychedelic history for authors, practitioners, and obscure psychonauts—Frank Lake, Effie Lillian Hutton, Richard Heron Ward and Harry Fainlight—who have been, for whatever reason, overlooked and ignored in previous historical accounts. Dickins enjoys finding unsung psychedelic players who lurk in the margins of psychedelic history. For example, who knew that Frank Lake, founder of the Clinical Theology Movement (1962), was quietly treating over 50 parsons and vicars from the Church of England with LSD therapy? Dickins’s eclectic reading of British psychedelic history also contains an analysis of the groundbreaking pioneers of British psychedelia: Aldous Huxley and Dr. Humphry Osmond. His account of the etymology of the phrase “psychedelic” is the best that I have ever read.
Fittingly, Cobwebs of Trips (2024) begins with Peter Witt, a Swiss pharmacologist, who doused spiders with LSD, mescaline, cannabis, and caffeine for his scientific research in the 1940s and 1950s. For Dickins, the notion of the web becomes a source of fascination and a way of theorizing the psychedelic experience itself: the would-be tripper finds themselves suddenly suspended in a temporal web of reality that is distinct from everyday life. For Dickins, the experience of the web often encompasses opposing emotions of terror and delight as well as an encounter with the beautiful and the horrific.
Dickins and his beautiful partner recently moved into a house in the Vale of Pewsey, a valley in Wiltshire. The Vale of Pewsey is just down the road from Stonehenge and other neolithic sites. The psychedelic historian and curator frequently tends his lush garden and goes on long walks with “Whispa,” his Welsh Border Collie. He describes the landscape around him as “magical and deeply historic.” With the merging of the historical and the pastoral, I imagine that Dickens has found the ideal spot for sublime and contemplative psychedelic experiences.
What was British Psychedelic culture like in 2008/2009 when you started Psychedelic Press?
In some respects psychedelic culture was the same then as it is now – lots of small communities of friends centered around local areas, music and party scenes, and curious psychonauts. All of which are more or less loosely connected, and this has been the prevailing vibe since at least the 1970s in Britain. When people say “psychedelic culture” then this is what I think of – decentralized, largely out of the public eye, and extraordinarily fluid in regard to those involved.
If you think of psychedelic culture as scientists and researchers though (which is of course what the renaissance vibe is all about), then 2007-2011 was an important time–with a few vital precursors such as Andy Letcher’s’ excellent Shroom (2006) and the Exploring Consciousness conference in Bath (2004). After 2007, the odd article about psychedelics began appearing in the medical literature; Albion Dreaming (2008), Andy Roberts’ brilliant history of LSD in Britain was published; lecture series in London (such as David Luke’s Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness) were exploring psychedelic questions; research started happening at Imperial and other universities; the Psychedelic Press started, and so on. Then, thanks to the original founders of the conference Breaking Convention, all these strands were brought together, really rooting what came after.
How has it changed?
The party scene shifts and changes but is definitely still going strong. It has, of course, blossomed bringing in many more people and ideas. There was a popular term a few years back, ‘psychedelic mainstreaming,’ which, to be honest, I detested and thought thoroughly cringeworthy at the time. However, on reflection, it is very accurate. Asking how psychedelic culture has changed in this respect is now just asking how culture has changed. Within this mainstream, the prevalent fashionable ideas one is spoon fed at university or through the media is now done through the psychedelic prism. Of course, there’s some brilliant research going on in regard to some fundamental questions around the plants and molecules concerned. Broadly, however, funding streams mean they’ve joined the dominant hegemony. Yet, throughout all the passing fashions and ideas, trippers gonna trip, and that perhaps never changes.
How do you see yourself at this point? What is your role in the psychedelic renaissance?
I am a historian and publisher who has played a small part in some of the psychedelic goings-on over the last 15 or so years. I think ultimately we should leave it to future historians to figure out what has happened!
I was intrigued by your central metaphor of the spider and the web. Why did this particular metaphor attract you so much? How did it become the central metaphor of your alternative history of psychedelics in postwar Britain ?
The image of the spider was a motif that cropped up time and again during my reading and research. There’s a sense, sometimes explicitly in the case of Harry Fainlight’s poetry, that one might become caught in a psychedelic experience as if it was web-like. Of course, the spider has been widely used as a motif in literature elsewhere yet the historical paths in psychedelia led neatly back to the research of Dr. Peter Witt. He famously experimented dosing our little eight-legged friends with a variety of substances in order to examine their interaction with web-making. It’s a very fine example of the influence of science on poetry and writing – an interaction itself which is one important strand in Cobweb of Trips.
