Mescalin, mystics and madness
Aldous Huxley was a famous but unlikely crusader for psychedelic drugs and their mind-expanding capabilities. English, classically educated and the hard-thinking contemporary of T.S. Elliot and Bertrand Russell, his position as a precursor to Timothy Leary remains one of the most intriguing subplots of 1960s American counterculture. Unlike his friend D.H. Lawrence, for example, who voices his rebellions against mainstream culture angrily throughout his essays and fiction, Huxley writes with an objectivism and gentlemanly calm apparently at odds with his radical visions. Allene Symons’ Aldous Huxley’s Hands is part Huxley biography, part history of psychedelic science but also an attempt by a daughter to commemorate her father’s amateur scientific research into the physiognomy of hands.
By Guy Stevenson.