Are psychedelics religious sacraments? Can they provide keys to unlock the "Beyond Within," leading to mystical experiences? Even before Tim Leary and the 1960s counterculture, the spiritual potentials of consciousness-changing drugs were explored in America by two expatriate British spiritual seekers, Aldous Huxley and his friend Gerald Heard.

Readers of Island Views are familiar with Huxley (1894-1963) But who was Gerald Heard and what were his contributions to contemporary thought and to the role of psychedelics? An Anglo-Irish historian, philosopher, BBC science journalist, novelist and mystic seer, Heard (1889-1971) wrote over 30 books in the fields of science, history, religion, philosophy and fiction. A learned advocate of exploring taboo areas of nonconsensus reality, including psychic research, mysticism, pacifism, UFOs, synchronicity, homosexuality, terror, madness, and criminality, he saw these offbeat topics as sharing a common link to the mysterious role played by consciousness in molding our bewildering variety of reality maps, a view we may call "postmodern."

Heard, who lived his last 34 years in Los Angeles, was also one of the first to interpret psychedelics as harbingers of this postmodern cultural breakthrough. He viewed mind-altering drugs, along with psychical research, the New Physics, ecology, holistic field theory, Gestalt psychology, semantics, and the sociology of knowledge, as part of a larger cultural mutation, a profound epistemological revolution in our postmodern psyche. Heard was convinced that only through research and ongoing experimentation can we test the significance of consciousness-changing drugs for society, therapy, education, invention, discovery, and religion.

Heard as Psychedelic Psychopomp

In the early history of the American psychedelic movement of the the 1950s, Heard functioned as a "psychopomp," a soul guide (with all the Hermetic overtones of t hat term) striving to awaken potential initiates to the spiritual mysteries that psychedelics (as "soul revealers") might trigger in them. In 1954, for example, he stimulating the interest of Los Angeles psychiatrist Dr. Oscar Janiger in LSD research. Janiger's acknowledgment of his debt conveys the spirit of Heard's transformative, apocalyptic vision:

It was the philosopher Gerald Heard who introduced me to psychedelics. He told me that the emergence of LSD in the twentieth century was simply God's way of giving us the gift of consciousness. He believed that LSD was a device for saving humanity from Armageddon.

In other reminiscences, Janiger, who was later to introduce LSD to Hollywood stars Cary Grant, James Coburn, and Jack Nicholson, and who cofounded the Albert Hofma nn Foundation, elaborates on Heard's vision. The psychedelics, Heard claimed, were destined to contribute philosophic-spiritual meaning and help us escape from the dead-end of our culture's rationalist-mechanistic paradigm:

....But we [in Los Angeles] were the only group, to my knowledge, that was really beginning to study this "mystical," if you will, "transcendental" aspect of it....It's just that the medicine fell on some far more profound people here than it did elsewhere, I can assure you. That was what did it. It fell on Huxley and Heard.

In his speculations about the religious and therapeutic potential of modern psychedelics, Heard as psychological historian traced how human societies have employed drugs for visionary purposes "in the rites of religion, in social procedures, in drama and in oracle systems." In Heard's analysis, the task of religion is to "rebind" the soul to integral thought since the pressures of civilization and increasing individuality had caused the self-conscious ego to split off from the subconscious. The role of religion is to devise mind-body techniques to overcome psychic fragmentation and restore humanity's communion with self, society and cosmos.

For moderns seeking spiritual insight, Heard emphasized those drugs that heighten attention, while reducing fear and anxiety. Religiously efficacious drugs, he believed, induce a "mild dissociation which permits the self to regard its conduct with detachment" and aid our escape from the distracting ego with its "stress of present, past or future concern." He particularly esteemed mescaline and LSD for these purposes (preferring LSD because it produced fewer physiological side-effects), and believed that they foster creative, "integral thought" and open us up to wider horizons of awareness.

Huxley was the first to open the "doors of perception" when "one bright May morning" (May 6, 1953), he took mescaline at his Los Angeles home under the medical supervision of psychiatrist Dr. Humphry Osmond. Heard was not far behind. The two would later share their first LSD experience together (along with the "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD," Captain Al Hubbard), and thereafter they would several times collaborate in their psychedelic experiential research.

Heard shared Huxley's positive view of psychedelics (expressed in the novel Island). These drugs were a potential "moksha" medicine, a liberation to the living and a "sacrament" to assist the dying attain to the "Clear Light of the Void." In his memorial tribute, Heard honored Huxley's daring advocacy of the psychedelics (especially, LSD) both as religious sacrament, "a perfect psycho-physical aid to sustain the mind at its utmost reach, "and as an aid to that total unwavering attention which permits the emergence of the highest quality of comprehensive consciousness."

Heard's attitude to the psychedelics was enthusiastic (with appropriate research caveats and precautions). Playing the role of "psychedelic psychopomp," he championed their intelligent use (under a physician's supervision) among his select coterie of friends, who included, for example, William C. Mullendore (Chairman of the Board of Southern California Edison), Bill Wilson (the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous), philosopher William Ernest Hocking, Jesuit theologian Father John Courtney Murray, film director John Huston, and Time publisher Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Booth Luce.

