Psychedelia usually refers to a style or aesthetic that is resembled in the psychedelic subculture of the 1960s and the psychedelic experience produced by certain psychoactive substances. This includes psychedelic art, psychedelic music and style of dress during that era. This was primarily generated by people who used psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline (found in peyote) and psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms) and non-users who were participants and aficionados of this subculture. Psychedelic art and music typically recreate or reflect the experience of altered consciousness. Psychedelic art uses highly distorted, surreal visuals, bright colors and full spectrums and animation (including cartoons) to evoke, convey, or enhance the psychedelic experience.
Psychedelic music uses distorted electric guitar, Indian music elements such as the sitar and tabla, electronic effects, sound effects and reverb, and elaborate studio effects, such as playing tapes backwards or panning the music from one side to another.
Psychedelic states are an array of experiences including changes of perception such as hallucinations, synesthesia, altered states of awareness or focused consciousness, variation in thought patterns, trance or hypnotic states, mystical states, and other mind alterations.
These processes can lead some people to experience changes in mental operation defining their self-identity (whether in momentary acuity or chronic development) different enough from their previous normal state that it can excite feelings of newly formed understanding such as revelation, illumination, confusion, and psychosis. Individuals who use psychedelic drugs for spiritual purposes or self-discovery are commonly referred to as psychonauts.
Etymology
The term was first coined as a noun in 1956 by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond as an alternative descriptor for hallucinogenic drugs in the context of psychedelic psychotherapy.Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 419. It is irregularlyOxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, September 2007, s.v., Etymology derived from the Greek words ψυχή psychḗ 'soul, mind' and δηλείν dēleín 'to manifest', with the meaning "mind manifesting," the implication being that psychedelics can develop unused potentials of the human mind.A. Weil, W. Rosen. (1993), From Chocolate To Morphine: Everything You Need To Know About Mind-Altering Drugs. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company. p. 93 The term was loathed by American ethnobotanist Richard Schultes but championed by American psychologist Timothy Leary.W. Davis (1996), "One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest". New York, Simon and Schuster, Inc. p. 120.
Seeking a name for the experience induced by LSD, Osmond contacted Aldous Huxley, a personal acquaintance and advocate for the therapeutic use of the substance. Huxley coined the term "phanerothyme," from the Greek terms for "manifest" (φανερός) and "spirit" (θύμος). In a letter to Osmond, he wrote:
To which Osmond responded:
It was on this term that Osmond eventually settled, because it was "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations." This mongrel spelling of the word 'psychedelic' was loathed by American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, but championed by Timothy Leary, who thought it sounded better.W. Davis (1996), One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest. New York, Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 120. Due to the expanded use of the term "psychedelic" in pop culture and a perceived incorrect verbal formulation, Carl A.P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and R. Gordon Wasson proposed the term "entheogen" to describe the religious or spiritual experience produced by such substances.R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and, Carl A.P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (North Atlantic Books, 2008), pgs. 138–139
History
From the second half of the 1950s, Beat Generation writers like William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen GinsbergJ. Campbell, This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), . wrote about and took drugs, including cannabis and Benzedrine, raising awareness and helping to popularise their use.R. Worth, Illegal Drugs: Condone Or Incarcerate? (Marshall Cavendish, 2009), , p. 30. In the same period Lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, or "acid" (at the time a legal drug), began to be used in the US and UK as an experimental treatment, initially promoted as a potential cure for mental illness.D. Farber, "The Psychologists Psychology:The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation – Drugs in the Sixties Counterculture", in P. Braunstein and M. W. Doyle (eds), Imagine Nation: The Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s (New York: Routledge, 2002), , p. 21.
In the early 1960s, the use of LSD and other hallucinogens was advocated by proponents of the new "consciousness expansion", such as Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler,Anne Applebaum, "Did The Death Of Communism Take Koestler And Other Literary Figures With It?", The Huffington Post, 26 January 2010. their writings profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth.L. R. Veysey, The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press, 1978), , p. 437. There had long been a culture of drug use among jazz and blues musicians, and use of drugs (including cannabis, peyote, mescaline and LSDT. Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay area, 1945–1980: an Illustrated History (University of California Press, 1985), , p. 166.) had begun to grow among folk and rock musicians, who also began to include drug references in their songs.J. Shepherd, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: Media, Industry and Society (New York, NY: Continuum, 2003), , p. 211. In the UK rock scene, some notable users were groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Moody Blues.