When I discovered that Witt’s unpublished memoir was available to read, what was a curiosity or short section of context became, for me, a very interesting idea about how ideas are propagated. Have you ever been in a garden and leant down to a plant or flower only to realize you’ve unwittingly—pun intended—face planted a spider’s web? It seems to me that this is very often the effect of having a psychedelic experience. Ideas that have long circulated and which make up the fabric of our everyday feelings and understandings can easily become so embedded in life that they may be invisible to us.
I have noticed that your alternative history includes several fascinating, albeit marginal, figures from psychedelic history, such as Peter Witt, Frank Lake, Effie Lilian Hutton, Richard Heron Ward, and Harry Fainlight. Many of these figures might have completely disappeared had you not resurrected them in your history. Was it part of your project to restore their place and importance in history?
In one respect I have always found the margins and interstices of history the most fascinating. There is something of an allure to those aspects shrouded in either mystery or obscurity and, as I’m sure many other historians will attest, it presents something of a research challenge – bread and butter stuff. Who were they? What’s their legacy? How did they fit into the wider historical picture? What evidence of them still exists? The most obvious example in Cobweb being Dr. Effie Lilian Hutton – a fascinating woman and a pioneering psychiatrist. Bringing such individuals to light (or perhaps I should say more light, as they have of course neither completely vanished, nor yet fully appeared), necessitates ascribing them some new degree of importance.
I think my favorite chapter was your chapter on how British psychedelic culture and the sublime are often connected and intertwined. I enjoyed how you traced the genealogy of the sublime and how Huxley enlarges our understanding of the literary sublime when he writes The Doors of Perception (1953). Can you comment on why the sublime is a useful and enlightening way of framing and understanding the psychedelic experience and its history?
The sublime presents itself quite quietly at the roots of modern psychedelia in the Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond epistolary in which they search for a new name for the class of drugs which, on Osmond’s suggestion, become psychedelics. Huxley less famously suggested, ‘To make this world sublime, take half a gramme of phanarothyme’. As a literary historian, this is fascinating. Huxley was a student of English and would have undoubtedly employed the term with knowledge of its technical meaning. The sublime refers to a particular type of mixed-emotional experience, of terror and delight, that emerges through confrontations with power, and has been used in regard to both literary aesthetics and everyday experience. Questions arise from this: What power do psychedelics confront us with? And what does this tell us?
Can you elaborate on how terror and delight are part of the sublime and the psychedelic experience? Does this imply that the psychedelic experience necessarily includes ecstatic and terrifying moments, such as heaven and hell, good trips and bad trips?
The question of power I refer to above comes from Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime. He suggests that the sublime emerges when we are confronted by beasts, sovereigns, or deities – understood broadly by me to represent the social, political and religious. In short, it’s about experiences that threaten our sense of self, ones that simultaneously elevate and destroy ourselves, never completely, but on the verge of doing so. The sublime psychedelic experience, I suggest, is about those moments of dual-transcendence. Neither completely heaven, nor completely hell, but a threshold in which both present themselves as threats to the cohesion of self. When Huxley wrote Doors of Perception he had yet to have a more typical “mystical” experience, which is more often described as “beautiful” and filled with “love.” Doors is sublime.
According to Huxley, are bad trips as important as good trips?
I don’t think Huxley understood trips in this binary way. They were potentially filling a social function, meeting a drive that he believed we all have to engage with transcendence, a kind of religious impulse. A bad trip, I would guess, would be one in which the contextual power of the occasion proved to be socially limiting for the individual involved.
I was also fascinated with your discussion of Huxley’s Island (1961). You point out that Huxley was interested in mind-altering drugs in the 1930s before he ever took psychedelics in the early 1950s. How does it sum up or encapsulate Huxley’s lifelong interest in mind altering substances?
Two aspects of Huxley’s thoughts barely change throughout his life. On the one hand, he followed the work of Alfredo Pareto and the role of elites in managing society. The question for him was always about how successful or otherwise any said elite was in maintaining the liberty of the individual. On the other hand, he saw drug-taking as the result of a kind of religious impulse to transcend, or take a ‘holiday from reality’. In the 1930s, he saw this impulse as being destructive in regard to the population – alcohol, opiates, cocaine, etc., which he understood as being nefarious outlets for this religiosity. He also worried, in the case of soma in Brave New World, what would happen if a totalitarian government should develop a drug that could use this impulse to its own advantages.
Drugs, for Huxley, were thus a barometer of this power dynamic (and why the sublime experience is such a useful tool for gauging it). After he tried mescaline and later LSD himself, he began to think in terms of how this relationship might be beneficially mediated by certain substances. What would a drug look like and how would it function in a society that was to people’s benefit? Island is his answer to that and the drug in question was the mushroom-derived ”moksha medicine.” The novel allows Huxley to put the sublime question of psychedelics in these social, political, and religious contexts – one sublimely dovetailed by elite theory. In this sense, it’s a lovely fruition of his thinking.
Main image: Framed print of Cobwebs of Trips cover art, by Ellen Osborne.