ANDRZEJ KRAUZEHaving lived through it, I can free-associate for hours about the so-called Hippie Era. It’s really (dare I say it) an invitation to fall down the rabbit hole of memory. Music comes to mind first: White Rabbit (“One pill makes you larger/And one pill makes you small/And the ones that mother gives you/Don’t do anything at all”), of course, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (tangerine trees, marmalade skies, kaleidoscope eyes), to name just two. Then there was the attire (patterns run wild, bell bottoms, beads); the pelage (long, wild, puffy), which got star billing in the 1967 musical Hair; and the books (Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America come to mind).
But for a wordsmith like me, it’s the associated vocabulary and the era’s identifying dictums that I love: “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” “Drop acid, not bombs,” “Don’t bring me down,” or “Sock it to me,” “That really blows my mind,” and “Far out, man.”
So when Diana Kwon turned in her cover story (here) on using psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, and synthetic LSD as treatments for a wide variety of psychological ailments, not only did the article inspire a trip down memory lane, but it made me curious about the etymology of the word “psychedelic.” Apparently, the term was coined in 1956 or 1957, just as the beatnik era was being supplanted by hippiedom. British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond and author Aldous Huxley (Brave New ...