By the mid-1960s, the psychedelic life-style had already developed in California, and an entire subculture developed. This was particularly true in San Francisco, due in part to the first major underground LSD factory, established there by Owsley Stanley. There was also an emerging music scene of folk clubs, coffee houses and independent radio stations catering to a population of students at nearby Berkeley, and to free thinkers that had gravitated to the city.R. Unterberger, Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock (London: Backbeat Books, 2003), , pp. 11–13.
From 1964, the Merry Pranksters, a loose group that developed around novelist Ken Kesey, sponsored the Acid Tests, a series of events based around the taking of LSD (supplied by Stanley), accompanied by light shows, film projection and discordant, improvised music known as the psychedelic symphony. The Pranksters helped popularize LSD use through their road trips across America in a psychedelically decorated school bus, which involved distributing the drug and meeting with major figures of the beat movement, and through publications about their activities such as Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).J. Mann, Turn on and Tune in: Psychedelics, Narcotics and Euphoriants (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2009), , p. 87.
Leary was a well-known proponent of the use of psychedelics, as was Aldous Huxley. However, both advanced widely different opinions on the broad use of psychedelics by state and civil society. Leary promulgated the idea of such substances as a panacea, while Huxley suggested that only the cultural and intellectual elite should partake of entheogens systematically.
In the 1960s, the use of psychedelic drugs became widespread in modern Western culture, particularly in the United States and Britain. The movement is credited to Michael Hollingshead who arrived in America from London in 1965. He was sent to the U.S. by other members of the psychedelic movement to get their ideas exposure. The Summer of Love of 1967 and the resultant popularization of the hippie culture to the mainstream popularized psychedelia in the minds of popular culture, where it remained dominant through the 1970s.
Modern usage
The impact of psychedelic drugs on western culture in the 1960s led to semantic drift in the use of the word "psychedelic", and it is now frequently used to describe anything with abstract decoration of multiple bright colours, similar to those seen in drug-induced hallucinations. In objection to this new meaning, and to what some consider pejorative meanings of other synonyms such as "hallucinogen" and "psychotomimetic", the term "entheogen" was proposed and is seeing increasing use. However, some consider the term "entheogen" best reserved for religious and spiritual usage, such as certain Native American churches do with the peyote sacrament, and "psychedelic" left to describe those who are using these drugs for recreation, psychotherapy, physical healing, or creative problem solving. In science, hallucinogen remains the standard term.
Visual art
Advances in printing and photographic technology in the 1960s saw the traditional lithography printing techniques rapidly superseded by the offset printing system. This and other technical and industrial innovations gave young artists access to exciting new graphic techniques and media, including photographic and mixed media collage, metallic foils, and vivid new fluorescent "DayGlo" inks. This enabled them to explore innovative new illustrative styles including highly distorted visuals, cartoons, and lurid colors and full spectrums to evoke a sense of altered consciousness; a number of works also featured idiosyncratic and complex new fonts and lettering styles (most notably in the work of San Francisco-based poster artist Rick Griffin). A number of artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s attempted to illustrate the psychedelic experience in paintings, drawings, illustrations, and other forms of graphic design.
The counterculture music scene frequently used psychedelic designs on posters during the Summer of Love, leading to a popularization of the style. The most productive and influential centre of psychedelic art in the late 1960s was San Francisco; a scene driven in large measure by the patronage of the popular local music venues of the day like the Avalon Ballroom and Bill Graham's Fillmore West, which regularly commissioned young local artists like Robert Crumb, Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin and others. They produced a wealth of distinctive psychedelic promotional posters and handbills for concerts that featured emerging psychedelic bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. A number of these works are now regarded as classics of the poster genre, and original items by these artists command high prices on the collector market today.
Contemporary with the burgeoning San Francisco scene, a smaller but equally creative psychedelic art movement emerged in London, led by expatriate Australian pop artist Martin Sharp, who created multiple psychedelic posters and illustrations for the influential underground publication Oz magazine, as well as the famous album covers for the Cream albums Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire.
Other prominent London practitioners of the style included: design duo Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, whose work included multiple famous posters, as well as psychedelic "makeovers" on a piano for Paul McCartney and a car for doomed Guinness heir Tara Browne, and design collective The Fool, who created clothes and album art for several leading UK bands including The Beatles, Cream, and The Move. The Beatles loved psychedelic designs on their albums, and designer group called The Fool created psychedelic design, art, paint at the short-lived Apple Boutique (1967–1968) in Baker St, London.