Throughout the period that he experimented with psychedelics (from about 1954 or earlier to about 1966), Heard documented his findings in a series of fascinating books, essays, reviews, lectures, and broadcasts that repay attentive study. For example, in his 1963 Horizon essay, Heard answers the title question "Can This Drug Enlarge Man's Mind?" with an emphatic "yes!" and prophesies a major cultural breakthrough in neuroscience whereby futuristic pharmaceuticals (of which LSD is simply a precursor) could "change and maintain human personality at any desired level." Heard concludes that LSD should function as a research drug "used with greatest care to explore the minds of those who would volunteer to aid competent researchers by offering themselves as voyagers to the soul's "Gate of Ivory."

Rebirth, the Realm of Pan, and the New Era of "Metacomedy"

In sum, Heard, as soul guide (psychopomp) and prophet of postmodern consciousness, was an influential explorer of the spiritual potentials of the psychedelics.

In a 1966 letter summarizing the meaning of psychedelics, Heard asks his fellow psychonaut, Dr. Sidney Cohen, "What have we learned from LSD?" He reflects that drugs like LSD are "only the first hint of the oncoming Psychological Revolution, the Copernican Revolution of and in the Mind." We are, as he mentions elsewhere, "condemned to postmodernity," to face up to our psyche's terrible responsibility for creating its own reality maps. Heard projects the futuristic Heaven or Hell our psyche can unleash, even without drugs, through our awesome creative freedom:

Soon quite likely with brain research we will be able to turn on or turn off the fine electric currents (no drug needed) in the various parts of the brain and produce at a touch, in the mind of the subject pleasure, pain, panaesthesia or anaesthesia, ecstasy or agony, euphoria, dysphoria, eudaimonism (the Greek word for the highest happiness) or dysdaimonism (the despair of Hell).

We may conclude by sketching how, from Heard's mythic perspective, the psychedelics might serve as religious catalysts for: (1) experiencing spiritual postmortem rebirth, (2) encountering the great god Pan (Hermes' son), and (3) inspiring the literary artist to raise the curtain on humanity's "Third Act," the new postmode rn epoch of "Metacomedy," which transcends the two previous historical Acts of "Comedy" and "Tragedy" to give us the "God's-eye view" of the communion of all being, beyond all of our laughter and all of our tears.

In his 1965 essay, "Rebirth Without Fear," Heard addresses the religious need to devise effective mind-body techniques to help us navigate through the major stages of the human life cycle, particularly our final exit from the body and post-mortem rebirth. Heard had earlier sympathized with his friend Aldous Huxley's partaking of the "sacrament" LSD on his deathbed while his wife read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In his essay, Heard endorses the same ritual use of psychedelics, accompanied by readings from the Bardo Thödol.

1. In Heard's literary imagination, the ancient Greek god Pan was the patron deity of the strange, postmodern terrain, where consciousness interplays with reality to construct shifting reality maps. For Heard, Pan possessed spiritual associations, which cast preternatural shadows throughout his final work, the brilliant novel of ideas, AE: The Open Persuader. In a 1956 talk on the religious dimensions of psychedelics (with Aldous Huxley), Heard invokes Pan as the daimonic Life Force. Heard conceives of the Life Force that we perceive in elevated states of awareness, whether through cosmic love, psychedelic states, or profoundly moving art, as an awesome spiritual energy that can be mythically personified as the god Pan, the mutant hybrid daimon, part god, man, and instinctual animal.

2. Heard speculated that psychedelics might assist in birthing this postmodern era of human mutation, the trans-individualist epoch on the "growing edge" of Pan's Life Force. He argues that the task of ushering in this new era, "The Third Act" or "Metacomedy" belongs to the religious-cultural role of the inspired writer, inspired by the "sacramental aid" of psychedelics, which bestow a revelation of our oneness with the Life Force. Through LSD, the creative writer can "enter a frame of which is post-tragic" and afterwards "can come back to his work able to create characters-in-action which can pass on to us convincingly the new picture of man." Heard, in his role as psychedelic psychopomp heralds the coming era of Metacomedy which will be presided over by Shiva (Pan):

The Third Act is due. And the writer today must face it....Beyond Tragedy lies Meta-comedy. The central figure of that play is known in Asiatic drama. There is no tragic goal in the Indian Theatre. The very world Play they call Lila, the weaving dance that displays and resumes the universe. The central figure who dances out of the cosmos, Shiva, consummates laughter and tears in an ecstasy that goes beyond pleasure and pain.

John Cody is an associate professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of San Francisco's College of Professional Studies. Among the several books on Gerald Heard he is completing are Gerald Heard: The Postmodern Mythmaker, and a comprehensive bibliography on the works of Heard. He may be contacted at (415) 387-6613.