Psychedelia

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Psychedelia refers to psychedelic art,

psychedelic music and the subculture
that originated in the psychedelic
experience of the 1960s, by people who
used psychedelic drugs such as LSD,
mescaline (found in peyote) and
psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms).
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, tabla,[1]
electronic effects, sound effects and
reverberation, and elaborate studio
effects, such as playing tapes backwards
or panning the music from one side to
another.[2]

Liquid oil projection using a powerful lamp has been

used to project swirling colours onto screens since
the 1960s.

The term "psychedelic" is derived from

the Ancient Greek words psychē (ψυχή,
"soul") and dēloun (δηλοῦν, "to make
visible, to reveal"),[3] translating to "mind-
manifesting".

A psychedelic experience is
characterized by the striking perception
of aspects of one's mind previously
unknown, or by the creative exuberance
of the mind liberated from its ostensibly
ordinary fetters. 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,
enlightenment, confusion, and psychosis.

Etymology
 

The smoking clover, a computer-generated image of

psychedelic artwork

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.[4] 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 make this mundane world

sublime,

Take half a gram of

phanerothyme

To which Osmond responded:

To fathom Hell or soar angelic,

Just take a pinch of
psychedelic [5]
It was on this term that Osmond
eventually settled, because it was "clear,
euphonious and uncontaminated by
other associations."[6] 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.[7] 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.[8]
History
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origins of psychedelic culture that is available
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for copy at ..
From the second half of the 1950s, Beat
Generation writers like William
Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg[9] wrote about and took drugs,
including cannabis and Benzedrine,
raising awareness and helping to
popularise their use.[10] 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.[11] 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,[12][13] their
writings profoundly influenced the
thinking of the new generation of
youth.[14] There had long been a culture
of drug use among jazz and blues
musicians, and use of drugs (including
cannabis, peyote, mescaline and LSD[15])
had begun to grow among folk and rock
musicians, who also began to include
drug references in their songs.[16][nb 1]

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.[18] 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.[19] 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.[20][21] 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).[22]

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.[23] 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.[24]

Modern usage

A retro example of psychedelia; the dancer

combines 1960s fashion with modern LED lighting.

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, many 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.[25]

Visual art
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British rock and blues guitarist, Eric Clapton's "The

British rock and blues guitarist, Eric Clapton's "The
Fool" (replica shown) is one of the world's best-
known guitars and has come to be symbolic of the
psychedelic era.

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; many works also
featured idiosyncratic and complex new
fonts and lettering styles (most notably
in the work of San Francisco-based
poster artist Rick Griffin). Many artists in
the late 1960s and early 1970s
attempted to illustrate the psychedelic
experience in paintings, drawings,
illustrations, and other forms of graphic
design. In the modern era, computer
graphics may be used to produce
psychedelic effects for artwork.

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. Many 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. Peter Max's
psychedelic poster designs helped
popularize brightly colored spectrums
widely, especially among college
students.

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 many striking 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
numerous 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.[26]

Joplin's Porsche 356C in "Summer of Love – Art of

the Psychedelic Era" at the Whitney Museum in New
York City.

Blues rock singer Janis Joplin had

psychedelic car Porsche 356. The trend
also extended to motor vehicles. The
earliest, and perhaps most famous of all
psychedelic vehicles was the famous
"Further" bus, driven by Ken Kesey and
The Merry Pranksters, which was painted
inside and out in 1964 with bold
psychedelic designs (although these
were executed in primary colours, since
the DayGlo colours that soon became de
rigueur were then not widely available).
Another very famous example is the
Rolls Royce owned by John Lennon –
originally black, he had it repainted in
1967 in a vivid psychedelic gypsy
caravan style, prompting bandmate
George Harrison to have his Mini Cooper
similarly repainted with logos and
devices that reflected his burgeoning
interest in Indian spirituality.

Music
The fashion for psychedelic drugs gave
its name to the style of psychedelia, a
term describing a category of rock music
known as psychedelic rock, as well as
visual art, fashion, and culture that is
associated originally with the high 1960s,
hippies, and the Haight-Ashbury
neighborhood of San Francisco,
California.[27] It often used new recording
techniques and effects while drawing on
Eastern sources such as the ragas and
drones of Indian music.

One of the first uses of the word in the

music scene of this time was in the 1964
recording of "Hesitation Blues" by folk
group the Holy Modal Rounders.[28] The
term was introduced to rock music and
popularized by the 13th Floor Elevators
1966 album The Psychedelic Sounds of
the 13th Floor Elevators.[28] Psychedelia
truly took off in 1967 with the Summer of
Love and, although associated with San
Francisco, the style soon spread across
the US, and worldwide.[29]

The counterculture of the 1960s had a

strong influence on the popular culture of
the early 1970s. It later became linked to
a style of electronic dance music known
as psychedelic trance.

Festivals
 

Psychedelic Festival in Brazil

A psychedelic festival is a gathering that

promotes psychedelic music and art in
an effort to unite participants in a
communal psychedelic experience.[30]
Psychedelic festivals have been
described as "temporary communities
reproduced via personal and collective
acts of transgression ... through the
routine expenditure of excess energy, and
through self-sacrifice in acts of
abandonment involving ecstatic dancing
often fuelled by chemical cocktails."[30]
These festivals often emphasize the
ideals of peace, love, unity, and
respect.[30] Notable psychedelic festivals
include the biennial Boom Festival in
Portugal,[30] OZORA Festival in Hungary,
Universo Paralello in Brazil as well as
Nevada's Burning Man[31] and California's
Symbiosis Gathering in the United
States.[32]

Conferences
In recent years there has been a
resurgence in interest in psychedelic
research and a growing number of
conferences now take place across the
globe.[33] The psychedelic research
charity Breaking Convention have hosted
one of the world's largest since 2011. A
biennial conference in London, UK,
Breaking Convention: a multidisciplinary
conference on psychedelic
consciousness[34] is a multidisciplinary
conference on psychedelic
consciousness. In the US MAPS held
their first Psychedelic Science
conference,[35] devoted specifically to
research of psychedelics in scientific and
medical fields, in 2013.

See also
Counterculture of the 1960s
Ego death
 Erowid
God in a Pill?
Psychedelic era
Psychedelia – Film about the history of
psychedelic drugs
Psychedelic fish
Psychedelic literature
Psychedelic plants
Psychonautics
Serotonergic psychedelic
Timeline of 1960s counterculture

Notes
1. New York folk musician Peter
Stampfel claimed to be the first to
 use the word "psychedelic" in a song
lyric (The Holy Modal Rounders'
version of "Hesitation Blues",
1963).[17]

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External links

Look up psychedelic in Wiktionary,

the free dictionary.

Look up psychedelia in Wiktionary,

the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media

related to Psychedelia.

Erowid
Science & Consciousness Review, The
Neurochemistry of Psychedelic
 Experience
Psychedelic History
Artists interpretation of psychedelic
experiences.
Online archive: Religion and
Psychoactive Sacraments
Magic Mushrooms and Reindeer - Weird
Nature. A short video on the use of
Amanita muscaria mushrooms by the
Sami people and their reindeer
produced by the BBC. [1]

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